CHAPTER 9

Family

(Scorpion's Garage)

"And that was the last time I ever asked my dad to help me with my hair." Paige finished her story.

"That's terrible!" Quinn laughed at the image she'd painted of a teenage Paige with her hair burnt and tangled hours before a school dance.

"So what about you? Where are you from?" Paige relaxed back against the couch.

"Alabama originally but I've lived all over the place." Quinn looked down at his hands. "Not as exciting as it sounds though."

"Mom was a bit of a drifter too." Paige didn't know why she'd said it. There was no reason to drag her mother into things.

"Yah she was." Quinn frowned.

"What?" Paige turned to look at Quinn more closely. "Did you know my mother?"

"Well, no, I… uhm…" Quinn couldn't believe what he'd done.

"That's it!" Toby crowed.

"What's it?" Paige stood up and moved away from Quinn.

"You two are related, aren't you?" Toby looked back and forth between them.

Paige looked confused but Quinn's face clearly said that the jig was up.

Eliot had heard things going off the rails and had already started moving before Toby had made his guess about Quinn and Paige. He stepped in front of Quinn facing Toby. "This isn't any of your business. You need to back off." The Eliot who laughed and was relaxed over breakfast was gone and had been replaced by someone who hit other people for a living, and enjoyed it.

Parker dropped from the I-beams and landed lightly next to Eliot. "Eliot is right. This isn't anyone's business." Her glare wasn't as intimidating as Eliot's but the look on her face said that a smart person wouldn't cross her either.

Hardison had slid back in his rolly-chair to see what was happening in case they needed to make a quick exit.

Paige had seen Quinn's face before his friends stepped in to shield him and she knew that as impossible as it seemed Toby was right. She stepped to the side where she could see Quinn. "Toby's right, isn't he?"

Quinn stood and his face was blank when he looked at her. "Yes."

"Who? How are we related?"

"I'm your brother."

Page put a hand over her mouth. "I just need a minute." She walked slowly to the stairs and went up to the loft.

Quinn didn't run but he didn't move slowly as he walked out the front door.

~~o0o~~

Quinn walked down the block until he saw an alley that had several dumpsters lined up along one side. About halfway down the alley he turned to the closest dumpster and hit it several times as hard as he could. One fist after the other until he felt like he could breathe again. Until the pain from his split knuckles finally registered.

"All I wanted was a couple more hours." He muttered and sucked at one knuckle. "Things were fine." He remembered Paige's face as she laughed and told him stories. "Damn, damn!" He punched the dumpster again. He really wanted to punch Toby. He wanted to blame it all on Toby, but he knew it was really his own fault.

~~o0o~~

"Was this some way of getting even for Parker telling everyone about your baby?" Eliot growled the words at Toby. "She didn't know that none of you knew."

"No, I… It was just…" Toby stammered.

"Doc, I think you and Happy should take a walk." Cabe put a hand on Toby's shoulder and directed him away.

"I'm sorry about that." Cabe offered but Eliot was still glaring at Toby's back. "I know it doesn't change a thing, but I'm sure he wasn't doing it to be malicious it was just a puzzle that he solved and the thrill of figuring it out overrode his good sense."

Parker patted Eliot's arm. "Go talk to Quinn."

Eliot stared at Parker for a minute, and everyone could see something pass between them before Eliot nodded and turned to follow Quinn.

~~o0o~~

Walter waited a moment before he followed Paige. This was one of those times he wished that relationships had a user's manual or could be handled analytically.

"Paige? Is there anything I should do?" Walter sat on the bed next to her and hesitated for a second before he patted her back. "Do you want to cry or, or express your emotions?"

Paige couldn't help a small laugh at Walter's attempt at comforting her. She turned and rested her head on his shoulder. "I want to cry, and I want to yell and mostly I just want to shake my mother until her head rattles."

"You know statistically it is more likely that Quinn would be your father's son."

"No. This is Veronica Barnett Dineen all the way." Paige realized she truly was angry and that felt better than the feeling of having been punched somewhere vulnerable which was as close as she could describe the feeling that had flashed through her when Quinn said he was her brother.

~~o0o~~

Eliot followed Quinn's scent to the mouth of the alley, where he found Quinn pacing.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Eliot wanted to help he just didn't know what he could do.

"No." Quinn kicked at a piece of rubbish. "I don't think there's a damn thing anyone can do."

"What do you want to do then?"

Quinn ran a hand through his hair. "I better go and face the music."

Eliot grabbed Quinn by the shoulder and pulled him into a quick fierce hug. "You can do this."

~~o0o~~

Quinn tapped against the wall since there wasn't a door at the top of the stairs. "May I come in?"

Paige nodded at Quinn. She squeezed Walter's hand. "Walter, can you give us a few minutes?"

Walter kissed Paige's forehead before he got up and left the room.

Quinn stood at the end of the bed where Paige was sitting. "I'm sorry about all of that."

"Were you planning on telling me at all?"

Quinn knew that he could get away with a lie because Paige couldn't smell it, or feel it, but he didn't want to lie to her even if it might make things easier for him. "No."

"Why not?"

"Because you're happy. You've made a family and a good life here. You don't need someone like me in the picture."

"And that's it? I don't get a say?"

Quinn curled and uncurled his fingers. "What do you want?"

"I want to know everything." Paige felt like she was on the verge of tears again.

"I'm guessing that Veronica never mentioned me? Never told you that you had a brother?" Quinn quirked an eyebrow.

Paige shook her head but didn't miss the quick flash of hurt that passed over his face. He was obviously trying to keep his emotions in check but, much as she hated it, she was her mother's daughter, and she could read people.

"Veronica, had me when she was seventeen." He saw anger and disbelief flit across Paige's face despite her control and he could smell her distrust, but he kept going. "She left me with her parents although she didn't bother signing custody over to them until I was five. That's when she met your father. Her parents kept me until I was twelve, but Allen had a heart attack and they decided it would be better if I lived with our aunt. Lea wasn't thrilled with the situation, and I know she didn't bother to look for me when I left town at fifteen."

Paige knew the names of her grandparents and her aunt although she'd never met them but the cold way that Quinn spoke about them surprised her.

His face softened a little as he looked at Paige. "I'd heard about you. Veronica sent a couple of Christmas cards that had pictures of you." Quinn pulled his wallet out and slid out a photo that had been carefully laminated. He held it out and Paige took it.

She looked at a picture that she'd seen hundreds of times. It was a picture of her on her first day at kindergarten. She handed the picture back to him and he carefully tucked it back into his wallet.

"Mom always said she was seventeen when she had me." Paige bit her bottom lip while she tried to sort things out in her head. "If you're telling me the truth, she was twenty-three when I was born?"

"That's right." He always wondered, if Veronica, pretending she was seventeen, when Paige was born was supposed to somehow rewrite the past or make up for what she'd done with Quinn.

"It sounds like you didn't get along well with ou…our grandparents."

"They didn't want me." Quinn looked down at his hands for a moment. "No one has wanted me, Paige. That's why I wasn't going to tell you. You are a terrific person and we got to almost be friends and I didn't want to find out that I wasn't welcome here either." He started to turn but she held a hand out.

"Quinn, wait." She patted the bed next to her. "Please don't go. I've got so many questions."

Quinn sat carefully on the edge of the bed and waited for her questions.

"I… can I ask you more stuff about you, about back then?" Paige set her hand on top of his.

"Sure."

"If our family didn't want you, why didn't you stay with your dad?"

"I don't know who he was. I think he might be the reason Allen and Carol didn't want me. They knew who he was, but they never would say." He pulled his wallet out again and handed her another photo. This one showed a much younger Veronica, wearing a pink sweater with some kind of purple pattern around the neck.

The picture had been torn but Paige could see the hands and just a corner of the forehead of someone that was holding Veronica in the picture.

"Whoever he was, he was a white man with sandy brown hair." Quinn held his hand out for the picture. "That's all I know about him."

"Oh Quinn, I'm so sorry." She pulled him into a quick hug. "If that photo of me is all that you had how could you have known that I'm your sister, that I'm the girl in the photo?"

Quinn looked away shoulders hunched. "When I finally earned enough money I… I had you followed for a couple of weeks." He saw the shocked look on her face. "It was several years ago. And I've had others check on you from time to time, just to be sure you were okay."

Paige leaned away from him. "Okay, that's just creepy."

"I'm sorry. I just wanted to know a little more about you. You're the only family I had left." He started to get up, but she stopped him again.

"So now that I know, now what?"

He looked at her confused. He honestly expected her to call him a few names and demand that he leave. He certainly hadn't thought he'd get a say in things. "What do you mean?"

"I mean; do you want to stay in touch? Can we keep talking? Or is this where you leave, and I just have to wonder about you and maybe hire a PI to stalk you for a while?" She teased to show that she understood at least a little bit why he'd spied on her.

He couldn't help it as a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. "I'd really like to stay in touch. I'd like to really get to know you and Ralph."

~~o0o~~

"Cabe, you know how you said I should let you know if there are other things that didn't make sense? Things that I should show you?"

Cabe was just as caught up in the drama as everyone else seemed to have been, so it took a second for him to really register that Sly was talking to him. "Hhhmm? What?"

"I went over the numbers and did some comparative research last night and the data just doesn't make sense."

"What data?" Cabe still wasn't tracking with what Sly was talking about.

"The fastest typing speed ever recorded was two hundred and sixteen words per minute, but Alec is averaging three hundred and fifty. Yesterday Eliot took out eight guards in the dark in just under a minute. Cabe that's not possible. The dark should have made him slower as he had to search for opponents or wait for them to come to him and even in full light that is still faster than should be physically possible."

"So what are you saying?"

"I don't know. The numbers just don't make sense and the numbers always make sense." Sly reorganized his pen cup for the third time. "And I looked into the kind of injury that Eliot would have received when he was hit with that wrench." He took a marker and went to his dry erase board to start writing out his equation. "That wrench weighed eighteen point eight six pounds and if it was swung at an average of fifty miles an hour, and yes that accounts for the drag and weight of the wrench…" He wrote quickly across the board.

W=KE=Fd=1/2mv2= F=

1/2mv2

d

"So when we plug in the numbers… here and …. Here." Sly circled his final number and tapped at the board to emphasize his point. "That would have left him with a point zero zero eight three percent chance of surviving. There is no way he should be up and moving right now."

"I see what you're saying, and you know I have complete faith in your math, but I can't explain this and really I don't think it's any of our business." Cabe put a comforting hand on Sly's shoulder. "Maybe it's one of those things that science just hasn't explained yet."

"Maybe we're really super villains."

Both men looked up sharply and spotted Parker in the rafters above Sly's desk. She pushed herself up into a back bend and then into a walkover on the beam she'd been resting on. She walked down the beam toward Hardison and Eliot. She dropped with a flip and Hardison caught her.

. ͽϿ Ѻ Ͼͼ .

"You really screwed up this time." Happy said as she held Toby's hand.

"I know. I just got carried away." He knew the moment that the words had left his mouth, it had been a wrong move.

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"I think public apology and possible groveling is my only avenue." Toby slid his hat back.

"I didn't buy Eliot's hole Cherokee grandmother thing…" Happy placed her free hand over her belly for a second.

"You don't think a man would lie about his grandmother, do you?" Toby teased and readjusted his hat.

"No." She rolled her eyes. "I don't care if his grandmother was Cherokee or Chinese. I don't think his grandmother had anything to do with him knowing I'm pregnant."

Toby nodded. "I have no idea either how he could have known."

"There's some other things about these guys that seems off to me."

"Yah, you're not alone. Sly mentioned something too and I still think the way Eliot recovered after that hit he took with the wrench is funky." Toby let his fingers drum softly on the back of Happy's hand. "Do you think he was wearing body armor and maybe threw himself farther out of the way than it looked at the time?"

"I'm sure he wasn't wearing body armor and the hit he took sounded very solid. I don't think it was a glancing blow."

They'd circled around the block and had just come back to the garage. Toby sighed and looked up at the building. "Well, time to throw myself to the wolves."

Happy patted his shoulder and pressed the button on his key chain.

'Atta boy'

. ͽϿ Ѻ Ͼͼ .

Quinn followed Paige back downstairs to the main part of the garage. All eyes turned to them, and Quinn wanted to glare until they all looked away, but these people were Paige's family, and he didn't want to give them reason to push him away from Paige. So he kept his eyes down and his face blank.

In a whisper that he knew the humans couldn't have heard he heard Eliot. "We got your back."

Quinn did look up then and he could see his pack standing behind the others.

"You two get things worked out?" Cabe asked.

"Guys, I'd like to introduce you to my brother." Paige smiled.

Cabe smiled and shook Quinn's hand. Walter and Sly looked a little confused but Ralph stepped forward and shook Quinn's hand.

"Does that mean I have to call you uncle?" Ralph looked from Quinn to his mother.

"You don't have to but I think I'd like it." Quinn couldn't help his smile.

The front door opened and closed and Toby and Happy joined the group.

Toby stepped forward. "Paige, Quinn, I'm really sorry for how I handled things. It was a bonehead move on my part."

Paige gave Toby a brief hug. "Forgiven."

Quinn assessed Toby for a minute before he put a hand out to shake.

With the tension from earlier settled, Hardison Walter and Ralph went back to the code they'd been working on before. Cabe offered Eliot a cup of coffee while they waited, and Parker leapt onto Eliot's back as they headed for the kitchen.

Sly looked over his equation one more time, but couldn't bring himself to erase it yet. Toby wandered over to Sly's desk and reviewed the numbers. "Happy and I were just talking about the same things."

"You two were discussing horizontal-force impact ratios?"

Toby smirked. "We were talking about how there's things that aren't making sense."

"And you are going to have to live without those answers." Eliot spoke from behind Toby making him jump. "And if I find out you been nosing around in our business, well, let's just say you won't like what happens next." Eliot turned to rejoin Parker, but they could all hear his knuckles crack as he clenched his hands into fists.

. ͽϿ Ѻ Ͼͼ .

(LAX airport)

Hours later the pack loaded up and headed to the airport. Quinn had tried to keep a blank face at first, but it didn't last long since his pack could feel what he was feeling anyway.

"I'm glad things worked out with you and Paige." Hardison slid his tablet into his bag.

"Me too." Quinn smiled. "The phone number I gave Paige is good right?"

"I already flagged it in my system, so we don't use it on a con or anything. So yah, as long as you don't use it for business, we probably won't need to burn it." Hardison slid the side door of the van open as Eliot parked.

Eliot patted Quinn on the back as they unloaded bags out of the back and Parker poked a pointy finger into Quinn's arm. "I told you brothers are important."

"I don't know about that." Quinn smiled. "She did say I should call her when we get home though."

"I guess LA wasn't so bad after all huh?" Eliot slung one bag over his shoulder and picked up a couple of others.

Quinn set a hand on the back of Hardison's neck as they walked toward the office to return the rental van.

It didn't take Hardison long to take care of the paperwork for the van. For all the damage the team had taken this time, this had been one of those rare jobs where the van wasn't a complete shambles that required extra fees when it was returned. Before long, they were headed into the airport proper.

"Okay." Hardison called his pack to attention. "I got three tickets to Oregon leaving in two hours. Digital tickets are on your phones." He looked at Quinn and Parker.

Eliot's wolf wanted to whine. He knew he'd left in a hurry when he'd had to go to Louisiana, but he didn't think it would matter in the long run with his pack.

"Eliot, I got you on the next flight to Louisiana. Leaves in an hour."

Now Eliot really did feel confused. Yes, Gemma was in Louisiana and he was already missing her but he'd already spent so much time away from his pack that he wasn't ready to give them up yet.

"You better do whatever you gotta do in Louisiana in a hurry 'cause I got you on a flight back home day after tomorrow."

"What are you talking about?" Eliot glowered.

"Gemma wants to talk to you in person and we did have to leave in a hurry. So maybe this will give you time to fix things with her." Parker leaned against Eliot with her chin on his shoulder.

"Thanks." He wrapped an arm around Parker's shoulders. "I'll be home soon."

~The End~