The Scottish Thistle and The English Rose by HaylsValo

Chapter 1: Introduction: Welcome To Charming

This is just an introduction to my story, so far set in November of 2003. Chibs is still part of SAMBEL and Opie has just gone to jail. I'll get into the swing of things in the first chapter but I just wanted to lay out the background of my main character to begin with, rather than boring you all with a few chapters going over her past. Chibs will appear in a later chapter.

If you asked Clay Morrow if he had any children, he'd proudly tell you that he had a son. It didn't matter to him that Jackson was a Teller and the biological son of his deceased best friend, all that mattered was that he was married to his mom and that he saw Jax as his son.

What he wouldn't tell you is that he had a daughter, conceived with a sweetbutt in early 1986 while visiting SAMNEW (The charter of the Sons of Anarchy in Newcastle, England) and born in November of that year. He had little contact with her for the first 15 years off her life, just the occasional letter, cards on her birthday and at Christmas (at Gemma's insistence, she wouldn't let him get away with not talking to his daughter, even going as far as having a DNA test done when Clay insisted the 'brat kid' wasn't his) and a call once or twice a year that was usually awkward and short lived. After all, what can a 50 something year old biker say to his estranged teenage daughter?

All that changed however, just days after the girls 15th birthday, when she was thrust into his care after her mother brutally murdered her stepfather.

Hayley Morrow's life was, until the age of 15, uneventful, boring and full of routine. Her mother, upon finding out she was pregnant, had moved south, near London to raise her daughter away from the outlaw bikers of SAMNEW. She got herself an honest job and an honest man and threw herself into a normal family life, wanting her child to have a life different from her own. She didn't want her daughter hanging around bikers and booze, didn't want her goal in life to be an Ol' Lady or worse, a sweetbutt.

And for 15 years it seemed as though she was getting her wish, her daughter was shy and withdrawn, smart and so focussed on her work she finished her GSCE's early and was already doing her A-levels when her life was suddenly and completely uprooted.

Just 2 days after her 15th birthday, Hayley's life was thrown into utter turmoil when her mother killed her stepfather in cold blood, without so much as a warning or a reason. He'd been a good father to Hayley, a good husband to her mother and as far as Hayley was concerned had given her mother no reason to not trust him, to hate him, to kill him.

Whatever the reason for her mother's crime, Hayley never found out. Social services were quick to swoop in and arrange for her to live with her biological father in Charming, California. It didn't matter to them that she'd never meet the man, didn't matter that she didn't want to move to America to live with him. They told her that she had to move there, and so she did.

For the first 6 months in Charming, Hayley spoke to no one but Gemma, or occasionally Clay. After 15 years in an unassuming town in southern England the world of SAMCRO was intimidating and overwhelming to her. When forced to be at the clubhouse, she retreated to a darkened corner of the room with a book, and hid between its page's, jumping out of her skin when anyone dared to talk to her. A combination of that and her pale English skin earned her the nickname 'Boo'. It started with Tig, who had a nasty habit of sneaking up the girl and yelling 'Boo!' as he grabbed her shoulders and it had stuck with her as a nickname even after Gemma eased her out of her shell.

By aged 16 Hayley was a completely different girl to the one that had arrived in Charming a year earlier. Gemma had taught her well and she was now sassy and confident, comfortable around SAMCRO and a firm family member. She'd even started to call Clay 'dad' and was establishing some sort of father/daughter relationship with him. She saw the club as family, its members her brothers and had struck up a strange sort of companionship with the Sergeant at Arms. With her being a similar age to his own estranged daughters, Tig felt his guilt at not having them in his life ease up a little by being there for Clay's only daughter and Hayley found it easier to connect with Tig that her father, and indeed the rest of SAMCRO, when she realised she had the same sort of sick and twisted, dark sense of humour that he had. Unlike the rest of the club, who treated her like a kid, he treated her like an adult and she revelled in that. She was distant from her step-brother Jax, despite the fact that he was quite protective of her. They struggled to bond with Hayley getting used to life in Charming, and Jax more interested in sweetbutts and everything else the club had to offer.

By the time SAMCRO were celebrating Hayley's (by this point, known solely as Boo) first year in Charming, the 16 year old was settled, doing her A –Level's and a GED diploma at home rather than attending the local High School (the local authorities deciding it would be best for her to finish off the education she'd already started rather than uproot her education entirely and stick her in a completely different system, especially since her educational level was ahead of what it should be.) and earning herself some spare cash by learning how to be a mechanic in her free time, shadowing Tig who had offered to be her mentor. Not surprisingly she had a knack for working with Harley's. She had few friends outside the club, but the club offered her such a sense of family she wasn't bothered by that.