Julia woke up, feeling rather less rested than usual. She was quiet and somewhat surly over breakfast, and of course, she couldn't tell her parents why she hadn't slept well. That would have gone over really well, yeah, I couldn't sleep last night after I listened in on your conversation about the nightmare you had because of the questions that I asked you. Not that Julia was feeling guilty or anything.
She sort of drifted through the first half of the school day without really hearing anything that the teachers were saying. It didn't really matter, she knew most of it anyway and she could always fake it if she didn't. She'd read her school books through in the first week of classes, so this was mostly review for her. What little she couldn't get from the books, she could reason out on her own. There were times when she wondered why she even bothered going to school.
She decided to skip lunch and instead headed for a computer lab. Maybe some work would shake her out of her foul mood.
Before she'd gone to bed the night before, she had managed to pin down those elusive references to '04's support troops'. It seemed that there were between twenty and forty mobile suits, all in colors adapted for desert combat, that followed Gundam 04 around to a number of its battles.
What that suggested to her was fascinating, enough so that she momentarily forgot everything she'd heard last night. What it meant, she thought, was that not only did the Gundams originally have the support of the colonies, the pilots (or at least one of them) were the type of people who could gain a following. The support troops were not Gundams, not by a long shot. They were fairly advanced mobile suits, but they didn't have the same kind of shielding or weapons that all of the Gundams had, and they still followed 04 into battles where they were vastly outnumbered and often in a weaker position. The men in those suits were in danger, even more so than the Gundam pilot, there must have been something there that made them willing to follow him into battle.
Julia found it difficult to believe that it was just the Gundam pilot, although the evidence suggested it, quite strongly. If the support troops were just fighting because of what was going on in the colonies, why weren't they fighting by themselves, or with all of the Gundams? Either of those behavior patterns would have made sense if they were just fighting for the colonies at large, but they weren't, they were following 04 around. The few times they were sighted away from 04 (from what she could tell) they were always working in conjunction with that pilot, either coordinating their attacks at exactly the same time, or attacking places that clearly had some connection to the target of Gundam 04. So they weren't just fighting alongside a Gundam, they were following the pilot himself.
And that thought was just weird. She didn't respect them much, but she had read a lot of those articles about the horrible terrorists, it was very difficult to picture them being the sort of people that could gain a following.
But she was getting somewhere, Julia realized after a moment's thought. It never would have occurred to most people to even consider the possibility that one of the pilots might be worth following. They were terrorists, plain and simple. But no one ever questioned that people like Zechs Marquise were worth following, and he had hundreds of kills under his belt before the Gundams ever showed up. What was it that made him simply a good soldier and the Gundam pilots monsters? Well, there was the fact that they were terrorists, but... they attacked military targets. Except for the incident involving Gundam 01b destroying a bunch of colonies (and she still had no idea why that had happened), the Gundams had never attacked anything but military targets. Even when they killed the Alliance doves (another incident that just didn't make sense - she was missing far too many pieces of the puzzle), that could still count as a military target. When you looked at it that way, Oz and the Alliance had killed more civilians with their wars and what they did to the colonies than the Gundams possibly could have! But the Gundam pilots were still the bad guys...
She did have to admit that even the top mobile suit pilots for both the Alliance and Oz never racked up numbers of kills close to any of the pilots, and the people that they were killing were clearly 'the enemy', members of noncomplying nations. To the people of those nations, surely those mobile suit pilots were just as bad as the Gundams. It was just that most of the world was part of the Alliance, so there were that many people who saw the Gundams of the enemy. But that didn't make them monsters, did it?
Maybe it was because of the politics involved. Zechs Marquise (aka the Lightening Count, aka Milliardo Peacecraft - she really needed to figure out what was going on with him) had been working for a legitimate government for most of his career when he was out killing people. Was that the difference?
But the Gundam pilots were there because of politics, too. The thought jumped into her head before she knew it, and froze. The idea was so simple, and so obvious, she couldn't believe that she hadn't seen it before. Had they actually expected to topple the Alliance (or Oz) when they were sent, or were they just sent to gain attention? Surely that had been part of their mission - to get people to look at the colonies to figure out why they sent the Gundams to Earth. Nothing else had worked, not the protests that were staged by the colonists when the colonies were first taken over by the Alliance, not the pacifistic teachings of Heero Yuy, not even his assassination; none of that had brought enough attention to the colonies to force the Alliance to stop what they were doing.
They must have been desperate. The colonies were being smothered, and no one on Earth seemed to care. And the Gundams did get people's attention. Since her initial investigation, she'd discovered that shortly after all of the Gundams disappeared for that four-month period, and before the colonies repudiated the Gundams, Oz had been quietly courting the colonies, offering support against the Alliance and promising all sorts of freedoms that were never actually granted. After about a month, the colonies suddenly accepted Oz's overtures, and in the same moment, repudiated the Gundams.
Once again Julia was caught by that thought, imagining what it must have been like for the pilots in that situation. They were the ones who'd gotten Oz to take a look at the colonies (probably in hopes of stopping the pilots' attacks), and the first thing the colonies did with their newfound influence was turn on the very people who'd made it possible. The betrayal...
Julia actually shook her head slightly, trying to dispel the thoughts, to concentrate on the task at hand. She was thinking about why the pilots were looked on as monster when those around them, who committed the same sorts of crimes (although not with the same sort of numbers, she had to admit), were not treated the same world.
Maybe it was because they were faceless. It was easy to hate an enemy who was known only for the number of bodies he left behind. When the soldiers were fighting an enemy, it was usually in battle, against other soldiers in similar weapons. That was entirely different from an enemy that materialized out of nowhere, killed hundreds or thousands with no discernable effort, and then disappeared just as quickly. The Alliance hadn't even had any evidence that the other four Gundams (aside from 01, which was shot down during entry) even existed - they only knew that someone was destroying their bases so completely that there were never any survivors to report what had happened.
Julia felt a slight shiver run down her spine. It was frightening to think of an enemy like that, almost insubstantial except in the damage they did. The Oz pilots who faced them... that had to be the ultimate nightmare for them! And the Gundam pilots apparently were that good, it wasn't just the Gundams (which were several steps beyond everyone else's capabilities as it was), the way she'd originally thought. She'd glanced over a couple of the battles that happened to be caught on tape, and it was obvious even to her inexperienced eye that not only were the Gundams vastly superior to the mobile suits they were fighting against, but the pilots in them were also better than the pilots in the regular suits - much better. The differences between them and the regular pilots were almost as pronounced as those between the Gundams and regular suits.
Julia closed her eyes, replaying one particular short battle involving Gundam 02 and a dozen or so Taurus'. It was only about a minute and a half of footage, because that was all the suit taking the pictures could broadcast before 02 got to him. It was difficult, knowing that she was able to do this research because someone had died, but she did her best to push it out of her mind. It was funny, sort of, she felt like she could almost see the tactics the Gundam pilot was using, and a few times she actually knew what he was going to do an instant before he did it. The patterns she saw seemed somewhat familiar, which was patently ridiculous.
Actually, maybe it wasn't - mobile suits were made to approximate the human form, so once they exhausted their artillery (or once the Gundam got in too close for the mobile suits to use their artillery without risking either hitting one of their fellows or being caught up in the explosion), they started 'hand to hand' combat, which closely resembled normal fighting. Julia knew enough about fighting that it wasn't entirely surprising that it would look familiar, it was just that she couldn't identify it. All she knew was that it looked familiar, which was frustrating.
But it seemed very odd that she would so easily see the tactics of the Gundam, when all she'd done was glance at their battles a few times. During the war, Oz and the Alliance devoted dozens, hundreds of people to studying the Gundams, their attacks, their advantages, in hopes that they'd be able to capitalize on whatever weaknesses they possessed. It was more than likely that her mind was just trying to put a familiar face on the fighting than that she actually saw something reliable in there. The few times she'd been able to anticipate the moves could be luck, or just a very common move that she'd seen before in the footage. She'd have to do a lot more research on what was taught to mobile suit pilots in terms of tactics before she could make any judgments.
Before she realized it, the black Gundam with that strange sickle-shaped weapon was flying towards her (or so it appeared in her memory of the recording she'd seen), and there was that final, horrible scream before she jolted out of the memory, her eyes flying open.
How could anyone do something like that to another human?
Julia found that she was panting slightly, and took several deep breaths to calm herself. What sort of question was that? How could there be wars at all? How could the Alliance do what it had done to the colonies? She might as well ask how Cain had killed his brother. It was an endless cycle, violence begat violence. The Gundams were created in response to what was done to the colonies, which was probably in response to what was happening on Earth, which was in response to... who knew, after a while? What she wanted to know was why the Gundam pilots had done it. How could wait for a philosophy discussion with one of her fathers.
Julia quieted as she realized what she had just thought. Why the Gundam pilots did it. That's what it came down to, eventually. She might have said that she was going to focus on the world as it was when the Gundam pilots appeared, that she was going to leave them as a fairly peripheral part of her project because of the lack of information, but the Gundam pilots had always been her interest. What in the world (or off it) could drive people to do what they'd done?
I could try to find out. Julia stared at the paper in front of her and discovered that she'd unconsciously been doodling little Gundams. Little 01's and 02's, as a matter of fact. Her ability to draft pictures from her mind was as phenomenal as the rest of her mental abilities, although she had few creative impulses. It seemed stupid to draw stuff that she'd never seen, and she felt bad about flaunting her skills in front of true artists, especially when she hadn't worked for the ability at all.
There wasn't any way that she could do what she wanted to, was there? It would make for a fascinating project, trying to get into the heads of the pilots. For her final presentation, she could do a sort of fake interview, ask the questions and see if she could figure out how they would have responded. It could be fascinating. It could be absolutely ridiculous.
Julia had always had a gift for getting into other people's minds with very little information, understanding why they reacted the way they did, based on how they presented themselves, word choice, their eyes, even their body language. She usually could tell quite a bit about a person within a few minutes of meeting them. That was how she'd picked up what she had about her fathers being from the colonies. But could she possibly do that for people whose faces were never seen? Could she do that from what she knew about the colonies, their targets, and the combat footage she had?
There were too many holes in the story right now, she needed to fill some of them in before she could know if this would work, but in the meantime... There was battle footage out there, very little from the earlier battles but more, a lot more, from later in the war, including the final battle. She hadn't looked at it yet because she didn't feel like she knew enough about it, but she'd change that. She knew of a half-dozen legitimate resources she could look through to find out what tactics were taught mobile suit pilots as a beginning, and if that wasn't enough, she could start looking in other places. She might even ask Wufei, he worked for the Preventers, who were (supposedly) the only group that owned any mobile suits any more. Who knew, he might even know something about piloting one.
Julia quickly scooped all of her papers, including the doodles, and crammed them into her bag as the bell signaling the end of the period rang. Her mind was already occupied, replaying the battle scenes she'd viewed and reviewing what little she knew about mobile suit fighting in general. At least she had something to work on now.
------------
At the beginning of the last period of school, Julia got a note from Mrs. Kinley, saying that her teacher had arranged a meeting for her with one of the veterans of the war. Since Julia wasn't quite ready to declare open war between herself and her advisor (although there was a part of her that wished she could, just out of pure stubbornness), and because she really was interested in a first-hand account, she headed for the address immediately after school. She ought to have enough time to talk to the man for a couple of hours, and still make it to aikido on time.
It only took her about fifteen minutes to walk the couple of miles to the address, but when she saw the building, she hesitated. I probably should have expected this, she thought, irritated with Mrs. Kinley's obvious attempt to 'subtly' affect her view of the pilots, and even more irritated with herself for not expecting it in the first place. All Mrs. Kinley had given her was an address, so it was something of a shock when she ended up standing in front of a sign by the side of the road proclaiming the building to be a home for wounded soldiers.
She'd heard about these places before. The war killed a lot of people, but worse in some ways, it also left a lot of men crippled, sometimes so badly that it was impossible for them to function normally or even take care of themselves. The lucky ones had families to help them. The unlucky ones, or the ones whose families' couldn't be bothered taking care of them, ended up in facilities like this. It was something like a nursing home, only most of the inhabitants were much younger and often in need of a lot more aid.
Julia had never personally been to one, and she wasn't sure what it would be like, but it was practically guaranteed that whoever she talked to would have a number of old scars, and be very bitter about the Gundam pilots. She sighed. That wasn't exactly what she was looking for, but she couldn't exactly leave now, and she was still interested. Besides, she couldn't really blame Mrs. Kinley or whoever she was going to talk to for feeling that way; if she'd lost family or a future because of the war, she'd probably feel that way, too.
Julia walked up the long path to the building and in the front door. It was a pretty place, just very... isolated. It felt almost as if time stopped as soon as you entered the property, and in one sense, it was partially true. A nice woman at the desk in the foyer asked her what her business was, and she gave her the name that Mrs. Kinley had given her. The woman asked her to take a seat and then picked up a phone. Julia waited patiently for several minutes, then glanced up as she heard a footstep on the carpet behind her.
She turned slightly in her seat, and saw a man in his early forties with dark glasses and a cane walk through the door. He turned his head towards the receptionist, who immediately said, "She's sitting in the chair immediately to your right."
He's blind, Julia realized as she stood up. He turned to face her, a slightly questioning look on his face. "Miss Yuy-Maxwell?" he asked, and Julia realized that she still hadn't said anything.
"Oh, yes! I... I'm sorry, I just..."
"You were expecting to see a grizzled old war veteran?" he asked with a hint of a smile, and held out his hand. "Richard Louis."
"Julia," she replied, taking his hand and shaking it. "And yes, a little. I'm sorry," she apologized.
He shrugged slightly. "That's all right, I'm sorry for disappointing you," he said with a bigger smile.
Julia blushed slightly and found herself smiling as well. "No, I'm not disappointed. Pleasantly surprised, probably. Thank you for taking the time to see me." She mentally winced. Sure, use the word 'see' around a blind person. Real good.
"My pleasure. It's a nice change from the boring routine, at least," he said.
"Routine?" Julia asked, not sure if she was being polite or absolutely rude. Mr. Louis was utterly different than what she'd expected, and she wasn't sure exactly what to say or do. She had the distinct impression that Mrs. Kinley had never actually met Mr. Louis, or she wouldn't have sent Julia to meet him.
"You know, get up, eat, work, that sort of thing," he responded absently.
Julia blinked, then she carefully asked, "What sort of work do you do?"
"I'm a computer programmer, I work on commission for a local company, that way I don't have to deal with the commute. The home also pays me to help any newcomers adjust, if they need it," he added with a slight shrug.
Julia stared at him for a second without speaking. She wanted very badly to ask him why, if he was obviously financially independent and capable of taking care of himself, as it seemed from what little she'd seen of him, why he was living here. She really wanted to ask him that, but couldn't think of anything that wouldn't be unbearably rude, even by her standards. "Oh," she finally managed. "Um, how long have you been working there?"
"About ten years now," he responded, then turned his head towards the receptionist when she cleared her throat. "I'm sorry, Mary," he said, then gestured through the door with his cane. "We really shouldn't be clogging up the entrance like this," he commented. "Do you have any preferences as to where we talk?"
"Ah, no, not really."
"How about outside?"
"Outside?" she asked, then winced at how ridiculous the question sounded. Did she honestly think that he never went outside just because he couldn't see? Julia hadn't felt like this much of an idiot in a long while, and wondered if her Duo-daddy's tendency to shove his foot in his mouth was something you inherited through genetics or a learned behavior. If it was the latter she was in trouble.
"Yup. It's a beautiful day, and it's quieter. If that's not a problem," he quickly added.
"No, that's fine."
He turned and lead her through several corridors, finally pushing open a door and stepping out into the bright sunshine. Julia noticed that he didn't use the cane at all through out the whole journey, but she caught him putting out one hand to check for the hallways when they needed to turn, and suddenly realized what he was doing. He had the hallways here, probably the entire building, memorized, so he didn't need to feel his way around. She also better understood the comment about not having to deal with the commute, he could have been in serious trouble if he got off at a wrong stop on the bus.
Once outside, he started gently tapping the cane on the ground in front of him, but didn't display any signs of hesitation as he lead her down a gravel path, finally stopping at a small gazebo with several chairs and a small table inside.
"Oh, this is beautiful," Julia said without thinking, then winced, wondering if he'd be hurt by the statement.
"I bet," he said, quietly feeling his way to a seat. "Describe it for me?"
Julia blinked. "You want me to..."
"Well, I can't see it," he said, gesturing to the glasses with his cane, a wry smile on his lips. Julia looked at him and something suddenly snapped into place in her mind. He was trying to break every possibly stereotype she might have had of disabled people, to get her to look at him like a person. And he was having some fun doing it, knowing how uncomfortable she was.
Julia had a stubborn streak as wide as a barn. Call it a personality flaw, but now her lips pressed together until they were a thin line as she fought to keep her emotions out of her voice. She'd never met anyone with any major disabilities before, and she hadn't known that she was coming to a home for wounded veterans when she set out this afternoon from school. There was no way that she could have known how to act. This might be one way to handle the problem and make her more comfortable, but it wasn't the best way. Like I'm one who should talk about that.
In the back of her mind, she admired how well he'd managed to break through the stereotype of 'poor old wounded soldier', but most of her attention was focused on how irritated she was right now. Fine, he wanted play? She could do that.
"It is beautiful," she said, quickly organizing her thoughts. "You know that the chairs, table, and gazebo are white?" her voice sounded just the way it had a few seconds earlier, a fact for which she was very proud. At his nod, she continued, "Well, the sun is shining down through the leaves of the trees, and you can actually see them in the air. The sky is completely blue, what of it you can see, and a few of the leaves are just beginning to turn red around the edges."
Mr. Louis now had an odd look on his face, peaceful, almost longing, but with a hint of a frown around the corners of his mouth. So she had him confused by how easily she was talking to him. Good. It was no more than he deserved, for leading her on like that. She decided that this ridiculousness had gone on long enough. "And behind you, there's this odd tree with bright neon pink leaves," she continued, raising her voice slightly. She saw his mouth drop open and outright suspicion on his face a second before she finished, "And there's a purple elephant sitting on the lowest branch, and he's waving at me."
She outright shock on his face now, and settled back to wait for the outrage. This wouldn't be the first time her tongue had gotten her in trouble, and it probably wouldn't be the last, although she had gotten slightly better at holding it in the last few years. Well, this just blew that record to hell. The casual relationship she shared with her fathers didn't help in this case, with them, she was free to express herself honestly, no matter if it was something that they didn't want to hear or not. There was a fair amount of teasing, especially between herself and Duo-daddy, that seemed perfectly natural, but when she acted that same way around other adults, they tended to act as if she'd done something wrong. It didn't take her too long to figure out that most adults weren't comfortable with children who were just as intelligent and confident as they were, who were used to being treated as equals, the way she was. Most of the time, nowadays, she managed to act 'properly' in public, but every now and then her mouth got the best of her.
Then, to her surprise, he burst out laughing. "I guess I deserved that, didn't I?" he asked rhetorically.
"Probably not," Julia admitted after a moment's thought. "I probably overacted. Sorry."
"No need to apologize, I did push you a little. I thought that you were one of those who was going to tiptoe around me like I was going to break. I didn't realize you'd met someone like me before."
Well, she hadn't, but that wasn't really important. The point was that he wasn't going to break, and he'd managed to get that across quite well. "There isn't a purple elephant," she offered. "But one of the trees is this amazing bright orange, almost neon pink."
"I do wish I could see it, but I can see it pretty well in my mind," he said, his tone slightly regretful. "Thank you."
"You're welcome. Thanks for talking to me."
"Like I said before, it's no problem. Do you have anywhere you want to start in particular?"
Julia thought quickly. "If I ever go somewhere that you don't want to talk about, just say so, and I'll drop it," she said hesitantly. After the reactions she'd gotten from Mrs. Kinley and her parents, she wasn't anxious to upset anyone else.
"Well, I can't promise that I won't curse at you a little if you hit anything sensitive, but I won't hold it against you. At least, not for long," he said cheerfully, momentarily reminding her of her Daddy.
"That's fine," she said with a grin. "Um, first of all... What happened to your eyes, and why are you here?"
"Don't pull your blows, do you?" he asked rhetorically, then held up his hands. "No, no, that's OK. I did volunteer for this job. My eyes... well, that's simple. The consul I was monitoring during a Gundam attack blew up in my face. I'm told that I was quite lucky, actually, it could have taken off my head."
"So you weren't a mobile suit pilot?"
"No! I wasn't nearly talented enough for that!" he said with a slight snort. "Never really wanted to be one, either. I was in computer programming, same as now, only then it was for targeting systems instead of making up games for kids to play, to help them learn to read. That's what I do now, by the way.
"When I tell it that way, that seems a little boring, doesn't it? It really is that boring, though. I joined the Academy when I was sixteen, graduated when I turned twenty one, and I barely had a year's worth of experience when the Gundams showed up. I got drafted to help fix a computer that had gone haywire, and I'd just finished when the Gundam showed up. I took over the station when we found out that he'd blown up the barracks where the person who was supposed to be there lived. I took a few recordings, gave a few orders, and then the damn thing exploded. Some sort of feedback, I don't know, I'm no electrician." He shrugged philosophically. "I do remember that the thing I was most irritated about when I woke up was that they'd ruined all my hard work. That was before I found out that I was blind.
"And how I ended up here? Well, during most of the war I got handed around from one military instillation to another. Not much a blind man could do during that time, or so I thought. Basically it was about six months of me feeling sorry for myself," he commented analytically. "Then, before I knew it, the war was over, and I didn't have anywhere to go. I was born really late to my parents, and they died before I got out of the Academy, and there wasn't anyone else. Then places like this started popping up, and I got shipped off to one of them. I don't have to pay anything, the government takes care of it, and apparently that was supposed to be enough." He snorted again. "Let me tell you, boredom does weird things to the mind. I spent the first five years or so moping around feeling sorry for myself. One of the nurses finally shocked me out of it... well, it doesn't really matter how she did it, but it did the trick. I went out, got a job, and eventually I figured out that just because I couldn't see didn't mean it was the end of the world. A couple of years ago the director of this place asked me if I'd become a counselor officially, help some people here, because I'd adjusted so well." He laughed for a moment, and it was clear that he saw the irony in it. "Just some evidence that anyone can turn themselves around." He turned his head towards her. "Does that answer your question?"
"Yes. Thank you," she said seriously, impressed. He... she couldn't think of who he reminded her of, but it wasn't everyone that could take an experience like that and grow beyond it.
"So what else did you want to hear about?" he asked with slightly forced cheerfulness.
------------
Julia talked to him for several hours, and by the time she left, she had to run in order to get to aikido on time. She had asked him about the time period, about what he knew about the colonies (it was almost nothing), why he'd joined the Academy (he hadn't had the money to go to college, and knew that he could get a good education and training working for the Alliance), and a number of other questions about the world when he was her age. It was very strange, he was only a few years older than her parents, if they'd been born a few years later, they might have been in the war, too. The thought was frightening, that they might have ended up like Mr. Louis, or worse, dead.
Besides all of the planned topics, they'd also spoken quite a bit about him getting over the war, what it was like to be trained to kill, even if he'd never done it (a fact for which, he confessed, he was very grateful), and especially what the Alliance used to tell their soldiers in order to get them to kill, to die for them, something Julia had never considered.
She pushed all of these thoughts to the back of her mind as she walked through the door to the dojo, trying to empty her mind of all outside considerations. Sometimes she wondered if her parents had known what this would mean to her, these quiet hours several times a week. She smiled slightly, most people would not consider time when you were learning how to fight 'quiet' time, but she wasn't talking about her body. It was her mind that was quiet during this time, and she needed that, very badly. Sometimes she thought that she might have gone crazy without the calm that these lessons gave her.
Julia automatically turned her attention to the ceiling, listening for the soft sound of footsteps on the floor overhead. When she didn't hear anything, she turned her head to the room at the back of the dojo, where her sensei sometimes worked before classes. No footsteps there either, and she couldn't hear any breathing. She bowed as she entered the dojo, then looked at John, the senior student. "Where's sensei?"
He gave her an odd look. "Some day I'm going to figure out how you do that," he commented with a smile, then answered her question. "He got stuck in a traffic jam, he isn't going to be able to make it tonight. Feel up to being uke tonight?" he asked with a grin.
"Always," she responded with a smile of her own. "Just let me get changed." John had been teasing her for years about her 'mystical powers'. Just because she was observant didn't make her a psychic. At first she'd tried to explain this to him, but all that had ended up happening was her getting flustered. Eventually she learned to tease him back, which helped, but he never gave up on the mystical powers explanation.
Julia quickly changed into her gi and headed back upstairs. Despite everything, she'd still managed to reach the dojo before most of the rest of the class, so the mat was pretty empty. She stepped onto the mat, dropped to her knees and bowed respectfully, then stood up and looked at John respectfully. "What did you have him mind?"
"Attack me, cross-hand grab. I had this idea, and I think there's a way out of it, but I need to see it first."
Julia helpfully grabbed his wrist, and allowed herself to be spun around and forced to her knees. Once he was there, however, he paused. "You OK?"
"Yeah, I'm fine." The position might look painful, but Julia was pretty flexible, and she'd been training for most of her life, so she knew where to go when she was thrown. "You planning on doing anything with this, or just leaving it there?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder at her arm extended up behind her.
"I'm trying to remember what it was I'm supposed to do. Or what you're supposed to do, actually."
"To get out of this?"
"Mm-hm."
Julia reacted without thinking, twisting slightly in his grip and feeling along his wrist for a particular point... she found it and pushed. He let out a cry of pain and let go of her wrist long enough for her to twist free - she dove forward into a roll, latching onto *his* wrist and using the move that Tousan had taught her a few weeks earlier, threw him away from her as she rolled to her feet.
John wasn't the senior student for nothing, he rolled automatically as she threw him and came up facing her, but he wore a grimace of pain on his face and was rubbing one wrist with his hand. "Ouch," he said mildly.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" she exclaimed, looking at the way he was holding his hand. It looked like it was just hanging there. Sensei had demonstrated a few pressure points on her before, so she knew approximately what he was going through.
"That wasn't exactly what I had in mind," he said dryly, shaking his hand, obviously trying to get some feeling back into the extremity.
"I'm sorry," she repeated, aware that everyone was staring at them.
"It's all right, I'll be fine," he told her. "And it did work. Where the heck did you learn that?"
"I... I'm not sure. The last part my Tousan taught me a few weeks ago, but I don't remember..." Julia trailed off as something distant surfaced in her mind. "I... I could figure it out, but it's going to take some time." She blinked several times to keep her mind rooted in the present, and felt a strong hint of resentment. This was supposed to be her time when her mind was quiet and not bothering her! This had happened to her before, so she recognized the signs, which was why she knew it would take a long time to summon up the memory.
She knew it was a fact that people never really forgot anything they'd ever seen, heard, or experienced. It wasn't that they remembered everything, but it was all there, somewhere, tucked away in their brains. Not for her, when she remembered everything, she really remembered it. Weird things from when she was a baby (a real baby) floated up into her conscious mind at the oddest times. If she concentrated, she could usually find the entire thing in a couple of hours, but she rarely bothered. Who really wanted to remember laying in a crib staring at shiny objects? The novelty of remembering the way she thought when she was that young wore off pretty quickly, and anyway, she always had a headache after she finished.
The nerve pinch she'd just used, she could have seen or been taught it at any point in the last ten years, and she really didn't feel like practically going into a trance for the next several hours to figure out where and when.
John was giving her a strange look. "Are you all right?"
Julia pushed her irritation aside. "I'm fine. Look, I'll figure out where I learned it later, OK? I think it was in a book or something, I'll go look it up when I get home." That was a lie, she had the distinct impression that one of her fathers was involved, but that would have required more of an explanation, and she didn't talk to people (outside of her parents) about her mind anymore. She didn't like the way they looked at her when they found out how weird her mind was. She'd had enough of that to last a lifetime when they first figured out that she was a genius.
He shook his head slightly, denying that he wanted anything from her at all. Even though she knew that he was still curious, she relaxed slightly when she saw his attempt at making her feel better. "It's ok, Julie, whatever you want is ok, all right?" Julia nodded uncomfortably, then glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost time for the class to start. She nodded almost imperceptibly at the clock and saw John's eyes fix on it. Without waiting for him to respond, she walked to the middle of the mat and sank down to her knees, sitting on her heels. After so many years of practice, she barely even noticed that sitting in that position for long periods of time could be rather painful.
As John clapped his hands to signal the beginning of the class, and walked to the front of the mat, Julia firmly pressed all of the odd memory out of her mind. She wasn't going to think right now.
------------
"Something's bothering her," Duo murmured to Heero that night, as they were getting ready for bed. Duo paused in his preparations for a moment to admire his koi's body. Fifteen years had done nothing to diminish Heero's attraction, nor had it eroded his figure in the least. Duo found himself eyeing the little patch of Heero's stomach just above his bellybutton speculatively, and shook his head slightly, trying to focus, at least for now. But later... just because you were older than thirty didn't mean you were dead, did it?
"Hn."
"Any idea what it was?"
Heero shook his head as he headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and Duo sighed. It would be at least ten minutes before his husband returned, and at this rate his teeth would remain perfect for dozens of years after he died. Duo's teeth, on the other hand, were likely to start rotting away any day now, when all the sweets he ate caught up with him.
Julia had been quiet during dinner. She mentioned that she'd had a new idea of how she was going to approach the 'Gundam project', as he'd begun to think of her delving into their history, but probably sensing that the topic disturbed them, no matter how much they tried to hide it. Then she'd related a little of her meeting with the war veteran, who'd been blinded in a Gundam attack. She either didn't know which Gundam it had been, or hadn't told them, the former being much more likely. Why should she care which one of them it had been?
He knew that he'd come perilously close to giving himself away with his reaction when she mentioned that the nice young man she'd met had been blinded by a Gundam attack. And he wasn't even a combat soldier, just a technician who'd never killed anyone, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He pushed away the regret to the back of his mind, the same way he had for longer than he wanted to think about. They'd all done things in the war that still made him sick to think about now, but letting it bother him wouldn't help or fix anything.
Heero came walking back into the room. "Are you all right?" he asked, tilting his head slightly.
"I'll be fine, it's not me I'm worried about. How about you?" Duo asked.
Heero shrugged slightly and walked over to put his arms around Duo. "Une called today, she wants me to take a mission," he murmured.
Duo stiffened involuntarily. "Not active?!" he demanded. You would think that after all this time she would have given up. They'd both been taking occasional missions for the Preventers when they found out what the scientists had been up to, but shortly after they got Julia, they gave up doing those missions. Permanently. The missions were dangerous, and while Duo hadn't planned on getting himself killed any time soon, he wasn't going to risk it. Not when it wasn't just himself and Heero at risk. They weren't going to let their daughter grow up an orphan. Une had accepted the decision with ill grace, especially when Quatre and Trowa had also announced that they weren't going to be taking any missions at the same time, and when Wufei had followed suit a few years later, when his first child was born. It can't have been easy for her to see five of her best operatives suddenly retire themselves from active duty, but after fifteen years, you would have thought she would have given up.
"Iie. It's just a computer job. They need some information on a group that's trying to build mobile suits."
Duo shook his head. Sometimes the idiocy of people astounded him. They finally had peace, and what did those fuck-ups want to do but screw it up again? Fifteen years of trying to watch his tongue around his daughter had failed to cure him of the habit of cursing, either. He just cursed in private, now.
"Well, then, if it's just a computer job..." Duo sighed and kissed Heero, then pulled him towards the bed.
"Do you think we should tell her?" The words froze him where he stood.
After several seconds his brain unfroze just enough for him to start talking (big surprise there), although he couldn't quite think yet. "I don't know. Do you think so?"
"She'd going to be angry when she finds out."
"Yeah, I know. But I don't really want to tell her. I don't think I could, not just outright. You?"
"Iie."
Duo bit his lip. "But we are going to have to tell her something, eventually, even if she figures it out on her own, she going to have questions."
He could practically feel Heero's intense concentration, and held back a groan. Great, I've given him another mission. I'll be lucky if I get three words out of him in the next week. But Heero surprised him by pulling him the rest of the way to the bed with gentle hands - he was usually too preoccupied after being given a mission to pay attention to details like that.
"I'll work on it," Heero said shortly, before drawing the covers over both of them and turning off the lights.
Well, this section turned out completely differently than I expected. Richard Louis was supposed to be a total throwaway character (and probably resemble the sort of stereotype he ended up mocking) but then he went and became an actual character on me. I'm not sure what role he's going to play in the rest of the story (if any), but he does provide an interesting perspective on the whole situation.
As a note, I happen to have several friends who are either blind or handicapped, and it is from their attitudes that I created Richard's. Yes, it sucks beyond belief to have something like that happen to you, probably more than I can ever imagine, being a reasonably healthy person. But it isn't the end of the world, nor do people's lives end just because they can't see, or are short a leg. One friend does make a joke out of the fact that she can't see, and gets extremely irritated when people get sensitive about using words like 'see' or 'sight' around her.
Anyway, sorry for yet another extremely long and (this time) preachy author's note. I am having a great time writing this story, it's turning out to be one of the more interesting things I've ever written.
Marika 10/11/01
She sort of drifted through the first half of the school day without really hearing anything that the teachers were saying. It didn't really matter, she knew most of it anyway and she could always fake it if she didn't. She'd read her school books through in the first week of classes, so this was mostly review for her. What little she couldn't get from the books, she could reason out on her own. There were times when she wondered why she even bothered going to school.
She decided to skip lunch and instead headed for a computer lab. Maybe some work would shake her out of her foul mood.
Before she'd gone to bed the night before, she had managed to pin down those elusive references to '04's support troops'. It seemed that there were between twenty and forty mobile suits, all in colors adapted for desert combat, that followed Gundam 04 around to a number of its battles.
What that suggested to her was fascinating, enough so that she momentarily forgot everything she'd heard last night. What it meant, she thought, was that not only did the Gundams originally have the support of the colonies, the pilots (or at least one of them) were the type of people who could gain a following. The support troops were not Gundams, not by a long shot. They were fairly advanced mobile suits, but they didn't have the same kind of shielding or weapons that all of the Gundams had, and they still followed 04 into battles where they were vastly outnumbered and often in a weaker position. The men in those suits were in danger, even more so than the Gundam pilot, there must have been something there that made them willing to follow him into battle.
Julia found it difficult to believe that it was just the Gundam pilot, although the evidence suggested it, quite strongly. If the support troops were just fighting because of what was going on in the colonies, why weren't they fighting by themselves, or with all of the Gundams? Either of those behavior patterns would have made sense if they were just fighting for the colonies at large, but they weren't, they were following 04 around. The few times they were sighted away from 04 (from what she could tell) they were always working in conjunction with that pilot, either coordinating their attacks at exactly the same time, or attacking places that clearly had some connection to the target of Gundam 04. So they weren't just fighting alongside a Gundam, they were following the pilot himself.
And that thought was just weird. She didn't respect them much, but she had read a lot of those articles about the horrible terrorists, it was very difficult to picture them being the sort of people that could gain a following.
But she was getting somewhere, Julia realized after a moment's thought. It never would have occurred to most people to even consider the possibility that one of the pilots might be worth following. They were terrorists, plain and simple. But no one ever questioned that people like Zechs Marquise were worth following, and he had hundreds of kills under his belt before the Gundams ever showed up. What was it that made him simply a good soldier and the Gundam pilots monsters? Well, there was the fact that they were terrorists, but... they attacked military targets. Except for the incident involving Gundam 01b destroying a bunch of colonies (and she still had no idea why that had happened), the Gundams had never attacked anything but military targets. Even when they killed the Alliance doves (another incident that just didn't make sense - she was missing far too many pieces of the puzzle), that could still count as a military target. When you looked at it that way, Oz and the Alliance had killed more civilians with their wars and what they did to the colonies than the Gundams possibly could have! But the Gundam pilots were still the bad guys...
She did have to admit that even the top mobile suit pilots for both the Alliance and Oz never racked up numbers of kills close to any of the pilots, and the people that they were killing were clearly 'the enemy', members of noncomplying nations. To the people of those nations, surely those mobile suit pilots were just as bad as the Gundams. It was just that most of the world was part of the Alliance, so there were that many people who saw the Gundams of the enemy. But that didn't make them monsters, did it?
Maybe it was because of the politics involved. Zechs Marquise (aka the Lightening Count, aka Milliardo Peacecraft - she really needed to figure out what was going on with him) had been working for a legitimate government for most of his career when he was out killing people. Was that the difference?
But the Gundam pilots were there because of politics, too. The thought jumped into her head before she knew it, and froze. The idea was so simple, and so obvious, she couldn't believe that she hadn't seen it before. Had they actually expected to topple the Alliance (or Oz) when they were sent, or were they just sent to gain attention? Surely that had been part of their mission - to get people to look at the colonies to figure out why they sent the Gundams to Earth. Nothing else had worked, not the protests that were staged by the colonists when the colonies were first taken over by the Alliance, not the pacifistic teachings of Heero Yuy, not even his assassination; none of that had brought enough attention to the colonies to force the Alliance to stop what they were doing.
They must have been desperate. The colonies were being smothered, and no one on Earth seemed to care. And the Gundams did get people's attention. Since her initial investigation, she'd discovered that shortly after all of the Gundams disappeared for that four-month period, and before the colonies repudiated the Gundams, Oz had been quietly courting the colonies, offering support against the Alliance and promising all sorts of freedoms that were never actually granted. After about a month, the colonies suddenly accepted Oz's overtures, and in the same moment, repudiated the Gundams.
Once again Julia was caught by that thought, imagining what it must have been like for the pilots in that situation. They were the ones who'd gotten Oz to take a look at the colonies (probably in hopes of stopping the pilots' attacks), and the first thing the colonies did with their newfound influence was turn on the very people who'd made it possible. The betrayal...
Julia actually shook her head slightly, trying to dispel the thoughts, to concentrate on the task at hand. She was thinking about why the pilots were looked on as monster when those around them, who committed the same sorts of crimes (although not with the same sort of numbers, she had to admit), were not treated the same world.
Maybe it was because they were faceless. It was easy to hate an enemy who was known only for the number of bodies he left behind. When the soldiers were fighting an enemy, it was usually in battle, against other soldiers in similar weapons. That was entirely different from an enemy that materialized out of nowhere, killed hundreds or thousands with no discernable effort, and then disappeared just as quickly. The Alliance hadn't even had any evidence that the other four Gundams (aside from 01, which was shot down during entry) even existed - they only knew that someone was destroying their bases so completely that there were never any survivors to report what had happened.
Julia felt a slight shiver run down her spine. It was frightening to think of an enemy like that, almost insubstantial except in the damage they did. The Oz pilots who faced them... that had to be the ultimate nightmare for them! And the Gundam pilots apparently were that good, it wasn't just the Gundams (which were several steps beyond everyone else's capabilities as it was), the way she'd originally thought. She'd glanced over a couple of the battles that happened to be caught on tape, and it was obvious even to her inexperienced eye that not only were the Gundams vastly superior to the mobile suits they were fighting against, but the pilots in them were also better than the pilots in the regular suits - much better. The differences between them and the regular pilots were almost as pronounced as those between the Gundams and regular suits.
Julia closed her eyes, replaying one particular short battle involving Gundam 02 and a dozen or so Taurus'. It was only about a minute and a half of footage, because that was all the suit taking the pictures could broadcast before 02 got to him. It was difficult, knowing that she was able to do this research because someone had died, but she did her best to push it out of her mind. It was funny, sort of, she felt like she could almost see the tactics the Gundam pilot was using, and a few times she actually knew what he was going to do an instant before he did it. The patterns she saw seemed somewhat familiar, which was patently ridiculous.
Actually, maybe it wasn't - mobile suits were made to approximate the human form, so once they exhausted their artillery (or once the Gundam got in too close for the mobile suits to use their artillery without risking either hitting one of their fellows or being caught up in the explosion), they started 'hand to hand' combat, which closely resembled normal fighting. Julia knew enough about fighting that it wasn't entirely surprising that it would look familiar, it was just that she couldn't identify it. All she knew was that it looked familiar, which was frustrating.
But it seemed very odd that she would so easily see the tactics of the Gundam, when all she'd done was glance at their battles a few times. During the war, Oz and the Alliance devoted dozens, hundreds of people to studying the Gundams, their attacks, their advantages, in hopes that they'd be able to capitalize on whatever weaknesses they possessed. It was more than likely that her mind was just trying to put a familiar face on the fighting than that she actually saw something reliable in there. The few times she'd been able to anticipate the moves could be luck, or just a very common move that she'd seen before in the footage. She'd have to do a lot more research on what was taught to mobile suit pilots in terms of tactics before she could make any judgments.
Before she realized it, the black Gundam with that strange sickle-shaped weapon was flying towards her (or so it appeared in her memory of the recording she'd seen), and there was that final, horrible scream before she jolted out of the memory, her eyes flying open.
How could anyone do something like that to another human?
Julia found that she was panting slightly, and took several deep breaths to calm herself. What sort of question was that? How could there be wars at all? How could the Alliance do what it had done to the colonies? She might as well ask how Cain had killed his brother. It was an endless cycle, violence begat violence. The Gundams were created in response to what was done to the colonies, which was probably in response to what was happening on Earth, which was in response to... who knew, after a while? What she wanted to know was why the Gundam pilots had done it. How could wait for a philosophy discussion with one of her fathers.
Julia quieted as she realized what she had just thought. Why the Gundam pilots did it. That's what it came down to, eventually. She might have said that she was going to focus on the world as it was when the Gundam pilots appeared, that she was going to leave them as a fairly peripheral part of her project because of the lack of information, but the Gundam pilots had always been her interest. What in the world (or off it) could drive people to do what they'd done?
I could try to find out. Julia stared at the paper in front of her and discovered that she'd unconsciously been doodling little Gundams. Little 01's and 02's, as a matter of fact. Her ability to draft pictures from her mind was as phenomenal as the rest of her mental abilities, although she had few creative impulses. It seemed stupid to draw stuff that she'd never seen, and she felt bad about flaunting her skills in front of true artists, especially when she hadn't worked for the ability at all.
There wasn't any way that she could do what she wanted to, was there? It would make for a fascinating project, trying to get into the heads of the pilots. For her final presentation, she could do a sort of fake interview, ask the questions and see if she could figure out how they would have responded. It could be fascinating. It could be absolutely ridiculous.
Julia had always had a gift for getting into other people's minds with very little information, understanding why they reacted the way they did, based on how they presented themselves, word choice, their eyes, even their body language. She usually could tell quite a bit about a person within a few minutes of meeting them. That was how she'd picked up what she had about her fathers being from the colonies. But could she possibly do that for people whose faces were never seen? Could she do that from what she knew about the colonies, their targets, and the combat footage she had?
There were too many holes in the story right now, she needed to fill some of them in before she could know if this would work, but in the meantime... There was battle footage out there, very little from the earlier battles but more, a lot more, from later in the war, including the final battle. She hadn't looked at it yet because she didn't feel like she knew enough about it, but she'd change that. She knew of a half-dozen legitimate resources she could look through to find out what tactics were taught mobile suit pilots as a beginning, and if that wasn't enough, she could start looking in other places. She might even ask Wufei, he worked for the Preventers, who were (supposedly) the only group that owned any mobile suits any more. Who knew, he might even know something about piloting one.
Julia quickly scooped all of her papers, including the doodles, and crammed them into her bag as the bell signaling the end of the period rang. Her mind was already occupied, replaying the battle scenes she'd viewed and reviewing what little she knew about mobile suit fighting in general. At least she had something to work on now.
------------
At the beginning of the last period of school, Julia got a note from Mrs. Kinley, saying that her teacher had arranged a meeting for her with one of the veterans of the war. Since Julia wasn't quite ready to declare open war between herself and her advisor (although there was a part of her that wished she could, just out of pure stubbornness), and because she really was interested in a first-hand account, she headed for the address immediately after school. She ought to have enough time to talk to the man for a couple of hours, and still make it to aikido on time.
It only took her about fifteen minutes to walk the couple of miles to the address, but when she saw the building, she hesitated. I probably should have expected this, she thought, irritated with Mrs. Kinley's obvious attempt to 'subtly' affect her view of the pilots, and even more irritated with herself for not expecting it in the first place. All Mrs. Kinley had given her was an address, so it was something of a shock when she ended up standing in front of a sign by the side of the road proclaiming the building to be a home for wounded soldiers.
She'd heard about these places before. The war killed a lot of people, but worse in some ways, it also left a lot of men crippled, sometimes so badly that it was impossible for them to function normally or even take care of themselves. The lucky ones had families to help them. The unlucky ones, or the ones whose families' couldn't be bothered taking care of them, ended up in facilities like this. It was something like a nursing home, only most of the inhabitants were much younger and often in need of a lot more aid.
Julia had never personally been to one, and she wasn't sure what it would be like, but it was practically guaranteed that whoever she talked to would have a number of old scars, and be very bitter about the Gundam pilots. She sighed. That wasn't exactly what she was looking for, but she couldn't exactly leave now, and she was still interested. Besides, she couldn't really blame Mrs. Kinley or whoever she was going to talk to for feeling that way; if she'd lost family or a future because of the war, she'd probably feel that way, too.
Julia walked up the long path to the building and in the front door. It was a pretty place, just very... isolated. It felt almost as if time stopped as soon as you entered the property, and in one sense, it was partially true. A nice woman at the desk in the foyer asked her what her business was, and she gave her the name that Mrs. Kinley had given her. The woman asked her to take a seat and then picked up a phone. Julia waited patiently for several minutes, then glanced up as she heard a footstep on the carpet behind her.
She turned slightly in her seat, and saw a man in his early forties with dark glasses and a cane walk through the door. He turned his head towards the receptionist, who immediately said, "She's sitting in the chair immediately to your right."
He's blind, Julia realized as she stood up. He turned to face her, a slightly questioning look on his face. "Miss Yuy-Maxwell?" he asked, and Julia realized that she still hadn't said anything.
"Oh, yes! I... I'm sorry, I just..."
"You were expecting to see a grizzled old war veteran?" he asked with a hint of a smile, and held out his hand. "Richard Louis."
"Julia," she replied, taking his hand and shaking it. "And yes, a little. I'm sorry," she apologized.
He shrugged slightly. "That's all right, I'm sorry for disappointing you," he said with a bigger smile.
Julia blushed slightly and found herself smiling as well. "No, I'm not disappointed. Pleasantly surprised, probably. Thank you for taking the time to see me." She mentally winced. Sure, use the word 'see' around a blind person. Real good.
"My pleasure. It's a nice change from the boring routine, at least," he said.
"Routine?" Julia asked, not sure if she was being polite or absolutely rude. Mr. Louis was utterly different than what she'd expected, and she wasn't sure exactly what to say or do. She had the distinct impression that Mrs. Kinley had never actually met Mr. Louis, or she wouldn't have sent Julia to meet him.
"You know, get up, eat, work, that sort of thing," he responded absently.
Julia blinked, then she carefully asked, "What sort of work do you do?"
"I'm a computer programmer, I work on commission for a local company, that way I don't have to deal with the commute. The home also pays me to help any newcomers adjust, if they need it," he added with a slight shrug.
Julia stared at him for a second without speaking. She wanted very badly to ask him why, if he was obviously financially independent and capable of taking care of himself, as it seemed from what little she'd seen of him, why he was living here. She really wanted to ask him that, but couldn't think of anything that wouldn't be unbearably rude, even by her standards. "Oh," she finally managed. "Um, how long have you been working there?"
"About ten years now," he responded, then turned his head towards the receptionist when she cleared her throat. "I'm sorry, Mary," he said, then gestured through the door with his cane. "We really shouldn't be clogging up the entrance like this," he commented. "Do you have any preferences as to where we talk?"
"Ah, no, not really."
"How about outside?"
"Outside?" she asked, then winced at how ridiculous the question sounded. Did she honestly think that he never went outside just because he couldn't see? Julia hadn't felt like this much of an idiot in a long while, and wondered if her Duo-daddy's tendency to shove his foot in his mouth was something you inherited through genetics or a learned behavior. If it was the latter she was in trouble.
"Yup. It's a beautiful day, and it's quieter. If that's not a problem," he quickly added.
"No, that's fine."
He turned and lead her through several corridors, finally pushing open a door and stepping out into the bright sunshine. Julia noticed that he didn't use the cane at all through out the whole journey, but she caught him putting out one hand to check for the hallways when they needed to turn, and suddenly realized what he was doing. He had the hallways here, probably the entire building, memorized, so he didn't need to feel his way around. She also better understood the comment about not having to deal with the commute, he could have been in serious trouble if he got off at a wrong stop on the bus.
Once outside, he started gently tapping the cane on the ground in front of him, but didn't display any signs of hesitation as he lead her down a gravel path, finally stopping at a small gazebo with several chairs and a small table inside.
"Oh, this is beautiful," Julia said without thinking, then winced, wondering if he'd be hurt by the statement.
"I bet," he said, quietly feeling his way to a seat. "Describe it for me?"
Julia blinked. "You want me to..."
"Well, I can't see it," he said, gesturing to the glasses with his cane, a wry smile on his lips. Julia looked at him and something suddenly snapped into place in her mind. He was trying to break every possibly stereotype she might have had of disabled people, to get her to look at him like a person. And he was having some fun doing it, knowing how uncomfortable she was.
Julia had a stubborn streak as wide as a barn. Call it a personality flaw, but now her lips pressed together until they were a thin line as she fought to keep her emotions out of her voice. She'd never met anyone with any major disabilities before, and she hadn't known that she was coming to a home for wounded veterans when she set out this afternoon from school. There was no way that she could have known how to act. This might be one way to handle the problem and make her more comfortable, but it wasn't the best way. Like I'm one who should talk about that.
In the back of her mind, she admired how well he'd managed to break through the stereotype of 'poor old wounded soldier', but most of her attention was focused on how irritated she was right now. Fine, he wanted play? She could do that.
"It is beautiful," she said, quickly organizing her thoughts. "You know that the chairs, table, and gazebo are white?" her voice sounded just the way it had a few seconds earlier, a fact for which she was very proud. At his nod, she continued, "Well, the sun is shining down through the leaves of the trees, and you can actually see them in the air. The sky is completely blue, what of it you can see, and a few of the leaves are just beginning to turn red around the edges."
Mr. Louis now had an odd look on his face, peaceful, almost longing, but with a hint of a frown around the corners of his mouth. So she had him confused by how easily she was talking to him. Good. It was no more than he deserved, for leading her on like that. She decided that this ridiculousness had gone on long enough. "And behind you, there's this odd tree with bright neon pink leaves," she continued, raising her voice slightly. She saw his mouth drop open and outright suspicion on his face a second before she finished, "And there's a purple elephant sitting on the lowest branch, and he's waving at me."
She outright shock on his face now, and settled back to wait for the outrage. This wouldn't be the first time her tongue had gotten her in trouble, and it probably wouldn't be the last, although she had gotten slightly better at holding it in the last few years. Well, this just blew that record to hell. The casual relationship she shared with her fathers didn't help in this case, with them, she was free to express herself honestly, no matter if it was something that they didn't want to hear or not. There was a fair amount of teasing, especially between herself and Duo-daddy, that seemed perfectly natural, but when she acted that same way around other adults, they tended to act as if she'd done something wrong. It didn't take her too long to figure out that most adults weren't comfortable with children who were just as intelligent and confident as they were, who were used to being treated as equals, the way she was. Most of the time, nowadays, she managed to act 'properly' in public, but every now and then her mouth got the best of her.
Then, to her surprise, he burst out laughing. "I guess I deserved that, didn't I?" he asked rhetorically.
"Probably not," Julia admitted after a moment's thought. "I probably overacted. Sorry."
"No need to apologize, I did push you a little. I thought that you were one of those who was going to tiptoe around me like I was going to break. I didn't realize you'd met someone like me before."
Well, she hadn't, but that wasn't really important. The point was that he wasn't going to break, and he'd managed to get that across quite well. "There isn't a purple elephant," she offered. "But one of the trees is this amazing bright orange, almost neon pink."
"I do wish I could see it, but I can see it pretty well in my mind," he said, his tone slightly regretful. "Thank you."
"You're welcome. Thanks for talking to me."
"Like I said before, it's no problem. Do you have anywhere you want to start in particular?"
Julia thought quickly. "If I ever go somewhere that you don't want to talk about, just say so, and I'll drop it," she said hesitantly. After the reactions she'd gotten from Mrs. Kinley and her parents, she wasn't anxious to upset anyone else.
"Well, I can't promise that I won't curse at you a little if you hit anything sensitive, but I won't hold it against you. At least, not for long," he said cheerfully, momentarily reminding her of her Daddy.
"That's fine," she said with a grin. "Um, first of all... What happened to your eyes, and why are you here?"
"Don't pull your blows, do you?" he asked rhetorically, then held up his hands. "No, no, that's OK. I did volunteer for this job. My eyes... well, that's simple. The consul I was monitoring during a Gundam attack blew up in my face. I'm told that I was quite lucky, actually, it could have taken off my head."
"So you weren't a mobile suit pilot?"
"No! I wasn't nearly talented enough for that!" he said with a slight snort. "Never really wanted to be one, either. I was in computer programming, same as now, only then it was for targeting systems instead of making up games for kids to play, to help them learn to read. That's what I do now, by the way.
"When I tell it that way, that seems a little boring, doesn't it? It really is that boring, though. I joined the Academy when I was sixteen, graduated when I turned twenty one, and I barely had a year's worth of experience when the Gundams showed up. I got drafted to help fix a computer that had gone haywire, and I'd just finished when the Gundam showed up. I took over the station when we found out that he'd blown up the barracks where the person who was supposed to be there lived. I took a few recordings, gave a few orders, and then the damn thing exploded. Some sort of feedback, I don't know, I'm no electrician." He shrugged philosophically. "I do remember that the thing I was most irritated about when I woke up was that they'd ruined all my hard work. That was before I found out that I was blind.
"And how I ended up here? Well, during most of the war I got handed around from one military instillation to another. Not much a blind man could do during that time, or so I thought. Basically it was about six months of me feeling sorry for myself," he commented analytically. "Then, before I knew it, the war was over, and I didn't have anywhere to go. I was born really late to my parents, and they died before I got out of the Academy, and there wasn't anyone else. Then places like this started popping up, and I got shipped off to one of them. I don't have to pay anything, the government takes care of it, and apparently that was supposed to be enough." He snorted again. "Let me tell you, boredom does weird things to the mind. I spent the first five years or so moping around feeling sorry for myself. One of the nurses finally shocked me out of it... well, it doesn't really matter how she did it, but it did the trick. I went out, got a job, and eventually I figured out that just because I couldn't see didn't mean it was the end of the world. A couple of years ago the director of this place asked me if I'd become a counselor officially, help some people here, because I'd adjusted so well." He laughed for a moment, and it was clear that he saw the irony in it. "Just some evidence that anyone can turn themselves around." He turned his head towards her. "Does that answer your question?"
"Yes. Thank you," she said seriously, impressed. He... she couldn't think of who he reminded her of, but it wasn't everyone that could take an experience like that and grow beyond it.
"So what else did you want to hear about?" he asked with slightly forced cheerfulness.
------------
Julia talked to him for several hours, and by the time she left, she had to run in order to get to aikido on time. She had asked him about the time period, about what he knew about the colonies (it was almost nothing), why he'd joined the Academy (he hadn't had the money to go to college, and knew that he could get a good education and training working for the Alliance), and a number of other questions about the world when he was her age. It was very strange, he was only a few years older than her parents, if they'd been born a few years later, they might have been in the war, too. The thought was frightening, that they might have ended up like Mr. Louis, or worse, dead.
Besides all of the planned topics, they'd also spoken quite a bit about him getting over the war, what it was like to be trained to kill, even if he'd never done it (a fact for which, he confessed, he was very grateful), and especially what the Alliance used to tell their soldiers in order to get them to kill, to die for them, something Julia had never considered.
She pushed all of these thoughts to the back of her mind as she walked through the door to the dojo, trying to empty her mind of all outside considerations. Sometimes she wondered if her parents had known what this would mean to her, these quiet hours several times a week. She smiled slightly, most people would not consider time when you were learning how to fight 'quiet' time, but she wasn't talking about her body. It was her mind that was quiet during this time, and she needed that, very badly. Sometimes she thought that she might have gone crazy without the calm that these lessons gave her.
Julia automatically turned her attention to the ceiling, listening for the soft sound of footsteps on the floor overhead. When she didn't hear anything, she turned her head to the room at the back of the dojo, where her sensei sometimes worked before classes. No footsteps there either, and she couldn't hear any breathing. She bowed as she entered the dojo, then looked at John, the senior student. "Where's sensei?"
He gave her an odd look. "Some day I'm going to figure out how you do that," he commented with a smile, then answered her question. "He got stuck in a traffic jam, he isn't going to be able to make it tonight. Feel up to being uke tonight?" he asked with a grin.
"Always," she responded with a smile of her own. "Just let me get changed." John had been teasing her for years about her 'mystical powers'. Just because she was observant didn't make her a psychic. At first she'd tried to explain this to him, but all that had ended up happening was her getting flustered. Eventually she learned to tease him back, which helped, but he never gave up on the mystical powers explanation.
Julia quickly changed into her gi and headed back upstairs. Despite everything, she'd still managed to reach the dojo before most of the rest of the class, so the mat was pretty empty. She stepped onto the mat, dropped to her knees and bowed respectfully, then stood up and looked at John respectfully. "What did you have him mind?"
"Attack me, cross-hand grab. I had this idea, and I think there's a way out of it, but I need to see it first."
Julia helpfully grabbed his wrist, and allowed herself to be spun around and forced to her knees. Once he was there, however, he paused. "You OK?"
"Yeah, I'm fine." The position might look painful, but Julia was pretty flexible, and she'd been training for most of her life, so she knew where to go when she was thrown. "You planning on doing anything with this, or just leaving it there?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder at her arm extended up behind her.
"I'm trying to remember what it was I'm supposed to do. Or what you're supposed to do, actually."
"To get out of this?"
"Mm-hm."
Julia reacted without thinking, twisting slightly in his grip and feeling along his wrist for a particular point... she found it and pushed. He let out a cry of pain and let go of her wrist long enough for her to twist free - she dove forward into a roll, latching onto *his* wrist and using the move that Tousan had taught her a few weeks earlier, threw him away from her as she rolled to her feet.
John wasn't the senior student for nothing, he rolled automatically as she threw him and came up facing her, but he wore a grimace of pain on his face and was rubbing one wrist with his hand. "Ouch," he said mildly.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" she exclaimed, looking at the way he was holding his hand. It looked like it was just hanging there. Sensei had demonstrated a few pressure points on her before, so she knew approximately what he was going through.
"That wasn't exactly what I had in mind," he said dryly, shaking his hand, obviously trying to get some feeling back into the extremity.
"I'm sorry," she repeated, aware that everyone was staring at them.
"It's all right, I'll be fine," he told her. "And it did work. Where the heck did you learn that?"
"I... I'm not sure. The last part my Tousan taught me a few weeks ago, but I don't remember..." Julia trailed off as something distant surfaced in her mind. "I... I could figure it out, but it's going to take some time." She blinked several times to keep her mind rooted in the present, and felt a strong hint of resentment. This was supposed to be her time when her mind was quiet and not bothering her! This had happened to her before, so she recognized the signs, which was why she knew it would take a long time to summon up the memory.
She knew it was a fact that people never really forgot anything they'd ever seen, heard, or experienced. It wasn't that they remembered everything, but it was all there, somewhere, tucked away in their brains. Not for her, when she remembered everything, she really remembered it. Weird things from when she was a baby (a real baby) floated up into her conscious mind at the oddest times. If she concentrated, she could usually find the entire thing in a couple of hours, but she rarely bothered. Who really wanted to remember laying in a crib staring at shiny objects? The novelty of remembering the way she thought when she was that young wore off pretty quickly, and anyway, she always had a headache after she finished.
The nerve pinch she'd just used, she could have seen or been taught it at any point in the last ten years, and she really didn't feel like practically going into a trance for the next several hours to figure out where and when.
John was giving her a strange look. "Are you all right?"
Julia pushed her irritation aside. "I'm fine. Look, I'll figure out where I learned it later, OK? I think it was in a book or something, I'll go look it up when I get home." That was a lie, she had the distinct impression that one of her fathers was involved, but that would have required more of an explanation, and she didn't talk to people (outside of her parents) about her mind anymore. She didn't like the way they looked at her when they found out how weird her mind was. She'd had enough of that to last a lifetime when they first figured out that she was a genius.
He shook his head slightly, denying that he wanted anything from her at all. Even though she knew that he was still curious, she relaxed slightly when she saw his attempt at making her feel better. "It's ok, Julie, whatever you want is ok, all right?" Julia nodded uncomfortably, then glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost time for the class to start. She nodded almost imperceptibly at the clock and saw John's eyes fix on it. Without waiting for him to respond, she walked to the middle of the mat and sank down to her knees, sitting on her heels. After so many years of practice, she barely even noticed that sitting in that position for long periods of time could be rather painful.
As John clapped his hands to signal the beginning of the class, and walked to the front of the mat, Julia firmly pressed all of the odd memory out of her mind. She wasn't going to think right now.
------------
"Something's bothering her," Duo murmured to Heero that night, as they were getting ready for bed. Duo paused in his preparations for a moment to admire his koi's body. Fifteen years had done nothing to diminish Heero's attraction, nor had it eroded his figure in the least. Duo found himself eyeing the little patch of Heero's stomach just above his bellybutton speculatively, and shook his head slightly, trying to focus, at least for now. But later... just because you were older than thirty didn't mean you were dead, did it?
"Hn."
"Any idea what it was?"
Heero shook his head as he headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and Duo sighed. It would be at least ten minutes before his husband returned, and at this rate his teeth would remain perfect for dozens of years after he died. Duo's teeth, on the other hand, were likely to start rotting away any day now, when all the sweets he ate caught up with him.
Julia had been quiet during dinner. She mentioned that she'd had a new idea of how she was going to approach the 'Gundam project', as he'd begun to think of her delving into their history, but probably sensing that the topic disturbed them, no matter how much they tried to hide it. Then she'd related a little of her meeting with the war veteran, who'd been blinded in a Gundam attack. She either didn't know which Gundam it had been, or hadn't told them, the former being much more likely. Why should she care which one of them it had been?
He knew that he'd come perilously close to giving himself away with his reaction when she mentioned that the nice young man she'd met had been blinded by a Gundam attack. And he wasn't even a combat soldier, just a technician who'd never killed anyone, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He pushed away the regret to the back of his mind, the same way he had for longer than he wanted to think about. They'd all done things in the war that still made him sick to think about now, but letting it bother him wouldn't help or fix anything.
Heero came walking back into the room. "Are you all right?" he asked, tilting his head slightly.
"I'll be fine, it's not me I'm worried about. How about you?" Duo asked.
Heero shrugged slightly and walked over to put his arms around Duo. "Une called today, she wants me to take a mission," he murmured.
Duo stiffened involuntarily. "Not active?!" he demanded. You would think that after all this time she would have given up. They'd both been taking occasional missions for the Preventers when they found out what the scientists had been up to, but shortly after they got Julia, they gave up doing those missions. Permanently. The missions were dangerous, and while Duo hadn't planned on getting himself killed any time soon, he wasn't going to risk it. Not when it wasn't just himself and Heero at risk. They weren't going to let their daughter grow up an orphan. Une had accepted the decision with ill grace, especially when Quatre and Trowa had also announced that they weren't going to be taking any missions at the same time, and when Wufei had followed suit a few years later, when his first child was born. It can't have been easy for her to see five of her best operatives suddenly retire themselves from active duty, but after fifteen years, you would have thought she would have given up.
"Iie. It's just a computer job. They need some information on a group that's trying to build mobile suits."
Duo shook his head. Sometimes the idiocy of people astounded him. They finally had peace, and what did those fuck-ups want to do but screw it up again? Fifteen years of trying to watch his tongue around his daughter had failed to cure him of the habit of cursing, either. He just cursed in private, now.
"Well, then, if it's just a computer job..." Duo sighed and kissed Heero, then pulled him towards the bed.
"Do you think we should tell her?" The words froze him where he stood.
After several seconds his brain unfroze just enough for him to start talking (big surprise there), although he couldn't quite think yet. "I don't know. Do you think so?"
"She'd going to be angry when she finds out."
"Yeah, I know. But I don't really want to tell her. I don't think I could, not just outright. You?"
"Iie."
Duo bit his lip. "But we are going to have to tell her something, eventually, even if she figures it out on her own, she going to have questions."
He could practically feel Heero's intense concentration, and held back a groan. Great, I've given him another mission. I'll be lucky if I get three words out of him in the next week. But Heero surprised him by pulling him the rest of the way to the bed with gentle hands - he was usually too preoccupied after being given a mission to pay attention to details like that.
"I'll work on it," Heero said shortly, before drawing the covers over both of them and turning off the lights.
Well, this section turned out completely differently than I expected. Richard Louis was supposed to be a total throwaway character (and probably resemble the sort of stereotype he ended up mocking) but then he went and became an actual character on me. I'm not sure what role he's going to play in the rest of the story (if any), but he does provide an interesting perspective on the whole situation.
As a note, I happen to have several friends who are either blind or handicapped, and it is from their attitudes that I created Richard's. Yes, it sucks beyond belief to have something like that happen to you, probably more than I can ever imagine, being a reasonably healthy person. But it isn't the end of the world, nor do people's lives end just because they can't see, or are short a leg. One friend does make a joke out of the fact that she can't see, and gets extremely irritated when people get sensitive about using words like 'see' or 'sight' around her.
Anyway, sorry for yet another extremely long and (this time) preachy author's note. I am having a great time writing this story, it's turning out to be one of the more interesting things I've ever written.
Marika 10/11/01