A.N.: Hullo. First story in english. First story in the new account. Be kind to me. Give it a chance past the prologue, I swear the narration gets better. Also, this fanfic is as AU as it can be.
I did not spell-check this chapter. Sorry, guys.

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Oh, but if I did...

00. Prologue

We're raised to believe that people will love and cherish us - specially our family and the so-called friends - but, unfortunately, that's not how it usually goes. Yes, there are indeed some people that are lucky enough to never face the abandon in their lives but, if you're reading this, I'll just assume that's not your case. Because this is not a story about a couple of lucky bastards. If I happen to be wrong and you're the type mentioned above, well, I wish you good luck and a great doses of make-believe to try to catch even the smallest glimpse of what this story is all about. At the light of these modern days where family and friends are nothing more than a depraved social construct, being abandoned has become an inherent part of most people's lives.

And the only thing one can do about is to accept it.

Some people are meant to be left. It doesn't really matter how good of a person you are or how wisely you choose your paths in life, how many old ladies you help to cross the streets or how many pence you give away to charity, if you're one of these people - and there's a considerable chance you are - in some point of your life you most definitely will be left. If by a mischance you happen to be a complete hapless - and, sadly, there's still a chance that's your case - your life will assume a circular form causing you to pass over and over again through the point where you're abandoned.

If you're one of the first type - and here comes the first good news - you'll get over it. It will obviously hurt and devastate you. You'll question yourself in so many ways, about so many things - things you didn't even imagine until that time came - but, eventually, you'll get over it. It might take a week, a year or a decade, but you'll make it through. However, dealing with it several times is most certainly a very peculiar form of art. And not all people have this talent. So, if you happen to be the unlucky kind of person that's stuck in a vicious circle of abandonments - and then we go back to the set of bad news - you can go two different ways: you can become the most bitter human being on earth, drawing yourself away from contact with everyone else, constantly mulling over the fact that you've been left at your own luck so many times that all that's left of you is pain - or - you can turn into the loveliest person that ever landed the feet in this planet, transforming all the pain inside of you in the most genuine form of love and kindness.

Matt Farrell¹ was the perfect example of the later kind of person. The odds that there's another person on earth that's just as unlucky as he is are as close to zero as they could be. Matt was abandoned so many times during his not-so-short-yet-not-so-long life he'd long lost the count of how many times he had gone through the torture of being left by someone.

Since all good stories start from the beginning, his started in the second night of July of 1990² when his father didn't show up for dinner. New York is a big city, he could be late stuck in a traffic jam or something of the kind. He didn't show up for breakfast in the next day either nor for supper later that night. He never picked him up at school again and he didn't even bother showing up in his five year old birthday in the next February. It took little Matt a while to realise that New York was not that big for him to take that long to come home and that his father was not coming back and, until that time came, there were countless waisted afternoons in the threshold of his old house in Hunts Point waiting for someone that was never returning.

Later in 1992 it was his mother's turn to leave everything behind. One day after he got home from school she called him aside and told him she loved him very much in a very plain and emotionless voice. His mum wasn't there to wave to him from the door as he left with the school bus next morning and she wasn't expecting him for dinner when he came back from school either.

But Matt didn't want to tell anyone his parents had vanished away. And he kept going as he could in the little house he once lived with his family, except now it was just him and Charlie. Charlie was an incredibly weird and overweight stray dog that lived with him from as long as could remember. One day, however, Matt forgot to completely close the backdoor and Charlie, for he was a very very stupid dog, ran away and never managed to find his way back, despite all Matt's efforts to help him making trails of bread in the backyard. That night he missed Charlie a lot because there was no one to lay down by his feet and make them warm during night time.

A five year old obviously couldn't keep this going for too long and although it seemed to him a lot more, only three days passed until Ms. Owen came to collect the rent and found all alone in the house. That was on 25 of March of 1992. Oh, March 25th, he would never forget this date. This was the day when he entered the system.

He didn't think the orphanage was too bad - in fact, he liked it a lot better than Hunts Point - but he was not really fond of his foster families. By the time he was sixteen there had been three of them: the Johnson's decided they wanted a girl instead of a boy, the Bentley's said he was a little too old for what they were looking for and, finally, the Crawford's decided to go on a red cross mission in Haiti.

But at this point, there's a sudden stop in this series of unfortunate events as we jump to the year of 2010 when Matt met Lola. Lola was probably the most amazing person he had ever met. She studied creative writing and had a lovely english accent that he'd secretly try to imitate when he was alone in his rented room at night. At the time he had a job in a book shop downtown where Lola used to shop for her books. He used to give her his 15% employee discount without letting her know. They'd talk for hours after his shift in a caffe down the street. They'd talk about their infinite love for sci-fi shows and dream of the day they'd co-write for one of these shows together. And they fell in love. And that's why when Lola asked Matt if he'd go back to england with her he didn't hesitate to say yes. But despite all her qualities there was one that Matt loved the most: she hadn't left him.

Yet.

¹ I know it sucks but it's a pen name. Will be explained later on!
² I know that his canon birth year is 1990 but as I said, this is completely AU. I kinda had to anticipate it in about 4 years to make the whole fanfic thing work. Please, put up with me.