Here before au notes
“Once I had a child,he was wilder than moonlight. he could do it all like he’d been here before”
-here before Vashti Bunyan
Tw: implied child abuse
-The here before au is a separate universe in which Jack Wallace stayed in Tulsa for a few months with an abusive foster family when he was around 8/9 years old.
-His stay in Tulsa wasn’t permanent although he returned to it again when he was 13 going on 14 and leaving when he was 16 going on 17.
-In this universe Jack is aware of the fact that he previously lived in Tulsa and is trying to separate himself from the quiet boy he used to be, he’s paranoid of familiar faces recognising him.
-He has a lot of conflicting emotions surrounding his childhood friends because on one hand he doesn’t them to remember who he used to be but on the other hand he’s relieved they remember him and that he actually meant something to someone.
-Little Jack was very different to his current self the two would be almost unrecognisable if it weren’t for their familiar hazel eyes.
-Little Jack was a very quiet and sensitive boy, from a young age he held a high emotional intelligence created through his challenging formative years.
-Little Jack didn’t know how to mask/hide his home life yet so he would have been more open and less secretive over his identity as a foster kid.
-Little Jack had a few childhood friends in Tulsa most notably another boy from a troubled family Toby Fischer, he was quite attached to these people and honestly sort of latched onto them following them around like a lost duckling.
-Jack spent alot of his time outside doing whatever he could to avoid going home.
-adding onto this younger jack was unable to mask his audhd yet and was beginning to face isolation from his peers due to struggling to form connections with them in comparison to older! Jack who’s become good at masking his audhd to conform and try his best to appear normal to others.
-little jack was also a very emotional boy he was an easy crier, had a tendency to lash out and got overwhelmed easily.
-Jack is embarrassed by his younger self for a multitude of reasons but mainly stemming from his openness over being a foster kid and not masking.
-Current Jack is a lot different to his past self although there’s still similarities between them he isn’t entirely unrecognisable from his past.
Jack is more extroverted talkative and popular than he used to be although he still struggles to tell when people are being genuine or not and has trouble controlling his emotions and still gets overwhelmed from things.
-When jack moved back to Tulsa he hoped to start out as a blank state with a reputation as the new kid believing that people wouldn’t be able to recognise him but he finds that hes wrong when he notices people looking at him with a hint of familiarity in their eyes.
-he has hazy memories of Tulsa but he’s able to recognise his old childhood friends, he knows them but is scared to approach them incase they recognise them so at first he keeps his distance but then he gradually becomes more comfortable interacting with them and slowly befriends them again pretending that he isn’t their old friend.
-Jacks charade can only go on for so long before the sense of deja vu starts creeping in again and what will happen when he’s forced to confront the ghost of the boy hey used to be?
