Julia hit the streets, wandering around aimlessly, trying to clear her mind. :It's too much, too fast.: To learn that her fathers had committed those atrocities...
:And what about OZ? What about the Alliance? Were the atrocities they committed any less horrible?: Julia demanded. She wasn't sure who, exactly, she was talking to. Herself, probably. :Great, now I'm talking to myself. Just what I needed. I'm losing my mind.:
Sighing, she glanced up at the sky as she heard a plane passing overhead, then just as quickly averted her eyes as they protested looking anywhere near a source of light. :Shit, not now,: she thought, recognizing the signs that one (or more) of her senses was about to go crazy. It was so familiar at this point that she was more irritated than frightened, although she did immediately begin to look around for a store that she could duck into, preferably a poorly illuminated one.
The pain in her eyes grew worse, and her vision began to white out as she hurried down the street. Shielding her eyes with her hands, Julia picked a door at random and stepped inside. She got lucky, it was a dimly lit store. By the time she got inside, Julia's eyes were almost completely useless, so she kept them closed for a full minute after she stepped into the store, willing them to return to normal.
"Mam?" asked a concerned voice to her right. At least her hearing hadn't gone crazy, too. "Are you all right?"
"I just have something in my eyes," she lied. "I'll be fine in a minute."
"Would you like to sit down?"
"Thank you," Julia replied, and felt him take her arm. She let him guide her to a seat at sat down. Already the whiteness was beginning to fade, but it had her worried. She didn't usually actually lose her vision when this happened, she usually just closed her eyes until it went away, but she'd definitely lost it before she closed her eyes this time. What if this was a sign that something was getting worse? What if she went completely blind at some point? The thought terrified her. Despite what she'd seen Richard accomplish, she didn't want to have to deal with the limitations that he had.
Should she tell her parents? Tousan had said to tell him if it didn't go away. She'd thought that it had, after the break, but maybe it had just gone away for a little while, and now it was getting worse again.
What could they do about it? They didn't know who her parents were, most likely they were just casualties of the war at some point, but maybe they'd had some sort of disease that had killed one or both of them. Maybe she had inherited... whatever was wrong with her... from them. What could her parents do about it?
:They're Gundam pilots, they'll figure something out.: The thought popped into her mind. Then she realized what she'd just thought and buried her face in her hands. :I've got to figure out what I think about this, or I am going to go crazy.:
"Mam?" the voice asked again, and she looked up. The owner of the voice was a neat-looking fifty-something year-old, with a round face, round glasses, and a comb-over. He was wearing a white shirt and a brownish vest, and looked bookish. "Are you feeling better, or would you like me to call someone?"
"I'm much better now, thank you," she replied automatically, remembering to smile at the last second. She looked around the store, seeing her original impression of the man carried out in the fact that this was a used bookstore. It was also nice and quiet, with few other people. "Do you mind if I look around a little?" she asked. That would give her some more time to think, and to make sure that her senses didn't go crazy again before she headed back outside.
"Oh, of course not!" he exclaimed, and she could practically see him switching gears from 'concerned bystander' to 'business owner.' "Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help you."
"I will." She nodded, smiling at the sudden transformation, and moved into one of the aisles, examining the titles. After a few minutes, she realized that it wasn't so much a used book store as an antique book store. Some of these things were ancient, they were from centuries before the colony-era began.
:The colony-era...: That thought brought her back to the problem that had originally driven her outside and had ended up with her being here. For the first time since she'd found out, Julia felt as if her mind had cleared enough for her thoughts to flow coherently. The shock must finally be wearing off.
:All right, if my brain is functioning again, then we can work through this logically,: Julia told herself. :Start from the beginning. My parents are both Gundam pilots. They killed a lot of people during the war in various ways. A lot of people tried to kill them. They both went through some very horrible stuff when they were very young. And they were both engineered to be something a little more than human so that they *could* fly Gundams.:
Julia paused and evaluated that last thought-stream. Yes, that fairly well summed-up what she knew. That was an extreme oversimplification of the situation, but it pretty much covered the important parts. :All right. I knew most of this beforehand. I knew that the Gundam pilots killed lots of people, I knew that lots of people tried to kill them. I guessed that something awful must have happened to them. I didn't know how young they were, but that's not the issue here. And I did guess know that the Gundam pilots were reported as being 'not human.' I know what the Alliance did to the colonies. I was even thinking that they did the right thing, sort of,: she added, grimacing as she remembered the confrontation with Richard. :So what's the problem?:
The answer occurred to her almost as soon as she asked the question. It was because they were her fathers. The same people who'd taken care of her when she was a baby, taught her to walk and talk, dried her tears when she used to have those headaches when she was little. They still took care of her, giving her advice when she needed it, helping her keep her mind occupied when she was bored... and teaching her how to fight. Now that she looked back, Julia was startled to realize exactly how much of what they'd taught her had been things that they must have learned during their training, or during the war itself. Then again, was that so surprising? It wasn't as if either of them had ever had a formal education, or gone to college. They were both geniuses, they must have been to survive the war, but they just taught her what they knew best...
:Which was war.: Julia grimaced. The sheer *number* of things they knew was astonishing, and she was sure she'd only seen a little of what they were capable of, but that didn't change the fact that it was her parents she'd been studying all these months, trying to figure out why they *killed*. Her otousan and daddy. At some basic level she just couldn't accept the fact that her parents were killers.
But... Julia couldn't help remembering the darkness that had been in her daddy's eyes as he described what had happened to him on L2. His eyes had looked so old. She'd seen that same look, over and over again, on the recordings, when he killed the enemy. No matter how he grinned and joked about it, no one would ever convince her that he'd enjoyed killing them, not really. Not when his eyes looked like that.
And even more telling was her parents' reaction when she first told them that she was studying the Gundam pilots, when she told them about Richard, and when they finally told her the truth. The strange looks, the glances they exchanged, the ones she had correctly identified as guilty, even if she'd dismissed her own observations at the time. :That'll teach me to underestimate myself,: she thought with dark humor.
But there was the heart of the matter. She couldn't picture her parents killing people, but she'd seen them feeling guilty because of the people they'd killed. This wasn't any misplaced guilt because they'd seen someone killed when they were kids, it was because *they'd* been the ones killing people.
Julia leaned against one of the bookshelves, closing her eyes, but the image of her daddy staring at her with those ancient eyes seemed to be burned into her retinas. Her daddy, with those ancient eyes. Her otousan, with behavior patterns from the war that were so ingrained that she couldn't imagine what he'd be like without them. Her fathers.
She wasn't sure exactly how long she just stood there, staring into space, trying to get used to the idea. Her fathers. Gundam pilots. It wasn't as impossible as she'd thought. It wasn't *easy*, but it wasn't impossible, either. The clues had been there, and besides, they were her fathers. She loved them, and what was she going to do, go on being irritated with them for not telling her this for the rest of her life? She could even understand, a little, why they hadn't wanted to tell her. But they had told her, hadn't tried to conceal it from her, once she asked them straight-out instead of avoiding it. Julia smiled slightly as she realized that Daddy had somehow managed to conceal this from her for as long as he had without breaking his customary no-lying rule.
:I need to talk to them.: They had to be not very happy right now. She remembered Tousan telling her that he loved her, at a very odd moment, several weeks ago, and now it was obvious that he was worried that wouldn't be the case after she found out the truth. And, of course, the first thing she did after finding out was to go into shock and then run off without telling them anything. They had to be feeling pretty miserable right now. Julia felt more than a little guilty.
Well, in her defense, it *was* a shock. But she must have hurt them with her reaction, which was exactly the opposite of what she'd wanted to do. She'd wanted to *stop* hurting them. And that started now.
Julia turned, about to go home, when a title caught her eye. She paused and carefully pulled the old book off the shelf. It was in remarkably good shape, considering it had been out of print for well over a century. She opened the first page to make sure that the inside of the book matched the outside. It did, and she smiled. She'd first read "Stranger in a Strange Land" when she was nine, just after she'd finally gotten over the worst of the headaches. Of course, she'd read it off a disc, since hardcopies of the book were almost impossible to find, but it had struck something deep within her at the time. Maybe it was just because she'd been feeling so isolated from everyone around her (except her parents), between her intelligence and the headaches that kept her out of most of the activities her classmates enjoyed. For whatever the reason, the book had always held a special place in her heart. She'd been trying to get Daddy to read it for years now. She knew that he wasn't disappointing her on purpose, but he really preferred reading things that he could actually hold, instead of scrolling text off of a computer. Maybe if she got a hardcopy for him, he would finally read it. (1)
Turning the book over, she dug into her pocket to see if she had enough money with her. Luckily, she'd automatically stuffed her wallet in her pants when she got up this morning, or else she probably would have left the house without any money at all. Sometimes her absent-mindedness terrified her. Checking, she saw that she had enough money, if barely, and walked to the front of the store. She quickly made the purchase, feeling more than a little guilty that she was buying a present for Daddy with money that he'd given her. That sort of defeated the purpose of buying presents, but she figured it was the thought that counted.
Once she had the book, she stepped back outside, carefully shielding her eyes until she was certain that her eyesight wasn't about to go crazy anymore. Looking around, she realized she was only a few blocks from Richard's. She wondered whether it was habit or something else that had drawn her here. Julia stared down the street towards his home for a moment before shaking her head. There was no way she could tell him this. It was just too much. If *she'd* had as much difficulty accepting it as she had, what could she expect from him? She'd have to figure out something to tell him, and soon. The week was almost passed, and she had promised to visit him.
But not now. Tucking her purchase up under an arm, Julia started back towards home.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, and she paused, looking around. :What the hell was that?: she wondered, rubbing the back of her neck with a slight shudder. The only person in sight was well over a hundred meters away. She looked at him, then frowned.
He was staring at her. The shudder became more pronounced as she realized the intensity with which he was studying her. And he *was* staring at her, there was no mistaking it, his eyes were a bunched up and watering with the effort of seeing her at this distance. Julia was seized by a sudden strong urge to get very far away from here right now. She didn't know whether he was just some kind of harmless pervert who just liked watching her, or if he would actually try to approach her, and she didn't want to find out. She turned and ran at a medium jog all the way back home.
---------
Julia had almost, but not quite, managed to convince herself that it had all been in her head by the time she got home. She was barely breathing hard, but paused for a moment on the threshold to compose herself. She didn't want to worry her parents. When she was certain that she looked completely normal, she pushed open the door. The house was quiet, but she concentrated, and heard two heartbeats in the kitchen.
"Hello!" she called, making sure that she was giving them some warning. On the other hand, they probably knew she was coming. After all, they were the ones with the genetic enhancements. She hated to think what problems they must have had with their senses, after all the difficulties she'd had with hers.
She walked directly into the kitchen. Tousan was at the stove, wearing an apron over his usual tank-top and jeans. That was what he'd worn during the war, too. At least he had given up on the spandex shorts. Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table with a large pile of mail in front of him and an irritated expression on his face. That expression disappeared as soon as he saw Julia. "Julie!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. Then his expression became guarded, and he slowly sat back down.
That hurt. Julia walked over to her father and hesitantly held out the back containing the book. "Ah, here," she said, feeling incredibly stupid.
He glanced at her, then down at the bag before taking it from her. He pulled the book out and his eyes widened slightly. "Where did you find..."
"I ended up in an old book store. I thought maybe *now* you'd read it," she said sternly, putting both hands on her hips.
He grimaced. "Sorry, I meant to read it, really I did..."
"It's OK," she flung herself at him and nearly knocked him off his feet as she hugged him. He stiffened for a moment, then returned the gesture. "I'm sorry," she whispered as she clung to him.
"Sorry? For what?" Daddy sounded genuinely confused.
"For making you worry. I love both of you guys, you know that, right?" she asked, pulling back to study his face.
He looked as though he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. Tousan had the same non-expression as always, but Julia thought that she detected a bit of worry, mixed with hope, in his eyes. "You thought I'd stop loving you because you were Gundam pilots?" she asked.
"Well, ah..."
"You know, for a couple of geniuses, you can be pretty stupid sometimes," she scolded them. "I'm not going to stop loving you guys. Ever. Got that?" she asked, glancing over at Tousan to make sure he was absorbing this as well. He was still staring at her, although now there was a hint of a smile on his face. She gave Daddy another hug, then straightened up and moved over to the stove, giving Tousan a big hug, squeezing him as hard as she could.
She stayed there for a solid minute, until he said, "The sauce will burn."
Julia obediently let go, knowing that that was his way of asking for some space. He never was particularly comfortable with openly showing his feelings, which was why she'd been so surprised when he just started hugging her those weeks ago. Julia glanced at the pot and saw that he'd gone for traditional (depending on what country/colony you were originally from) and simple - spaghetti and meat sauce. She sniffed. "Smells great, Tousan." Maybe she was laying on 'normal' a bit thick, but her parents could be thick-headed sometimes, and she wanted to make sure she got her point across.
"Julie, honey... are you OK with this?" Daddy asked worriedly.
"It's still a little weird," Julia admitted. "And I think it's going to take some getting used to, but I'll live. It was just the shock, before. I do agree, sort of, with what you did, did you know that?"
"What?!"
"Richard and I had a... well, it wasn't exactly an argument, but... it was a disagreement," Julia finally said. "Before vacation. Because I wouldn't outright condemn the Gundam... I mean you guys," she corrected herself. "Because I told him that there was a reason. I showed him everything I'd found, and he agrees with me now," she added. "I'm not saying that I'm crazy about what you did, but... it might have been necessary."
"There should have been a better way," Daddy said softly, his eyes gone flat again. "There was, but we kept destroying the chance every time it came. First Heero Yuy, then the Alliance doves. Every time there was a better way, it got destroyed..." he shook his head slightly.
"But that wasn't your fault," Julia said softly, knowing even as she spoke that there was nothing she could say to make her parents feel better, to lift some of the burden of the guilt off of them. They'd lived with this longer than she'd been alive. The thought was somewhat humbling, and she wished she could make them feel better. She didn't like the thought of her parents being unhappy, for any reason. "And something had to happen to help the colonies. And it did help."
Daddy nodded, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that he was mostly humoring her. Julia shifted uncomfortably and decided to lighten the mood. "You know, you guys really screwed things up for me," she said casually, pulling one of the kitchen chairs next to Daddy's so she could lean against him as she talked.
She felt him stiffen slightly before he asked, "What'd we do?"
"I'm supposed to be doing this project on the Gundam pilots, and the main part of it was going to be me making up a pretend interview with the pilots, based on what I'd found out about them through the research. How the heck am I supposed to do a pretend interview now?"
---------
Julia hummed happily to herself as she walked towards aikido class. It had been over three weeks since she'd found out her parents' secret, and it almost felt like things were getting back to normal. It had been hard at first, trying to act normal when she finally went back school after getting back from vacation. None of her teachers had really bought the 'I didn't feel well' excuse, but it hardly mattered. They had no reason to complain unless she fell behind, and, as usual, she was way ahead in all of her classes. This entire experience was teaching her the wrong thing about not attending classes, since it apparently made no difference whether or not she attended school. Of course, she'd known that before, but to see it proven so thoroughly was a little depressing.
After that first day of school she'd gone to visit Richard. She'd taken a page from her father's book and done her best not to lie while skirting the truth by a rather large margin. She felt very bad about lying to him (because as far as she was concerned, deceiving was the same thing as lying, no matter if a lie didn't actually pass your lips), but she didn't have a choice in the matter. This wasn't like showing him the research she'd done, this part wasn't public record (or what should be part of public record), and it wasn't like him finding out that she was a genius. This wasn't her secret to share, and even if it had been, she probably still wouldn't have told him. She wasn't sure if he'd be able to handle it or not, but it was just too big a chance to take. If he couldn't, and he told someone... there were a lot of OZ and Alliance soldiers still on Earth after the war, and Julia didn't want her parents to have to go into hiding, the way they had during the war.
She didn't think he'd noticed anything.
It wasn't easy, sometimes, trying to act like nothing had changed, now that she knew this secret that no one else did. And she'd nearly gotten in a shouting match with Mrs. Kinley during her first meeting after vacation, when her teacher started going on about the Gundam pilots again. Somehow it had been easier to brush off the derogatory comments when the Gundam pilots weren't her fathers and uncles. But now, knowing exactly why they'd done what they'd done, and knowing what sort of people they really were, it was nearly unbearable. She'd avoided yelling only by making an abrupt exit from Mrs. Kinley's office. Then she'd given herself a strong talking-to about self-control, gotten herself under control, and gone back in to apologize. Mrs. Kinley had accepted the apology with ill grace, and things had gone back to the uneasy state they'd been before.
She was still working on her project. She was trying to write it the same way she'd originally planned, getting into the heads of the pilots and writing from their perspective. It was a little irritating, doing it that way, when she knew she had a couple of them living with her, but if she actually interviewed them, it wouldn't be her work. Better to turn in something that was slightly flawed but her own than to be dishonest. Besides, she knew that her parents still weren't completely comfortable with her knowing, and didn't really want to discuss it with her. So the project was progressing without any input on their part. At least they'd stopped tensing and exchanging those looks every time she mentioned it.
It was strange, sometimes it was incredibly easy to act normal. Especially when she was around her parents. She didn't have to hide anything from them, and for the first time ever, they didn't have to hide anything from them. Other than that, nothing had changed, not really. They were the same people she'd known all her life, and she was still their daughter. It was easy to act normal under those circumstances.
Julia was still a few blocks from the dojo when she noticed something was wrong. She actually stopped in the middle of the street, looking around, trying to figure out what was bothering her. The few other people on the street gave her some strange looks... at least, most of them did. One or two looked vaguely alarmed, and continued watching her long after everyone else had lost interest. Julia's stomach clenched.
Clutching her bag very tightly, Julia hurried down the street towards the dojo. She didn't know exactly what was going on, but she had a very bad feeling about some of the people, and wanted to get to somewhere where she'd be surrounded by her friends, people she trusted. As she sped up, Julia noticed several people - the ones she'd noticed before - detaching themselves from the crowd to follow her slightly faster speed.
Julia turned the corner and stepped onto the street where the dojo was with a feeling of relief. :Just another minute...: She stopped short as four largish men stepped directly in front of her, blocking her path. She turned to retreat back to the other street, where there were at least *some* other people, and found the way blocked by the three men who she'd spotted earlier. "What do you want?" she asked nervously, turning back to face the four in front of her, while keeping track of the ones behind her by their heartbeats. :Oh, that was brilliant,: her mind commented. :Why do you *think* they're surrounding a lone teenage girl?:
"Are you Julia Maxwell-Yuy?" one of the men asked in a straightforward manner.
Julia's heart jumped straight into her throat. :Why the hell do they know my name?!:
"Who wants to know?" she asked in response, and was amazed when her voice was steady.
The men in front of her exchanged a glance that she really didn't like the looks of, then the one who'd spoken said, "It's her. Take her."
(1) - Sorry about this, but I couldn't resist throwing in a reference to this book. I happen to love it, and I reccommend it to anyone who likes science fiction of any kind.
Sorry about this, but this chapter started being waaaay too long, so I just chopped it off. I'm almost done with the second part, it should be out in a few days. (Assuming all goes well, which may be too much to ask for.) Anyway, I'm not sure how well I handled the section where she was just sitting around thinking, but I liked the part with Heero and Duo. Julia's re-establishing her job as caretaker for her parents.
The next section should be out in a few days.
Marika 1/30/02
:And what about OZ? What about the Alliance? Were the atrocities they committed any less horrible?: Julia demanded. She wasn't sure who, exactly, she was talking to. Herself, probably. :Great, now I'm talking to myself. Just what I needed. I'm losing my mind.:
Sighing, she glanced up at the sky as she heard a plane passing overhead, then just as quickly averted her eyes as they protested looking anywhere near a source of light. :Shit, not now,: she thought, recognizing the signs that one (or more) of her senses was about to go crazy. It was so familiar at this point that she was more irritated than frightened, although she did immediately begin to look around for a store that she could duck into, preferably a poorly illuminated one.
The pain in her eyes grew worse, and her vision began to white out as she hurried down the street. Shielding her eyes with her hands, Julia picked a door at random and stepped inside. She got lucky, it was a dimly lit store. By the time she got inside, Julia's eyes were almost completely useless, so she kept them closed for a full minute after she stepped into the store, willing them to return to normal.
"Mam?" asked a concerned voice to her right. At least her hearing hadn't gone crazy, too. "Are you all right?"
"I just have something in my eyes," she lied. "I'll be fine in a minute."
"Would you like to sit down?"
"Thank you," Julia replied, and felt him take her arm. She let him guide her to a seat at sat down. Already the whiteness was beginning to fade, but it had her worried. She didn't usually actually lose her vision when this happened, she usually just closed her eyes until it went away, but she'd definitely lost it before she closed her eyes this time. What if this was a sign that something was getting worse? What if she went completely blind at some point? The thought terrified her. Despite what she'd seen Richard accomplish, she didn't want to have to deal with the limitations that he had.
Should she tell her parents? Tousan had said to tell him if it didn't go away. She'd thought that it had, after the break, but maybe it had just gone away for a little while, and now it was getting worse again.
What could they do about it? They didn't know who her parents were, most likely they were just casualties of the war at some point, but maybe they'd had some sort of disease that had killed one or both of them. Maybe she had inherited... whatever was wrong with her... from them. What could her parents do about it?
:They're Gundam pilots, they'll figure something out.: The thought popped into her mind. Then she realized what she'd just thought and buried her face in her hands. :I've got to figure out what I think about this, or I am going to go crazy.:
"Mam?" the voice asked again, and she looked up. The owner of the voice was a neat-looking fifty-something year-old, with a round face, round glasses, and a comb-over. He was wearing a white shirt and a brownish vest, and looked bookish. "Are you feeling better, or would you like me to call someone?"
"I'm much better now, thank you," she replied automatically, remembering to smile at the last second. She looked around the store, seeing her original impression of the man carried out in the fact that this was a used bookstore. It was also nice and quiet, with few other people. "Do you mind if I look around a little?" she asked. That would give her some more time to think, and to make sure that her senses didn't go crazy again before she headed back outside.
"Oh, of course not!" he exclaimed, and she could practically see him switching gears from 'concerned bystander' to 'business owner.' "Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help you."
"I will." She nodded, smiling at the sudden transformation, and moved into one of the aisles, examining the titles. After a few minutes, she realized that it wasn't so much a used book store as an antique book store. Some of these things were ancient, they were from centuries before the colony-era began.
:The colony-era...: That thought brought her back to the problem that had originally driven her outside and had ended up with her being here. For the first time since she'd found out, Julia felt as if her mind had cleared enough for her thoughts to flow coherently. The shock must finally be wearing off.
:All right, if my brain is functioning again, then we can work through this logically,: Julia told herself. :Start from the beginning. My parents are both Gundam pilots. They killed a lot of people during the war in various ways. A lot of people tried to kill them. They both went through some very horrible stuff when they were very young. And they were both engineered to be something a little more than human so that they *could* fly Gundams.:
Julia paused and evaluated that last thought-stream. Yes, that fairly well summed-up what she knew. That was an extreme oversimplification of the situation, but it pretty much covered the important parts. :All right. I knew most of this beforehand. I knew that the Gundam pilots killed lots of people, I knew that lots of people tried to kill them. I guessed that something awful must have happened to them. I didn't know how young they were, but that's not the issue here. And I did guess know that the Gundam pilots were reported as being 'not human.' I know what the Alliance did to the colonies. I was even thinking that they did the right thing, sort of,: she added, grimacing as she remembered the confrontation with Richard. :So what's the problem?:
The answer occurred to her almost as soon as she asked the question. It was because they were her fathers. The same people who'd taken care of her when she was a baby, taught her to walk and talk, dried her tears when she used to have those headaches when she was little. They still took care of her, giving her advice when she needed it, helping her keep her mind occupied when she was bored... and teaching her how to fight. Now that she looked back, Julia was startled to realize exactly how much of what they'd taught her had been things that they must have learned during their training, or during the war itself. Then again, was that so surprising? It wasn't as if either of them had ever had a formal education, or gone to college. They were both geniuses, they must have been to survive the war, but they just taught her what they knew best...
:Which was war.: Julia grimaced. The sheer *number* of things they knew was astonishing, and she was sure she'd only seen a little of what they were capable of, but that didn't change the fact that it was her parents she'd been studying all these months, trying to figure out why they *killed*. Her otousan and daddy. At some basic level she just couldn't accept the fact that her parents were killers.
But... Julia couldn't help remembering the darkness that had been in her daddy's eyes as he described what had happened to him on L2. His eyes had looked so old. She'd seen that same look, over and over again, on the recordings, when he killed the enemy. No matter how he grinned and joked about it, no one would ever convince her that he'd enjoyed killing them, not really. Not when his eyes looked like that.
And even more telling was her parents' reaction when she first told them that she was studying the Gundam pilots, when she told them about Richard, and when they finally told her the truth. The strange looks, the glances they exchanged, the ones she had correctly identified as guilty, even if she'd dismissed her own observations at the time. :That'll teach me to underestimate myself,: she thought with dark humor.
But there was the heart of the matter. She couldn't picture her parents killing people, but she'd seen them feeling guilty because of the people they'd killed. This wasn't any misplaced guilt because they'd seen someone killed when they were kids, it was because *they'd* been the ones killing people.
Julia leaned against one of the bookshelves, closing her eyes, but the image of her daddy staring at her with those ancient eyes seemed to be burned into her retinas. Her daddy, with those ancient eyes. Her otousan, with behavior patterns from the war that were so ingrained that she couldn't imagine what he'd be like without them. Her fathers.
She wasn't sure exactly how long she just stood there, staring into space, trying to get used to the idea. Her fathers. Gundam pilots. It wasn't as impossible as she'd thought. It wasn't *easy*, but it wasn't impossible, either. The clues had been there, and besides, they were her fathers. She loved them, and what was she going to do, go on being irritated with them for not telling her this for the rest of her life? She could even understand, a little, why they hadn't wanted to tell her. But they had told her, hadn't tried to conceal it from her, once she asked them straight-out instead of avoiding it. Julia smiled slightly as she realized that Daddy had somehow managed to conceal this from her for as long as he had without breaking his customary no-lying rule.
:I need to talk to them.: They had to be not very happy right now. She remembered Tousan telling her that he loved her, at a very odd moment, several weeks ago, and now it was obvious that he was worried that wouldn't be the case after she found out the truth. And, of course, the first thing she did after finding out was to go into shock and then run off without telling them anything. They had to be feeling pretty miserable right now. Julia felt more than a little guilty.
Well, in her defense, it *was* a shock. But she must have hurt them with her reaction, which was exactly the opposite of what she'd wanted to do. She'd wanted to *stop* hurting them. And that started now.
Julia turned, about to go home, when a title caught her eye. She paused and carefully pulled the old book off the shelf. It was in remarkably good shape, considering it had been out of print for well over a century. She opened the first page to make sure that the inside of the book matched the outside. It did, and she smiled. She'd first read "Stranger in a Strange Land" when she was nine, just after she'd finally gotten over the worst of the headaches. Of course, she'd read it off a disc, since hardcopies of the book were almost impossible to find, but it had struck something deep within her at the time. Maybe it was just because she'd been feeling so isolated from everyone around her (except her parents), between her intelligence and the headaches that kept her out of most of the activities her classmates enjoyed. For whatever the reason, the book had always held a special place in her heart. She'd been trying to get Daddy to read it for years now. She knew that he wasn't disappointing her on purpose, but he really preferred reading things that he could actually hold, instead of scrolling text off of a computer. Maybe if she got a hardcopy for him, he would finally read it. (1)
Turning the book over, she dug into her pocket to see if she had enough money with her. Luckily, she'd automatically stuffed her wallet in her pants when she got up this morning, or else she probably would have left the house without any money at all. Sometimes her absent-mindedness terrified her. Checking, she saw that she had enough money, if barely, and walked to the front of the store. She quickly made the purchase, feeling more than a little guilty that she was buying a present for Daddy with money that he'd given her. That sort of defeated the purpose of buying presents, but she figured it was the thought that counted.
Once she had the book, she stepped back outside, carefully shielding her eyes until she was certain that her eyesight wasn't about to go crazy anymore. Looking around, she realized she was only a few blocks from Richard's. She wondered whether it was habit or something else that had drawn her here. Julia stared down the street towards his home for a moment before shaking her head. There was no way she could tell him this. It was just too much. If *she'd* had as much difficulty accepting it as she had, what could she expect from him? She'd have to figure out something to tell him, and soon. The week was almost passed, and she had promised to visit him.
But not now. Tucking her purchase up under an arm, Julia started back towards home.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, and she paused, looking around. :What the hell was that?: she wondered, rubbing the back of her neck with a slight shudder. The only person in sight was well over a hundred meters away. She looked at him, then frowned.
He was staring at her. The shudder became more pronounced as she realized the intensity with which he was studying her. And he *was* staring at her, there was no mistaking it, his eyes were a bunched up and watering with the effort of seeing her at this distance. Julia was seized by a sudden strong urge to get very far away from here right now. She didn't know whether he was just some kind of harmless pervert who just liked watching her, or if he would actually try to approach her, and she didn't want to find out. She turned and ran at a medium jog all the way back home.
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Julia had almost, but not quite, managed to convince herself that it had all been in her head by the time she got home. She was barely breathing hard, but paused for a moment on the threshold to compose herself. She didn't want to worry her parents. When she was certain that she looked completely normal, she pushed open the door. The house was quiet, but she concentrated, and heard two heartbeats in the kitchen.
"Hello!" she called, making sure that she was giving them some warning. On the other hand, they probably knew she was coming. After all, they were the ones with the genetic enhancements. She hated to think what problems they must have had with their senses, after all the difficulties she'd had with hers.
She walked directly into the kitchen. Tousan was at the stove, wearing an apron over his usual tank-top and jeans. That was what he'd worn during the war, too. At least he had given up on the spandex shorts. Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table with a large pile of mail in front of him and an irritated expression on his face. That expression disappeared as soon as he saw Julia. "Julie!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. Then his expression became guarded, and he slowly sat back down.
That hurt. Julia walked over to her father and hesitantly held out the back containing the book. "Ah, here," she said, feeling incredibly stupid.
He glanced at her, then down at the bag before taking it from her. He pulled the book out and his eyes widened slightly. "Where did you find..."
"I ended up in an old book store. I thought maybe *now* you'd read it," she said sternly, putting both hands on her hips.
He grimaced. "Sorry, I meant to read it, really I did..."
"It's OK," she flung herself at him and nearly knocked him off his feet as she hugged him. He stiffened for a moment, then returned the gesture. "I'm sorry," she whispered as she clung to him.
"Sorry? For what?" Daddy sounded genuinely confused.
"For making you worry. I love both of you guys, you know that, right?" she asked, pulling back to study his face.
He looked as though he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. Tousan had the same non-expression as always, but Julia thought that she detected a bit of worry, mixed with hope, in his eyes. "You thought I'd stop loving you because you were Gundam pilots?" she asked.
"Well, ah..."
"You know, for a couple of geniuses, you can be pretty stupid sometimes," she scolded them. "I'm not going to stop loving you guys. Ever. Got that?" she asked, glancing over at Tousan to make sure he was absorbing this as well. He was still staring at her, although now there was a hint of a smile on his face. She gave Daddy another hug, then straightened up and moved over to the stove, giving Tousan a big hug, squeezing him as hard as she could.
She stayed there for a solid minute, until he said, "The sauce will burn."
Julia obediently let go, knowing that that was his way of asking for some space. He never was particularly comfortable with openly showing his feelings, which was why she'd been so surprised when he just started hugging her those weeks ago. Julia glanced at the pot and saw that he'd gone for traditional (depending on what country/colony you were originally from) and simple - spaghetti and meat sauce. She sniffed. "Smells great, Tousan." Maybe she was laying on 'normal' a bit thick, but her parents could be thick-headed sometimes, and she wanted to make sure she got her point across.
"Julie, honey... are you OK with this?" Daddy asked worriedly.
"It's still a little weird," Julia admitted. "And I think it's going to take some getting used to, but I'll live. It was just the shock, before. I do agree, sort of, with what you did, did you know that?"
"What?!"
"Richard and I had a... well, it wasn't exactly an argument, but... it was a disagreement," Julia finally said. "Before vacation. Because I wouldn't outright condemn the Gundam... I mean you guys," she corrected herself. "Because I told him that there was a reason. I showed him everything I'd found, and he agrees with me now," she added. "I'm not saying that I'm crazy about what you did, but... it might have been necessary."
"There should have been a better way," Daddy said softly, his eyes gone flat again. "There was, but we kept destroying the chance every time it came. First Heero Yuy, then the Alliance doves. Every time there was a better way, it got destroyed..." he shook his head slightly.
"But that wasn't your fault," Julia said softly, knowing even as she spoke that there was nothing she could say to make her parents feel better, to lift some of the burden of the guilt off of them. They'd lived with this longer than she'd been alive. The thought was somewhat humbling, and she wished she could make them feel better. She didn't like the thought of her parents being unhappy, for any reason. "And something had to happen to help the colonies. And it did help."
Daddy nodded, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that he was mostly humoring her. Julia shifted uncomfortably and decided to lighten the mood. "You know, you guys really screwed things up for me," she said casually, pulling one of the kitchen chairs next to Daddy's so she could lean against him as she talked.
She felt him stiffen slightly before he asked, "What'd we do?"
"I'm supposed to be doing this project on the Gundam pilots, and the main part of it was going to be me making up a pretend interview with the pilots, based on what I'd found out about them through the research. How the heck am I supposed to do a pretend interview now?"
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Julia hummed happily to herself as she walked towards aikido class. It had been over three weeks since she'd found out her parents' secret, and it almost felt like things were getting back to normal. It had been hard at first, trying to act normal when she finally went back school after getting back from vacation. None of her teachers had really bought the 'I didn't feel well' excuse, but it hardly mattered. They had no reason to complain unless she fell behind, and, as usual, she was way ahead in all of her classes. This entire experience was teaching her the wrong thing about not attending classes, since it apparently made no difference whether or not she attended school. Of course, she'd known that before, but to see it proven so thoroughly was a little depressing.
After that first day of school she'd gone to visit Richard. She'd taken a page from her father's book and done her best not to lie while skirting the truth by a rather large margin. She felt very bad about lying to him (because as far as she was concerned, deceiving was the same thing as lying, no matter if a lie didn't actually pass your lips), but she didn't have a choice in the matter. This wasn't like showing him the research she'd done, this part wasn't public record (or what should be part of public record), and it wasn't like him finding out that she was a genius. This wasn't her secret to share, and even if it had been, she probably still wouldn't have told him. She wasn't sure if he'd be able to handle it or not, but it was just too big a chance to take. If he couldn't, and he told someone... there were a lot of OZ and Alliance soldiers still on Earth after the war, and Julia didn't want her parents to have to go into hiding, the way they had during the war.
She didn't think he'd noticed anything.
It wasn't easy, sometimes, trying to act like nothing had changed, now that she knew this secret that no one else did. And she'd nearly gotten in a shouting match with Mrs. Kinley during her first meeting after vacation, when her teacher started going on about the Gundam pilots again. Somehow it had been easier to brush off the derogatory comments when the Gundam pilots weren't her fathers and uncles. But now, knowing exactly why they'd done what they'd done, and knowing what sort of people they really were, it was nearly unbearable. She'd avoided yelling only by making an abrupt exit from Mrs. Kinley's office. Then she'd given herself a strong talking-to about self-control, gotten herself under control, and gone back in to apologize. Mrs. Kinley had accepted the apology with ill grace, and things had gone back to the uneasy state they'd been before.
She was still working on her project. She was trying to write it the same way she'd originally planned, getting into the heads of the pilots and writing from their perspective. It was a little irritating, doing it that way, when she knew she had a couple of them living with her, but if she actually interviewed them, it wouldn't be her work. Better to turn in something that was slightly flawed but her own than to be dishonest. Besides, she knew that her parents still weren't completely comfortable with her knowing, and didn't really want to discuss it with her. So the project was progressing without any input on their part. At least they'd stopped tensing and exchanging those looks every time she mentioned it.
It was strange, sometimes it was incredibly easy to act normal. Especially when she was around her parents. She didn't have to hide anything from them, and for the first time ever, they didn't have to hide anything from them. Other than that, nothing had changed, not really. They were the same people she'd known all her life, and she was still their daughter. It was easy to act normal under those circumstances.
Julia was still a few blocks from the dojo when she noticed something was wrong. She actually stopped in the middle of the street, looking around, trying to figure out what was bothering her. The few other people on the street gave her some strange looks... at least, most of them did. One or two looked vaguely alarmed, and continued watching her long after everyone else had lost interest. Julia's stomach clenched.
Clutching her bag very tightly, Julia hurried down the street towards the dojo. She didn't know exactly what was going on, but she had a very bad feeling about some of the people, and wanted to get to somewhere where she'd be surrounded by her friends, people she trusted. As she sped up, Julia noticed several people - the ones she'd noticed before - detaching themselves from the crowd to follow her slightly faster speed.
Julia turned the corner and stepped onto the street where the dojo was with a feeling of relief. :Just another minute...: She stopped short as four largish men stepped directly in front of her, blocking her path. She turned to retreat back to the other street, where there were at least *some* other people, and found the way blocked by the three men who she'd spotted earlier. "What do you want?" she asked nervously, turning back to face the four in front of her, while keeping track of the ones behind her by their heartbeats. :Oh, that was brilliant,: her mind commented. :Why do you *think* they're surrounding a lone teenage girl?:
"Are you Julia Maxwell-Yuy?" one of the men asked in a straightforward manner.
Julia's heart jumped straight into her throat. :Why the hell do they know my name?!:
"Who wants to know?" she asked in response, and was amazed when her voice was steady.
The men in front of her exchanged a glance that she really didn't like the looks of, then the one who'd spoken said, "It's her. Take her."
(1) - Sorry about this, but I couldn't resist throwing in a reference to this book. I happen to love it, and I reccommend it to anyone who likes science fiction of any kind.
Sorry about this, but this chapter started being waaaay too long, so I just chopped it off. I'm almost done with the second part, it should be out in a few days. (Assuming all goes well, which may be too much to ask for.) Anyway, I'm not sure how well I handled the section where she was just sitting around thinking, but I liked the part with Heero and Duo. Julia's re-establishing her job as caretaker for her parents.
The next section should be out in a few days.
Marika 1/30/02