Chapter Text
I miss you.
She can't get those words out of her head. Especially not when she sees him like this— a miserable, hulking beast, a dark mutant thing not even remotely resembling who it used to be. The sight of him makes her wince. Even seeing his peaceful, sleeping form under that fort stirs up some uncomfortable feeling in her chest.
Gangle spends a lot of time trying to put her mind off of it. Helping with repairs, talking to Zooble… anything to distract her. Not like it really matters, because even the smallest of moments alone allow for a whirlwind of thoughts to come sweeping through again.
She thinks about him. She wonders if he’s okay in there. She wonders if he’s even in there at all. She’s ashamed that she cares.
You hurt me.
Every day. Pushing, shoving, kissing, tugging, berating, ignoring, fucking, choking– It was hell. It was the kind of hell that you don’t notice you’re in until you’re in far too deep to even conceive of escaping. The kind that makes you think that maybe you’ve always been there. Makes you think that maybe it’s where you belong.
How long would she have kept letting him hurt her if he hadn’t abstracted? If she didn’t have anyone to stand up for her? What if he were all she had? Zooble tells her that there’s no point in ruminating over things that didn’t happen. That all that matters is that she’s out. He can’t hurt her anymore.
Gangle knows that they’re right, but it doesn’t stop her from thinking, knowing that she…
She would have stayed.
She didn’t escape him. She didn’t run away, she didn’t tell him off– she didn’t even think about it. Even with the opportunity for a better life with someone else, she just couldn’t fathom the idea of leaving him. Of abandoning him.
She believed in him. She couldn’t quit him.
I loved you.
Gangle can’t bring herself to hate him. Not like this, not when she knows how miserable he must have been to abstract– far more miserable than her. He had it worse. Worse enough to die.
She was beholden to him. She was his toy. If he wanted to hurt her, then she just had to take it. Back then, it felt like any attention was better than none. She wanted all she could get. Even on his bad days, even when he broke her.
She pitied him.
She would hear him quietly weep in bed sometimes, after he had finished fucking her brains out. After he thought she had fallen asleep. Those were the nights when he didn’t just up and leave afterward, leaving her to take care of the mess herself.
She knew he was vulnerable. Not enough for him to say it out loud, but she knew. Sometimes she caught glimpses of it, when he would make her say that she would never betray him, or when he “joked” about blowing his own head off— She knew. From one broken person to another, she could see it— his weakness.
Do I forgive you?
The concept of forgiveness was always a confusing thing to Gangle– the idea that anyone would say “sorry” to her felt foreign. Like a sick joke. It was usually Gangle who did the apologizing, especially to Jax. At a certain point, “sorry” became analogous to “please don’t hurt me,” in her lexicon. Sometimes it didn’t work.
Now that Jax is gone – as gone as he can be – Gangle thinks more and more about the reality of what happened to her— of what he did to her. Zooble has certainly helped open her eyes to it all. She already knew that Jax wasn’t the greatest person. She knew that he mistreated her, but it felt surreal to define her experience as abuse— that ugly word.
But that’s what it was. As strange as it felt, she also felt it as a deep truth that some part of her had known all along. And she knows that puts her squarely in the “victim” category.
Forgiving him means, to her, once again relinquishing power to him, continuing to feel bad for him in spite of his cruelty. It feels like letting him use her when he'd get upset, all because of the sadness she saw behind his eyes. It feels like another slew of apologies falling out of her after being called worthless. It feels like submission.
Not forgiving him feels equally wretched. Denying what’s left of him any kind of resolution to his suffering. Looking up at that massive, sad creature, she’s faced with the amalgamation of all his inner turmoil. Just a hopeless, desolate thing before her. There’s nothing he can do to her anymore. She’s the only one of the two of them that has the power to decide where they stand. So why can’t she?
She feels like she doesn’t deserve this power. She feels just as helpless as she ever was. Jax didn’t deserve this. No one does. That’s the one thing she’s certain of.
Gangle thinks, that maybe one day she’ll be over it, that she’ll forgive him, but—
Not yet.