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tellshannon815Title: And The World Has Changed So Much Since You've Been Gone
Fandom: Yellowjackets
Characters: Jeff, Randy, Shauna, Jackie
Pairing: Jeff/Shauna, Jeff/Jackie
Warnings: Spoilers all through S1
Summary: The aftermath of the disappearance of the flight from Jeff's perspective. In a moment of frustration, Jeff says to Randy that he wishes something would happen so he didn't have to make a choice between Jackie and Shauna. He gets his wish.
“You and Shauna? Are you shitting me?”
As soon as Randy said it, Jeff thought he shouldn’t have said anything. But he needed someone to talk to, and Randy was his best friend, after all, the obvious choice to confide in.
“So, that time when I asked you if Shauna was going to be at the party, thinking I might have a chance with her, you were screwing her all along, and you never said?” Randy shook his head.
“Jackie was right there, remember? What was I supposed to say, tell you all about it right in front of her?” Jeff demanded, knowing he shouldn’t snap at Randy, that it was his own guilty conscience causing him to react that way, but unable to stop himself anyway.
“So what are you going to do, man? You’re going to have to make a choice, Jackie or Shauna. And they’re both off to the Nationals right now, probably sharing a room in the hotel. Shauna might tell Jackie herself before you get the chance to.”
“Shauna wouldn’t do that. But you’re right. I am going to have to….I told her I loved her, you know? Before she got on the plane.”
“Which one, dude?” Randy asked.
Jeff hesitated. “Uh…both of them. I know what you’re thinking, man, and Shauna said she wasn’t going to hold me to it. Thing is, I kind of think I meant it.”
Randy whistled. “So, that’s it for you and Jackie?”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t know, man, okay? I think I meant it when I said it to her as well. I just don’t know right now which of the two of them I want to be with.”
“Seriously, dude, you have two girlfriends and I can’t even get one, kind of hard for me to have any sympathy for you right now. But as your best friend, I am telling you, you are going to have to choose one or the other of them and stick to it.”
That was when Jeff said it.
“I know you’re right. But you know what I wish? I wish something would happen so that I didn’t have to make the choice.”
In the days and weeks after he’d said it, Jeff started to come to the conclusion that he’d jinxed things by saying that, even though logically he knew it wasn’t possible. But at the time, he hadn’t thought anything much of it. Yes, he wished there was some way things could work out without him having to be the bad guy making the decision. But he hadn’t got beyond that and thought about how that might pan out.
It had seemed like a normal day; he and Randy had dropped that conversation, had spent a little time playing video games. For Jeff, it had been a relief to think about something mindless, to not have to worry about the day he was going to have to make his choice (and certainly to not think about the conversation he thought he’d be having with Jackie later when she called him from the hotel to check in). He and Randy hadn’t watched the news; why would they? Watching the news wasn’t exactly on his priorities back then, and he’d had no way of knowing what was coming until he walked through his front door and found his parents waiting for him, a breaking news story flashing across the screen.
“It’s the Yellowjackets’ plane. It never arrived in Seattle. Jeff, Jackie is missing.”
As Jeff watched, images flashed across the screen; his school, the photo of the team that had been in the last yearbook, that Allie kid who’d broken her leg after some drama with Taissa Turner (that he’d only been half listening to when Jackie tried to explain) talking about how that could so easily have been her, Laura Lee’s family praying for news of the plane, Lottie Matthews’s father, who had arranged the plane in the first place, yelling about suing the company.
Jeff’s words to Randy flashed through his mind again: I wish something would happen so that I didn’t have to make the choice.
I guess I got my wish.
Randy called later that night, but Jeff didn’t feel up to speaking to him. He tried to call Jackie’s family, getting through on the third attempt, but her father was quite short in the moment, said her mother was upstairs crying, just wanted to get him off the line; Jeff realised afterwards they were trying to keep the line open in case the call came through that the plane had been found, that he probably shouldn’t have called. At one point he even dialled the Shipmans’ number, but hung up before dialling the last digit; what would he have even said to them anyway? Shauna’s family didn’t know anything that had happened between them, they wouldn’t even understand why he would have called, if they were aware of Jeff at all it was as Jackie’s boyfriend.
He did go round to see the Taylors the next day, where the same rolling news coverage was on TV. Some reporter was saying that search parties were out along the plane’s planned route, but there had been a storm and they weren’t sure whether the plane had been caught up in that, or whether it had diverged from its planned flight path, and if so, what route it had taken, so it seemed like no one was quite sure where to start searching. Jeff felt useless, sitting there with Jackie’s family, not much that he could actually do; they were too far away for him to easily join a search party even if they did have any clue where to start. Every time the phone rang he would jump, convinced it would be someone calling with news, and it would just be some idiot trying to sell them a new kitchen, someone asking if there was anything they could do to help, or worst of all, the reporters. One guy even ended up trying to call Jeff at home at one point; thankfully for him, his father had taken the call and ripped him a new one to save Jeff having to do it. Jeff didn’t even know what he would have said if he had taken the call; how could he talk about his relationship with Jackie, knowing how hollow his words would ring to his ears?
His first day back at school, Jeff found himself getting stares from all these kids who had never said more than two words to him, but knew him as Jackie Taylor’s boyfriend. People were getting upset about the slightest things like the time Laura Lee once let them borrow her pen, or how they’d been lab partners with Vanessa in the eighth grade; Jeff just wanted to shake them all and ask them what the fuck they knew about anything, that these people knew jack shit about any of the Yellowjackets and who did they think they were latching on to the grief as though they’d ever been real friends with any of them.
Over time, life went on for most people at the school; people got used to seeing the empty seats in class, the shrine to the Yellowjackets in the sports department, but stopped mentioning any of their names. Conversations at Wiskayok High turned to the usual stupid shit about who was screwing who, stressing over college applications, anything but the disappeared plane and the Yellowjackets. It wasn’t long before Homecoming came around and became the primary topic of conversation; Jeff decided to skip it that year. Jackie had been talking for ages about how the two of them would be Homecoming King and Queen their senior year, and had she been here, she could probably have pulled that off. That was Jackie all over, always making plans for them, getting so excited about them, and yet not stopping to think about whether it was what the other person involved actually wanted. Shauna had confided in him, not long before the crash, that she’d secretly applied to Brown even though Jackie had had her heart set on them going to Rutgers together; he’d never heard whether she’d been accepted, but he thought she could have done well and been happy there.
He never told anyone about the time he caught Kevyn Tan crying in the locker room about the fact that he hadn’t taken the chance to tell Natalie Scatorccio how he felt about her; in the moment Kevyn had said it was easier to talk about it with Jeff because he’d lost someone he loved in the disappearance of the plane too, and Jeff had thought about how that was more true than Kevyn knew. But even though he felt that the two understood each other in the moment, Jeff hadn’t felt he could tell Kevyn, someone he hadn’t even really been friends with before that, that he harboured the same guilt over not having told Shauna before the flight that he understood now that when he said he’d loved her, he’d meant it after all.
Time went on; Jackie’s birthday came around, and her parents decided to throw a party in her honour, to which Jeff was invited to attend. Although the whole thing felt a bit weird to him, Jeff had attended; the regular visits continued, even though Jeff found it awkward, not really knowing what to say. The last thing said on the news had been that they were going to scale back the search, yet despite all indications being that there was little hope now of finding the Yellowjackets alive, Jackie’s parents refused to give up, kept saying she could still be out there somewhere. Jeff was still regularly welcomed into their home, still got contacted by the odd reporter if the story made it back into the news for any reason, still got attention as Jackie’s boyfriend, and yet part of him wanted to yell out that he was a fraud, that they shouldn’t be acknowledging him in this way, because the fact was, he could no longer say for sure that if Jackie had come home, he would still have been her boyfriend at this point. There he was, accepting the hospitality of her parents, knowing they would have kicked him out of the house had they known the whole story of him and Shauna at the time.
And through all his interactions, with his friends, with Kevyn, with every kid who tried to piggyback onto what had happened because they’d sat next to someone on the plane in some class in 1994, and especially with Jackie’s family, the memory of his flippant remark to Randy was never far from his mind. Jeff had never entirely managed to shake the feeling that he’d caused this somehow, that his wish to never have to make the choice between Jackie and Shauna had been granted in a way he had never wanted. He’d watch the hope gradually fade from Jackie’s parents’ eyes, and he’d feel like that was on him, that making that comment had jinxed the plane somehow. It was one of the reasons why Jeff never did reach out to the Shipmans to share memories of Shauna; he couldn’t face looking at them and feeling like he had caused their pain too. Randy, the only person who knew about the conversation, knew how it was still playing on Jeff’s mind and had kept trying to tell him that it wasn’t even possible for that comment to have had any effect on the outcome, and Jeff wanted to believe him, but his voice still kept sounding in his head, making that fateful remark.
Graduation day came; the principal gave some speech honouring the Yellowjackets and presenting their families with diplomas in absentia. Jeff would have been tempted to swerve that one too, trying not to think about Jackie’s plans for the day together (yes, she had tried to talk to him about that before the flight), but his parents had insisted he attend. If anyone had asked him afterwards, Jeff couldn’t have told them a single thing about the day, or about the party afterwards where he’d got very drunk and ended up vomiting all over Randy.
Time went on; lots of Jeff’s classmates went their separate ways to different colleges, and Jeff couldn’t help but think of the future that could have been Jackie and Shauna’s, whether they had gone to the same or separate colleges. Jeff himself was now working in a local furniture store, where he was felt to have prospects and could be considered management material one day; maybe one day he would feel something more than this numbness that had been a part of him ever since the disappearance of the flight, and would actually care about his career.
Randy called one day, told Jeff to turn on the TV straight away. “It’s the Yellowjackets. They haven’t said too much yet, but the plane’s been found! Some of them are alive!”
Jeff watched as Travis Martinez was first to disembark from the plane bringing them home, followed by Misty Quigley, and wondered if Kevyn Tan was watching as Natalie Scatorccio appeared. He watched the familiar faces, waiting for the two he most wanted to see; finally, after what seemed like forever, Shauna came on screen, supported by Taissa Turner. Jeff continued watching, looking over Shauna’s shoulder, but the face he half expected to see never appeared. Jackie hadn’t returned home.
A part of Jeff wanted to run right over there, to see Shauna again, yet another part of him flashed back to that long ago conversation once more.
Something had happened. He didn’t have to choose.
Fandom: Yellowjackets
Characters: Jeff, Randy, Shauna, Jackie
Pairing: Jeff/Shauna, Jeff/Jackie
Warnings: Spoilers all through S1
Summary: The aftermath of the disappearance of the flight from Jeff's perspective. In a moment of frustration, Jeff says to Randy that he wishes something would happen so he didn't have to make a choice between Jackie and Shauna. He gets his wish.
“You and Shauna? Are you shitting me?”
As soon as Randy said it, Jeff thought he shouldn’t have said anything. But he needed someone to talk to, and Randy was his best friend, after all, the obvious choice to confide in.
“So, that time when I asked you if Shauna was going to be at the party, thinking I might have a chance with her, you were screwing her all along, and you never said?” Randy shook his head.
“Jackie was right there, remember? What was I supposed to say, tell you all about it right in front of her?” Jeff demanded, knowing he shouldn’t snap at Randy, that it was his own guilty conscience causing him to react that way, but unable to stop himself anyway.
“So what are you going to do, man? You’re going to have to make a choice, Jackie or Shauna. And they’re both off to the Nationals right now, probably sharing a room in the hotel. Shauna might tell Jackie herself before you get the chance to.”
“Shauna wouldn’t do that. But you’re right. I am going to have to….I told her I loved her, you know? Before she got on the plane.”
“Which one, dude?” Randy asked.
Jeff hesitated. “Uh…both of them. I know what you’re thinking, man, and Shauna said she wasn’t going to hold me to it. Thing is, I kind of think I meant it.”
Randy whistled. “So, that’s it for you and Jackie?”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t know, man, okay? I think I meant it when I said it to her as well. I just don’t know right now which of the two of them I want to be with.”
“Seriously, dude, you have two girlfriends and I can’t even get one, kind of hard for me to have any sympathy for you right now. But as your best friend, I am telling you, you are going to have to choose one or the other of them and stick to it.”
That was when Jeff said it.
“I know you’re right. But you know what I wish? I wish something would happen so that I didn’t have to make the choice.”
In the days and weeks after he’d said it, Jeff started to come to the conclusion that he’d jinxed things by saying that, even though logically he knew it wasn’t possible. But at the time, he hadn’t thought anything much of it. Yes, he wished there was some way things could work out without him having to be the bad guy making the decision. But he hadn’t got beyond that and thought about how that might pan out.
It had seemed like a normal day; he and Randy had dropped that conversation, had spent a little time playing video games. For Jeff, it had been a relief to think about something mindless, to not have to worry about the day he was going to have to make his choice (and certainly to not think about the conversation he thought he’d be having with Jackie later when she called him from the hotel to check in). He and Randy hadn’t watched the news; why would they? Watching the news wasn’t exactly on his priorities back then, and he’d had no way of knowing what was coming until he walked through his front door and found his parents waiting for him, a breaking news story flashing across the screen.
“It’s the Yellowjackets’ plane. It never arrived in Seattle. Jeff, Jackie is missing.”
As Jeff watched, images flashed across the screen; his school, the photo of the team that had been in the last yearbook, that Allie kid who’d broken her leg after some drama with Taissa Turner (that he’d only been half listening to when Jackie tried to explain) talking about how that could so easily have been her, Laura Lee’s family praying for news of the plane, Lottie Matthews’s father, who had arranged the plane in the first place, yelling about suing the company.
Jeff’s words to Randy flashed through his mind again: I wish something would happen so that I didn’t have to make the choice.
I guess I got my wish.
Randy called later that night, but Jeff didn’t feel up to speaking to him. He tried to call Jackie’s family, getting through on the third attempt, but her father was quite short in the moment, said her mother was upstairs crying, just wanted to get him off the line; Jeff realised afterwards they were trying to keep the line open in case the call came through that the plane had been found, that he probably shouldn’t have called. At one point he even dialled the Shipmans’ number, but hung up before dialling the last digit; what would he have even said to them anyway? Shauna’s family didn’t know anything that had happened between them, they wouldn’t even understand why he would have called, if they were aware of Jeff at all it was as Jackie’s boyfriend.
He did go round to see the Taylors the next day, where the same rolling news coverage was on TV. Some reporter was saying that search parties were out along the plane’s planned route, but there had been a storm and they weren’t sure whether the plane had been caught up in that, or whether it had diverged from its planned flight path, and if so, what route it had taken, so it seemed like no one was quite sure where to start searching. Jeff felt useless, sitting there with Jackie’s family, not much that he could actually do; they were too far away for him to easily join a search party even if they did have any clue where to start. Every time the phone rang he would jump, convinced it would be someone calling with news, and it would just be some idiot trying to sell them a new kitchen, someone asking if there was anything they could do to help, or worst of all, the reporters. One guy even ended up trying to call Jeff at home at one point; thankfully for him, his father had taken the call and ripped him a new one to save Jeff having to do it. Jeff didn’t even know what he would have said if he had taken the call; how could he talk about his relationship with Jackie, knowing how hollow his words would ring to his ears?
His first day back at school, Jeff found himself getting stares from all these kids who had never said more than two words to him, but knew him as Jackie Taylor’s boyfriend. People were getting upset about the slightest things like the time Laura Lee once let them borrow her pen, or how they’d been lab partners with Vanessa in the eighth grade; Jeff just wanted to shake them all and ask them what the fuck they knew about anything, that these people knew jack shit about any of the Yellowjackets and who did they think they were latching on to the grief as though they’d ever been real friends with any of them.
Over time, life went on for most people at the school; people got used to seeing the empty seats in class, the shrine to the Yellowjackets in the sports department, but stopped mentioning any of their names. Conversations at Wiskayok High turned to the usual stupid shit about who was screwing who, stressing over college applications, anything but the disappeared plane and the Yellowjackets. It wasn’t long before Homecoming came around and became the primary topic of conversation; Jeff decided to skip it that year. Jackie had been talking for ages about how the two of them would be Homecoming King and Queen their senior year, and had she been here, she could probably have pulled that off. That was Jackie all over, always making plans for them, getting so excited about them, and yet not stopping to think about whether it was what the other person involved actually wanted. Shauna had confided in him, not long before the crash, that she’d secretly applied to Brown even though Jackie had had her heart set on them going to Rutgers together; he’d never heard whether she’d been accepted, but he thought she could have done well and been happy there.
He never told anyone about the time he caught Kevyn Tan crying in the locker room about the fact that he hadn’t taken the chance to tell Natalie Scatorccio how he felt about her; in the moment Kevyn had said it was easier to talk about it with Jeff because he’d lost someone he loved in the disappearance of the plane too, and Jeff had thought about how that was more true than Kevyn knew. But even though he felt that the two understood each other in the moment, Jeff hadn’t felt he could tell Kevyn, someone he hadn’t even really been friends with before that, that he harboured the same guilt over not having told Shauna before the flight that he understood now that when he said he’d loved her, he’d meant it after all.
Time went on; Jackie’s birthday came around, and her parents decided to throw a party in her honour, to which Jeff was invited to attend. Although the whole thing felt a bit weird to him, Jeff had attended; the regular visits continued, even though Jeff found it awkward, not really knowing what to say. The last thing said on the news had been that they were going to scale back the search, yet despite all indications being that there was little hope now of finding the Yellowjackets alive, Jackie’s parents refused to give up, kept saying she could still be out there somewhere. Jeff was still regularly welcomed into their home, still got contacted by the odd reporter if the story made it back into the news for any reason, still got attention as Jackie’s boyfriend, and yet part of him wanted to yell out that he was a fraud, that they shouldn’t be acknowledging him in this way, because the fact was, he could no longer say for sure that if Jackie had come home, he would still have been her boyfriend at this point. There he was, accepting the hospitality of her parents, knowing they would have kicked him out of the house had they known the whole story of him and Shauna at the time.
And through all his interactions, with his friends, with Kevyn, with every kid who tried to piggyback onto what had happened because they’d sat next to someone on the plane in some class in 1994, and especially with Jackie’s family, the memory of his flippant remark to Randy was never far from his mind. Jeff had never entirely managed to shake the feeling that he’d caused this somehow, that his wish to never have to make the choice between Jackie and Shauna had been granted in a way he had never wanted. He’d watch the hope gradually fade from Jackie’s parents’ eyes, and he’d feel like that was on him, that making that comment had jinxed the plane somehow. It was one of the reasons why Jeff never did reach out to the Shipmans to share memories of Shauna; he couldn’t face looking at them and feeling like he had caused their pain too. Randy, the only person who knew about the conversation, knew how it was still playing on Jeff’s mind and had kept trying to tell him that it wasn’t even possible for that comment to have had any effect on the outcome, and Jeff wanted to believe him, but his voice still kept sounding in his head, making that fateful remark.
Graduation day came; the principal gave some speech honouring the Yellowjackets and presenting their families with diplomas in absentia. Jeff would have been tempted to swerve that one too, trying not to think about Jackie’s plans for the day together (yes, she had tried to talk to him about that before the flight), but his parents had insisted he attend. If anyone had asked him afterwards, Jeff couldn’t have told them a single thing about the day, or about the party afterwards where he’d got very drunk and ended up vomiting all over Randy.
Time went on; lots of Jeff’s classmates went their separate ways to different colleges, and Jeff couldn’t help but think of the future that could have been Jackie and Shauna’s, whether they had gone to the same or separate colleges. Jeff himself was now working in a local furniture store, where he was felt to have prospects and could be considered management material one day; maybe one day he would feel something more than this numbness that had been a part of him ever since the disappearance of the flight, and would actually care about his career.
Randy called one day, told Jeff to turn on the TV straight away. “It’s the Yellowjackets. They haven’t said too much yet, but the plane’s been found! Some of them are alive!”
Jeff watched as Travis Martinez was first to disembark from the plane bringing them home, followed by Misty Quigley, and wondered if Kevyn Tan was watching as Natalie Scatorccio appeared. He watched the familiar faces, waiting for the two he most wanted to see; finally, after what seemed like forever, Shauna came on screen, supported by Taissa Turner. Jeff continued watching, looking over Shauna’s shoulder, but the face he half expected to see never appeared. Jackie hadn’t returned home.
A part of Jeff wanted to run right over there, to see Shauna again, yet another part of him flashed back to that long ago conversation once more.
Something had happened. He didn’t have to choose.