Summary: You and Les had been high school sweethearts. You're going to be a music teacher, he's going to climb the ranks of the SAMDINO MC. The only thing that stands in your way is his mentally unstable brother, Isaac. Things fall apart and fifteen years later, your daughter calls Les for help when you're in a coma and she's trying to figure out how to stay out of foster care. Les is faced with figuring out if you daughter is his or possibly Isaac's. Either way, he can't walk away for a second time from you and your daughter.
TW: This chapter has a mention of rape.
Les Packer is a tough son of a bitch and there is very little that surprises or unnerves him. Seeing you lying in a hospital bed, tubes and IVs and monitors surround you makes his heart race and his palms sweat. The constant beeping of your heartbeat, the whoosh of the ventilator, the ticking of your brain waves are all hopeful signs that you’ll survive this but the constant noise grates at his nerves. Your coloring is off, your eyes closed, your hands are still. He remembers you always being so animated, bright, and full of life. You didn’t stay still for longer than necessary.
You’re almost unrecognizable.
Almost.
Zoey goes through the routine of setting down her backpack in one of the pastel vinyl chairs in the room, opening the blinds, and putting fresh water in a plastic vase of drooping roses. She picks up the dropped petals and drops them into the small trash can in the bathroom. The routine has come so naturally to her, she seems to forget that he’s even in the room at the moment. It’s when she turns from the trash can that she seems to finally notice him.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Les smooths a hand over the soft leather of his kutte, wishing he could touch you. But it’s been so long, too much damage hangs between the two of you. Damage he had hoped one day to fix but it seems time may have run out. “It’s been sixteen years.”
Your hair has been braided, the thick rope draped over the side of your bruised neck and shoulder. Zoey carefully undoes the plait and gently brushes your hair. There’s no movement from you whatsoever, no flicker of eye movement, tic of your cheek. He steps up to the other side of the bed and slips his hand into yours. His fingertips brush over yours, looking for the familiar callouses he had come to love feeling against his skin. But they’re not there anymore. Another thing lost.
Zoey turns those blue-green eyes towards him, studying his face with a shrewd intelligence, as she rebraids your hair. She almost looks like Isaac in her intensity, her planning and scheming. “She told me my father died before I was born.”
It’s almost a challenge but more of a question. He wonders if she went home last night and recognized her eyes in the mirror, that she saw the similarities that he did. That she has the same questions he does: who is her father? There’s only one person who can answer that and you may never be able to solve that mystery for them.
He understands, with almost a sad resignation, why you would have said that and it only seems to confirm his suspicions. He stays quiet, neither confirming or denying anything. He had been hopeful last night when he had returned home that Zoey had been his own child, born out of passion, love, and joy. Instead, evidence is pointing to his unstable brother and his off the charts intelligence. This struggle brings back another time with stunning clarity when he struggled with the idea of Zoey being his daughter or his niece.
He’d been standing in front of your door for ten minutes, squeezing and twisting the soft stuffed rabbit in his hand. This was the third time he’s ridden down to Santee, a suburb of San Diego that was dilapidated and falling down. He wished you would get a better lock on your door, carry mace or a knife on your person. But he did see how the community treats you and it’s with nothing but kindness.
Especially now that the baby was born.
A little girl with your dark hair and bright blue eyes. She’s beautiful and fierce. And he wants nothing more than to protect you both. But he can’t. That night at the clubhouse, in the middle of the chaos of celebration with a group of Sons from Seattle, proved he couldn’t protect you. That’s why he didn’t blame you for leaving him and San Bernardino. You deserved so much better, as does the little girl you’ve been gifted.
He took an envelope out of his back pocket. It had a note, words filled with regret, bitterness, and a need for forgiveness, that he had spent hours writing. It also had $500 in it, a pitiful amount to help as best he can with this burden you’ve taken on yourself. He wanted you to know he realized just how much he failed you. How he failed your child. How desperate he was to make it up to you both, if it was at all possible. But then he recalls that night with razor sharp clarity: you in the dim light of the clubhouse, holding your ripped blouse closed, a dark navy shirt with bright yellow lemons on it. It’s a sunny, happy shirt that you only wear on special occasions. There was a thin rivulet of blood running from your nose, some of it already smeared as you had tried to wipe it away. Your eyes, dark ringed with smudged mascara, downcast and tear filled as you slipped out the backdoor.
He removed the note from the envelope. He didn’t deserve forgiveness for that. Not yet at least. When he trades in his Sergeant at Arms flash for the Vice President, and then the President’s flash, when he officially takes Isaac’s kutte from him and banishes him for good from the club and San Bernardino, then he can come ask for your forgiveness. Until that happens, he has no right to invade your life. So he set down the stuffed rabbit with the envelope of money in front of your door and left.
“Mr. Packer?”
“Les.” He chuckles. “Well, when CPS comes around, better call me Uncle Les.”
Zoey finishes off your braid and ties the end, a small smile on her face. “Uncle Les. I like that.”
