Everything Has Changed

Freebird

If I leave here tomorrow

Would you still remember me?For I must be traveling on now'Cause there's too many places I've got to see

The drive back to Oregon is long and lonely. Freebird blares through the speakers of Jax's Charger, attempting to clear his mind of the last few months. It had all started as a simple, selfish want, to see Tara again. To hold his children in his arms and a dream that his family could be resurrected from the ashes of a life in ruins. It ended, much as it began, with a memory of life left behind, and a time he couldn't recapture.

The open road in a car is much like a bike, at a certain speed it all blurs. Everything becomes about the immediate, and if he's honest with himself that's about all he can handle right now. Thinking about everything he's left behind in Charming is too painful. Thinking about the days in the future he will have without Tara and his children is unbearable and he longs to feel the chill of the air from astride a motorcycle to help him forget. He decides that when he gets home the first thing he's going to do is buy a bike. Something he can rebuild, to occupy his mind and free his soul. That is a part of him he will never let go.

He pulls into his garage and leaves what few belongings he's brought back from Charming in the car. Maybe in a few days he'll deal with it. For now, he needs the immediate. He opens the windows to air out his house that's been closed up all this time. He throws out the spoiled food in the fridge, and calls his shop manager to give him the day off tomorrow since the man has more then stepped up in his absence. He writes himself a note to give the man a raise.

He checks his phone, already a message from the kids. They all take their turns saying goodnight on the voicemail. It breaks his heart. He sits on the bed in his room. Alone. Never before, has this house felt so empty. In the years before his brief return to Charming it had always been filled with hope. Rooms left empty for when his boys filled them, drawers left unfilled for Tara to fill once she was there.

He glances at the laundry basket he's left filled with clean folded laundry. He'd been to excited to head out to put them away. He pulls open one of the consistently empty drawers and begins to fill it with his clothes. He's trying to hide his pain and disappointment, even from himself, but when he catches sight of himself in the dresser mirror he sees the bag under his eyes from lack of sleep, the new creases in his eyes from worry, and hardness he hasn't seen in his jaw since he left Stockton, and Charming behind. He also sees the picture of him and Tara he's kept there every single day. It's a selfie they took while sneaking away to a field for a few moments of together time before things with Clay and the Irish took a shit.

He is overcome with all the emotions he's had to push aside to do what needed to be done. It almost didn't seem real. He hadn't held a gun or worn a kutte in years and yet the amount of blood on his hands still hadn't worn off. He would bear the stamp of all the lives he's taken for the rest of his life, and now he had lost hope. If not for his children Jax knew it would be easy to lose this new, better version of himself he'd worked so hard at creating.

Jax stares the eyes of the man in mirror and knows it's going to be one step at a time. He takes down the picture and pulls out his wallet and adds the newest pictures of Thomas, Abel and Charlie. He will focus on them and make sure he can be someone they can be proud to call, dad. He heads to the bathroom to shave off the beard that Charming had grown on him.

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But if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you can not change, oh, oh, oh, oh.
And this bird you can not change.
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows I can't change.