Julia stared blankly at her father. "What?"
"We weren't sixteen or seventeen during the war, we were fifteen," he explained calmly, as if they were discussing the weather.
Julia wasn't entirely certain that he knew what she was thinking. "But..."
"Bugged the hell out of the Ozzies," he continued in that same voice. "They could never stand it that they were getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of kids."
It seemed odd, but Julia noted that this was the first time her father had willingly cursed in front of her. Then her brain actually caught up with that statement. "Ozzies?"
"Oz soldiers," he clarified.
"You... fought the Oz soldiers?"
"Mm-hm."
"You were a Gundam pilot?"
"Yeah. We were."
"We?!" she turned her gaze to Tousan, who nodded and then moved forward across the bed and wrapped his arms around Daddy, still watching her. Of course, he was the one who was working for the Preventers, apparently, and the one who was still sparring with her... :Of course, it all makes perfect sense,: she thought, sounding mildly hysterical even to her own ears. :Both of my parents are Gundam pilots.: She concentrated for a second, matching up what she knew about the pilots to her parents. "You're 01, aren't you?" she asked Tousan. "And you're 02," she said to her other father.
"That's right."
"And this is what you wanted to talk to me about earlier?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. I see. You know, you could have interrupted me for this," she said, her voice sounding perfectly calm. "I wouldn't have minded so much."
"We... should have told you a long time ago," Daddy admitted. "I'm sorry. But it isn't something we really wanted to talk about, especially not with you."
"Especially not with me?"
"Julie, that wasn't... a great time for us. It isn't something that we wanted to expose you to, that side of us."
"Oh."
There was a short silence, then he asked, "Julie, are you all right?"
"I don't know."
"Fair enough."
"I probably have a thousand questions, but I can't think of any right now."
"OK."
They were silent for a minute, then Julia suddenly asked, "How did you guys meet?"
"What?"
"You would never tell me. I always wanted to know how you guys met, but you always distracted me with something else. I assume it has something to do with this. So how did you meet?"
Something odd passed between her fathers - two Gundam pilots - and they broke apart, Tousan heading for the closet and Daddy folding his legs up under him on the bed. "Funny story, that," Duo-daddy said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. "I sort of... shot him..."
"What?!"
"I shot him."
There was a muffled grunt from Tousan, who was still in the closet, but Julia missed it because of her shock. "What did he say?" she asked, berating herself for not paying attention.
"Twice," Daddy repeated with a slight glare at Tousan.
"You... shot him... twice?" Julia repeated slowly.
"Yeah, but it wasn't my fault! I had to do it, he was trying to kill Relena Darlian! And I didn't aim to kill..."
"Relena Darlian? You mean Foreign Minister Darlian?! Why were you trying to kill her?!"
"She saw me," Tousan said unhelpfully, emerging from the closet with a metal box - about the size of a shoebox - with a lock on it.
"What?"
"She saw his face when he came out of the ocean after he crashed," Daddy clarified. "She could identify his face. Back then, that was more than enough reason to kill someone. Of course, all I saw was him about to shoot a helpless girl, so me, being the nice guy that I am, tried to stop him. Had to shoot him twice just to get him to drop the gun. Then she stepped in front of him and tried to protect him! Weird girl, but she's better now, I guess."
"Oh. I see." Julia most emphatically did not see, but she couldn't think of anything else to say. The thought of Daddy shooting anyone was just strange, and the way he talked about the Foreign Minister, like he'd known her... Something else suddenly occurred to her. "You knew the other pilots! You know who they were!"
"Yeah," Daddy ducked his head slightly, avoiding her eyes. "So do you."
:So do I?!: Julia immediately began sorting through information. There were five of them, two had been accounted for. They were all going to be around her fathers' ages... three of them... :It can't be.: "Wufei?" she guessed hesitantly, and got a nod. "And Trowa?" Another nod. "And... it can't be Quatre," she said, shaking her head as she pictured her other uncle.
Daddy frowned slightly. "Now how come he always gets that reaction when people find out? When they find out about me and Deathscythe, it's like, 'Oh, I should have seen it coming,' but when they find out about him, it's like..."
"Deathscythe?" Julia cut him off, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Maybe then she could figure out how *Quatre* could possibly be a Gundam pilot. He was just too... nice.
"Oh, that's right, you wouldn't know about that," Daddy said with a tilt of his head. "All of the Gundams had names, based on some of their features, along with... other stuff. My Gundam was Deathscythe, his was Wing," he said, jerking his head towards Tousan, who nodded slightly.
"Oh." Julia closed her eyes. :Deathscythe. Why am I not surprised?: Well, she knew the answer to that one: she wasn't surprised because it fit what she knew about the pilot of 02... who was her father. She opened her eyes and thought about what they had been talking about. "Quatre... he was 04... ah..."
"Sandrock," Daddy said helpfully.
"Sandrock," Julia repeated. "That was Quatre, right?" She got another nod. "But... what happened in space? With the second... ah... Wing, when it destroyed the colony..."
Her parents exchanged a glance. "Here," Tousan said, thrusting the box at her. She now saw that there was a card on top of it - the key for the lock.
"What is this?" she asked, taking the card and sliding it through the electronic lock. She opened the top of the box, half-expecting to see another gun, but instead, there were over a dozen computer discs, each in it's own holder and carefully labeled with some dates and numbers.
"Mission logs," Tousan told her. "From the war, and our own notes from the Mariemaia incident. Our own reports, and the recordings from the Gundams of our battle data. This should answer most of your questions, if you want. If you have any more questions, we will answer them."
"This... these cover the entire war?" Julia asked slowly, picking up the top one and turning it over in her hands.
"They're organized chronologically, the ones marked 01 are mine, 02 are Duo's."
Julia nodded slightly. "I see. Thank you." She put the disc back, then stood up and carried the box back to her room. She turned on the light, turned the computer screen back on, inserted the first disk labeled 01, and started watching.
---------
It actually started just a few minutes before the Gundams were launched, with an old man with prosthetic eyes standing in front of the open cockpit, telling the occupant that he needed a code name for the mission, and telling him that he would be Heero Yuy, named for the assassinated pacifist leader. :But... if that was his code name... why is he still using it? What's his real name?:
Julia quickly made note of the questions and set them aside as the mission began in earnest, watching with a mix of awe and horror as Gundam 01 - Wing - blasted through several mobile suits before crashing into the ocean. She saw a figure in a space suit complete with helmet pop the hatch and swim out into the darkness right before the water rushed in and everything went black.
The screen brightened again, and Julia stared. It was her Tousan... but at the same time it wasn't. He was just a kid, younger than her even. There was nothing childlike about the expression on his face, however. He stared calmly at the camera for several seconds, his hands moving around, flipping buttons and typing at one of the numerous keyboards in the cockpit. After those several seconds he started talking in a dull, unemotional voice, identifying himself as pilot 01, codename Heero Yuy. His eyes then roamed around the cockpit, checking sensors and dials as he relayed the events that had led to him recovering the Gundam. He reported that he had 'made contact with pilot 02' and had already had 'severe difficulties'. Then came a list of the damages that the Gundam had suffered in the fight with the mobile suits, the crash into the water, and most importantly, from his own attempt to destroy it. He then reported that he had plans to 'remove the necessary parts from Gundam 02' and repair his own Gundam. Then he started listing the damage he had taken in swimming to the surface (what amounted to a severe case of decompression sickness), getting shot by pilot 02 and then jumping off a boat as he launched some missiles (two gunshot wounds, one in the upper arm and one in the thigh, aggravated by the fall and the salt water, as well as a number of contusions and bruises, also from the fall), and finally when he jumped out of the hospital and didn't bother to open his parachute (several broken bones, one of which required setting and a makeshift splint, the rest were minor enough to be ignored, a few strained and torn muscles, and yet more bruising, all of which could be ignored).
Julia stopped the recording and stood up, pacing across her room. She'd expected this sort of attitude from pilot 01, but expecting it and seeing it were two completely different things. Seeing it on her Tousan's face was worse. Listening to him report the events that had happened to him in that unemotional voice was bad enough, but when he started listing his injuries the same way that he listed the damage to the Gundam... it was like he didn't think he was anything more than a machine!
:You knew he was like that,: she reminded herself. She'd built his personality in her mind, and she had known that he was like that. But this was her father now, and that was different. It shouldn't have, objectively, but she was having some difficulty remaining objective at this point. This was her father they were talking about! She wanted to know who had taught him to think that way, and she wanted to hunt them down and hurt them very badly.
Julia stopped pacing and looked back at the frozen face of Gundam pilot 01. :Maybe not,: she thought, quickly taking back her last thoughts. She didn't really want to hurt anyone, although she didn't know what she'd do if she ever came face-to-face with whoever had done that to him. But she didn't want to hurt anyone, not really. Not when she was sitting here facing the screen, looking at her father describing how he'd survived falling out of a building after being shot. They had actually done what she'd just thought of: they'd hurt people, a lot of people. They were the ones who had blinded Richard, who had killed Mrs. Kinley's brother, who had done all of the things that caused them to be labeled as terrorists.
Julia wanted very badly to take the disc out of the computer and smash it. Her parents would still tell her the story, if she asked them. But they'd given her an opportunity to see them as they had actually been, without them sugarcoating it at all. Because she knew, no matter how much they tried, they would end up sugarcoating it for her, making it less immediate, avoiding talking about the most painful memories. And she would let them get away with it, because she wouldn't want to upset them any more than they already were. She'd never get the entire story, not really.
Julia sat back down at the computer and started the recording again. The pilot continued listing technical data for a while, but very shortly she could dimly hear yelling from somewhere outside the cockpit. Despite herself, Julia smiled as she recognized her other father's voice, then saw Tousan turn and shout at him to shut up. Then there was a beep and Tousan looked down and to the left of the screen. His eyes flicked back and forth several times as he read something, then he explained to someone off-screen that he had a mission to destroy an ore shipment later that day. "Nimou ryoukai," he said directly into the camera, just before turning it off.
Reaching out, she stopped the recording before it could start up again. After a moment of thought, she pulled the disc out of the computer, and inserted the first disc for pilot 02. This tape started with his insertion onto the planet, which went much more smoothly than 01's. For him, the fighting didn't start until after he'd reached Earth, when he attacked an Alliance outpost. Unlike Tousan, who mostly kept silent except for grunts of effort every now and then, Daddy talked almost constantly as he fought - to himself, to his enemies, to his Gundam... the only times he stopped talking were when he took an especially bad hit that knocked the wind out of him.
Eventually, several minutes into the battle, he stopped just shouting and yelling at the enemy soldiers long enough to say, "This is Duo. Primary mission completed. Now I might as well play around with these guys for a bit longer." There was a dark light in his eyes that was terrifying, to say the least. :Play around with them? He's talking about killing them!: a part of her mind protested. Well, what did she expect from a Gundam pilot? He was getting revenge for his family... And how was that different from his primary mission, which appeared to be blowing up yet more people and suits?
Julia froze as something else occurred to her. :Revenge... all of the pilots were captured at one point or another... OZ hated them, what did they do when they had them as prisoners...: Julia knew, far better than she should, what OZ did to its prisoners, when they had information they needed. The thought of someone doing that to either of her parents was enough to make her almost physically ill.
A short silence in the video caught her attention, and when she looked back, the Gundam was in a new place, fighting what looked like an underwater battle. She blinked as the Gundam produced it's scythe weapon and started slashing through the submarines and mobile suits that were running around down there. Julia's eyes widened. :How the hell can he be using a energy weapon underwater like that?!: That went against everything she'd ever read on the way energy weapons worked, it went against all the physics she knew! How in the universe had he done it?!
It suddenly occurred to her that she could ask him, herself. This wasn't like her other research, it wasn't like looking through OZ's old files or through the public records. She was looking at the records of the Gundam pilots themselves. She could ask them any questions she wanted... and expect to get the answers. Because the Gundam pilots were her fathers. :I don't think that's really sunk in yet.: Suddenly the fighting drifted near what had only been an indistinct shape before, but was suddenly revealed to be Gundam 01... Wing. Then they drifted away again, and after a few minutes, the fighting ended.
After the shouting, the shooting, and the screams of the other pilots, it seemed unnaturally quiet after the fight. Daddy... pilot 02 was sitting in the cockpit, hair hanging in his eyes as he checked a bunch of readings before hitting a bunch of buttons. In a few seconds it became obvious that he'd shut down most of the systems as the cockpit dimmed around him, leaving him mostly in darkness. He sat there silently for over a minute, just breathing in and out. Julia thought she could see him shaking slightly. After a few minutes had passed, he suddenly straightened upwards, tossing his bangs out of his face, and he grinned at the camera for a second before he turned it off.
There was a short blank period, then he reappeared, sitting in the cockpit with all
of the panels dark, but with a light over his head illuminating his face. He looked distinctly irritated.
"All right, let's get this over with," he muttered to himself. He looked up at the camera. "It's April 9, 195," he announced, sounding bored. "And it's me. I don't have to go through the whole spiel every time, do I? Anyway, mission completed successfully, and I've got a new Gundam too. Eliminated the enemy... blah, blah, blah, the battle records are on this disc, anyway. Recovered Gundam 01 from the ocean, but both it and Deathscythe took some damage." His eyes narrowed slightly as he said this, but quickly shook it off. "Yeah, yeah, I know you'll want some details. Seems like *someone* was afraid that it was going to fall into enemy hands, and that same someone is something of an overachiever. I'll give you a full report later, but I've got to get going now. Got a new mission - I've got to go check on him in the hospital. 01, that is. What happened, you ask? Well, it's a long story, and I promise I'll tell you later. As soon as I break him out of that military hospital." He paused for a second, looking thoughtful. "Anyhow, once I get him out of there, I'll bring him back here. Assuming he can still walk. He was in the water an awfully long time before they pulled him out." He grimaced again. "I probably could have said that better. This isn't making you any happier, I know, but hey, you'll live. So I'll be back in a couple of hours, assuming all goes well. And assuming I can manage not to shoot him again," he muttered to himself just before he turned off the camera.
Julia quickly shut off the recording. How like her father to talk like that, to joke about serious things. Getting a confession that something had gone wrong with him was always like pulling teeth, getting one little piece of information out of him at a time. Like the time he was in a car accident, someone slammed into him from behind. He managed to get out of it with nothing more than a mildly sprained wrist from where he braced himself against the dashboard and a slight cut on his head, but that didn't stop him from trying to avoid having to tell them. First he called them to ask them for a ride home (without saying why). When they asked, he said that he couldn't take his car. Then he told them that the tire had gone flat, which was entirely true, just not the whole truth, that the entire back half of the car had been smashed in. It took them almost ten minutes to find out that he'd been in an accident, and was waiting for them by the wreck of his car.
A painful smile appeared on her face as she remembered the incident. How like her father... and how unlike him too, that darkness, the edge in his voice that she could clearly hear, no matter how he tried to hide it. And the pain... was it still in his eyes now, almost twenty years later, or was she just imagining it now that she searched her memory?
How had she described 02 before? Driven, incredibly so, by some dark memory of his past. Well, now she knew why that was, and it was worse then she could have possibly imagined. He danced into battles, killed everyone who saw him without hesitation... a killer. Her father.
Julia swallowed, set her shoulders, and started up the recording again.
---------
After almost ten hours, Julia decided to take a break. She glanced at the clock on the wall... it was past one. She hadn't eaten since the snack the night before, and she hadn't eaten a real meal since breakfast yesterday. She was missing school. It seemed incongruous that she should notice that now, but this was the first day in her entire life that she'd cut school. It was the first day in quite a few years that she had been absent at all - she didn't get sick very often. When she was little, she used to miss school all the time, because of the headaches, but ever since they'd gone away, she almost never missed school. Well, she was missing it now. There was no way she was going to go into school to sit and listen to the teachers talk about things she herself could teach - in her sleep - while these discs waited for her at home.
There was no sign of either of her parents as she walked down the stairs to get herself something to eat. They hadn't gone to work, either, she could still hear two heartbeats coming from somewhere in the house. So they were avoiding her. That was fine with her, she wasn't sure yet if she was mad at them for not telling her earlier. She understood their hesitation, and on some level, deep down where she refused to acknowledge it, she wished that they hadn't told her, that they'd made up some kind lie.
No, that wasn't true, she would have seen through a lie, and even if she hadn't, she needed the truth. Hadn't she said so just a few hours ago? They were dredging up old, obviously painful memories for her...
Julia quickly finished eating, and headed back upstairs. In seconds she was back into the world her fathers had lived in for over a year.
At around six, she took another break, this one for a short nap. She could go for a long time without sleep, but her sleep schedule had been off already, and she'd only gotten a couple hours of sleep after they got back from the colony. Then last night she'd only gotten three hours of sleep before Duo woke her up... she thought, startled. Since when did she call her father by his first name?
:Since he stopped just being my dad and started being a Gundam pilot as well.: The answer appeared in her mind almost the second the question was asked. She was seeing them for the first time, not as her fathers, but as the people that they had been.
:And still are, to a degree.: Another unwanted thought popped into her mind against her will. She'd seen enough of Heero ... Tousan to realize that there was something seriously wrong with the way he thought back then, with the way he was brought up. It went beyond just having a bad childhood (Duo probably had cornered the market on that particular problem), it was even in the way he processed his thoughts, as far as she could tell. He seemed to be fundamentally incapable of placing himself before the mission - he wasn't just well-trained, he was... machinelike. She'd seen it before, but she hadn't realized how deep the training was buried. It was still with him. Now that she knew what to look for, she remembered one time when a car had let out a loud 'pop!' when it passed the house, and she'd seen him tense and drop partially to the ground, one hand going behind his back, before he'd stopped himself. She hadn't known it at the time, but she knew what it was now. He'd thought it was a gunshot, and had been going for his own gun.
There were other, smaller things that seemed to be built into his subconscious, things that he wasn't even aware of, things that she was noticing now. He always sat with his back to the wall; even when they went to restaurants, he always requested a table by the wall, so that he could see the entire room. His obsession with keeping things clean might be a part of it as well, and probably his hatred of formal clothing. :And let us not forget the two guns in the attic,: she thought wryly. Julia didn't have any specific evidence to support this (although *that* was just a matter of time until she had time to look up guns), but she just knew that both of them were in working order. All that had to be done was to place the cartridges in the guns, and they would be ready to fire, no matter how long it had been since they'd last been used. She suspected that neither of her parents would ever let their weapons fall into disrepair.
Julia shook herself slightly, trying to drag her mind out of the patterns it had fallen into. This was not going to help her get the sleep she needed to continue. She needed to keep her mind off of these thoughts until after she was asleep...
And, of course, that led her mind to things that would not help her sleep, like remembering when Heero had tried to kill himself. She remembered the utter shock she'd felt when Une handed over the ultimatum: surrender or she'd destroy the colonies, and when the old man with the weird glasses suddenly appeared on Wing's screens... she'd known, instantly, what he meant when he said that, *he* surrendered, but not the Gundams, but it had taken her several seconds to get her brain to actually accept that information. In that time Heero had popped the hatch and stepped out onto the small platform the shielding created, holding the small detonator in one hand. Then, without hesitating, he held it out in front of him... and activated it.
There had been an odd humming noise in the cockpit, swiftly rising in pitch as the engines quickly worked themselves to overloading. Then the picture went dark.
Despite the fact that Julia knew that he had in fact survived, knew it beyond a doubt, that hadn't kept her heart from jumping up into her mouth for a few seconds, and it hadn't stopped her from scrambling for Duo's disc for that same time period, to see the event from his perspective.
It wasn't any better from the outside. She heard Duo let out an anguished cry - even though this was long before they had anything that could be considered a formal (or informal) relationship, her Daddy obviously already cared for him. She heard Quatre whimpering. It sounded very loud, somehow.
With a nearly audible grunt, Julia tore herself away from the image playing over and over again in her mind. That moment of silence, then the bright light...
She shuddered, and then shut off the light. She needed some sleep. She just hoped that she'd get it.
---------
Well, she ended up getting the sleep, although it was mostly one long string of nightmares that left her feeling little refreshed. Despite that, she immediately plunged back into the files, working until hunger began to gnaw at her stomach again.
Julia kept going until she had finished all of the files, stopping to eat and rest whenever she needed to, for almost three days. There were over fifty hours of material to go through, not counting time needed for sleeping or eating.
Eventually, she did it. Julia made her way through over a year of Heero coldly completing his missions, of Duo's near-hysterical yelling as he killed enemy soldiers. She had a number of questions to ask them, and even more questions to ask herself. But she wanted the whole story before she did that. She glanced at the clock. It was two in the afternoon. Neither of her parents had been to work in three days. She got up and walked to their room. She knocked once and then entered.
Both of her parents were there, Duo was reading a very thick book that looked old, and Heero was typing away on his laptop. They both stopped what they were doing when she entered. There was a moment of awkward silence, then Duo asked, "Made it through them already?" She nodded. "You made good time," he commented lightly.
No one smiled. Finally Julia said, "I have a few questions to ask."
"Shoot," Duo said, then grimaced as she involuntarily winced at the reminder. "I mean..."
"No, it's OK," she replied. "It's... never mind." She looked at Heero. "Who raised you?"
He blinked once, then responded. "I was originally raised by Odin Lowe. He was an assassin. He trained me to help him. He was killed when a mission went bad, and Dr. J somehow found out about me and had me brought to him. Then he trained me to be a soldier, to fight for him." His voice was perfectly emotionless, without any hint of inflection at all, but his shoulders were tense, and his right hand was opening and closing, as if he was missing holding something. Like a gun.
"You hate him?"
Duo moved closer to Heero, and put one hand on his arm, and Heero made a visible effort to relax. "Yes."
"He... did things to you, didn't he?"
"Yes. It was considered necessary for my training."
"By who? The old man... J?"
"Him, and others. Dekim Barton was in charge."
"And that... was your entire childhood? Just training and..." she couldn't think of the right word to describe it. "More training?"
"Hai."
"And... what about your name?"
"What about it?"
"In the beginning, he said it was your code name. Why are you still using it?"
"It's my name. Now."
"But... it was your code name. What was your real name?"
He shrugged slightly. "I never had one. Odin called me 'Junior' most of the time, or used whatever name we were using for a job. J just called me boy, or 01."
"So Heero Yuy... was the first real name you had?"
"It was a code name, but I had it for a long time, and it was the name that those closest to me called me by, so I kept it after the war. It's the same for Trowa."
"I ran across a man named Trowa Barton when I was doing the research," Julia said thoughtfully. "Dekim Barton's son. I thought the fact that Trowa has the same was just a coincidence."
"He was supposed to be one of us. Something happened, and he ended up dead. You'd have to ask Trowa for the whole story," Duo elaborated. "All I know is that Trowa took his name to hide the fact that the real Barton was dead. And he kept it after the war."
"Oh, I see," Julia said slowly, wondering how Trowa had grown up so that he didn't have a name. Even Duo had given himself a name.
They waited silently for several minutes, while Julia collected her thoughts. Then she asked, "What was the ZERO system? It's mentioned over and over again, and... it did things... but you never said exactly what it was."
She was watching carefully, so she didn't miss it when Duo's face went absolutely white, or when Heero tensed again. "That is a hard question to answer. It was intended to be a combat system, to enhance pilot performance. The system took data about battles and fed it directly into the pilot's mind. It cut down on response time dramatically, and increased suit responsiveness as well. But it was more than that," Duo shuddered.
"More than that?" Julia asked.
"It was supposed to show you your enemies, but it didn't do just that. It twisted things around in your head, made you see things that weren't there. It put our abilities literally off the charts, but you never knew what, exactly, you were fighting. When Quatre saw the colonies kill his father, it pushed him towards the edge, and when he got on the ZERO system, it identified the colonies as his enemies."
"And he destroyed his enemies," Julia said slowly. "But... didn't he know what he was doing..."
"I saw myself destroy a colony, when I was in that damn thing," Duo said in a harsh whisper. He stared into space for several seconds before shaking his own head, shaking off the memory the same way she did. "Heero and Quatre were the only ones who ever mastered it, who could use it and keep it from controlling them."
"Why them?"
"Who knows?" Duo asked with a shrug. "Maybe the training did do some good, or maybe it was just random. I know I never wanted touch that thing again."
---------
Over an hour passed before they finished answering Julia's questions. Duo did his best not to get lost in his memories of the past, and to answer her questions as simply and concisely as he could, but it wasn't easy. Not when she was asking questions like, "What is the ZERO system?" and "Did you ever find out how your communications were compromised so that Treize started manipulating your orders?" and even worse, "According to the readings, you were both pushing your bodies far beyond normal human limits, how is that possible?"
Finally, she had her answers - or at least enough answers to occupy her mind for the time being. She stood up quietly and said that she needed some time to think about it, and that she'd be back before dinner tonight.
They sat silently for several minutes, then Duo finally said, "That went well, I think."
"Hn."
"It's not over, you know."
Heero turned a look on him that probably would have had Oz soldiers running for their lives back during the war. But Duo had lived with him for a long time now, and was mostly immune. "I know you don't want to hear this, but now that she knows about us, we're going to have to tell her about herself soon."
"Give her some time to adjust to this," Heero suggested quietly, with unusual (for him) sensitivity. "Then we'll tell her."
Duo was silent for a few minutes, thinking it over. "She was calling us by our first names, instead of calling us 'Dad'."
"Aa."
"What do you think she's thinking?"
Well, there's another section out. Not crazy about the section in the middle, but I had a good time writing the sections with Heero and Duo. I still haven't decided how I'm going to refer to them in the next few chapters, but I do know that the tone of the story is going to shift slightly. Before the focus was on her finding out her *parents'* secrets, not her own. Now the focus has shifted, and she's not aware that there's anything more to find, which will make a big difference. Her determination has been driving her for a while now, and now she's lost that drive. Going to change things. I think the problem with the middle is that she's mostly in shock, so her responses to things aren't as interesting as they could be.
Marika 1/6/02
"We weren't sixteen or seventeen during the war, we were fifteen," he explained calmly, as if they were discussing the weather.
Julia wasn't entirely certain that he knew what she was thinking. "But..."
"Bugged the hell out of the Ozzies," he continued in that same voice. "They could never stand it that they were getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of kids."
It seemed odd, but Julia noted that this was the first time her father had willingly cursed in front of her. Then her brain actually caught up with that statement. "Ozzies?"
"Oz soldiers," he clarified.
"You... fought the Oz soldiers?"
"Mm-hm."
"You were a Gundam pilot?"
"Yeah. We were."
"We?!" she turned her gaze to Tousan, who nodded and then moved forward across the bed and wrapped his arms around Daddy, still watching her. Of course, he was the one who was working for the Preventers, apparently, and the one who was still sparring with her... :Of course, it all makes perfect sense,: she thought, sounding mildly hysterical even to her own ears. :Both of my parents are Gundam pilots.: She concentrated for a second, matching up what she knew about the pilots to her parents. "You're 01, aren't you?" she asked Tousan. "And you're 02," she said to her other father.
"That's right."
"And this is what you wanted to talk to me about earlier?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. I see. You know, you could have interrupted me for this," she said, her voice sounding perfectly calm. "I wouldn't have minded so much."
"We... should have told you a long time ago," Daddy admitted. "I'm sorry. But it isn't something we really wanted to talk about, especially not with you."
"Especially not with me?"
"Julie, that wasn't... a great time for us. It isn't something that we wanted to expose you to, that side of us."
"Oh."
There was a short silence, then he asked, "Julie, are you all right?"
"I don't know."
"Fair enough."
"I probably have a thousand questions, but I can't think of any right now."
"OK."
They were silent for a minute, then Julia suddenly asked, "How did you guys meet?"
"What?"
"You would never tell me. I always wanted to know how you guys met, but you always distracted me with something else. I assume it has something to do with this. So how did you meet?"
Something odd passed between her fathers - two Gundam pilots - and they broke apart, Tousan heading for the closet and Daddy folding his legs up under him on the bed. "Funny story, that," Duo-daddy said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. "I sort of... shot him..."
"What?!"
"I shot him."
There was a muffled grunt from Tousan, who was still in the closet, but Julia missed it because of her shock. "What did he say?" she asked, berating herself for not paying attention.
"Twice," Daddy repeated with a slight glare at Tousan.
"You... shot him... twice?" Julia repeated slowly.
"Yeah, but it wasn't my fault! I had to do it, he was trying to kill Relena Darlian! And I didn't aim to kill..."
"Relena Darlian? You mean Foreign Minister Darlian?! Why were you trying to kill her?!"
"She saw me," Tousan said unhelpfully, emerging from the closet with a metal box - about the size of a shoebox - with a lock on it.
"What?"
"She saw his face when he came out of the ocean after he crashed," Daddy clarified. "She could identify his face. Back then, that was more than enough reason to kill someone. Of course, all I saw was him about to shoot a helpless girl, so me, being the nice guy that I am, tried to stop him. Had to shoot him twice just to get him to drop the gun. Then she stepped in front of him and tried to protect him! Weird girl, but she's better now, I guess."
"Oh. I see." Julia most emphatically did not see, but she couldn't think of anything else to say. The thought of Daddy shooting anyone was just strange, and the way he talked about the Foreign Minister, like he'd known her... Something else suddenly occurred to her. "You knew the other pilots! You know who they were!"
"Yeah," Daddy ducked his head slightly, avoiding her eyes. "So do you."
:So do I?!: Julia immediately began sorting through information. There were five of them, two had been accounted for. They were all going to be around her fathers' ages... three of them... :It can't be.: "Wufei?" she guessed hesitantly, and got a nod. "And Trowa?" Another nod. "And... it can't be Quatre," she said, shaking her head as she pictured her other uncle.
Daddy frowned slightly. "Now how come he always gets that reaction when people find out? When they find out about me and Deathscythe, it's like, 'Oh, I should have seen it coming,' but when they find out about him, it's like..."
"Deathscythe?" Julia cut him off, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Maybe then she could figure out how *Quatre* could possibly be a Gundam pilot. He was just too... nice.
"Oh, that's right, you wouldn't know about that," Daddy said with a tilt of his head. "All of the Gundams had names, based on some of their features, along with... other stuff. My Gundam was Deathscythe, his was Wing," he said, jerking his head towards Tousan, who nodded slightly.
"Oh." Julia closed her eyes. :Deathscythe. Why am I not surprised?: Well, she knew the answer to that one: she wasn't surprised because it fit what she knew about the pilot of 02... who was her father. She opened her eyes and thought about what they had been talking about. "Quatre... he was 04... ah..."
"Sandrock," Daddy said helpfully.
"Sandrock," Julia repeated. "That was Quatre, right?" She got another nod. "But... what happened in space? With the second... ah... Wing, when it destroyed the colony..."
Her parents exchanged a glance. "Here," Tousan said, thrusting the box at her. She now saw that there was a card on top of it - the key for the lock.
"What is this?" she asked, taking the card and sliding it through the electronic lock. She opened the top of the box, half-expecting to see another gun, but instead, there were over a dozen computer discs, each in it's own holder and carefully labeled with some dates and numbers.
"Mission logs," Tousan told her. "From the war, and our own notes from the Mariemaia incident. Our own reports, and the recordings from the Gundams of our battle data. This should answer most of your questions, if you want. If you have any more questions, we will answer them."
"This... these cover the entire war?" Julia asked slowly, picking up the top one and turning it over in her hands.
"They're organized chronologically, the ones marked 01 are mine, 02 are Duo's."
Julia nodded slightly. "I see. Thank you." She put the disc back, then stood up and carried the box back to her room. She turned on the light, turned the computer screen back on, inserted the first disk labeled 01, and started watching.
---------
It actually started just a few minutes before the Gundams were launched, with an old man with prosthetic eyes standing in front of the open cockpit, telling the occupant that he needed a code name for the mission, and telling him that he would be Heero Yuy, named for the assassinated pacifist leader. :But... if that was his code name... why is he still using it? What's his real name?:
Julia quickly made note of the questions and set them aside as the mission began in earnest, watching with a mix of awe and horror as Gundam 01 - Wing - blasted through several mobile suits before crashing into the ocean. She saw a figure in a space suit complete with helmet pop the hatch and swim out into the darkness right before the water rushed in and everything went black.
The screen brightened again, and Julia stared. It was her Tousan... but at the same time it wasn't. He was just a kid, younger than her even. There was nothing childlike about the expression on his face, however. He stared calmly at the camera for several seconds, his hands moving around, flipping buttons and typing at one of the numerous keyboards in the cockpit. After those several seconds he started talking in a dull, unemotional voice, identifying himself as pilot 01, codename Heero Yuy. His eyes then roamed around the cockpit, checking sensors and dials as he relayed the events that had led to him recovering the Gundam. He reported that he had 'made contact with pilot 02' and had already had 'severe difficulties'. Then came a list of the damages that the Gundam had suffered in the fight with the mobile suits, the crash into the water, and most importantly, from his own attempt to destroy it. He then reported that he had plans to 'remove the necessary parts from Gundam 02' and repair his own Gundam. Then he started listing the damage he had taken in swimming to the surface (what amounted to a severe case of decompression sickness), getting shot by pilot 02 and then jumping off a boat as he launched some missiles (two gunshot wounds, one in the upper arm and one in the thigh, aggravated by the fall and the salt water, as well as a number of contusions and bruises, also from the fall), and finally when he jumped out of the hospital and didn't bother to open his parachute (several broken bones, one of which required setting and a makeshift splint, the rest were minor enough to be ignored, a few strained and torn muscles, and yet more bruising, all of which could be ignored).
Julia stopped the recording and stood up, pacing across her room. She'd expected this sort of attitude from pilot 01, but expecting it and seeing it were two completely different things. Seeing it on her Tousan's face was worse. Listening to him report the events that had happened to him in that unemotional voice was bad enough, but when he started listing his injuries the same way that he listed the damage to the Gundam... it was like he didn't think he was anything more than a machine!
:You knew he was like that,: she reminded herself. She'd built his personality in her mind, and she had known that he was like that. But this was her father now, and that was different. It shouldn't have, objectively, but she was having some difficulty remaining objective at this point. This was her father they were talking about! She wanted to know who had taught him to think that way, and she wanted to hunt them down and hurt them very badly.
Julia stopped pacing and looked back at the frozen face of Gundam pilot 01. :Maybe not,: she thought, quickly taking back her last thoughts. She didn't really want to hurt anyone, although she didn't know what she'd do if she ever came face-to-face with whoever had done that to him. But she didn't want to hurt anyone, not really. Not when she was sitting here facing the screen, looking at her father describing how he'd survived falling out of a building after being shot. They had actually done what she'd just thought of: they'd hurt people, a lot of people. They were the ones who had blinded Richard, who had killed Mrs. Kinley's brother, who had done all of the things that caused them to be labeled as terrorists.
Julia wanted very badly to take the disc out of the computer and smash it. Her parents would still tell her the story, if she asked them. But they'd given her an opportunity to see them as they had actually been, without them sugarcoating it at all. Because she knew, no matter how much they tried, they would end up sugarcoating it for her, making it less immediate, avoiding talking about the most painful memories. And she would let them get away with it, because she wouldn't want to upset them any more than they already were. She'd never get the entire story, not really.
Julia sat back down at the computer and started the recording again. The pilot continued listing technical data for a while, but very shortly she could dimly hear yelling from somewhere outside the cockpit. Despite herself, Julia smiled as she recognized her other father's voice, then saw Tousan turn and shout at him to shut up. Then there was a beep and Tousan looked down and to the left of the screen. His eyes flicked back and forth several times as he read something, then he explained to someone off-screen that he had a mission to destroy an ore shipment later that day. "Nimou ryoukai," he said directly into the camera, just before turning it off.
Reaching out, she stopped the recording before it could start up again. After a moment of thought, she pulled the disc out of the computer, and inserted the first disc for pilot 02. This tape started with his insertion onto the planet, which went much more smoothly than 01's. For him, the fighting didn't start until after he'd reached Earth, when he attacked an Alliance outpost. Unlike Tousan, who mostly kept silent except for grunts of effort every now and then, Daddy talked almost constantly as he fought - to himself, to his enemies, to his Gundam... the only times he stopped talking were when he took an especially bad hit that knocked the wind out of him.
Eventually, several minutes into the battle, he stopped just shouting and yelling at the enemy soldiers long enough to say, "This is Duo. Primary mission completed. Now I might as well play around with these guys for a bit longer." There was a dark light in his eyes that was terrifying, to say the least. :Play around with them? He's talking about killing them!: a part of her mind protested. Well, what did she expect from a Gundam pilot? He was getting revenge for his family... And how was that different from his primary mission, which appeared to be blowing up yet more people and suits?
Julia froze as something else occurred to her. :Revenge... all of the pilots were captured at one point or another... OZ hated them, what did they do when they had them as prisoners...: Julia knew, far better than she should, what OZ did to its prisoners, when they had information they needed. The thought of someone doing that to either of her parents was enough to make her almost physically ill.
A short silence in the video caught her attention, and when she looked back, the Gundam was in a new place, fighting what looked like an underwater battle. She blinked as the Gundam produced it's scythe weapon and started slashing through the submarines and mobile suits that were running around down there. Julia's eyes widened. :How the hell can he be using a energy weapon underwater like that?!: That went against everything she'd ever read on the way energy weapons worked, it went against all the physics she knew! How in the universe had he done it?!
It suddenly occurred to her that she could ask him, herself. This wasn't like her other research, it wasn't like looking through OZ's old files or through the public records. She was looking at the records of the Gundam pilots themselves. She could ask them any questions she wanted... and expect to get the answers. Because the Gundam pilots were her fathers. :I don't think that's really sunk in yet.: Suddenly the fighting drifted near what had only been an indistinct shape before, but was suddenly revealed to be Gundam 01... Wing. Then they drifted away again, and after a few minutes, the fighting ended.
After the shouting, the shooting, and the screams of the other pilots, it seemed unnaturally quiet after the fight. Daddy... pilot 02 was sitting in the cockpit, hair hanging in his eyes as he checked a bunch of readings before hitting a bunch of buttons. In a few seconds it became obvious that he'd shut down most of the systems as the cockpit dimmed around him, leaving him mostly in darkness. He sat there silently for over a minute, just breathing in and out. Julia thought she could see him shaking slightly. After a few minutes had passed, he suddenly straightened upwards, tossing his bangs out of his face, and he grinned at the camera for a second before he turned it off.
There was a short blank period, then he reappeared, sitting in the cockpit with all
of the panels dark, but with a light over his head illuminating his face. He looked distinctly irritated.
"All right, let's get this over with," he muttered to himself. He looked up at the camera. "It's April 9, 195," he announced, sounding bored. "And it's me. I don't have to go through the whole spiel every time, do I? Anyway, mission completed successfully, and I've got a new Gundam too. Eliminated the enemy... blah, blah, blah, the battle records are on this disc, anyway. Recovered Gundam 01 from the ocean, but both it and Deathscythe took some damage." His eyes narrowed slightly as he said this, but quickly shook it off. "Yeah, yeah, I know you'll want some details. Seems like *someone* was afraid that it was going to fall into enemy hands, and that same someone is something of an overachiever. I'll give you a full report later, but I've got to get going now. Got a new mission - I've got to go check on him in the hospital. 01, that is. What happened, you ask? Well, it's a long story, and I promise I'll tell you later. As soon as I break him out of that military hospital." He paused for a second, looking thoughtful. "Anyhow, once I get him out of there, I'll bring him back here. Assuming he can still walk. He was in the water an awfully long time before they pulled him out." He grimaced again. "I probably could have said that better. This isn't making you any happier, I know, but hey, you'll live. So I'll be back in a couple of hours, assuming all goes well. And assuming I can manage not to shoot him again," he muttered to himself just before he turned off the camera.
Julia quickly shut off the recording. How like her father to talk like that, to joke about serious things. Getting a confession that something had gone wrong with him was always like pulling teeth, getting one little piece of information out of him at a time. Like the time he was in a car accident, someone slammed into him from behind. He managed to get out of it with nothing more than a mildly sprained wrist from where he braced himself against the dashboard and a slight cut on his head, but that didn't stop him from trying to avoid having to tell them. First he called them to ask them for a ride home (without saying why). When they asked, he said that he couldn't take his car. Then he told them that the tire had gone flat, which was entirely true, just not the whole truth, that the entire back half of the car had been smashed in. It took them almost ten minutes to find out that he'd been in an accident, and was waiting for them by the wreck of his car.
A painful smile appeared on her face as she remembered the incident. How like her father... and how unlike him too, that darkness, the edge in his voice that she could clearly hear, no matter how he tried to hide it. And the pain... was it still in his eyes now, almost twenty years later, or was she just imagining it now that she searched her memory?
How had she described 02 before? Driven, incredibly so, by some dark memory of his past. Well, now she knew why that was, and it was worse then she could have possibly imagined. He danced into battles, killed everyone who saw him without hesitation... a killer. Her father.
Julia swallowed, set her shoulders, and started up the recording again.
---------
After almost ten hours, Julia decided to take a break. She glanced at the clock on the wall... it was past one. She hadn't eaten since the snack the night before, and she hadn't eaten a real meal since breakfast yesterday. She was missing school. It seemed incongruous that she should notice that now, but this was the first day in her entire life that she'd cut school. It was the first day in quite a few years that she had been absent at all - she didn't get sick very often. When she was little, she used to miss school all the time, because of the headaches, but ever since they'd gone away, she almost never missed school. Well, she was missing it now. There was no way she was going to go into school to sit and listen to the teachers talk about things she herself could teach - in her sleep - while these discs waited for her at home.
There was no sign of either of her parents as she walked down the stairs to get herself something to eat. They hadn't gone to work, either, she could still hear two heartbeats coming from somewhere in the house. So they were avoiding her. That was fine with her, she wasn't sure yet if she was mad at them for not telling her earlier. She understood their hesitation, and on some level, deep down where she refused to acknowledge it, she wished that they hadn't told her, that they'd made up some kind lie.
No, that wasn't true, she would have seen through a lie, and even if she hadn't, she needed the truth. Hadn't she said so just a few hours ago? They were dredging up old, obviously painful memories for her...
Julia quickly finished eating, and headed back upstairs. In seconds she was back into the world her fathers had lived in for over a year.
At around six, she took another break, this one for a short nap. She could go for a long time without sleep, but her sleep schedule had been off already, and she'd only gotten a couple hours of sleep after they got back from the colony. Then last night she'd only gotten three hours of sleep before Duo woke her up... she thought, startled. Since when did she call her father by his first name?
:Since he stopped just being my dad and started being a Gundam pilot as well.: The answer appeared in her mind almost the second the question was asked. She was seeing them for the first time, not as her fathers, but as the people that they had been.
:And still are, to a degree.: Another unwanted thought popped into her mind against her will. She'd seen enough of Heero ... Tousan to realize that there was something seriously wrong with the way he thought back then, with the way he was brought up. It went beyond just having a bad childhood (Duo probably had cornered the market on that particular problem), it was even in the way he processed his thoughts, as far as she could tell. He seemed to be fundamentally incapable of placing himself before the mission - he wasn't just well-trained, he was... machinelike. She'd seen it before, but she hadn't realized how deep the training was buried. It was still with him. Now that she knew what to look for, she remembered one time when a car had let out a loud 'pop!' when it passed the house, and she'd seen him tense and drop partially to the ground, one hand going behind his back, before he'd stopped himself. She hadn't known it at the time, but she knew what it was now. He'd thought it was a gunshot, and had been going for his own gun.
There were other, smaller things that seemed to be built into his subconscious, things that he wasn't even aware of, things that she was noticing now. He always sat with his back to the wall; even when they went to restaurants, he always requested a table by the wall, so that he could see the entire room. His obsession with keeping things clean might be a part of it as well, and probably his hatred of formal clothing. :And let us not forget the two guns in the attic,: she thought wryly. Julia didn't have any specific evidence to support this (although *that* was just a matter of time until she had time to look up guns), but she just knew that both of them were in working order. All that had to be done was to place the cartridges in the guns, and they would be ready to fire, no matter how long it had been since they'd last been used. She suspected that neither of her parents would ever let their weapons fall into disrepair.
Julia shook herself slightly, trying to drag her mind out of the patterns it had fallen into. This was not going to help her get the sleep she needed to continue. She needed to keep her mind off of these thoughts until after she was asleep...
And, of course, that led her mind to things that would not help her sleep, like remembering when Heero had tried to kill himself. She remembered the utter shock she'd felt when Une handed over the ultimatum: surrender or she'd destroy the colonies, and when the old man with the weird glasses suddenly appeared on Wing's screens... she'd known, instantly, what he meant when he said that, *he* surrendered, but not the Gundams, but it had taken her several seconds to get her brain to actually accept that information. In that time Heero had popped the hatch and stepped out onto the small platform the shielding created, holding the small detonator in one hand. Then, without hesitating, he held it out in front of him... and activated it.
There had been an odd humming noise in the cockpit, swiftly rising in pitch as the engines quickly worked themselves to overloading. Then the picture went dark.
Despite the fact that Julia knew that he had in fact survived, knew it beyond a doubt, that hadn't kept her heart from jumping up into her mouth for a few seconds, and it hadn't stopped her from scrambling for Duo's disc for that same time period, to see the event from his perspective.
It wasn't any better from the outside. She heard Duo let out an anguished cry - even though this was long before they had anything that could be considered a formal (or informal) relationship, her Daddy obviously already cared for him. She heard Quatre whimpering. It sounded very loud, somehow.
With a nearly audible grunt, Julia tore herself away from the image playing over and over again in her mind. That moment of silence, then the bright light...
She shuddered, and then shut off the light. She needed some sleep. She just hoped that she'd get it.
---------
Well, she ended up getting the sleep, although it was mostly one long string of nightmares that left her feeling little refreshed. Despite that, she immediately plunged back into the files, working until hunger began to gnaw at her stomach again.
Julia kept going until she had finished all of the files, stopping to eat and rest whenever she needed to, for almost three days. There were over fifty hours of material to go through, not counting time needed for sleeping or eating.
Eventually, she did it. Julia made her way through over a year of Heero coldly completing his missions, of Duo's near-hysterical yelling as he killed enemy soldiers. She had a number of questions to ask them, and even more questions to ask herself. But she wanted the whole story before she did that. She glanced at the clock. It was two in the afternoon. Neither of her parents had been to work in three days. She got up and walked to their room. She knocked once and then entered.
Both of her parents were there, Duo was reading a very thick book that looked old, and Heero was typing away on his laptop. They both stopped what they were doing when she entered. There was a moment of awkward silence, then Duo asked, "Made it through them already?" She nodded. "You made good time," he commented lightly.
No one smiled. Finally Julia said, "I have a few questions to ask."
"Shoot," Duo said, then grimaced as she involuntarily winced at the reminder. "I mean..."
"No, it's OK," she replied. "It's... never mind." She looked at Heero. "Who raised you?"
He blinked once, then responded. "I was originally raised by Odin Lowe. He was an assassin. He trained me to help him. He was killed when a mission went bad, and Dr. J somehow found out about me and had me brought to him. Then he trained me to be a soldier, to fight for him." His voice was perfectly emotionless, without any hint of inflection at all, but his shoulders were tense, and his right hand was opening and closing, as if he was missing holding something. Like a gun.
"You hate him?"
Duo moved closer to Heero, and put one hand on his arm, and Heero made a visible effort to relax. "Yes."
"He... did things to you, didn't he?"
"Yes. It was considered necessary for my training."
"By who? The old man... J?"
"Him, and others. Dekim Barton was in charge."
"And that... was your entire childhood? Just training and..." she couldn't think of the right word to describe it. "More training?"
"Hai."
"And... what about your name?"
"What about it?"
"In the beginning, he said it was your code name. Why are you still using it?"
"It's my name. Now."
"But... it was your code name. What was your real name?"
He shrugged slightly. "I never had one. Odin called me 'Junior' most of the time, or used whatever name we were using for a job. J just called me boy, or 01."
"So Heero Yuy... was the first real name you had?"
"It was a code name, but I had it for a long time, and it was the name that those closest to me called me by, so I kept it after the war. It's the same for Trowa."
"I ran across a man named Trowa Barton when I was doing the research," Julia said thoughtfully. "Dekim Barton's son. I thought the fact that Trowa has the same was just a coincidence."
"He was supposed to be one of us. Something happened, and he ended up dead. You'd have to ask Trowa for the whole story," Duo elaborated. "All I know is that Trowa took his name to hide the fact that the real Barton was dead. And he kept it after the war."
"Oh, I see," Julia said slowly, wondering how Trowa had grown up so that he didn't have a name. Even Duo had given himself a name.
They waited silently for several minutes, while Julia collected her thoughts. Then she asked, "What was the ZERO system? It's mentioned over and over again, and... it did things... but you never said exactly what it was."
She was watching carefully, so she didn't miss it when Duo's face went absolutely white, or when Heero tensed again. "That is a hard question to answer. It was intended to be a combat system, to enhance pilot performance. The system took data about battles and fed it directly into the pilot's mind. It cut down on response time dramatically, and increased suit responsiveness as well. But it was more than that," Duo shuddered.
"More than that?" Julia asked.
"It was supposed to show you your enemies, but it didn't do just that. It twisted things around in your head, made you see things that weren't there. It put our abilities literally off the charts, but you never knew what, exactly, you were fighting. When Quatre saw the colonies kill his father, it pushed him towards the edge, and when he got on the ZERO system, it identified the colonies as his enemies."
"And he destroyed his enemies," Julia said slowly. "But... didn't he know what he was doing..."
"I saw myself destroy a colony, when I was in that damn thing," Duo said in a harsh whisper. He stared into space for several seconds before shaking his own head, shaking off the memory the same way she did. "Heero and Quatre were the only ones who ever mastered it, who could use it and keep it from controlling them."
"Why them?"
"Who knows?" Duo asked with a shrug. "Maybe the training did do some good, or maybe it was just random. I know I never wanted touch that thing again."
---------
Over an hour passed before they finished answering Julia's questions. Duo did his best not to get lost in his memories of the past, and to answer her questions as simply and concisely as he could, but it wasn't easy. Not when she was asking questions like, "What is the ZERO system?" and "Did you ever find out how your communications were compromised so that Treize started manipulating your orders?" and even worse, "According to the readings, you were both pushing your bodies far beyond normal human limits, how is that possible?"
Finally, she had her answers - or at least enough answers to occupy her mind for the time being. She stood up quietly and said that she needed some time to think about it, and that she'd be back before dinner tonight.
They sat silently for several minutes, then Duo finally said, "That went well, I think."
"Hn."
"It's not over, you know."
Heero turned a look on him that probably would have had Oz soldiers running for their lives back during the war. But Duo had lived with him for a long time now, and was mostly immune. "I know you don't want to hear this, but now that she knows about us, we're going to have to tell her about herself soon."
"Give her some time to adjust to this," Heero suggested quietly, with unusual (for him) sensitivity. "Then we'll tell her."
Duo was silent for a few minutes, thinking it over. "She was calling us by our first names, instead of calling us 'Dad'."
"Aa."
"What do you think she's thinking?"
Well, there's another section out. Not crazy about the section in the middle, but I had a good time writing the sections with Heero and Duo. I still haven't decided how I'm going to refer to them in the next few chapters, but I do know that the tone of the story is going to shift slightly. Before the focus was on her finding out her *parents'* secrets, not her own. Now the focus has shifted, and she's not aware that there's anything more to find, which will make a big difference. Her determination has been driving her for a while now, and now she's lost that drive. Going to change things. I think the problem with the middle is that she's mostly in shock, so her responses to things aren't as interesting as they could be.
Marika 1/6/02