Title: Fathers
Summary: Macey, Bex, and Liz share thoughts about their dads.
A/N: I haven't read the latest GG book, so this might be AU. Also, the timeline may be a little wonky; I assumed that Bex was fifteen in November of last year.
My father's always been good at kissing babies. It's what he does most on the campaign trail, besides shaking hands and giving speeches written for him by a staff member.
It makes me wonder why he values the children of anonymous voters more highly than me.
Father's off on another mission, and Mum is called into the office. I don't want to go out of the flat until Mum comes back, and there's nothing good on the telly. So I go snooping instead.
Not deep spying. I don't want to know where they keep their condoms. I didn't want to know that they used condoms at all, but I was more curious last year, and, well, I found them. Moving on now.
So I just move around Da's desk, looking at the photos on it. I vaguely recognize one, a blonde woman who's laughing at the camera. She used to babysit me when I was little. I haven't seen her since I was six. There's one new photo, and this man I recognize immediately. It's Da's best mate, Scott. I slide the photo out of the frame and hold it up, into the sunlight. Scott's small smile is distorted by writing on the other side of the photograph. I flip it over. In Da's smooth cursive, I read Scott Weston, deceased 5 Nov 2010.
There's something cold in the bottom of my stomach, and it's beginning to melt and run through the rest of my body. I jam Scott's photo back into its frame and grab almost blindly at the blonde's laughing face. The tacks on the back are hard to move with my trembling fingers. But eventually I get it out and flip it over. Patricia Redd, deceased 17 May 2001.
No. No no no no... They're all the same, all of the photos have a death date neatly written on the back. There's six photographs in total, and I put the last one back in its frame and shove myself away from the desk. I'm sweating and dizzy, and I wipe trickles of moisture off my cold forehead with a hand that shakes.
A spy's life is dangerous. I have always known that. But I never truly realized that my parents have seen their friends come back from missions in body bags- not until I looked at the neat arrangement of photos on my father's table.
Later I remove a framed photo of my father from my bedside table and hide it in the back of my wardrobe.
I have my mother's hair, and my mother's brain, and my mother's slim figure. We share noses, eyes, chins- even our fingers are the same size. I commandeer the floor-length mirror two days after I come home from school, and I sit in front of it.
After a half hour, Mom comes into the room and stops when she sees me staring at myself. "What are you doing, darlin'?" she asks in the soft Southern drawl that I also possess.
"We learned about genetics this year in advanced biology," I tell her. "Half of my chromosomes came from Dad. I'm looking for his DNA in me."
She blinks. "I'm sorry, Liz... what?"
I swivel entirely away from the mirror now. "I'm looking for Dad. In here." I wave my hand up and down my body. "But you have very dominant genes. I can't find him."
Her eyebrows raise. I'm sure it's not just my odd answer. I'm also being uncharacteristically calm for an easily excitable fourteen-year-old who loves to tinker until the fire department has to take care of the chemical fumes in the back shed.
But it's been nagging at me for a long time. I've seen Cammie and her mother together, and although they look alike, there are enough differences that I formed a bad sketch of her father in my head long before Cammie trusted me enough to show me his picture. Now that I'm home for the summer and I can compare my features to my parents' every day, I want to pinpoint how their DNA mixed to create me.
"Are you sure that mirror is the best tool you can use to solve your problem?" she finally replies, and I smile as I recognize the tone she uses when she's helping an undergraduate design an experiment.
"The light in here is brighter than the one in the bathroom. And this mirror doesn't have flecks on it from the dye that I poured down the sink in fifth grade."
"That's not exactly what I meant." She sees my incomprehension and gently shrugs. "Well, lunch is in an hour." I tilt my head up so she can kiss her fingertips and touch my forehead with them. Then I memorize her face, flip it longitudinally, and overlap it with my reflection. Back to studying the small differences and seeing if they came from Dad or just one of my maternal grandparents.
When I go down for lunch, it's almost a shock to see Dad's strong features and long nose. I take a sandwich and hop onto a stool. "So I've determined that I look nothing like you, Dad."
He gives me a napkin and a wry smile. "I thank the Lord for that every day."
I roll my eyes and swing my feet. "I'm serious, Daddy. Like, how do I know for sure that you're my real father? Mom could have married you after I was born and never told me to keep me from feeling abandoned by my birth father. It's unlikely... but hypothetically, it could have happened."
"Maybe," he says. "Except your mother and I always agree that you're more like me than her, for all you look as beautiful as she does." He finishes off his sandwich, puts another on my plate, and covers the last two. "For your mother when she gets back from the store," he offhandedly tells me. I nod, my mind working through what he's said.
"How am I more like you?" I finally ask.
"'Thought you were going to that school to learn how to use the mind you were given." And with that, he pats my hand and goes back to his garage, where he's fixing up another old car.
Well, that's one thing we have in common. We're always working on projects. Mom relaxes after she gets home from work, but Dad and I... our brains are busy, busy, busy, constantly tripping over new ideas while the old ones are still blueprints. I lay my head on my arms and think.
We have the same sense of humor, really. Half-joking, half-sincere, with whimsy thrown in whichever way. Mom's sarcasm can and has delicately cut someone down to size.
I've got Dad's bleeding heart too, which honestly makes my mother despair when we see a beggar and want to empty our wallets. She's the one who subtly points out the woman's bloodshot eyes and trembling fingers, stops us from bankrolling her drug addiction, and takes us to buy packaged food to give her instead.
I'm logical like Mom. But when I was younger, I skipped steps and forgot to write down my solvents and units of measurement because I was so impatient to see the experimental results. Dad still has a laissez-faire attitude toward life; I trained myself to follow the scientific method after botching experiment after experiment. Going to the Gallagher Academy has only reinforced that training; Dr. Mosckowitz is an absentminded teacher, but he never forgets to drill the importance of following directions in the laboratory into each new seventh grade class. I can recite the scientific method in my sleep: State the problem Gather information Hypothesis formation Hypothesis testing Data recording Data analysis Conclusion Repeatable process Bex give me back my notecards.
And suddenly I see it.
I love my mother. She's a brilliant chemist and a wonderful teacher. But she would never have flourished in the Gallagher Academy. Logic is something computers possess. Becoming a spy takes something more: intuition. The tingly feeling on the back of your neck when you know you're being followed, even though you don't see anyone behind you. The way Cammie can melt into a crowd just by sensing where the clusters of people are and the overall movement of a mass of humanity. Bex's ability to take small snippets of information and extrapolate an accurate picture of a much larger situation- an instinctual ability she gets almost no credit for, since we're taught how to do that in school.
And me? I'm a genius, not to brag. But more importantly, I can look at a new discovery and see hundreds of applications in a wide variety of fields. I can gain a feel for how the computer programmers of a particular agency think, and look for backdoors in their codes based on that information. My mother can't.
But my father can. My brilliant, disorganized father, who funds his hobbies by developing mechanical innovations. With a surface glance at my family, it is my mother whom people admire: the coolly practical and organized biochemist with two doctorates in chemistry and biology. My father is just a jovial, easygoing inventor who dropped out of college to take care of his sick mother and never returned to get a degree.
I'm ashamed that in fourteen years of life, I have never looked past the surface.
Dad's underneath a car when I go into the garage. I sit next to it and look at the tools on the wall. "Hey, do you need something?"
He shifts. "Rebecca? You're back already?"
I smile- apparently even my voice is like my mother's- and correct him. "It's Liz, Dad."
"Oh. Well, can you put this back?" He hands me a wrench and starts to push himself out. I glance at it- a medium-sized socket wrench- and place it back on the wall.
Dad's stretching when I turn around. I smile when I see his stained mechanic's apron- how many times have I tried it on?- and say, "I bet Mom wouldn't have put that away so fast."
He looks at me oddly and says, "And I'd get lost in her laboratory if she didn't give me directions."
I blush. "I just meant- I think I understand, about me being more like you than Mom. I didn't mean to act superior or anything," I mumble.
Dad nods and pulls me into a hug. I squeal. "Ew, Dad, you have grease on your clothes!" He belly-laughes, ruffles my hair, and starts teasing me about being picky now about my clothes, and did I have a crush on a boy? Eventually I escape to my room.
The mirror goes back in my parents' bedroom that day, and I add more lessons to the ones I learned at Gallagher last year:
Appearances deceive. And I should avoid my father when he's dirty from working in the garage.