Work Text:
Title: Getting Past It
Author: 
frey_at_last
Pairing: Jack/Liz (background Jack/Avery)
Spoilers: None, but set in S5
Rating: PG
Self-deception is one of the pillars of business sense, Don Geiss said on an occasion years ago, as they reclined on his yacht in the evening. It became something Jack repeated to promising subordinates who betrayed an imprudent honest streak.
Yet, even for Jack, it's difficult to lie to oneself regarding those things that impinge most noticeably, those heaviest distractions, like falling in love with a friend.
Jack knows this because of slight experience - a time which thankfully did not last too long. There were many reasons to resist that temptation, and he heeded each one of them. Now, that time - the months when he had, suffice it to say, certain feelings for Lemon - is far enough in the distance that he can mull it over from his place as a new father and a nearly married man. It does seem long ago. Since it ended he's loved three different women and imagined futures with each of them. Now he is imagining life with Avery and his daughter, and he's certain it will be the one that comes true.
He was never certain of that, with Lemon. There were so many variables and mismatches, and it seemed likely that she would never return his feelings. Granted, she never did - but he was able to overlook the improbability that year when he wanted her, and particularly on those summer evenings when he'd get off the plane from DC and find himself bouncing his leg impatiently as he waited for his driver to arrive, anticipating seeing her face. And that once, when he couldn't wait, and hired a cab.
"You called a cab, really?" she'd asked him. "Not even a cab limo?"
"There was a pile-up that Antonio was unable to bypass," Jack had lied.
He could never tell if she knew when he was lying. But she looked suspicious and he smiled to see it. Jack found all of her expressions rather fetching, then.
When he proposed to Elisa, Jack was taken with her mouth and hands and, yes, her breasts, which any objective observer might attest were sublime. It's not that there wasn't more - she'd cared for him when he felt alone - but he let her go easily and didn't look back.
("Don't look back, but get somebody to watch your back," was Liz's attempt at levity.
"I thought that's what I had you for," he'd said, but Liz could never let him be truly earnest with her.
"I'll scare her off with my slanket," she'd said derisively - whether her scorn was directed toward Elisa or toward herself, he didn't know.)
Would it be too harsh to say he was disappointed by her? Things seemed simple while they were apart, and he thought he'd never before known what it meant to love someone not in spite but because of their flaws.
He's certain that he loved Elisa and Nancy, the women in between. It seems Jack is no longer capable of meaningless love affairs with young socialites or aspiring models. Elisa and Nancy were far from that, and his feelings for them were so surprising they must have been genuine.
Yet he sometimes thinks that if things had gone differently with her - with Lemon - he wouldn't have known or loved the others. He thinks he would still be with Liz.
Not, mind you, that he still has the same feelings for her. Things have changed, and he has changed. But perhaps, in that world, he would have changed differently. Perhaps they would have changed together.
"You're not still holding a torch for Bianca, are you?" asks Liz one night in his office. She seems to be running one last check; fortified by the alcohol in her system. They are drinking together at his insistence.
("My party tomorrow" - his bachelor party - "will be quite upscale and a socially significant event" - Liz is not invited, given that there will be entertainment only suitable for men - "and will feature no alcohol of any kind" - as Avery is still several weeks away from birth.
"Your soon-to-be-wife plans your bachelor party and agrees to let you go to gross rich-guy gentlemen's clubs, but won't let you drink at them," Liz says. "What a woman."
"I presume you would not?" Jack says.
"I would pretty much dump Carol if he went to a strip club," Liz says - though that wasn't what he'd meant.)
Jack pauses to pour another glass and refill Liz's, his mouth now less manueverable than it was an hour ago.
"I am not carrying anything for Bianca," he manages, "least of all something flammable."
"Do you miss Nancy?" she asks.
"I find this a strange topic of conversation."
"Brutal honesty," she says. "For me."
"I thought we'd banned that game."
"Truth or dare?"
"Would you rather."
"Be honest," she says. He looks at her, her head lolling back on the seat of his couch, their bottles clustered around her knees on the floor, the flush on her skin and her slow blink.
"I don't miss Nancy."
(He wonders what that makes her think of him. Her face doesn't seem to register disgust.)
"Will you be happy with her, Jack? Do you think you'll stick it out?"
Jack is drunk enough to wonder why she asks. He gestures to her with his liquor, as if it, and Liz's own drink, is enough of an answer.
"Why do you ask?" He barely pauses. "I've told you. This is my life."
She reaches out and touches his ankle, right below where his slacks are hitched up over his sock.
"I just want you to be happy," she says.
There are moments when that time (when even the thought of her moved him) does not seem so distant at all.
So when Avery asks him one more time, a few weeks before the birth of their child and after he comes in the door from a late dinner with Liz -
"You really never had feelings for her?"
(a moment of vulnerability for her, the uncommon stepping stones of their precarious life together)
he answers, "You're making it more than it is. It was never that complicated."
"Funny," Avery says, "she said the same thing."