Chapter Text
You never know the day your life is supposed to change. You never wake up knowing that the day your life is going to change is that day. You know it by the end of the day of course but you never know when the day starts.
She thinks this as she watches the dust motes fly around the burning ceiling. She thinks this as her pains increase. She had been close to popping when she had been dragged to Beth’s office and the world had ended. She had not known that she was going to make the decision to do what she did today, but she did know that she had done it now.
She watched the dust motes and turned on her side and breathed as best she could forcing herself to a sitting position. The little life inside of her was struggling to get out, desperate to taste it’s first breath of fresh air when the truth was that this air was filled with dust and dirt and smoke and the horrors that came with being John Dutton’s daughter.
She supposed there were good things too. But for her, her life had been one bad thing after another.
Jamie would later ask her when she had planned to do it. He would be the only one who suspected and he would never have the balls to put the thoughts he was thinking into words. He would stand there with her and look at the grave and ask her if it was planned. She wouldn’t tell him and he would never ask again.
Nobody else would ever suspect her.
She dragged herself onto her knees and breathed through the pain.
Oh this time was supposed to be different! She’d had a plan! She’d had a real plan. She’d had a plan to do this differently! She’d wanted to go into the forest and have a water birth—okay so that part was debated with Ryan and her father both of whom thought she was slightly mad, fucking crackers, but she’d had a plan and now…
Well…best laid plans and all.
She staggered downwards and yanked her skirt up thanking God she had gone with a dress today and found that her panties were soaked. There was something pressing into them and…
A shadow moved and she looked up.
Kayce was there.
“KAYCE!” he turned to look at her and she could see him through the smoke and the burning fire and he staggered over to her falling down a little as he pushed aside something that might have been a desk and tripped over something that might have once been a human being. She heard glass clinking on the ground and her big brother was there and…
“Now”
“What’s now?” he asked and his face was smeared with soot and blood and his eyes dazed. But he was sharper than Jamie who she had not seen yet…he was a war veteran her brother…a war veteran and right now she had never been more glad of it because he at the very least knew where he was and had his wits about them.
“Coming now” she moaned and she gripped his shoulders.
“Grace?”
“Baby…now”
“Okay can you—”
“No…catch the fucking—”
Her brother went white as the implications of what she was saying hit him.
Or maybe he had just looked behind her.
She didn’t know. She pitched forwards into his arms as the sirens were heard in the distance and the beam of wood outside the office fell down and hit the floor with a bang. She felt her head throb and she knew she was so close to loosing consciousness that she gripped onto his jacket as if to grip onto life.
And she had gripped onto life hadn’t she?
She was Grace fucking Dutton.
It was all she knew how to do.
You may ask how we got here and believe me we will go back and examine that in depth.
But for now…
A little flashback.
“Your shitting me”
“Fraid not little girl. Only way Daddy will have you home, no bastards on the Ranch”
“Defeats the purpose of Rip” she snapped. Beth snarled. Rip was still a sore subject.
To get to this point you have to understand what came before. Grace Dutton was pregnant, Grace Dutton was also fourteen and perhaps in the contradictory way of teenagers she had gone to her sister rather than her father and her sister’s solution had been this.
“I’ll go home and tell Dad before I do this” she said getting out the car.
“Thought you were pro-choice?”
“I am you evil bitch, pro choice means choosing, I choose to come to you for help I didn’t choose this”
She slammed the car door shut but Beth (unknown to Grace at this point) was still smarting from her own abortion years ago and so she got out of the car too. Perhaps things would have been easier if she had stayed in the car put her sister back in and took them home but she did not.
“Then don’t come back. Seriously Grace he wont have you back pregnant at fourteen. Especially if you don’t know who the father is”
Grace paused. She did know who the father was. That was part of the problem. She could still feel what the father of this baby had done to her. Beth’s idea of a joke to get her drunk and leave her at the mercy of the ranch hands. It was another reason why now she was really wondering weather or not she had done the right thing when she had gone to Beth but Jamie had been at school, Kayce couldn’t drive, she couldn’t go near the bunkhouse to tell Rip, telling Lee was testament to telling her father and telling her father was laughable.
Right not it might be the only option.
“Beth. I am not going to do this”
“Then don’t come home”
“Fuck you”
“I mean it Grace. Don’t come home. Don’t darken our doorstep again, cause he wont want you here, none of us will. This is how you stay a member of the family, I had to do it so do you. Time to pay the piper”
There was a pause and then.
“Fuck you Beth. You’re the reason I’m in this mess.”
“What does that mean?”
Unbidden the image of a hand at her throat came to mind. She shuddered it back. Grace had gotten very good at shuddering back images such as these over the years. She had gotten very good at putting one foot in front of the other and trying to be normal. It was the only way she knew how to survive right now. She wasn’t good at this. She was fourteen and she had been raped and now she was pregnant and her sister who had gone and fucked Rip up against a wall while she had been raped was telling her not to come home unless she had an abortion.
For Beth this was a form of tough love. For Grace this was the beginning of the end.
That was the last time anyone saw Grace Dutton, fourteen years old stomach just rounding with her baby, cheeks wet with tears.
It would be four years before John Dutton saw his baby girl again.
And a lot had changed since then.
Everything hurt.
And she was not exaggerating. Everything fucking hurt. Every part of her, and she was exhausted, she was tired and bone achingly exhausted and as she climbed out the car she had to hide how much of an effort that was. She had pride after all, maybe too much of it.
In an ideal world she’d have asked Kayce to pick her up and then bed one with it but then there was her father and he had made it quite clear that he was the one to drive her home. Never again was she getting in a car with Beth.
The little cottage as her father called it was low on the field, it overlooked a nice little field that they had once used for horses, small ponies that had eventually been sold. She took in the little brick house with it’s chimney and porch swing and then the door opened and a human cannonball fell out of the room.
“MOMMA!”
“JESS—”
She would have moved to go and hug him but the second she did pain flared up her side and she whimpered. Her Dad tutted. “And that” he said in a lofty know it all tone that he used in the mornings most of the time, “Is how you rip your stiches”
She staggered and Jesse came to a stop as she bit her teeth down into her lip. Hard.
“Jesse boy” came a voice and she looked up to see Rip there hat on his head. “What did we talk about?”
“Momma’s been hurt so I have to wait until she’s comfortable before I can hug her”
“Damn straight and what else?”
“Jumping ponies is only to be done under supervision by you and not Jimmy and not at night”
“Damn straight” Rip muttered. Jesse rolled his eyes in a move she knew he got from her but he shot her a grin and she winced.
“Let me get inside Jess and then you can hug me”
Her son took off at a run Tate behind him a half second later sending Kayce sideways into the woodwork.
“Fucking hell”
“The kids or me”
“Both” he said kissing the side of her head. “You look like shit, but in a good way”
She opened her mouth to ask how the hell that was supposed to be a good thing but then she was inside the house and her mouth was open for another reason. It wasn’t that everyone was there—even though she didn’t want anyone there if she was being honest—it was that the house had been done up from the inside into a nice little home.
It was perfect.
“Fucking hell”
“Yep”
“How the hell did you—”
“Jesus Beth you want a picture?”
“No I just…how did you…”
“This time, I think I forgot to take the pill”
Beth laughed genuinely amused.
“Of course you did” she said tiredly. “Well…Dad’s gonna be happy.”
“No he won’t”
Beth said nothing and then.
“I am happy for you” she said quietly. “As happy as I can be”
“I don’t know if I am—”
“But you do”
Grace sighed.
“I haven’t taken the test” she said finally. “But I know the signs”
Beth nodded as Carter ambled back into view.
“Well then” she said with a forced smile. “Go and piss on that stick little girl, let’s find out”
Kayce had dragged her back onto her back and she screamed as something slid out of her. As far as labour went considering the state she had been in the last time that was saying something.
He bent down and swore a blue streak. Something or rather someone groaned from the corner.
That being said it could have been her.
“Okay kiddo” he said quietly. “You are going to have to push, the head is already out and one shoulder…why you do this to me Gracie you don’t half pick your moments do you!?”
And muttering under his breath about his sister’s foolishness he bent to catch. There was a terrible slithering noise and then a thin weedy cry but Grace couldn’t hear.
It had not meant to be like this, it had not meant to be like this, it had not meant to be like this…
She had not even realised that she was speaking this out loud.
Kayce looked at her and his mouth was moving but no words were coming out. She didn’t even know if the baby had been born healthy. She didn’t even…did they have a name? She couldn’t remember.
She looked up at the hole in the ceiling where she was pretty sure there had once been a chandelier and she took one deep breath and another as the sirens stopped and…
“WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY CHILDREN?!”
There was a gap in the wall where they could hear him though it didn’t matter. They could always hear him, John Dutton wasn’t John Dutton unless you could hear him constantly.
You never did know she thought as Kayce clutching her baby to his chest screamed at her, if today was the day that your life was going to change.
You never knew at the start of it.
At the end…well…at the end you knew.
Or Grace did.
She knew that at any rate.
And that was the last thought she had before she let her eyes roll back in her head and she fell unconscious as Beth’s office bombed to smithereens and back burned down around them.