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There was always music playing in one room of the house or another, that was the requirement.
“I won’t have a fucking funeral parlour as a home, none of that Bach shit.”, he’d lamented the moment he moved all his stuff into the place.
Before, when he lived half his life in hotel rooms or large expensive tour buses, the place just collected dust, a impulse buy after his first album landed and the promotion tour subsided.
It was of his own accord to have it built out in the woods, akin to the large cabin’s you’d see out in the Canadian Rockies, all stained wood and rustic interior design.
The main points being that it felt secluded and almost supernatural in nature. If you screamed in the forest that lingered behind the cabin, you’d only end up hearing yourself, the nearest major city was a 30 minute drive away.
At the moment, it was an older Fleetwood Mac album filtering through the walls. Spinning on the record player that was perched upon the bookcase in the living room.
Jack surely wasn’t biased to country music, if you could even consider Stevie Nicks country.
He heard her before he saw her, harmonizing somewhat with the chorus. She spins on knee high clad legs, bringing her leg out into a dancer’s extension, executing a pirouette easily on the hardwood flooring of the cabin.
“I’ll never get tired of watching you dance like that peach,” He grins, his voice low, teeth capturing his lower lip.
Her mouth moves to say something in response, but he doesn’t catch it immediately, but instead, feeling the weight of her frame as she flops herself down onto the opposite side of the couch, immediately setting her legs onto his lap.
“What was that?” He raises a brow in inquiry, not actually needing to hear her speak again for understanding but for the pure joy and pleasure of hearing her voice alone. She adjusts the socks, the lace that decorated the top of them, delicately accenting the exposed skin of her legs.
She tips her head up, pushing a large chunk of her hair away from her face
“Ah it’s nothing, I was just saying how nice it is here, all the pine and the firs and everything. And the quiet, it’s so goddamn quiet here, I mean, I haven’t heard myself think like this in months-years even. How do you not go absolutely insane out here?”
She pauses. “I heard at the cafe the other day that someone saw a moose out here, a goddamn moose Jack, how crazy is that? It’s so nice out here, feels like I’m in my own little fairytale, complete with my own Prince Charming-“ she pauses again,
“Well, not that I’d ever want to camp here or anything -God no, all the deer and everything? Freaks me the hell out.”
He would never tire of this, he decided, her rambling about the most minimal things. It was a blessing in disguise to have someone else be doing the talking for once in his life.
“Does it snow a lot here? We’ve never spent winter together at the cabin before.” She asks, propping her face up with one curved hand.
He hums in response “Well, yeah, I guess so, I think we end up actually getting the brunt of the storms that migrate up to the Pacific Northwest.”
He can feel how Charlie scuttles beneath his feet at the sound of his voice and he picks up the toy that was dropped for him, giving it a good toss out to the deck.
They had the screen open since it wasn’t snowing yet, and they were both naturally self proclaimed ‘warm blooded’ individuals, always running hot.
He runs a hand along his scruffy jawline thoughtfully.
He’d forgiven shaving the last couple of weeks, considering the fact that at the last joint “house call” type meeting with his therapist , she had asked his wife to lock his razors into a small box that currently resided in the bedroom cabinet, as if he was a fucking child. Taunting him every time he opened it to get a bandaid to wrap around his withered thumbs.
No matter how many times Ally nagged him about it, he still wouldn’t play with a guitar pick. Claiming that it wasn’t the way he was taught, and it wasn’t ‘authentic’ enough for him.
Truthfully, Jackson needed to be babied, considering the fact that he couldn’t even remember how to unlock his own goddamn front door when he first came home out of his inpatient program.
Thankfully, it was coming up on almost four whole months since his discharge, and his therapist still does house calls once a week for him, for Ally alone, and then for them together.
It was a lot, mentally for him, but considering the fact that she was pouring her hard earned money into all this to keep him well, not to mention all of the countless yoga sessions she dragged him to, and the endless appointments with alternative medicine professionals that ended in “ist”, she’d hired to help with the toll that years of hardcore alcohol and drug abuse took on his body, not to mention the strain from detoxing in such a small window of time.
He wasn’t about to fuck it all up by being .. well, Jackson.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“What’s on your mind baby?” Her soft voice pulls him out of his thoughts.
And This was the Ally he couldn’t get enough of, no makeup and stripped down, (figuratively and almost literally), hardly anything done to her hair or nails , the natural brown roots peeking through her stage persona’s trademark almost neon auburn, clad in one of his old ratty tour t-shirts with almost nothing underneath.
She hadn’t been on a promotion media circuit in what felt like forever, but she always told him that she wouldn’t have it any other way.
That these next five months were for them. For him to get better with her by his side every single step of the way, no matter how hard things got.
After Jackson’s failed suicide attempt, it took a lot for Ally to even try to sing again, and it brought him to his knees with the realization that someone cared for him that passionately and deeply.
Not to mention the fact that every news outlet in America wanted them on TV together to talk about it, but his wife, ever the stubborn wouldn’t budge.
Not even for a California interview with Oprah Winfrey herself.
“I won’t let them make a spectacle out of you,” she’d told him in the hospital, and he still can remember in the odd hours of the night, how it felt, waking up and seeing her sitting across from his hospital bed and remembering how puffy her eyes always were, as if she'd been crying in secret, trying to keep it hidden from him and how broken she looked.
During his time at the facility she’d made some major moves on her own, she’d started her own charity to help underprivileged children at low funded city schools discover music, and she’d even went on to publish a few singles.
He was doubtful anyone would ever play his music on the radio again after “Jackson Maine: Druggie” seemed to be the topic of every morning radio talk show.
But again, she strived to prove to him just how wrong he was. He’d ended up even receiving some bullshit award about “resilience and strength in music.”, and then again they both had recently received formal invitations to play at a music festival out in Las Vegas in a close few months.
“Just thinking about life and stuff I guess,” he mused, bowing his head to meet hers, she’s shifted to sit so she’s straddling his lap, his own hands moving to comfortably settle under the shirt, dancing his fingers along the soft skin of her naked hip bone, trying desperately to distract himself from his own mind.
She playfully rolls her eyes, tilting herself forward every so slightly to meet his touch. “My husband, the ever descriptive and expansive, but I’m being serious here.”
“The future y’know all that sappy shit.” He shrugs, pulling his gaze away from hers.
“Why?” She probes, dipping her head down and pressing a kiss against the skin of his neck, a small but intimate action.
“I guess when I...” he tapers off, the coherency of the sentence fleeing, and she swallows the growing lump in her throat. She could almost feel how his pulse quickened as he spoke.
While they were quite open with each other, it was still hard for her to hear him talk about that night.
Ally had described it to the therapist before as like “flashlights”. In that, that night only came back to her in brief flashes and in her nightmares.
Her, finishing a show, hairpiece halfway falling out and sweating with glitter.
Her, walking out of her dressing room to immediately run into Bobby and some sharply dressed deputy’s.
The almost cynical difference of the white of the hospital walls in contrast to her husband’s grey skin and the red that had plastered the tile walls of the master bathroom of the house.
That shade of red is mainly the only thing that plagues her in her nightmares.
That, and the memory of the ungodly sob that seemed to escape her chest that night and never stopped until he opened his eyes again, in that same white room.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
She still has a scar that runs along her wrist, from that night.
Before the others got to the house, she’d tried to break down the door herself, causing the splintered wood to graze her deep enough to need stitches, granted, she’d immediately taken in the months during his period of recovery to cover it up with a tattoo. A lyric of Jackson’s she'd snatched up from his songbook, his fifth grader like scrawl and all.
“It gave me a different outlook on life, like I got that second chance to do something with it, and to not just fuck it up again.” His voice cracks and he hates it, it makes him feel like a dorky teenager again, talking about his childhood to the woman from CPS.
“You’re not a fuck-up Jack,” she murmurs into his shoulder, and he sighs heavily, and he could almost feel how his rib cage shuddered under her touch .
“You’ve never been one, you just made some really bad choices, I’m not gonna lie there, ButI’m glad you decided to stay my love, you came back to me, and I’ll forever thank you for that ‘cause I’m so goddamn happy you chose me,” She struggles to blink back the tears that threaten to fall onto her cheeks.
“I know, I know, you really are my future, and I’ll choose you again and again, and a million times over.” he muses and she immediately jolts upright again, pressing stray hairs away from her eyebrows.
“You better say that again so I know your not lying Jackson Maine.” It was her turn to play this card now, and she’s teasing him of course.
“Y’heard me, you’re my future Ally Maine,”
It still felt so fucking weird for him to say that, after months upon months of calling her ‘just Ally’ and now she had his last name attached to her, legally bound together by proclaimed “holy matrimony ” (as weird as it sounded) which was just about a trip all by itself.
For fuck’s sake they were married, and he still had to remind her almost every other day how much he did a number on him just by walking out into the kitchen in a lacey bra and gym shorts. He didn’t mind it in all honestly and he’d keep doing everyday for the rest of his life if it meant he got to sleep beside her every night.
“I don’t deserve you Ally..really.” His voice is hoarse and vulnerable.
She clasps both of her hands around his face, running the pad of her thumb along his jawline and to his cheeks, her eyes locked on him intently.
“Jackson Maine...Don’t you remember what I said to you in that church? After you gave me that god awful excuse for a wedding ring?”
He nods, blinking up at her, “It wasn’t that ba-“
“Repeat it back to me, please.”
He reaches up to run a hand down her spine, tracing the outline of her.
“That we wouldn’t give up on each other, no matter how hard things get, or how many storms we have to face, we do it all together.”
“That’s right,” she nods in approval, leaning down to press a slow and soft kiss to his lips. “I’m stuck with you forever now, no matter how annoying you find me.”
He scoffs “You’ll never be annoying to me.” She raises a single brow in question and he laughs. “Well, maybe just a bit after you force me to watch that cheesy family singing movie over and over again.”
Ally juts out her bottom lip in a mock pout. “You told me you liked The Sound of Music,”
And truth be told, he really did, and he often found himself humming the opening notes to “sixteen going on seventeen” in the early hours of the morning when he’d run Charlie down their long street or even singing the chorus in the comfort of his shower late at night, the notes easily echoing off the glass, but for now, he’s decided to let her believe he dislikes the movie as much as shovelling snow off the walkway.
But this was his life, and his wife, the one that he created and the one that he chose to live.
And holy fuck, was Jackson Maine every thankful to be living right at this moment.
She intertwines their fingers together, and presses her lips against the gold of his wedding band, and he watches, ever so carefully, as the sun catches the diamond of her band.
He made a mental note to go to the jeweller in a few weeks, design something special to have wrapped up for her before their flight south for the music festival.
Something that all the pop media outlets could write home about.
He didn’t believe in any kind of higher power before, but he slowly, and surely, he found himself becoming a lot more of a thankful person, a lot more of a grateful person. Even going so far as to
attend church for Christmas and Easter service with her dad and all of her drooling little baby cousins.
Even for that, Jackson Maine was thankful.
To have his beautiful girl in his arms, in one of his favourite places in the world is something he never ever wants to forget.
“I love you so fuckin’ much Al,” he tips his head up to smile softly at her.
“I love you too Jackson, I’ve got you, for now and for forever.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He says it again, hours later, after she’s tangled in the silk sheets of their bed.
He murmurs it against the side of her thigh, and she says it back through strings of swear words and hushed whispers. He shows her how much he loves her, until she’s swearing that she’s seeing stars.
He loves her so much and he'll never be able to say how truly she saved him, how she plucked his heart out of his chest and had him gasping for breath as if he'd just been ran over by a semi.
And he knows that it'll never be enough, not in his eyes at least.
But he tries.
And he'll keep trying.