Happy Birthday, Pardra!

This is a birthday giftfic for Pardra, who requested X with his kids. The first scene I started writing ended up not heading in that direction, but I'll include it because siblings.

Sharks have been around for a very, very long time. Of course the Jaws theme would survive.

"Hm-hm," she subvocalized to herself under the water's surface. "Hm hm hm hmhmhm…"

There wasn't really any chance of sneaking up on her sister like this, even underwater. They all had proximity sensors. Yes, Levi was swimming under the dock to approach where Harp sat, dangling her feet in the water as she read in order to lure any rogue mechanaloids that might remain in the area for a little target practice (and to prevent other people from getting ambushed), but since Harp was aware of the possibility that something might go for her boots, even the fraction of a second's warning as Levi came out from under the dock would be enough for Levi to get a dash boot charge to the face, or rather grabby hand. Levi had her own dash boots, but she was dragging a bit of dead weight

So she pulled herself up onto the dock next to her sister, sitting down and pulling up the net bag full of mechanaloids. They were supposed to leave the ones that didn't attack them alone, but Dad made them work for their allowance, and cutting down on the numbers of hostile mechanaloids and hauling them back for scrap was one of the more palatable ways to make quota.

They could always take a shift guarding the plants, but that was on dry land and sometimes nothing even attacked the experimental fields and greenhouses, and that was boring. Harp didn't mind – she was on duty right now – but Harp had her eyes in the sky, and she could be over there in thirty seconds if anything came out of the hills or the seismograph detected some burrowers, which wasn't much worse than when Fefnir patrolled on the ride chaser.

Harp glanced over at the catch. "Anything interesting?"

"I'm working my way outward," Leviathan said cheerfully. "No new types, but I'm spotting a few more Kelpies now." While sometimes an irregular one would be hostile, Kelpies were a new design of maintenance mechanaloids, as opposed to the various wild varieties that hunted each other for raw materials. If they could get a proper seaweed forest growing here, then she'd been promised that her father would buy her whatever fish she liked, even genemodded to survive outside their preferred temperatures.

It wasn't as thought there was an organic environment in the waters around ancient Japan, or what was left of the islands, to be damaged by invasive species.

For now they'd also have to be modded to resist chemicals and heavy metals, but with the augmented kelp in among the seaweed forests… It would be generations before humans could eat wild fish in any kind of quantity without dangerous heavy metal poisoning, but that wasn't a problem for Levi. She was a reploid: metals were good for her.

To be honest, though, she hadn't liked the fish she'd tried all that much. Fruit was way better.

"Hold my book," Harp told her, tossing it over lightly as she pulled her legs up under her, spread her wings and kick-dashed up to get a bit of a boost before taking off properly.

Levi drew in a worried breath, glad trajectory calculations let her catch the book by its sides instead of touching the pages. "My gloves are wet!" she sent.

"I wouldn't read real paper next to the ocean," Harp said back, with a little modulation of the signal that meant she was rolling her eyes as Levi's audios picked up the sound of a few buster shots. Harp circled back: no need to land with small fry like that.

"So, once we've finished making some pocket money," Leviathan said, after handing Harp her book back, "What do you think about heading to the mainland?"

"I should have brought a bookmark," Harp said to herself, but oh? "The mainland?" That was an odd way to put it.

"We don't have to teleport everywhere. I can swim, you can fly: as long as I stayed near the surface, we could back each other up." And of course they'd bring their support units for extra backup, if they were heading far from civilization and its missile launchers. Dad would insist. "If it gets too hairy, we can just teleport out of there." And if they ran into something they couldn't handle? The Sea of Japan had been charted, but by larger boats. They hadn't found any mechanaloids capable of posing a danger to a good team on a strong ship, but what would happen when smaller boats were allowed into the area? A lot of the mechanaloids evaluated whether or not to attack based on size.

"Have you asked Dad about this already?" Harp looked at her with disapproving pale green eyes. She'd run this by Dad before asking her about it?

"No, I haven't yet, but I think he'll say yes. He might want someone to come with us," but it might be someone from the Oceanography Institute with interesting experiences to talk about. Dad might not want them to be too challenged, infinite potential system or no infinite potential system, but he knew better than to stick them with boring babysitters. Especially when the two of them could just whistle up a little fog, a little electronic interference, and presto! …Dad would brutally murder them in simulations when they got home. Repeatedly. Then after that there'd be the live fire test, and he'd coach them through doing field repairs on themselves afterwards, until they understood even a fraction of how much he'd suffered, thinking they might be dead.

But still.

The sky over the greenhouse was kind of bluish, having his gloves buried in the potting soil wasn't bad at all, even if the itty bitty plants they were putting in them were way more delicate than he'd like, and it just wasn't a bad day. It wasn't that he minded spending time with his dad. A sigh still passed his lips, a bit of steam wafting through the air.

"Are you upset that Harp and Levi ran off to the pier without asking you if you wanted to come?" X asked as he examined another sapling to see if it would hold up to being transplanted yet.

Fefnir sighed again, this time like a human. "I was just playing around." With his internal temperatures. It wasn't showing off that he could make clouds, and he could do stuff with water.

So why were they always going off and doing stuff together and leaving him out? He knew about their environmental systems: why hadn't Dad built him with one? He was the only one without one of those things, and he was the only male model: hadn't Dad realized that he would be the odd one out?

He still hated being left out, all the time.

"To be fair to your sisters," X said, putting down the pot, "you spent all your time with Aurora when she was here."

"Well, yeah," Fefnir started to say, about to claim that was totally different, but then he realized that "I was doing the same thing to them that they do to me. Doing stuff and leaving them out." Showing off that he had a friend, and they were going to do cool stuff together, and they weren't going to play with Harp and Levi, so there.

It made it worse that they hadn't even noticed.

"They don't mean to leave you out," X said. Fefnir didn't turn, since he felt like even more of a newbuilt when he saw the gentle compassion in his father's eyes. "Your sisters are unique. The only two like them in the entire world, just like Aurora will be until the process is refined. I built them so that they would have each other. I'm sorry: I didn't realize that you would feel left out."

"They're way weirder than Aurora is," Fefnir said, even though that wasn't true at all. He just felt like Aurora needed sticking up for more than Harp and Levi did. Sure, Aurora had a sister now, but it was a human baby and it was going to be like a decade practically before it could stick up for anyone. That was just crazy. As bored and useless as he felt sometimes, and stupid because there was so much stuff he didn't know, when his sisters practically had a private language and his dad knew everything, it had to just suck to be a human child.

Not that telling himself that he didn't have it that bad and should stop grumping around about it made him anything but grumpier.

"Why don't we do something together?" Dad offered. "I was hoping that you'd make more friends among the people that are coming to work here, but family is family." Now that the fields and greenhouses were built, the pier and the hardened buildings. Once they cleared out more of the dangerous mechanaloids, this might even become a boom town. There were even going to be a lot of humans moving in, because this would be a new center of ecological reconstruction research and there were a lot of humans in that field.

Fefnir had hoped that Aurora's family might come, but MMHQ and the Cain Foundation headquarters nearby were the center of reploid research again, they way they were before the virus, so her parents were staying there. He wished she'd visit more often, but her parents didn't want her going out on her own too much. She'd get mobbed the way Dad did when they knew who he was.

"People are a little, well, they know I'm your kid," Fefnir said, feeling a little awkward and glancing over at the wall. It wasn't Dad's fault that people got weird around Fefnir, and he didn't want him to think that Fefnir blamed him for it, but it was the truth. "Phantom said I should try wearing a disguise, but that just doesn't seem right." To make friends when he was lying to them about who he was. "Doing something together sounds great," he said, kind of hurriedly to change the subject. He didn't want X to feel bad.

"Mmm, what about a trip?" X thought aloud, with a little contemplative note that told Fefnir that he'd noticed what Fefnir said about other people and was considering what to do about it. "Camping might be nice." They wouldn't get mobbed, except possibly by mechanaloids, so Fefnir might actually get to have some uninterrupted time with his Dad without having to handle squishy little things and worry about killing them. X also turned his communicator off during family time, but the other two were there then, and they were doing all that ecological reconstruction stuff that they could talk about with Dad and what did Fefnir have to talk about? He wasn't doing anything interesting, just saving up for a ride chaser and trying to figure out what the good options were.

Which mostly consisted of drowning in numbers and graphs of performance curves and his sisters giving him looks like this was so easy and should take like five seconds and what was he stupid until his dad reminded them that Fefnir was an ordinary person, not like those weirdos, and they should be nice.

That was just the problem, though. Fefnir was ordinary.

Except he wasn't, he found when he tried to talk to other people. He was his Dad's kid, and that meant he couldn't be ordinary, either. There wasn't anyone who was going to treat him like 'one of them,' even if his dad was probably thinking about some way to try to make them. Dad was old and knew a ton of stuff and even more people, but if his dad made friends for him, then that would still mean they weren't hanging out with Fefnir because they wanted to hang out with Fefnir. It wouldn't be the same as making friends on his own.

He let out another little huff of steam.

"If camping doesn't sound interesting, what about the races? Or we could go shopping for your ride chaser. Cain Labs has contacts with a lot of the manufacturers, for parts production and safety certification. It wouldn't be hard to arrange some tours and see who has the time to talk to us."

Fefnir perked up at that a little. It sounded cool to talk to the experts, even if they'd be doing it because his dad pulled some strings, instead of because they wanted to talk to some random newbuilt who was just learning about ride chasers. He could still learn a lot from it. "You don't have to," he said, because he knew his dad didn't like taking advantage of how many people would do anything for him. X could say it would be a business contact thing, but Fefnir knew by how that people would do it just because this was X asking for it.

"And your grandfather didn't need to take the time to build all those armor capsules, when he was getting old," X said, tapping a finger in his forearm. He didn't sound quite disapproving, but rather like there was something that Fefnir should know by now. "You're my son. It's always worth it to do things that will make you smile. Or help keep you safe." Like wearing armor around the house all the time, to set a good example, even though Axl kept exclaiming every time he came over that X was still wearing it, when he'd kept saying during the wars that he wanted someday to take it off, put it down. "If you ask for something and it's too much trouble, I'll tell you. If I'm offering you something, it's because I want to do it for you, if it will cheer you up."

It made Fefnir blush, looking way too much like the color of his armor, and duck his head. It wasn't like he didn't know he had the best dad in the world, everyone knew he did. It was just that his dad said things like this, and how was Fefnir supposed to pay it back?

"I try not to spoil you," X said, "but will you let me, every once in awhile?"

He stood there, just not knowing what to say, relieved that his father could read it in his face, relieved when blue arms wrapped around him.

It was embarrassing, and he wished feelings were easier to control, but he really did have the best dad.

My X-muse is reflecting that being a parent again has turned him into Zero. It's one thing to walk around without armor himself. It's another to see his kids walking around unprotected, not matter how safe things currently are. Now that he's experienced war, anyway.

I like the idea of Fefnir being the most mechanically inclined, between his guns and the artillery focus of the Jin'en. Even if he lacks the natural aptitude for it Harp and Levi have, it's nice to think that in another universe there might have been a third generation of Drs. Light in the robotics field.

He's young now, so the focus is things that go fast, and later things that destroy things that are killing people once the war starts, but finding how engines are put together interesting, and how to make them work even better leads to understanding the theory and finding the entire thing fun…

But for now, as an android (human-like) he has the human problem of figuring out what he wants to do with his life. And doesn't realize that choice itself is the infinite potential that made his father so special to begin with. The potential that the virus stole from reploids for so long.

And then the war comes, and he too must put aside dreams for the future to become what the world needs, while X watches.