Binding Ties

A/N: I’ve decided that the focus will shift back and forth from Prue/Cole to the other Halliwells in alternating chapters. So for example, this chapter will focus on Phoebe, Paige and Piper, and we’ll catch up with Prue and Cole in the next chapter before returning to the Manor and P3 again. But these “family-focused” chapters are necessary to understanding the whole plot, so please don’t skip them or you’ll be lost soon. Enjoy!

Not much in this world or the next was capable of rendering Phoebe Halliwell speechless. But those five words from this jumpy girl just about did the trick. She stood there gaping like a fish for a full minute, until the girl started to freak out again. “I-I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I even went to the funeral. I’ll just get out of here, and leave you and your sister alone.” She started to get up, and the movement startled Phoebe out of her shocked silence.

“No, wait. Sit down and just let me get my head around what you’re telling me.” Phoebe waved emphatically at the chair the girl had jumped up from. Still looking very uneasy, the girl sank back down into the seat. Phoebe leaned back, covering her face with her hands. She counted to twenty. Slowly she lowered her arms until her elbows rested on the sticky tabletop and her palms cradled her chin. “Okay. Let’s try this again. What’s your name, first of all?”

The girl looked at Phoebe for a few seconds. “Paige Mathews,” she finally said.

Phoebe nodded, smiling weakly. “Well, Paige, I’m Phoebe. That’s Piper over there at the bar.” Phoebe turned and gave Piper the tiny secret wave the sisters had made up when Phoebe started kindergarten. It meant: I’m okay right now, but stay close and be ready to come running. Since becoming witches they’d gotten a lot more mileage out of that and the many other little signals they shared.

Paige fiddled with the napkin she’d been doodling on. “I, uh, knew that. I mean, I’ve been coming to P3 for about a year now, and she is the owner and all.”

Phoebe zeroed in on the new bit of information. Anything to keep the girl calm and talking. “A year? Then I guess you would know who we are by now, huh?” She laughed lightly. “So, uh, please don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s not every day you meet someone claiming to be a lost relative, you know?”

Paige nodded in understanding. Part of her still couldn’t believe that she had been “outed” by the sisters. How had they known she’d come back to the club? Her own curiosity about that and the million other questions about the women she’d imagined from afar to be her family kept her seated. When Phoebe next spoke Paige was almost paralyzed in place.

“I want to believe you’re telling me the truth. I mean, I believe that you believe you’re telling the truth. It’s just that knowing my family history, I don’t really see how it’s possible for, well, for our mother to be your birth mother. Um, could I ask what your date of birth is? That might help --”

“August 2, 1977,” Paige broke in. When Phoebe just stared at her, closed mouthed, she continued as if reciting from memory. “Place of birth: Unknown locale in the County of San Francisco. Along with the name “Patricia Halliwell”, that’s all the relevant info I got from my birth certificate.”

Phoebe shook her head. Again she took a breath while her mind worked furiously to figure out what, if anything, this information might mean. The date made sense; it fell right in the middle of what Phoebe suddenly realized would be an over two year long window between her own birth in November 1975 and her mom’s death at the end of February 1978. But that still left three major issues with the girl’s story that Phoebe could think of off the top of her increasingly confused head.

“Huh,” she said to Paige. “That actually fits, um, I mean, within the timeline of my mom’s life. I guess you probably know she died over twenty years ago.”

Paige bit her lip as she nodded. “That’s one of the reasons I didn’t approach you and your sisters. But I didn’t know her exact date of death, and I couldn’t find a copy of her death certificate no matter where I looked or who I asked for favors.” At Phoebe’s astonished look, she quickly added, “I work at a social services agency, and the different departments have routine access to those types of records. Not that we’re supposed to request any for personal research,” she gave Phoebe a sly look, “but the mail boy and I are pals.”

Phoebe had to bite her own lip to keep back a laugh. She liked this Paige Mathews more by the minute, and she found herself wishing that somehow her fantastic claim was true. But still the major questions needed to be asked and answered.

“I see. Well, since you’re curious, and you definitely don’t seem like the type to do anything horrible with this info, I’ll just tell you. My mom died on February 28, 1978. She,” Phoebe had pause and swallow a small lump in her throat as the memory of a vision she received two years before came back to her, “drowned, at this lake where my sisters went to camp the summer before. There was press coverage, and I guess the camp wanted to stop the publicity. I don’t really know. Maybe her death certificate was kept out of the public record because of that, or maybe the police pulled it. Her death was the last in a whole string of drownings there, and the camp had to close. ”

Paige’s mouth quirked. Now who sounds like she’s being evasive, she asked herself. But she was glad that the timing did fit, after all. “So maybe it is possible that she is my birth mother?”

Glad to get back to what passed for a safer topic in this unusual conversation, Phoebe made a small noise of protesting disbelief. “Timeline wise, yeah, I guess it is possible. But there are a couple other issues involved. One is that my parents separated just after my mom got pregnant with me. They divorced before I was six months old and my dad moved out of state.” She looked at Paige intently. “I think you can see where I’m going with this.”

Paige tried not to flinch away from the look. “You’re saying she must have had an affair or something in order to have had me.”

“Or something,” Phoebe echoed, her gaze never losing its intensity. “And again, no offense, you’re a nice person and I know you’re just looking for your roots or whatever, but this is my mom we’re talking about.”

Paige leaned forward over the table. “Oh, no, I understand. If anyone came up to me and suggested that my adopted mom had done something like that that I had never even known about, I’d be upset too. I didn’t mean to say anything bad about her. I just hoped, you know?”

Phoebe’s look softened at the girl’s earnest sincerity. “I do know. When I was younger I wanted nothing more than to have one day more with her. But then I realized as I grew up that wasn’t going to happen. I kind of settled for hearing my sisters tell their memories of her over and over.”

Paige shifted in her seat at the mention of both of the older Halliwells. To try and keep the conversation away from any more talk about her actions at the funeral, she said softly, “You said there were a couple reasons. What were the others?”

“Well,” Phoebe replied, sounding glad to move on, “After our mom died our grandmother raised us on her own, and one thing she would always tell me whenever I asked about when I was born was that my mom had a difficult labor with me. Like she and I nearly died, difficult. So, I just don’t know about the idea of her getting pregnant again after that. I mean, either physically or emotionally it must have been rough. That’s one other reason. The third is why would she give you up?”

Paige didn’t know how to answer that question, and she didn’t have a good response to the rest of what Phoebe said, either. She’d known that this was a long shot, that adoption records weren’t always accurate, especially in an abandonment case like hers, and that there was no substitute in any record for the kind of personal, relevant knowledge she was getting from Phoebe. But it hurt all the same to see her little dream weighed down into the dust by cold hard logic.

Phoebe, for her part, watched Paige closely and was somewhat relieved to see her struggling to reconcile what she’d already heard. Magic and how it complicated the whole scenario probably wouldn’t have to even be mentioned. She believed that was the only way to go right now. If Paige was wrong, then she was better off in blissful mortal ignorance. If the story held up, she and Piper could decide when and how to break that news. After they got some magical answers of their own, of course. Which reminded Phoebe that she owed her sister and brother-in-law an update.

“So,” she said to Paige, “I should go back over and tell Piper what you’ve told me. And I think I should do it myself. She’s had a long day, like we all have. But please just stay put, okay?” She gave Paige a quirked smile. After Paige matched it with a sheepish one of her own, Phoebe got up and returned to Piper and Leo at the bar.

To Phoebe’s joyful astonishment, Piper remarked without a trace of long suffering or bitter sarcasm, “Seems like you were talking to that girl all night, Pheebs. What’s her story, anyway?” She bent below the counter to re-stack a glass she’d been drying.

Phoebe sat down on a barstool and then leaned over the bar to take the rag cloth out of Piper’s hand. When Piper protested, she replied, “Trust me, you’re going to want to pay complete attention to what I have to tell you.”

Piper straightened up. “Okay, well you’ve got it.”

Putting her hands palms down on the bar counter, Phoebe said in a rush, “That girl, her name’s Paige Mathews, and she says she’s been coming to P3 for a year, she’s adopted, she started looking for her birth mother, and Mom’s name is the one listed on her birth certificate.”

In the next few seconds, Phoebe was dimly aware of being glad that Piper had put away that glass and being not so glad there weren’t many chairs behind P3’s bar. Piper gripped the edge of the bar counter so tightly her knuckles were white. She said in a strained voice, “Our mother’s name is on some innocent’s birth certificate?! What, why, how is that possible? Leo?” Still holding onto the counter, she turned to her husband for an answer.

Leo, unnoticed by the sisters, had gone pale at Phoebe’s news. More so than either of them, he’d remained confused about why the Elders hadn’t known about the innocent and her ability to orb. Not to mention why exactly Phoebe had gotten the premonitions in the first place. Now, hearing Phoebe reveal the girl’s claim, along with her P-initial name and the other details, he began to put two and two together. “Piper, I do think it’s possible,” he said softly, with as much calm as he could manage under the circumstances.

“How, Leo? How does that make any sense at all?” Piper’s voice had regained the pleading note of desperation from the wake. In an effort to soothe her nerves, Leo took his wife’s hands in his.

Using his most supportive whitelighter-husband tone, he replied, “Think about your mom, honey, and everything you’ve learned about her since you got your powers back. You had no idea she was a witch, remember telling me that? And then a year later at the lake you discovered the letters she had written to Sam, and what they had had together. What we saw it was possible to have together.”

Phoebe had stepped back a bit to let Leo try and reach out to Piper while her sister took in what Phoebe had learned. But when she heard Leo refer to the letters and to Sam, Phoebe reached forward for the bar counter in a shock of remembering, realization and further disbelief. “Mom had an affair with her whitelighter,” she murmured. “Mom had an affair with her whitelighter. And-and after she and dad split up,” she looked almost wildly at Piper and Leo, “Somehow she got pregnant. I’m still not sure on the how, Piper, but somehow, okay? You two know better than anyone what the Elders thought of witches and whitelighters being together, so there’s that. But it wasn’t only that, was it?”

She looked at Leo for confirmation of her unvoiced theory. He nodded at her, avoiding Piper’s blank look. Phoebe, bursting with the revelation again, spelled it out for her. “That wasn’t the only problem for Mom. She was already the mother of the Charmed Ones, right? It’s ‘we sisters three’, not four. So, they have this relationship that wasn’t allowed, and then a pregnancy that threatened us, our birthright as the future Charmed Ones. But we’re good witches, so she gave up the baby for adoption. She just had to do it in secret.”

“That does make sense,” Piper finally said in a small voice.

Leo spoke up. “It’s really the only explanation that fits the facts, the girl’s story, and what we know about your mom, Piper. I think it’s the truth.”

“So do I,” Phoebe agreed. “Which means I owe her an apology.” To their quizzical looks she explained sheepishly, “I kind of maybe implied that she was deliberately insulting Mom by suggesting she must have had an affair, or worse, to have had Paige.”

“Phoebe,” Piper admonished.

“I know, I know! Look at me, going to apologize!” Phoebe hurried back over to Paige’s table. Piper turned to her husband in dazed wonder.

“I have another sister, Leo. We buried Prue, and now we discover we’ve got another sister. Why are we learning this now, if it had to be such a big secret?”

Leo gave Piper’s hands a reassuring squeeze. “I think,” he told her, “it’s so that the Charmed Ones can be re-formed.”