Chapter Text
Jamie never thought she’d be a good mom.
It was the first reason she used to dispel Dani’s question about them ever having children. Dani had approached her two years into their marriage, wide eyed and sly grinning, and posed the question in a way that Jamie typically never refused. But Jamie was downright convinced she would be a shit parent, so she vehemently refused to even humour the conversation. Dani had quickly dropped it.
But Dani, ever the stubborn one of the relationship, came back a week later with the same question. This time, Jamie listened; she owed her wife that much.
And after gentle reminders that her childhood wasn’t a reflection of the parent she would be – and the offer to take things at Jamie’s pace – they had finally settled on a plan.
They would foster; and their age range would be 10 and up. Old enough for the kid to establish their own boundaries and rules while still needing the guiding hand of a step-in-parent. Jamie had decided that she might not be a good mother, but she could be a good friend. That could be enough.
It took them eight months to get their first placement. Toni Shalifoe - 15 and often times too head strong and stubborn for her own good. Jamie was worried that their matching grit and hot-headedness would make them clash. She worried that Toni would object their attempts to parent and make it entirely impossible for the both of them to gain her trust.
But Toni was an endless box of surprises. While she was oftentimes too quick to let her anger front her actions, she revealed early on to both women that it was the only way to keep herself safe.
Jamie knew too much about self-preservation. It was what kept her alive through her time in foster care and prison. For a long stretch of her childhood, she was the only person she could rely on, and that was clearly the same for Toni.
And while Jamie was convinced she would never make a good mother, Toni slowly began to make her believe otherwise. While she once feared that their similarities would drive them apart, they only seemed to draw them closer together. Toni took comfort in having a foster parent who knew the struggle, and she relished in her first true experience of having a safe home to live in.
And while Toni still flinched when either Jamie or Dani made too sudden a movement, or she went nights without sleep because of the nightmares that plagued her, by the fifth month of living in the Clayton-Taylor household she seemed to have accepted that this situation was good and that she could actually let her guard down.
And with that lowered guard, Jamie slowly found herself playing less of a friend to Toni and more of a mother. And she was a damn good mom.
Granted, she often thought that Dani was the better mom between them, not that it ever bothered Jamie. Dani was delicate and tender with Toni. She wiped tears, chased away nightmares, made meals that elicited gleeful giggles from the tough 15-year-old. But Jamie was the only one who seemed to have the right words for Toni when her anger consumed all of her. She could talk the girl down from the edge of an explosive episode, and she could pick up the pieces that came when that anger turned to desperation and sadness.
They all seemed to fall into their places as a family without even knowing it; and things were good. Jamie felt good. She felt like a good mom.
Until the first Sunday of their sixth month together.
It had started like any ordinary Sunday. Dani and Jamie had a slow start, cuddled in bed until 10, and then shared their breakfast on their small balcony surrounded by Jamie’s beloved outdoor plants. An hour later, Toni joined them outside and scarfed down four pancakes without even hesitating.
That was one thing Jamie loved watching; Toni accepting that food wasn’t a tool used to get her to behave. It was available to her whenever she wanted it; and she was free to eat however much she pleased. And boy could Toni eat. Had the pancake batter not run out, Jamie was sure Toni would’ve asked for a fifth serving.
It wasn’t until after they cleared away their breakfast and settled down in the living room that Jamie noticed the slight squint to Dani’s eyes.
Being with Dani for nearly six years, Jamie had memorized what all the shifts and changes in her body meant. When Dani squinted her eyes like she was, it typically meant her head was hurting and she was especially sensitive to the light in that moment.
“Poppins, you alright?” Jamie gently asked, making Dani look at her with a weak smile.
“Just fine. Why’d you ask?” Dani asked before she returned to looking at the math problem that Toni was trying to show her.
“You’re squinting, love.”
“It’s just a headache.” Dani tried to bat off her wife’s worried hand which was aimed to touch her forehead. But there was a slur to her words that Jamie had come to know as a sign of a migraine. She had no doubts that Dani was already putting up with the start of it and that it would only get worse from there.
“Maybe you can try sleeping it off then, yeah?” Jamie proposed as she finally brushed her finger’s over Dani’s neck. No fever. It wouldn’t be a bad one this time.
“I’m fine. Really,” Dani disregarded again as she tried to focus back on Toni’s math homework that the girl desperately needed help with.
“I can finish by myself,” Toni tried to interrupt, but neither women would have it.
“No, I promised I’d help,” Dani started to say.
“Let me have a crack at it, Poppins. You go rest and I’ll help this gremlin sort out her numbers,” Jamie said, winking at Toni who crinkled her nose at the nickname. She would never admit it, but Jamie was sure that Toni liked the pet names that she and Dani threw her way.
“Are you sure?” Dani breathed out, looking between her two girls unsurely.
“I doubt she can make me more confused than I already am,” Toni supplied with a shrug.
“See. We’ll be just fine,” Jamie promised as she grabbed Dani’s hand and gently led her back to their room.
She flipped all the blinds shut, drew the curtains, and plunged the room into as much darkness as she could in hopes of easing the pain that was clearly thumping in Dani’s brain.
“You sure you’ll be fine?” Dani asked as a blanket was draped over her.
“We’ll be fine. Really. How hard can math be anyways?”
Turns out, grade 10 math could easily kill Jamie. There were letters and the language the book used seemed far from English. Some symbols depicted numbers that weren’t there but already existed and other symbols depicted numbers that weren’t there but needed to be found. And if Jamie hadn’t already gone grey from just being a parent, she sure as hell grew a few strands in the three hours it took her to help Toni through her review package.
But they managed; after some heated periods between the two, and awful jokes that resulted in prolonged fits of laughter, they managed to finished all the questions with a certain degree of certainty that they got most of the questions right.
“Finally,” Toni groaned as she dropped her pencil and rested her forehead on the coffee table.
“That was awful,” Jamie said past a laugh as she puffed out her own relieved sigh and leant back into the couch.
“Can I make cookies?” Toni asked, the triumph of completing her math work bringing back her endless hunger.
“Cookies? Better be something good. None of those weird oreo ones that Dani made the other day,” Jamie teased, making Toni laugh at the reminder.
“No, no. I was thinking of making Dani’s favourite chocolate chip recipe? She’ll probably wake up hungry too and-,”
“That’s a very sweet thought,” Jamie interrupted before Toni could go on one of her explanation tangents. It was a habit that she clung to when she worried that Dani or Jamie would tell her no. “Go ahead, love. Kitchen’s yours.”
Toni enthusiastically shut her textbook and scrambled off, leaving Jamie to tuck into the couch with her tea and book for a while.
The baking seemed to have gone off without a hitch. While the cookies sat in the oven, Toni took reprieve on the couch with her head on Jamie’s lap. Jamie combed her fingers through the girl’s hair, read her book, and smiled every time Toni would chuckle at something she read on her phone.
When the timer went off, Jamie let Toni go to retrieve the tray. She knew that the girl could manage just fine. She’d handled hot pans before. But fuck, if Jamie could go back in time and force Toni to stay on the couch – if she could go and get the cookies herself – she would do it in a heartbeat.
Toni was never one to show her pain. She’d taken hard hits in her basketball practices and games. Some hits that could warrant a tear or two. But Toni always laughed through those incidents. She’d shake off the concern of her foster moms and tell them that it didn’t hurt at all. Jamie briefly wondered if Toni could actually feel pain; or if years in the system and years of abuse had rendered her unable to physically process pain.
But today, Toni proved otherwise.
Jamie knew what to listen for. The oven door would creak open, the pan would scrape as it was pulled from the rack, and the door would creak once more before it clanged shut.
And it started that way. The door creaked. The pan scraped. But then Toni cried out in pain. And the pan that she was likely holding crashed down and clattered against the oven and floor. And then Toni was cursing under her breath and there was a clear tremble to her voice. Toni was in pain.
And Jamie was up in an instant.
She never had to help Toni while she was in pain. This would be new territory. But Jamie was surprising herself and thought she could handle this.
That was until she saw the burn; and heard the sound of Toni’s pained gasps which resembled the wails of little Mikey who had pulled the pot of boiling water down on himself. Jamie suddenly felt like she did when she saw her little brother. She felt helpless and scared and while she wanted to reach out and comfort Toni, she physically couldn’t.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Toni was repeating as she cradled her arm to her chest and cornered herself at the far end of the kitchen. The hot pan and scattered cookies divided her and Jamie. It set the wedge between them that Jamie had always feared.
Thankfully, the commotion seemed to have stirred Dani who appeared beside Jamie in a concerned frenzy.
“What’s going on?” Dani asked as she took stock of the situation. Jamie was now practically hyperventilating, and Toni was no better off across from them.
“I’m sorry - fuck. Dani, I’m sorry,” Toni whimpered out. No - if Jamie really honed in her attention she’d noticed that Toni was sobbing. Toni was sobbing and she was just standing there not doing anything.
“Jamie. Jamie, can you get the oven?” Dani was talking to her. She could hear that. But her voice sounded so far away. Too far away. And she was just standing there, not doing anything.
“Jamie,” Dani tried again.
Toni was still crying.
Jamie still didn’t move.
But fuck, she wanted to.
-----
Dani always took pride in being rather level-headed. It came with being a former teacher, turned au pair, turned business owner. She’d dealt with a lot of people of varying ages in different states of being. She’d dealt with children hyped up on sugar, throwing fits, having meltdowns; she’d dealt with adults in a rush, demanding a better deal, cursing her for being unhelpful.
And with every scream, yell, cry: Dani never faltered. She never swayed. She just took a deep breath and worked through the situation.
Today was tricky because she had not one, but two people melting down before her. And she was still a bit hazy from her migraine induced nap, but she was aware enough to know that she had to lay out a plan.
“Okay,” Dani breathed out when she realized that Jamie was too lost in her own head to deal with the oven.
Dani grabbed the nearest oven mit and used it to grab the cookie sheet which had clattered onto the oven door; some of the cookies were still on it, so there was something positive to consider. Not all was lost quite yet.
She set the pan on top of the oven and finally shut the door, effectively preventing any further injury or panic for either of her girls.
“Jamie, honey, I need you to clean up the floor. Can you please do that for me?” Dani asked, looking at her wife who seemed to finally blink herself back into reality a bit. “I need to look at Toni’s arm. Can you please pick the cookies up?”
Jamie gave one stuttered nod. Then another. She understood.
Dani sighed out in relief and finally turned away from Jamie and towards Toni who was still pressing herself as far back into the corner of the kitchen counter as she could.
“Toni, baby, let me see,” Dani gently urged as she reached her hands out for the girl’s burnt arm.
“No,” Toni croaked out as she flinched away from Dani. “I’m fine,” she whimpered, though Dani knew better than to believe that claim.
“If you burned yourself we need to get you cleaned up to prevent any blistering. Can we go do that?”
Dani allowed Toni to look at her. To just look at her and scrutinize her for however long she needed to come to the conclusion that she was safe and that Dani was there to help her, not hurt her.
“Okay,” Toni relented, making Dani smile softly as she gently settled her hand on the girl’s shoulder and started to guide her from the kitchen.
Dani gave one last glance to Jamie who refused to look up from the floor which she was still plucking cookies off of. She would have to talk her wife down from whatever memory she was reliving. But for now, she needed to make sure that that whatever burn Toni sustained wasn’t worthy of a hospital trip.
Once in the bathroom, Dani turned on the cold water and looked once more at a still snivelling Toni.
She had calmed down significantly, but she still seemed ready to run off at any moment.
“Can I have a look, please?” Dani asked, making Toni glance at her once more before she gave a stuttered nod and allowed her right arm to extend out.
On Toni’s forearm, there was a long, red burn mark that ran across the middle of it. Dani surmised that she likely lifted her arm too early and caught the lip of one of the racks.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” Dani tried to reassure, using her left hand to reach for Toni’s elbow. When she came in contact with the skin just below her elbow, however, the girl bit back a yelp and withdrew her arm once more.
“I’m sorry, baby. Did you get the other side too?” Dani asked as she worriedly looked over her girl who tried to bite back her pain.
“I’m so stupid,” Toni finally said, a bitter laugh slipping past her lips.
“Hey, none of that. This was an accident,” Dani said as she finally caught Toni’s arm again and managed to turn it over, revealing that a good bit of skin from the top of Toni’s arm had been burned by the oven as well. It would explain the crying. Two burns in succession of one another on the same arm would make anyone shed a tear.
“How’d you manage to get both sides?” Dani asked as she gently guided Toni’s arm to the stream of water running from the tap.
Toni hissed when the cold water met her burns, but she soon took solace in the numbing effects of the icy stream.
“I hit my arm on the oven door, shifted away from the it because it burned, and then caught the top rack in the process,” Toni explained; Dani nodded her understanding and reached up to brush some of the baby hairs that refused to stay in Toni’s ponytail. She couldn’t help but smile when Toni didn’t flinch away from her this time. “I’m sorry I woke you up,” Toni decided to say as she sniffed and used her free hand to wipe at her cheeks which were still sticky with tears.
“That’s okay, sweetheart. I was already waking up a bit before I heard the noise,” Dani reassured as she reached for a hand towel on the sink edge. She briefly set it under the stream of water before reigning it out and using it to clean Toni’s cheeks. “You can be honest with me, y’know. If you feel like it hurts too much we can go to a walk in and have a doctor look at it.”
“It’s not that bad anymore,” Toni said as she briefly turned her arm over to look at the burn on the other side.
“A few more minutes under the water should help. Then we’ll go to my room and get you all bandaged up.”
Toni nodded her agreement but refused to meet Dani’s eyes again. It was clear that she was now feeling embarrassed, and while the blonde would like to reassure her that this was nothing to be embarrassed about she knew it would fall unto deft ears. Just like Jamie, Toni needed a few minutes to come to her own conclusion and settle her own quarrels.
After five minutes under the cold water, Dani shut off the tap and wrapped the younger girl’s arm in a fresh towel. Together, they made their way to Dani and Jamie’s bedroom, which was still plunged in darkness and left in a slight chaos that Dani’s abrupt wake-up call created.
Wanting to get things over with, Toni promptly sat on the edge of the bed while Dani retrieved the antibiotic ointment and gauze that they kept stored in the bottom drawer of their dresser and flipped on the nearest lamp.
“Let’s have a look,” Dani prompted as she knelt next to Toni and set the items down on the bed beside her.
Gingerly, the girl unwrapped her arm and showed off the angry red welts. The one on her forearm was starting to blister, but the one on the opposite side seemed to be doing a bit better. It was red too, but thankfully no bubbles were forming.
“We have to keep an eye on this. Don’t pick it, alright?” Dani said as she motioned to the blister.
“I’m sorry,” Toni started to say again when Dani began to layer a generous amount of ointment onto the burns.
“Toni-,”
“I upset Jamie. I wasted food. I woke you up. I shouldn’t have been in your kitchen in the first place-,”
“Wait a minute,” Dani tried to interrupt again.
“I destroy everything! Anything I touch just blows up and I…I…,”
And then Dani saw it. The tears that were flooding Toni’s eyes against her will and making her usually strong voice crack and falter.
Toni was always so sure of herself. But this was the first time that she let some of her fragility show. And it made Dani absolutely ache because here was her strong girl who tried to prove to the world that it couldn’t break her; here she was, on the brink of tears again because she felt like one accident would be enough to blow their lives up.
“I need you to listen to me,” Dani began as she gently reached up to cup Toni’s cheeks. Her eyes looked everywhere but Dani until she finally relented and locked her brown eyes onto blue ones. “You did nothing wrong. You made cookies in the kitchen, which you are allowed to use whenever you want, and you had an accident. Jamie didn’t respond out of anger; she was just scared too-,”
“She wouldn’t even look at me,” Toni cried as a sob bubbled to the surface.
“She had a bad experience with burns when she was a kid. Had it been any other kind of injury she would’ve been at your side in an instant,” Dani tried to explain, though it was clear that Toni still didn’t believe her.
“How do you know that?” Toni croaked out as she angrily reached up to wipe her cheeks. Dani grasped the offending hand and held it gently, trying to convey to her kid that she needed to treat herself kindly.
“Because I’ve been with Jamie for so long and I just know her.”
“I just wanted to make cookies,” Toni finally whispered out, making Dani release a small laugh.
“I know, baby,” Dani softly said before she stood up and wrapped her arms around the girl’s shoulders.
Toni returned the hug after a beat with her non-injured arm and inhaled deeply against Dani’s stomach.
The two held to each other for a beat, and Dani tried to convey in that single embrace that one small incident wasn't going to break the good thing they had going for them.
“Let’s finish up here, yeah?” Dani offered as she gently combed her fingers through Toni’s ponytail.
Toni bobbed her head in agreement and allowed Dani to wrap her arm in the gauze and tape.
“How does it feel?” Dani asked when she set the final piece of tape down.
“Hurts a bit,” Toni confessed, making her foster mom nod in understanding.
“Why don’t you lie down for a bit? Maybe sleep some of the pain off?” Dani suggested as she patted Jamie’s side of the bed.
Toni hesitated but eventually gave in to the suggestion and rested back against Jamie’s pillow. She turned onto her left side and allowed Dani to settle a pillow under her right arm in an effort to prevent her from rolling onto it. A blanket followed suit, and once Dani had tucked Toni in enough, she pressed a loving kiss to the teen’s forehead.
“Thanks, Dani,” Toni mumbled as she watched her foster mom head to the door.
“Anytime, sweet girl,” Dani replied before she slipped out of the room and gently shut the door behind her.
Now with one of her girl’s settled, Dani went to look for her other girl who was definitely in need of a hug based on how she was the last time she saw her.
Knowing her wife would probably take her time in the kitchen, Dani went there first. Sure enough there Jamie was, sat on the kitchen floor across from the oven with her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin settled on her knees.
The cookies had been picked off the floor, and any sign of incident had been cleared away, but Jamie still sat there looking at the offensive oven that had caused all this disruption to their relatively peaceful Sunday.
“How is she?” Jamie asked, her voice hoarse from disuse and/or tears. Dani wasn’t close enough yet to tell.
“Resting. It really wasn’t that bad,” Dani said as she sat down in front of her wife. Gently, Dani snuck her hands between Jamie’s knees and arms and gave a tug, which prompted Jamie to unravel a bit and let her wife in.
Shuffling in closer, Dani encouraged Jamie to wrap her legs around her so then they could be as close together as possible. Dani rested her forehead against her wife’s and allowed for a brief moment of calm to settle over them before she interrupted it.
“It was an accident,” Dani decided to open with, making Jamie shake her head.
“I should’ve grabbed the cookies myself. She’s just a kid-,”
“She’s a teenager, baby. She’s grabbed things from the oven before. Besides, this won’t be the last time something like this happens,” Dani said, laughing a bit in hopes of lightening the mood. It didn’t work all too well considering Jamie was still looking as down trotted as ever. “She isn’t Mikey,” Dani finally whispered, deciding to just address what was likely bothering her wife head on.
“I don’t think I can do it, Dani. I can’t lose her like I lost him,” Jamie whimpered as tears began to fall down her cheeks.
“Hey, we aren’t losing her,” Dani promised as she wrapped her arms around Jamie and allowed the other woman to hide in the bend of her neck. “Accidents will happen. She will get hurt and she will get sick, but we will always be there to help her through it.”
“I made it worse today, didn’t I?” Jamie asked as she pulled away and sniffled back her tears.
Dani weakly smiled her way and used the cuff of her sleeve to wipe away Jamie’s tears.
“She was just nervous that your reaction meant you were angry. I told her otherwise, but it might help for her to hear it from you directly.”
Jamie nodded, making Dani smile and puff out a breath of relief. She knew the only way for them to truly get over this bump in the road was for Jamie and Toni to have a proper conversation about it. And thankfully, Jamie seemed willing to do just that.
“You alright?” Dani asked before she allowed Jamie to get up from the kitchen floor.
“Better now,” Jamie reassured before she pressed a soft kiss to Dani’s lips.
They sat there for a moment, tangled up with one another on the kitchen floor with nothing but a few inches between them. Finally, less than an hour after chaos interrupted their peaceful Sunday, that former tranquility washed over them again.
“I’ll go have a chat with her,” Jamie finally said before she untangled herself from Dani and got up. Dani sat a beat longer and watched her wife go before she stood up herself and approached the plate of cookies by the sink. Despite losing half of them, Toni seemed to have done a fine job of preparing Dani’s go to chocolate chip cookies.
Just like a kid, Dani plucked a cookie from the plate and began to slowly eat it as she snuck over to her bedroom door to see how Jamie and Toni were holding up.
To her pleasant surprise, Jamie had laid herself parallel to Toni and was speaking to her in a hushed whisper. She was gently brushing back Toni’s hair and the teen was nodding her understanding every so often.
It was a beautiful moment – a private one that Dani had no intentions of interrupting – but a beautiful one nonetheless that she wanted to watch for a few minutes longer.
If only Jamie could see things from Dani’s perspective. Maybe then she could really grasp just how good and loving of a mother she truly was.