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PROLOGUE ' WHERE BABIES COME FROM '
* tws: season five episode eighteen derek, very blurry lines around consent, implied sexual content, blood, and vague mentions of domestic abuse *
Monica was on a fishing trip with her Father when she got her first period.
She was twelve at the time, and she looked the part: too-long limbs, skin that had to stretch over the knobs of her bones, and the fading Fox and the Hound t-shirt that hung loosely over her frame. She was very young, even at twelve, and one could tell: too sensitive, always hiding behind her brother wherever they went, and terrified of what having her period meant, of the implications of the only kind of bloodshed to be considered impure. So terrified, in fact, that, instead of telling her Father what happened and risking him abandoning the first thing they did together in months to take her home, she shoved a wad of rest stop toilet paper into her underwear and paid it no mind.
Or, at least, she tried to.
By the time they'd returned at the end of their trip, a cooler full of river fish (most of which he had caught) with them, she was painfully aware of it.
It wasn't until the sun started to set, when the two of them were sitting on rusty lawn chairs outside of the trailer the family called home and cleaning the fish they'd caught for cooking, the smell of the sweltering summer and the hushpuppies her sister was cooking on the air, that he finally noticed. Monica had been squirming for nearly half an hour, her face flushed with a burgeoning sunburn (her father, with his weather worn, leathery skin, hadn't thought to pack and sunscreen with them) and the embarrassment that was prickling up her neck, when he cleared his throat and asked her a question over the humming of the radio.
"You got ants in your pants, Copper?"
She didn't look up from the fish that she was carving from tail to gills. Just shrugged and said. "No."
"Then why're you wiggling like that?"
At twelve, Monica was many things, but she was not a very good liar. . It was a trait her mother used to boast about at Church on Sundays-- my middle one, my redhead, she tells me everything-- but, she found herself in trouble, and ostracized, more often than not.
Her only brother, Jack, once, while using the hem of his shirt to dab at a wound on her forehead that she swore up and down did not come from riding her bike after dark like she was warned not to, told her to never, ever play poker; their sister, Denise, who was three years Jack's junior but still much older than Monica (and somehow lacked all of the warmth that both of them possessed), tended to sneer, slamming doors in Monica's face and telling her to get lost, excluding Monica on the basis that the younger girl always coughed up to mother.
