log: Forge and Jennie, Sunday Night

[x-roulette.livejournal.com]

Forge has an answer to one of Jennie's most important questions. The revelations are not at all what she expects.



Forge checked his email, noting Jennie's response. Letting out a slow
breath, he looked over the paperwork again. Everything looked to lead
to the right conclusion, but... well, it would be Jennie's decision
where to go from here. He'd learned from the mishaps with Catseye's
family that it was better not to try and make people's decisions for
them.

It just happened to be that the last paper came off the small desktop
printer as the first knock came at the door. Smiling at the complete
lack of coincidence, Forge slid the papers into a folder and set it on
the small table in the common area before heading over to the door.

Opening it, he blinked a few times, before remembering Jennie's last
post to her journal. "Oh," he finally said, eyebrows raising to his
hairline. "it looks nice. Your hair, I mean."

Jennie fluffed it absently. "Why thank you. I think it suits me better
than the blonde." She quickly shoved her shaking hands in the back pockets
of her capris. She was nervous, no doubt about it. But this what she
wanted, or so she told herself. "So, whatcha got for me?"

Forge waved toward the small couch with one arm, the folder clearly
visible on the table. "Get you something, soda, any sandwiches that
Jay and Marius haven't already scarfed down?"

"No. I'm good." She couldn't eat even if she was hungry. She eyed
the folder on the table. "Is that it?" She pointed.

Tapping his fingers together nervously, Forge nodded. "Yeah. I went
back through your mom's tax records, those ones that were in the box
that you got sent? And back in late 1987, early 1988, she had a
significant chunk of money listed as gift income." Sliding onto the
sofa, Forge gestured at the folder again.

"Whatever her other failings may have been, your mother was pretty
fastidious about keeping paperwork. Especially when she got audited
the year you were born. Which was actually a boon, because it gave me
a lead on where that money came from."

Jennie sat down on the couch, and reached for the folder. She flicked
it open and began to scan the documents while Forge talked. He was
right, there was a significant amount of "gifts" listed in her records.
Including several thousand dollars worth of diamonds. Jennie had a brief
memory of playing with her mother's jewelry as a child, and her mother
being rather upset. No wonder, those bracelets were worth at least 6,000
a pop. It also lead Jennie to wonder why her mother didn't pawn them when
they needed money. Then again, she could have, and Jennie would have never
known.

She looked up from the folder. "Where is all this money coming from?"
She asked.

"That's what the IRS asked your mother back in January 1989," Forge
fished through the stack of papers, holding up copies of what looked
like very official revenue service inquiries. "She identified them as
gifts from her boyfriend at the time, a..." he paused, hand wavering
over the folder. "Well, it's in there. If you want to know - I mean, I
did checking. I'm ninety-five percent sure this man is your father."

Jennie set the folder back down on the coffee table. Her stomach did a
flip. "Who is he?" She said quietly.

"Two years ago," Forge pulled out a printout from an online newspaper
archive, and another page translating it from the Greek it had
originally been printed in. "Guy by the name of Dorian Niarchos was in
a bit of a scandal over in Greece. Seems he's a bit of a minor
celebrity there, like a second-rate Kennedy. Some girl claimed he got
her knocked up and she had a mutant child. So Niarchos goes and
publicly gets himself a genetic test and proves he couldn't have
passed along the mutant gene. But," he raised a finger with a smile,
"those test results were kept on a relatively insecure server that the
lab in Athens used. Of course, despite all appearances, I know
jack-all about hacking and network configurations and all that. So I
asked Doug to grab the files for me."

Turning to the back of the folder, Forge pulled out two pages, laying
them side by side. He'd circled different series of blobs and lines on
each, writing little codes to compare them by. "This one's the DNA
test from Dorian Niarchos. And this one... this one's yours. Of
course, I know jack-all about reading polymerase chain reaction tests,
so I had Paige help me out here. These spots," he pointed to the
circles, "are definite matches, but not these ones. Seems like you
guys don't share any mitochondrial DNA from your mother. But you
definitely have the same father."

Quietly, Forge turned one of the pages over to show a black-and-white
printout of an older man, smiling in what was obviously a publicity
photo. "His name is Aristotle Niarchos."

Jennie covered her mouth with her hand. She couldn't help it. They
had the same eyes. He was handsome, in an older-man-type way. "And
he, and my Mom....? But my Mom was in New York at this time. I was
born in New York."

"He lives in New York, has since the mid-eighties," Forge explained.
"The Niarchos family has a number of holdings in Greece, Italy, and
Turkey. Apparently Dorian oversees the day to day operations, but it's
Aristotle who makes the decisions. He's got a family villa in eastern
Greece... and a family."

Forge turned over another series of photographs, Aristotle surrounded
by four children and seated next to a beautiful woman
apparently in her forties. "They live in New York with him. And
judging by the lack of communication between he and your mother about
five months before you were born... I don't think he knows you're his
daughter."

Jennie stared at the photo. The eldest was a girl in her early teens.
Same blue eyes as Jennie. "What do you mean? My mother always made is
sound like....like he knew, but didn't want us." She frowned. Jennie
always thought that her father would be some dancer her mother had hooked
up with in her troupe, not some Greek billionaire. "Woah, Go Mom."
Jennie said quietly.

Forge rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "So that's what I was
able to find out. I mean, Doug helped a lot, but I didn't tell him
what it was for. Or Paige. This is your business, and if you want to
leave it here, that's totally up to you, I guess."

Jennie's jaw set. Whatever had happened between her mother and this man,
it had destroyed her mother. "Thank you Forge." She said, thankful that
her voice didn't break. "This means a lot, really." She stood and kissed
his forehead.

Forge turned bright red, mouth moving without any sound coming out for
a few moments. "I, uh... so Catseye demands seafood before prom.
You... uh, you cool with that?" he managed to stammer out.

"I'm cool with that. Can't cross Catseye when she's set on something."
Jennie smiled. "It'll be fun." She held the folder to her chest. Later,
she would figure out what to do about him later. For now, there was a prom
to get ready for