Santa Clarita: You're not my Mother!
By Max
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing.
Heero sat on the bed, naked as that was the way he'd been on that morning and Martha hadn't deviated from that memory, though as he watched Duo's face squish up and twist like he was fighting some dreadful internal blockage, Heero wondered where his clothes were. The clothing wasn't actually his. The orange shirt and pants technically belonged to the county in which he'd been arrested. He wondered if they'd bill him for them. He wondered if they'd been broken down and recycled for energy. The nuclear fission technology of this group was beyond real. He wondered how many households they could power with the energy contained in the molecules of his now stolen prison outfit.
"I got it!" Duo cheered, jumping up and down like a kid on some holiday. "God, fuck me. Heero! Put some fuckin' clothes on, will ya? We got places to go."
That kind of wasn't how Heero understood this was going to work. Not that there had been a lot of conversation that he'd been privy to, mind you. He was pretty sure they were supposed to just follow the same path they'd done before and grow up together. He'd expected some kind of normalcy. Even as he pulled his rolled up pants and shirt from his rucksack he grumbled internally that he really shouldn't have expected normal where Duo was concerned. Duo had never been normal and that was before all this deviant consciousness and incredible advances in technology.
Shirt on, he was pulling up his jeans, still no shoes yet, when he heard Duo cackle. Fear gripped him and he just knew that even though Duo had made himself taller, he hadn't made himself older, not really, and exactly how would have done that anyway? If there are normal developmental patterns to neurological tissue, if you didn't have it and hadn't seen it, you weren't going to exactly be able to understand that it wasn't what you already had.
Heero turned to see what Duo was cackling about. His mouth fell open and his fingers suddenly went too numb to button his jeans. As he sought to find some way to put into words, to make real what he saw, he thought maybe it was like a mortal suddenly finding out they were some great wizard. There was his Duo, his precious love, that he'd told himself so many stories about, that he'd searched the world for, there he was, hair unbraided, and fanned around him like an aura with a two meter radius and every millimeter glittered with black lightning. He wore some black gown thing like out of a video game, his violet eyes flowing with joy and power, and Heero wanted to cry out, to catch him before he fell.
He'd searched so hard and for a half a moment, he held his lover in his arms, and now he was losing him to a new threat, something couldn't even begin to understand.
"Please don't leave me," Heero whispered, willing to let his very selfhood, his identity, his sanity all just blow away if Duo would just take him with him.
Duo grinned like a maniac, stretching his palms apart and pulling black lightning like electric taffy. "Never! Just reach out with your mind, 'Ro! It's right there! Anything you want!"
"I can't," Heero said, tears slipping down his face. "I'm not ever going to be enough for you. I'm just not good enough."
Duo closed the distance between them, eyes wide and human, pure raw human with no pretence, no walls, just concern and curiosity. He was back to being shorter again and Heero reached out to touch his cheek, to be close with him for whatever moments he had left, because he just knew that Duo was going to reach into his head and pull him apart like a building block kit, just to see how he worked. If that's all he had to give him, maybe when Duo put him back together, he'd be good enough. "I love you."
"Bad dog," Martha growled, the force of her words sending Duo tumbling across the room, through the cheap and thin wall of their Rio flat and into what passed for the combined kitchen and bathroom. The roar hadn't touched Heero at all.
Maybe he was in shock. Shock seemed reasonable under the circumstances.
Watching Duo get back to his feet, a thousand little black electric snakes hissing at the end of his dancing hair, a legitimate black and jade scythe in his hands. "Who the fuck are you," he snarled, shifting into a Shinigami fighting stance.
Heero yawned, head light. Maybe it was the soles of his feet were going numb with a really intense panic attack, but he couldn't feel the floor.
Duo was going to burn the whole favela. Heero could just see how this was going to go.
Martha on the other hand looked like some nondescript secondary character in a horror movie, the kind where half a dozen people run from a lab that's just been contaminated or something. Except she wasn't screaming and her expression was something Heero had never seen before. Frustration, minor homicidal thoughts, and love, there was some love in that expression.
"I'm your mother, you stupid little shit," Martha snapped. "You need to power down or I will smack the ever loving shit out of you."
Duo, the older Duo, stepped up beside Heero, smiled and touched his shoulder lightly.
The blond man he'd seen earlier actually offered Heero some of the popcorn from a movie style paper popcorn box. Heero's lip curled in confused disgust. The other older Heero stepped up beside the blond man and took a bit of popcorn.
"They're going to fight," Heero said, clearly begging the others to stop them.
"Yeah," Older Duo said. "On behalf of my younger self, Heero, I'm really sorry I'm a fucking idiot."
Heero thought there should be something to say, but younger Duo's scream tore out the walls around them, leaving them on shaky floor with debris raining down.
"You're not my mother! Who said you could be my mother?"
Martha was the only one not even a little ruffled by younger Duo's rage. With a flick of her hand, all of them were in the middle of a field in the middle of somewhere that Heero had no idea where. Grass, blue sky, a couple of cows on the horizon and Heero felt so sure they were on Earth. How could gravity feel so real in a virtual reality system?
"That's kind of how it works, Duo," Martha said, "We don't ask for our parents or get a choice about them, we just get them."
The grass around Duo started to smoulder from sparks from his hair. He pointed a finger at her, chin lifted, nose wrinkled. "I don't accept you as my mother! I don't any parents! I'm not a child!"
"You are very much a child." Her face twitched as she suppressed a smile.
All his fire and snakes disappeared without so much as a poof. His hair straightened and smoothed itself, forming into strands to rebraid itself.
"Stop!" Duo said, batting at his braid, which sent him in a small circle for a moment before he tried the other direction and his braid kept avoiding him. "Stop!"
Now wearing the tee-shirt and jeans that older Duo had favored, Duo glared at her, his nose wrinkled up, upper lip tight, lower lip pushed out a bit, violet eyes glaring. "What did you do!"
"Child safe limiters," Martha said smugly. "I put a lot of effort into that. You're going to develop normally and be a decent human being. You are loved and you are safe."
Duo stamped his foot. "I am not a child!"
"You are. Now go to your room!"
Duo's face dropped, eyes wide, as he suddenly started sliding backwards across the field to a distant pale blue two story house. His hands reached out for them as if he were going to stop his moment.
Martha gently struck her palms together as if she were dusting them off. "There. Now," she turned to Heero.
His face went completely pale, blue eyes like oceans. No afterlife he'd ever imagined had been overseen by a bland soccer mom in a lab coat. "I won't leave without him," Heero said firmly, knowing he had no way whatsoever to enforce his will.
"I didn't expect you to," she said forcing a smile, which didn't seem to come easy for her. "I'm sorry about that family drama. I believe Heero and Duo have a room for you in their house. I let Heero move in too soon last time and it caused some issues. You're welcome to go to school with him, but you'll need to arrange visits rather than just coming over."
"Are you," Heero said, trying to find the right words, "Going to ... hurt him?"
"When I said I was his mother," Martha said, looking irritated. "I meant it. Joel, you will not visit him and give him cigarettes nor beer for at least an hour experience time."
"I would never," Joel said, holding a hand over his heart, the bucket of popcorn close to his chest.
Martha rolled her eyes. "There will never be an hour nor a planet where you are more clever than I."
He shook his head in tight light shakes. "Nope, never thought so."
Her face melted and for just a tiny moment, Heero saw her a more fluid and welcoming person. "Liar."
Duo threw an arm around Younger Heero's shoulders. "So! Come on! Let's go set up your room."
Joel followed them along as they walked away from the blue house. "I'm coming with you. She's going to be in a high energy state for a while. It's so good to have both of you home!"