A/N: I admittedly haven't seen very much of The Conners for a variety of reasons, but YouTube recently decided that I needed to see the clip of Jackie's drunken emotional breakdown at the end of the first season. Jackie has always been my favorite character, and Laurie Metcalf is so amazing that she just broke my goddamn heart for her. I couldn't get that scene out of my head, so here we are. :)

Title inspired by Taylor Swift's "Mastermind", because there's no better description of Roseanne Conner to be had.

"Come on in!"

Dan quits knocking at the sound of Jackie's greeting and turns the knob, pushing her apartment door open as he steps inside. She's stretched out on the couch with one arm thrown over her eyes and her stocking feet haphazardly tossed over the decorative pillows at the end.

"Hi Dan," she says without even the barest hint of movement.

He smiles a little as he closes the door behind him. Passing by the end of the couch on his way to the nearest armchair, he gives her ankle a supportive pat as he goes.

"Hey Jack."

It's not until he's already settled in that she pushes herself into a sitting position and scrubs a hand over her face, tucking her hair behind her ears. He doesn't comment on her red-rimmed eyes or the pile of used tissues sitting in her lap. He does, however, reach for the half empty glass that's within arm's reach on the coffee table and lifts it to his nose.

Jackie watches him, her expression somewhere between affectionate and resigned.

"It's water, Dan."

He knows before she says it that she's telling the truth, but he takes a swig anyway just for the hell of it before he puts the glass back down again. "Good," he tells her. "How bad was the hangover?"

"I've had worse."

He gives her an incredulous look, and she sighs.

"Look, Dan. I'm okay," Jackie says unconvincingly, "it all just kind of," she makes an exaggerated explosion gesture with her hands, "blew up, you know? You really didn't need to come all the way over here just to check up on me."

"Oh, I didn't come here to check on you," he scoffs, "I came to tell you that you earned us all a lifetime ban from the Chinese place with that performance of yours. Way to go."

The corner of her mouth turns up. "Well," she says with a shrug, "I guess I had that comin', didn't I?"

They're both quiet for a few moments before Dan gets to the point. "How can I help?"

"I told you I'm fine," she insists stubbornly, standing up and holding her hands out defensively. The tissues fall to the floor, forgotten. "You've got a whole household to worry about, don't go wasting your time on me." She turns away and starts walking off toward the kitchen. "You want a beer?" she asks him over her shoulder.

Frustrated, Dan gets to his feet too. "Damn it Jackie, I'm serious here. I'm not losin' anyone else in this family anytime soon, not if I have any say in it. Talk to me. You know Rosie would hate it if we didn't at least try. She's probably screamin' at us both right now from wherever she is to get it together and move the hell on with our lives."

Jackie looks as startled by his outburst as he is. It has its desired effect though, because she makes her way back over to him and drops wearily down onto the couch where she started.

"It's all my fault," she tells him reluctantly as he settles back down into the armchair. "There. Are you happy now?"

She looks at him expectantly, but he just raises his eyebrows at her.

"What do you mean it's your fault?"

"I should have noticed," she replies, as if it should be obvious, "I should have done something."

"Jackie – "

"I was just thinking about how one of the first things I really remember is us playin' tea party together," she says, cutting him off. "I was probably about five, and I begged her until she gave in."

Dan waits, curious to see where she's going with this story, and Jackie gives him a sidelong glance.

"I was pretty persuasive back then, you know, bein' so cute and everything."

He rolls his eyes at her dramatically, making her smile a little.

"So anyway," she continues, "I don't know what the hell we were thinking, but we, uh…we got out some of Mom's good dishes. Specifically, these little blue floral saucers with their matching china teacups. Mom used to go on and on about how she inherited them from her grandmother because," Jackie pauses to put her hands on her hips and make an expression like she's just sucked on a lemon, "your Nana Mary wouldn't know quality tableware from cheap plastic or paper, and don't you think that's such a shame, girls?"

Dan's chuckle at her Bev impression earns him another smile, but Jackie soon deflates.

"I was trying so hard to be grown up," she says wistfully. "We were using orange juice instead of tea since we weren't allowed to use the stove and all, and even though Roseanne told me to let her do it, I just had to pour it by myself."

Jackie stops for a moment, and Dan watches as she takes a breath and licks her lips. Her fingers find the edge of the cushion she's sitting on, and she squeezes it so tightly her knuckles turn white.

"It was too heavy, of course, and I knocked one of the cups off the table and onto the floor. It shattered. Dad heard."

Dan steels himself against what's coming next. He's heard entirely too many of their childhood stories to be able to expect that this one ended well, and even though it's sixty years too late to change the outcome, he finds himself curling his hands into fists anyway.

"Eight years old and she didn't even hesitate," Jackie tells him with a note of awe in her voice. "Told me to go hide in the linen closet until she came to find me. She thought I didn't notice the welts on her legs afterward."

She wipes away a tear and lets out an emotional chuckle. "She spent her entire life saving me, and when she really needed it, I didn't do jack shit for her."

Dan has no idea what to say to that, caught as he is between the ache in his chest and his murderous thoughts about a man already long dead and buried. He leans forward and grabs at her hand, then squeezes hard. She startles, looking at him with wide, sorrowful eyes, then squeezes back.

And suddenly he's eighteen all over again, and a fifteen-year-old Jackie is hanging out with them at the football field after a big loss, her sparkling eyes full of laughter as she mischievously introduces herself to him as Roseanne's daughter.

Roseanne had actually blushed (he's almost forgotten what it felt like to see her blush) before she'd glared in Jackie's direction and hollered at her to shut up.

"She's my sister," she'd clarified then, as if he hadn't already worked that out for himself, before she'd slid onto the back of the bike that had fit them both like a glove. Rosie had pressed herself right up against him, leather on leather, and held on tight. It was freedom and sex and rock and roll, baby. The world was their oyster.

The world, as it turned out, had amounted to a modest house, four kids, and an impressive series of shitty jobs between them. They never quite managed the white picket fence, but they had love and warmth and plenty of sass, and that suited them just fine.

So really, she'd saved him too, hadn't she? He was just a punk kid who had fallen in love with the brown-eyed girl outside study hall whose tight corduroys called to him by name. In return, she'd given him the kind of beautiful life that a lot of people would kill for.

So why didn't he see how much she was struggling? How had he missed all the pills?

"Dan?"

Back in the present, Jackie is still squeezing his hand hard enough to crack bone. She's sitting so close to him that their knees are nearly touching, and there's concern written all over her face. He blinks at her then, as if to clear the cobwebs, and her sympathetic expression tells him that she knows exactly where he disappeared off to.

"Don't," he finally manages. "You'll drive yourself crazy thinking like that."

Jackie huffs a mirthless laugh in reply. "Pot," she challenges him, "meet kettle."

He makes a face at her. "Ok fine, you got me. But look, Rosie was going to do what Rosie was going to do, alright, and neither one of us could have done anything no matter how much we beat ourselves up. And that's the truth of it."

Jackie gently extricates her hand from his and gives him a knowing look. "You really believe that?"

Dan heaves a big sigh. "I'm tryin'."

She nods. "You know, I keep pickin' up the phone to call her and then halfway through the ringing I remember she's never going to be on the other side ever again. What are we supposed to do without her?"

"The hell if I know," he replies with a shrug. "This is my first time being widowed. Just keep goin', I guess. And you gotta talk to me, we need to establish an open dialogue here. Rosie would want that."

Dan holds out a hand toward her then, his pinky finger extended expectantly.

Jackie's eyebrows shoot up in disbelief as she gives him the kind of look that tells him she thinks he's lost his damn mind.

"Humor me," he insists.

She finally laughs and wraps her own pinky finger around his.

"Ok, deal. But only if this works both ways, Dan. I mean it."

Her expression is serious, and he studies her face carefully, struck by the resolute strength he finds there. Suddenly realizing that it's possible for people to surprise you even after nearly fifty years of knowing them, he gives her an affirming nod.

"You got it, sister."