After failing to keep secrets, multiple Charming residents learn the hard way that though the truth always comes out, it isn't always the right version.

General trigger warnings for this story: Language, smut, mentions of rape, abuse, drug use/overdose, violence/death, racism/gang activity.

Playlists are available on Apple Music (mssierraalexis), and Spotify (M.S. Alexis), links can also be found on the ARAC Tumblr (aravenamongcrows). Be sure to follow where ask and submissions are open, and m. s. alexis on Instagram (tracking #aravenamongcrows), for exclusive photos, updates, and more!

CHAPTER 71: RX

;

"Sorry..." Tara winced as she pressed down the edge of the final butterfly bandage that had been placed on the corner of Sydney's lip. "There," she watched the blonde girl slowly open her eyes as she eased off of the pressure. "Nothing's broken. You should heal up within a few days."

Sydney nodded, turning to look in the mirror above the dresser where she saw that the redness beneath her eyes was already beginning to darken. "You know, when I told you that the appearance was the window to the soul, this wasn't exactly what I meant," she snorted.

"Well, if there was ever a soul to pull it off..." Tara winked as she packed up her medical bag.

"The 'walk of shame' outfit really sells it." Sydney turned around, dramatically striking a pose.

Tara laughed, putting her hands on her hips as she scanned over the look. "It's kind of cute," she shrugged.

"Maybe if I had the right shoes…" Sydney stuck out her leg, imagining how the perfect pair of sneakers could actually make the tied up Harley tee and oversized black sweatpants look somewhat stylish.

"You still have your teeth, that's what matters." Tara chuckled, feeling her chest tightening a bit—not with sadness, but with admiration as she gazed upon the younger woman who was sitting in front of her with a big toothy smile. Even with a grown man's clothing, two black eyes, and a split lip, Sydney was still the most beautiful girl that she'd ever laid eyes on; the kind of beauty that came from within—a beauty that emanated from her immense strength, and light-hearted attitude.

"Uh, do you think you could go get Tig? He has my stuff." Sydney asked as she combed her fingers through her damp hair, parting it down the middle where she began pulling it into two dutch braids down the back of her head.

"Sure." Tara laughed as she looked down at Sydney's bare feet, heading out to the bar in search of the Sergeant.

Once Tara was gone, Sydney turned back to the mirror—something that she, for some reason, couldn't stop herself from doing. She squinted at the reflection, trying to make herself hate what she was looking at, searching for the urge to turn away, but it was nowhere to be found. She brought her hand up to her face, tracing over the tiny white bandages with the tips of her long nails and she turned from side to side, her forehead creasing when she felt the corners of her mouth curling up into a sadistic smile. For the first time, she didn't feel weak or damaged by the clear evidence of her disadvantage, she felt resilient.

"Hey," she snapped out of it when she heard the door open behind her, whipping her head around quickly where she saw Tara peeking into the room, blinking as the sudden movement made her dizzy. "Jesus," Tara sighed as she crossed the threshold. "You need to be careful, you might have a concussion."

"Yes, Doctor." Sydney rolled her eyes, knowing that her dizziness had little to do with a potential head injury.

"Tig isn't here. Juice said he went to your house."

"Oh." Sydney looked away as a scowl came to her face. Surely Tig should've been back by now? She felt herself beginning to panic. What if he snapped? What if Stahl found a way around Hale's dismissal? What if Opie threw him under the bus, and he was arrested too?

"You want a ride there?" Tara offered as she watched concern cloud Sydney's face.

"Please," Sydney nodded eagerly, blinking again as her vision went fuzzy from the sudden movement. "I must've just heard him wrong in all the commotion." She tried to brush off the worry, ignoring Tara's suspicious brown gaze.

"Quit doing that!" Tara mock-scolded as Sydney made herself dizzy again. "It's no problem, let's go," she nodded out the door, helping her get to her feet.

;

Tig stood in the same spot in Sydney's kitchen that he'd been standing in for the last hour, leaning over the island where he rubbed his steadily-growing goatee with one hand, and tapped his thumb against the countertop with the other, trying desperately to process the multitude of shocking events that had occurred in the last few hours, in a way that wouldn't make him fly off the handle.

He rested his forehead in his hands, blowing out a breath of frustration as he tried to navigate the shit-storm in his brain, unsure what was fact and what was fiction, what was real and what was made up, what was rational and what was an overreaction. He squeezed his eyes shut harshly, hoping to make it all go away, but it didn't work. He couldn't see any clearer as he stared at the bottle of narcotics that had always managed to find their way back into his life, no matter how hard he tried to keep them out.

;

Happy laid back against the hard bed of the visitor's dorm with his hands folded behind his head as one of the newer SAMTAC croweaters sucked his dick. He stared at the ceiling as he tried to make himself enjoy it, tried to make the usually pleasant sensation wash away his newfound thoughts, but he had no idea how. Thoughts of other women had never clouded his ability to enjoy a free hummer.

"You like that, baby?" The brunette with the nasally voice asked as she came up for air.

Happy felt his lip turning up, and his forehead folding into a scowl. No, he didn't 'like that', and her talking only made him like it that much less. "Shut up," he grunted, not opening his eyes to see whatever look of offense painted her face before she got back to work. All he could see behind his closed eyes, was Maya's face, and all he could hear in the silent room, was Sydney's voice; telling him to leave, that she didn't need him anymore. "I'm done," he shook his head as he sat up abruptly, pushing the woman off of him.

"Um, o-okay," she wiped her mouth as her shoulders began to shake in the terrifying presence of the now angry the bald man.

"Just go." Happy softened his tone a bit, remembering that the fresh meat was not used to the brashness of the Tacoma Killer.

The girl nodded, scurrying out the door where she left Happy with some peace and quiet where his mind went straight back to the previous day. He couldn't stop thinking about the awkward encounter with Sydney... He knew that she'd been ignoring him on purpose, but after nineteen years together, he could tell that something else was off. She was in her head about something, but he'd lost his privilege of knowing what.

;

Sydney breathed a sigh of relief as she and Tara pulled up in front of her house to see that Tig's bike was parked in the driveway, hoping that maybe he had just found some calmness in the solitude away from the drama at the clubhouse.

"Thanks, Doc," she smiled at Tara, leaning over to give her a hug.

"Y-you're welcome," Tara smiled awkwardly as the unexpected physical touch flooded her with a discomfort that she knew could be chalked up to a multitude of things; her father, Kohn, Gemma's incessant power plays.

"Shit," Sydney pulled away as soon as she recognized the look on Tara's face, making herself dizzy again. "I'm sorry..."

"No." Tara shook her head, grabbing Sydney's hands to stop her. "It's okay… I need to get used to not being scared," she nodded, forcing a smile. "Now go, and stop doing that!" She laughed.

Sydney giggled, getting out of the car slowly where she tiptoed across the front lawn in her bare feet, making her way up the short set of steps and to the front door. She tried the handle, but found that it was locked; digging her key out of the deep pocket of her black sweatpants.

"Babe?" She called as she pushed the door open, stepping inside the house where she was met with an eerie silence; no distant sound of a TV or radio, or even Tig snoring. She slowly closed the door behind her as the worry resurfaced, taking one last cautionary look around before she began creeping down the hallway. "Babe?" She called again as the empty living room and dining room came into view.

"We need to talk." She jumped when she heard his voice, turning to find him standing with his hands resting on the island, and his head down.

Sydney didn't have to blink the dizziness away this time, the weight of his words snapped her right back into reality. "Good memories associated with those words," she scoffed, hoping that maybe, just maybe, if she joked about it, it would abolish the seriousness that she could tell was coming.

Tig chewed the inside of his lip, exhaling slowly as he placed the pill bottle on the island in front of him. "What am I looking at?" He sighed.

Sydney felt her heart drop—not sink the way that it had every time she'd worried about being sniffed out in the last few days, drop, because she knew exactly what he was looking at, but she prayed to some sick and twisted God that somehow, he didn't.

"I don't know. What are you looking at?" Her voice went flat with the only response that she could come up with, knowing that her luck with the guardian angel had run out, now it was Karma's turn with her.

"Was hoping you could tell me." His voice was equally as flat as he knocked the bottle over, watching the white pills tumble out onto the marble surface. Sydney winced, turning her head away as she felt her cheeks burning, and her heart rate picking up. How could she have been so careless?

Tig felt his chest beginning to heave as the anger returned, replacing the confusion that he'd forced himself to feel instead when he'd told himself that this was all just some big misunderstanding; that these were leftover pills from Half-Sack when she'd first been discharged from the hospital, or that they were from a previous injury that she'd tossed into a random drawer during her move, but the look on her face told him very clearly that this was no misunderstanding.

"What the hell is this?" He seethed.

"Apparently this is you taking a liking to snooping through my shit." Sydney didn't even know what she was trying to do as the passive words rolled over her cracked lips. Trying to keep the mood light? Trying to shift the blame? Trying to put off the argument for as long as possible?

"I'm not fucking around!" Tig growled as he smacked the pill bottle off of the counter, watching Sydney's eyes fall closed as the pills flew across the room in all different directions; the light bouncing as they settled being the only noise that cut through the deafening silence.

"So that night at the clubhouse… The first time that we talked about this, what you told me was just another one of your sneaky ways to get what you wanted." His voice was an laced with a equal mixture of anger and hurt.

"You think I would do that to you?" Her voice strained as her face contorted with the pain of the accusation, but it quickly fell when she realized that he wasn't wrong in thinking that. It wasn't far-fetched—it was what she had done her entire life, and it was how she'd gotten the pills in the first place; manipulating the leather-bearing men to get what she wanted. The irony was that Tig had been one of the only leather-bearing men that she'd never wanted to use to get what she wanted, and he had been the only leather-bearing man to ever cause her any real kind of guilt over the thought of doing so.

"I don't know what to think," he shook his head.

Sydney sighed shakily, knowing that she had no dog in this fight. "I just needed something to help me get through the week… No one was supposed to know about it," she admitted shamefully, unable to meet his eyes.

"No one except your little pal Kippy, right?" He cocked his head to the side.

Sydney felt her heart skip—a feeling that she would've traded for the dropping, any day. She could handle the guilt of lying to Tig, but what couldn't handle was the guilt of what was going to happen to the person who had done nothing but try and help her, because she knew that Tig wouldn't let something this serious slide a second time.

"What the hell are we doin' here, Syd? What kind of relationship is this if you can't come to me with any of this shit? Instead you go running off to another man," he spit out bitterly.

"All you would've done is worried like you're worrying now," she rolled her eyes, her own frustration feeling instantly justified the second that he began blowing things out of proportion.

"Yeah, I'm worrying now," he nodded. "I'm worrying because my girlfriend, with a family history of addiction, is popping pills behind my back!"

Any bit of guilt was instantly erased when Sydney heard the awful words come out of his mouth. "I am not my mother," she sneered with an ice-cold tone as her chest began heaving now.

"I know," he nodded firmly. "Why do you think this is so fucking shocking to me?"

"If I got them from the doctor, you wouldn't be saying any of this! What fucking difference does it make?" She threw her hands up.

"If you got them from the doctor, I would have no reason to worry!" He slammed his fist down against the counter.

Sydney winced again, closing her eyes as she took a deep breath, harnessing every bit of self-control that she could in order to stay calm. "I'm doing what I have to do," she told him quietly.

"Lying to me is what you have to do?"

"To keep you from ruining any chance that I have here to be seen as an equal?" She snapped. "Yes, it is."

Tig blinked a few times, taken aback by the answer that shot him right in the heart. It all made sense now... Her reluctance to accept his help, to open up to him, to let him see her. He hung his head, staring down at his hands as he leveraged himself against the cold, pill-littered surface. "After church," he began softly. "When you were hurting and didn't want anybody to know... I helped you. A few fucking hours ago," he grimaced as he tried to stay calm. "I offered to get you exactly what you've been hiding from me."

"Yeah, you did," she nodded, only choosing to acknowledge the first half of his statement. "You remember what happened after that?"

"Yeah, I do," he matched her challenge. "You remember why that happened? Because you didn't fucking tell me what was going on. You're so hung up on thinking that I'm going to ruin your chances, that you aren't even willing to give me any."

Sydney knew that she'd backed herself into a proverbial corner the moment that this conversation began, but now, as he flawlessly countered every single one of her points, she could feel that she was firmly pressed up against the wall, and she wished that it wasn't something that she was impressed by.

"Ask me what would've happened if you came to me for help," he requested as gently as possible, waiting patiently for an answer that didn't come as she stayed silent and kept her head down. "See, you can't," he shook his head. "Because you know that I would've done anything that you needed me to."

"I know that you would've gotten them for me," she snipped for no reason other than to get him to stop talking. "It's how you would've acted about it that I didn't want to deal with."

"Act how?"

"Like this!" She cringed as she heard the whine of frustration in her own voice.

"Like what? Giving a shit about you?"

"You really don't get it, do you?" She shook her head slowly, squinting as she stared deep into his eyes, feeling the words beginning to flow out of her in a way that she hadn't even fully comprehended yet. "If I ever get a chance… A vote… You're part of that. Half-Sack might not be. You're already the one who sees me at my weakest, and one 'no' is all that it takes…" She trailed off sadly as the hard truth slapped her in the face just as hard as it had slapped him.

"Sydney… You got out of the hospital on Thursday and I drove you to kill a man on Friday. Did I stand in your way? Try to take over? No, I didn't. Because I knew it was what you needed." Sydney stayed silent when, once again, he proved that every single one of her internal worries—her defence mechanisms—had been completely unnecessary. "Hap was the one who didn't want you on that hit, so don't put that on me."

Sydney perked back up. Finally, something that she could use to help make sense of her twisted logic. "You're right," she nodded. "Hap was the one who didn't want me on that hit... The one person who I never hid myself from, was the one person that didn't want me anywhere near my own revenge because they didn't trust that I could handle it."

Tig took a deep breath as he realized that at this rate, between their collective stubbornness and sizeable egos, they would be going back and forth all night. "I love you," He looked into her eyes sincerely. "When you're hurting, the last thing on my mind is your seat at the table." He tried to tell himself that it wasn't a lie, which, technically it wasn't; what consumed his mind wasn't her ability to handle herself, it was his inability to keep her from a danger that he feared would kill both of them.

"There's no room for that kind of weakness in this life..." She whispered.

"All I want is to make it better for you... For you to let me make it better for you. No matter what that means. Weakness don't matter to me, it's part of the deal."

"Until I get that patch, it matters to me." She hated that she couldn't fully give herself to him the way that he so immensely deserved. But she also belonged to the reaper, not just the crow.

"You'd really rather lie and hide shit from me, than let me help you?" He gave her a pained look as he shook his head, trying to understand what more he could possibly do to prove to her that she could trust him.

"Tig, it's not that big of a fucking deal," she sighed, wishing that this painful argument would end. She had been trying to let him help her, but she could only bend so far until she would break.

"You can tell yourself that all you want, but if it wasn't? We wouldn't be having this conversation."

"So you're telling me that you've never taken any pills? Not after an accident or at a party or even after a bad fucking day?" She mused as the leg she'd found to stand on began to stabilize. Because we both know that's a lie," she spit the venomous words at him.

"I know my limits." He had absolutely dabbled in the drug scene in the past, and it was no secret that he still did from time to time, but his past had been too tainted by the consequences of substance abuse for him to be able to ever fall victim to anything hardcore.

"And I know mine," she growled. "Maybe you should take a walk down memory lane, and think about what happened the last time that you pushed those limits before you wanna come and try to talk to me about mine. Because the reason I'm taking pills is so that I'm not in fucking agony, not because I need to escape my shitty life." She turned her back to him as she walked towards the patio door. She was done with this conversation.

;

Jax spent the remainder of the afternoon frantically riding all over town in search of some sign of his best friend—or something to help him believe that he hadn't turned—but he came up empty handed. There wasn't a soul in Charming who had seen the Winstons since they'd been carted off to god knows where by ATF, he just hoped that the reason for being carted off was still in the realm of 'god knows what', and not for the reason that he, and everybody else, worried it was.

;

Tig's mind was racing a million miles a minute as he stormed out of Sydney's house. He'd hoped that confronting her would've, at the very least, brought some kind of closure, but he hadn't gotten any of the answers that he'd wanted. Instead, he'd gotten a hard truth that he didn't want to have to acknowledge, because it would make him the biggest hypocrite in Northern California.

He took a deep breath as he felt himself beginning to hyperventilate, which usually meant that he needed to hit something, but he couldn't do that. He ran his fingers through his hair, pulling at his curls as the weight of his past became heavier and heavier—a crushing reminder that no matter how much good he did, it would never be enough to ward off the evil that he'd been plagued with ever since the awful day that he was brought into this world.

"Fuck!" He cursed as he kicked the cement beneath his boots, inhaling deeply as he turned back to the house, sighing and turning back around. He couldn't go back in there, not now, there was already too much damage done. He sighed heavily, walking over to his bike where he slammed his helmet on, and fired up the engine. He'd pushed her too far—too far when he should've known that it had already been too much. Too much after her dad, too much after their breakup, too much after the shooting, too much after Happy, too much after Tank, too much after the nightmare, too much after the cop. It had all just been too much, and as usual, he hadn't been enough.

;

Song for this chapter

TKO - Justin Timberlake