Respect between Enemies – The BetanWerecat
Gundam Seed: "Descending Sword" and after. OCs with appearances by canon characters. The actions of Kira, Athrun, and the others have far reaching effects. Rated T for language and off screen activity. (Reviews are welcomed but not required. This is written only for my own enjoyment. Flaming me will still get you ignored.)
No, this story is still not dead. Yes, I really, really WILL finish it. I've been dealing with the Great Unidentified Winter Bug and my brain has been more stopped up than my nose. Which is kinda scary when you think of it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Seed. On the other hand, the OC's are mine. Kindly to not borrow without permission.
Adrian decided it was a good thing he liked looking at trees and mountains. Because there sure wasn't much else to be seen at the moment and hadn't been ever since he'd awakened some four hours after they'd escaped from Nevada. Oh, there was an occasional small town and the odd road junction to break up the snow covered panorama but that was about it. Idaho was definitely a very vertical place.
If one was being honest, the sheer size of everything around him was amazing. Yes, he'd been on the planet before for an extended period. But the area around Carpentaria was nothing like the terrain around him now. It had impressed but not like landscape here did. The scales simply didn't compare.
They'd crossed the Colorado Rockies at night, jammed into the back of a small bus with the curtains drawn tight. He'd missed seeing those peaks up close and personal as he was seeing these. He'd missed the snow there too.
Snow. Now there was another thing he'd thought he knew something about. Frozen water, it came in tiny flakes with unlimited beautiful shapes that refracted the light from the microscopes used to see them into shimmering glories of color. He'd seen it covering the high country well back from the ZAFT base in Australia but he'd never gotten over there to check it out. Now, well now if something went wrong on one of those shockingly steep slopes around them, untold billions of those snowflakes would crash down and kill him instantly. It gave a whole new dimension to the word.
"The planet's amazing, isn't it?" Voril asked quietly, careful not to wake Yuri as he watched the passing landscapes from his comfortable spot on the over-the-cab bed.
"Very," Adrian agreed. "I thought I understood why some people down here don't think a Plant is all that impressive. Now I'm sure I do."
"Ha," Martha snorted. "A Plant is an amazing structure. Only an impossibly narrow mind can deny that. But it's a man-made structure just the same. It just can't match the variety and grandeur of nature. No matter what delusions some folks have, humans are most positively not gods."
"They aren't automatically monsters either." George noted as he deftly maneuvered the RV past a small car laboring up the steep road. "One needs to judge people as carefully as you judge nature; keeping the limits and wonders of both carefully in mind as you do."
"It's difficult to see man as a wonder right now." Yuri's unexpected comment had a dry sharpness to it, one Adrian knew was based on certain recent experiences.
You could here the wry smile in George's voice when he answered. "War brings out the very best and the very worst of us. It always has. And I have to grant you it's hard to see the good points when the bad ones have been rubbing your nose in the cesspit."
Yuri sighed. "I'm tired of being hated for the crime of existing."
"I can understand that," Martha replied dryly. "I got a lot of the same kind of treatment when I was up on Junius Seven helping your folks get their planned animal program started. There were a lot of Coordinators who were damn rude to the visiting Natural specialist. They'd get suddenly polite when they discovered who I was but it never did make up for their opening behavior. The good folks were few and discouragingly far between but they did exist. They couldn't compensate for all the rude dogs, but they did keep me from dismissing your lot as complete wastes. The best of your folks were as decent to me as the best of my friends back home. It was reassuring to know they existed."
"You were on Junius Seven?" Voril asked before Adrian could.
"Yes, just before I retired from the University of Idaho's Department of Animal Husbandry. It was my last consulting job for the University, and then some prejudiced cretin destroyed it all." Martha suddenly had no humor left. "I lost some very good friends when that nuke went off."
"Is that why, . . . . . .?" Voril trailed off, unmistakably unsure how to ask the question without being impossibly crude.
"In part," George agreed before he could find another way to put his foot into it. "But this is also an attempt to make sure that the people who are driven out know that not everyone hates them. If they can recall some good people to balance the bad ones, maybe we can make a peace that is just for all and that will last. The reality is, if someone up there with enough hate in his heart was to disrupt the orbit of the wrong asteroid, we will all disappear in one big, bright light."
"Charming thought." Yuri's shudder was strong enough to be noticeable to everyone under the bed's slot.
"Pragmatic one though," Adrian noted with a soft sigh. "And not all that hard to do. Really, you have to wonder why Chairman Zala bothered with the Genesis. An asteroid would have been much, much cheaper and a lot harder to stop."
"Ah," Martha replied gently. "It wouldn't have been half so satisfying for him though. A simple rock? Where is the genius of the Coordinator displayed by throwing a rock? Even if it would have been a great howling big one? I met him once, he had a deep need to force Naturals to recognize the superior abilities of Coordinators. I could just brain the people he grew up around. They ruined him. I don't think he really could allow himself to relate to any Natural on his own. His wife was a fine woman though and the anchor of his soul. We all lost terribly when she was murdered with everyone else on that Plant."
"No one more so than Athrun," Kayla's voice announced from the back of the RV. "He ended up losing both parents."
"Athrun Zala?" Martha turned around, a look of clear surprise on her face. "Kayla, have you actually met that boy?"
"Yes," she replied as she moved up to take the seat beside Adrian's. "He ended up fighting with the people who followed Lacus Clyne. He was aboard the Archangel when a Three Ships Alliance pilot hauled us in after our mobile suits got messed up getting just a touch too close to the first Genesis shot. He's a nice enough guy, really honest, great mobile suit pilot, damn good-looking, but very gloomy personality. He's with the Princess of Aube now."
"Really?" George was clearly startled. "There hasn't been any hint of that!"
"There isn't supposed to have been any hint of it." Adrian pointed out gently. "There are too many people here and from the Plants who want him dead right now."
"Oh, that's too bad! Lenore used to talk about him for hours. He must have been very badly affected by the war because she described him as a warm and loving boy." Martha frowned unhappily.
"There are reasons for the changes." Yuri agreed wearily.
The old woman just shook her head. "That's a shame. She and Don Ito used to sit in the barns and talk about their sons constantly."
Adrian stared at her in shock. He suddenly knew who she had to be. There had only been one expert from Earth who had worked closely with his father and Madam Zala.
"Dr. Fox?" He asked slowly. "Are you Dr. Angela Fox?"
Her head came around sharply as George nearly put them into the other lane in his surprise and the eyes that suddenly bored into his were not friendly. "Excuse me?"
"Are you Dr. Angela Fox?" He repeated his question. "Because she's the only animal husbandry expert from Earth Dad ever mentioned. I, . . . . . I'm Adrian, Adrian Ito."
"You knew Adrian's family?!?" Kayla yelped. "Oh hell! Do you have any pictures? All his were lost with the family. I've been wanting to put faces to their names ever since Adrian first started talking about them!"
"Arthur, pull us over at the next opportunity," the old woman ordered. "This isn't a conversation to hold in a moving RV."
"Really," he replied dryly. "What ever gave you the first clue?"
"That jerk you just gave the wheel wasn't a bad one."
"Your Mom will be happy you met someone who knew your family!" Voril said happily. "If there are pictures, that'll be even better!"
"Serin? Serin is still alive?" Dr. Fox asked sharply.
"Yes," Adrian couldn't meet anyone's eyes. "Mom, Grandfather and I were on our way home when the attack happened. We were within the blast halo when the nuke struck. Our shuttle survived because there was a larger cargo ship directly in between us and the blast."
Her eyebrows both rose. "The spavined old bull is still around too? Oh well, can't win 'em all."
"See!" Kayla cried. "Not everyone thinks Roland Ito is the best thing since sliced bread no matter what that old goat thinks!"
"I know," Adrian agreed with the obvious with a long-suffering sigh. "But do you have to crow about it?"
"Well, no, I don't. But it's so satisfying to yell at him, even when he isn't within ten thousand miles and can't hear it."
"All right," Arthur Fox said with wry amusement. "Sounds like Roland hasn't changed much." He nodded, "There's a scenic overlook coming up. Everyone hold on, a left turn in this old bus tends to feel a lot less stable than it is."
They parked, bundled up warmly, got out, talked, ate something that vaguely resembled lunch and talked some more. Adrian heard a number of stories that his father had told from a very different perspective. What he'd accepted without question as a boy became new insights on his lost home and his parents' world. For the first time since the destruction of Junius Seven, he rediscovered the occasionally fallible and often intriguing people his father, elder brother and their colleagues had been. Dr. Angela Fox and her husband returned his family to him, not as martyrs any longer, but as human beings again. And it was those human beings the Medicine Woman introduced his wife to. In his own mind, Adrian would owe her a debt for that kindness for the rest of his life.
They might have sat, talking and nibbling the leftovers for hours but a mobile phone rang in the cab of the RV. Arthur Fox answered it. While they couldn't hear the actual conversation, the sudden seriousness in the voice tone brought the pleasant visiting time to a swift end. By unspoken consensus, the boys policed their site while the two women packed up everything worth keeping. By the time the call ended, the only signs they'd been there were the RV itself and some tracks in the dirt.
"We need to get moving." Arthur told them as they clambered into the RV. "That was a friend. Eric Stanton was found dead in his bed at a truck stop outside Wendover. Someone stuck a needle in him. The only good thing about it is it happened at least four hours after you lot had already left."
"What was in the needle?" Kayla asked, at least as puzzled as she was disturbed. "I mean, I can see why someone would want the damn swine dead but why right now?"
The old man just shook his head. "We don't know the answer to either question. What we do know though is that the Nevada police are going to be looking for you lot as soon as they realize you were traveling with him. We have to get you out of the country and we have to do it soon."
"Grand Forks," Angela said suddenly. "We need to get to Grand Forks. Magpie says they can get a flight to Australia there. All other airports we could reach in under a day, including Vancouver, will have watchers before we can get there."
"Where is Grand Forks?" Voril asked.
"Montana." Kayla replied shortly, busy digging a map out of the pocket in the back of the front passenger seat of the RV.
"And this Montana is also where?" Yuri enquired politely.
"Dead east of here."
"Hang on," Arthur ordered as he put the RV into motion. "It's a good four hours across the mountains from here by the highway. It's going to be a bit longer going the way we will. We can't afford to be stopped."
"We won't be." Angela smiled grimly. "We can stick to the highway. Coyote won't let anything interfere with this trip."
All of them looked at each other but it was Kayla who voiced the common thought. "Coyote won't let anyone interfere. What the hell is this all about that Coyote is taking such a hand!"
"No idea," the old Medicine Woman replied. "But be grateful for his help. I doubt you'd make it another fifty miles without it."
"How do you tell a Spirit thank you?" Adrian asked quite seriously.
"In this case, you accept the help he's giving you and don't look back."
"Yes, Ma'am," Voril said earnestly, "we will. But I'd still like to know how to say thank you anyway."
She turned in the seat as the RV began to pick up speed and gave them each a long moment's careful study before she answered. "For the moment, don't worry about it. I'll ask Magpie to check if there is anything Coyote wants from you. You can bother about it when the answer comes back."
"But . . . ."
"No!" Kayla cut Voril off immediately. "You do not harass the Spirits! If there's something Coyote wants from us for this, you can be damn sure he'll let us know. Until then, you say 'thank you Coyote' and you leave it at that. He's helping us, don't make him regret it."
"Thank you, Coyote." Voril and Yuri chorused promptly and immediately shut up.
Adrian added his own silent thanks, suddenly aware of an approving nod from Golden Eagle as he did so. It occurred to him to wonder just how he was going to explain any of this when he got home. Somehow, he didn't think just reporting they had been helped by Native American nature spirits was going to be well received by the ZAFT. He really didn't want to have to try to explain it to Commander Thoms either. Eagle just laughed at him.
Lance pulled the car up and parked it. They were here to see if Rebecca and the children wanted to visit more of the PLANT than just the grounds of the Ito Project, fascinating as they might be. He looked over at his son with caution. Jiro had been silent for the entire trip, and that was very abnormal for him.
"Something going on I need to know about?" He asked the boy, well aware that if his son didn't want to explain, he wouldn't.
"If Larry's nasty, can I smack him?"
"Are you anticipating problems at the Council Hall today?"
Jiro looked up, openly surprised. "No. He's gotten a lot better around people and as long as no one calls him bad names, he pretty much stays polite."
"Then what brought this up?" Lance asked, uncertain what could have started the train of thought in the first place.
His son gave him a stare that spoke volumes for how dense he thought his father was being. "Ah, Dad, you asked me to think about having Larry and Shiloh live with us, remember?"
Oh, so that was what this was about! "Do you ask in hopes that I'll just agree to whatever you think should be done or did you have something specific in mind?"
Jiro stared fixedly at the front dash of the car, a monumental scowl on his face. Right. He'd been angling for permission to define 'nasty' himself.
"Then the answer is no." Lance eyed the boy's disappointment at the reply and decided it wasn't anything Jiro hadn't been expecting.
"Will I have to ask every time?"
"We will have to define the situations where something can be done with his mother. We are not cutting her out of this young man! Larry is her son and I do not want you to pretend he isn't. Am I clear here?"
"But I'm older'n him!" Jiro protested. "And he still doesn't know how to stay outta trouble everywhere!"
Lance let one eyebrow rise. "And being older than Larry should justify smacking him how?"
"Not smacking him for nothing Dad! Only when he's nasty."
"Again, who is defining 'nasty', who is defining when 'smacking' is necessary?" Lance refused to give any ground. "Or have you forgotten that business your Grandmother went over last night about power and corruption?"
The boy's mouth opened, probably to continue the argument. Then Lance saw the lights go on as he made the connections. The mouth slowly closed. He waited patiently as the boy thought it through. There were times when having one of the really bright ones for a child had distinct advantages. He might only be a bit over five, but Jiro's reasoning powers were quite well developed.
The child finally looked up warily. "Not so smart then?"
"Not so smart," Lance agreed calmly.
"Oh."
"Yes, oh." Commander Thoms granted evenly, trying to indicate approval for the grasp of the concepts without stopping the thought processing going on. He continued to wait patiently as his son worked on the idea. Jiro thought in decision trees, fairly direct ones at this point but still, interrupting the considerations had a tendency to degrade the end results of the reasoning. This was important enough for their future as a family to wait until he got all the way done. It took him a good ten minutes.
"Dad, if we talk to his Mom, would you agree?"
"No," Lance said gently. "Wanting permission to hit people isn't a good thing Jiro."
"Could I yell at him?" The boy tried another approach.
"Would you settle for being able to just tell him he's being rude? Remember what you think of people who yell at other people. Are you so sure you should be doing it yourself?"
The amethyst eyes glared up resentfully for a few seconds before his innate sense of honesty took over. "Well, I guess not."
"No, I guess not too," He grinned warmly at the boy, offering support for making a good decision. "What you should think about it how you can catch Larry quickly when he starts to explode and help him to control himself. You will both get along better if you can do that than you ever will 'smacking' or yelling at each other."
Jiro smiled shyly back. Lance let himself hug the boy just like he would have when he was three, something he hadn't really done since the war started. It was amazingly comforting for him, and it was even better when Jiro suddenly hugged back. They were both grinning like fools by the time they scrambled out of the car to head for the main doors where Dr. Serin and Rebecca were waiting for them with Shiloh and Larry waving madly.
The three children went diving back into the main lobby to play hide-and-seek through the planting beds. Rebecca, smiling broadly, followed them immediately to see to it that the plants survived the game. Lance started after her when there was suddenly a sheaf of papers in front of him.
He turned to eye Serin quietly. "And these are what?"
"Oh, just a bit of data you should take a look at."
He took the papers, recognizing them abruptly. He was suddenly cold. These could end his hopes immediately. And there had been nothing in Serin's tone to tell him which way it was going to go.
The first three pages were a waste of paper and ink. He really didn't think they needed to print out the applicable laws governing this every damn time someone requested a gene-scan! He knew the laws already! He wouldn't have asked for it if he didn't after all.
The next pages were interesting even though they weren't vital to the decision. It was good to know that both Larry and Shiloh were healthy. His eyebrows did go up as he came to the section regarding their future marriage possibilities to find lone word 'unrestricted' in the section usually filled with cautions and citations of specific genetic markers that would have to be avoided.
He looked up at Serin, who smiled grimly. "They're the results of crossing Coordinator genetics with Morrison Plan genetics. They'll be part of the new wave of children Roland is creating who will free us from the absolute necessity of the reproductive labs."
He nodded, completely understanding, and then turned to the pages that mattered most. The reading got heavy immediately. It irritated him. There was no excuse for this. No one who wasn't a geneticist needed most of this data at this point. Yes, it was a good thing to know your own genetic code. Fine, great. Did they have to waste four pages on it when all that mattered was the yes or no? And just where had they buried that anyway?
He was down to flipping back and forth through the last pages in frustration before Serin took pity on him and pointed to the section she knew he was seeking. Lance Thoms came to a complete stop, abruptly aware that he really, really didn't want to look and find a denial. He lowered the papers as that sank in.
He'd asked Jiro for a decision. He'd intended to abide by it; his son was the most important person in his life after all. But now, with the answer in his hand, he realized that Jiro had competition. That shook him. How had this young woman come to rival his son in his affections in less than a month of knowing her?
He looked up as shrieks of childish laughter rang through the high-ceilinged lobby. Larry and Jiro were racing through the front of the space with Shiloh and a brilliantly smiling Rebecca in hot pursuit. Lance watched, and let himself admit he'd fallen in love for the second time in his life. The idea of not having this wonderful woman beside him was not acceptable, period.
There was a quite sigh from the much older woman currently standing with him. "You aren't going to look until you have to are you?"
"I don't, can't accept a 'no'," he admitted quietly.
"Then it's just as well that the rating is A/B, now isn't it?" Serin asked as she walked off with a very smug smile.
"Wha . . . .?" Lance stumbled, then whipped up the sheets in his hands to stare at the relevant section. His eyes missed it on the first frantic effort to verify the information. On the third try, he locked onto the correct line.
And there it was, in clear black and white. He rated as an 'A' partner for her. She was a full 'B' for him. For a marriage in the Plants now, it was a stunningly high rating. Eyes wide, he stared at it. He glanced up at the two boys trying to hide behind one small bush. He knew what he wanted, what did his son want?
Being able to tap into the Project's security net did make it easier to keep an eye on Serin. It was a great help to know when she was going to be tied up in another part of the complex long enough to let him do some real work. And she was going to be involved with young Thoms and that Earth-born girl he fancied for a fair stretch of time today. He grinned to himself as he let himself into the small secure lab at the back of his office.
One quick look assured him nothing had been moved or removed. It was a relief since he knew she'd been in here this morning and, for his own security, this was the one place in the entire Project that had no security recording equipment in it. Too much of what he did in here simply could not be allowed to get out. It was safer to risk the vanishingly small chance of an enemy ambushing him here than having any unapproved information pass the door.
Swift hands pulled the materials he needed out of their hiding places and got the machinery set up. He'd reached a decision late last night. Any sequence that turned out to have only one or two viable samples was going to be twinned. That was too many really but he just couldn't allow himself to accept the chance of losing one of the gene sets if those so-limited samples died. So today he would split those two single zygotes but only one each of the seven sets with two viable samples before he got any more started.
For all that it was delicate work; it wasn't really hard to do. It only took a couple hours to complete, leaving him with nine twin sets and yet another decision to make. Well, a decision to formalize really. He'd more or less already made up his mind on how this should be handled. So one of each pair was deliberately mis-coded and set into the cryo unit that he would be taking to the lab for implantation in one of the maternal hosts later today and the other was correctly marked and put into the secret reserve. If all went well, the reserved zygotes wouldn't be incubated for years, possibly even a generation or two if he could just get hold of enough viable diversity from Earth.
If all went even better, the first of a new generation of truly independent Coordinators would be born nine months from now. Roland found himself just looking at the cryo unit. Who would ever have thought that arrogant, self-centered fool would really be the one to put together the genetic packages that truly would free them from the chains of the lab bench? He wondered if history would find this as ironic as he did or if it would dress up G.A.R.M. in a cloak of respectability because of it. The thought of Hibiki as a revered racial hero was actually kind of nauseating.
He took one last look around the lab to be sure he'd tidied everything back into the places things had been in when he entered. Serin had a very acute visual memory. Sometimes he'd been caught going behind her back by leaving something ridiculously minor out of place. He honestly didn't want to get into one more raging fight with his daughter-in-law, they took up valuable time and neither one of them were going to change their minds anyway. But the lab was in perfect order. Roland took the cryo unit and slipped out. He handed it off to his most reliable implantation team.
That done, he went to find Serin. She really shouldn't be getting too close to the lab until the work was done. Roland grinned to himself. Now, what petty bit of annoyance could he find to keep her occupied for the rest of the day?
