ONE YEAR AFTER THE MARIEMEA INCIDENT:
"Hey, how you guys been?" Duo asked with a grin as the others seated themselves at the table in the conference room at Preventers headquarters.
"We've been well," Quatre responded with a slight smile. It was clear that he was nervous, though, from the way that he gripped Trowa's hand. Trowa's expression, as usual, was a blank mask, although now he patted Quatre's hand reassuringly as he nodded to Duo. "You?"
"Oh, great! We bought out that scavenge operation I told you about, and Heero's helping me run it!" he gave his lover a broad grin before turning back to Quatre. "He's thinking about getting a computer job somewhere, maybe, to pull in a little bit of extra legitimate money."
Quatre's smile broadened slightly as he tried not to laugh. "That's great."
Heero grunted before looking around the room. "Why did Une want to talk to us?" he asked flatly.
"I don't know," Quatre replied with a worried frown. His head snapped up as the door opened and Chang Wufei walked in the room, followed by Lady Une. Wufei greeted his comrades with a curt nod, followed by a slight smile, but the slight creased lines of his brow meant that he didn't know what was going on, either.
"Lady Une," Quatre said, politely rising from his chair to greet her.
She smiled, tight-lipped, and nodded at him. "It's good to see you again, I'm sorry it had to be under these conditions."
"What conditions?" Duo asked suspiciously as Quatre seated himself again, with Wufei also sitting on their side of the table. Une remained standing.
"We finally got around to finding and checking out the remaining labs of the scientists who created the Gundams," she said, sounding uncomfortable.
"So? Were the old bastards there, or did they run into hiding?" Duo asked lightly. "Or are they dead? I never really bothered to check."
"They're alive... and in custody."
"For what?" Duo asked, simulating only mild interest.
"For breaking the ban on genetic experimentation on humans," she said, putting down several folders and sliding them in front of the five former pilots. Everyone in the room was well aware that all of the Gundam pilots had undergone some genetic manipulation in order to allow them to pilot the Gundams, but they also knew this wasn't what she was talking about. She waited silently as they quickly skimmed through the files.
"Those bastards..." Duo said, both of his hands clenched into fists. "How could they... how did they dare..." he fell silent as Heero rested a hand on his shoulder, but his stony expression and the fire in his eyes said more clearly than words that he agreed. Quatre was unusually pale and looked slightly nauseous. Trowa's expression hadn't changed, although his body had become one clenched muscle, and he refused to look anyone in the eye. Wufei simply looked furious.
"I don't know," Une said simply. "I actually visited one of the labs myself. What was there was... horrible. Most of the... experiments didn't make it past a month or two, and they were bad enough, but the ones that made it to seven or eight months..." she shook her head. "I'm sorry. But that's not why I called you here. Another matter has come up."
"What?" Heero asked in a low voice, sounding dangerous. "The labs - and everything in them, must be destroyed." There was a definite hint of 'if you don't, I will' in his voice.
Une correctly interpreted the threat. "The labs and all of the research will be destroyed, you have my word on it. But there are... some things that cannot be destroyed, and we thought you might know what to do with them."
"What is it?" Wufei asked sharply, giving his superior a suspicious look.
Une swallowed. "The viable experiments," she said simply.
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"Daddy, I'm home!" Julia shouted cheerfully as she walked through the front door of her home. She tossed her school bag on the floor, then carefully set down the bag containing her aikido gi on the dining room table. She needed to wash her gi and this way she'd remember to do it later. "Daddy!" she shouted again when her first call produced no response. She thought she heard a faint response from the work room, and, grabbing a couple of apples on her way, went to investigate.
She pushed open the door and looked around at the room, which was filled with various pieces of electronic and mechanical equipment, covering every open surface and most of the floor. A casual inspection did not reveal her father anywhere, but Julia knew better. She began a careful search of the room, and was finally rewarded when she saw a pair of boots sticking out from under a large engine that looked like it belonged to an old Taurus mobile suit. Where he'd found an antique like that was beyond her.
"Duo-daddy!" she shouted again, kicking the sole of one of his boots.
There was a loud clang and then some muffled cursing, and her dad slid himself out from under the engine, rubbing his head and wincing. "Feel like warning me before you do that?" he complained loudly, and Julia giggled.
"I did try when I came in, but you didn't hear me," she said. "And you have something on your face."
"I do?" he reached up to touch the grease-stain on his cheek, and succeeded in smearing it all over his face in the process. Julia giggled again. She knew it was completely childish and that he did stuff like that just to get a rise out of her, but she couldn't help herself. He was so cute, and he worked so hard at acting that way. It was absolutely not fair that her thirty-something fathers were both cuter than she would ever be, but it was a fact of life, and something she'd gotten used to.
"Yup, just a little," she told him. "Where'd you get this thing?" she asked, looking at the engine.
"Some tourists found it when they were poking around the wreckage of that colony in the L4 cluster," Duo told her, grimacing. "They're just lucky that it was the engine that survived the battle and not one of the guns! Idiots could have been blown to bits!"
"L4? So how did you end up with it?" Julia asked, walking around it in a large circle. It was in amazingly good condition, considering that it had obviously been through a battle and then had sat in space for over fifteen years. Of course, mobile suits were designed to operate in space, so the cold vacuum probably hadn't affected the metal all that much, but still, it was an impressive find.
"Well, the guys that found it knew that I'd know how to deconstruct the damn thing without getting it to blow up. Would you believe that the power core is still active?"
Julia's eyebrows raised slightly. "Really?" That made it an even better find. After the Mariemaia Incident, most of the mobile suits left from the war were destroyed, and the few that remained were in the hands of the Preventers. It wasn't every day that she got to see hardware like this.
"Yup! Hey, Julie," Daddy said, his purplish eyes taking on a decidedly wicked gleam, "I have to dismantle it, but that doesn't mean that we can't play with it a little first, check out the output readings, that sort of thing. You wanna help?"
Julia grinned at him. "Really?"
"Do I ever lie?"
"Nope. Cool! Just give me a few minutes to get changed." Julia knew from past experience that she always got dirty when she helped her Duo-daddy in the workshop, and she was wearing some nice school clothes.
"Oh, it doesn't matter. What's the use of having nice clothes if you can't get them messy?" Duo asked.
Julia ran a skeptical eye up and down her father's current attire. As usual, he was dressed almost entirely in black, which probably didn't show stains as well, but was damn hot in the summer. She'd never quite managed to get him to explain why he only wore black. "Are you going to clean my stuff after it gets dirty?" she asked archly, raising an eyebrow.
"No, that's OK, why don't you go get changed now," he said, pretending to be terrified at the thought of having to clean anything. Julia giggled again and walked back into the main part of the house, snagging her bags on the way up to her room.
Once there, she once again dumped her school books on the carpet and carefully set her aikido bag on the bed. It was very important to have one's priorities straight, after all. She immediately kicked off her shoes and went to her dresser, digging through the bottom drawer for her scrubs. Ah... there they were, a pair of sweatpants that had been irredeemably ruined when she spilled half of a vat of bleach on herself when she was trying to clean the floor of the workroom, and a tee-shirt that was liberally sprinkled with spots of paint from when they last painted the house. She frowned slightly at the memory. Somehow her Duo-daddy had ended up 'accidentally' dumping an entire bucket of paint on his head, although she couldn't quite imagine how he expected them to believe that you could 'accidentally' do that. And as for her other father...
Only her otousan could manage to paint an entire wall without getting one drop of paint on him, well, until Duo-daddy threw his arms around Tousan to give him a big kiss, smearing his entire face and a good deal of his chest with paint. Tousan had glared at Daddy (and he had a very impressive glare), told him that he was going to kill him, and then attacked him, using his paintbrush as a weapon, and occasionally crumpling some paper into a ball and dunking it in the paint if he felt the need for a projectile. They'd come very close to having a spotted house for some time. Julia still laughed whenever she thought about it.
She quickly stripped off her clothes, folding them neatly and laying them on the chair - she didn't want to have to deal with getting wrinkles out of them later - but she paused before she started to pull on the sweatpants, glancing at herself in the mirror. She was just barely sixteen years old, but she had a decent start on a womanly body, she guessed. She was well aware of the fact that most people thought she was beautiful, and also aware that few teenage girls thought that they looked good. So she was mostly being influenced by society at large and her own self-doubts, or something. So what? She might as well be normal in at least one thing.
There was very little that could be considered truly 'normal' in her life. Well, on the surface everything seemed pretty normal. Teenage girl, living at home with her two working parents, spending most of her time with school or after-school activities. Perfectly normal. Right.
That was where the normalcy ended. To start with, both of her parents were male. Now, while homosexuality wasn't considered wrong, per say, it wasn't exactly something that most people were comfortable with, and there were very few homosexual couples out there with children, although that number had gone up dramatically in the last fifteen years because of all of the orphans from the war. Julia was one of those - her fathers hadn't tried to conceal that fact from her, and it didn't really bother her that much. It was obvious that she couldn't be their child, and they treated her just like they would if she was their flesh and blood. Better than some of her friends parents, actually, although sometimes she wished that she really was related to them.
She did look a little bit like them, though that was probably more wishful thinking than any real resemblance. Her eyes were slanted slightly, a strange blue-gray color and her hair was a few shades darker than Tousan's, just a few shades short of black, but her face was similar in shape to Daddy's, and she had the same wiry build as her Japanese father. Coincidence, of course, but it was nice to think about.
Her fathers were very considerate about her feelings about being an orphan, probably because she suspected that they were also orphans. Neither of them had ever come out and just said it, but it was fairly obvious. Neither had ever mentioned any family, much less shown her pictures or introduced her to a distant relative. In fact, the only family they did claim were three other men, about their own age, with nothing at all in common, who were generally called her 'uncles'. Quatre and Trowa were also married, but living in the L4 cluster, where Quatre was amazingly rich and owned more companies than Julia wanted to think about. They had one daughter Julia's age named Katie, who she saw several times a year. Katie was a little strange, but very nice, and isolated because of her parent's wealth. Her other 'uncle' was a Preventer named Chang Wufei, whose wife also happened to be Julia's doctor. The two of them had five children, three girls ranging in age from a few younger than her to about five, and then twin boys who were only a few years old. She played with them whenever they visited, and thought of them as her cousins. His was the face that smiling forgot, but he was very nice and had shown Julia all around Preventer headquarters, in addition to telling her embarrassing stories about her parents from when she was little.
Now that she thought of it, she had no idea how the five had met, although she had asked several times. Each time one of her fathers had managed to distract her and lead the conversation in another direction, until she forgot her original question.
Realizing that she'd been standing in her room mostly naked for several minutes, she shook her head and started pulling on the sweats. Yes, not normal, that was her. Besides having two fathers, and being an orphan to boot, she had her own little abnormalities. Like the fact that she was a genius. Yup, a certifiable genius. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Mostly it meant that she was always bored in class, skipped a couple of grades, and then nearly sent away to be part of a study for 'gifted' children. She shuddered at how close she'd come to getting separated from her family, if Tousan hadn't realized what was going on and interrupted the process... After that both of her fathers had taken an active interest in her education, active interest in this case meaning that they basically took it over. While she had continued to attend regular boring classes during the day, every evening she sat down with one of them to learn something interesting, like molecular physics, or the history of propaganda used by various governments in the last fifty years, or the engineering behind the mobile suits, or in the reasoning that led to the creation of the mobile suits in the first place. All of it was a lot more interesting than anything she learned in school. Sometime in the last few years she realized how intelligent both of her parents were, that they were able to teach her all of that stuff, and that they managed not to let anyone else know about it. As far as she could tell, all of their neighbors thought that they were a perfectly normal (homosexual) couple. She'd followed their lead, and only got in trouble once when she displayed her knowledge by pointing out the obvious propaganda in some of the old history books they were reading. So now she was just barely sixteen, halfway through her senior year of high school with a bunch of training in a variety of subjects that no one knew about, and then...
And then, of course, there were her hobbies. Or rather, her one main hobby, which would be martial arts. Julia was well aware that some of her classmates thought that she was 'unfeminine' (at best) to spend so much time getting thrown around on the mat, but she didn't care.
When she was five or six, one of her best friends started taking a karate class, and talked about it so much that Julia had pestered her fathers until they agreed and signed her up for class. They'd been on hand for the first class, and had made it all of twenty minutes into the class before Duo-daddy stormed out onto the mat, fists and teeth clenched, to give the sensei the biggest tongue-lashing that Julia had ever seen.
Somehow he managed not to curse once in front of her, the other little kids, or the parents as he displayed his irritation with the teacher's 'discipline' and 'failure to teach proper basics' and a number of other sins that Julia hadn't understood at the time but now did and was horrified to think of.
One of the top students had been outraged at her father's lack-of-respect, and made as if to drag him off the mat. That was when Julia discovered that her cheerful, playful daddy was a fighter of some sort, quickly breaking the other guy's hold and giving him one warning before knocking him to the mat and holding him there for a full minute. Then he let him up, picked her up, and announced that they were leaving.
Despite that less-than-auspicious beginning, things had worked out surprisingly well. Both of her fathers had told her that if she wanted to learn to defend herself, they would help, but they had to find her another dojo. She hadn't had the heart to tell them that she'd been more interested in spending time with her friends than in actually learning to defend herself, and when she found out the result was that she got to spend more time with her dads, she was happy enough with that. For the three month gap between that first lesson and the time when they found a dojo that they felt was good enough for their daughter, they gave her some basic lessons in self-defense. After that they left her training up to her sensei, aside from watching it very carefully, until several years ago, when she asked them if they'd teach her some more, to go with what she was learning.
They hadn't been very happy (in fact, she got the impression that they wished she'd forgotten that they'd ever taught her), but after a little bit of cajoling, they agreed.
Now that she knew a little bit more about the different disciplines, she found what her parents taught her somewhat confusing. She'd thought, for a while, that maybe they met at a dojo or something, but the moment that they started teaching her again she knew better. Duo-daddy taught her with a style that could only be described as extremely dirty. Extremely dirty and extremely effective. Meanwhile, her otousan had a completely different style, one she couldn't identify from any discipline she'd ever heard of. It was also ruthlessly brutal. When she'd asked them about it, Daddy said that it was just something he'd picked up, so that he could take care of himself during the war.
She shivered. It must have been pretty awful back then if a couple of teenagers thought that they had to learn to protect themselves. Actually, people her age were already headed off for military academies, if they wanted. She wondered if either of her fathers had ever attended one.
Julia finished jamming her feet into a pair of otherwise ruined sneakers and headed back down the stairs and back to the workroom, catching her hair up in a ponytail as she walked. When she arrived, Daddy was once again underneath the engine with his feet sticking out again. Julia giggled, resisted the urge to kick his feet again, and lay down on the floor before wiggling her way underneath the large engine.
"How's it going?"
"Not too bad. See, some micrometeorites must have hit it, it's the only explanation for this type of fracture, see the pattern?"
"Yeah, I think so."
"That's not stress-related or caused from the impact that destroyed this," he continued. "So that has to be it, but I don't think that the damage is bad enough to stop us from turning it on."
'You think?"
"I'm almost certain," he said cheerfully. "Now get back."
"What?"
"Get back, I don't want you under here when I turn it on."
"Why?" she asked suspiciously.
"Because I just want to be careful."
"You think it's going to blow up, don't you?" she accused.
"No, I just want to be careful."
"If you get hurt, Tousan's going to kill you."
"Look, I'm going to be fine, it's not going to blow up."
"Then why do I have to go away?"
"I just want to be careful, Hee-chan will really kill me if you get hurt."
"So it's safe enough for you but not safe enough for me."
"Exactly."
"I'm not moving." Julia latched onto one of the pipes protruding out of the engine with her right hand and glared at her father. There was no way that she was going to let him risk himself over something stupid like this. Julia firmly believed that it was her job to keep both of her fathers out of trouble if at all possible.
"Julie..."
"If it's too dangerous for me to be here, then it's too dangerous for you to be here. Between the two of us we can rig something to turn it on from a distance in what, twenty minutes?"
"This would be a lot easier if you'd just get out of the way."
"No. Oh, and did you do anything about dinner?"
"Dinner?"
"It's your night, remember?" Since no one in their little household really enjoyed cooking, they'd come to an agreement some time ago that they'd share that chore, and as Julia had just pointed out, it was Duo-daddy's night.
She saw him bite his lip, probably to try to avoid cursing in front of her. It was kind of amusing, it wasn't like she didn't know those words, and he knew that she knew them as well, he just seemed to have something about not saying them in front of her. After a few seconds, he asked, "How does pizza sound?"
"Tousan's going to hate it."
"He'll eat it," Daddy said confidently.
"It's your funeral," Julia said with a shrug. "So, are we agreed? You go order the pizza while I start working on some way to turn it on that doesn't involve us getting blown up, and then we both turn it on together, from a distance?"
"Hey! I never..."
"Sure you did, Daddy," she said, giving him a kiss on the cheek and pulling him out from under the engine with her.
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As it turned out, they ran out of time to start up the engine that night, because first the pizza, then Tousan arrived at their house. After the pizza arrived, Julia took some time to clean up, so that she was actually able to throw her arms around her otousan's chest and give him a big hug without ruining the suit he had to wear for work. She'd never actually heard him complain about wearing it, but she thought that he didn't like it very much, since it never stayed on for more than five minutes after he arrived home.
Her outousan worked for some sort of computer company, testing their systems to make sure that they weren't vulnerable to hackers. He'd even shown her a little bit of what he did, and as far as she could tell, he was very good at his job.
"Tousan!" she shouted as he entered, and gave him a big hug.
"Hey, I'm supposed to do that," Daddy complained as he emerged from the kitchen, still with the grease stain on his face.
"Hn?" Julia was very proud of her father's ability to communicate an entire sentence without using a single word.
"Well, I'm the housewife, aren't I?" Daddy asked, fluttering his eyelashes and causing Julia to giggle and Tousan to roll his eyes.
"You have a job, baka. And a real housewife can cook." He glanced over at Julia, flashed her a quick smile, then mock-glared at Daddy. "You forgot again, didn't you?"
"Well, you know, pizza is a very good source of nutrition... Comeon, Hee-chan, you know you didn't marry me for my cooking skills!"
"Hn."
Julia quickly spun around to avoid seeing her parents kissing. There were some images that she just didn't need to have in her mind, and that was one of them. She didn't really have a problem with it, she just didn't want to see it. "I'll go get the table set," she muttered. Of course, when they were having pizza, setting the table meant putting out three plates and three cups, but it was always good to put together a record of being helpful, for when she really didn't want to help for one reason or another.
Five minutes later her fathers came into the kitchen. Daddy had cleaned the grease off his face, and Tousan was in his customary green tank-top and jeans. Chalk another one up to the not-normalcy of her family. A friend she'd once had over for dinner had gone on forever about seeing her father in a green tank-top, but that was what he'd worn for as long as she could remember, so she was used to it. It looked comfortable enough.
"How was work?" she asked them both as they each took a slice of pizza and sat down.
"Well, you saw the engine," Daddy told her. "But there wasn't much else. The problem is that when there isn't a war, there's not so much to salvage. Howard's thinking about branching off into mining asteroids, could be interesting."
"Three viruses and a worm got into the new accounting program," Tousan announced with a slight grimace.
"Bet they're not there anymore," Daddy teased.
"Hn."
"How was class, sweety?" Daddy asked.
"Fine. Sensei couldn't make it, so John took over the class, and he used me to demonstrate on most of the time," she told them proudly. "We got a couple of new guys in the class, too. Nice, both of them. One used to study karate, the other's never done anything before. I had to show him how to roll."
"Always gotta know how to fall before you can fight," Daddy said cheerfully. "All right, as your father I'm morally obligated to ask this. How was school?"
"Oh, it was fine, I picked my topic for my senior project." At Julia's school, all graduating students were required to do a major research project on a topic of their choice. Because you could pick anything you wanted and got out of one of your regular classes to do it, it was generally looked on as enjoyable rather than a chore.
"Oh, what was it?" Daddy grinned at her. "Are you going to write about your two wonderful parents?"
"No, unfortunately, I don't think they'd accept that as a topic. I'm going to research the Gundam pilots."
She was looking right at him, so she knew that it wasn't her imagination, her Duo-daddy did pale slightly when she said this. Tousan's expression didn't change, but something did, she could sense the tension in the air. "What's wrong?"
"That's a weird topic, Julie. A lot of people have some very strong feelings about them, even though the war was over fifteen years ago. Why'd you pick it?"
"That's why I picked it. I mean, they had a major impact on so many people's lives, and no one even knows who they are. I just thought it would be really interesting to find out everything I could about them, maybe try to guess why they did all the horrible stuff they did." She looked worriedly from face to face. "Is that OK?"
"Sure it is!" Daddy said, smiling again, although it looked a little forced. "Let us know if you need any help."
Since she'd expected that offer, she just smiled. "I will, but I'm really supposed to do this on my own, except for my advisor."
"Who is it?" Tousan asked.
"Mrs. Kinley, she's that English teacher I had two years ago. I'm going to go to school early tomorrow to talk about what sort of approach I should use."
Well, here's the next beginning of a story. Please let me know whether you think I should continue with it or not. I am also going to try to get 'The Others' finished soon.
Marika 8/9/01
"Hey, how you guys been?" Duo asked with a grin as the others seated themselves at the table in the conference room at Preventers headquarters.
"We've been well," Quatre responded with a slight smile. It was clear that he was nervous, though, from the way that he gripped Trowa's hand. Trowa's expression, as usual, was a blank mask, although now he patted Quatre's hand reassuringly as he nodded to Duo. "You?"
"Oh, great! We bought out that scavenge operation I told you about, and Heero's helping me run it!" he gave his lover a broad grin before turning back to Quatre. "He's thinking about getting a computer job somewhere, maybe, to pull in a little bit of extra legitimate money."
Quatre's smile broadened slightly as he tried not to laugh. "That's great."
Heero grunted before looking around the room. "Why did Une want to talk to us?" he asked flatly.
"I don't know," Quatre replied with a worried frown. His head snapped up as the door opened and Chang Wufei walked in the room, followed by Lady Une. Wufei greeted his comrades with a curt nod, followed by a slight smile, but the slight creased lines of his brow meant that he didn't know what was going on, either.
"Lady Une," Quatre said, politely rising from his chair to greet her.
She smiled, tight-lipped, and nodded at him. "It's good to see you again, I'm sorry it had to be under these conditions."
"What conditions?" Duo asked suspiciously as Quatre seated himself again, with Wufei also sitting on their side of the table. Une remained standing.
"We finally got around to finding and checking out the remaining labs of the scientists who created the Gundams," she said, sounding uncomfortable.
"So? Were the old bastards there, or did they run into hiding?" Duo asked lightly. "Or are they dead? I never really bothered to check."
"They're alive... and in custody."
"For what?" Duo asked, simulating only mild interest.
"For breaking the ban on genetic experimentation on humans," she said, putting down several folders and sliding them in front of the five former pilots. Everyone in the room was well aware that all of the Gundam pilots had undergone some genetic manipulation in order to allow them to pilot the Gundams, but they also knew this wasn't what she was talking about. She waited silently as they quickly skimmed through the files.
"Those bastards..." Duo said, both of his hands clenched into fists. "How could they... how did they dare..." he fell silent as Heero rested a hand on his shoulder, but his stony expression and the fire in his eyes said more clearly than words that he agreed. Quatre was unusually pale and looked slightly nauseous. Trowa's expression hadn't changed, although his body had become one clenched muscle, and he refused to look anyone in the eye. Wufei simply looked furious.
"I don't know," Une said simply. "I actually visited one of the labs myself. What was there was... horrible. Most of the... experiments didn't make it past a month or two, and they were bad enough, but the ones that made it to seven or eight months..." she shook her head. "I'm sorry. But that's not why I called you here. Another matter has come up."
"What?" Heero asked in a low voice, sounding dangerous. "The labs - and everything in them, must be destroyed." There was a definite hint of 'if you don't, I will' in his voice.
Une correctly interpreted the threat. "The labs and all of the research will be destroyed, you have my word on it. But there are... some things that cannot be destroyed, and we thought you might know what to do with them."
"What is it?" Wufei asked sharply, giving his superior a suspicious look.
Une swallowed. "The viable experiments," she said simply.
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"Daddy, I'm home!" Julia shouted cheerfully as she walked through the front door of her home. She tossed her school bag on the floor, then carefully set down the bag containing her aikido gi on the dining room table. She needed to wash her gi and this way she'd remember to do it later. "Daddy!" she shouted again when her first call produced no response. She thought she heard a faint response from the work room, and, grabbing a couple of apples on her way, went to investigate.
She pushed open the door and looked around at the room, which was filled with various pieces of electronic and mechanical equipment, covering every open surface and most of the floor. A casual inspection did not reveal her father anywhere, but Julia knew better. She began a careful search of the room, and was finally rewarded when she saw a pair of boots sticking out from under a large engine that looked like it belonged to an old Taurus mobile suit. Where he'd found an antique like that was beyond her.
"Duo-daddy!" she shouted again, kicking the sole of one of his boots.
There was a loud clang and then some muffled cursing, and her dad slid himself out from under the engine, rubbing his head and wincing. "Feel like warning me before you do that?" he complained loudly, and Julia giggled.
"I did try when I came in, but you didn't hear me," she said. "And you have something on your face."
"I do?" he reached up to touch the grease-stain on his cheek, and succeeded in smearing it all over his face in the process. Julia giggled again. She knew it was completely childish and that he did stuff like that just to get a rise out of her, but she couldn't help herself. He was so cute, and he worked so hard at acting that way. It was absolutely not fair that her thirty-something fathers were both cuter than she would ever be, but it was a fact of life, and something she'd gotten used to.
"Yup, just a little," she told him. "Where'd you get this thing?" she asked, looking at the engine.
"Some tourists found it when they were poking around the wreckage of that colony in the L4 cluster," Duo told her, grimacing. "They're just lucky that it was the engine that survived the battle and not one of the guns! Idiots could have been blown to bits!"
"L4? So how did you end up with it?" Julia asked, walking around it in a large circle. It was in amazingly good condition, considering that it had obviously been through a battle and then had sat in space for over fifteen years. Of course, mobile suits were designed to operate in space, so the cold vacuum probably hadn't affected the metal all that much, but still, it was an impressive find.
"Well, the guys that found it knew that I'd know how to deconstruct the damn thing without getting it to blow up. Would you believe that the power core is still active?"
Julia's eyebrows raised slightly. "Really?" That made it an even better find. After the Mariemaia Incident, most of the mobile suits left from the war were destroyed, and the few that remained were in the hands of the Preventers. It wasn't every day that she got to see hardware like this.
"Yup! Hey, Julie," Daddy said, his purplish eyes taking on a decidedly wicked gleam, "I have to dismantle it, but that doesn't mean that we can't play with it a little first, check out the output readings, that sort of thing. You wanna help?"
Julia grinned at him. "Really?"
"Do I ever lie?"
"Nope. Cool! Just give me a few minutes to get changed." Julia knew from past experience that she always got dirty when she helped her Duo-daddy in the workshop, and she was wearing some nice school clothes.
"Oh, it doesn't matter. What's the use of having nice clothes if you can't get them messy?" Duo asked.
Julia ran a skeptical eye up and down her father's current attire. As usual, he was dressed almost entirely in black, which probably didn't show stains as well, but was damn hot in the summer. She'd never quite managed to get him to explain why he only wore black. "Are you going to clean my stuff after it gets dirty?" she asked archly, raising an eyebrow.
"No, that's OK, why don't you go get changed now," he said, pretending to be terrified at the thought of having to clean anything. Julia giggled again and walked back into the main part of the house, snagging her bags on the way up to her room.
Once there, she once again dumped her school books on the carpet and carefully set her aikido bag on the bed. It was very important to have one's priorities straight, after all. She immediately kicked off her shoes and went to her dresser, digging through the bottom drawer for her scrubs. Ah... there they were, a pair of sweatpants that had been irredeemably ruined when she spilled half of a vat of bleach on herself when she was trying to clean the floor of the workroom, and a tee-shirt that was liberally sprinkled with spots of paint from when they last painted the house. She frowned slightly at the memory. Somehow her Duo-daddy had ended up 'accidentally' dumping an entire bucket of paint on his head, although she couldn't quite imagine how he expected them to believe that you could 'accidentally' do that. And as for her other father...
Only her otousan could manage to paint an entire wall without getting one drop of paint on him, well, until Duo-daddy threw his arms around Tousan to give him a big kiss, smearing his entire face and a good deal of his chest with paint. Tousan had glared at Daddy (and he had a very impressive glare), told him that he was going to kill him, and then attacked him, using his paintbrush as a weapon, and occasionally crumpling some paper into a ball and dunking it in the paint if he felt the need for a projectile. They'd come very close to having a spotted house for some time. Julia still laughed whenever she thought about it.
She quickly stripped off her clothes, folding them neatly and laying them on the chair - she didn't want to have to deal with getting wrinkles out of them later - but she paused before she started to pull on the sweatpants, glancing at herself in the mirror. She was just barely sixteen years old, but she had a decent start on a womanly body, she guessed. She was well aware of the fact that most people thought she was beautiful, and also aware that few teenage girls thought that they looked good. So she was mostly being influenced by society at large and her own self-doubts, or something. So what? She might as well be normal in at least one thing.
There was very little that could be considered truly 'normal' in her life. Well, on the surface everything seemed pretty normal. Teenage girl, living at home with her two working parents, spending most of her time with school or after-school activities. Perfectly normal. Right.
That was where the normalcy ended. To start with, both of her parents were male. Now, while homosexuality wasn't considered wrong, per say, it wasn't exactly something that most people were comfortable with, and there were very few homosexual couples out there with children, although that number had gone up dramatically in the last fifteen years because of all of the orphans from the war. Julia was one of those - her fathers hadn't tried to conceal that fact from her, and it didn't really bother her that much. It was obvious that she couldn't be their child, and they treated her just like they would if she was their flesh and blood. Better than some of her friends parents, actually, although sometimes she wished that she really was related to them.
She did look a little bit like them, though that was probably more wishful thinking than any real resemblance. Her eyes were slanted slightly, a strange blue-gray color and her hair was a few shades darker than Tousan's, just a few shades short of black, but her face was similar in shape to Daddy's, and she had the same wiry build as her Japanese father. Coincidence, of course, but it was nice to think about.
Her fathers were very considerate about her feelings about being an orphan, probably because she suspected that they were also orphans. Neither of them had ever come out and just said it, but it was fairly obvious. Neither had ever mentioned any family, much less shown her pictures or introduced her to a distant relative. In fact, the only family they did claim were three other men, about their own age, with nothing at all in common, who were generally called her 'uncles'. Quatre and Trowa were also married, but living in the L4 cluster, where Quatre was amazingly rich and owned more companies than Julia wanted to think about. They had one daughter Julia's age named Katie, who she saw several times a year. Katie was a little strange, but very nice, and isolated because of her parent's wealth. Her other 'uncle' was a Preventer named Chang Wufei, whose wife also happened to be Julia's doctor. The two of them had five children, three girls ranging in age from a few younger than her to about five, and then twin boys who were only a few years old. She played with them whenever they visited, and thought of them as her cousins. His was the face that smiling forgot, but he was very nice and had shown Julia all around Preventer headquarters, in addition to telling her embarrassing stories about her parents from when she was little.
Now that she thought of it, she had no idea how the five had met, although she had asked several times. Each time one of her fathers had managed to distract her and lead the conversation in another direction, until she forgot her original question.
Realizing that she'd been standing in her room mostly naked for several minutes, she shook her head and started pulling on the sweats. Yes, not normal, that was her. Besides having two fathers, and being an orphan to boot, she had her own little abnormalities. Like the fact that she was a genius. Yup, a certifiable genius. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Mostly it meant that she was always bored in class, skipped a couple of grades, and then nearly sent away to be part of a study for 'gifted' children. She shuddered at how close she'd come to getting separated from her family, if Tousan hadn't realized what was going on and interrupted the process... After that both of her fathers had taken an active interest in her education, active interest in this case meaning that they basically took it over. While she had continued to attend regular boring classes during the day, every evening she sat down with one of them to learn something interesting, like molecular physics, or the history of propaganda used by various governments in the last fifty years, or the engineering behind the mobile suits, or in the reasoning that led to the creation of the mobile suits in the first place. All of it was a lot more interesting than anything she learned in school. Sometime in the last few years she realized how intelligent both of her parents were, that they were able to teach her all of that stuff, and that they managed not to let anyone else know about it. As far as she could tell, all of their neighbors thought that they were a perfectly normal (homosexual) couple. She'd followed their lead, and only got in trouble once when she displayed her knowledge by pointing out the obvious propaganda in some of the old history books they were reading. So now she was just barely sixteen, halfway through her senior year of high school with a bunch of training in a variety of subjects that no one knew about, and then...
And then, of course, there were her hobbies. Or rather, her one main hobby, which would be martial arts. Julia was well aware that some of her classmates thought that she was 'unfeminine' (at best) to spend so much time getting thrown around on the mat, but she didn't care.
When she was five or six, one of her best friends started taking a karate class, and talked about it so much that Julia had pestered her fathers until they agreed and signed her up for class. They'd been on hand for the first class, and had made it all of twenty minutes into the class before Duo-daddy stormed out onto the mat, fists and teeth clenched, to give the sensei the biggest tongue-lashing that Julia had ever seen.
Somehow he managed not to curse once in front of her, the other little kids, or the parents as he displayed his irritation with the teacher's 'discipline' and 'failure to teach proper basics' and a number of other sins that Julia hadn't understood at the time but now did and was horrified to think of.
One of the top students had been outraged at her father's lack-of-respect, and made as if to drag him off the mat. That was when Julia discovered that her cheerful, playful daddy was a fighter of some sort, quickly breaking the other guy's hold and giving him one warning before knocking him to the mat and holding him there for a full minute. Then he let him up, picked her up, and announced that they were leaving.
Despite that less-than-auspicious beginning, things had worked out surprisingly well. Both of her fathers had told her that if she wanted to learn to defend herself, they would help, but they had to find her another dojo. She hadn't had the heart to tell them that she'd been more interested in spending time with her friends than in actually learning to defend herself, and when she found out the result was that she got to spend more time with her dads, she was happy enough with that. For the three month gap between that first lesson and the time when they found a dojo that they felt was good enough for their daughter, they gave her some basic lessons in self-defense. After that they left her training up to her sensei, aside from watching it very carefully, until several years ago, when she asked them if they'd teach her some more, to go with what she was learning.
They hadn't been very happy (in fact, she got the impression that they wished she'd forgotten that they'd ever taught her), but after a little bit of cajoling, they agreed.
Now that she knew a little bit more about the different disciplines, she found what her parents taught her somewhat confusing. She'd thought, for a while, that maybe they met at a dojo or something, but the moment that they started teaching her again she knew better. Duo-daddy taught her with a style that could only be described as extremely dirty. Extremely dirty and extremely effective. Meanwhile, her otousan had a completely different style, one she couldn't identify from any discipline she'd ever heard of. It was also ruthlessly brutal. When she'd asked them about it, Daddy said that it was just something he'd picked up, so that he could take care of himself during the war.
She shivered. It must have been pretty awful back then if a couple of teenagers thought that they had to learn to protect themselves. Actually, people her age were already headed off for military academies, if they wanted. She wondered if either of her fathers had ever attended one.
Julia finished jamming her feet into a pair of otherwise ruined sneakers and headed back down the stairs and back to the workroom, catching her hair up in a ponytail as she walked. When she arrived, Daddy was once again underneath the engine with his feet sticking out again. Julia giggled, resisted the urge to kick his feet again, and lay down on the floor before wiggling her way underneath the large engine.
"How's it going?"
"Not too bad. See, some micrometeorites must have hit it, it's the only explanation for this type of fracture, see the pattern?"
"Yeah, I think so."
"That's not stress-related or caused from the impact that destroyed this," he continued. "So that has to be it, but I don't think that the damage is bad enough to stop us from turning it on."
'You think?"
"I'm almost certain," he said cheerfully. "Now get back."
"What?"
"Get back, I don't want you under here when I turn it on."
"Why?" she asked suspiciously.
"Because I just want to be careful."
"You think it's going to blow up, don't you?" she accused.
"No, I just want to be careful."
"If you get hurt, Tousan's going to kill you."
"Look, I'm going to be fine, it's not going to blow up."
"Then why do I have to go away?"
"I just want to be careful, Hee-chan will really kill me if you get hurt."
"So it's safe enough for you but not safe enough for me."
"Exactly."
"I'm not moving." Julia latched onto one of the pipes protruding out of the engine with her right hand and glared at her father. There was no way that she was going to let him risk himself over something stupid like this. Julia firmly believed that it was her job to keep both of her fathers out of trouble if at all possible.
"Julie..."
"If it's too dangerous for me to be here, then it's too dangerous for you to be here. Between the two of us we can rig something to turn it on from a distance in what, twenty minutes?"
"This would be a lot easier if you'd just get out of the way."
"No. Oh, and did you do anything about dinner?"
"Dinner?"
"It's your night, remember?" Since no one in their little household really enjoyed cooking, they'd come to an agreement some time ago that they'd share that chore, and as Julia had just pointed out, it was Duo-daddy's night.
She saw him bite his lip, probably to try to avoid cursing in front of her. It was kind of amusing, it wasn't like she didn't know those words, and he knew that she knew them as well, he just seemed to have something about not saying them in front of her. After a few seconds, he asked, "How does pizza sound?"
"Tousan's going to hate it."
"He'll eat it," Daddy said confidently.
"It's your funeral," Julia said with a shrug. "So, are we agreed? You go order the pizza while I start working on some way to turn it on that doesn't involve us getting blown up, and then we both turn it on together, from a distance?"
"Hey! I never..."
"Sure you did, Daddy," she said, giving him a kiss on the cheek and pulling him out from under the engine with her.
------------
As it turned out, they ran out of time to start up the engine that night, because first the pizza, then Tousan arrived at their house. After the pizza arrived, Julia took some time to clean up, so that she was actually able to throw her arms around her otousan's chest and give him a big hug without ruining the suit he had to wear for work. She'd never actually heard him complain about wearing it, but she thought that he didn't like it very much, since it never stayed on for more than five minutes after he arrived home.
Her outousan worked for some sort of computer company, testing their systems to make sure that they weren't vulnerable to hackers. He'd even shown her a little bit of what he did, and as far as she could tell, he was very good at his job.
"Tousan!" she shouted as he entered, and gave him a big hug.
"Hey, I'm supposed to do that," Daddy complained as he emerged from the kitchen, still with the grease stain on his face.
"Hn?" Julia was very proud of her father's ability to communicate an entire sentence without using a single word.
"Well, I'm the housewife, aren't I?" Daddy asked, fluttering his eyelashes and causing Julia to giggle and Tousan to roll his eyes.
"You have a job, baka. And a real housewife can cook." He glanced over at Julia, flashed her a quick smile, then mock-glared at Daddy. "You forgot again, didn't you?"
"Well, you know, pizza is a very good source of nutrition... Comeon, Hee-chan, you know you didn't marry me for my cooking skills!"
"Hn."
Julia quickly spun around to avoid seeing her parents kissing. There were some images that she just didn't need to have in her mind, and that was one of them. She didn't really have a problem with it, she just didn't want to see it. "I'll go get the table set," she muttered. Of course, when they were having pizza, setting the table meant putting out three plates and three cups, but it was always good to put together a record of being helpful, for when she really didn't want to help for one reason or another.
Five minutes later her fathers came into the kitchen. Daddy had cleaned the grease off his face, and Tousan was in his customary green tank-top and jeans. Chalk another one up to the not-normalcy of her family. A friend she'd once had over for dinner had gone on forever about seeing her father in a green tank-top, but that was what he'd worn for as long as she could remember, so she was used to it. It looked comfortable enough.
"How was work?" she asked them both as they each took a slice of pizza and sat down.
"Well, you saw the engine," Daddy told her. "But there wasn't much else. The problem is that when there isn't a war, there's not so much to salvage. Howard's thinking about branching off into mining asteroids, could be interesting."
"Three viruses and a worm got into the new accounting program," Tousan announced with a slight grimace.
"Bet they're not there anymore," Daddy teased.
"Hn."
"How was class, sweety?" Daddy asked.
"Fine. Sensei couldn't make it, so John took over the class, and he used me to demonstrate on most of the time," she told them proudly. "We got a couple of new guys in the class, too. Nice, both of them. One used to study karate, the other's never done anything before. I had to show him how to roll."
"Always gotta know how to fall before you can fight," Daddy said cheerfully. "All right, as your father I'm morally obligated to ask this. How was school?"
"Oh, it was fine, I picked my topic for my senior project." At Julia's school, all graduating students were required to do a major research project on a topic of their choice. Because you could pick anything you wanted and got out of one of your regular classes to do it, it was generally looked on as enjoyable rather than a chore.
"Oh, what was it?" Daddy grinned at her. "Are you going to write about your two wonderful parents?"
"No, unfortunately, I don't think they'd accept that as a topic. I'm going to research the Gundam pilots."
She was looking right at him, so she knew that it wasn't her imagination, her Duo-daddy did pale slightly when she said this. Tousan's expression didn't change, but something did, she could sense the tension in the air. "What's wrong?"
"That's a weird topic, Julie. A lot of people have some very strong feelings about them, even though the war was over fifteen years ago. Why'd you pick it?"
"That's why I picked it. I mean, they had a major impact on so many people's lives, and no one even knows who they are. I just thought it would be really interesting to find out everything I could about them, maybe try to guess why they did all the horrible stuff they did." She looked worriedly from face to face. "Is that OK?"
"Sure it is!" Daddy said, smiling again, although it looked a little forced. "Let us know if you need any help."
Since she'd expected that offer, she just smiled. "I will, but I'm really supposed to do this on my own, except for my advisor."
"Who is it?" Tousan asked.
"Mrs. Kinley, she's that English teacher I had two years ago. I'm going to go to school early tomorrow to talk about what sort of approach I should use."
Well, here's the next beginning of a story. Please let me know whether you think I should continue with it or not. I am also going to try to get 'The Others' finished soon.
Marika 8/9/01