Title: Hate

Author: zeureka

Disclaimer: I don’t own That ‘70s Show. There is absolutely no money to gain from this.

Author’s Notes: This is just a bit of a drabble that came out of a topic I’ve been mediating on while (re)watching season two recently. If you need a setting for this, think season 4, while she’s broken up with Kelso, just before the California wackiness.

Please let me know what you think…reviews are like oxygen.

She’s never sure why it is that she always turns to him when she has trouble. But every time, like clockwork, if something goes wrong in her life, she finds herself in his strong arms, tears stinging as they teem from her eyes, uncertain as to why she ran to him in the first place, considering how they feel about each other.

Perhaps it’s the simple fact that he hates her and she hates him.

In their own way, after all, they are both fragile.

Two sides of the same coin, and they’ve already judged each other for it.

He’s open about the rush he gets from stealing, and she has discovered the power of that adrenaline high herself, since she started stealing lip gloss and earrings, and Casey Kelso’s clock radio some weeks ago.

Somehow, every time she and Michael split, he’s there to catch her. She knows he can’t resist it when she cries, but somehow, it seems as if it’s more than that. It’s more like, because he has already judged her as shallow and vacuous and not worth his time, she is free to be exactly who she really is with him.

She’s free to be the real Jackie, the one that the rest of the gang rarely sees, the one that Fez rejected when he took her out to take her mind off Michael, after she caught him and Laurie.

When she saw Michael and Laurie, she hated them both, understandably, she thinks. She had a long, terrible, hurt moment where she wanted to take both of their great big melon heads and smash them into the wall.

Later, after she’d run out and calmed down, she began to think back to the last several months. And slowly, she began to piece together the reality she’d missed: everyone knew but her. And the only one who’d tried to tell her was him.

She could think of a hundred times she had missed his hints; many of the ones that stood out were during or on the way to Vanstock. And when she locked herself in her room in tears, scarfing junk food like there was no tomorrow, what she found herself thinking about the most was that they all knew.

They had all known he was cheating on her, but the only one who had tried to warn her was him.

And the reality of it reverberated in her mind.

She hated them all for knowing and not telling; she hated him most of all not for just being the stupid, annoying poor person he was, but for trying to help her catch Michael but never telling her.

But that wasn’t the whole reason she hates him.

She hates him because he is exactly who she would be without the benefit of wealthy parents. Both their parents are absent, and when they’re not physically gone, they are mentally missing. Pam and Gross Edna might be great to go to if you need beer for a party (if you can find them), but their not much in the way of mothering.

She is grateful to him that he has Kitty. At least he isn’t entirely alone, as she so often finds herself.

There’s something about the fact that he hates her though, the fact that he already thinks she is the lowest of the low…

She can’t sink any further with him. He already thinks she is scum, and so when she feels so low, he can’t do anything but bolster her up.

And sometimes, that is more than she could ask for.