elrhiarhodan | White Collar Fic

Title: Kinship Analysis
Author:

elrhiarhodan
Fandom: White Collar
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Reese Hughes
Spoilers: S4.06 - Identity Crisis, S4.12 – Brass Tacks
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: None
Word Count: ~1200
Beta Credit:

jrosemary
Summary: With nothing else to do, Reese Hughes decides to solve a mystery in his own past.

A/N: Written for the Adoption square on my Love Bingo Card. My dear friend,

kanarek13 created cover art for this story for

fandom_stocking 2013. It’s under the cut.

__________________

Retirement didn’t suit Reese Hughes.

He didn’t garden, he didn’t play golf, he didn’t like to putter around and fix things that didn’t need to be fixed.

Nor did he have any grandchildren to spend his days with. You needed to have children for that. His wife was long gone; she’d left almost before she’d finished unwrapping their wedding gifts. When Anne walked out, she said it was because she couldn't take being married to a man who carries a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it. That was a convenient excuse, because she didn't want to tell him what he already knew: he was a cold man and she needed some warmth in her life.

Reese hadn't contested the divorce. Marriage to Anne was a little like bigamy. After all, he was already married to the Bureau.

Except that the FBI was a fickle creature and after twenty years, they tried to end it. The first time they retired him, he spent two years working for the NSA. He caused all sorts of havoc before the FBI realized its mistake and un-retired him. This time, though, the powers that were going to use every excuse in the rulebook to keep him from coming back: he’s too old, he’s keeping other agents from advancing, the budgetary climate…

No, there would be no third act for Reese Hughes in the FBI, and given the shit storm over at the NSA right now, he decided that it probably wasn’t the right time to go back into the spy business.

Of course, there was always private industry. He knew that he really should stand back for two years before heading into a related civilian business, but he negotiated and got them to look the other way. They wanted him gone, after all. Still, working as a consultant was nowhere near as fulfilling as running the White Collar division, even if it paid a hell of a lot more. His hours were too regular, his responsibilities too limited.

He needed a hobby. Or a project.

Sitting alone, nursing a glass of single malt, Reese knew exactly what he was going to do. It wasn’t precisely illegal – more a slightly out of bounds use of secret government resources. He’d spent enough of his career coloring right up to the line (and many times, outside of it), all the while maintaining a by-the-book façade, that such a minor infraction didn’t concern him in the least.

In truth, it had been a long time since he’d been bothered by anything like this. Twenty-four years ago, his father’s death had ripped open a hole in his life that he’d never been able to patch over.

Reese took a sip of whiskey and mentally corrected himself. Arthur Hughes wasn’t his father, at least not in a biological sense. That honor belonged to Viktor Arshenski, a highly decorated cold warrior, a favorite child of the Kremlin. He'd been seduced by a CIA operative – her name carefully redacted from the report Reese had found. The information was minimal, and Reese was never sure if they’d been careless or if the woman had planned to get pregnant. It didn’t matter, because the unnamed agent elected to carry her child rather than terminate. The file said nothing about how Arthur Hughes was connected to the agent, but Reese was able to draw a few educated conclusions.

She probably worked with, or for, Arthur Hughes, who’d been a spook’s spook, a CIA section chief who reported to the Director himself.

One of the more interesting things about his brief stint with the NSA was the access it gave him. And coupled with his putative parentage, he was able to put his eyes on some pretty amazing things. Not the real name of the woman who gave birth to him, but a whole lot of history about his father – both of them.

Reese had had no real interest in tracking down Arshenski, which wouldn't have been all that difficult. The spy had retired to a villa on the Black Sea shortly after the fall of the old Soviet regime and had died in his sleep a few years later. It could have been natural causes, or it could have been something else. Being the suspicious type, Reese figured it was probably something else.

Arthur Hughes had been a decent father. His wife, Miranda, had been an equally decent mother until breast cancer killed her when Reese is in his second year of college. They’d been distant but encouraging parents, typical WASPs who rarely showed any emotion.

So decent that Reese had no idea that he had been adopted until he found those papers. But the fact that he’s adopted isn’t what shakes his world apart. It’s the almost off-hand note on the back page of the report. After his birth, ~~XXXXXX~~ had resumed her relationship with Arshenski and continued to feed him disinformation for almost another two decades. Arshenski never learned that his mistress was a CIA operative, or that she bore him two children, two sons. Both were given up – one adopted by Arthur Hughes, the other left at an orphanage when he was two months old.

He had a brother. Reese never got over that. Somewhere out there is another man who shared his blood. A man who was once a babe that got left on a doorstep instead of being raised in a loving home.

Nearly a quarter century after discovering the truth, he was still haunted by this lost child. Maybe it was the Russian blood in him that made his heart grieve for the small child abandoned to a cold, cruel world. He could never stop wondering why his parents hadn’t adopted this other boy, why they didn’t bring home his brother. Did he thrive? Maybe he’d been adopted, too. Maybe he’d grown up happy and well-adjusted in a loving family with all the advantages. Reese hoped so.

On the table, next to his scotch, was a sterile tube with a swab in it. All he needed to do was rub it on inside of his cheek to gather the DNA sample. His contact in the NSA agreed to run the results through the database they’d been building for the last fifteen years and he’ll have an answer.

If people were outraged by the NSA’s indiscriminate collection of email and wiretapping, they’d be even more upset to learn that DNA samples had been taken from everyone who’d been in a hospital in the United States at any time since 9/11. That database was larger than any other by an order of magnitude. While using it to run a kinship analysis might technically be an abuse of government resources, who was going to come after him?

His hand hovered over the glass of scotch, but he picked up the swab instead. Reese didn’t stop to think as he took the sample and sealed the tube. He still had time to change his mind, at least until the morning, when he had breakfast with that old friend. And even then, he didn’t have to read the report that will come back.

But he he will. If his brother is out there, he needs to know.

FIN

This story continues in Old Haunts