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TW: Frank discussion of child sexual abuse (within PG-13 tolerances).
PLEASE READ WITH CAUTION.


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Jenn Lawson was, technically, on a plane. By technically, she meant: she was on a plane, but it was first-class and trans-Pacific, and if anyone wanted to s**t on her parade of skyping-her-son in her closed cabin, they could ******** well try. Anyway, she got cozy on the futon-like couch seat and hooked her headphones into her ears, brushing long black locks out of the way.

It would be just after dinnertime in Destiny City, she judged, looking at the time in the top right corner of her screen. At least she wouldn’t be risking the ruination of Carson’s entire day.

She dialed, and when he picked up she said, “Hey, baby. I heard you booked your tickets to come out for Easter.”


Carson had had half a mind to decline the call, but he’d promised Nell, and promises to Nell weren’t easily broken. Not if you didn’t want to have to live with the crushing guilt of letting her down. “Thanks,” he said, adjusting his earbuds. At least it wasn’t a video call - he didn’t want her to see him squirm. “I’m. Um. Looking forward to it.”

Sort of.

He let the comment hang for a moment, and then asked, experimentally, “Did you, uh, talk to Nell today?”


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“Yeah, I did,” said Jenn, and she frowned at the paperwork she was scrolling through on her laptop. “I understand why you didn’t tell me. You must have been very afraid.” Carson as a little boy had been so closed-off, so angry. She had always signed it off to the trauma of an alcoholic father, a chronically-ill mother, and the foster system. It rankled to know that she had missed something so obvious. “I’m sorry I didn’t see what was happening to you. I wanted to know what you wanted me to do about this.”

Staying with Luke wasn’t an option. She’d called her lawyer before boarding the plane to start the paperwork.

Jenn sounded calm, but she had been incandescently furious when she had hung up with Nell. Like her daughter, Jenn had a hair-trigger temper and a finely honed sense for justice; unlike her daughter, Jenn had also had forty years and the incentive to overcome it. “Nell was very concerned for you,” she said.


At least, thought Carson, she didn’t seem to expect him to discuss this in graphic detail, and he was thankful for small mercies. If this entire conversation consisted of veiled euphemisms and vague apologies, he would be no worse off for it.

“I don’t think I want you to do anything about it,” he replied, although he knew that probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Jenn, of all people, had an incredibly well-developed sense of when to lawyer up. She was probably waiting with bated breath for him to give the command - destroy him.

But Carson wasn’t going to do that.

“I don’t want publicity,” he said. “I don’t want to be a spectacle. I don’t want the whole country to look at our family and speculate over the gross details like they did with Anthony Weiner or John Edwards.”

Those had been grossly different situations, granted, but all political sex scandals boiled down more or less the same. It was all the same tabloid gristle in the end.

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Jenn nodded, though Carson couldn’t see it. “Of course, baby,” she said. “Anything you need.” Nell had, hopefully, sent the photographs along to Jenn’s lawyer by now. She tapped her fingernails against the keys of her laptop, too lightly for the computer to read a single press. The sound was comforting over the plane’s white noise. “Are you alright? Are you safe?”

There had been a time where Carson was not, after all. She had always assumed all teenagers were so dramatic, assigned Nell’s relative ease of handling to her daughter’s incredible maturity, but now… Why hadn’t Jenn seen?


“Yeah, I-” Carson glanced towards the window, as if expecting a youma to come bursting through it any second. “Why - why wouldn’t I be safe?”

Maybe, he thought, his mother was just being paranoid about Destiny City. That was preferable to the (unlikely) possibility that his father had already taken a hit out on him.

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Jenn frowned. “I was trying to be delicate about asking if you were going to hurt yourself,” she said. “I do worry, you know. Oh, can you tell your sister she’s not allowed to buy a house without my say-so? I don’t care how good a deal it is or how she needs a project. Her project is school.”


Carson shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see him. “No,” he said. “I - I’m fine. I don’t do that anymore.” He’d left all his teenaged death wishes in a desert on the far side of the world, trapped under some boulders and all wrapped up in the smell of bile and blood. “I’ll tell her. I-”

He bit his lip, the restrained nature of the conversation giving him a tight feeling in his chest.

“Mama?” he asked. “I - none of it was your fault, you know? Even if you’d known something was wrong, I wouldn’t have said what. You wouldn’t have gotten it out of me. It - it couldn’t have been helped.” It had all just been so… inevitable.


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With a rueful little smile, Jenn slid open the shade. Out before her was a night-time sea of clouds, the moon barely visible at the far end of the horizon. “I believe you,” she said, though she didn’t believe him and even now was tallying the things that should have clued her in. They’d done all the right things, she’d thought in retrospect, but now she knew that she hadn’t. The right thing would have been concentrating less on her daughter’s career and more on the welfare of all of her children. Nell wouldn’t have felt compelled to act out as she had with her grades. Perhaps several hundred man-hours of repainting their family home would have been saved. And Carson…

“I never would have let him send you or Marcus away,” she said. “I love you and your brother just as dearly as I love Nell, baby, and nothing’s ever going to change that. Not for as long as I’m living.”

She sighed. “Allow an old woman her worries. I don’t have terribly many, you know.”


“You’re not old, Mama,” replied Carson, because he knew it was the only correct response. Jenn had thrown herself an extravagant fortieth birthday party some three years prior and gone a little overboard with the over the hill theme. It had been funny at the time.

“How did Nell seem?” he asked, drifting back to the subject at hand. “When you spoke to her?” By the time she’d left his apartment earlier, she’d seemed like she was beginning to panic. He hoped she’d calmed down some - perhaps she had, if she’d also found time to talk about buying a house (what).

“You’re leaving him, right?” he added. If she wasn’t, then Carson supposed he didn’t know his mother half as well as he’d thought he did.

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“Of course I’m leaving him,” said Jenn, “And I’m taking everything, too. It likely won’t be over by Easter, but you won’t see him at dinner regardless.”

The question of Nell was a tougher one to answer. “She was upset, but I think she’ll be alright,” said Jenn. “Give her time. She thinks she’s all grown up now, but she’s still just a little girl, and she loves both of you.” Jenn knew about fraught relationships, especially between parent and child. In another world, Nell and Luke would have leveled out eventually, become less antagonistic. In this one... It’d be hard, but Nell would be alright.

“The house is a bit more of a long-running concern,” said Jenn with a sigh. “But she does believe in retail therapy.”


“I’ll try to distract her,” replied Carson, nodding to the empty room. If inviting Nell over to dinner with Elke and Naiime didn’t take her mind off things, he doubted anything would - even if it meant everything would get back to Jenn. Suddenly, that didn’t seem so bad. He hadn’t expected having all this off his chest to feel as good as it did, but this was the most openly he’d spoken to his mother… probably ever.

“Are - are you home?” he asked, almost an afterthought. There was a weird white noise on the call, almost like… like a plane. “No. Where are you going? Does he know you’re leaving yet?”

Did he need to expect a call?

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Jenn smiled, just a little. “No. I’m going home, and he won’t know until I land--sooner, probably--if he calls, turn off your phone. You don’t need to talk to him ever again.” She paused.

“Your sister broke her phone,” she said. “So texting her is the best way to get in touch, I believe.”


“Right, then,” said Carson, deciding that he didn’t want to know what Nell had done to break her phone. “Thanks for the heads up.”

He’d let her go, he decided - there wasn’t much more to discuss, at least not at the moment. “Hey, Mama?” asked Carson. “I love you.”

It had been a long time since he’d said it.

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“I love you too, baby,” said Jenn. “I’ll let you know when I land.” She hung up. Nothing left to do but wait, now.