Disclaimer: No Ownership of Rangers Here
A/N: This is a prep piece for 'Honor', Chip's part in TPF
Chip had not made friends easily before he moved to Briarwood. He was too quiet, too caught up in comic books and video games. He didn't speak up in school and suffered from severe anxiety during tests. That was before he got sick, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia they called it, or ALL. He had been seven and he didn't remember much about it except he'd hurt a lot and he didn't like the medicines. They made him feel bad and sometimes made the pain worse. And he's lost all of his hair.
His cancer had been tough on him, but worse on his parents. His dad worked long hours at the law firm, he was rarely home, but tried to come to see him at least once a week. His mother, never a strong woman, turned back to the vices that had shaped her teenage and young adult years, drugs and alcohol. Her visits tapered off until she just stopped coming. The last time he went into the hospital, he never saw his mother again. His aunt told him much later, when he was old enough to understand, that she had overdosed and killed herself.
When Chip was finally able to leave the hospital, his dad was far too busy to look after him and hired a 'nurse' to do the job. The woman lasted a month before Chip called his aunt in desperation, having endured being tied to his bed, cold showers and other mistreatments at her hand. After that, Chip, then ten, had moved to his aunt and uncle's in Briarwood. "Until he's better," the adults had said. That was a common refrain Chip heard that year, he would be homeschooled, "until he's better", he would be encouraged to enjoy quite pursuits like reading and video games, "until he's better." It got to the point where Chip thought he'd never be better.
Chip didn't hear much from his dad until the man had appeared to tell him that he was getting remarried. His dad's new family didn't like him and he returned the favor, going out of his way to aggravate them whenever they were forced to be together. At thirteen, Chip had a brief brush with cancer, but it again responded to the treatments and if he started high school bald, he did so with a new attitude on life.
Gone was the quiet, comic book geek, Charlie Thorn. The kids of Briarwood would be meeting Chip, the home school kid with a blatant disregard for sanity. His own or others. He was encouraged in this by his first friends Madison and Vida Rocca, who had helped him stand up to a group of bullies his first day.
For four years, Chip developed his personality, hiding emotional pain as he had hidden physical pain, ignoring his fears of another bout of cancer, and desperate to enjoy what he had. His motto became, "If I am going to die tomorrow, then I will have no regrets for what I did or did not do; only what I could not do."