Julia was in a foul mood, and she didn't want to take it out on anyone else, so she was glad when she got home and discovered that both of her parents were still at work. Actually, it was probably a good thing that she didn't have aikido today, because she was entirely in the wrong mind-set to get anything accomplished, although she probably would have managed to hurt herself or someone else.
It wasn't that anything had gone wrong, it was that nothing was going particularly right. She'd thrown herself into her project with an intensity that was probably obsessive, and one that would have been frightening to most people. She'd been immersing herself in the not-so-distant past for the last two weeks, and very little of what she'd found seemed to make any sense. That was all right, she'd been expecting to put together information, but it wasn't that the information didn't make any logical sense, it was more that her mind refused to accept it. She felt a kind of shocked horror that this sort of information had to be hunted for, and it was this part of the information that she couldn't, wouldn't accept. It should be a part of public record, not to mention taught in the schools, so that it wasn't forgotten, so that it never happened again.
When she learned about the history of the war in school, the teacher and books went on in great length about the friction between the various Earth governments, and about the formation of the Earth-Sphere Alliance, and then about the constant battles between those countries who had joined and those who had not. There was, of course, mention of Heero Yuy, the pacifistic ambassador from the colonies, who was assassinated in the mid-seventies. There was even a little mention of the colonies' desire for peace and independence prior to the appearance of the Gundams, although there was a lot more attention given to it after the appearance of the Gundams, as the various authors of the books tried to explain what could cause people to go out and commit atrocities on the level that the Gundam pilots did. But as far as she could tell, none of those authors had done any kind of research when they were writing their papers, since most of them insisted that the Gundams were supported by some tiny extremist faction in the colonies.
A little bit of basic research about the Gundams, combined with what Daddy had told her, convinced her that her initial instincts had been right, that it couldn't be some tiny little group. The Gundams, if they were anything like the image she was slowly building in her head, were just too expensive for one minor extremist faction to build. A substantial part of the population must have had some idea that countermeasures were being taken, even if they only donated money to the cause. So, the logical conclusion from that was that there had to be a good reason for that many people to be willing to support the construction of machines capable of mass destruction. So she went looking for evidence of that.
And she found it, which was the current cause of her disgust and horror with the entire situation. How could this stuff be omitted from the books? It had taken some looking, but the information wasn't concealed, just... tucked away. Martial law imposed on the colonies for months, years at a time... constant military occupation of the pacifist colonies... their freedom and independence taken from them by force years before... no freedom of speech, no freedom to speak of at all, communications between the colonies were eliminated, except for military communiques... plagues, horrible plagues for which cures were known, plagues that would have been dealt with in a matter of weeks on Earth, which were allowed to sweep through the slums of the poorer colonies, killing anywhere from 1/2 to 7/8 of the population.
At this point she'd stopped to think. One of the few things that she did know about her parents' background was that they were both from the colonies. They probably weren't aware that she knew it, but she'd figured it out years ago. She'd had a friend when she was little whose parents had come from the colonies, and there were certain mannerisms, certain speech patterns and assumptions they made in everyday life that made it obvious, once you figured out what you were looking at. Like always closing doors. In the colonies, most doors to houses and sometimes to individual rooms were sealed so tightly that in case there was a breach through the outer wall of the colony and the air started escaping, you'd stand a good chance of surviving until it could be patched up. Or eating every single thing on your plate. There wasn't much extra food in the colonies, and even if there had been, there was a limited amount of space with which to dispose of it. So you ate everything, and made sure that there was very little that actually had to be thrown away, instead of reused or recycled. Living in a place where everything was balanced so delicately certainly led them to be more ecologically conscious.
So, because nothing was ever simple, that raised the question of why none of this was ever mentioned, or included in the curriculum. Well, the immediate answer was easy - the Alliance probably did not allow people to speak or write about what was really happening in the colonies. And since communication and travel between the colonies was so restricted, it would be difficult to get the word out. But that didn't explain why nothing had been said later on, why it wasn't known now. The information she'd found hadn't been hidden, just difficult-to-find. She momentarily played with the idea of the current United Earth Government deliberately suppressing the information, then abandoned that idea. They were not in the business of trying to hide the sins of the past governments - if they had, she never would have found what she had. So why wasn't it there?
She couldn't think of anything, and was on the verge of asking one of her parents when an idea occurred to her. She'd been trying to avoid talking to her parents about her research project whenever possible, because she didn't want to upset them, but that itself gave her an idea. The few adults she had talked to already all reacted in different fashions, but the reaction was always negative. It was a difficult thing for her to grasp, something that would affect an entire generation that way, make them close up, or frown, or shudder in horror or fear or she didn't even know what else. Sometimes things she saw in her parents made her think they felt guilty or something, although that didn't make much sense, they'd only been kids during the war. Of course, emotional responses rarely had anything to do with logic. Maybe they'd known someone who died in the war, and felt guilty for not stopping it, even if there was nothing they could do. She certainly wasn't going to invade their privacy by asking them. There were some things it was OK to ask your parents about that they probably wouldn't tell you on their own, wars from their childhoods were not one of them.
It was entirely possible that it was just something that most people didn't want to think about, let alone relive by writing a lot about it. She wasn't willing to let it lie at that, but it was a good enough explanation for now.
So she'd gotten some things accomplished in the last few weeks. The lack of answers was frustrating, but she'd expected that. The information she'd found that should be readily available but wasn't irritated her to the point of anger, but that wasn't what had her stomping around her room, kicking a pillow across the floor to see how far she could get it to bounce off the wall. She could get it to bounce pretty far. While she was chasing her pillow around the room, at least she wasn't doing something else, like punching the wall. It was better than actually destroying something, which is what she really wanted to do, but it probably wasn't a good idea to give in to those impulses.
The main frustration right now was Mrs. Kinley. Today Julia had had her fourth meeting with her 'advisor', and her first real fight. After the uncomfortable silences in the first meeting, it only got worse from there. Mrs. Kinley was completely unreasonable about the Gundam pilots, refusing to even think about what their motives might have been. She was very quiet and usually pretty polite about it, but most of her arguments came down to the fact that the pilots were responsible for everything bad that had happened during the war, and that they were nothing more than mindless killers. In short, she hated the pilots. And Julia still hadn't been able to bring herself to ask why. It didn't seem right, but...
Julia abruptly came to a decision, and abandoned her pillow-kicking to sit at her computer. Within seconds she was on the internet, searching for information. There was something not quite right with this picture, that she wasn't willing to ask her teacher for information because it was rude, but that she was willing to look for information on her on the internet. She shrugged to herself and decided to put the issue aside for now.
By the time that Tousan and Daddy got home a few hours later, she had her answer. Mrs. Kinley used to have a brother who was a soldier. He was killed during the war in a Gundam pilot attack.
Julia cleared the information and quickly hid her tracks, then shut off her computer. Then she sat and stared at the blank screen for a while. What was she supposed to do now? From the beginning, she'd wanted to give an even, balanced report. All that she'd found in the last few weeks had only made her more interested in the Gundam pilots than ever before. She wanted to know more about them, what sort of situations they came from in the colonies, and why they did the horrible things that they did. And were they so horrible... well, she wasn't quite ready to think about that yet. But she hadn't decided to do this to vilify the pilots, which was what Mrs. Kinley seemed bent on doing. If Julia wanted to do that, she could have looked at any one of the hundreds of books on the topic. It was easy enough to write that way, after all, the Gundam pilots weren't going to show up and dispute any of their arguments.
She heard the front door open and close, and a couple seconds later, heard footsteps. "Welcome home, Tousan!" she shouted without bothering to turn or even open the door to her room. She knew it was Tousan because he had this funny little ritual, where he always stopped to see who was in a room before he entered it. She'd seen it so many times she could even picture it in her head - the door opened, and his eyes quickly swept over the entire room. Once he'd seen where everyone was, he took one step into the room to look at the corners that he hadn't been able to seen before, then continued normally. It was kinda cute, actually.
In response, she got some sort of muffled grunt that she couldn't quite make out through the door and halfway across the house. Actually, that didn't make much of a difference, if she could hear his footsteps on the floor at that distance, she could certainly hear his voice. That grunt probably would have been indistinct even if she was standing right next to him.
She heard footsteps coming closer and then there was a knock on her door. "Come in," she called, then turned as the door opened. Her otousan quickly glanced around the room, took a single step into it, checked the two corners he'd missed before, then stepped normally into the room and closed the door behind him. "How was your day?" he asked.
"OK," she answered with a slight shrug. She wasn't sure if she was ready to talk about what had happened, or admit what she'd done yet. "You?"
"Fine."
Julia loved her otousan dearly, but she had some difficulty talking to him sometimes. Or maybe it was a great deal of difficulty. Now was one of those times. After a short strained silence, she ventured, "I got a hundred on my math test."
"Good."
Julia stared at her father in surprise. That was more of a response then she usually got. "Is everything all right, Tousan?" she asked.
He stared at her for a second, clearly not sure what to say next. Finally he said, "Daisuki."
"Daisuki, Tousan," she replied, standing up to give him a hug. "Is everything all right? Is Daddy OK?"
Tousan just stared at her for another second, then shook his head slightly. "He's fine. I just... had a long day."
Julia eyed her father suspiciously. He generally wasn't vocal enough to get into evasions, but this sounded suspiciously like one. "You're sure?" she asked. "Nothing's wrong? I thought you said your day went fine."
"I was being polite," he said shortly, his lips curling upwards slightly. "Duo's been coaching me."
Julia giggled, although she knew that he was just trying to change the subject. "I'll tell him that you did very well. That was very polite of you. Now, would you please tell me why you had a long day?"
-----------
Since Tousan was the one making dinner that night, it was pretty good. He might not like the chore very much, but he was a more than fair cook when he put his mind to it.
"Hey, Julie, why are you so quiet?" Daddy asked as he finished scraping the last of the food off his plate. Once it was in his mouth, he leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head and somehow making a contented sound around the mouthful of food.
After Tousan had explained why it had been a long day (a new employee accidentally crashed his computer and nearly took down the network, then several people some how mistook *him* for the company technician, and thought that he was supposed to help them - how they made that mistake, Julia would never guess), she'd gone back to her quiet study of the blank screen. She had no idea what she should do with what she'd found out. Should she go to the class advisor and ask for a different mentor? But then she'd have to say why, and probably admit to what she'd done. But she wasn't sure if she could work with Mrs. Kinley...
Julia started out of her thoughts to look at Daddy's expectant face. "I... ah..." she stammered, then recklessly decided to tell them what had happened. "Mrs. Kinley and I had a fight."
Daddy blinked. "Mrs. Kinley? Your mentor?"
Julia nodded nervously. Her parents, both together and separately, had given her several uses on the appropriate use of her gifts, and she was pretty sure that they weren't going to be happy with her actions earlier today. But she hadn't actually hacked anything... well, not much.
"Why?"
"She... see, I've been trying to figure out what was going on in the colonies, trying to figure out why they sent the Gundams to Earth." Once again as she said the word 'Gundam', she saw reactions from both of her parents. "And... well, she just seems to think that they were nothing more than bloodthirsty terrorists. I mean, I know they were terrorists, everyone knows that, and they did kill a lot of people, but that's not the entire story, right?" She looked at the two of them for confirmation, but neither responded. "So anyway, she just hates the Gundam pilots, but I didn't know why, so I... ah... I sorta went on the internet and looked for information on her. I know I shouldn't have," she quickly continued, "but I was trying to understand, and I didn't want to ask her and get her upset..."
"It's all right, honey," Daddy finally answered. "Although I'm glad that you recognize that there might be better ways to handle this situation."
Julia nodded guiltily. "I know, and I'm sorry. But... I found out why she hates them so much. She had a brother, and he was killed by one of the Gundam pilots." She paused as Daddy closed his eyes for several seconds, then he opened them and she continued. "But I don't know what I can do now. I'm not sure I can work with her, but I can't go tell someone that I need to change mentors because I went behind my mentor's back and found something like this out about her! I don't know what to do."
"That's a difficult situation," Daddy said after a long silence. "Just how much does she affect your project?"
Julia thought for a few seconds. "Not that much, if I don't want her to. I mean, I'm required to have a meeting with her every week, but that's about it. But if she gets really mad at me, she can kill my grade."
"But if she does that for no good reason, you can protest it, can't you?" he pressed. This was the way her parents always operated, for as long as she could remember. She could come to them for advice for just about anything, and they would do the best they could to give it to her, but they never did anything for her. They gave her solutions that she could use herself, except for the one or two occasions when there simply hadn't been anything that she could do. In those instances, they had taken care of the situation almost the moment she told them.
Julia nodded slowly, seeing where this was leading. "And if it comes to that, what happened to her brother will probably come out anyway. I won't be doing anything wrong, even if I don't do what she tells me to."
"What's she telling you to do?" Daddy demanded, his eyes narrowing dangerously.
Julia shook her head. "She didn't come out and say it, but basically she wanted me to write another one of those pieces of garbage that are written about the Gundam pilots, you know, the ones with no historical references, just saying how horrible the Gundam pilots are. I want to write an actual research paper."
"You think those papers are garbage?" Daddy asked her soberly, and Julia realized that she might have said something that would really bother her parents. She wished she had thought about that before she opened her mouth. Even if some of the colonists supported the Gundams, they had killed a lot of people, and the colonies had disowned them. Hearing their daughter say that the Gundams might be something other than just 'murdering terrorists' had to be hard for them.
Julia bit her lip. "I mean... I don't know whether they're right or not, but they haven't done any sort of research to back up so much of what they claim. They just rely on public curiosity and outrage to sell their work. I... I may or may not end up writing something like that, but if I do, it's going to have some actual research behind it, not just hysterical yelling." She looked at them anxiously, hoping that they wouldn't be too upset.
To her surprise, Duo-daddy smiled. "I'm very proud of you, Julie, for looking for the truth and not just taking the easy way out."
Julia blinked. She wasn't quite sure what she had been expecting (had she honestly thought that they would tell her she was a bad person for wanting to find out the truth?) but this wasn't it. After a couple of seconds, she swallowed, and spurned on by his encouragement, asked something she'd been wondering about for a long time. "Um... you guys are from the colonies, right?"
Her fathers exchanged a startled glance, one that almost looked alarmed. Then Daddy said, "Yeah, we are. I'm from L2, originally, and Heero is from L1. How did you know?"
Julia shrugged slightly. "It's just little things that you do. Remember Amy? From elementary school? Her mother was from the colonies, and she did a lot of the same stuff you do," she said, and told them a little of what she'd observed.
They exchanged another unreadable look. After another silence, Daddy said, "That's very good. You're very observant."
Julia smiled briefly at them both. Her Duo-daddy was a lot more easy-going than Tousan, but if he gave her a compliment, it was still something to be taken seriously. "So anyway, I was wondering if I could just ask you a couple of questions. Nothing really specific, just a little bit about it was like living in the colonies. I know that you were just kids when this stuff happened, but... Please?" she ended hopefully.
Another glance, then Daddy said uncomfortably, "Sure, honey, you ask away. If we have the answers, we'll give them to you."
"Thanks. Um, were the colonies really under martial law? I mean, curfews and everything?"
Duo-daddy closed his eyes for a second before he responded. "Ah, not in my colony, sweetie. But that was mostly because the Alliance didn't care enough to control it that way. There wasn't anything valuable enough for them to worry about. Mostly they just controlled every bit of trade that did go on within the colony, and cut us off from everyone else, so we couldn't get any relief."
"Relief?" she asked softly, trying to understand, a little, what he was talking about. She had a feeling that things had been much worse than he could ever tell her, but she wanted... no, needed... to understand some part of what her parents had gone through, of the time that she was immersing herself in.
"Most of the L2 colonies were in an economic slump before Heero Yuy was assassinated," Daddy said with a glance at his husband. "From there it went downhill fast. Most of the colony I grew up on was a slum. I don't even think any of the other colonies knew what was happening there," he muttered, almost to himself. "I sure as hell know that Earth didn't. But any relief that could have been sent... wasn't allowed to reach the people, at least not that I saw."
Julia wanted to ask more, but when she saw the look in Daddy's eyes, she bit her lip. It was too much, she didn't want to upset him, not like this. She'd known that what happened before and during the war must have been bad for the colonists, but she didn't think it would be this bad. His face... it almost seemed dead, his eyes looked like holes staring out of his face. Julia closed her eyes for a second, not wanting to see that expression on her father's face. It didn't belong there, it was just wrong to see an expression like that on your parent's face - she knew it was absolutely ridiculous, parents were people just like anyone else, her fathers weren't perfect or immortal or anything, but it just seemed wrong to see him weak like that.
She opened her eyes... and stared. Her father was looking at her with a faintly curious expression, a slight smile on his face. "Sorry about that, honey. Does that answer your question?" There was absolutely no sign of that half-dead expression he'd just been wearing, no sign that he'd been upset at all.
Julia might have been young, but she hadn't been born yesterday, and she certainly wasn't stupid. She knew that that was not a healthy reaction to have to something like that, but she didn't know what to do about it. Glancing at Tousan, she saw a slight bit of concern in his eyes, and relaxed. He'd seen the problem and he'd help Duo-daddy, later, when she wasn't around. She smiled weakly. "Ah, yeah, that's fine, thanks." She promised herself that she would never bring this topic up again.
"Guess it's your turn, Hee-chan," Daddy said, turning his eyes towards his husband.
Julia started to shake her head, saying that it wasn't necessary, but Tousan had already begun to speak. "I spent much of my... youth traveling," he said. "There were many restrictions upon the freedoms of the colonies." His emotionless recitation clashed strongly with what she'd just seen from Duo-Daddy, it was more like he was giving a report in school, not telling her about something he'd actually witnessed. In a way, it was just as disturbing to see as Daddy's reaction. "There were also rebels there, although for the most part they were completely ineffectual." His voice had a hint of disapproval in it, and Julia wondered at it. "The Alliance crushed them wherever they found them. The common people were too frightened to do anything to fight for their freedom. But there was reason for that fear." He paused, then nodded his head slightly, as if he'd reviewed what he just said and approved of it.
"Ah, thanks," Julia said, and promised herself that she wouldn't bring up the topic around him, either. It didn't seem to have upset him the way it did Duo-daddy, but that reaction didn't seem healthy, either. They finished the rest of dinner and silently cleaned up, and then Julia headed up to her room. Something about what her otousan had told her was bothering her, and she wanted to chase it down.
She felt sort of bad for analyzing her father this way, but she was curious, and she almost always followed things that made her curious. It wasn't as if it could really hurt anyone, anyway.
Throwing herself onto her bed, she bounced once, then rolled over on her back to stare at the ceiling. She took out a small set of balls and began juggling them, just a simple pattern, something to keep her hands occupied while she thought. The ceiling hadn't changed since the last time she lay on her bed and stared at it. I really ought to do something about that, she thought lazily, allowing her mind to drift. This was the best way to figure something out, to bring it to the surface, much better than concentrating on it and driving herself crazy. Maybe I should paint a maze on it or something. It would be more interesting than off-white, at least.
Now, Tousan... He had spoken, and something had been wrong. He said he traveled around a lot. I wonder what he did? Julia smiled to herself. Maybe he was a circus performer, like Trowa. The thought was enough to make her giggle. She didn't know much about the histories of her uncles, either, but they'd taken her to a circus when she was younger, and Trowa took her back behind the tents, introduced her to the lions, and then introduced her to his sister. She'd seen Cathy a few times since then, and each time wondered if Cathy was actually Trowa's sister or if she was a sister to Trowa like Quatre and Daddy were 'brothers'. In any case, Cathy had told her that a while back, Trowa had been in the circus. Even better, he'd been a clown in the circus. She couldn't imagine the quiet and often-solemn Trowa being a clown, but she wouldn't have pegged Quatre as a multi-billionaire, either. Cathy now ran quite a bit of the circus, but when she was younger, she'd been a knife-thrower. She'd promised to teach Julia how to do it someday, but every time Julia asked, she was told to wait 'until she was a little older.'
In any case, the thought of Tousan as a circus clown was even more unlikely than the thought of Trowa as a clown.
No, she had a hard time picturing Tousan as a member of any sort of group like that. He probably traveled around with... who? She was assuming that it wouldn't be his family. His guardians, maybe? Maybe they were merchants or something like that. Not Alliance officials, he wouldn't have spoken of the Alliance with such scorn if that had been the case. Not rebels, either, it hadn't sounded like he thought any more of them...
Her eyes flew open, and the small balls dropped onto her stomach as she lost the pattern. That was it! That was what had been bothering her! Her father had listed a number of groups during his discussion, but he'd never acted as though he were a member of any one of them! Her brow furrowed as she replayed the conversation in her head - he'd spoken against the Alliance, the Rebels, and the common people... what did that leave?
Well, a lot, actually. Common people was a fairly vague term. So, for that matter, was Rebel. Alliance was pretty straightforward, although as she'd learned with that entire confusion between Oz and the Alliance, it wasn't quite as simple as it seemed. But Rebel... well, if he meant anyone that spoke out against the Alliance, that covered a lot of territory, if he meant people who had been branded Rebels by the Alliance, that covered less, and if he meant the people who'd actually picked up weapons to fight against the Alliance, that covered even less. And the phrase 'common people' had so many different meanings that it was useless to try to narrow them down without more information.
Julia sighed. Well, she'd figured out what she'd missed, but she wasn't going to be able to find out more about her father's past from it. Too bad.
I wonder where the Gundam pilots came from? The thought popped into her mind almost automatically. A good many of her thoughts nowadays came to this conclusion. It was inevitable, she was spending so much time concentrating on them, and there was so much that was unknown about them, that any query she had about anyone naturally applied to the pilots as well.
It would be nearly impossible to tell, after all, no one knew who they were, much less where they'd come from.
Hmm... There was something tickling the edges of her mind, but it refused to surface.
After a few minutes of concentration failed to raise anything, Julia shrugged to herself and went to her computer. In the past few days she'd found numerous references to '04's support troops', whatever that meant. She'd thought that Gundams were completely self-sufficient, but apparently 04 had... well, someone following him around, at least. She wanted to track that down before she forgot about it.
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"Stop!"
Julia jolted out of a deep sleep at the shout that echoed through the house. She automatically slapped her hand down on the alarm clock and rolled out of bed, and was two steps across the room when she realized several very important facts: 1. Her alarm hadn't gone off. 2. It was still dark out. 3. It was the middle of the night. 4. She'd woken up because someone had screamed.
Throwing off the last vestiges of sleep, Julia silently walked to the door of her bedroom and eased it open. She only opened it a crack, and then listened. It took some work, but she managed to focus her hearing on her parent's room, ignoring the sounds of the television show their neighbors were watching. When she was younger, she used to get headaches because of everything that she was listening to, but her fathers had explained that she just had to concentrate on whatever conversation she was interested in, and filter out everything else. It took some work, but Julia learned to do it, and now it was completely automatic, unless she wanted to listen in on something that was somewhat distant, like this. She figured that everyone had these problems, and that she just had a little more trouble dealing with it than most people because of the way her mind worked.
In a couple of seconds, she'd filtered out the neighbor's tv and heard heavy breathing coming from her parents' room through their closed door. "Shh, it's all right," said a soft voice. It took her several seconds to identify it as Tousan. His voice was different, it sounded so... gentle. It wasn't that she thought he was unfeeling, or that he didn't love her, but he did not express those feelings well. His awkward statement this afternoon was highly unusual, strained though it had been. Come to think of it, she'd never really figured out why he'd been acting so strange. It didn't sound like he'd had a good day, but it didn't sound like he'd had a *bad* day, either, not enough to account for it. It was almost as if he needed some reassurance that she still loved him, but that didn't make any sense. Why on Earth would he think that she didn't love him anymore? Maybe it just had been a bad day.
Julia's attention snapped back to her parents' room as she heard a second voice. "I'm all right." It sounded like a hoarse whisper, and Julia could barely hear it. It took her another several seconds to recognize Daddy's voice. It sounded... she didn't know what it sounded like, she'd never heard him speak that way before.
"Which one was it?" That was Tousan, again speaking in that very soft, gentle voice.
A weak bark of laughter, then a slight snort, then Daddy responded, "Maxwell again. What else would it be?"
Julia frowned slightly. Why would her father be talking about... having bad dreams about... his own last name?
After a few seconds, Daddy continued again, "I should have expected it, after Julie brought it up..."
Julia gasped, and the voices in the other room immediately went silent. Without waiting, Julia silently eased the door closed, then hurried back to bed and buried herself under the covers. Several seconds later, she heard the door to her room open.
Counting silently, she made sure that her breathing was slow and even, and almost a minute later, she heard the door close, and breathed a silent sigh of relief. Her parents didn't know that she knew that trick, and she'd prefer to keep it that way, so she let them catch her laying their pretending to sleep every so often.
After he left, she didn't move back to the door. Truth be told, she'd already been feeling a little guilty about listening in on her parents' conversation, but her curiosity had gotten the best of her. Now the danger of getting caught was more than enough to tip the balance in the other direction. Besides, she had plenty to think about now, anyway. Something *she'd* said had given Daddy nightmares. Asking him about his past had given him nightmares bad enough for him to wake up screaming? And what did Maxwell have to do with it?
With those disturbing questions in her mind and a heavy feeling of guilt resting in her heart, she finally drifted off into a restless sleep.
----------
"She's asleep," Heero reported as he returned to their bedroom and climbed back into bed beside Duo.
Duo chuckled, but it sounded forced, and Heero wrapped his arms around the slightly smaller man. "She certainly does sleep well, sometimes I think you could land Wing on the house and she wouldn't wake up. And that's a good thing," he added after a moment's thought.
Heero nodded, knowing what his koi was talking about. Even so many years after the war, neither of them slept particularly well or deeply. Especially right after Julia first came to them, he'd found himself waking every time she rolled over or made a sound that he didn't recognize, in addition to the dozens of feedings that were necessary throughout the night. That she could sleep so deeply was a sign that she really felt safe, that she didn't have to worry about who would sneak up on her if she didn't wake at the slightest sound.
"Are you all right?" Heero asked slowly, after hesitating for several seconds. Even after all these years, he sometimes wasn't sure how to handle himself when it came to emotional issues, especially involving Duo.
"I'll be fine. Like I said, I should have expected it," he said, shaking his head slightly. His eyes were still hidden by his bangs, so Heero couldn't be sure of how he really felt. "Do you think I upset her too much?"
"Hn. No more than me." To be honest, Heero wasn't entirely certain what their daughter thought about their responses to her question. She'd seemed worried, though. He didn't doubt that he'd confused her this afternoon, but he'd needed to hear it, before she found out about their pasts. There was no doubt in his mind that she would, it was just a matter of how long.
"I called Quatre today, to warn him," Duo commented. "I just thought that he ought to know what's going to happen."
"And?" Heero asked, when Duo hesitated.
"He already knew," Duo snorted softly. "I don't know why I was surprised. He said that Katie told him about it a couple of weeks ago."
Heero blinked, then shrugged slightly. He probably should have anticipated that Quatre and Trowa's daughter would already know about something like this. It didn't really matter, anyway - it wasn't as if she didn't know how to keep a secret, and Quatre and Trowa should know about this.
"I warned Wufei, too, and he said that he'd pass word along to Sally. He's... a little worried, but he says that if we need help with anything, they'll provide it. Otherwise, they'll let us deal with it."
Heero nodded slightly, that sounded like Wufei.
"Quatre also offered help, if we need it, but he didn't think there was much we could do about it. I didn't ask him if Katie told him what happened or not. I don't think I want to know." He sighed, then settled a little more comfortably into Heero's arms. "You know how lucky Julia is? Sometimes I'm so grateful for it, that she didn't end up like Katie, and then... I feel so guilty. I don't know how Quatre and Trowa have managed."
"They're Gundam pilots," Heero said without thinking. It was true, in a way. Being a Gundam pilot meant that you dealt with whatever came your way, and that you didn't give up. It was as simple as that. It also wasn't the best thing he could have said at the moment, and he realized that an instant after the words left his mouth.
Duo's entire body tensed, and Heero tightened his grip on his koi. "Yeah, I know, I'm just glad we have Julia, you know?"
"She's our daughter."
"Yeah, I know."
Heero waited several minutes, then asked, "Do you want to go back to sleep?"
The way Duo's body tensed up gave him his answer before he even spoke. "No... not yet. I just want to stay like this for a while."
All right, another longish author's note. First of all, I know it may seem like there's an awful amount of evidence for Julia to see, but I'm going under the assumption that the last things you question are things that are closest to you. As for what happened in the colonies during the Alliance's occupation, aside from the little mentioned in the Episode Zeros for all the pilots, I haven't been able to find any official information, so I'm making it up as I go along. If anyone knows of anything official that I've got wrong, please let me know.
Also I wanted to thank Julia, Kelly, Ari, RavynFyre, and anyone else I missed who sent me information on various Japanese words. The help was very much appreciated.
Marika 10/2/01
It wasn't that anything had gone wrong, it was that nothing was going particularly right. She'd thrown herself into her project with an intensity that was probably obsessive, and one that would have been frightening to most people. She'd been immersing herself in the not-so-distant past for the last two weeks, and very little of what she'd found seemed to make any sense. That was all right, she'd been expecting to put together information, but it wasn't that the information didn't make any logical sense, it was more that her mind refused to accept it. She felt a kind of shocked horror that this sort of information had to be hunted for, and it was this part of the information that she couldn't, wouldn't accept. It should be a part of public record, not to mention taught in the schools, so that it wasn't forgotten, so that it never happened again.
When she learned about the history of the war in school, the teacher and books went on in great length about the friction between the various Earth governments, and about the formation of the Earth-Sphere Alliance, and then about the constant battles between those countries who had joined and those who had not. There was, of course, mention of Heero Yuy, the pacifistic ambassador from the colonies, who was assassinated in the mid-seventies. There was even a little mention of the colonies' desire for peace and independence prior to the appearance of the Gundams, although there was a lot more attention given to it after the appearance of the Gundams, as the various authors of the books tried to explain what could cause people to go out and commit atrocities on the level that the Gundam pilots did. But as far as she could tell, none of those authors had done any kind of research when they were writing their papers, since most of them insisted that the Gundams were supported by some tiny extremist faction in the colonies.
A little bit of basic research about the Gundams, combined with what Daddy had told her, convinced her that her initial instincts had been right, that it couldn't be some tiny little group. The Gundams, if they were anything like the image she was slowly building in her head, were just too expensive for one minor extremist faction to build. A substantial part of the population must have had some idea that countermeasures were being taken, even if they only donated money to the cause. So, the logical conclusion from that was that there had to be a good reason for that many people to be willing to support the construction of machines capable of mass destruction. So she went looking for evidence of that.
And she found it, which was the current cause of her disgust and horror with the entire situation. How could this stuff be omitted from the books? It had taken some looking, but the information wasn't concealed, just... tucked away. Martial law imposed on the colonies for months, years at a time... constant military occupation of the pacifist colonies... their freedom and independence taken from them by force years before... no freedom of speech, no freedom to speak of at all, communications between the colonies were eliminated, except for military communiques... plagues, horrible plagues for which cures were known, plagues that would have been dealt with in a matter of weeks on Earth, which were allowed to sweep through the slums of the poorer colonies, killing anywhere from 1/2 to 7/8 of the population.
At this point she'd stopped to think. One of the few things that she did know about her parents' background was that they were both from the colonies. They probably weren't aware that she knew it, but she'd figured it out years ago. She'd had a friend when she was little whose parents had come from the colonies, and there were certain mannerisms, certain speech patterns and assumptions they made in everyday life that made it obvious, once you figured out what you were looking at. Like always closing doors. In the colonies, most doors to houses and sometimes to individual rooms were sealed so tightly that in case there was a breach through the outer wall of the colony and the air started escaping, you'd stand a good chance of surviving until it could be patched up. Or eating every single thing on your plate. There wasn't much extra food in the colonies, and even if there had been, there was a limited amount of space with which to dispose of it. So you ate everything, and made sure that there was very little that actually had to be thrown away, instead of reused or recycled. Living in a place where everything was balanced so delicately certainly led them to be more ecologically conscious.
So, because nothing was ever simple, that raised the question of why none of this was ever mentioned, or included in the curriculum. Well, the immediate answer was easy - the Alliance probably did not allow people to speak or write about what was really happening in the colonies. And since communication and travel between the colonies was so restricted, it would be difficult to get the word out. But that didn't explain why nothing had been said later on, why it wasn't known now. The information she'd found hadn't been hidden, just difficult-to-find. She momentarily played with the idea of the current United Earth Government deliberately suppressing the information, then abandoned that idea. They were not in the business of trying to hide the sins of the past governments - if they had, she never would have found what she had. So why wasn't it there?
She couldn't think of anything, and was on the verge of asking one of her parents when an idea occurred to her. She'd been trying to avoid talking to her parents about her research project whenever possible, because she didn't want to upset them, but that itself gave her an idea. The few adults she had talked to already all reacted in different fashions, but the reaction was always negative. It was a difficult thing for her to grasp, something that would affect an entire generation that way, make them close up, or frown, or shudder in horror or fear or she didn't even know what else. Sometimes things she saw in her parents made her think they felt guilty or something, although that didn't make much sense, they'd only been kids during the war. Of course, emotional responses rarely had anything to do with logic. Maybe they'd known someone who died in the war, and felt guilty for not stopping it, even if there was nothing they could do. She certainly wasn't going to invade their privacy by asking them. There were some things it was OK to ask your parents about that they probably wouldn't tell you on their own, wars from their childhoods were not one of them.
It was entirely possible that it was just something that most people didn't want to think about, let alone relive by writing a lot about it. She wasn't willing to let it lie at that, but it was a good enough explanation for now.
So she'd gotten some things accomplished in the last few weeks. The lack of answers was frustrating, but she'd expected that. The information she'd found that should be readily available but wasn't irritated her to the point of anger, but that wasn't what had her stomping around her room, kicking a pillow across the floor to see how far she could get it to bounce off the wall. She could get it to bounce pretty far. While she was chasing her pillow around the room, at least she wasn't doing something else, like punching the wall. It was better than actually destroying something, which is what she really wanted to do, but it probably wasn't a good idea to give in to those impulses.
The main frustration right now was Mrs. Kinley. Today Julia had had her fourth meeting with her 'advisor', and her first real fight. After the uncomfortable silences in the first meeting, it only got worse from there. Mrs. Kinley was completely unreasonable about the Gundam pilots, refusing to even think about what their motives might have been. She was very quiet and usually pretty polite about it, but most of her arguments came down to the fact that the pilots were responsible for everything bad that had happened during the war, and that they were nothing more than mindless killers. In short, she hated the pilots. And Julia still hadn't been able to bring herself to ask why. It didn't seem right, but...
Julia abruptly came to a decision, and abandoned her pillow-kicking to sit at her computer. Within seconds she was on the internet, searching for information. There was something not quite right with this picture, that she wasn't willing to ask her teacher for information because it was rude, but that she was willing to look for information on her on the internet. She shrugged to herself and decided to put the issue aside for now.
By the time that Tousan and Daddy got home a few hours later, she had her answer. Mrs. Kinley used to have a brother who was a soldier. He was killed during the war in a Gundam pilot attack.
Julia cleared the information and quickly hid her tracks, then shut off her computer. Then she sat and stared at the blank screen for a while. What was she supposed to do now? From the beginning, she'd wanted to give an even, balanced report. All that she'd found in the last few weeks had only made her more interested in the Gundam pilots than ever before. She wanted to know more about them, what sort of situations they came from in the colonies, and why they did the horrible things that they did. And were they so horrible... well, she wasn't quite ready to think about that yet. But she hadn't decided to do this to vilify the pilots, which was what Mrs. Kinley seemed bent on doing. If Julia wanted to do that, she could have looked at any one of the hundreds of books on the topic. It was easy enough to write that way, after all, the Gundam pilots weren't going to show up and dispute any of their arguments.
She heard the front door open and close, and a couple seconds later, heard footsteps. "Welcome home, Tousan!" she shouted without bothering to turn or even open the door to her room. She knew it was Tousan because he had this funny little ritual, where he always stopped to see who was in a room before he entered it. She'd seen it so many times she could even picture it in her head - the door opened, and his eyes quickly swept over the entire room. Once he'd seen where everyone was, he took one step into the room to look at the corners that he hadn't been able to seen before, then continued normally. It was kinda cute, actually.
In response, she got some sort of muffled grunt that she couldn't quite make out through the door and halfway across the house. Actually, that didn't make much of a difference, if she could hear his footsteps on the floor at that distance, she could certainly hear his voice. That grunt probably would have been indistinct even if she was standing right next to him.
She heard footsteps coming closer and then there was a knock on her door. "Come in," she called, then turned as the door opened. Her otousan quickly glanced around the room, took a single step into it, checked the two corners he'd missed before, then stepped normally into the room and closed the door behind him. "How was your day?" he asked.
"OK," she answered with a slight shrug. She wasn't sure if she was ready to talk about what had happened, or admit what she'd done yet. "You?"
"Fine."
Julia loved her otousan dearly, but she had some difficulty talking to him sometimes. Or maybe it was a great deal of difficulty. Now was one of those times. After a short strained silence, she ventured, "I got a hundred on my math test."
"Good."
Julia stared at her father in surprise. That was more of a response then she usually got. "Is everything all right, Tousan?" she asked.
He stared at her for a second, clearly not sure what to say next. Finally he said, "Daisuki."
"Daisuki, Tousan," she replied, standing up to give him a hug. "Is everything all right? Is Daddy OK?"
Tousan just stared at her for another second, then shook his head slightly. "He's fine. I just... had a long day."
Julia eyed her father suspiciously. He generally wasn't vocal enough to get into evasions, but this sounded suspiciously like one. "You're sure?" she asked. "Nothing's wrong? I thought you said your day went fine."
"I was being polite," he said shortly, his lips curling upwards slightly. "Duo's been coaching me."
Julia giggled, although she knew that he was just trying to change the subject. "I'll tell him that you did very well. That was very polite of you. Now, would you please tell me why you had a long day?"
-----------
Since Tousan was the one making dinner that night, it was pretty good. He might not like the chore very much, but he was a more than fair cook when he put his mind to it.
"Hey, Julie, why are you so quiet?" Daddy asked as he finished scraping the last of the food off his plate. Once it was in his mouth, he leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head and somehow making a contented sound around the mouthful of food.
After Tousan had explained why it had been a long day (a new employee accidentally crashed his computer and nearly took down the network, then several people some how mistook *him* for the company technician, and thought that he was supposed to help them - how they made that mistake, Julia would never guess), she'd gone back to her quiet study of the blank screen. She had no idea what she should do with what she'd found out. Should she go to the class advisor and ask for a different mentor? But then she'd have to say why, and probably admit to what she'd done. But she wasn't sure if she could work with Mrs. Kinley...
Julia started out of her thoughts to look at Daddy's expectant face. "I... ah..." she stammered, then recklessly decided to tell them what had happened. "Mrs. Kinley and I had a fight."
Daddy blinked. "Mrs. Kinley? Your mentor?"
Julia nodded nervously. Her parents, both together and separately, had given her several uses on the appropriate use of her gifts, and she was pretty sure that they weren't going to be happy with her actions earlier today. But she hadn't actually hacked anything... well, not much.
"Why?"
"She... see, I've been trying to figure out what was going on in the colonies, trying to figure out why they sent the Gundams to Earth." Once again as she said the word 'Gundam', she saw reactions from both of her parents. "And... well, she just seems to think that they were nothing more than bloodthirsty terrorists. I mean, I know they were terrorists, everyone knows that, and they did kill a lot of people, but that's not the entire story, right?" She looked at the two of them for confirmation, but neither responded. "So anyway, she just hates the Gundam pilots, but I didn't know why, so I... ah... I sorta went on the internet and looked for information on her. I know I shouldn't have," she quickly continued, "but I was trying to understand, and I didn't want to ask her and get her upset..."
"It's all right, honey," Daddy finally answered. "Although I'm glad that you recognize that there might be better ways to handle this situation."
Julia nodded guiltily. "I know, and I'm sorry. But... I found out why she hates them so much. She had a brother, and he was killed by one of the Gundam pilots." She paused as Daddy closed his eyes for several seconds, then he opened them and she continued. "But I don't know what I can do now. I'm not sure I can work with her, but I can't go tell someone that I need to change mentors because I went behind my mentor's back and found something like this out about her! I don't know what to do."
"That's a difficult situation," Daddy said after a long silence. "Just how much does she affect your project?"
Julia thought for a few seconds. "Not that much, if I don't want her to. I mean, I'm required to have a meeting with her every week, but that's about it. But if she gets really mad at me, she can kill my grade."
"But if she does that for no good reason, you can protest it, can't you?" he pressed. This was the way her parents always operated, for as long as she could remember. She could come to them for advice for just about anything, and they would do the best they could to give it to her, but they never did anything for her. They gave her solutions that she could use herself, except for the one or two occasions when there simply hadn't been anything that she could do. In those instances, they had taken care of the situation almost the moment she told them.
Julia nodded slowly, seeing where this was leading. "And if it comes to that, what happened to her brother will probably come out anyway. I won't be doing anything wrong, even if I don't do what she tells me to."
"What's she telling you to do?" Daddy demanded, his eyes narrowing dangerously.
Julia shook her head. "She didn't come out and say it, but basically she wanted me to write another one of those pieces of garbage that are written about the Gundam pilots, you know, the ones with no historical references, just saying how horrible the Gundam pilots are. I want to write an actual research paper."
"You think those papers are garbage?" Daddy asked her soberly, and Julia realized that she might have said something that would really bother her parents. She wished she had thought about that before she opened her mouth. Even if some of the colonists supported the Gundams, they had killed a lot of people, and the colonies had disowned them. Hearing their daughter say that the Gundams might be something other than just 'murdering terrorists' had to be hard for them.
Julia bit her lip. "I mean... I don't know whether they're right or not, but they haven't done any sort of research to back up so much of what they claim. They just rely on public curiosity and outrage to sell their work. I... I may or may not end up writing something like that, but if I do, it's going to have some actual research behind it, not just hysterical yelling." She looked at them anxiously, hoping that they wouldn't be too upset.
To her surprise, Duo-daddy smiled. "I'm very proud of you, Julie, for looking for the truth and not just taking the easy way out."
Julia blinked. She wasn't quite sure what she had been expecting (had she honestly thought that they would tell her she was a bad person for wanting to find out the truth?) but this wasn't it. After a couple of seconds, she swallowed, and spurned on by his encouragement, asked something she'd been wondering about for a long time. "Um... you guys are from the colonies, right?"
Her fathers exchanged a startled glance, one that almost looked alarmed. Then Daddy said, "Yeah, we are. I'm from L2, originally, and Heero is from L1. How did you know?"
Julia shrugged slightly. "It's just little things that you do. Remember Amy? From elementary school? Her mother was from the colonies, and she did a lot of the same stuff you do," she said, and told them a little of what she'd observed.
They exchanged another unreadable look. After another silence, Daddy said, "That's very good. You're very observant."
Julia smiled briefly at them both. Her Duo-daddy was a lot more easy-going than Tousan, but if he gave her a compliment, it was still something to be taken seriously. "So anyway, I was wondering if I could just ask you a couple of questions. Nothing really specific, just a little bit about it was like living in the colonies. I know that you were just kids when this stuff happened, but... Please?" she ended hopefully.
Another glance, then Daddy said uncomfortably, "Sure, honey, you ask away. If we have the answers, we'll give them to you."
"Thanks. Um, were the colonies really under martial law? I mean, curfews and everything?"
Duo-daddy closed his eyes for a second before he responded. "Ah, not in my colony, sweetie. But that was mostly because the Alliance didn't care enough to control it that way. There wasn't anything valuable enough for them to worry about. Mostly they just controlled every bit of trade that did go on within the colony, and cut us off from everyone else, so we couldn't get any relief."
"Relief?" she asked softly, trying to understand, a little, what he was talking about. She had a feeling that things had been much worse than he could ever tell her, but she wanted... no, needed... to understand some part of what her parents had gone through, of the time that she was immersing herself in.
"Most of the L2 colonies were in an economic slump before Heero Yuy was assassinated," Daddy said with a glance at his husband. "From there it went downhill fast. Most of the colony I grew up on was a slum. I don't even think any of the other colonies knew what was happening there," he muttered, almost to himself. "I sure as hell know that Earth didn't. But any relief that could have been sent... wasn't allowed to reach the people, at least not that I saw."
Julia wanted to ask more, but when she saw the look in Daddy's eyes, she bit her lip. It was too much, she didn't want to upset him, not like this. She'd known that what happened before and during the war must have been bad for the colonists, but she didn't think it would be this bad. His face... it almost seemed dead, his eyes looked like holes staring out of his face. Julia closed her eyes for a second, not wanting to see that expression on her father's face. It didn't belong there, it was just wrong to see an expression like that on your parent's face - she knew it was absolutely ridiculous, parents were people just like anyone else, her fathers weren't perfect or immortal or anything, but it just seemed wrong to see him weak like that.
She opened her eyes... and stared. Her father was looking at her with a faintly curious expression, a slight smile on his face. "Sorry about that, honey. Does that answer your question?" There was absolutely no sign of that half-dead expression he'd just been wearing, no sign that he'd been upset at all.
Julia might have been young, but she hadn't been born yesterday, and she certainly wasn't stupid. She knew that that was not a healthy reaction to have to something like that, but she didn't know what to do about it. Glancing at Tousan, she saw a slight bit of concern in his eyes, and relaxed. He'd seen the problem and he'd help Duo-daddy, later, when she wasn't around. She smiled weakly. "Ah, yeah, that's fine, thanks." She promised herself that she would never bring this topic up again.
"Guess it's your turn, Hee-chan," Daddy said, turning his eyes towards his husband.
Julia started to shake her head, saying that it wasn't necessary, but Tousan had already begun to speak. "I spent much of my... youth traveling," he said. "There were many restrictions upon the freedoms of the colonies." His emotionless recitation clashed strongly with what she'd just seen from Duo-Daddy, it was more like he was giving a report in school, not telling her about something he'd actually witnessed. In a way, it was just as disturbing to see as Daddy's reaction. "There were also rebels there, although for the most part they were completely ineffectual." His voice had a hint of disapproval in it, and Julia wondered at it. "The Alliance crushed them wherever they found them. The common people were too frightened to do anything to fight for their freedom. But there was reason for that fear." He paused, then nodded his head slightly, as if he'd reviewed what he just said and approved of it.
"Ah, thanks," Julia said, and promised herself that she wouldn't bring up the topic around him, either. It didn't seem to have upset him the way it did Duo-daddy, but that reaction didn't seem healthy, either. They finished the rest of dinner and silently cleaned up, and then Julia headed up to her room. Something about what her otousan had told her was bothering her, and she wanted to chase it down.
She felt sort of bad for analyzing her father this way, but she was curious, and she almost always followed things that made her curious. It wasn't as if it could really hurt anyone, anyway.
Throwing herself onto her bed, she bounced once, then rolled over on her back to stare at the ceiling. She took out a small set of balls and began juggling them, just a simple pattern, something to keep her hands occupied while she thought. The ceiling hadn't changed since the last time she lay on her bed and stared at it. I really ought to do something about that, she thought lazily, allowing her mind to drift. This was the best way to figure something out, to bring it to the surface, much better than concentrating on it and driving herself crazy. Maybe I should paint a maze on it or something. It would be more interesting than off-white, at least.
Now, Tousan... He had spoken, and something had been wrong. He said he traveled around a lot. I wonder what he did? Julia smiled to herself. Maybe he was a circus performer, like Trowa. The thought was enough to make her giggle. She didn't know much about the histories of her uncles, either, but they'd taken her to a circus when she was younger, and Trowa took her back behind the tents, introduced her to the lions, and then introduced her to his sister. She'd seen Cathy a few times since then, and each time wondered if Cathy was actually Trowa's sister or if she was a sister to Trowa like Quatre and Daddy were 'brothers'. In any case, Cathy had told her that a while back, Trowa had been in the circus. Even better, he'd been a clown in the circus. She couldn't imagine the quiet and often-solemn Trowa being a clown, but she wouldn't have pegged Quatre as a multi-billionaire, either. Cathy now ran quite a bit of the circus, but when she was younger, she'd been a knife-thrower. She'd promised to teach Julia how to do it someday, but every time Julia asked, she was told to wait 'until she was a little older.'
In any case, the thought of Tousan as a circus clown was even more unlikely than the thought of Trowa as a clown.
No, she had a hard time picturing Tousan as a member of any sort of group like that. He probably traveled around with... who? She was assuming that it wouldn't be his family. His guardians, maybe? Maybe they were merchants or something like that. Not Alliance officials, he wouldn't have spoken of the Alliance with such scorn if that had been the case. Not rebels, either, it hadn't sounded like he thought any more of them...
Her eyes flew open, and the small balls dropped onto her stomach as she lost the pattern. That was it! That was what had been bothering her! Her father had listed a number of groups during his discussion, but he'd never acted as though he were a member of any one of them! Her brow furrowed as she replayed the conversation in her head - he'd spoken against the Alliance, the Rebels, and the common people... what did that leave?
Well, a lot, actually. Common people was a fairly vague term. So, for that matter, was Rebel. Alliance was pretty straightforward, although as she'd learned with that entire confusion between Oz and the Alliance, it wasn't quite as simple as it seemed. But Rebel... well, if he meant anyone that spoke out against the Alliance, that covered a lot of territory, if he meant people who had been branded Rebels by the Alliance, that covered less, and if he meant the people who'd actually picked up weapons to fight against the Alliance, that covered even less. And the phrase 'common people' had so many different meanings that it was useless to try to narrow them down without more information.
Julia sighed. Well, she'd figured out what she'd missed, but she wasn't going to be able to find out more about her father's past from it. Too bad.
I wonder where the Gundam pilots came from? The thought popped into her mind almost automatically. A good many of her thoughts nowadays came to this conclusion. It was inevitable, she was spending so much time concentrating on them, and there was so much that was unknown about them, that any query she had about anyone naturally applied to the pilots as well.
It would be nearly impossible to tell, after all, no one knew who they were, much less where they'd come from.
Hmm... There was something tickling the edges of her mind, but it refused to surface.
After a few minutes of concentration failed to raise anything, Julia shrugged to herself and went to her computer. In the past few days she'd found numerous references to '04's support troops', whatever that meant. She'd thought that Gundams were completely self-sufficient, but apparently 04 had... well, someone following him around, at least. She wanted to track that down before she forgot about it.
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"Stop!"
Julia jolted out of a deep sleep at the shout that echoed through the house. She automatically slapped her hand down on the alarm clock and rolled out of bed, and was two steps across the room when she realized several very important facts: 1. Her alarm hadn't gone off. 2. It was still dark out. 3. It was the middle of the night. 4. She'd woken up because someone had screamed.
Throwing off the last vestiges of sleep, Julia silently walked to the door of her bedroom and eased it open. She only opened it a crack, and then listened. It took some work, but she managed to focus her hearing on her parent's room, ignoring the sounds of the television show their neighbors were watching. When she was younger, she used to get headaches because of everything that she was listening to, but her fathers had explained that she just had to concentrate on whatever conversation she was interested in, and filter out everything else. It took some work, but Julia learned to do it, and now it was completely automatic, unless she wanted to listen in on something that was somewhat distant, like this. She figured that everyone had these problems, and that she just had a little more trouble dealing with it than most people because of the way her mind worked.
In a couple of seconds, she'd filtered out the neighbor's tv and heard heavy breathing coming from her parents' room through their closed door. "Shh, it's all right," said a soft voice. It took her several seconds to identify it as Tousan. His voice was different, it sounded so... gentle. It wasn't that she thought he was unfeeling, or that he didn't love her, but he did not express those feelings well. His awkward statement this afternoon was highly unusual, strained though it had been. Come to think of it, she'd never really figured out why he'd been acting so strange. It didn't sound like he'd had a good day, but it didn't sound like he'd had a *bad* day, either, not enough to account for it. It was almost as if he needed some reassurance that she still loved him, but that didn't make any sense. Why on Earth would he think that she didn't love him anymore? Maybe it just had been a bad day.
Julia's attention snapped back to her parents' room as she heard a second voice. "I'm all right." It sounded like a hoarse whisper, and Julia could barely hear it. It took her another several seconds to recognize Daddy's voice. It sounded... she didn't know what it sounded like, she'd never heard him speak that way before.
"Which one was it?" That was Tousan, again speaking in that very soft, gentle voice.
A weak bark of laughter, then a slight snort, then Daddy responded, "Maxwell again. What else would it be?"
Julia frowned slightly. Why would her father be talking about... having bad dreams about... his own last name?
After a few seconds, Daddy continued again, "I should have expected it, after Julie brought it up..."
Julia gasped, and the voices in the other room immediately went silent. Without waiting, Julia silently eased the door closed, then hurried back to bed and buried herself under the covers. Several seconds later, she heard the door to her room open.
Counting silently, she made sure that her breathing was slow and even, and almost a minute later, she heard the door close, and breathed a silent sigh of relief. Her parents didn't know that she knew that trick, and she'd prefer to keep it that way, so she let them catch her laying their pretending to sleep every so often.
After he left, she didn't move back to the door. Truth be told, she'd already been feeling a little guilty about listening in on her parents' conversation, but her curiosity had gotten the best of her. Now the danger of getting caught was more than enough to tip the balance in the other direction. Besides, she had plenty to think about now, anyway. Something *she'd* said had given Daddy nightmares. Asking him about his past had given him nightmares bad enough for him to wake up screaming? And what did Maxwell have to do with it?
With those disturbing questions in her mind and a heavy feeling of guilt resting in her heart, she finally drifted off into a restless sleep.
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"She's asleep," Heero reported as he returned to their bedroom and climbed back into bed beside Duo.
Duo chuckled, but it sounded forced, and Heero wrapped his arms around the slightly smaller man. "She certainly does sleep well, sometimes I think you could land Wing on the house and she wouldn't wake up. And that's a good thing," he added after a moment's thought.
Heero nodded, knowing what his koi was talking about. Even so many years after the war, neither of them slept particularly well or deeply. Especially right after Julia first came to them, he'd found himself waking every time she rolled over or made a sound that he didn't recognize, in addition to the dozens of feedings that were necessary throughout the night. That she could sleep so deeply was a sign that she really felt safe, that she didn't have to worry about who would sneak up on her if she didn't wake at the slightest sound.
"Are you all right?" Heero asked slowly, after hesitating for several seconds. Even after all these years, he sometimes wasn't sure how to handle himself when it came to emotional issues, especially involving Duo.
"I'll be fine. Like I said, I should have expected it," he said, shaking his head slightly. His eyes were still hidden by his bangs, so Heero couldn't be sure of how he really felt. "Do you think I upset her too much?"
"Hn. No more than me." To be honest, Heero wasn't entirely certain what their daughter thought about their responses to her question. She'd seemed worried, though. He didn't doubt that he'd confused her this afternoon, but he'd needed to hear it, before she found out about their pasts. There was no doubt in his mind that she would, it was just a matter of how long.
"I called Quatre today, to warn him," Duo commented. "I just thought that he ought to know what's going to happen."
"And?" Heero asked, when Duo hesitated.
"He already knew," Duo snorted softly. "I don't know why I was surprised. He said that Katie told him about it a couple of weeks ago."
Heero blinked, then shrugged slightly. He probably should have anticipated that Quatre and Trowa's daughter would already know about something like this. It didn't really matter, anyway - it wasn't as if she didn't know how to keep a secret, and Quatre and Trowa should know about this.
"I warned Wufei, too, and he said that he'd pass word along to Sally. He's... a little worried, but he says that if we need help with anything, they'll provide it. Otherwise, they'll let us deal with it."
Heero nodded slightly, that sounded like Wufei.
"Quatre also offered help, if we need it, but he didn't think there was much we could do about it. I didn't ask him if Katie told him what happened or not. I don't think I want to know." He sighed, then settled a little more comfortably into Heero's arms. "You know how lucky Julia is? Sometimes I'm so grateful for it, that she didn't end up like Katie, and then... I feel so guilty. I don't know how Quatre and Trowa have managed."
"They're Gundam pilots," Heero said without thinking. It was true, in a way. Being a Gundam pilot meant that you dealt with whatever came your way, and that you didn't give up. It was as simple as that. It also wasn't the best thing he could have said at the moment, and he realized that an instant after the words left his mouth.
Duo's entire body tensed, and Heero tightened his grip on his koi. "Yeah, I know, I'm just glad we have Julia, you know?"
"She's our daughter."
"Yeah, I know."
Heero waited several minutes, then asked, "Do you want to go back to sleep?"
The way Duo's body tensed up gave him his answer before he even spoke. "No... not yet. I just want to stay like this for a while."
All right, another longish author's note. First of all, I know it may seem like there's an awful amount of evidence for Julia to see, but I'm going under the assumption that the last things you question are things that are closest to you. As for what happened in the colonies during the Alliance's occupation, aside from the little mentioned in the Episode Zeros for all the pilots, I haven't been able to find any official information, so I'm making it up as I go along. If anyone knows of anything official that I've got wrong, please let me know.
Also I wanted to thank Julia, Kelly, Ari, RavynFyre, and anyone else I missed who sent me information on various Japanese words. The help was very much appreciated.
Marika 10/2/01