TITLE: No Angel

Email: wotan_anubis@yahoo.com

DISCLAIMER: I own none of these characters, I’m not making any profit, blahblahblah.

RATING: PG-13

PAIRING: Sam/Brooke

NOTE: No matter how much I try to stick with “realistic” fics, ideas much like this one have that annoying tendency to keep popping up. Sorry about that.

It was a nice, sunny afternoon and Samantha McPherson found herself all alone in the Palace living room, save for Mac who sat quietly in her playpen biting a chew toy. Sitting on Sam’s lap was her laptop, displaying a large blank screen that should quickly be filled with an article. Fortunately, Sam did have an article along with the all the facts and proof needed for it. Unfortunately, Sam hadn’t yet been able to form all the loose facts into a coherent whole. So mostly, she just sat on the couch, working out sentences in her head and keeping half an eye on Mac. Mac, evidently, got tired of her chew toy and threw it as far away as she could as an experiment to see if it would come down again. Smiling, Sam leaned forward somewhat and typed in the opening phrases for her article. Then she leaned back again against the couch and reread them. Frowning, she decided to delete them again. Sighing, she looked back at the playpen where Mac was busy in retrieving her chewing toy. Mac wasn’t moving, but the toy was. Sam looked back at her laptop screen, closed down Word, then shut down Windows and, consequently, her laptop. She carefully put the computer on the table, walked over to the playpen and picked up Mac. She walked out of the room, up the stairs and into her bedroom. Fortunately, Jane had ordered Sam to clean up her room a few days ago so the scanning of the ground for sharp or small objects didn’t take too long. Sam carefully put Mac on the ground, walked over to the door, closed it and locked it. Then she walked over to the window and closed the curtains. Finally, she headed into the bathroom and locked the door on Brook’s side of it. She walked back into her bedroom and kneeled down in front of Mac, who seemed to regard her with a kind of fascinated curiosity. Sam carefully lifted her right hand and gently pressed two fingers against Mac’s forehead. A faint green glimmer sparkled over the baby’s skin and a forked tongue flicked out of her mouth once. Sam nodded, retracted her fingers and went to unlock the doors and open the curtains again. Then she carefully made her way downstairs again and put Mac back into her playpen. Sam sat down on the couch again, restarted her laptop and set out to work again when one highly important detail presented itself to her.

What Mac had just displayed was very definitely a McPherson trait.

But Mac didn’t have McPherson parents.

Which really left room for only one other possibility.

Sam smiled quietly to herself. It seemed that her mom had a tendency to fall for a very particular kind of man.

It was late in the evening and while Brooke and Mike were watching some movie in the living room, Sam had gently, yet urgently, guided her mother into the kitchen for a private conversation.

“OK, I’m here, what’s so important?” Jane asked.

“Err… Have you… noticed something about Mac?” Sam asked.

“Like what?” Jane asked, folding her arms in front of her chest.

“Like… something that might remind you of dad,” Sam said.

Jane sighed. “I did, yes.”

“Do Mike and Brooke know?”

“About Mac, no.”

“I really meant, about themselves.”

“No.”

Sam nodded. “We have to tell them.”

Jane shook her head. “No, we don’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“They… they won’t be able to handle it.”

Sam chuckled. “So we’re just going to leave them in the dark?”

“That’s right. It’s best for them.”

“Yeah, right,” Sam said sarcastically. “Just like it would have been for the best if Copernicus had just shut up about his discovery that the Earth is round, is that it?”

“That’s not a good comparison, Sam,” Jane said.

“No? Everybody believed something that wasn’t true and Copernicus pointed out the reality of the situation. If he hadn’t done that, we’d probably still be thinking the Earth is flat. And we if we don’t tell them, they’ll keep on thinking they’re perfectly normal human beings.”

“Is that so wrong then?”

“Err… yeah,” Sam said emphatically. “Because you can’t keep stuff like this locked away. It will come out. And if it comes out at the wrong time we’re all screwed.”

“Mike seems to have done perfectly well so far.”

“Lucky for us. Doesn’t change the fact that they still have to know about themselves.”

“No, Sam. They’re perfectly happy the way they are and if you… reveal things to them their world is going to fall apart.”

“That’s why they call it the harsh light of day. They can’t keep on living this lie, mom.”

“Yes, they can. And they will. Because we are not going to tell.”

“But mom…”

Jane held up her hand. “That’s final Sam,” she said.

Sam glared at her mother until she had left the kitchen. After that, she continued glaring in general and leaned back against the kitchen counter.

“They have to know,” Sam muttered to herself. “And I’m going to make sure they do.”

TBC