The second ring came from Ashley Dawkins, the girl he'd loved and lost.

Nine years old

His first foster home had been... painful, to say the least. The other kids were mean, the parents treated him like shattered glass- even the dog seemed to hate him sometimes. So, he ran away.

He was hiding in an alley when a girl came barreling around the corner and smacked him down. Leo gaped at her from the ground; she flushed apologized, and helped him up. "I'm Beth, by the way. What's your-" Leo had heard enough. He was done. He didn't want to hurt this girl like he'd hurt everyone else.

He ran.

Later he remembered that she didn't chase after him at first, but after she'd gotten over her shock, she had. Two streets away from where they'd started, he found himself pinned to the ground wsith a voice above him telling him, "Calm down, wilya? I ain't gonna hurtcha!" Leo struggled as much as he dared before telling her that she was, indeed, hurting him. "Oh. Sorry." The girl- about sixteen or seventeen, he realized now- let him up. "Like I said, I'm Beth McKinney. What's your name?"

"Leo," he said in a whisper.

"Leo." She seemed to be trying out the name. "Leo." Beth smiled tentatively. "I like it." Only then did Leo notice that somewhere behind her eyes she was shattered inside. Only then did he want to help her.

"My name is Beth McKinney," she repeated. "I help people."

~LINE BREAK~

Beth led Leo back to her camp, where a girl about Leo's age sat holding a baby. The girl handed the baby off to Beth, who immediately began nuzzling the baby's forehead and crooning, "Hey, sweetie. Have you been a cutieface today? I bet you have!"

The girl caught Leo's gaze with an eyeroll that summed up a decade's worth of parental incompetence. Beth tore her attention from the baby long enough to notice their interaction and quickly introduced the girl as Ashley, "a street kid, like you, Leo." The baby started crying a little, so Beth wandered a little ways off to calm him down, leaving Ashley and Leo to their own devices.

"So... the baby..." Leo started to ask. "Are you both her kids?"

Ashley shook her head. "Not me. The baby is." She snorted. "Name's Isaac. Still pretty brand-new. Bastard-born, but she loves him to death."

Leo tried to remember what bastard meant, then remembered a conversation between Aunt Rosa and Grandma Carmen a few Thanksgivings back. Not quite sure how that definition fit into Ashley's, he settled for the universal, "Huh?"

Ashley nodded. "Yup. On her own ground, no less."

And that was pretty much the end of that conversation.

~LINE BREAK~

Twelve years old

For some unfathomable reason, Beth had been arrested and was spening the night in jail, which the left the five of them- Leo, Ashley, Isaac, and two teenagers who called themselves Kick and Jex- temporarily without adult supervision. Jex had also "found" a stash of beer, which they could freely consume, thanks to the aforementioned lack of supervision. Kick had never touched alcohol and didn't want to start, so she settled for keeping an eye on Izzy while her friends got drunk off their arses.

Thankfully, they were too drunk to remember anything the next morning, but they were still able to piece it together from the fact that Kick and Jex were both blushing like heck.

Before the tension got too thick to handle, Ashley just happened to glance down at the ground and see a plastic toy ring covered in dirt. She presented it to Leo with a bow and a "dear sir" and asking him if he would be so kind as to allow her to grant the gift of this ring.

At that moment, the four of them silently agreed that they would never, ever mention this to Beth.

~LINEY LINEY LINE BREAK~

Two months later, Leo's semi-decent life fell apart when Ashley sat down next to him and told him she'd missed her period.

"Shit," Leo said, hitting his head against the wall behind him. "Shit," he repeated. "I'm going to be a dad."

"Unfortunately, yes," Ashley replied.

Leo tried to process this. How could they even afford a baby? And what about diapers? Diapers were expensive. So was baby food. And was the world even ready for another Leo Valdez?

"Okay," he told her. "But we're not naming him Leo."

The next day the foster care people found him and took him to a new home, effectively destroying his life.

"So why do you have to take me to a new place?" he asked the social worker. "I was happy!"

"A boy need s a family," the social worker, Dr. Smythesson, replied. She liked her job, even if it gave her almost no time to herself.

She thought the boy- Leonardo Tesla Valdez, according to his profile; disappeared from his first foster home less than a year after arriving, never reported missing, found a year later but slipped straight from the cops' hands- had fallen asleep, but she realized she was wrong when he lifted his head and whispered, "I had a family."

Over the years she'd be working with him, she would keep in touch with one Elizabeth McKinney and one Ashley Dawkins, and was, in fact, the one who told Leo that Tomas James Valdez was born perfectly healthy at 3:32 a.m. Pacific time.

For the rest of her time as a Texas social worker, she'd tell her charges the story of the ring, and of the twelve-year-old boy who never gave up on his first family.

~LINE BREAK OF AWESOMENESS~

And... Done with eight minutes to spare! I'm writing this at lunchtime, so...

Don't expect a lunchtime post for the rest of the week, but this will hopefully be done next Tuesday. Chapter three will be short, but chapter four will be long, but not quite as long as this one, probably.

Sorry for the near-lemon.

-Beth M