Fic: Gossamer (13/18)
Mar. 14th, 2012 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sara_wolfTitle: Gossamer
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: "Paige, you're pregnant." Three weeks after her parents' death, Paige receives some surprising news. What she decides next will change the course of history, not only her own, but that of the family she doesn't even know exists...
*****
"Mama? Mama? Mama?"
Paige cracked an eye open to see Pax standing beside her bed, leaning so close that for a second, all Paige could see were bright green eyes.
"Hi, baby," she said, sleepily. Pax laughed, scrambling onto the bed beside Paige and throwing herself across Paige's chest.
"Hungry!" Pax declared.
"Oh, yeah?" Paige replied. "Well, let's go get some breakfast, shall we?"
"Yay!" Pax cheered, and before Paige could stop her, she jumped off the bed. She hit the ground, but bounced up before Paige could ask if she was hurt and ran wildly for the door.
Paige chuckled as she got out of bed, getting dressed in the clothes she'd been wearing the night before and following her daughter out of the room. She went downstairs to the kitchen, to find Henry's foster mother, Sharon, busy with a hot stove. It looked like she was making pancakes.
Paige liked Sharon, and her husband Jim. They'd been Henry's foster parents for a couple of years when he was thirteen, and they'd been one of the few good families he'd been placed with. Henry had told her once that he'd fought leaving Sharon and Jim, that losing them had been the reason he'd started acting out and fighting.
He'd lost contact with Sharon and Jim for a few years, but a few months ago he'd turned eighteen and had been officially aged out of the system. He'd been sleeping on the couch in Paige and Nick's tiny apartment, facing the equally-distressing thoughts of going into one of the transitional homes, or trying to make it on his own, when Sharon had tracked him down and told him in no uncertain terms that she wanted her son to come home. For that alone, Paige loved the older woman like family. And it didn't hurt that they regarded her and Pax as the same.
"Hey, sweetie," Sharon said, without turning around. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yeah," Paige replied, as she scooped Pax up and deposited her in the high chair Sharon had dug out of the garage. "Thanks for letting me stay over."
"Honey, you wouldn't believe the number of fights that Jim and I had where one of us walked out of the house," Sharon told her.
"Any so bad that you didn't want to go home, again?" Paige asked, quietly.
"A couple," Sharon replied. "Want to talk about it?"
Paige sighed, joining Sharon at the counter and idly stirring the bowl full of batter that the other woman pressed into her hands.
"He came home drunk last night," Paige confided in her. "He said that he had to work, missed Pax's birthday because of it, and then he came home reeking of alcohol."
"I've made Jim sleep on the couch for far less," Sharon mused. "But, I get the feeling that there's more to it than that."
"Nick and I have been fighting," Paige told her, after a long moment. "I think he works too much, doesn't spend enough time with Pax. He thinks I'm wasting my time with school, and he doesn't like Henry or Prue. Says they're a bad influence."
"You fight a lot?" Sharon asked, and Paige shrugged.
"I guess," she said. "I mean, I knew married life wasn't going to be all sunshine and roses, but I didn't expect this."
"Is this the first time Nick has come home drunk?" Sharon probed, and Paige sighed.
"No," she admitted, softly. "He's never been this bad, before, and it's always after he spends time with his family. I tried to get him to just stop seeing them, if this is what it does to him, but he just told me to mind my own business, that I didn't understand what I was talking about, since my family was dead." She winced with remembered pain over that particular fight. "He made himself sleep on the couch after that one."
"Paige," Sharon prompted, after a moment, and she looked up to see the older woman watching her with a concerned expression on her face. "When Nick gets drunk, does he ever get violent?"
"Does he hit me, you mean?" Paige asked, shrewdly. "I'm not stupid, Sharon. The first time he hits me, it's over. And I'll kill him if he ever touches Pax."
"You know you're always welcome here, right?" Sharon asked, bumping Paige with her shoulder. "Henry certainly wouldn't protest getting to see more of you." She smirked knowingly at Paige, but before Paige could reply, Sharon leaned back and peered through the doorway into the living room. "Where is that boy, anyway?"
"Henry's still sleeping," came the sing-song answer, and Jenna, Sharon and Jim's fifteen-year-old daughter came into the kitchen. "Hey, pancakes!"
"Pancakes!" Pax echoed, happily, and then she burst into wild giggles as Jenna descended on her, tickling the baby until she was breathless with laughter.
"Henry!" Sharon bellowed, the sheer volume making Paige jump. "Get your lazy butt out of bed!"
A couple minutes later, Henry came stumbling into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He was clearly still half-asleep as he moved across the kitchen, hugging Paige briefly from behind before he dropped into one of the chairs around the table.
The kitchen fell into a companionable silence, Paige and Sharon still working on breakfast. Sharon had just poured a big bag of chocolate chips into the pancake batter, winking conspiratorially at Paige, when the phone rang, and she snatched it up without missing a beat.
"Hello? Oh, really?" Paige cocked a curious eyebrow at the older woman; she had an idea of who might have gotten that reaction. And her suspicions were confirmed when Sharon continued, "And why, exactly, should I let you talk to her?"
Wordlessly, Paige held her hand out for the phone, nodding in reply to the question in Sharon's eyes.
"It's okay," she said, softly. "I'll talk to him."
She took the cordless phone out into the living room, dropping onto the couch in front of the big bay window.
"Nick," she said, quietly, and she heard a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.
"Nothing I say or do will make up for what I did last night," Nick said, without preamble. "All I can do is apologize for my actions."
"It's a start," Paige agreed. "I don't think you should just be apologizing to me, though. Don't you agree?"
"Is Pax angry at me?" Nick asked, and Paige had to give him points for asking first about their daughter.
"Pax is one year old," Paige reminded him. "Luckily for you, she's too young to understand just what a colossal idiot her father was, last night."
"Are you mad at me?" was Nick's next question, and Paige sighed, rubbing at her temples where she could feel a headache forming.
"I'm disappointed," she replied, and in the back of her mind, she heard an echo of the old arguments she used to have with her parents. "Nick, why would you even go out with your brothers? You told me that you hate the person you are after you see them."
"They're my family, Paige," Nick protested. "I can't just ignore them, or cut them out of my life." He sighed, adding, "You wouldn't-"
"Don't you dare say that I wouldn't understand," Paige gritted out.
"My family is really intense," Nick argued, but Paige shook her head in exasperation.
"You were the one who wanted them out of our lives in the first place," she snapped. "You insisted that Cheryl would take over our lives, remember?"
Nick sighed, and then he was silent for several long seconds. Paige would have thought that he'd hung up, except that she could still hear him breathing.
"Are you coming home?" he finally asked, and Paige shrugged, even though she knew that Nick couldn't see her.
"I don't know," she echoed her answer from last night. "I need some time to think."
"Will you call me, tonight?" Nick asked, a plaintive tone in his voice.
"Yeah," Paige replied, softly. "Yeah, I'll call you later tonight."
"I love you," Nick said, and Paige closed her eyes.
"I know," she said, and then the phone went dead in her ear.
Paige went back into the kitchen, replacing the phone in the cradle, and then she looked up to see three pairs of curious eyes watching her. She gave them a weak smile.
"Can you watch Pax for a couple of minutes?" she asked Sharon. "I need to get some fresh air."
After Sharon nodded, Paige headed for the door that led out to the back porch. She settled herself on the porch swing, giving the swing a gentle push to start it moving, and leaned back with her eyes closed. When the swing shifted a few seconds later, she reached out and squeezed Henry's hand without opening her eyes.
"Maybe I'm being too hard on Nick," she said, quietly, and Henry snorted in disbelief.
"After what he did-" Henry started, but Paige sighed.
"That used to be me," she said, bluntly. "I was angry, and I was stupid, and I made my parents' lives miserable. The day they died, they'd caught me sneaking home, hung over, from some stupid party. The same party where Nick and I-" She trailed off, shaking her head. "I hardly have the moral high ground to be lecturing anyone on drinking."
"You're not that person, anymore," Henry said, gently, as he pulled her to him in a hug. "And Nick's behavior doesn't just affect you, it affects Pax, too."
"I know," Paige replied. "And I will do anything to protect her."
"Don't make any rash decisions," Henry told her. "Don't do anything while you're still angry."
"Where have I heard that sage advice before?" Paige asked, teasingly, and Henry grinned at her.
"Hey, it's still good advice," he protested. "And, my feelings about Nick, aside, I think you should take some time to figure out what you're going to do."
"I will," Paige agreed.
They sat out on the porch swing for a couple more minutes, side by side in silence. When they went back inside, they found that Jim had come back from the station, and was sitting at the table digging happily into a big stack of pancakes. Pax was sitting on his lap, chocolate smeared all over her face, and Paige burst out laughing when she saw her daughter.
"You," she declared, as she swooped down on her baby girl and swept her up into her arms, "are a complete mess. What am I going to do with you?"
"More pancakes!" Pax cheered, and Paige grinned.
"I don't really think that you need any more chocolate," she said, shaking her head. "What you do need is a bath."
"No bath."
"Yes, bath," Paige laughed. Turning around, she added, "Sharon, do you mind if I-"
"Go right ahead," the older woman told her.
Paige nodded in thanks, taking Pax down the hall toward the guest bathroom. She filled the tub with warm water, testing the temperature against her wrist, and then she stripped Pax out of her dirty clothes and put her in the water to let her splash around.
She'd been in there for about ten minutes when there was a hesitant knock on the door, and then Henry poked his head into the bathroom. Paige smiled at him, and he came in and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. There was a plain white envelope in his hands.
"What's that?" Paige asked, nodding curiously at the envelope.
"Mail that Jenna forgot to give me, yesterday," Henry told her. "It's – um – it's from the police academy."
"Have you opened it?" Paige asked, and Henry shook his head, wordlessly. "Well, go on, then."
"What if it says no?" Henry ventured, and Paige huffed in exasperation.
"It's not going to say no," she told him. "The San Francisco Police Department would be lucky to have you."
"Jim was telling us about this case he caught late last night," Henry blurted out, and Paige raised an eyebrow at the non sequitur. "These joggers found a body in Golden Gate Park. The poor girl's throat had been slashed."
"That's horrible," Paige gasped.
"She was like us," Henry went on, gesturing aimlessly between the two of them. "She was a foster kid. No one even knew she was missing until Jim went knocking on her foster mom's door. She died in the middle of the night, alone and scared, and no one knew until it was too late. No one cared."
"Jim cares," Paige pointed out. "That's why he took the case. You care, or you wouldn't be so upset."
"I want to make a difference, you know?" Henry asked, his head hanging and his hands dangling between his knees. The letter had dropped unnoticed to the floor between his feet. "I want to be able to help kids like that girl. Keep something like this from happening, again."
"And you'll be great at it," Paige reassured him, gently. "Henry, come on. Open the letter."
Bending at the waist, she scooped the letter off the bathmat, holding it out to Henry. He took it like she was offering him a live bomb, and then he just stared at it, blankly.
"I can't open it," he finally told her. "What if it's a no?"
Paige sighed, snatching the letter from between his nerveless fingers. She slid her finger under the flap and peeled it open, pulling out the first sheet of paper in the envelope. Scanning the letter, she smiled at the end of the first paragraph.
"Dear Mr. Mitchell," she read out loud, "we are pleased to inform you-"
"What?" Henry interrupted her, incredulously, looking as though he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Paige handed him the letter to read for himself, smiling reassuringly at him. Henry didn't look down at the letter, still staring straight at her, and Paige took pity on him.
"You're in," she told him. "You're going to be a cop."
Continued here
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: "Paige, you're pregnant." Three weeks after her parents' death, Paige receives some surprising news. What she decides next will change the course of history, not only her own, but that of the family she doesn't even know exists...
*****
"Mama? Mama? Mama?"
Paige cracked an eye open to see Pax standing beside her bed, leaning so close that for a second, all Paige could see were bright green eyes.
"Hi, baby," she said, sleepily. Pax laughed, scrambling onto the bed beside Paige and throwing herself across Paige's chest.
"Hungry!" Pax declared.
"Oh, yeah?" Paige replied. "Well, let's go get some breakfast, shall we?"
"Yay!" Pax cheered, and before Paige could stop her, she jumped off the bed. She hit the ground, but bounced up before Paige could ask if she was hurt and ran wildly for the door.
Paige chuckled as she got out of bed, getting dressed in the clothes she'd been wearing the night before and following her daughter out of the room. She went downstairs to the kitchen, to find Henry's foster mother, Sharon, busy with a hot stove. It looked like she was making pancakes.
Paige liked Sharon, and her husband Jim. They'd been Henry's foster parents for a couple of years when he was thirteen, and they'd been one of the few good families he'd been placed with. Henry had told her once that he'd fought leaving Sharon and Jim, that losing them had been the reason he'd started acting out and fighting.
He'd lost contact with Sharon and Jim for a few years, but a few months ago he'd turned eighteen and had been officially aged out of the system. He'd been sleeping on the couch in Paige and Nick's tiny apartment, facing the equally-distressing thoughts of going into one of the transitional homes, or trying to make it on his own, when Sharon had tracked him down and told him in no uncertain terms that she wanted her son to come home. For that alone, Paige loved the older woman like family. And it didn't hurt that they regarded her and Pax as the same.
"Hey, sweetie," Sharon said, without turning around. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yeah," Paige replied, as she scooped Pax up and deposited her in the high chair Sharon had dug out of the garage. "Thanks for letting me stay over."
"Honey, you wouldn't believe the number of fights that Jim and I had where one of us walked out of the house," Sharon told her.
"Any so bad that you didn't want to go home, again?" Paige asked, quietly.
"A couple," Sharon replied. "Want to talk about it?"
Paige sighed, joining Sharon at the counter and idly stirring the bowl full of batter that the other woman pressed into her hands.
"He came home drunk last night," Paige confided in her. "He said that he had to work, missed Pax's birthday because of it, and then he came home reeking of alcohol."
"I've made Jim sleep on the couch for far less," Sharon mused. "But, I get the feeling that there's more to it than that."
"Nick and I have been fighting," Paige told her, after a long moment. "I think he works too much, doesn't spend enough time with Pax. He thinks I'm wasting my time with school, and he doesn't like Henry or Prue. Says they're a bad influence."
"You fight a lot?" Sharon asked, and Paige shrugged.
"I guess," she said. "I mean, I knew married life wasn't going to be all sunshine and roses, but I didn't expect this."
"Is this the first time Nick has come home drunk?" Sharon probed, and Paige sighed.
"No," she admitted, softly. "He's never been this bad, before, and it's always after he spends time with his family. I tried to get him to just stop seeing them, if this is what it does to him, but he just told me to mind my own business, that I didn't understand what I was talking about, since my family was dead." She winced with remembered pain over that particular fight. "He made himself sleep on the couch after that one."
"Paige," Sharon prompted, after a moment, and she looked up to see the older woman watching her with a concerned expression on her face. "When Nick gets drunk, does he ever get violent?"
"Does he hit me, you mean?" Paige asked, shrewdly. "I'm not stupid, Sharon. The first time he hits me, it's over. And I'll kill him if he ever touches Pax."
"You know you're always welcome here, right?" Sharon asked, bumping Paige with her shoulder. "Henry certainly wouldn't protest getting to see more of you." She smirked knowingly at Paige, but before Paige could reply, Sharon leaned back and peered through the doorway into the living room. "Where is that boy, anyway?"
"Henry's still sleeping," came the sing-song answer, and Jenna, Sharon and Jim's fifteen-year-old daughter came into the kitchen. "Hey, pancakes!"
"Pancakes!" Pax echoed, happily, and then she burst into wild giggles as Jenna descended on her, tickling the baby until she was breathless with laughter.
"Henry!" Sharon bellowed, the sheer volume making Paige jump. "Get your lazy butt out of bed!"
A couple minutes later, Henry came stumbling into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He was clearly still half-asleep as he moved across the kitchen, hugging Paige briefly from behind before he dropped into one of the chairs around the table.
The kitchen fell into a companionable silence, Paige and Sharon still working on breakfast. Sharon had just poured a big bag of chocolate chips into the pancake batter, winking conspiratorially at Paige, when the phone rang, and she snatched it up without missing a beat.
"Hello? Oh, really?" Paige cocked a curious eyebrow at the older woman; she had an idea of who might have gotten that reaction. And her suspicions were confirmed when Sharon continued, "And why, exactly, should I let you talk to her?"
Wordlessly, Paige held her hand out for the phone, nodding in reply to the question in Sharon's eyes.
"It's okay," she said, softly. "I'll talk to him."
She took the cordless phone out into the living room, dropping onto the couch in front of the big bay window.
"Nick," she said, quietly, and she heard a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.
"Nothing I say or do will make up for what I did last night," Nick said, without preamble. "All I can do is apologize for my actions."
"It's a start," Paige agreed. "I don't think you should just be apologizing to me, though. Don't you agree?"
"Is Pax angry at me?" Nick asked, and Paige had to give him points for asking first about their daughter.
"Pax is one year old," Paige reminded him. "Luckily for you, she's too young to understand just what a colossal idiot her father was, last night."
"Are you mad at me?" was Nick's next question, and Paige sighed, rubbing at her temples where she could feel a headache forming.
"I'm disappointed," she replied, and in the back of her mind, she heard an echo of the old arguments she used to have with her parents. "Nick, why would you even go out with your brothers? You told me that you hate the person you are after you see them."
"They're my family, Paige," Nick protested. "I can't just ignore them, or cut them out of my life." He sighed, adding, "You wouldn't-"
"Don't you dare say that I wouldn't understand," Paige gritted out.
"My family is really intense," Nick argued, but Paige shook her head in exasperation.
"You were the one who wanted them out of our lives in the first place," she snapped. "You insisted that Cheryl would take over our lives, remember?"
Nick sighed, and then he was silent for several long seconds. Paige would have thought that he'd hung up, except that she could still hear him breathing.
"Are you coming home?" he finally asked, and Paige shrugged, even though she knew that Nick couldn't see her.
"I don't know," she echoed her answer from last night. "I need some time to think."
"Will you call me, tonight?" Nick asked, a plaintive tone in his voice.
"Yeah," Paige replied, softly. "Yeah, I'll call you later tonight."
"I love you," Nick said, and Paige closed her eyes.
"I know," she said, and then the phone went dead in her ear.
Paige went back into the kitchen, replacing the phone in the cradle, and then she looked up to see three pairs of curious eyes watching her. She gave them a weak smile.
"Can you watch Pax for a couple of minutes?" she asked Sharon. "I need to get some fresh air."
After Sharon nodded, Paige headed for the door that led out to the back porch. She settled herself on the porch swing, giving the swing a gentle push to start it moving, and leaned back with her eyes closed. When the swing shifted a few seconds later, she reached out and squeezed Henry's hand without opening her eyes.
"Maybe I'm being too hard on Nick," she said, quietly, and Henry snorted in disbelief.
"After what he did-" Henry started, but Paige sighed.
"That used to be me," she said, bluntly. "I was angry, and I was stupid, and I made my parents' lives miserable. The day they died, they'd caught me sneaking home, hung over, from some stupid party. The same party where Nick and I-" She trailed off, shaking her head. "I hardly have the moral high ground to be lecturing anyone on drinking."
"You're not that person, anymore," Henry said, gently, as he pulled her to him in a hug. "And Nick's behavior doesn't just affect you, it affects Pax, too."
"I know," Paige replied. "And I will do anything to protect her."
"Don't make any rash decisions," Henry told her. "Don't do anything while you're still angry."
"Where have I heard that sage advice before?" Paige asked, teasingly, and Henry grinned at her.
"Hey, it's still good advice," he protested. "And, my feelings about Nick, aside, I think you should take some time to figure out what you're going to do."
"I will," Paige agreed.
They sat out on the porch swing for a couple more minutes, side by side in silence. When they went back inside, they found that Jim had come back from the station, and was sitting at the table digging happily into a big stack of pancakes. Pax was sitting on his lap, chocolate smeared all over her face, and Paige burst out laughing when she saw her daughter.
"You," she declared, as she swooped down on her baby girl and swept her up into her arms, "are a complete mess. What am I going to do with you?"
"More pancakes!" Pax cheered, and Paige grinned.
"I don't really think that you need any more chocolate," she said, shaking her head. "What you do need is a bath."
"No bath."
"Yes, bath," Paige laughed. Turning around, she added, "Sharon, do you mind if I-"
"Go right ahead," the older woman told her.
Paige nodded in thanks, taking Pax down the hall toward the guest bathroom. She filled the tub with warm water, testing the temperature against her wrist, and then she stripped Pax out of her dirty clothes and put her in the water to let her splash around.
She'd been in there for about ten minutes when there was a hesitant knock on the door, and then Henry poked his head into the bathroom. Paige smiled at him, and he came in and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. There was a plain white envelope in his hands.
"What's that?" Paige asked, nodding curiously at the envelope.
"Mail that Jenna forgot to give me, yesterday," Henry told her. "It's – um – it's from the police academy."
"Have you opened it?" Paige asked, and Henry shook his head, wordlessly. "Well, go on, then."
"What if it says no?" Henry ventured, and Paige huffed in exasperation.
"It's not going to say no," she told him. "The San Francisco Police Department would be lucky to have you."
"Jim was telling us about this case he caught late last night," Henry blurted out, and Paige raised an eyebrow at the non sequitur. "These joggers found a body in Golden Gate Park. The poor girl's throat had been slashed."
"That's horrible," Paige gasped.
"She was like us," Henry went on, gesturing aimlessly between the two of them. "She was a foster kid. No one even knew she was missing until Jim went knocking on her foster mom's door. She died in the middle of the night, alone and scared, and no one knew until it was too late. No one cared."
"Jim cares," Paige pointed out. "That's why he took the case. You care, or you wouldn't be so upset."
"I want to make a difference, you know?" Henry asked, his head hanging and his hands dangling between his knees. The letter had dropped unnoticed to the floor between his feet. "I want to be able to help kids like that girl. Keep something like this from happening, again."
"And you'll be great at it," Paige reassured him, gently. "Henry, come on. Open the letter."
Bending at the waist, she scooped the letter off the bathmat, holding it out to Henry. He took it like she was offering him a live bomb, and then he just stared at it, blankly.
"I can't open it," he finally told her. "What if it's a no?"
Paige sighed, snatching the letter from between his nerveless fingers. She slid her finger under the flap and peeled it open, pulling out the first sheet of paper in the envelope. Scanning the letter, she smiled at the end of the first paragraph.
"Dear Mr. Mitchell," she read out loud, "we are pleased to inform you-"
"What?" Henry interrupted her, incredulously, looking as though he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Paige handed him the letter to read for himself, smiling reassuringly at him. Henry didn't look down at the letter, still staring straight at her, and Paige took pity on him.
"You're in," she told him. "You're going to be a cop."
Continued here
