A/N: This story is part of my Lucy Thorne world. You can find the timeline of all the stories on my profile page.

The sound of the front door opening came as a surprise to Lucy Rollins. Seth, her husband, had not long left for a rare night out with friends, and her adopted nineteen year old daughter Clementine was out for a meal with her boyfriend. For some reason, one of them had returned much earlier than expected.

Lucy quickly muted the TV show that she had just settled down in front of and called out, "Hello?"

No response came from whoever had entered the house. With her brow furrowed, Lucy got up and walked out of the living room into the hallway. Looking down towards the front door, she saw Clementine taking off her light blue jacket and hanging it up. She was clearly upset, looking like she was on the verge of tears.

"Clem?" Lucy asked with real concern, hurrying towards her. "Clem, are you okay? What's happened?"

Clementine turned to face Lucy, her eyes tinged red as a result of crying. "Mason broke up with me," she said desperately, bursting into tears again as she finished the short sentence.

"Oh, sweet pea," Lucy said with the deepest sympathy, wrapping Clem into a tight embrace. She was shocked by the news herself. Clementine and Mason had been in a relationship for nearly two years, and Lucy had picked up barely an inkling that things were not going well between them. "Why, what happened?" she asked as gently as she could.

"Basically, he said it wasn't working for him anymore," Clem said through her tears. "He said he was getting bored, and felt it was the right thing to do to tell me now that he wants to end it."

"Oh, sweetheart, that's awful," Lucy said, her heart breaking as Clem started sobbing. She knew how happy Clem had been in the relationship. To have been totally blindsided by Mason telling her that he was bored of her, of all things, had to have been devastating to say the least.

For a few moments, Clementine cried into Lucy's shoulder, leaving the older woman floundering for something to say to make things better. "I know it hurts, Clem," she tried. "But you'll be okay, trust me."

"I loved him, mom," Clem wailed. "What am I supposed to do?"

Lucy's mouth had dropped open in shock, and tears began to fill her eyes. Clementine had just addressed her as mom. That had never happened before. Since they had adopted her, Clem had always called them Seth and Lucy. It was perfectly understandable, since she had lived the first ten years of her life with her birth parents before losing her father to a car accident and her mother to a brain tumour in quick succession.

But she had just used the word mom to Lucy, seemingly without thinking about it. Lucy wondered if it had been a mistake, or if Clem really did think of her as her mom now. Just the possibility of the latter being the case seemed too good to be true for Lucy, who most definitely loved Clem as though she was her own daughter.

Getting no response to her question, Clementine pulled back slightly and looked into Lucy's eyes.

"You… You just called me mom," Lucy stammered, feeling warm tears flowing down her cheeks.

There was a moment of silence, Clem looking a little taken aback by what seemed to come to her as something of revelation. She clearly hadn't planned on saying the word, or even realised that she had.

"I get it," Lucy gulped, feeling the need to give her a way out. "You're very upset, it just came out. It's okay, Clem." She was lying through her teeth, but doing a great job of not letting it show. Inside, she longed for Clementine to tell her she had meant what she said more than she had ever wanted anything before in her life.

"No," Clem said slowly, deliberately. "You've been here for me all these years, every time I've needed you. You've always treated me and loved me like your daughter. I love you, mom." The final word had sounded like Clem was trying it out to see how it sounded, but there was no lack of feeling in it.

Lucy was totally overcome with emotion and broke down in tears, sobbing harder than she ever had before. Not even Seth's proposal of marriage was as memorable a moment as that. There was nothing that could compare to a bond between a mother and her daughter, and as far as Lucy was concerned the fact that Clementine wasn't biologically hers made not one iota of a difference. Being referred to as mom mean more to her than she could ever hope to put into words. She was holding her daughter in bear hug that would have had most of WWE's women's roster tapping out.

"You're going to have to let me go at some point, mom," Clem croaked after a couple of minutes; an attempt to lighten the mood. Somehow, she suddenly felt a lot less cut up about her relationship with Mason being ended than she had when she had walked in the house. It now felt like something much more important had happened as a result of it. Her bond with Lucy and Seth was much more significant than a guy who had plainly never really meant it when he said he loved her deciding to walk away.

"Sorry, sweet pea," Lucy said with an emotional laugh. She let Clem go and tried to get herself under control, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of the hoodie she was wearing.

The baseball cap that Clementine almost always wore had been knocked to one side during the hug. As she straightened it up, she said, "I think we could both use a drink."

Being English, Lucy had convinced Seth that, at least in the house, they would allow Clem to drink from the age of eighteen, the legal age in Britain, rather than the twenty one stipulated under US law.

"Good idea. Very good idea," Lucy said, trying to pull herself together as they walked into the kitchen.

A couple of minutes later, they were sitting next to each other on a couch in the living room, each of them with a glass of white wine in hand. Lucy took a substantial hit from her glass.

"Woah," Clem breathed, watching her go at it. "Are you, uh, okay?"

"I just didn't see that coming, Clem. I've thought of myself as a mother to you ever since we adopted you, but for you to actually call me mom is something I wasn't sure would ever happen. It certainly came as a total surprise tonight. I love you so much, sweetheart."

"I love you too, mom," Clem replied a little tentatively, as she took Lucy's hand and squeezed it. Saying the word as a matter of course was going to take some time to get used to. "It does feel kind of strange saying it," she admitted.

"What I don't want to do is make you feel like Seth and I are dishonouring your parents or trying to take away their place in your life," Lucy said delicately. "We've never wanted to do that, Clem. Your mom and dad both loved you with all their hearts, and of course you loved them that much too. No matter what happens, they are always going to be your mom and dad."

Clementine sniffed and closed her eyes for a moment, struggling with the subject of the loss of her birth parents, as ever. "I know they are," she said eventually. "And I never want to forget them or stop loving them. But at the same time, for the past nine years I couldn't have hoped to have been raised any better or to have lived a happier life than I have here with you and Seth. It might seem odd to some people, but I consider you guys to be my parents now, too. I'd like to keep calling you mom, and start calling Seth dad, if that's okay with you guys?"

"Of course it's okay, baby," Lucy said softly, putting her wine glass down on the floor. "Come here," she said, spreading her arms for another hug.

Clem put her own glass on the floor the shifted along the couch to accept the embrace. "Not how I expected this night to end up," she said quietly. "It's weird, but I feel like I almost don't care about Mason right now. This all feels so much more important."

"Right now it does," Lucy said, knowing that even with that being the case, the breakup was going to hurt for some time to come. "Any breakup is hard though, Clem. This is your first big one, so you're going to have to trust me when I say that it'll take some time to stop missing Mason, to stop running over in your head what you or he might have done so that things could have worked out differently. But, and this is the important part, you will get over it, and you will find the right guy out there for you. You're such a sweet, kind, loving person, there's no way someone isn't going to fall for you and treat you the way you deserve to be treated."

Clem shifted so that she could look Lucy in the eye. "You really think so?"

"I know so. Trust your mom," Lucy said with a nervous smile, referring to herself in that way for the first time.

"I guess I need to have a talk with Seth, or should I say dad, when he gets home," Clem said thoughtfully.

"Maybe sometime tomorrow, sweet pea," Lucy suggested. "He'll likely be steaming drunk by the time he rolls in tonight."

Nodding slowly, Clem considered how best to approach the subject with Seth the next day. "I think I might ask him if he wants to go for a walk somewhere, like, out in the countryside. I love it when we do that, and I know he does too. It's our thing to do when we spend time with each other, you know?"

"He'd love that," Lucy said with an emotional smile.

Clem nodded. "And when we get somewhere nice and private, I'll tell him there's something I need to talk to him about."

Lucy tried to picture the look that would be on her husband's face the first time Clementine called him dad. She knew all too well that it would mean as much to him as being called mom had to her. She would have loved to be there to see it, but she understood and respected Clem's wish to have some privacy for the conversation.

"That'll be perfect, Clem. That'll be absolutely perfect. Seth will be the happiest dad in the world, just like I'm the happiest mom in the world."

Clementine squeezed Lucy's hand again. "And I'm the happiest daughter in the world."

A/N: There you go, guys. The story of how Clementine came to call Lucy and Seth mom and dad. I hope you enjoyed it.