#Erika has LOOTTSS of secrets

[nessie665]

helloo for the fanfic questions id love to hear about #20 for home and #29!!💕💕

20. If you wrote a prequel to [Home], what would it involve?

omg, when I rebloged that post I thought to myself ''I'm gonna keep my answers simple and short, bc that's why people don't talk to me, I never shut up'' but keep it short for that gem of a question? I could NEVER. First of all, thank you so much for your ask <3

My mind immediately went to Christine. Her growth as to become the person she was in the series. That would imply writing about her father's death, her relationship with her foster parents, the loss of them, her working her way up to be able to go to Paris, her discovering her talent, her first relationships with women. All that could be a very meaningful story to tell.

BUT, I'm a messy bitch, so I would instead choose to write about Erika's childhood and teenage years, and her relationship with her family

Erika's relationship with her paternal family was always a big factor in the way I wrote her in that series, and i just never brought it up! I never did, I had all this trauma and lore stuck in my head and I never did anything with it.

In Home's canon, Erika was brought up as Gerald's ''goddaughter'' after her mother's death, but anybody in the Carrière family with 2 brain cells could put 2 plus 2 together and knew she was his daughter. So, even if she couldn't be recognized as such, she was raised as a granddaughter more

Of course, that did stir a lot of controversy. Her grandfather DESPISED her. He hated the image she gave to the family, he was repulsed by Erika's face and just disgusted by her unique behaviors and health problems, not to mention her ethnicity -I have always written Erika as being wasian-. However, he was quite intrigued by Erika's intelligence, so he tolerated her presence as a child. But as she grew older, he would get more and more aggressive with those behaviors.

Those opinions influenced her older aunts and uncles, who then passed that same dislike to their children

Her grandmother (who is actually still alive up to the Home events, remember Gerald was basically a teenage dad, so he is not that old) is a whole liege on her own. A better grandmother than a mother, gives zero fucks and has no chill. She, NEVER stuttered choosing between her granddaughter and her husband, she didn't even think about it

She adored Erika. Not only because of her intelligence, and talent, but of her grace, passion, and creativity; her dark sense of humor and sensitive character, and dotted on her. Fiercely protective of Erika, and presented a blatant favoritism for her, (both bc genuine love and connection, and to compensate for her asshole children) which eventually became a factor in her poor relationship with the rest of the family, and later, to their own.

But moving on, after her grandfather died, the whole family began turning on each other, and Erika was just the easiest to point with a finger. After all, her being a child born out-of-wedlock was a big tension point at the time, and the fact that her very existence seemed to cause countless conflicts in her grandparents' marriage.

Not all of them were bad, but she did eventually cut contact with all of them, by getting out of the county as a teenager, and returning way too scarred to ever initiate contact again. I feel Erika has a very forgiven heart, mostly because of her desire to being loved, so she may forgive them one day.

She still has contact with her grandma, tho sporadically, and she has no idea Erika is in the same country as her, Erika would love to see her again one day. She likes to think her grandmother would love Christine, but knows she would side eye her once she learned she was an actress first.

So yeah, that's my choice, I would do a speed run through 30 something years of Carrière family drama.