The carpool rolled up around 8 am and honked. Daniel and Mary never looked forward to those few days when they had to front up to the secret base. Daniel was looking forward to an eventual promotion but had to endure all manner of guinea pig tests to get it. Mary dreaded her reports to the project team. They were always with the questions that could not be answered gracefully, such as "Why has one twin not killed the other?" Simple answers like "they are evenly matched and built like brick shithouses" never seemed to suffice. In a normal office this would entail the boss asking for an explanation. In Mary's case it entailed being struck by a taser or dropped into a pit of something horrible.
Lilith and Angela were left to be watched and coached by 'SHE' the android maid/secret agent for the organisation. This generally meant they were guided into beating seven levels of smeg out of each other all day. At least it meant the house wouldn't burn down.
By the time Daniel got home just after 4pm, SHE had gone and the twins were already attempting to cook. He could tell because the street stank of burning plastic.
"Take the wrappers off BEFORE you cook them, BEFORE," he explained to Angela.
"Before. Right," Angela nodded. He'd told her a hundred times at least. Nothing remotely domestic sank into either girl unless it was beaten in with bricks. Angela scraped the melted plastic wrappers from the frying pan and dumped the soggy hamburgers onto a plate. She took a fork out of the drawer and took her plate to the table.
"You can't eat that!" Daniel pointed at her.
"Why not!?"
"... she doesn't even know... Let me cook you up a nice dinner instead how about that?" Daniel took another pot out of the cupboard and held it up with a pathetic grin.
"Alright!" Angela tossed the plate, 'food' and all, into the sink and wandered off. Daniel sighed, he'd rescued them from probable food poisoning so many times he'd lost count. At least they had finally stopped playing with the toilet water.
Mary arrived home not long later, her head aching and her skin twitching. It had gone well, relatively. She was still alive and had all her limbs... still attached to her body. What she really wanted was a nice bath and for the twins to be acting less like monkeys.
When she opened the gate she saw the twins were fighting in the front garden, in their underwear.
"Check out what SHE taught me!" Lilith had Angela in a painful headlock and was crushing the girl as hard as she could manage, "Cool huh!"
Mary tilted her head and examined them for a moment, "I don't know. Angela still has her arms free."
Angela heard this and reached up, grabbed a handful of Lilith's hair and pulled. Lilith shrieked but Mary wasn't in the mood to care, "You're fighting like a couple of girls," she grumbled on her way into the house. The waft of good food she was greeted with was just what she needed, "Ahh that's nice."
Daniel held up a spatula, "I'm making everyone toasted cheese sandwiches!"
Mary smiled and headed for the bathroom, "I'm just going to have a quick bath first."
While Daniel fed the twins, Mary ran the bath, poured in some perfumed lotion and sank in with a sigh. She closed her eyes and heard the door open. Daniel walked in with a grin, "Can I join?" Mary smiled.
The bath was really far too small for the both of them but Mary hardly minded. She washed Daniel's back and noticed a grey hair. Daniel gave a yelp when she plucked it out.
"Grey hair," she said absently and held it up. Daniel turned his head and squinted at the errant hair, "I do not have grey hair!"
"Relax I only found one... oh wait..."
"Ow!"
"Just kidding!" Mary laughed to hide her concern. There really were a lot of grey hairs there, more than she'd noticed lately. 'He really is under a lot of stress,' she thought, 'things will be quieter when he gets that promotion.'
