2Disclaimer: Jericho is not mine.
She stares down the darkened hallway with their last conversation echoing in her head. She should move or go somewhere or do something other than stand frozen in the face of the repercussions of his words. He always does this. He always turns everything upside down around her ears. She thought that she was finished allowing him to have that sort of power over her, but it has become increasingly clear to her in the weeks since the bombs went off that she was only fooling herself with a temporary reprieve.
"Like you and Jake," he told her before walking out of her life as if he had just been sharing some helpful little piece of information instead of sending her into a spiral. She should know by now that she is always better off when she puts less thought into the things that Jonah says, but she cannot seem to stop herself. He even said it as if it was something that she should be proud of - that she and Jake are somehow a repeat of her parents. How was she supposed to consider that a good thing? Was she supposed to pretend that she did not grow up seeing the way her parents circled each other in some sort of toxic orbit where neither one of them was willing to stay with the other but neither one of them was ever willing to completely walk away? Was she supposed to pretend that she did not remember the yelling or the arguing or the way that her mother used to cry herself to sleep when she thought that her children were long asleep and could not hear?
She cannot get the image of the wedding band still resting on his finger as they tried to stop the bleeding from his arm to stop appearing behind her eyelids every time that she blinks. Has he always worn that? She cannot remember if he had it on the last time that she saw him. It speaks volumes about the state of the relationship that she has (or does not have) with her father that she would not have put it beyond possible that he would have slipped it on to up his chances of her helping him. Only the lack of time that he likely had to make his escape from the compound and hide himself in her house makes her less inclined to think that.
She is a little bit numb and a little bit sad and a little bit angry. (It has been a really rough couple of days.) She wants to be furious for the out and out lie that he told her before he left, but she cannot summon up the energy to feel that way. She is sticking to mostly numb - it requires the least amount of effort on her part. That line he fed her about how he "didn't want to" leave her mother and her and her baby brother is slowly driving her back toward agitation. The saddest part of all is that she honestly thinks that he does not realize that it was a lie. He really thinks that he did not have any other options. There were options. She has always known that in the same way that her loyal, devoted to her children first mother had always known that he could have given up the road he was taking to stay with them but had not. Her mother had never come out and said it, but Emily had seen the far off look in her eyes after he had taken off again after a Christmas or birthday visit that was misty and wondering why it was that the three of them were not worth keeping.
Her mother had gone to her grave never sorry that she had put her children first but still hoping that the time would come when their father would realize and change and decide that they were what he wanted most. She was not her mother. She did not want to be her mother, and she most definitely did not want Jake to be her father. That was a mess that no one would willingly choose, except she was starting to realize that she had.
There had been years of back and forth between her and Jake. They had been the high school couple that broke up and got together again and broke up and argued loudly and made up in public and provided enough drama to keep all of the school gossips in tales. The problem was that they had never really stopped. They had left high school and become young adults who still broke up and got together and broke up again and argued loudly and made up in public and provided enough drama to keep all of the town gossips in tales. There was something off about that, but they had never seemed to be able to break completely out of each other's orbit.
That "sad and depressing" song (as Jake had described it) had been them exactly. They had spent so much time unhappy but had never been able to shake each other or the way things were when they could ignore everything else and just be the two of them together without anything else in focus. Then, he had been gone. The two of them had not really had any sort of closure - not for them. It was their normal cycle just on a bigger scale. Chris had been dead, and she had wanted to blame the world. She had blamed Jake - she had blamed him loudly and vehemently. He had walked away - not just for a few hours or days like their normal fights. He had been really gone. Days had turned to weeks and weeks had turned to months, and somewhere along the way there had been Roger. Her life had moved on around her without her realizing that that was what was happening.
But Roger was gone and Jake had come back, and there were moments when it felt like nothing had changed. It was so easy to let familiar patterns take over. It was so easy to fight with Jake and have sweet moments with Jake by turns. Everything was chaos, but the back and forth with Jake was her normal. She had claimed for a long time that she did not want it to be, but she was no longer so sure about that. She needed to stop thinking. She definitely needed to stop leaning against the wall in her unlit hallway thinking. She needed out of that house with pieces of Roger and her father telling her things that she did not want to hear. Roger was gone. Her father was gone - more gone than even during the times that he had been in prison. It was a strange thought to have, and it gave her an unsettled feeling.
The house was too big and too strange, and she suddenly couldn't breathe in it. She would go to Bailey's. Bailey's was always Bailey's. It was comfortable there. In this moment, there was nothing that she thought she needed more than something comfortable.
