Hello, another story from me and back (after a very long break) to come back to this wonderful fandom with a new story.
So yeah this is massively AU. I don't really have a lot of background notes in the works in terms of the timing for this story, I am going to put it about seven to eight years before the first season, also I am not an adoption/medical expert nor an expert on teenage parents in another state so I don't know how accurate this is going to be.
I know I have made Mamma Reagan the enemy in this story, I am choosing to make her the villain of this story because A. we needed one and B. She's not really a character I ever write so it was easy. I am also choosing to write that her reaction to Jamie and the pregnancy on the same day she got the diagnosis for her cancer. Again this is AU so if she is a bit OCC...believe me she pays the price later on. Hopefully this story begins to make more sense as we get into it.
I don't know when I will be able to update, it used to be weekly but that was before I got a job so...I will try and update when I can. I predict this little story will be seventeen (ish) chapters.
Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine.
Please Read and Review and let me know what you think when you get a chance!
AU for Trigger Warnings for Cancer, underage pregnancy, medical issues and a lot of swearing-I swear a lot in my stories so if that is something that you struggle with them please keep that in mind.
And yes...Eddie makes an appearance at some point...I just don't know when.
Spelling and Grammar are never my strongest points and so please keep that in mind as you read.
There's A Place Where Lost Things Go
AU-It wasn't Jamie's plan to be a teenager father, it wasn't his plan to raise his son alone. It certainly wasn't his plan to raise his son on the streets after his mother threw him out but somehow he has made it work. Only now his Mom is dead and he finds himself back in New York with a sick son and a pretty blonde nurse who swears to him that Danny is on his side.
But can he trust him?
Pre series.
Chapter 1-To Be A Man (Out In The Cold)
Jamie is out in the cold. Frank has no idea what is going on. Danny is at war and Joe is alive. Essentially.
For a second Jamie was sure he had misheard.
"Beg pardon"
"You heard me" his Mom said her face once filled with love and kindness and the soft support he had come to relay on each day to get through the most mundane of tasks now hard and brittle. He could only think it was almost amusing that his grandma wasn't here either because at this point she'd be bringing out the holy oil and the cross and doing a bit of interpretive dance.
"You want me to leave?"
"If you intend to be a part of that girls life then yes"
"And what would you have me do here Mom? Drag her to the clinic? Tell her what to do with her own body? You didn—"
She had smacked him. Hard.
Fuck.
Here he was fourteen years old with a pregnant girlfriend waiting outside at the local coffee shot chewing on her lip until it bleed and the one person he thought would have supported him when he planned to sit with his father and tell him was telling him to leave.
"Mom"
"Jamie I…I don't know how you could do this, I don't know how you could do this to me or your father or…we talked about sex I told you it was for married couples only—"
Here Jamie refrained from rolling his eyes with immense difficulty. It was all very well and good his mother and the priest saying that but in reality in a high school in New York it was very different. Olivia and him had only done it the once and now there was a little baby on the way and Jamie had thought he had done it right.
But with Joe moving up the ranks of the police force and Danny away in the war there was very few people to ask. He sure as hell wasn't going to go to his father or his grandfather…that would create more problems than it was worth but now looking back it was probably the right thing to do.
"Mom—"
"And now you do this…to me. To your father…"
"It's a teenage pregnancy Mom it's not like a murdered someone"
It was an attempt at a joke but she pulled herself up to her full height and Jamie realised that it was probably a little late to be joking.
By the time she was done she had thrown him outside in the snow and slammed the door shut on him. He didn't have anything, his jacket, his documents, money…any of it. She had told him to leave and never come back. Him and his little bastard baby.
He didn't know what had happened to her that day until much later. When the truth came out it would be up to you to decide weather or not it justified anything but there it was.
He turned at the end of his street in time to see his father's black car that came with the promotion to Chief of Detective pulling up in front of the house and he watched through eyes rapidly filling as his Dad, that well loved figure got out of the car. Jamie was fourteen years old. He had never considered that his parents didn't act in consort together. So much of their lives they were unable to play one against the other. How disappointed and disgusted was his Dad going to be when he found out. His Mom had thrown him out the house. Perhaps his Dad would go that one step further.
He was fourteen and twice in the space of a day his world had been rocked. He was a mess of contradictions.
It never occurred to him as he turned and walked down the street tears frozen on his cheeks that he might have been wrong.
It was the last time that they saw Jamie for another two years. The next time he came back to New York he would be sixteen and things would be remarkably different.
But here they were.
Olivia's parents hadn't reacted as badly but they had not been pleased. They had decided the best thing to do for the lot of them was to ship both Jamie and her off to Florida which was where her Aunt lived. Jamie didn't know why shipping your daughter off to another state was the best thing to do but at that point he was just relieved to have a roof over his head. His Mom and Dad had never bothered to come looking for him, he had disappeared that very night and the next day he had been in Florida where the winters were warm and the summer was even hotter and he thought that anything could happen.
It never occurred to him then either that the plan was to put the baby up for adoption out of state and then ship Olivia back home. It never occurred to him that the McAvoy's didn't want their grandson. It never occurred to him until Olivia gently broke the news to him that she didn't want to be a Mom, that she wanted to go back to school and live her life and so this was the best thing, the very best and what was the alternative? Homelessness with a baby?
It made sense in the abstract way and he would sit on a low hanging wall and breathe in the warm air and he would think about it until his head hurt. He couldn't help but throw the wrench in the plan, to take his son as soon as his son was born because perhaps it was selfish but that baby was his. He had been raised to never shirk his responsibility and so he had never had. He had been a Reagan first and foremost even when the Reagans had never wanted him.
And so when Harrison had been born he took custody himself, split in the night with what he could salvage and then disappeared before anyone could stop him.
If Olivia knew what he was doing she didn't say anything. But the one hundred bucks spoke for themselves. Jamie didn't judge her. But he didn't expect to see her.
And he didn't.
Harrison Declan Reagan was born on the Fourth of September. He was small for his age but with a tuft of blonde brown hair and big blue eyes and he grew into an adorable baby. They stayed in shelters along the coast for a while, while he could do anything that paid some form of cash (and quite a lot that didn't) and while he managed to get food into his son he didn't always quite get it into himself. That was fine though. Jamie was beginning to understand the depths of love that a parent could feel for their child and it was staggering.
The problem was that when Olivia left so did everything else. The home the security all of it.
He was alone, him and his son they were alone in a state with little to no cash and no documents and no family.
It was then that Jamie learnt truly what it was to be without anyone. Granted he had his son but his son couldn't talk so he thought that kind of took care of it. He learnt how to be economical with his cash, learnt how to work for food alone, took charity if he had too and he managed to stay in shelters when he had to.
One year turned into two and then suddenly he was sixteen, the parent of a toddler and dying inside. He was courting a fine line, Jamie didn't know what the state of Florida would do if they found a teenager living on the street with a baby but he imagined that they would either ring his father or take Harrison off him and both of those options was something that he was never going to concede.
Two years on the street eating in the street trying desperately to figure out something that resembled a plan had hardened his heart towards his parents. His Mom…Christ…it was better he didn't think of his Mom at all. His Dad…well…what was the point? Sometimes when he was really sick of it all he wondered if his Dad had even bothered looking for him or if climbing up the ladder at the NYPD had been the thing that had mattered most. His Dad with his unfailing, unflinching, unbroken view of what was right and wrong and God help you if you came in between the way of that.
Right now he hated the both of them.
He wondered if Danny would care where he ended up. Or Joe. He wanted to see both of his brothers again, show them his son and tell them what a wonderful nephew they had more than he wanted air sometimes. He loved Erin, he loved his grandparents but he loved both of his brothers a little bit more. He knew deep down, deep, deep down that he had he gone to Danny first then maybe things would be different, if he had gone to Joe's apartment that night that maybe he could have had some help.
It was only when Harrison was learning to toddle around in the shelter with Jamie hanging onto his fat little hands that he realised what his brothers were missing out on. He sat on the floor listening to the noises all around him watching as his son chewed on his second hand teddy bear with one eye and he wondered weather or not it would be better for him to ring Joe. To ring him and just see…just see what had happened to him, to see if Joe wanted to know him again. He didn't know how deep his Mom's hook had gotten, didn't even know if Danny was stateside…
He thought about it right up until he managed to scrounge access to the internet.
It was not planned. But part of working at the shelter was that he actively try to get into some work and he was always desperate for food, clothing, anything that would make a difference and one night when the heat was so bad he found that he was sweating from how hot it was he found that he was searching for his family.
And then he saw it.
His father was Commissioner of the NYPD.
And his mother was dead.
Both of those facts ran around his head for a long time.
His father was Commissioner of the NYPD.
And his mother was dead.
His father was Commissioner of the NYPD.
And his mother was dead.
Dead and buried by the sounds of it. He doesn't know what to make of it, doesn't know how to feel. On the one hand she is still his mother, on the other hand…on the other hand his face sometimes still smarts from the force of her slap.
And his father was Commissioner of the NYPD.
Well…Jamie didn't know what to do with that one.
"Da! Horsey"
"Yes" he said to Harrison going through the motions "Horsey go and find Teddy for me and we can play"
There was no two ways about it he thought sat on the floor watching his son cough and splutter, he was drowning. It did not escape him that for all his bravado he couldn't even afford to give his child cheesy puffs.
He chewed his bottom lip and searched for Danny.
That didn't take long. Danny was back in New York, he had joined the NYPD and had all but skipped the patrol years to land the youngest Detective in years.
Well Jamie thought with a rueful grin. His big brother wouldn't have had it any other way.
He made his mind up that night.
It was time to go back to New York. It was time to at least see if help was available even if it was a couple of hundred bucks. Harrison needed stability and he needed to sleep a decent nights sleep without wondering if some creep was going to try and grab his son. Danny or Joe he was sure would listen to him, he was sure deep down neither one of them would shut the door in his face.
The more he clung to that the more he was reminded that his mother had done that and she was the one person who was supposed to love him above all else. He looked down at Harrison asleep in their shared bunk and felt another stab of vicious hatred for the woman which far outweighed the grief that he felt for her. He had clung to that hatred for a long time and he was not going to let go of it now. He was sixteen. Grudges were in the blood.
But he had to believe that Danny was different, that Joe was different, that Erin even was different, that they loved him enough to help even if they were as disgusted with him as their mother and father had been, this plan had to work it just had to…
Because to be honest…Jamie didn't know what the hell he was going to do if it didn't.
And there we go, first chapter done and the next one coming soon. Let me know what you think.
Next Chapter-Jamie is back in New York and with Harrison running a fever and it being winter he takes his son to a clinic. There he meets a very pretty blonde nurse called Linda.