how different is the abortion roadtrip kleinsen fic's au from canon? is it like a whole different timeline, before or after canon did or would happen? does it share any of your hcs about canon universe?
CW: Teen pregnancy, and the inherent references to underage sex that come with it. Canon-Compliant suicide.
Thanks so much for asking! I've been kicking this one around in my head for a while and it feels great to finally share a bit of it with other people.
On the relationship to canon:
It falls very squarely in the Canon Divergence school of AUs, so the setup is almost exactly the same as a the start of the show with two or three key details spinning the story off in a wildly different direction.
It's still the beginning of senior year. Connor has still killed himself, the school is still reacting the same way. Evan had the same summer vacation--with the same cast to show for it. Evan and Jared's relationship is exactly where it is when we meet them in canon.
But we quickly find out that at the end of junior year, there was this drama club / band kids party that Jared actually got invited to for running tech on the spring musical, and he insisted that his mother insisted that he drag Evan along with him. Jared had a miserable time trying to socialize with the theatre kids, while Evan snuck off and hid in an empty room for basically the whole thing. Jared mentally wrote the whole ordeal off as a failure for both of them, and that was the last time they saw each other before Jared left for camp.
Except Jared learns much later that Connor Murphy was also at that party because his mother actually insisted that Zoe drag him along, and he also snuck off and hid in an empty room for basically the whole thing. And Jared only learns this because two weeks after Connor kills himself, Evan needs somebody to drive him out of state for a parental awareness-less abortion.
In terms of Canon Compliance on the Connor/Evan side of things, their interaction with Jared went almost the same. Jared made his shitty school shooter joke and dipped, Evan laughed awkwardly, Connor yelled at him and called him a freak--but I don't think, at least right now, that he pushed Evan. This was the first time they saw each other since the party.
Due to the fact that they already met And Then Some at said party, that means Connor was too angry or embarrassed to approach Evan in the computer lab to try to make amends. He left as soon as he saw Evan. He didn't sign his cast. He wouldn't have freaked out about Zoe because Evan certainly didn't write about her this time, but that doesn't matter because he never saw the letter in the first place.
On my headcanons:
This one actually has two major deviations from two of my biggest headcanons.
The first is that Evan is transmasc and Jared is cis, which is the opposite of how I always write them otherwise. (Cisgender Jared Kleinman attempting to be a trans ally is definitely something I'm having a lot of fun trying to figure out, especially given the circumstances he's been thrown into here.)
The second is that I'm actually setting this one in Bethesda MD and not my preferred location of Rochester NY, exclusively because Maryland law requires that at least one parent or guardian be notified before a minor receives an abortion and Evan very very desperately does not want Heidi to find out.
I'd say that the main headcanons I'm keeping fully intact so far are Jared being deeply closeted (although that is going to change over the course of the trip) and Jared being an absolute film bro. I'm even building an entire list of movies I want him to reference in the Notes Apps on my phone.
