Sorry for the long wait. I had a personal issue happen to me and I had to deal with it. If anyone is curious, I was heartbroken. Thats all I'm going to say about it. Hopefully you guys will enjoy this chapter. Mother and daughter meet face to face for the first time.
Erin sat in the chair after Will gave her the file, her hands shaking madly with a mixture of horror and guilt. It just couldn't be possible. It wasn't. She was supposed to be safe, somewhere far from Chicago, never to be seen or heard from again. Hank had set it up. It just wasn't possible, not after all these years.
These results told Erin the unspoken truth. No matter how much she wanted to deny it validity, Erin couldn't bring herself to speak. Thea was her daughter. The daughter that she had left behind a lifetime ago, because Erin herself was still only a child. Tears began to well up in Erin's eyes, her breath caught in her throat as a rush of memories flooded her mind, her heart pounding in her chest.
Erin had only been 15 years old when she discovered that she was pregnant. It had been quite the day waking up, only to be running to her bathroom to relieve herself of Camille's spicy meatloaf, one of her favorite meals. It had stirred up quite the wonder, but while at first she thought it was just a stomach bug, she got the shock of her life when she learned that she hadn't had he period for two weeks.
Needles to say, nobody was very happy to find out that Erin was pregnant, especially after she promised Hank that she wouldn't get into any trouble, though to be fair, pregnancy wasn't the same as hitting the pills. Not that it mattered. The fact remained that she was pregnant
Erin was pulled out of school during the later half of her pregnancy while she started to show; Hank didn't want her to be viewed any more negatively than she already was. Erin herself took it hard, because she knew that she had made a very big mistake. To make matters worse, she was torn in the matter of what to do with said baby. She was too young to take care of one efficiently, what with ho she was raised and didn't want to subject a child to that sort of trauma, but neither did she want to get an abortion either because she grew to love the child that was growing inside of her.
So in the end, Erin had to give Thea up in order to give her the life that Erin never could have. The young detective never could have imagined that Thea would ever find her way back to Chicago.
Erin remembered that day; the day that she had given Thea up for adoption. Tears pricked her eyes as the thought came to her.
A younger Erin, hair all matted and face all red, sweaty from the delivery process, lied down in her bed, breathing heavily from the most daunting and painful experience of her life. Jesus Christ, if there was one thing she could never understand, it was how a simple night of pleasure could turn into a scourge of pain that ripped a woman's body apart. The nurse had taken the screaming child away, clearly to get it cleaned up since it was covered in birth fluid. Erin didn't mind though, for she could use the peace and quiet to think about where she was going with her life now.
Six hours. Six damn hours of labor and pushing and only now did Erin feel like she could relax. And yet, she just couldn't. The reason being was that the demon spawn that was originally inside of her was bawling its lungs out, giving her a major headache. And yet, despite that, she wanted nothing more than to hold that baby in her arms. It was her flesh and blood, her legacy. And she didn't want to regret anything from giving it up.
Even now, saying that tore her heart in two. She was giving up her baby. After nine months of carrying that fetus to term, Erin was going to give her away, to the system that failed her, so that, god willing, a family would take in this baby and give it all the love and affection that Erin felt she couldn't afford to give. She was only fifteen, working as a CI for the police, going to a school that mostly despised her, and to top it off, she was afraid of what her mother would do to her if she found out about her pregnancy and by extension the child. She couldn't allow her mother to get her hooks onto the baby. The only way to prevent that was to get her as far away from Chicago as possible.
Erin looked to her left, where Hank sat. As Erin didn't have her boyfriend here, she asked Hank to be in the room for support, basically a simple way of saying 'I need to squeeze the life out of your hand while I push an unbearable mass of flesh and blood out of my birth canal, and I don't care if I break your fingers doing it' needless to say, hank was more than likely going to be dealing with a large purple hand for the next few days. He was still nursing his hand, whimpering slightly and she was sure that he was cursing under his breath.
She smiled, defiantly deciding that she wasn't going to stay silent on the matter. Here was Hank Voight, a great cop, reduced to a whimpering baby, moaning in pain at the sight of his hand, after witnessing his adopted daughter in childbirth.
Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard the nurse say "Miss Lindsay?" Erin turned looking at the nurse. In her arms, was a bundle of pink blankets, signifying that the child she had just given birth to was a girl.
The nurse moved the bundle slightly, showing the baby's face to Erin for the first time. It was chubby and red faced, whimpering and moving slightly in the confines of her blankets. It stirred a feeling of guilt in her heart. The baby was acting in manner reminiscent of reaching out for its mother.
Without even realizing what she was saying, Erin quickly blurted out the words before she could stop them from exiting her mouth. "Can... Can I hold her?" Immediately Erin stiffened surprised by her own words. However before she could stop her, the nurse held out the baby, practically dumping the newborn in her arms.
In that moment, the world stopped as Erin found herself staring into the baby's eyes. Baby blue eyes looked up at hazel. Erin felt her heart stop and her breath got caught in her throat as the baby- no her daughter cooed up at her, a goofy chortle escaping from her throat.
As Erin looked at her daughter, the sound of a shutter filled her ears. She turned to see Voight with a camera a tender smile on his face. Despite herself, Erin let out a smile, before glancing back at the little girl in her arms. She was so small.
"Hello… Althea" she whispered. It was the first and last time that she would ever say her daughter's name.
Erin… are you ok?" Will asked, snapping Erin out of her memory. She gave Will a glare; partially from his interrupting her and partially from the heartache she was feeling. "Yes! I'm fine!" she snapped at him, despite the fact that she was actually feeling quite terrible. It was the first time she had thought about that day in years and even after all this time, it still managed to make her regret everything about the choices she made that day.
Will bit his lip, clearly unnerved by the look on Erin's face, but even angry, Erin could clearly make out the concern in his eyes. He pointed to his eye and mouthed the words "You're crying" to her.
Erin blinked. Then blinked again, before raising her hand to her cheek. As soon as her hand touched her cheek, she became aware of the tears that were silently making their way down her face. She had been crying.
"I…" Erin paused, trying to come up with the right words. She just couldn't believe it after over a decade of pushing any thought of Thea away, life decided to throw in a wrench and force Erin to form a bond with her newly discovered, or rather recovered, teenage daughter. It wasn't something that she didn't want. But just how could she uproot Thea from her life, let alone be apart of it. How was she going to be a mother to this child? How could she, when she abandoned her a day after her birth? It was unforgivable. And Erin… Oh god. What was she going to do? What if Thea asked for her? It wasn't uncommon for victims top ask how they ended up in the hospital.
Erin took in a breath closing her eyes, and rubbing them, trying to clear her face of the tears and stop her crying. At the very least, he wasn't exactly being loud and attracting attention to herself.
"How long has she been here? In Chicago I mean." She asked quickly, wanting to learn everything she could about Thea, or at least what the doctor could tell her.
Will gestured to the file that he had given Erin. "Its all in there, if you want to take a look at it." He said "besides, wouldn't you want to ask her yourself?" he asked.
Erin stiffened, knowing that in all honesty that Will was trying to imply that she should go and officially meet her daughter.
Erin's heart clenched with anxiety. Could she? Could she really face Thea, now that she knew her connection to the young girl?
Erin knew herself all too well. It was like she was caught in a time loop. Her mother was an uncaring bitch who preferred her drink over her flesh and blood. Sure Erin wasn't the same as her mother, but that didn't mean that Thea would be forgiving when she cane face to face with the woman who abandoned her and left her in the foster care system, hoping that she would be adopted. Guess she never was, and Erin could only blame herself for that.
Erin weighed her options. She regretted giving up Thea once, despite thinking that it was the right thing to do. Could she really do it again? She felt torn. A part of her wanted to run in the room that Thea was in and embrace her like she should have done a decade ago. The other half wanted to bolt from the hospital and never look back, afraid to see the look on Thea's face when told Erin was her biological mother.
But she would be looking for answers and only Erin could give them to her. Plus Erin had some questions to ask Thea as well. Mainly how she ended up in the hospital when she looked relatively healthy.
Or was it that she was yearning to see her daughters face while she was awake?
Erin stood up, handing the file back to Will "take me too her." she requested the doctor.
Will nodded, before turning, gesturing for Erin to follow him "come with me" He said, leading her to one of the rooms in the lobby. He stood next to the door, before opening it, and stepping aside, allowing Erin to enter the room. she made her way next to the bed and sat down in the chair beside it, taking a real good look at her daughter.
Her skin was relatively the same shade as Erin's, as was her skin. However her face was rounder and more reminiscent of …
A sudden quiet moan filled the air as Thea stirred slightly, before her eyes opened, revealing baby blue eyes.
Eyes that looked just like her fathers.
Erin felt her breath hitch as she locked eyes with Thea, hazel meeting blue. She could see the confusion in Thea's eyes, which made her feel even guiltier. Immediately she was overcome by many emotions, love ,guilt, heartbreak, regret, horror, all of them overloading her senses.
Erin opened her mouth to say something… Anything to Thea, when her eyes were drawn to the pendant around Thea's neck and everything suddenly came to a grinding halt
Before Thea could even think to say anything, Erin bolted from the chair and ran out of the room, out into the lobby and out of the hospital, tears streaming down her face.
Because the pendant that Thea was wearing was the same one that HE gave to HER, the night Thea was conceived.
I had too. Thea's father will be introduced later on, proving a nice little wrench to a subplot that will come later down the line. as always, leave your thoughts and stay tuned.