~NOTE: THIS FIC HEAVY FOCUSES ON THE DEATH OF A RECURRING CHARACTER ~

I have several other fics I need to worry about for other fandoms and I'm nursing a hell of a migraine, but this plot bunny just wouldn't go away.

Shoutout to scorpion-nerdherd and honey41283 on Tumblr for helping me remember details of 3.08 that will help me write parts of this fic. For real. They the real MVPs.

It was a very rare day when Paige had the garage to herself.

Without any distractions, she finished her most pressing paperwork earlier than usual and wandered into the kitchen for an apple. The fruit basket was getting severely depleted, which pleased her. Back when she'd insisted on it's existence, she was practically force feeding the geniuses whenever they got too involved in their work to remember to take care of themselves. Walter was the only one that seemed to realize how important eating was during those periods, and even then, he always forgot that that applied to himself. After passing an orange or banana over to Sylvester, he'd bend back over his work, leaving it up to Paige to make sure he ate too.

They'd gotten so much better at replenishing for themselves.

She dropped the core into the trash and headed upstairs to the loft. She'd been up until all hours the previous night, going over and over Walter's planned presentation for Ralph's computer class. Most of the kids in the class – all but Ralph, actually – were not geniuses, and Walter was terrified that he wouldn't be able to make the lecture interesting for them. And, he'd confessed, he was worried about his matter – of – fact personality coming off as condescending. It often did, after all.

So, after at least a dozen run throughs, the two of them agreed that he was ready. By then, it was practically time for Paige to run home and get Ralph up for school. She had gotten two hours of sleep as a gracious estimate and thinking back it was a bit surprising to her how productive she'd been all through the morning. It was definitely catching up to her now.

Easing back the covers on Walter's bed, she made a hmmm noise in the back of her throat at how nice the cool sheets felt. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and typed out a quick text to Walter. Call me when you leave the school, please. This way she could maximize her sleep, rather than potentially setting an alarm for before she had to get up. It was efficient. Walter and Ralph would approve.

She jumped as a vibrating sound came from the desk halfway across the room. Sitting up, Paige craned her neck to see.

Well, shit. Paige opened the alarm app on her phone, double checking the current time and predicting that she'd have about an hour to nap. She lay back down, closing her eyes and sliding one of her arms under the pillow.

What woke her wasn't her alarm, and it certainly wasn't a full hour later. Paige groaned as she pushed up on her arms, glaring over at the desk even though it wasn't the phone's fault that it was ringing. She debated letting it go to voicemail – but it could be Toby, or Happy, or Sly or Cabe, or something work related. She begrudgingly crawled out of the bed and crossed the room.

The ringing stopped by the time she reached it, and a notification had popped up. 'Missed Call from Mother'. "That's very, very weird," Paige said aloud. "She never calls him."

The phone began to ring again. Incoming call from Mother. Paige hesitated, then figured it must be important. She pressed answer and held the phone to her ear. "Walter's phone." Walter's phone? She rolled her eyes at her formality.

"Paige, darling? Is that you?"

"Hi Louise," she said. "Yeah, it's me. What's goin' on?"

"Is Walter around, hon?"

"No, he's at Ralph's school giving a presentation and left his phone here...is everything okay?" Paige hadn't spoken to Louise but a handful of times, and it'd been a long time since she'd seen her, but she sounded...different. Weak.

"Well, no darling," Louise said quietly. "Things aren't so fine here." There was a long silence, and Paige pulled the phone from her ear and looked down to make sure the call hadn't dropped. She returned it to her ear just in time to hear Louise continue. "Walter's father has passed away."

"Oh my God!" Paige sat on the edge of the desk. "Louise, I'm so sorry, I...when did this happen?"

"Just a few hours ago. He had a heart attack in town. They took him to the hospital but...but there was nothing they could do."

Paige put a hand up into her hair, trying to calculate in her head. Ireland was eight hours ahead, which made it after ten o'clock at night there. "Do you want to call him tomorrow, or would you rather I tell him?"

"I feel like I should be the one to tell him, but I don't want to burden you with keeping it a secret, dear. We are still working on finalizing funeral arrangements but we do know it will be on Friday." She grew quiet. "It'd mean a lot to me if he could be there. You too. I know Sean would want that. If you can."

"Of course," Paige said quickly, before realizing that she honestly had no idea if Walter would want to go. He wasn't close to either of them, and the last time they'd gone to Ireland he'd barely skirted disaster. He and his father had seemed to come to an understanding of sorts before they'd embarked back to the United States, but Paige had thought that they'd had a similar understanding when Megan had passed away, and then the following year had brought back all the same old tensions. "I...I'll tell Walter all about the arrangements. Is there anything I can do for you right now?"

"No, honey. The neighbor is helping me make phone calls to friends and more distant relatives. I do appreciate it, though." She was quiet for a moment. "I do hope that you two can make it."

Paige hesitated. If Walter was going to get too stressed out about being back in his childhood town, she didn't want to pressure him into going. But she could hear in Louise's voice how badly the older woman wanted to see her son. Paige didn't blame her. Louise was only in her late fifties, and she'd already lost a husband and a daughter. Realizing how dry her lips had become, Paige wet them with her tongue and sucked in a breath. "I hope we can too. I'll keep you posted, okay?"

"Thank you. I...I should..."

"Get to bed," Paige said. "It's late there."

"I don't think I'll sleep tonight," she said. "But I'll have to try, I suppose."

"I'm so very sorry."

"Thank you." Walter's mother sighed. "I will speak with you soon."

"Okay."

Paige hung up the phone and held it in her lap, her right leg moving rapidly up and down as her heel tapped against the floor. She hadn't liked Sean much – she couldn't, not when he treated his son with such condescension, judgement, and outright disdain – but he was Walter's father. That didn't necessarily mean anything – Drew was Ralph's father, but Walter did far more to fulfill that role - but it was hard to shake the weight that people tended to place on biology. Cabe did more for Walter on any given day than Sean ever had, but that didn't change the fact that Walter hadn't had the kind of bond that society expected fathers and sons to have. And that didn't change the fact that she knew – she knew – that that hurt him.

She thought about potentially telling him that going to their father's funeral was something that Megan would do – and something that Megan would want him to do. It would probably be a convincing argument, but it felt...wrong. It felt too much like manipulation.

She supposed she could cross that bridge when she came to it – Paige smiled in spite of herself when she remembered the time Happy had misremembered the idiom and had told someone you can always burn that bridge when you get to it – but this wasn't a mere hypothetical that may or may not come to fruition. This was a real conversation she had to have with Walter as soon as he got home.

She remembered having to make the calls herself, at just seventeen years old, when her own father had died. But this was different. She'd been close to her dad, the man who had sacrificed so much for her, to protect her from the pain her mother caused and to do enough parenting for both him and Veronica. He had been a comforting constant in her life that she suddenly had to be without. He was a presence whose absence left a sizeable gap in her heart, and in her routine. Sean's absence – both literal and figurative, had affected Walter greatly, and still did, but he wasn't a person who crossed the genius' mind daily, or even weekly. Life here in L.A. would be no different with Sean O'Brien gone.

Paige's phone buzzed, and she fished it back out of her pocket. It was Sylvester. Did Walter's mom call him? Paige nodded, then realized that that response didn't make sense. She texted back that's she had, but he left his phone here. If you happen to see him before I do please don't say anything.

Do you think he's going to the funeral?

I'm not sure.

She stood up, glancing back at the bed. She wasn't going to get back to sleep. The twenty five minute nap was going to have to be good enough.

Note: there may be one chapter rated M in this fic, but as the overwhelming majority of the word count is going to be T rated, I will probably keep the rating as T as people who go to the M rated stories are generally looking for stories that heavily feature smut and this fic will not. I will include at the top of the chapter that is M rated a note of that for anyone who doesn't want to read it, so if you're looking to avoid any smut, pay attention to my A/Ns.

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