Prologue Part One: Present Day, New Orleans

The ringing of his cel phone on the nightstand in the bedroom of their hotel suite brought Jax Teller out of his early afternoon sleep. Untangling himself from his wife's long limbs, he rolled over and cracked an eye to look at the number calling.

Fuck. This wasn't going to be good by any definition of the word. It was a number with a Charming area code. When he had left, or been exiled, depending on who you spoke to, nearly sixteen years earlier, he'd had almost zero contact with anyone from Charming. He'd chosen not to patch SAMCRO. His family, blood and otherwise, had chosen to disown him in return.

His wife stirred behind him. "Are you going to answer it or just stare at it?" She wrapped herself around him once again. He liked to joke that she was part octopus. She always just shrugged with a smile, saying it was his own damn fault he was "better than a body pillow", to which he would usually just roll his eyes and pull her closer.

"It's a Charming number, babe." He felt her still behind him. She'd been to Charming exactly once, and as she had said at the time when they left, she really hadn't found it to live up to its name. But then again, she had been the biggest, but truly not the only reason he'd chosen not to patch into the club, and she had taken the heat for it. He also knew that his wife still carried a shit-ton of unfounded guilt over his family casting him out. In almost sixteen years he hadn't regretted making that choice for one minute. Not that he didn't miss his family, both blood and SAMCRO. There were times he certainly did, but he knew at the very center of his being that he'd made the right decision for himself. And even on days when his wife drove him batshit crazy, she reaffirmed it for him daily.

"Then you should probably answer it. If someone from there is calling, they're not callin' to make idle chit-chat." The natural Alabama accent that his wife usually muted was coming out like it usually did when things got tense. Her voice was lower and huskier than normal. They'd been up 'til the early morning hours celebrating a friend's birthday and neither of them was twenty anymore.

He sighed and swiped at the screen to accept the call. "Hello." He kept his voice as neutral as he could.

"Jackie boy, that you?" Chibs's voice came on the line.

He untangled himself, again, from his wife so he could sit up. His wife let out a mildly put out huff and rearranged herself, once more weaving her legs in with his and resting her head on his torso. Friends joked about how his wife had no need for furniture, she had him. Neither of them tried to defend themselves, they had no defense for the truth. She did enjoy using him as a chair, couch, bed, whatever. And he certainly had no objections at all.

"Chibs?" Reaching over to the nightstand, he shook a Marlboro Black out of its box. Lighting it, he took a deep drag and closed his eyes. If Chibs was calling it was beyond not good, it was catastrophic.

"Aye Jackie, it's me." Chibs sounded awful. He sounded like a man carrying the weight of the world on one shoulder.

As he exhaled the smoke from his lungs he opened his eyes. Even with the impending sense of doom he couldn't help but smile. Right in front of his face was his wife's raised hand, fingers at the ready for a smoke. While not motivated enough to get up and get her own damn smoke, she was opportunistic enough to take advantage of the fact that he had been. She took a quick drag of the cigarette and handed it back to him.

"Why are you calling Chibs? You do remember I was disowned, right? As a matter of fact, I was told I was dead to you all." He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice but it was impossible. He had been exiled and shunned because he had chosen not to become a Son.

"Jackie..." Chibs's voice broke a little. "Ye need to come home laddie..." The Scotsman's voice broke a second time, and though he wasn't positive, it sounded like the man was crying.

His wife must have sensed his tension because he could feel her legs grasp his a little tighter and the nails of the fingers that had been resting on his hip dug in a little. The small flare of pain grounding him, reminding him where he belonged. To whom he belonged.

"Jax, where are you and how long will it take you to get here?" All of a sudden Tig's voice was aggressive on the line and sounded nearly as wrecked as Chibs's.

"New Orleans." He took another drag of his smoke. "But we're not goin' anywhere until you tell me what the fuck is goin' on that has you callin' me after nearly sixteen goddamned years. You guys, my supposed family cut me off, not the other way around, so..."

"Gemma and Thomas are dead. Apparently Gemma never changed her will so part of the garage is yours along with half of the house. How long will it take for you to get your childish ass here? Take care of what needs takin' care of and then you can go back to whatever the fuck it is that you do. Think you can find it in your heart to do that little for your Mom and brother?" Tig sounded pissed.

He didn't even know where to fucking begin. "Where's Clay, why isn't he callin'?" If he didn't talk about Gemma and Thomas, it wouldn't be real yet. He wasn't sure he was ready for that.

"Dead. How long will it take for you to get here?" He'd forgotten how much like a dog with a bone Tig could be. "And before you ask, so are Piney, Opie, Otto and Bobby." Tig's voice was shattering in his ear.

He suddenly felt like he had taken a sucker punch to the diaphragm. He felt like he was getting hardly any oxygen. "What happened to Gemma and Thomas?" He couldn't bring himself to speak above a whisper. He couldn't call her Mom, not after he had called, trying to plead his case to her, and she had responded to his entreaty of "Mom..." with a cold tone. "I only have one son and I just watched him ride out of the lot with his club." And then hung up on him. That had been an ugly day.

Tig must have sensed how close to the edge he was because the voice that answered had lost its bite, but none of the grief. "Have you seen the news or read a newspaper in the last twenty-four hours?" Fuck. That could only be bad, the fact that Tig was sure it had made national news.

"No. But that's not unusual when we're here." And it wasn't. If they were in NOLA, they were celebrating something and anything other than whole world stopping news, they were out of the current affairs loop.

He gave his wife a pat on the ass to signal he was getting up. Getting out of bed, he wandered out into the living room of the hotel suite and fired up his laptop.

In all of the years of his exile, he had trained himself not to search out information on SAMCRO. In the beginning he rationalized it by saying he wasn't a masochist and wasn't gonna fucking torture himself. As the years had gone on, and the emotional wounds had scarred over, he had just become indifferent and just really did not give a fuck. Well, that and the fact that he and Cade had their own shit to deal with over the years, and it had kept them occupied.

"So you don't live there then?" Tig was grasping at straws trying to keep the conversation going.

"No." He wasn't going to tell them that he and Cadence had no real, fixed home other than each other and the gunmetal gray '57 Chevy they crisscrossed the US and parts of Canada and Mexico in. There was a series of storage units strategically rented around the country that held some things they had gathered over the years but mostly served to house bikes (primarily warm weather places, his wife didn't like being on the back of a bike when it was cold. Or wet.) And give him space to work on the car when needed. There was also various PO and Safe Deposit Boxes, but no fixed residence. If they were somewhere they liked or needed to be and were staying longer than a couple of weeks, they'd get a furnished month to month rental. Or stay with friends. Otherwise they moved the fuck on.

"Okay, then." Tig seemed resigned to his curtness. Until he knew what the fuck was going on, these people weren't getting shit from him. They had cast him out without a second thought, turned their backs and now they want to make conversation? That shit wasn't gonna fly with him.

His laptop flared to life and he quickly clicked on the news tile on the start page. Scrolling through the Sources page, he clicked on the tile for the Sacramento Bee with a slightly shaking hand.

He thought, well, hoped, he would have to search, but no, there it was on the front page. As he skimmed the article from a headline that already had his blood running cold, he could hear his heart beating loud and erratic in his chest. He could hear his wife in the other room ordering coffee from room service. He could hear Tig breathing over the cel phone line.

He wrote fiction, kind of, and he could barely believe what he was reading. Thomas had killed their mother to get revenge for Gemma killing Tara, whom Thomas had married and had children with. Then the day after he kills Gemma, he kills two men, one an alleged dirty cop, the other an alleged crime kingpin, in broad fucking daylight, in front of dozens of witnesses. His brother, his once sweet baby brother, then led close to two dozen CHP and county sheriffs on a high speed chase that ended when Thomas purposely steered his bike into an oncoming semi, recreating their father's demise. What in the ever loving fuck had led to this?

"You found it." Shit, he must have said that last part out loud because Tig sounded even more wrecked than before.

"Yeah." He walked over and opened the curtains so he could look out onto the balcony that overlooked the Quarter. For a second he took comfort in the familiar cacophony coming up from the street. He was struggling with a hell of a lot of emotions and little real information on what had led to all of this. "We can be there in a day and a half, two days depending on how hard we push it."

As he turned back into the suite, his wife had come out of the bedroom with a hotel robe wrapped around her, her long, strawberry blonde hair hung in loose waves around a face that still took his breath away a little even after all of their years together. Raising a questioning eyebrow, she tossed him a pair of boxers to throw on before room service showed up.

He gestured towards the laptop as he tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder so he could get into his boxers.

"Yeah, okay." He was barely listening to Tig while he watched his wife reading the article.

He knew when she was finished by the muttered "fuck me, runnin'" that came from her lips as she looked up at him, shock in her dark blue eyes. He nodded grimly.

"We'll hold off on making the arrangements until you get here." There was a tone of mild relief in the SAA's voice. Although, hell, with what seems to be everyone he knew dead, Tig could be the fucking President for all he knew.

He saw no point in them holding off on making the funeral arrangements. They would know what Gemma and Thomas would want, probably more so than he would at this point. While he wanted the services to be held until he and Cade could get there, he trusted SAMCRO to do right by his mother and brother and told Tig as much. His wife nodded her agreement as she went to answer the door so room service could bring the coffee in.

"Any idea on when you might be on your way?" He looked at the clock in the living room. Two in the afternoon. He knew that his wife had a meeting at four with the manager of a small gallery here in the Quarter that wanted to do an exhibit of her photography. He also knew by the look on her face she was thinking of blowing it off and hitting the road ASAP. He wasn't going to let her do that. Not for these people. They had castigated her when he had turned his Prospect cut in. Gemma, in fact, had attempted to physically attack her, so no, he wasn't going to let SAMCRO or the situation there take something from his wife, his family.

"Cade's got a meeting at four. We'll get on the road sometime shortly after that's finished." He cleared his throat. He knew he should probably talk to his wife first, but he was 99.99 percent sure she would agree. She really didn't want a damn thing to do with Charming either. "Tig?"

"Yeah?" Tig had caught the uncertainty in his voice. "Whaddya need kid?"

"Are you..." He cleared his throat again, feeling like the kid Tig had just called him. Straightening his spine, he took a deep breath. "Are you Pres now?"

"VP, Jax. Thomas elevated Chibs from VP."

"Oh. I guess I need to talk to him then." He gratefully took the cup of coffee his wife handed him.

"Hold on a sec." He waited as he heard murmuring at the other end of the line. Then Chib's still rough voice came on.

"What do ye need Jackie?" His lips formed a small half-smile at the Scot's old nickname for him.

"Can you have your lawyer draw up papers for me to sign my part of the garage over to the club? We've got no need for it, and well..." He didn't want to say that he just didn't want the ties to Charming any longer. They had shunned him and he had found a life outside of them and he wasn't going back. After his mother and brother were buried, and all of the legal shit was taken care of, he and his wife, their little family of two, were out. Forever.

"Ye sure ye want to do that Jackie? Why don't ye think about it on the way home and if that's what ye still want then we'll get it arranged." Chibs's voice sounded like he was talking to a child. Fuck that, time to school the man.

"First of all, I'm no longer a boy, so don't talk to me like one. Secondly, I have no use for anything that may tie me to Charming. It's not my home and hasn't been for a very long time." Cade came over to where he was sitting on the couch, and crawled into his lap. He set his coffee down and wrapped the arm not holding the phone around her. "You think you would feel any differently if you were sittin' in my shoes?"

There was a long silence followed by an almost pained sigh. "No Jackie, I probably wouldn't." There was another silence. "I'll get the suit to get the paperwork together. It'll be ready for ye when ye get here." He leaned his head on his wife's shoulder, tension leaking from him at the Scot's easy capitulation.

"Thanks." He wanted to be done with this phone call. He had known before he had ever answered it was going to be a clusterfuck, and he was right. "Like I told Tig, it'll be a couple of days before we get there. We're driving and it takes about thirty, thirty-five hours if you push, it's Wednesday, we'll be there sometime early Friday evening." Putting a tone of finality in his voice.

"Aye, Jackie. We'll expect ye sometime around then." There was a sadness that he couldn't place in Chibs's tone, but fuck, he really didn't need any more shit crowding his head, it already had enough to deal with.

"Yeah. See you then."

Disconnecting the call, he dropped his phone onto the couch cushion beside them and wrapped both arms around his wife's trim waist, turning her so she was straddling him. Resting his head on her chest, he took solace in her strong, steady heartbeat, the unique scent that was hers alone under the residue of smoke, booze, sleep, and sex. He closed his eyes as her fingers carded through his hair, nails lightly scratching his scalp.

They sat there like that, comfortable in the silence in a way only two people who had lived in each other's pockets for close to two decades could be. He was waiting for the tears to come, but they weren't and probably weren't going to anytime soon. Then he realized. He had mourned them all when he was nineteen. They really had been dead to him for years. While yes, they had existed, not one of them had been truly alive for him since he was told to go and never come back. He wasn't even sure they would be going back if there wasn't legal stuff to take care of.

At nineteen he had been naive enough to think he could have it all. A life outside of SAMCRO with a girl that had, well, really just snatched his heart up into her crazy, capable, compassionate hands and refused to let go, and still have his family. At almost thirty-five, he knew better. Going back to Charming was a dangerous proposition. He could hear it in the weariness of Chibs's tone. In the clipped words from Tig. He just wasn't sure of the meaning. If it had to do with him or just the entire mess was weighing on them. Or both. He really hated not having enough information to even begin to wrap his head around anything.

His wife sensed the conflict in his head. She held him a little tighter and he felt her lips against his ear. "You and me, sugar."

He turned his head and gave her a deep, possessive kiss. When they finally pulled away from each other, foreheads resting together, and every breath was a shared one, he looked into her eyes and smiled. "Against the world."

She nodded with a bright smile and he felt almost all of his tension drain away. They could do this. They could go back to Charming, bury his family and not get dragged into the mess that their lives and SAMCRO had seemed to become.

His wife, knowing her job of getting him to not freak out was done, hopped off of his lap, saying something about a shower. When the robe was off before she hit the bedroom, he knew that was his cue that she hadn't planned on showering alone.

Swallowing down the rest of his coffee quickly, he followed his wife to the bathroom, grabbing a last bit of normality before they headed west for some final good-byes.

Prologue Part Two: Present Day, Charming

Chibs closed the cel phone and laid it on the table in the chapel at Red Woody. Tig thought the man looked exhausted. Whatever the fuck Jax had said to the new President had delivered a verbal punch.

Then again, who the fuck knew? With everything that had gone down over the last five years or so, they were all fucking physically, spiritually, and emotionally spent. The last few months had been a nightmare of epic fucking proportions and they were feeling it something deep. Especially Chibs. He'd been close to Tommy, the two bonding in the years since Jax turned his cut in. Up until that time, the Scot had grown close to the older Teller boy and hadn't handled Jax's exile well. So this was a double-edged sword for the man and Tig knew he would do well to keep that in mind.

Chibs lit a smoke and gave him a tired look. "Lad said they'll be here sometime early Friday evenin'." The new President of SAMCRO ran a hand over his face. "Need to get a hold of the lawyer. Jackie wants to sign over his part of TM to the club."

He wasn't shocked by that revelation. Why would Jax even want part of TM? "Makes sense. I'll call the lawyer here in a bit. Did he say anything about the house?"

Chibs shook his head bitterly. "Nah, although after what he said about the garage, he may just want to burn the place down. Says he wants nothin' that'll tie him to Charming." He could hear the disappointment weave itself into the Scot's words.

He lit a smoke and exhaled towards the ceiling. He looked back over at Chibs who was staring off at a whole lot of nothing. He cleared his throat to get the man's attention. When Chibs looked back to him, he shrugged. "Can you really blame him?" When Chibs didn't say anything, he pressed on. "The way Clay and Gem ran that kid off when he made the decision not to patch in..."

Chibs looked up at him with surprise on his scarred face. "Don't remember ye stickin' up for the lad back then Tiggy."

He shrugged. "Not in front of the rest of the club, no. But behind closed chapel doors, just me and Clay?" He shrugged again, this time with a slight smirk. He had bitched Clay out about it. Everyone who sat at that table had a life before SAMCRO. They all had things in their pasts that had led them there. Opie, Jax, and Tommy had never had any other choice, it was club or nothin'. That had never sat well with him. He had always felt that those three should have been allowed to test the world outside of SAMCRO first. Yeah, Clay had sent Jax on the walkabout that had led to the young man deciding not to patch in, but it hadn't really been about Jax finding what he really wanted out of his life, it had been to purge Tara from his system so he could come back and continue on the path to the gavel that Gemma and Clay had decided he was on. Too bad for them Fate had put a tall, leggy, gorgeous strawberry blonde in the kid's path. With that girl, just by looks alone, he wasn't sure he wouldn't have made the same damn decision Jax had.

Then he gave Chibs a pointed look. "And I don't remember anyone coming to the kid's defense back then." And even though it had wrecked Chibs, he wasn't wrong. Not a single one of them had stood up to Clay and Gemma in front of Jax, or hell any of the others. All of them turned their backs on that kid and Chibs was lucky Jax hadn't hung up the second he heard that Scottish accent.

Chibs looked down at the table while he continued to look pointedly at the man. "Jax made a choice not to become a Son. That was his choice to make, and he doesn't sound like a man who has regretted that decision one bit." He slid his chair back from the table. "I'm goin' to go talk to Wendy and Nero. Jax said to go ahead and make arrangements. That we'd know better than he would. But he'd like us to hold off on the services until they get here."

Chibs looked up. "Yeah, should probably let them know Jackie is on his way."

As he was getting ready to open the door to leave chapel, he turned. "I know you're grieving Tom, we all are. Don't let that shit blind you to who Jax is now. He ain't club, doesn't want to be, and all of us need to respect that."

Without giving Chibs time to form a response he left the room and made his way out to his bike. As he rode away from Red Woody and into Charming, he looked around. Jax Teller was coming home to a place that while parts not looking so different, was a far different place than when he had left. Or more accurately put, been run out of town on a rail. Because that's what had happened, when one chose not to sugarcoat it. Jax had been disowned by his mother, brother, step-father, and extended family. They had earned whatever animosity that Jax may still carry.

Sitting at a stoplight, he shook his head with some regret and bitterness. Jackson Teller was coming home to bury his past and he already knew that there would be those who would try to keep him here.

He hoped the intervening years had made Jax a strong enough man to walk away a second time.