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Chapter Twenty-One

Retrospect


The two desires that spur human action are hunger and love. Without memory, humankind would no longer hunger for love. – Kilroy J. Oldster


We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. – George Bernard Shaw


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Memories are funny things, in how they can look completely different from one year to the next - what details you notice when you're in the middle of a situation, compared to hindsight. The longer you live, the more you recognize just how many bullets you've managed to dodge, despite how it felt like you caught every single one.

Everyone gossips, from oldest to youngest, trying to get their facts straight before the next wave of the storm hits. It goes just about as accurately as your average game of telephone.

oOo


For the first time in ever, it's right on time. Would you look at that.


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November 14th 198 – Thursday – Tivoli, Italy

"My sons," Jack growled. "Are the kings of bullshit."

Then it's a very good thing that Jake will inherit Relena's titles rather than the other way around.

Des grinned at the thought, but restrained himself all the same as he tucked the phone against his shoulder and picked Lyle's bottle back up. "Good morning to you too," he greeted. "Aren't you at work?"

"The firm cut everyone's hours again, or so the story goes," the other man groused. "I'm not sure I buy it, since none of the young bucks I work with are complaining, but if I ask? There's a fair chance they'll tattle and I'll be reprimanded for breaking policy – while my hours are cut again for what they'll be quick to reassure me are entirely unrelated reasons." A sigh came through the line. "Sorry, that sounded… It's fine. That's not why I called. I didn't wake anyone up, did I?"

That didn't sound 'fine' to Des… but it also didn't sound bad enough to pick at his friend's pride first thing in the morning. Something to keep an eye on because Jack hated asking for help, hated even bringing up problems he didn't already have a solid plan for handling yet, but not worrying enough to cause problems yet.

Well. Probably. With the Miller men it was best to keep a circumspect eye; they were prone both to trouble and… for lack of a better word, extremes. Jack couldn't figure out how to do something halfway any more than his son.

Sons, maybe, he reminded himself, ignoring the quiver of unease in his gut and instead focusing on adjusting his own son in his arms… gently jostling him so he woke back up enough to realize there was still a nipple in his mouth and he'd eat a little more before passing out entirely. "Nah," he reassured Jack, walking back toward the back windows. "Cass is out having her weekly breakfast club with her girlfriends, and I'm trying to convince Lyle to finish one more ounce." The boy was growing fast enough that he had to be getting it from somewhere… and maybe it was stress making him see things, but once he'd gotten home again he'd have sworn the little guy had lost a little of his pudge over the course of his ear infection.

He couldn't remember if he'd been half this neurotic with Lucrezia. When he focused on the details the answer was a solid yes, but every time he tried to remember a specific incident, it was overlapped by Sylvia laughing delightedly at his fumbling before taking over with sure hands and easy words.

Sighing, he settled onto one of the window seats spanning the back of the house, leaning back into a pile of cushions – Cassandra kept swapping out the old ones for more comfortable, supportive ones when she thought he wasn't looking, and he could admit that he sat here more often now that she had. It was too cold to want to step out, but the sun was bright enough on his face this morning that he could almost pretend he was sitting out on the swing instead of hiding in his house. The Dermiglass his ancestors had installed on the house's second rebuild meant this room, despite being a virtual fishbowl, was always comfortable no matter how sweltering the summer or crisp the winter. Even with…

Ugh, no. He rolled his eyes and twisted his head to hold the bottle with his chin so he could pull his ear back from his shoulder and grab his cell before it started to fall, flicking it to speakerphone and setting it on the seat in front of him. Brood, brood, brood… enough. He was home and his family was fine. The kids he'd halfway adopted at his daughter's behest were busy being big damn heroes, and he was proud of that. Jake was out-adulting him when it came to coping with news of his brother, which was something none of them had ever thought would happen. He wasn't entirely convinced that he wasn't trying to be depressed right now just because he was bored.

That wasn't the reason why and he knew it, but since the actual reasoning couldn't hold much more water than that and was too damn nebulous to conceptualize, he figured he might as well reframe it into something equally as stupid.

Lyle spat out the bottle and scrunched up his face, and the timing was perfect enough for his thoughts that Des couldn't help but grin. "I know, right?" he murmured, low enough that Jack shouldn't hear. Setting the bottle next to the phone and bringing the baby up against his chest, he focused back on the adult conversation he was supposed to be having as he started patting out a light rhythm. "So, seeing as you now have time to hang out with an old friend during a weekday, what did Jake do this time?"

Jack barked out a short laugh. "What isn't Jake doing right now?" he returned sardonically. "I could probably make a more accurate list of that, even with his staff actually sending me updates and invites to things I didn't know existed a month ago. I have no idea what story he's spinning for who, though I'm sure it's fantastic.

"Junior, though? I think I've found at least three different places he should've been and isn't. It's so damn close to flawless that I'd be proud if picking my way through five different false leads in as many hours didn't make me want to hit something."

He blinked a few times as he chewed through all the implications in that statement… and resisted the urge to groan. Given how calmly Jake had taken Junior's sudden existence even when he forced the kid back up against the wall from two different psychological angles? He really should have remembered that the little shit came by his penchant for trouble honestly.

Lulu, sweetheart, you sure know how to pick them, don't you? Given Jake's periodically terrifying childhood idiosyncrasies and refusal to discuss his past, he'd assumed the worst about Jack until his daughter caught him alone and asked him what he thought of trying to bridge the gap there. If the man had tried knocking any time before that rather revealing conversation, he'd probably have slammed the door in his face…

…and given Jack's tenacity in the face of what he thinks is unjust, there's a fair chance he would've tried to break in to talk to me, and then I would have been facing accidental manslaughter charges. He bit back a smirk, shifting Lyle and adding a little more pressure. That would have been a loss. He didn't have too many peers left these days, and while he was just fine with joining the younger generations, Jack was probably the best friend he'd had since Sylvia died.

His four times over great grandfather had built this house as a vacation villa, and the generations since had maintained its sanctity through all its upgrades and expansions even after they'd lost the noble status that had prompted such measures in the first place. As far back as their history read, the Noins had always been fiercely protective of their own, both natural and by inclination.

Ah well. Given the current era, it was just as well that the house hadn't killed an intruder for forty some-odd years. It had been long enough now for the facts to fade out of public memory, which meant their defenses should actually work if push came to shove and they needed them. Security measures that were well understood could be circumvented, and even friends were only given strong precautionary measures, not details. Jake only knew as much as he did because he'd helped them update the systems back in 192, and Jake was family.

In any case, as a consequence of Lu's intervention, along with an obscene amount of time and conversation, and a ludicrously enjoyable number of incidents he'd managed to get into with Jack over the years… In retrospect, it's a wonder the two of us never got arrested or worse.

He grinned. Jack was family too, though a friend first and foremost.

Even when he's being stupid. "I'm not asking how you got these fruitless leads," he announced blandly, rubbing soothing circles over his son's back after a burp. "Or how you investigated them without leaving Switzerland." At least we're talking over the cells Jake's tech guy forwarded instead of the landline that is most assuredly still being tapped – periodically at least, if not every call.

Every single person his daughter had ever laid claim to had a strong appreciation for the fine details, for better or worse. Unfortunately, that fucker she'd been crazy about had never even tried to get over his entitlement issues, so here they were. Better to plan around the worst case scenario.

Jack snorted. "It's not like it's hard."

Des rolled his eyes. He'd tried getting Jack to try to actually explain how he did his computer internet magic shit exactly once, and despite a fair amount of effort it had remained exactly that. He did not agree with that sentiment. "However easy you find it, my concern is more to do with other players," he pointed out, shifting Lyle back out of the slump he had fallen into and starting another rhythm.

"Am I supposed to repeat myself?" the other man returned, voice thick with amusement. "The only person who's ever come close to catching me was Odin, and that was after he picked up on the fact that he should probably be concerned about how much time his little girl was spending with that techie she met in a coffee shop four jobs or so back."

He snickered a little at the image; this wasn't something he'd heard before. In general, the two of them usually didn't talk about their dead wives so much as how… how everything was different. Considering how much it still hurt to talk about the woman who had so perfectly wrecked and remade his world before wrecking it all over again when he had to figure out how to do more than breathe and keep talking to his kid…

He'd always figured that it was the same for Jack, or maybe worse. For all the shit that he'd gathered flew back and forth between the younger couple and despite how very different it sounded like Rhea had been from Sylvia, whenever she came up in any real detail it just… Every damn time, as soon as Jack's thoughts drifted away from the story and back to now, the look on his fellow widower's face was such a mirror of Des's own worst moments of after that he'd never pressed… and then they'd change the subject.

"You're laughing, but this was one of the most terrifying times of my life," Jack protested, despite the fact that he was obviously only just holding down laughter himself. "My lead, Dan: he says we're going to hire this real high class spook from Earth to get through Tieman's security after that twisted fuck 'handled the situation' on L1-V0031. And I'm like, 'Alright, but I thought you said that wasn't going to work anytime soon' because it had been brought up before and we sent out a bid, but we knew we didn't have anything close to high enough of a ticket for this guy Dan'd heard of to notice, let alone take us up on.

"But then out of the blue he contacts Dan asking for a timeframe and listing options, and we need to know what changed. Because this was about Tieman, and the last time he lost his temper with us he flooded the colony's vents with sarin. What if he'd counterbid on us to the same guy?"

Des felt his face go cold, the laughter he'd been holding in turning into a shrieking deep in his chest. Jesus Christ. He wheezed out a cough as he slumped deeper into Cass's pillows, staring at the opposite wall. Jesus fucking Christ, sarin loose in a colony's vents. That was… beyond horrifying even as a concept, let alone as something Jack would casually mention as tactics he'd faced off with when he still worked as a guerilla fighter for L1 independence.

Incidents like that were the reason why Lucrezia insisted to him that the Alliance had to be brought down; why Romefeller needed to be corralled. That had been back before she wanted to be in on the active part of the revolution itself, but she had walked him through why Treize was planning to break the world regime even when her future plans had only involved preparing the next generation of pilots for the changes to come. By the time the shit actually started to hit the fan…

He started patting Lyle's back again, tried focusing on the story Jack was still telling, but all the same he couldn't help but drop his cheek down to the top of his boy's downy head. I really hope your sister helps get this all squared away before you have to grow up watching the same shit all over again. His dad had worked so hard to make sure he didn't been pressed into the military the way Des's grandfather had pressed him, and the man had still died so damn young. Lucrezia had almost given him a God damn heart attack at thirty-nine the first time she turned her young, stubborn eyes on him and said she was going to fly someday.

But so long as the fucking nobles were doing things like dumping nerve gas into an entire city state because someone was harrying their embargo, all these reckless young kids were right. Jack had been right, and Des just hadn't seen it, living sheltered on Earth in old, aristocratic Europe. Lucrezia, though… She'd been able to look out at the world with her mother's clear eyes and not only see the problems, but decide she was going to be part of the solution instead of eking her life by on the edges of the safety margin.

He was proud of that. Proud of her now too, standing up against this new fucked up Regime despite her history with the monster who thought destroying planets was acceptable retaliation, but… God, but he was so tired of being scared.

"-and then she… I didn't think it was a legit lead going in, you know? But she was there, and the name she told the coffee guy was right even if she didn't pronounce it the way I'd expected, and I'm sitting there trying to think of the best way to pull more data and she just waltzes up to me, sets her bag down on my table, leans over, and smiles. For a good ten seconds I thought I'd totally been made and… I didn't even care. She was completely focused in on me and I couldn't care that she was probably about to knife me because of that damn smile."

He couldn't help but snort at that. Definitely more fraught than his initial meetings with either of the women he'd ended up falling for – but considering Jack, Jake, and everything he'd heard about Odin, he couldn't be surprised, either.

"So I'm sitting there a little slack-jawed, literally already planning out how the hell I'm going to get out of a coffee shop in the middle of downtown main with a fucking gut wound instead of doing anything, and she starts talking, leaning coy on one hand with her hip against the side of the table. And I'm halfway through sorting out which alleys off 4th should be most empty that time of morning when it finally clicks that she's hitting on me. She breezed past three different guys side-eying her that were taller and, you know, not all grungy beanie and sweatshirt, and this gorgeous little co-ed with the most glorious mane of hair I've ever seen all the way down to her thighs is chatting me up like I'm in the middle of a romcom… while I was trying to be subtle running surveillance on her. And all I can think about now is that I've got three days of lazy scruff covering my face and I can't actually remember the last time I showered."

Des started shaking with helpless laughter. "That bad, huh?"

"I've been hit softer by a fucking train, Des."

He resisted the urge to sigh again. Sometimes I marvel that you survived long enough to sire children, let alone reach forty. He had heard that story, and he still couldn't work out how the hell the man had only broken three ribs and dislocated his knee beyond some really deep bruising. Well, no; Jack admitted to internal bleeding too, though only in hindsight because he refused to go to the fucking hospital for three months. The hematoma in his gut that formed up before the blood pouring out of his spleen had clotted had apparently left the doctors confused when the imaging came back showing an 'old' injury when their patient insisted he couldn't think of something that could have caused it: 'You don't think I have some sort of blood disorder, do you?'

In Des's opinion, the fact that he'd figured out how to run with the fractures and fucked knee – to get away from the soldiers that were the reason he'd chosen dodging over very active train lines instead of taking his chances with a .45 in the skull – clearly proved that despite a long history of shitty life choices? Jack understood the Darwin scale with a degree of precision that made your teeth ache.

Thank God Jake didn't inherit that shit. He'd certainly gotten the ability to convincingly lie his way out of just about anything when it should have been physically impossible, but he'd heard enough awful cock and bull stories from David to know that while the kid was capable of more or less shutting off his response to pain and piledriving through something, he also understood the meaning of triage and how cooperating with modern medicine got you up on your feet faster. He healed fast enough even without Remalene to startle doctors, but his stubborn pride usually only came out to play when working through PT to get everything back up to what he considered an acceptable standard.

Then again, Jake had been able to maneuver his way into a position where he had those options, while his father had just had to make do on… well, on not much beyond luck and sheer nerve. If he'd gone to a hospital after the train incident, someone would have been able to put the pieces together and he'd have been arrested – if not executed on the spot, with the way the Alliance had tolerated revolutionaries. For all of Jack's doubts and concerns over the years about the boy's ethics and equally shitty life choices, Jake had still grown up in a much better world than his father.

And if that doesn't say how fucked up our society is right now, I'm not sure what does.

"But… I mean, I remember I have a damn tongue before she loses interest and try playing into my cover a bit – say I've been up all night working on an algorithm for a project but thought a change of scenery was due in with the caffeine – then admit I'm actually way ahead of deadline and that I was mostly trying to pretend I hadn't lost the inspiration I was following, and shut my laptop before she can see what I'm up to and just… talk. She…" Jack cut himself off as his voice turned wistful, clearing his throat. "It was easy, you know? We sat there drinking coffee while she worked her way through some overpriced fruit thing, completely happy to slum it with me for an hour while she waited for stuff to open, and towards the end of it she started asking if I knew anything about some sort of arts festival that was supposed to be happening a couple miles away.

"I'd never heard about it, but Lowe had been the one to list a time and place for initial face-to-face and final terms with Dan. I'd only been through that colony in passing before, so I said I was a new transfer from one of the satellite offices for the company I worked with, and I was still new myself. So she pulls out this high end tablet that probably cost the same as two months' rent to start showing me details on this big, old school, earth style sakura festival. I mean… she was so into it that she probably could have been talking about anything at all and I'd've decided I totally dug it too, but… She was showing me all the little stands and events that were supposed to be happening, more excited by the minute, then started on about some video she'd seen online where somebody used a leaf blower in colonial low-G and it looked nuts; said she wanted to see if she could do it with a fan and sakura petals.

"Then she went on this big rant about how her brother had too much history with some folks in Japan for them to go to a real festival, whining about how he wouldn't let her go on her own either because he never trusted anybody. But she'd finally found ads for this festival, and she'd still had to bother him for weeks before he'd consider it… and that she'd thought they were just going to go before they got on the final shuttle and he pointed out that he'd picked up a job, so he'd be nearby if she 'wanted to go have a tea party in some pink trees.'"

Des found himself caught between a grimace and laughing out loud. Wow. "Tactful."

"Oh, she was having a complete fit over it. I don't know how much of this she actually said to him, but I got a hell of an earful about traditions and art and shit I honestly only knew a tiny bit of. I think I learned more in five minutes than my mom managed in ten years, but she'd done all this research, and I was a little embarrassed because she started using words that I'd never even heard of. Her Japanese was good for someone who'd never used it day to day, and… at the end she just slumped a little and groused about how her brother never seemed to do anything just to do it unless she strong-armed him into it, and how if nothing else, she just wanted some pictures. She wanted to see the full tea ceremony stuff too, but she'd hoped he was at least coming with her for the pictures part, because she should've known he'd only agreed in the first place because he 'found something new to pad his portfolio' with."

He choked at that, and Jack let out a humorless little chuckle that turned into a groan. "Yeah… I mean, she said it that way to make it sound like he was doing something legit, but that's literally what she said. I have no idea how I kept a straight face. I mean, maybe I didn't, she was busy trying to pull up that leaf video and she could've missed it before I recovered, but… That was how I ended up on what we eventually decided was our first date. In this beautiful grove, drinking tea I hated and trying to do downright improbable things with a fan and battery-operated hairdryer to make some kind of sakura tornado."

Des's lips twitched, and since he'd gotten another two burps out of Lyle he shifted the boy back into the crook of his elbow and picked the bottle back up. "How'd that go?"

"I think she was trying to recreate some kind of crazy anime scene, it literally made no sense," Jack admitted. "She couldn't find the original video she was trying to parody either, but… I literally spent most of a morning rolling around in the grass with a gorgeous blonde, and she laughed like crazy through most of it, so I decided to take it as a win."

It sounded like charming teenage shenanigans, to be sure. Jack was forty-six now, which meant he'd been… twenty-four, when they'd had Jake. Otherwise he knew the two of them hadn't gotten married right away, though he remembered Jack saying they realized Jake was on the way a little sooner than they'd initially planned, not long after the wedding.

So yeah, teenage shenanigans sounded about right. "I'm not seeing the terrifying," he noted dryly.

"It wasn't, not until after she started pouting that I hadn't asked for her number, or even just her email," his friend returned, voice shifting into a deadpan. "I didn't realize just what I'd gotten myself into until after she answered the phone and started gibbering happily in what I later found out was Finnish, rolling her eyes and tone changing to bitch at her damn brother while she wrote her address out on my arm.

"So suddenly I'm remembering that I need to go tell Dan that it looks like our scary assassin is doing a low bid, high risk job for us literally to make his baby sister stop giving him grief. Because he won't let her go more than twenty miles away from him."

He couldn't help it; he started laughing, though he at least managed to keep it low, under his breath.

Jack pointedly ignored him. "But she's amazing, and she's not being coy, and even if I'd had zero interest? At this point? I wasn't entirely convinced I wouldn't just disappear out a convenient airlock if I upset her. Also, for the record? Literally no one ever sorted out exactly how Odin got through Tieman's security. The man just stopped showing up to work one day, and eventually people started muttering about a syndicate he'd pissed off a few years before maybe having caught up to him."

Because that isn't terrifying, even as a concept, Des privately agreed. He could handle the idea that this kind of horror still happened – mostly – because he understood and even mostly agreed with the strong moral code he'd seen Jake carefully apply. He could handle it because he'd known what was happening behind the scenes on the worst of Khushrenada's bullshit just by nature of who his kid was. More than once, Lu had walked him through the pile of horrible options they had been left with and why they'd chosen the path they had, and he got why sometimes it might be for the best.

But everyone who had ever known Odin Lowe more than passingly were very firm about the fact that while he'd had very strong beliefs about family, his moral compass was otherwise absent. And considering how utterly he'd thrashed both of his nephews' early psychology, let alone whatever might have happened after Jake said he went into a depression and disappeared into the fucking abyss with Junior for four years? However insistently Jake argued that Odin had loved them, you could damage a child just as thoroughly with the wrong kind of positive attention as you could negative. Wherever the man had fallen on the scale between loving parent and psychopath, he'd done some pretty awful stuff for no reason at all, especially considering the kind of money he'd been able to leave behind.

If Jake was right, and the course of the custody battle Jack had dragged them through had planted doubt that made the man question the way he lived his life? The fact that he felt driven to suicide less than five years later proved that yeah, Odin had loved them, and was starting to get a real good idea of just what he'd done. Even if the assassin had never acknowledged any of his kills as real people, Des could see how his last acts showed that he had loved his boys.

If he'd made any fucking arrangements for the younger one beyond fingerprints in a private database and making sure Jake was within a day's travel when he went through with it, Des might even be understanding about why he couldn't handle watching the results of his handiwork. It was a shitty thing to do, and both kids had been too damn young and frankly still too God damn damaged to understand… But if he'd even made just a single fucking phone call, even just a damn text message before he went through with it? Or hell, if he couldn't bring himself to tell or trust anyone but the boys, he could have given Junior an explicit set of instructions for 'if this goes wrong' that would've led him into his brother's arms without letting the boy know he planned on making it go wrong.

There was no reason they should have lost the kid with him. Maybe there had been a failsafe or two that had collapsed in the clusterfuck that was the assassin's funeral pyre, but either way? Instead of handing off custody in a way that could be interpreted as even mildly rational, what Odin had done was abandon a terrifyingly lethal nine-year-old in the middle of a violent coup and hope his twelve-year-old brother could pick up the pieces before the little one stepped in front of the wrong person's gun.

Or, you know, realize he had nothing left to lose and that whoever shot Odin down might be able to connect the two of them and come to finish the job, if he didn't run.

Jake had always been adamantly, absolutely certain that the kid didn't know he had any other family by the time it all went down. It had always been hard to get a straight answer out of him about why, but from what Des had been able to piece together: the complete separation Odin imposed after 185 was the man trying to actually be a parent and limit the trauma after the boy 'handled' his world getting split up by forgetting everything from before he turned six. In Jack's darker, drunker moments over the years he'd muttered a few heart stopping phrases about 'identity schism' and 'dissociative amnesia' that Des hadn't pressed on because whatever had happened, Jake had sorted himself out with comparatively mundane control and anger issues, and Jake was the only survivor.

Only apparently he wasn't, and now both Miller men had clammed right back up about exactly what went down in 184. They usually only got this bad when they'd decided they were guilty of something terrible. But seeing as Jake had only been eight and Jack was the only sane adult present at the time, he was calling bullshit.

But then, it doesn't matter whose fault it is when shit goes badly enough. He'd spent years grieving for what they'd put Lucrezia through during all of Sylvia's treatments and the wreck he'd been afterwards, and while he knew better, that didn't mean he was ever going to stop. The best he could manage was to stop thinking about it so much and focus on what good came after in spite of it.

…So on the bright side, it looked like now they'd eventually get Junior's side of the story, and maybe Jake would get a little closure if he had the rest of the puzzle pieces. Not that the kid cared about that anymore, which was actually fantastic progress… but those questions were chump change compared to the revenant brother that hopefully wasn't all the worst of their uncle reborn.

God, I'm fixating again. No wonder Jack spent all night trying to find him. The very idea of the kid was both wonderful and utterly terrifying. Coping with Jake had been the same way originally, but he'd also been ten and entirely devoted to his daughter, which softened the blow. By the time he physically met the boy he'd already been tentatively included in people the kid was intent on caring about, the same way all the stories about Odin revolved around an absolute devotion to his family – both the sister he'd taken custody of when he was a teenager, and her sons. Jake openly attributed the man he'd become to the relationships he'd formed as a teenager…

…and less openly, to the reality checks caused by the disasters and resounding grief of his childhood. The boy was fully aware of the fact that all the trauma had forced him to question everything he thought he understood, over and over, until he had a healthier working model.

After watching Jake struggle for over a decade, he… He didn't know. The boy could have gone in a lot of terrible directions and didn't – and that was despite some pretty crap odds and an intensely manipulative personality that was only a few points shy of maliciously dissociative. But instead of taking the easy route, he'd figured out how to channel that need for control into constructive work and had become a hell of a humanitarian. So if that terrifying little sociopath in waiting that Lucrezia had first met in the Specials could construct and internalize a moral compass and grow up to be one of the best people he knew, odds were that the younger one was capable of the same feat, as absurd the idea felt when it was first suggested.

They just… didn't know. They didn't know anything and Jake was refusing to even try learning for fear scaring him off.

Interestingly though, despite how vehement the kid had been on that front? He'd gone and forgotten that he and his old man tended to attack problems from entirely different angles.

Let's hope he's being overdramatic again, he decided wryly, sighing when Lyle refused to have anything to do with the bottle. He might have known the kid better than anyone once, but it's been fourteen years. Jake had been trying to stop his father from doing any number of things for just as long, and the only successes he'd ever seen involved significant physical violence – and even then, it only led to delays, not cessation.

Jack didn't take anything resembling failure as the end. He just found a new way to bull his way forward.

"Des?"

Shit. He'd been listening, but that was a bad habit. Quickly, he ran back over everything Jack had been saying… and fought back a guffaw as he actually processed it. The young lovebirds had shared three months of letters via email and calls and texts before the scary big brother realized Rhea was making a solid attachment, at which point he did his homework and saw the initial connection – which, despite lingering terror on Jack's end, only resulted in annoyance at the sister for missing it and grudging acknowledgement to Jack for running cautious surveillance on an unknown.

Then, when Jack thought that would be the end of it, Rhea had effectively rolled her eyes and pointed out that she wasn't stupid – and could he please tell her what he actually did now? Because Odin wouldn't, and as hilarious as it had been listening to him come up with ways to reframe anything he told her into an innocent light, she was genuinely curious.

Then it had taken Odin another six weeks to realize that instead of solving the boyfriend problem, he'd made it worse.

"When did she figure it out, then?"

"About a week after that coffee shop, maybe? Apparently it just made me more interesting. She said she wanted to see how long I could keep it up, and then the fact that I just made it work without making a mistake was 'fantastic'. The only thing she'd been able to figure out through her brother was that I was connected to some enemy or other of Tieman, and that shithead had more than just a few, so she was having fun trying to unravel the mystery?" He sighed. "It blew my mind, but her sense of humor was always a little off-kilter."

Des frowned. "Odin wouldn't tell her?"

"Yeah," the other man's voice darkened as it went terse. "Funny thing about that. Rhea knew firearms and basic self defense, not to mention a lot of social engineering and basic spycraft, but he never involved her in his work. He sheltered her, indulged her interests, and he only gave her minimal privacy and independence, but… nothing like with the boys. By the time I met her she had killed before, but only once, and it was open and shut self-defense – Odin had good reasons for not letting her wander far, despite the fact that she'd outgrown it by the time we met. She knew some darker truths about the world than most people living in the kind of luxury he raised her in, but… She was just a world-savvy girl with an unusual perspective on life, and a lot of the stranger things about her could be written off to how they never stayed put. Barely any attachment to anything outside the two of them, but whatever they wanted they had, and… everything else was disposable.

"When you only have one person that you care about in reference to anything for your whole life, because nothing else stays, it's no wonder if your sense of empathy is… is weird, you know? Everybody does it to some degree about most of the shit in the world… I mean, how else would you get through the damn day? The two of them were a happy family, and as weird as Odin was, he wasn't actually a sociopath. Rhea was never his possession, or an obligation he couldn't get out of. He practically worshipped the ground she walked on, and she was literally the only one ever that could talk him into or out of something he'd already made his opinion clear on. The two of them were each other's whole world. If it wasn't in their little sphere of personal involvement, they just… didn't care."

Des sat up straighter, blinking. That… made a lot more of the pettier arguments he'd witnessed between father and son over the years make a lot more sense. Living in a disposable world. It certainly wasn't how Jake actually thought about anything, but he could see the argument, especially if the patterns were similar to before.

"Shit, Des, when I got out and went to find them? I'd half expected that Jake wouldn't know who I was. With how our last conversation had gone and years of nothing… I'd hoped for better, but I wasn't counting on it. Rhea didn't even know their parents' names until after her first pregnancy started going sideways and the doctors were trying to figure out why, if it was genetic or what. Odin had never been subtle about how he only tolerated me because Rhea told him to. But I figured even in the worst case scenario, even after I caught up and found out she was gone, and about Junior, that he'd been bringing them up the same way.

"I could never figure out why he changed, beyond grief that she was gone and maybe a psychotic break. When I actually pushed him around about it, the most he'd say was that he didn't want to repeat the same mistakes. It never made any damn sense."

…Wow. Des grimaced. He wasn't about to argue; Jake had essentially been a child soldier, though one with more loving support than the usual run of those got. How you went from raising a child to be aloof and maybe entitled to that was anyone's guess.

Instead, he tried to steer the subject back into lighter waters. "The shitty parts aside, I'm still not seeing the terror in this story if Odin was actually blasé." He could guess, but Jack needed the distraction.

"He was only blasé until he realized she was talking to me more," the other man admitted, going with it. "Then he tried to spook me, but after a few weeks he had to admit he couldn't outmaneuver me in the digital lanes, as it were, even just to get a real address. So he started hunting me the old-fashioned way and I had to bail."

He thought about that for a moment, considering, then, "So when you told me that the first time you stole a ship it wasn't for altruistic reasons-"

"It was because I was getting the fuck out of dodge before my future father-in-law could nail me to a wall for target practice," Jack agreed. "I mean, I still stole it from some Alliance shithead I wanted to piss off, but I wasn't that big of a fish yet; that was new. I figured out half the damn controls on the fly and it's probably a minor miracle I didn't crash the thing into anything important in the process, but it bought me enough time to come up with my next move, at least. Spent the next two and a half months using every trick I knew and rediscovering a few classics to stay a step or two ahead of Odin, and I managed to get something of a name for myself as a side effect. By the time he caught me, he was impressed enough – and Rhea'd wheedled at him long enough – that he just glowered and demanded I show him how I worked computers."

His voice turned wistful. "At least he taught them that, I guess? The only reason I was able to track down Jake at any point after 185 was because he couldn't figure out how to combat his own tricks being used against him. Odin never told them they were mine, but he did teach them things I would have… even with all the fucked up shit he added in for spice."

So much for diverting him. He considered his very asleep son, shrugged, and set the bottle back down. Hayden said these lines were secure. "Junior works the same way, then?"

Jack hesitated. "…Maybe. It's… sometimes? It's more chaotic. I saw two false leads that looked like something Jake or I would do, but another two that were a different style entirely, and two more that I thought were legit until I got cameras to disprove them, one after the other. Either he's absurdly diverse, or he's made friends that are willing to play identity games with him for favors. Or both."

"…That sounds complicated."

"All these leads, most of them subtle, and he's not at any of them, Des," Jack admitted, sounding… dismayed? Confused? "Even Odin left a better footprint than this. He's got someone using his ID doing something in backwoods Russia, even, and there's no trace of him that I can find beyond being a founding member of some new age social group."

Huh. "The friend in Russia's probably from that," Des suggested. Jake's comment about how they should be glad the kid had close friends came to mind. For all that the cover story was apparently bullshit, it was genuinely rare for a person to go through life without forming any meaningful connections – and a hell of a warning flag if someone managed to pull it off. "Do you think he might be shadowing one of his leads, maybe?"

Another thoughtful pause. "Maybe. From what I could tell, Odin got better about identity work after 184. If he slides into entirely separate identities at the drop of the hat, I wouldn't know to track it in the first place."

So you're upset that you can't do the impossible? Good job. He rolled his eyes. "Did you try tracking the little sister?"

"Unless she gets on a commercial plane or something, she's supposedly young enough that she won't leave much of a trail. The last marker I have on her is an ATM withdrawal in Warsaw, and that conflicts with all of Junior's trails again."

"Supposedly young?"

"It's an easy way to pass someone under radar," Jack explained. "Maybe she's exactly what the cover claims, but maybe she's something else entirely. I had enough of a baby face through my early twenties that if I shaved I could get away with all sorts of shit, claiming to be someone or other's kid brother. I'll believe it when I see it."

He supposed Jack would be one to know. "What's the name of the social group?" He put enough crap online now about Lyle so Lu could find it that it wouldn't hurt to keep an eye out.

"Revenant Rubato. It has real, solid roots from before he went into that HTD office, but not by too long. It's new and exclusive and I'm half and half on it being legit versus a front? So it's probably both. Like you said, the tall redhead I caught images of using his ID in Russia this morning is most likely a member, but their online presence is pretty barebones, and it's very private so far."

Des hummed. Revenant certainly fits the bill for Junior, at least. It was a little daunting to think it might fit the whole group, but… Well, he'd cross that bridge when he had to. Rubato, though? His lips twitched. I do hope they're referencing music, not Italian.

But then, considering Jack's history, he supposed there were worse things. If it was a front, he'd have to give them credit for being blatant and still getting away with it. "Have you told Jake?"

"If he doesn't know about it by the time I see him at Thanksgiving, I will," Jack dismissed. "This is the kind of thing his networks pick up and pass on more or less automatically. Are you coming to that?"

"That's the plan," he agreed. "Do you have any details on it yet?"

"No, something about getting a caterer in this week and working out the details once she's here. With the Ministry move, Polanski said a few plans are turning a little more improv than they originally meant them to be."

Ah, so Hayden has become the official father-wrangler, Des thought with a grin, relaxing back. He'd been wondering about that. At least it meant no one was expecting Jake to remember to pick up the phone anymore; too many things had been falling between the cracks with how much the kid had on his plate even if he was being far less avoidant now.

"They're out of house until Tuesday or Wednesday, if I'm remembering right," he mused. "If I don't hear back today, I think I'll call Hayden and make sure it's fine for us all to show up on Wednesday, because we're starting to get pretty close." He should've done that already, really… and he didn't feel like roadtripping this time. It had been fine with Jake doing a good chunk of the driving on the way up, but he really wasn't in the mood to spend twenty hours in the car for such a short visit – the kids were going right back on tour in a different direction afterwards, so there wouldn't be much point in lingering.

"Could I get you to call me back afterwards? I got the time off, but I still need to get a bus ticket, and the sooner I do that, the better."

Right, so he needed to poke Hayden and buy three plane tickets, because Jack's supervisor was shitty enough and the bus took long enough that if he didn't fly, he'd probably only get to stay at Jake's house for maybe ten hours before he had to start the trek back. The other man wouldn't admit to it unless he was cornered on the subject after the fact, but with some of what he'd muttered about in passing lately? He probably felt like he should be cautious and go with the option that was easier on his savings instead of the one that let him actually spend time with his son.

The fact that Jack had a tendency to barely make ends meet while never telling anyone about it was probably something he should have pulled Jake aside about years ago, but there'd never been a way to do it that he couldn't see going viciously wrong. The kid practically flung money at complete strangers and would've done something if Des asked him to, but Jack was a proud son of a bitch and… well. While insanely rich children should look after their parents, the Millers' relationship had always been fragile at best.

Before the Fall and some of his best investments had fallen through, it hadn't been a big deal to float the other man periodically when things went to hell, just to avoid that situation. But afterwards…

In retrospect, he probably shouldn't have refinanced the house to help kickstart a new American company that looked promising as hell. Everyone involved in it – along with all their collateral – had gone under with the Fall, and while he'd still had a healthy passive income from other investments that hadn't crashed, it wouldn't have come close to paying back the loan in time. His daughter had been MIA, he'd had no way to contact Jake or David in all the chaos – or even a true confirmation that they'd made it. By February, he'd been quietly panicking but doggedly working out the logistics of a new budget for when the bank forced them out into an apartment.

Then he got the call thanking him for resolving his contract so quickly, and to please ignore any letters he may have already received about collections, as they were dated.

He had been so furious when the boy wouldn't talk to him after that. At the time, he'd been half convinced that Lu was dead – that Jake might be the only thing he had of her left – and the boy wouldn't even talk to him. And maybe he'd commiserated a little more than usual with Jack over the little shit, but…

He'd felt more alone at the start of 196 than he had since Sylvia breathed her last. He loved Cassandra, but it had been the end of everything all over again, with Lucrezia gone this time instead of her magnificent mother. Cass had been the only one there to help him keep his head above the water… Except there had been no time to prepare this time. There'd been a while there where he… he'd really thought that Cass was all he had left.

All because of other people's choices. The life he'd painstakingly built for his family, brick by fucking brick, year by year in spite of all the shit that happened along the way, gone in the space of a single damn night. And he was angry just as much as he'd been despairing, because at least with Sylvia? There had been literally nothing that they could do. This time? The isolation had been intentional.

Just because he understood why Jake couldn't handle seeing him when he thought Lu was dead didn't mean he couldn't be mad about it. He'd cried like a fucking baby that first birthday after Libra, when Lucrezia sent a box of the same tarts he'd gotten from her every year since she turned seven.

'Happy Birthday! Sorry I can't be there. I love you.'

He'd bawled his eyes out in sheer relief and joy and pure fucking hate for that dictator she'd fallen in with, and he'd gone through another round of trying to get ahold of any of the decent brats she'd bring home with her… Because in so many ways Jake was his son, and sometimes he'd wished the girl would come to her senses and see the way the boy looked at her when her back was turned. He'd hoped, at one point, that she would leave the royal to the nobility and politics she didn't care about and settle down with someone who would actually take care of her instead of making ultimatums and leaving her behind… and for a long time Jake had been the best candidate for that, even after he stopped holding a torch for her.

But in the end of the day, Jake did have issues enough with misplaced guilt that he quietly cleaned up everyone's messes before disappearing like a thief in the night. And when it came right down to it, there hadn't been anything to do about the boy avoiding him unless he wanted to convince Jack to offer himself up as a bloody sacrifice – and there were limits. Considering how badly their first visit after Libra had gone, he didn't want to think about how much more volatile Jake would have been if his old man tried confronting him about his emotions towards Des at the same time.

No, in the end of the day, you had to find a way to live with the shit you didn't like but couldn't change… and despite the stress of the past five months, seeing Jake with Relena? That was something else. The reality there was a bonfire compared to the candle of any could-have-beens he'd imagined in a scenario between Jake and Lucrezia, and that was the way it should be.

Jake didn't have to be his son legally for him to claim the little brat – and technically speaking, he'd claimed him legally anyway by making him Lyle's godfather, so there.

"I'll let you know," Des agreed, even as he decided to call Hayden as soon as Jack was off the phone. He brought in less money than he did pre-Fall, but with the house paid off again it was still very comfortable, and he had no issues paying for his friend's flight. It just felt wrong, now that Jake was finally done running and rising to the challenge, to continue excluding him… because as soon as the boy realized that spotting Jack was something he'd been doing for years, he was going to get embarrassed. If he figured it out on his own he'd feel enough guilt for all damn three of them, but if he heard it straight from Des, he'd have a better chance of thinking it through and making a decision about how he wanted to address this sort of thing in the future instead of freaking out and doing something that they might all regret.

For the first time in the boy's life, he actually trusted him to make a sane decision about his father instead of becoming an angry emotional supernova.

…Clearly, it was time to bully him into being more of a grown-up. At least a little. Relena and all the extraneous angst and stress had worked wonders on that kid's psyche, miserable as the process had been. The princess deserved a fucking medal for that, but he still had a long way to go.

oOo


oOo

Amsterdam, Netherlands – New Renew

'When you get a chance, I need you to tell me what led you to Ieper.'

Still no response.

Duo sighed, tucking the phone back in his pocket and focusing back on the motorbike he was working on – normally more 'Liss's thing than his, but it was a slow enough day to not matter, and… Shit, she really does need to quit the Militia. She'd been stretching herself too thin lately. The fact that it hadn't taken too much effort after they woke up to talk her into calling out for work and going back to sleep said a lot.

Still, now that he had the hang of it, he liked working on bikes, at least. They tended to be custom enough that they were more interesting than cars, and he could lose himself in the work while his mind wandered. Will was upstairs with the boys working on their history and social studies, and Harold had Renee today while Rina pulled a double – one of the other girls had called out sick at the pub. Father Espen was going to have all his kids out at a nearby park this afternoon to skate, and ideally he'd be able to go along to that, but if it got busy, he knew Val and Carlos were going to keep an eye on things. Whether or not he made it, though, he figured he'd boot the boys out of the classroom and in that general direction; Amos would be happy for the break, but sometimes Nolan needed the reminder that there was more to being happy than books and family.

If I can get Will on board, he'll go. The man could use more time in the sun anyway, weak as it was. So long as they set up a chair for him there, he should be alright – he was coming along decently on his recovery now that Shov had gotten involved. Mm, if everything stays on an even keel here, maybe I'll just stay and ask Melissa to take pictures for me. It might as well be a real day off for her, and Will would definitely go, if she was. Marien had been puttering around the kitchen this morning muttering about picnics, so it was probably going to be a pretty nice little event.

It was good. The upside of the whole 'Dutchman' reputation spreading was the absolute peace he was seeing on the home front – even the late night patrols, which usually saw the worst, were starting to cool down with the weather.

It was good, but… he couldn't be easy about it. And that was okay, he didn't need to be easy about whatever was happening outside his home, and he was growing more confident by the day that they were going to be okay, but…

But there'd been another bombing yesterday.

Belgium again, but further away this time, which made him feel better even when it probably didn't mean anything. Some building owned by the Regime, but the press wasn't releasing more details on that beyond the casualty reports. The media was kicking up a ruckus about it happening in a city Relena was in the process of touring, but that was just the usual fearmongering. Definitely the erratic bomber again, not the opportunistic one, though, and that…

It was strange, to be on the other side of the fence. He'd gone out of his way to try to be erratic and unpredictable for most of his life because it was harder to track. If the enemy didn't know much about you or your motives, you were that many steps ahead of them. It was a smart way to work.

It was fucking hard to defend against. And the Regime had to know more than they were saying, but seeing as this was the fourth attack he'd heard about from this guy and the sixth bomb in total, he wasn't convinced they were going to have any more luck finding the asshole than they were him.

So what, exactly, led Adam and Hil to the Ancient Wars Memorial? He hadn't gotten a decent chance to talk to Hilde since that time Heero put her on speakerphone in July, but if the phones Heero and his girl cooked up were half as good as they claimed, maybe he could. Adam had been squirrely as hell about the whole thing right after and it hadn't seemed important to ask when he had enough to do on his own front, but… Well, he was trying to fix that now.

It was weird, though. Adam usually answered pretty fast, and he'd sent that text last night. Then again, it is a loaded question. He figured the guy would be calmer about it all by now, but maybe it was a conversation he'd rather have in person. Still, he could say that much.

Almost on cue, his phone chirped. His hands were full, though, so he took a few minutes to finish what he was doing and wash his hands before pulling it back out and unlocking the screen. The newer model they'd given him after the Rotterdam trouble was cheap enough to escape most notice while still doing most of the fancy shit, though with a much smaller screen than Amos's… and the new text was from Odin, not Adam.

Making a face, he unlocked the screen and opened it anyway. Whatever Heero had to say, it probably-

…What the actual fuck? He squinted, tapping the picture to make it fill up the screen, but… yeah, that was… a bar. A partway underground bar a lot like Jérémy's, actually, except the entrance was literally half frozen over.

The door was missing, and showed waist-high ice, and a second picture showed the whole place looking like that – someone had tossed at least a dozen glowsticks in for light and it was eerie shit. The water had been dirty enough that it wasn't clear, but he could make out the shadows of the tables and at least one chair back was sticking up out of the ice, pool cues popping up near the wall like some kind of new age tree. The last picture showed another doorway, this time with just the top half of the door broken off, but the whole thing was clogged with debris and more ice. It looked like… those metal shelves they kept in food places? Except at a tilt in a pile, and there was rock or something mixed in with the ice, like maybe the building had collapsed a little on the far side.

Someone had clearly been taking an icepick or something to the mess, but it didn't look like they'd made much progress.

Backing up out of the pictures, he scrolled down to the text that came with them.

'I'm out of ideas. You got anything?'

Duo groaned, leaning back against the door and debating. 'What are you even doing?'

A few seconds later, he had a response. 'You don't want to know. Ideas?'

What an asshole. Just because he didn't want to get into their new game against the Regime didn't mean they had to ask leading questions then leave him hanging. 'Where are you?' Considering for a moment, he added, 'Might be easier to go through the roof.' Wherever the hell this was, it was clearly abandoned.

His phone chirped again but there was no new text, and it took him a moment to realize it was from a different conversation. Adam was finally responding, but-

He groaned again, reading. 'That part of the building is under almost a meter of slab for the neighboring foundation. Please tell him blasting is a bad idea.'

Switching back to Heero's conversation, he opened it just in time to avoid the noise going off. 'Not an option, and Chicago.'

…What the fuck were the two of them doing in Chicago? At least the way it was abandoned made more sense, but, seriously?

Another chirp. 'I have some C4 and the tools to put a decent shape on the charge, but it's a last resort. Sledge is hurting us more than the wall, and the axe is too slow.'

God damn it, how was he friends with these guys again? Right, because this is the stupidest shit we ever got up to. He snorted. If only. He wondered what the hell they were trying to dig up, though. 'There's probably enough alcohol and pressurized cannisters back there for that to end badly,' he warned. Depending on if it had survived until now, there'd be CO2 tanks and flour and who knew what backstock in layers back there; the front of bar had been pretty small with a large area for patrons, so there'd be a lot in the back. He thought for a long moment before adding, 'I assume you don't have any thermite?'

'It's too wet. I'm mostly over blowing myself up, thanks.'

Right, the ice, that was a stupid question. It was weird to be thinking about explosives when he wasn't the one doing it, context was a problem. In his defense, he was still thinking about the concrete above, but the doorway, with that much water around, it could still turn into a steam explosion – if not initially, then when it made it through to the room below… And that was assuming he got the amount right and it didn't just eat through whatever they were trying to get in the room for in the first place. 'How likely is it that your C4 would wreck your objective?'

'Depends on how well it works.'

He rolled his eyes. 'No shit. How delicate are we talking, though?'

'Delicate, but secured to the back of a walk-in. Depends on how much the blast budges the freezer.'

Something small, then, so probably delicate. 'How bad would it be if you collapse your entrance and have to give up?'

'Irritating but salvageable. Cat can get by without every piece, but it's a setback.'

Now he really wanted to know what they were doing, damn it. 'Worth coming back later with better equipment?'

'Maybe, but I probably won't.'

Well, if it was the same either way, then it might be worth trying a blast. Heero'd always liked remote detonators, so it wasn't like Adam had a legit reason to fuss anyway. Still, given how most back of house operations worked… 'What other equipment is in there, besides the freezer? If it's vented, I'm assuming the shafts are too small to try that way?'

There was no fast response, and he wasn't sure if that was the service – because they were in freaking Chicago – or if they'd figured something out. Shaking his head, he switched back to Adam's conversation and added, 'Seriously, I want to know what led you to Ieper, see if I can connect a few dots.'

'Ask me when I'm not on a different continent. I'm taking watch now that Yasa is trying the vents.'

He made another face, but decided that was fair. 'Good luck and stay safe,' he offered. Letting out a sigh, he pocketed the device again and got back to work.

He could fuss over issues outside his town later.

oOo


oOo

November 16th 198 – Saturday – Hannover, Germany – Evening

"It's not as big a victory as I would like," Relena admitted, leaning back into the cushions with a sigh. "But I'll count it."

"Pretty much," Jake agreed, refusing to wince as he stripped out of his blazer and rolled up his shirtsleeves. "The militarization campaign has too much steam behind it already; it feels prearranged."

She hummed at him, tipping her head back and closing her eyes. "A leftover of Milliardo's, you think?"

"A planned response," he affirmed. "Everything this month from the Regime has been either smooth response or floundering when their target refuses to follow the script." Draping the suit jacket over a chair, he picked up the service menu and a pair of water bottles before joining her. "I'm not sure I appreciate the cultural impact, but the endgame is direct enough."

"'Intimidate my neighbors into leaving me alone'?" she asked scornfully

"Intimidation tactics are a classic for good reason," he defended. Setting everything down on the coffee table and opening a bottle, he pointed out, "It's visceral, and people respond to that. It's less impressive right now because you blatantly sabotaged a lot of the goodwill buried in the movement, not because it lacks effectiveness."

"It's blatant fearmongering," she huffed, leaning into his side. "I hate it."

"It is." He took a drink and offered her the bottle. "But if it makes the East second-guess themselves and delay, then mission accomplished." Relaxing back and wrapping an arm around her, he added, "I don't think we've damaged that prong of the attack overmuch, which is good. It's debatable whether if this new level of peacekeeping they've proposed is even enforceable. Keeping the increased military presence out of the democratic zones is a victory, both in terms of quality of life and establishing your own authority. It's a good extension of your established persona."

She let out an amused sort of scoff into his shoulder. "My persona, huh?"

Jake smirked. "Just because you're genuine doesn't mean everyone else is going to believe that." He grimaced. "And we're going to have to start building on that and being more subversive, with these new alliances."

"I know." She sat up for a moment to set the water down, then resettled with her legs curled over one of his, fingers idly tracing the straps of his shoulder harness. "I'm not opposed; I just haven't had the kind of staying power I would need, to move more powerfully."

"I know," he echoed, because they'd been over this before and he did. "But it needed to be said. I'm not going to repeat my mistakes with you, but I don't want you to get staggered when Noventa issues a kill order for Gerry Boutelle."

Relena gusted out a breath. "We need to decide on parameters for that kind of thing, but yes, I'm aware of the problem."

Given how Don Pommier had managed to skate his charges and disappear to another family estate up in Latvia, or how all the witnesses against Gabriel McKlveen had disappeared and put his court case into an eternal kind of limbo, he knew she did. "I know," he repeated, turning his head to press his lips to the top of her head for a moment. He'd hoped that using the press and power of public outrage against the nobles would help, but he'd warned her how these things usually ended before she tried moving against them. With the change in government it had been worth a try, but unfortunately the Regime's domestic scope when it came to the nobles was just as limited as the old puppet democracy had been.

Words mattered little among Romefeller, and actions only for so long as you could actively enforce them. Zechs had made an effort to restore checks and balances to their power, but the results were paltry. Just like before, anything short of capital punishment could be maneuvered around if you knew the right people – and they had worked around the Alliance for long enough that they were good at skimming just below the line of what could be interpreted as treason.

There was a reason Treize had him run so many off the books investigations during his career with OZ. Whether or not he'd been the one to mete out a response for the ugly cases, he'd never disagreed with his friend's sense of justice. He didn't miss wet work, but he would never argue that it hadn't been necessary. The courts were only designed for the lower classes.

"I'll start the conversation with BJ on Wednesday," he offered. Anything along those lines had to begin with intelligence gathering, and while the nobles only ever responded to the physical, leverage in the form of lost assets and blackmail against one-time allies who would take it out of their hide often worked as well as more violent measures. Treize had adhered to a strict code on this kind of thing whatever the rumors said about him, and Ballard's inclinations meant he would be invaluable to a new system's design.

He wanted a rubric in place before Noventa tried to talk them into something they didn't have the time to investigate personally. Until BJ could get a solid network running they were going to have to rely on her intel, but he didn't want to trust her judgement. Maybe she would prove herself better than Ventai, but only time would tell.

He really didn't like that he wouldn't be able to handle the cases himself, but he'd already figured out that delegation was the shittiest part of growing up. He was just going to have to learn to get over himself and trust other people's work. At least I'm high enough up on the food chain to vet them all myself, these days. It had to count for something.

"Thank-you." Tugging lightly at the straps she'd been playing with, she added, "We're settled for the night; give your shoulder a rest."

Honestly, getting in and out of the harness ached more than wearing the thing, but he supposed he could do without the extra weight. Kissing her crown again, he unwrapped his arm from her shoulders and unholstered his Daewoo, debating for a moment before tucking it into the cushions on the far side of Lena's thigh. It was closest to his good hand right now anyway, and within her easy reach that way too. "Your Ruger isn't still bruising you, is it?" He'd been carrying a second Daewoo at the back of his left hip before this trip, but taking on a civilian role meant being more subtle. Lin and Mai both carried an extra in the same place now for the princess' ease of reach in a true emergency, but time and familiarity had also warmed her up to the idea of a true conceal carry.

Mai was a godsend; he hadn't realized how much more difficult women's clothes were when it came to printing. It had taken some finagling, and a few of Lena's regular outfits would never accommodate a weapon, but it was something.

Relena sighed, leaning away from him to half lay on the couch and undo her pants. "It's not comfortable and I'm not sure I can keep wearing it."

Or maybe it's not a thing. Nonetheless he nodded tiredly and reached out a hand for the slim little gun she pulled out. "Sorry."

"I don't mind the ankle one," she pointed out, planting both feet on the couch between his legs so she could lift her hips and reach the latches to take the holster off. "But my hips ache from a day in this thing even without the gun, and it's not going away. I'm liking Mai's idea of a portfolio more and more."

He made a face, but nodded again. "I'll ask her to get one, then." She might have already, but he'd wanted to hold off on what had felt like the easy way out, instead of acclimating. Still, it was her body, and the kind of heavy pocketbook wallet they'd talked about would get them around the wardrobe issue.

It was just… Up until now she had been viewed as a largely benign figure, but taking the Ministry seat was the start of a big change; allying with Treize and Noventa, openly or not, was another. As she began competing with anyone in a serious way her threat level was going to rise, and soon enough, the Guard would be handling more than overeager fans and nearby disasters. Before too long, someone was going to try issuing a kill order on her; and he knew she wasn't helpless, he'd made sure she wasn't helpless since the disaster in Brussels last year, but…

It only took a moment. He'd done it enough times to know exactly how narrow a margin for error an assassin could work with.

He took the lacy band of fabric from her when she handed it over, setting both it and the Ruger on the coffee table while she did her pants up again and curled back into his side. It looked enough like lingerie to make him smile, but he just shook his head, turning to bury his nose in her hair. "Will you be willing to pick up the response drills again?" he asked instead.

In truth, those were probably more important. Relena would never be a quick draw or a sharp shooter, and the kind of attack he was most worried about slipping by him and the Guard wouldn't be the sort she could shoot her way out of even if she were. Her reflexes weren't phenomenal but they weren't bad either, and she'd responded well to training them before. The Guard would probably benefit from the practice too.

"Mm, yes," she agreed quickly – though she twisted to give him a warning look. "I need a few rules added on, though; I don't always want to be registering you as a threat when we're together."

…He hadn't thought that far ahead yet. "That's fair." Sudden attacks had no business mixing with intimacy. That sounded horrible. I might not be the best person for this anymore. "Let me talk to the others and see what level they're all at. I'm going to tentatively say this will be a group project and if we're alone, it's off." Maybe they'd revisit it later but…

No. He wasn't doing that; just the idea made him vaguely nauseous.

"Then it sounds like a good idea," she decided, setting her head against his chest again.

He hummed in agreement, carding his fingers through her hair, and changed the subject. "I got an email from Hayden earlier, and the construction on the second floor is just about done. By the time we're back, the paint and other little finishes should be sorted out too. The work on the ground floor isn't there yet and we're still waiting on a few things to start the outbuildings, but the upper levels should be sacrosanct again."

"Good." Stretching a little, she gestured to the menu he'd dropped on the coffee table. "Are you hungry?"

"Food sounds good, but not urgent," he admitted. "I figured we'd reconvene and make a decision after Vaughn finished getting the cars settled; he said he was going to bring up ice for Mai and me."

"That's a good idea; you're still being careful with your arm."

"I'm going to be careful with it for a couple of weeks," he warned. "If I'd landed on it any worse, I probably would have lost the Remalene argument."

"Maybe you should have?" she pointed out dryly.

Jake rolled his eyes. "Not while we're on tour." Remalene's ability to boost the healing process was practically magic in some ways, but it made you sluggish – when it didn't outright put you back on your ass. Not to mention its metabolism demands and the immune compromise; with how stressed he already was this trip, even a low Remalene dose would undoubtedly have him catching, at best, a nasty head cold. "I know my body," he continued. "I ache right now, but if I keep myself from pushing it I'll be fine in a few weeks, and in the meantime it's not enough to impede me in an emergency." Mai had needed a dose to be sure she'd be back on active duty before the month was out, and compensating that far without sending her home made him nervous enough.

"Alright," she soothed, sitting up enough to reach out and grab the menu. "I just worry; I'm not used to seeing you hesitate."

"It's something I'm actively forcing myself to do," he pointed out. "Planned, not a flinch." Holding himself back right now was frustrating, but would see the issue handled faster.

"That helps to know. Mm." Gesturing with the menu, she added, "I forgot to ask – the caterer. What's the news on that front?"

He managed to hold in the bubble of laughter that wanted to sneak out, but couldn't help the smirk. Hayden had had things to say about that, and Illian was being so suspiciously silent that it was clear the captain was watching for the axe to fall. "It's going well. Addie says she swept in like a storm two days ago, ran the logistics, and got right to work. It'll take her a couple of weeks to work out the infrastructure details for the average day to day, but she's going to be running the show for Thanksgiving. By the time we're back from the second leg of our tour, the rest should be sorted out too." The estimates and plans she had forwarded through Hayden were auspicious and he'd immediately approved, though he'd tacked on a few additions and funds to stay on the safe side.

"Excellent, I look forward to meeting her. It's… Raina, right?"

"Raina Krishnawswami," he confirmed.

Relena frowned, meeting his eyes again. "Where's that from?"

He shrugged. "Australia?"

She snickered a little, rolling her eyes. "Alright, I walked right into that one." Shrugging a little, she decided, "Still, an old friend of Mai's should be interesting, if nothing else."

"Mm hmm." Not too interesting, he didn't think, but still. Mai. However much flack they gave her though, he did trust her judgement.

Changing the subject again, he added, "Jack and the Noins are flying in on Wednesday morning, and Mrs. Moretti is coming two days before that and setting up a cook camp in Kelly's apartment."

Relena snickered again. "So Kelly is going to try living out of her office by Tuesday."

"Given Rome's stories of just how abysmal his sister is at cooking, I imagine we'll be grateful if she avoids getting pressganged into the kitchen," he said by way of agreement. For all that Jerome's family had expatriated themselves almost six years before Libra, the three of them were still big on most of the American traditions – which evidently involved a lot of baking in November. "In any case, it should-"

He cut himself off as his phone started ringing, listening. His 'do not disturb' settings turned off at six, and that wasn't the generic tone he used for unknown numbers. An ally tone, which could mean any number of factions… but he hadn't emptied his blazer pockets.

Sighing, he pulled his gun back out of the cushions and disentangled himself from Relena, standing and testing his shoulder's range of motion as he strode back to the desk chair. It really wasn't too bad, just swollen – that ice Vaughn had promised really would be a good idea. Tucking the Daewoo into an appendix carry, he pulled the heavy left chest of the jacket aside to reach into the breast pocket.

Hopefully the first shipment from Atelier's will also have made it to the house by Thanksgiving, he mused. He'd updated his suits the last time he'd had a growth spurt not long after Libra, but he hadn't thought Relena would be willing to consider body armor before they'd left to pick up Leia, and quality took time. He'd put in a priority for the basic underpinnings and an alteration for her favorite coat once he'd gotten her measurements out of the seamstress Dorothy had sent him to, though.

Seeing the caller ID, he smiled. Good timing. He'd started to think he was going to have to reach out first. He hit the connect, turning back to Relena. "Mu, hey! I was starting to think you'd lost my number."

"Hi, Jake," the American woman returned cheerfully. "Sorry, it's been really busy up here; and Tate said something about a letter, so you got dropped to the bottom of my priority list for a while."

"I guess that's fair," he decided, sitting back down next to Lena and holding the phone so she could hear easily. He'd gotten a little bit of feedback from his old friend alongside the burner phone David had forwarded for Leia, but Treize's returning letter had been a simple absolution and a promise to get back in touch when the situation was more tenable – more emotional reassurance than anything else. All the same, they really needed to talk.

The two of them were in an odd sort of limbo right now. It was convenient that the other man's coalition appeared to be self-sustaining at this point – or at least, Jake assumed Treize had arranged more local sponsors. The last time they had truly talked shop, a prerequisite of the plan to move into space had included gaining the cooperation of the Winners, and they were possessive enough to not like the idea of sharing. Funding him had been one thing while Treize was still on Earth, in full hiding from the Regime with his revolution still in its infancy while he worked to gain allies. It had still made sense while he was waiting for Lena to cast him out – he could have worked fully with Treize again, and still supported her anonymously through the relationship she had developed with the Rhea Lowe Tomorrow Today Fund without knowing the deeper workings of her court.

But he didn't think it was right to be at the exact center of both parties. While he could continue to handle the financial burden of two very active RLTT candidates, the cost in intrigue would get messy, even between allies. The potential for abuse in either direction was just too great. They had only gotten away with it so far because he'd left Treize with more free reign than he had ever offered a candidate the closer he had grown to Relena, and his old friend had responded by closing off the avenue – Jake had automated Treize's funding and otherwise ignored it, and the other man hadn't abused the implied trust. After getting Dave's packet from Cassidy, he'd looked at the accounts for the first time since January – Treize hadn't made a substantial withdrawal since the beginning of August.

"It's good to hear from you, Mu," Relena announced, dropping her legs over one of his again and snuggling closer. "Have you been settling in okay?"

"Hi, Lena! I was hoping I'd catch you too. And like I said, it's been busy, but good. I just wanted to touch base."

"It's about the same here," Lena admitted. "We had to rearrange the schedule after the Italian Incident, but we're on a new tour now with more components for the Ministry added on, now that we've opened a full office again." Shifting her weight, she added, "I'd really like to get everyone on the phone soon; the others all miss you too. If you can work out the screen time, we're going to be back home for a few days next week – maybe we can work out a conference call?"

"Ooh, I like that idea. My cousin's connection is slow enough that I don't think I can get a vid connection running, but voice should be fine. I've been pulling a lot of odd hours, though – give me the dates and I'll get back to you?"

"We should be back in Sarracenia by late afternoon on Wednesday, then out again with the sun on Saturday," Jake explained, wrapping his arm around Lena's waist again. "Long enough to celebrate the holiday and iron out any wrinkles with the new Ministry office, then east for the next leg of the tour."

"Alright, I'll see what I can do and shoot you a text." She paused for a moment, then sighed. "Great, Audri's baby just woke up and I'm watching her, I've gotta go. I'm not always great about answering the phone, but you guys feel free to text me, alright? Don't be strangers."

"Take care," Relena returned, and he muttered a good-bye as well before disconnecting the call. Turning an amused look on him, she added, "I'm a little bemused that a woman named 'Mu' had a cousin named 'Audri'."

"Her last name is Ackroyd," he reminded her, rolling his eyes. "She only looks as Asian as she does because after the first time, the Ackroyd men kept falling for Chinese women instead of mixing in and out like the Millers did."

"Hm." Giving him a thoughtful look, she admitted, "I never could pin down Jack's ancestry."

He shrugged, and mentally pushed into the pain instead of wincing – he kept forgetting. "It's complicated," he admitted, seeing the buried question. "'Miller' is a holdover from pre-colonial era America and we're not sure where it originally came from, but based on what Jack was told growing up, they'd married Greek so many times they were practically pure. Then the three generations leading up to my father married Japanese, back to Greek, and Japanese again on both sides, and the Lowes were Scandinavian." He rolled his eyes, amused at the memory of the ridiculous chart Treize had drawn up one night when they were younger, a little drunk on wine out of his mom's cellar after watching Leia's home videos of Marie into the wee hours. "We did the math once, and apparently I'm something like a fifth Japanese – not that it really works that way. Other than my build I mostly take after the Lowe side, and Junior could probably pass off as two or three quarters."

He started snickering, a thought occurring to him. It was strange to be able to think of this sort of thing without getting upset, but he had to admit it was a refreshing change. There'd been a lot of hilarious things about his childhood alongside the dysfunctional, and it was nice to be able to think about it without a heavy pall of grief. "You know… That's probably the only reason we managed to get out of the hospital without investigation? My uncle signed Junior's birth certificate as the father even though it was on record that Rhea was his sister, but the Lowes are as white as you get and the kid looked too Asian for anyone to call incest."

She seemed bemused at that. "Why sign it in the first place?"

"It meant he didn't have to file an adoption. My mom's will left us in his custody, but I was born on L1 and had a living parent – a big part of why Jack won custody of me later was because the courts wouldn't let my uncle formally adopt me. I'm not sure how much of Junior being born in San Francisco was superior medical care versus Earth's native citizenship. I mean, the hospital there was supposedly legendary for tricky obstetric cases, but so was the one I was born at, and she still died anyway."

Making a face, he admitted, "When we were in court, later, he said my mom told him to do it. I don't know if that's true or it was just a failed gambit against the judge, but he said she wanted it that way – that if Jack didn't have rights to both of us, he wouldn't be willing to split us up. That either Jack would leave again, or that he'd have to co-parent with Odin."

Relena frowned thoughtfully. "I suppose I could see that logic."

"I have no idea if he just made that part up or not," Jake reminded her. "Considering what did happen, there's obvious problems with the idea, and my uncle was a convincing actor when he wanted to be." He licked his lips as his stomach sank. For all that he could talk about this now, and he wanted to be open with Lena…

He had promised himself that he wasn't going to lie to himself anymore, as well as Relena. And while avoiding an idea wasn't the same thing as lying, it certainly didn't help the problems he was trying to mitigate.

"It… Lena, Jack tried. I hated him on principle the moment he introduced himself, but he didn't just show up and start ripping us apart. He found us the spring of 183 and followed us around just trying to get to know the two of us. My uncle didn't even try to chase him off beyond snide remarks and a cold shoulder. I was a real brat and Junior usually followed my lead, but he didn't let that put him off." He swallowed. "I'm… I'm mostly sure Jack even ran a couple hits with him that year, as some sort of compromise to keep the two of us out of it?" Jack's morals didn't always allow for that kind of thing, but with some of the arguments he'd overheard, it was entirely possible his father had influenced which jobs Odin accepted during those months so that he could palate it. "We'd already started teaching Junior to shoot and he wasn't a fan however coordinated the kid was. I took that as an insult at the time, but… Lena, he wasn't even four, and we…"

He hadn't known any better. He'd been a few weeks shy of three when Junior was born, and his uncle had said they were starting Junior on guns a little younger than he had Jake, but not by much. The kid learned everything he got near so fast that it made perfect sense at the time, and he'd been proud of him, even when Odin ruffled his hair and said it was only because Jake was such a good brother, helping him all the time. He'd said two of them had been inseparable almost since the minute Junior was born, and it had been unthinkable to… to…

"I…" He cut himself off and swallowed again, meeting Lena's quiet eyes. "I could never have done that. The things Jack was willing to compromise on to make all four of us work as a family? There's no way." Taking a deep breath, he held it for a count of three before letting it out. "I don't know if it just got to be too much or if something specific happened, the two of them argued almost constantly near the end, but after Christmas he threw down the gauntlet. Served the papers, called Child Protective Services, and laid out exactly how many favors he'd called in to make sure that if Odin disappeared with us again, it would be full kidnapping charges and a manhunt. And I've never known anyone who can hide from Jack when he's got a scent on them, at least not long-term."

Looking back, it was impressive that his father had come up with a way to entrap Odin in the first place; it couldn't have been easy setting that all up without the older man noticing. And maybe his uncle should have seen it coming with how much the two of them fought, but maybe that had been a smokescreen? At least on some level.

Junior had always hated the yelling, and he'd always tugged at Jake until he'd leave with him during the fights. From an adult perspective, he knew now that his brother had always been an unusually quiet child, for all that he'd written it off as part of how smart he was. After realizing it wasn't just shyness, Jack had fussed about that a lot, tried to say they needed to treat him differently, and Jake had stopped even vaguely trying to figure Jack out because there was nothing wrong with his brother.

…Something might have been genuinely wrong with Junior. He wasn't sure what because his memories were biased as hell, but he'd seen enough young children by now to recognize the warning flags that set Jack off. And maybe some of them could be brushed off as a side effect of how the kid had been something of a kinesthetic prodigy, but all of it together started to paint a fairly alarming picture.

"Jake?"

He blinked, realizing he'd been staring off, and closed his eyes, leaning into the hand Lena was running though his hair. "Sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry for," she reassured, tugging him closer and resting her other hand on his neck. "It sounds like it was a terrible situation for all of you." A thumb rubbed along his cheek. "But you're here now, and there's no reason to brood… and I still need your help tonight. We're going to be formalizing our alliance with Treize this week, and there are details about that we still have to cover."

That was a fair point. "Don't hold your breath for formality," he warned, closing his eyes again and relaxing fully. "There's going to be a lot of information exchange and feeling out before we even begin to get close a full agreement. Given the stealth they have to employ for this call at all, we're also going to be on a timer; I can't see the process taking anything less than three sessions, if we do it all by voice." He smirked a little. "Also, despite the show he puts on for the public, Treize isn't that big on ceremony. It's expected, so he does it, but one of the big reasons he's always been so…" Over the top? Absurd? "So much is because it bores him. It got to be a game at some point, about how ridiculous he could make it before he got called out."

Lena snorted. "How did that go?"

Jake started snickering again. "Sky is the limit, apparently? Shit like Une happened instead. I swear he got even weirder just to push it past boiling point, but instead of calling him a fruitcake people just went with it." It had been downright hilarious, and teasing a beleaguered Treize for such an epic misfire had never gotten old.

Though admittedly, the whole Une situation would have been a lot funnier if she hadn't also been batshit crazy. One of them really ought to have seen the warning signs, there.

Relena huffed out a laugh, warm breath tickling the nape of his neck. "Oh dear."

"It just kept escalating," he continued happily. "I started giving him prompts to try making stupid analogies about and Dave kept daring him to do stupider shit, though I really hope he never followed through with the bathtub thing. I heard a rumor once, but I really hope he didn't sink that low."

"I'm… not sure I want to know," Relena decided, hidden laughter in her voice. "But how about this: why don't you tell me more about the Treize you know, instead of the façade?"

That sounded like an excellent idea. "There was this one time, when we took leave off base for the weekend at Victoria…"

oOo


oOo

Szczecin, Poland

'It sounds fine. We'll go over all the code once I'm back, but what you've laid out so far sounds stable.'

Marie made a face, even as she tapped out her next message. 'are you almost done? i need to start figuring out the orbital part if you guys want this ready before sudan, and cat's starting to mutter.' Figuring it might take him a minute to answer, she flipped back to her conversation with Yasa, considering.

oOo

'Do u know the story about handguns missing from adams american stashes? Cuz theres some major inside jokes here, only ur brothers the only one getting it. Adam keeps asking and getting new unhelpful answers to snicker .'

'like what?'

'First was, like, 'we went on a road trip'. Then 'philosophical conversion attempt' and 'failed retribution'.'

'Think adams fav so far is 'we had an existential crisis'. He tried to ask if they had one at the same time, and odin said adam started off then botched it and pissed off someone named cathy, so he was leading by example.'

'…Im so lost. Send help?'

oOo

The thing was, she had no idea either. And she was pretty sure that if she asked, she would get trolled just as hard, if that was the kind of mood he was in – which might be funny enough to try anyway, but didn't really help Yasa.

It was kinda just one of those Odin things that new people had to get used to.

"There you are."

Shaking her head, she flipped back to Odin's conversation.

'You can plan out the orbital work now. We can't do it until we have the code finalized, but help Cat plot a course and contingencies, and we'll meet you in space in… five days? I'll have a better timeline once we're closer to Idaho, but we'll need a pick-up from Howard's.'

She supposed that made sense. 'how goes it anyway?' Yasa had texted something the other day about being 'the tiniest hero' whatever that meant, but while some of the crap he was sending out was laugh out loud hilarious, it didn't explain anything.

Apparently he'd decided that if he got to be left confused, so did everyone else?

She hit silence as the next text came in, already reading. '3/5, and Twin Falls is one of the ones I'm almost positive should be fine, so it ought to be a total of four. Buffalo was a wash. That whole half of town got buried at some point, then frozen over, I can't even landmark it.'

Marie made a face; that sounded crappy, and he wouldn't have said it like that if it wasn't frustrating him. 'ouch'. Still, even three was higher than he'd quoted, so Cat would be super happy to get four. 'i'll let cat know and keep you posted on the rest.' She considered for a moment, debating… but why not, really? 'what's the gun story anyway?' The worst he'd do was come up with some new funny way to put her off.

In the meantime she started packing up all her stuff from where she'd spread out, debating where Cat was. She only knew the most basic barebones of the satellite hardware they'd be messing with, but Cat had said he'd go over it with her once she was ready. Or if he was busy she could go poke at Ethan and Ardith about the best ways to handle transportation. She had a few decent ones from whatall she'd seen Odin get up to, but her brother's solo approach to everything was completely different from every tactic she'd seen the Rubato guys run, and she wanted to know.

Odin was still figuring out how to work with more than one or two people at a time, but he was willing to admit having a system was more efficient. She was totally going to gloat when she worked it out first. He'd just roll his eyes and smile but seriously, it wasn't like she got ahead of him all that often.

"Hey, Audi!"

Looking up, she smiled broadly at Darren. "Hey!" He and Josh had gotten back on Friday, but she'd still been holed up feverishly coding. "How was Japan?"

"Totally batshit," he answered immediately. "I felt like a goddamn explorer on safari or something, only creepier because there were almost no animals either." He made an entirely exasperated noise. "And the kudzu, man. It's the fucking cockroach of the plant world, I swear."

"The what?"

"Kudzu," he repeated, holding both hands out level and moving his arms out in a spread. "Super invasive vine plant that climbs over everything, and everywhere we went was covered in the stuff. Like, I thought we were on a hill but then it clanged, and it was a freaking car. It took us almost an hour to get through this one door because we had to rip it all off and then the other side was covered too and the thing still wouldn't open. It was a goddamn jungle, except it's, like… mostly just the one plant."

…Huh. "I think I'm starting to understand why you were on about wanting a machete."

He snorted and rolled his eyes. "Yeah, we got a fire safety axe out of a case pretty early on, but it was rusted to shit, and the heft's all wrong."

She'd never really messed with axes, so she couldn't really say she followed. About to shrug, she opened her mouth to admit as much… and an idea occurred to her. "Wait… wasn't one of the drives in a high rise?" One of the big reasons why Josh had volunteered for that trip was that he had a lot of climbing experience from before the Fall, if things got tricky.

"Yeah, on something nuts like the sixty-seventh floor. All things considered, I'd say the tower held up pretty well, structurally."

"So, like…. This plant stuff was covering the whole thing?"

"I mean… mostly? It wasn't a solid green, but it had vines all the way to the top, sure."

She reached over and grabbed his hands, trying to make her eyes big. "Please tell me you got pictures!"

Darren laughed delightedly, gripping her hands back and bouncing them once before letting go. "Just what do you take me for, of course I have pictures! Evidence, my young friend, is important!"

Marie snickered. "Yeah, but I'm usually more on board with making it up or getting rid of it, you know?" Which was generally way more complicated and fun, but, she wanted to see that.

Her friend just laughed again, shaking his head. "I already offloaded my phone though, so I'll have to go get my hard drive to show you." He considered her half packed bag. "Wait, are you all done?"

"That's the theory," she agreed, stepping back to finish loading up. Remembering something Cat had said, she asked, "Are you coming to space with us for the last bit of hardware, or no?"

"That's the theory," he mimicked back happily, tucking his hands into his pockets. "Do we have any details yet?"

"Literally about to go find Cat and work on that," she noted. "Our timeline's a week or so, according to Odin."

"Nice, I was just bothering him about that," Darren admitted. "He's in his office right now." His grin was bright. "I'll grab my drive and meet you there?"

"Sure! Just give me a few minutes." The more she thought about it, the better an idea it sounded to grab food on her way – something all three of them could munch on while going over the details. Cat had already said that Darren was one of the most tech inclined of the guys – all the Lake Victoria grads had had to understand their suits well enough to run at least emergency repairs, and the Aries model that Darren had favored were apparently known for enough trouble that most of their pilots got better at it than the usual rank and file. She wasn't going to turn down the opportunity to pick his brain.

Once she had everything together again she checked her phone, knowing her pocket muffled it sometimes – and she'd been distracted besides. Sure enough, she had a response from Odin, so she thumbed the unlock, opening the conversation again…

'If he doesn't remember, then I'm not telling him.'

'I don't regret it, but'

'It made me who I am. I can't regret that. It's important, because people are important, and I needed to know that, but…'

'He didn't think it was a bad idea, and I don't regret it, but no one should ever do something like that. If you ever feel the way I did you need to find another way around it, and if he doesn't remember what happened, he won't remember why we thought it was a good idea.'

That… Maybe he wasn't frustrated so much by the loss of the Zero drive as this? And it felt like something they should talk about face to face, like when she'd tried to ask about the retraining because he didn't talk around stuff like this unless it really messed him up, but talking around stuff in the first place usually made him worse, and she wasn't going to see him for at least five more days.

She wanted to ask if he was okay, but that was a kinda stupid question – he was okay, because he was Odin, but he sounded upset; and he'd taken Adam and Yasa with him because they were good to watch his back in hostile territory, not because they were close.

So… what does he need, to help?

She bit her lip, debating… but it had helped before, right? To just push a little? 'okay, that makes sense… but what happened?'

As she stood there waiting, she realized that asking directly before had helped but… he hadn't really explained either, had he? She'd asked what the retraining had been, and he'd explained how it started and something about how it was supposed to 'fix' him before he just… bottomed out.

He'd as good as said he'd wanted to die in 194, and he wouldn't talk about the retraining, and then he'd… 01 had self-destructed on command not too long after the gundams fell, hadn't it? She'd never really thought about it because obviously he'd shown up fine later, but she'd heard someone mention that Trowa had nursed him back to health once, and…

She looked back up at what he'd said, feeling cold. 'If you ever feel the way I did you need to find another way around it.' Maybe he was insisting he didn't regret it, but he wanted to make sure no one ever repeated it and that meant he thought it was a mistake.

He was always really clear about how he didn't want her to repeat any of his mistakes. Usually it was hard to remember that he made them at all, because her brother was just that good, but-

"There you are."

Swallowing, she activated her screen again, unlocking it.

'I handed a loaded gun to everyone I thought had a decent reason to want me dead. Trowa helped me track them down.'

Sitting back down in the chair she'd spent the last week or so camped out in, she choked back a sob. That… wouldn't help. He'd… Taking a deep breath, she flipped back to Yasa's conversation, reading it again.

Road trip… philosophical conversion attempt, failed retribution… And Odin's rant about how killing for money was wrong because people were too remarkable and forgiving to be worth something as petty as a paycheck. That if they weren't, he would be dead of regret the same way he said Odin Sr had been.

'I can't regret that. It's important, because people are important, and I needed to know that.'

She'd thought, at the time, that what he'd said hurt, because of how much it said without even trying to explain. Well, now I have my explanation. It felt hollow, though.

Existential crisis. And… God, he'd made it sound funny, but Adam had 'started off and botched it' so Odin had… Taken Adam off on some kind of suicide pact road trip, holy shit, no wonder he didn't want to talk about it, Adam didn't remember they'd gone and tried to…

She swallowed again, and her hands only shook a little as she pulled the keyboard function back up in Yasa's window. 'how many guns are we talking?'

…Her brother was only alive because everyone he'd talked to had refused to follow through. Failed retribution. Licking her lips, she switched back to Odin's window, rereading the last line.

She wished she was there. But at the same time, maybe it was a little easier to be what he needed instead of freaking the crap out, this way. So…

'…yeah, i can see why you don't want to tell him. that's pretty dark and personal.'

Just, calmly… She shuddered her way through another deep breath, thinking.

Existential crisis.

'i mean… if he's not that way now and he doesn't remember, then there's no real point, right?' Only the two of them had been there, and… Well, they'd both gotten over it – Adam's accident hadn't been his fault. It'd probably be a pretty horrifying thing to learn about yourself, if you couldn't even remember being that depressed. Maybe it wasn't fair to try to keep him in the dark, but… Well, she hadn't been there and didn't really know Adam, so that was her brother's decision.

"I see you."

That was Yasa… but she ignored it for a minute, still staring down her conversation with Odin. She thought… She'd said what he probably needed to hear to feel okay about it, but it wasn't enough. And maybe getting super emotional wouldn't help much, but leaving it there wasn't good enough, and she needed to be able to say something more solid back too.

It took her another minute to figure it out, but thankfully he didn't say anything before she did… and she felt better, hitting send.

'odin… if people are important like that? never forget that you're people too, okay?'

Taking another deep breath, she set her phone aside and pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, trying to level back out. Odin was fine. He wasn't like that anymore, and he felt bad about it getting brought up, and that was a good thing, right? He knew it'd been a mistake, even if he wouldn't call it that.

He was fine. He was fine and she'd see him next week and make sure he knew just how much she loved him, and after she calmed down she'd double-check with Quatre and, like… make sure this wasn't a possible relapse thing? Maybe. She was almost positive that wasn't a thing, but….

She didn't think she wanted to go find snacks anymore, but she needed to calm down before Cat picked any of this up. They were going to get confused if she totally bailed after talking to Darren, but she'd rather raincheck like that than go be a total wreck in front of the empath.

Maybe she could just… take fifteen and be okay.

"I see you."

Marie gusted out another breath and dropped her hands, picking her phone back up and opening Yasa's conversation again.

'Like, minimum 60? Dont have a real #.'

She sighed, closing her eyes. It figures. Odin had always been all 'go big or go home'. Maybe she wasn't feeling the number right now, but… well, it wasn't actually a surprise, and it probably didn't matter. He'd done it, and it had worked out, and…

…God, more than sixty, no wonder he was so solid about how killing without conviction was totally screwed up. If anything, he'd gotten more stubborn the higher the number went, and maybe that was why it had gotten through to him in the first place? What was it he'd said before? If people were just a little less remarkable… less patient, forgiving… something else.

He'd said that this was what made him who he was. She wasn't so sure about that, but… well, maybe she owed some sixty plus people a big thank-you too.

She took another deep breath before opening her eyes again and reading his second text… and grinning so wide it hurt.

'Woah, what did u say? Didnt think he COULD smile that big.'

Maybe she'd be good to go talk to Cat now after all.

oOo


oOo

November 17th 198 – Sunday – Space, Near L5

"What the actual fuck," Vitorie groaned, scrubbing her hands over her face. "This makes no sense."

There had been no battle here. Not only did she have zero intel on it, but there was no evidence either – no debris fields or blast damage, and even the coordinates were spot on. This didn't look like battle damage.

But at the same time, she couldn't think of much besides an MS that could put that kind of dent in good titanium and walk away. This wasn't a software issue, or even a lost connection; someone had thrashed this communicator hub.

"Where do I even start?" she groused as she unbuckled and pushed out of her chair, heading for the locker she kept her flight suits in. She wasn't even sure if the emergency hatches on the thing would still open. Better make sure my saw's still locked in the bay. She was going to be in a truly foul mood if she had to cut her way in, but she didn't have a lot of options. If she couldn't get this baby back online in the next two days she'd have to find another way around the latest communications blackout and she just didn't have the time. At this rate she was going to have to pull Alondra off her latest assignment to help play catch-up, and maybe someone else too.

In the end she was able to make one of the tertiary access hatches work, but it took some doing and almost wasn't worth it. The seal was so damaged she might as well have actually cut a hole in the damn thing; it probably would have been easier to patch. "Log," she muttered into her mic, starting up her dictation. "Atmospheric compromise confirmed. Source is…" Grabbing onto a safety bar by the inner door, she took a moment to tap in the company's emergency code for the airlock and made a face when a wave of pressure whooshed out at her. Great. "Source is repair technician, that's interesting…" Gently swinging her way through the doorway, she re-engaged the bay doors and keyed in for the atmospheric protocols to engage… only to get no response. "Peripheral controls appear nonfunctional," she added. "Unsure if this is a local disconnect or a system collapse; will investigate."

She continued on, noting observations as she went, but the longer she spent in the hub the more sure she was that whoever had worked it over only did so from the outside. Sure, there was damage in here, but it wasn't direct; more likely just a result of the external trauma. The main control bay itself looked almost untouched.

Almost in spite of herself, she logged out and took a quick tour around to all the bay doors before trying to see if she could boot the old girl back up. "Well, that seals it," she groused. None of them were operable; the only way in or out of this place was the entrance she'd forced. "Log," she announced, re-opening her program. "All potential entrances have suffered mechanical failure due to trauma. Tertiary power appears intact… heading back to the core. Log out."

Resting her hands on her hips, she glowered at the ruined doors. "It's just rude, is what." I can get wanting to hijack it or blind us, but this? Torie groaned as she started a careful path back to the control center. "What's the big idea with all the wanton destruction, huh? There's easier ways." She rolled her eyes, using a doorway to propel herself along. "Sharable ways, even, did you think of that? Of course not! You could've reprogrammed it, even, or turned it off. Hell, why not just steal the damn power node, if you want some staying power? It would take a couple weeks to get a new one for this old of a unit fabricated and ported out here. What's the big idea, taking a bat to the girl like she's a big piñata?"

Her best theory at this point was that someone had used construction suits to work the hub over like an old mafia hustler; maybe set up a jamming field beforehand to keep the local AI from sending out a panic beacon, or maybe just targeted those antennae first. I suppose it depends on just how much they knew about what they were doing. She scoffed, dragging herself down into the control chair and slipping into the shoulder straps. Which let's face it, wasn't exactly this moron's best feature. So long as she could get in and still had power, she could do a lot… so what was the point?

Idiots, she decided, rebooting all systems and starting a diagnostic. The majority of the important stuff in a hub like this was located internally, protected from stray debris – space could be dangerous, and you didn't leave your investment out for someone to bump into if you could help it. The more obvious long-range antennae were nothing but space junk now, along with the lights and a handful of vid cams that would have given her a better idea of who the vandals had been, but the thermal imaging seemed mostly okay, and radio would still be working at full capacity if it weren't for the antennae issue. Those were a dime a dozen, at least; so long as she could get them to attach, she could replace them out of her stock of spares.

So… someone up and decided to get in a suit and play kick the can with a deep space telemetry hub. She scowled. If they weren't in the middle of a war, she'd say some assholes had borrowed their construction suits off hours or stolen a couple to go joyriding and paint the town. It happened sometimes. But the timing was off… and she couldn't remember any of the construction companies being close enough for that kind of impromptu vandalism. She'd have to check; there'd been too many developments to bother keeping track of them all in the past few years, but nothing came to mind.

Privately owned, maybe? She'd gotten a closer look while trying to crack this baby open again and it was definitely suit damage, but like she'd initially thought, nothing military. No scars or burns from artillery or a beam weapon – just blunt trauma. There were no laws against owning suits, despite how the Alliance had heckled and hawed; the problems came after you armed them. Mobile suits had first been developed for the purpose of in-vivo colony construction, to handle the macroscale projects. Most colonies hosted at least a few old models for maintenance or emergencies – it was a hell of a lot easier to seal a hull breach in a mecha than just a flight or EVA suit.

Then, of course, if you had the cash for one, a lot of people just liked to play. Earth folk got fancy cars or boats, but colonial cars were both super limited and not all that interesting; and even if they were, there wasn't anywhere you'd be able to open one up and just go. Colony layout was planned down to the fine minutia, and control was too critical to the colony's survival to allow for something that could go more than 60 kph that didn't rely on tracks. If you wanted to feed that need for speed you needed space, so you… well, went to space. It was a toss-up for preference on whether people went for cruisers or suits, but so long as you booked out a field so you didn't screw up someone else's flight plan, it was a pretty common practice. Now that the Alliance was gone, more little companies had started popping up offering rentals so the average blue collar could indulge once in a while without breaking the bank.

She wrinkled her nose. The Alliance had always been so strict they practically strangled, never mind all the shittier things they'd done in the name of suppressing both real and supposed rebellions. Their hand had always rested heavy on the necks of the wealthy too – most of the insanity of the original Winner Corporation charter happened in an attempt to combat that control. Using Romefeller's own system of inheritance meant it couldn't be contested, and even with the company half butchered the rest of the clauses that had been included in the initial write-up had been what saved them – if Peacecraft refused to acknowledge Atia or Sarali, as the only publicly known Winners right now, then control of Winner Corp passed back to the third invested family, the Carskadons. And no one wanted that, because the Carskadons had been purporting a super gross segregation agenda since before the Claflinns shut them out by arranging the marriage of their only daughter to the Winner's only son and hoping test tube babies solved the fertility problems staring both dynasties down.

If it hadn't been for the old primogeniture clause demanding a male heir, it probably would have too… though as the twenty-fourth child of Zayeed and Quaterine's massive brood, she couldn't really complain. As much as she whined sometimes, she liked being alive, thank-you very much. Besides, she'd only been three when her mom died, and Laina had been on crap enough terms with their old man that it wasn't like she had any memories of her bio parents. Laina told some pretty awesome stories about their mom, but it wasn't like Quaterine had been her mom. She'd call her a grandmother, the same way Tay did, if it didn't feel disrespectful. After all, Loraina was only three years younger than Tay's mom and Torie only had fifteen months on Tay, so Laina was old enough to have actually been her mom. Families just… got a little weird when there was a thirty year age gap between oldest and youngest.

…Okay, so Laina would've had to have been knocked up as a teenager to have had her, and Atia was too old for that to have flown if their sister hadn't started lying about her age as soon as she adopted them and Felicia, but who cared? There'd been a lot of fast footwork involved when everyone split about who went with who, because after Camille, they'd stopped bothering with age gaps. Sarali was only eight months older than her, and Inez only three months younger, and they were just the ones that survived.

Quatre hadn't been the first boy, truly. Not by a long shot. Colait said there was a solid two years between Tamelia and Camille because there had been four boys conceived all in a row… all of them dead for no reason before twenty-three weeks. Only three boys besides Quatre had ever even made it past the five month mark at all in the thirty years that they were trying for one.

No one could figure out why, though there were a few theories. The first – the only – viable test tube boy their family had ever produced was Amilie's little Silas, who just turned five and had had no complications whatsoever. Tricia and Jolene both freely admitted to having had the same issue as their parents, with only daughters surviving to viability in the vitro-wombs, but so many of her older sisters had followed Courtney's example and gone about children the old-fashioned way that they didn't have enough of a sample size to truly parse it out.

Big enough for a case study, but still not big enough to study trends. The Winner-Claflinn bloodline had, at this point, produced a total of forty-seven people – only ten of which were male.

Including Quaterine, their family had eight confirmed empaths; and half of them came out of the far smaller male pool.

It certainly didn't explain anything and the theory still had a lot of holes, like a handful of test-tube female empaths, but… that was a significantly higher rate of incidence. Silas, who showed no signs of empathy yet, was the only male test-tube fetus in their family whose heart and brain activity hadn't inexplicably stopped for no reason in the early second trimester… and the sisters who went about kids the old-fashioned way showed a normal rate of male to female births. Also, she might have never met Quatre, but Tay and Rhett were both strong; they made the crap she had to deal with look like a cute party trick. No one had a good read on Dayton just yet with how late he'd come into it, but given the grim set to Heather's mouth the last time it had been brought up as she'd only said 'they're still working on it', Torie was pretty sure he was in the same class.

…Poor Dayton. If Heather was that upset about it when she'd been living in Ukraine since April, she didn't want to imagine what a mess Colait must be, and that couldn't be helping. Her own empathy had grown alongside her concept of other senses, and while it made for a crappy childhood in some ways, she couldn't imagine just… getting hit with it out of nowhere at fifteen. At least she'd had time to get used to it… and as much as she hated her empathy, she also knew she'd feel half-blind without it. She hated how much harder it was to tell if someone was lying over the phone.

The computer chimed depressively, snapping her out of her thoughts. "Ooh, sweetheart," she crooned. "Who programmed you to sound sad? It's not so bad." Like she'd thought, all the basic visuals were gone, and half the running lights… Which was its own sort of danger, with how deeply in the middle of nowhere this hub was. Still… Running a hand over the desktop, she announced, "I'm going to get you fixed right up, you'll see. A few fresh parts, a little TLC, some new shiny to make sure people can see you, and you'll be okay. Nobody cares about the visual feeds anyway." She didn't have the equipment needed to replace those cameras, but this was space – they were only practical as an anti-theft deterrent anyway. Not that that worked.

Still, she wondered as she made her way back to her ship for supplies. Everything she had found pointed to asshole vandals of one type or another, but… the timing was suspicious. And maybe it was just coincidence making her paranoid when normally this was the kind of thing she'd dismiss out of hand, but…

Who gains from this? Maybe they'd been idiots and really thought wrecking the outside of the hub would turn it to junk, which meant it was someone other than the Coalition with something to hide? She'd certainly been running her own brand of interference with the communication networks to help turn the Regime army into disarray. But this wasn't the Coalition, they had her and smarter ways to do this. And the Regime had no motive. No motive, and just because they were from Earth didn't mean they were stupid; there were at least three smarter ways to interfere with this hub… and the Regime army hadn't even been close to here so far.

Third-party, then… But simple assholes, or someone with an agenda?

She sighed. "Why do I even bother wondering where all my free time goes these days?" Investigating for a culprit was going to take forever and probably not give her anything useful anyway. I really am going to need to ask for help. "Log," she announced. "Private. Remember to call Alondra about the Sector 192 switchboard. Set timer…" She made a face. "Alarm set: Two point five hours." The antennae should be done by then at the minimum, and that was really all she'd need for a strong connection. "Private out. Log out."

All the same, it wasn't as though she didn't like her job. "Activate Media Majik. Cue 'Work Mix'."

There was something downright invincible about standing at the edge of literally everything, making something perfect while the universe listened.

oOo


oOo

November 20th 198 – Wednesday – Munich, Germany – Sarracenia

"And that's about the length of it," Illian decided, tucking his hands in his pockets as he leaned back against the table. "We need to finalize a couple more things while they're home, but otherwise I'll have the crews come back Saturday to finish the rest."

"That's good to hear," Lin admitted, glancing back up at the screens to see if anyone had made their way back into the office yet. Given how tired Relena had been when she stepped out of the car and announced she was having a bath before dealing with anything he didn't really expect to see her or Jake for at least another forty minutes, but he could be wrong; she and Jake weren't all that great at separating work from their personal life. He figured it was even odds that they were talking strategy while they soaked versus christening every surface while they had the place locked down – he didn't really care so long as they didn't make him go looking for them once the clock struck five.

They still had some work to get through before they could really declare it holiday time, and BJ was supposed to be there at five thirty for some pretty grueling talk that he wasn't looking forward to. These last two weeks had been insane enough for him that he really got the need to relax a little once they were home, but that didn't make him not jittery.

"How's the major holding up? Well." Illian grinned. "The other major, I mean?"

Mai had rushed for the bathroom just as quickly as Relena, and he had yet to see her again either. "Fine. She's an awful patient, but she hasn't popped a stitch yet, which seems like a miracle with how some of the lacerations are laid out." He'd practically had to sit on her to make her sit still for the waterproof bandaging the docs had recommended, and if she was still in the damn shower, he was glad he'd insisted. Although… He turned his head to look at the screens covering the grounds. "Did she go outside? She's been muttering about her dog all week." He'd assumed she would head up to the office after she washed up, but that was just habit talking, not sense.

"Yeah, they're playing with the dog right now," Hayden announced, glancing up at the screen array then back down at the papers in front of him, frowning as he picked up an eraser.

Lin blinked, watching for movement in the direction Polanski had looked. "They?"

Hayden just snorted, scrubbing at something hard with the art gum. "Yeah. I think Addie and Mrs. Noin are still out there too, but it's getting dark; they'll be in soon."

Uh huh That didn't answer his question. "What are you doing?"

"Plotting," the younger man announced blandly without looking up. "Every time I think I have the layout sorted, I run into another issue." He did look up then, considering them before focusing on Illian. "But if neither of you are actually paying attention, then I'm done for now. I thought you were taking over surveillance for a minute."

That was probably fair. "I'm going to go make sure everything's settled for the evening," he decided, standing up straight. "Sorry; I wasn't trying to be a distraction."

Captain Derusha made a face. "No, that's my bad, I got distracted." He turned back to Hayden. "Sorry, he was just right there and I didn't think about it. Did you want to finish that in here or go find somewhere else?"

"I'll use the table instead of the desk if you're still serious," Hayden decided, voice skeptical. "It's fine if you're not; I only pulled this back up because you offered."

Lin decided to make himself scarce and miss the tail end of that argument, heading up to his room. So long as the princess was still occupied, he might as well sort his laundry from the trip… and shit, he had a whole new room now, most of his things were still in boxes. He sighed. No time like the present. He made a point to text Illian to let him know when Lena was ready to get back to work before peeling out of his uniform jacket and setting to work. The closet was a little bigger but the furniture was the same, so reloading his dresser and bookcase didn't take much time or thought. The room itself was a little bigger now and connected to a bathroom that he only had to share with Mai, which was nice – reflection of the new rank, he figured.

Not that he spent enough time in his room to care, really, but he appreciated the thought. He'd liked having access to the private bathroom Jake had used off Relena's suite when he'd started sleeping in the man's old Murphy bed, and this way, the others didn't have to coordinate timing as much when it came to routines. Kansas and Rome had a similar set-up to him and Mai now, and from what he remembered of the new blueprints, the extra space for the bathrooms had largely been a downsizing of the second floor kitchenettes that they'd barely used before. One of the newer outbuildings was getting a full commercial kitchen on the ground floor, so both the ground floor kitchens would be more for personal use anyway once that was done…

Caterer. He'd almost forgotten about that, beyond knowing Mai was excited to see the woman. That was probably the 'they' Hayden had meant; he'd have to go introduce himself later.

When he made it up to the office there was still no sign of Lena or Jake, but Hero chirruped at him happily as soon as the door was open, and he grinned, obligingly crouching to scratch him along the neck and jaw. "Hello, cat," he greeted, grinning as the creature tried to more or less drop his entire body weight into his hand, rumbling out a purr. "I see you've gotten bigger while we were away."

"Good evening, Lin," Leia called from one of the couches. "And he's only nine months old. To be honest, I rather expected him to be bigger than this by now, but I won't complain if he stays small enough to sit on one shoulder as an adult."

Lin shrugged, switching to pet the tomcat from head to tail a few times before standing again. "Whatever works," he agreed easily, brushing off his hands and making a beeline for the work satchels Jake had dropped in here before entering private space. "How've you been?"

"Fine. I'd worried about being bored, but even when he's not there, Jake has a talent for keeping you busy," the woman noted wryly.

He grinned. "Yeah… But to hear him tell it, he learned that from you first, so…"

She laughed, uncrossing her legs before crossing them back the other way. "I suppose this is where I make some comment about his quality education?"

"Something like that," he agreed happily, opening up the myriad of folders and starting to organize them across the table. Really, she looked happier than the last time he'd seen her, and that was nice. She'd been a bit mopey before, not that he could blame her; house arrest was shitty, even if it was better than where she'd been before.

That and, once he got over the shock factor, it turned out she and Treize were both hopeless romantics. It was cute and weird and horribly sad all at the same time. "Were you able to get a little more voice time with your man while we were out?" He wasn't sure he actually wanted to know, but it was polite, and he figured he needed to stop being intimidated by the man sooner than later.

"A little," she admitted with a smile. "Mostly we're back to letters, though; the colonial network hasn't been the most stable the last few weeks."

"And that's even before we get into the stealth issues," he agreed wryly. "We're supposed to have him on the phone for a while on Friday, but I'm not entirely clear on the how with technical issues and security."

"They're working on it," Leia reassured him. "I don't know the details, but they're maneuvering or rearranging something to make the deadline." She frowned. "He's said that their casualties have been minimal so far, but Zechs isn't playing the game the way he expected; they're still trying to sort out why."

He made a face, thinking of the Noventa situation. "Seems like that's the story for literally everyone lately."

The bathroom door opened and Jake came out in jeans and a t-shirt, rubbing at damp hair with a hand towel. "Don't worry," he offered with a grin, clearly having eavesdropped. "No one's predicting us any better than they are everyone else, so it could be worse."

Relena followed a moment later, dressed much the same and looking thoroughly relaxed. "Hello, Leia."

"Hello." Taking a moment to eye the papers Lincoln had been laying out, she turned a curious look on the younger woman. "Do you need to me go so you can work?"

"Not right now," Relena dismissed. "When we bring BJ back up here then yes, but we have time before then, and I'm hungry."

"Well, there's at least eight different kinds of pie downstairs," Lin offered. "Someone was even polite enough to label them."

"Raina's very serious about allergies," Leia agreed by way of explanation, a secretive smile curling at one corner of her mouth. "And very serious about her handheld label maker."

Jake's easy smile widened into a mischievous smirk. "That sounds like a story."

The doctor's eyes glittered. "The boys might have tried to tease her for being a little thorough, before realizing they'd bit off more than they could chew. I believe it started when Hayden got a label for 'fresh meat' slapped on one arm, and Tai spent most of the day running around with one that read 'Contains: Awesome' stuck to his forehead." She shook her head. "We're still finding improbable titles left behind after the cleanup… That or someone keeps putting them back. I haven't quite worked out why the dining room table has been named Michelle, but as I very much doubt any of your guests are going to crawl under the table and find her tag, I don't see the harm either."

Jake snickered, but Lin frowned. "Tai?"

"Mrs. Krishnawswami is a widow," the colonel explained easily. "Two children. The girl will be starting school next week, but Tai is still a little young, I think."

"She found a kindergarten for him, but they said she needed to wait for the new school year in January," Leia added. "For now the parents working for the Ministry have some sort of rotation worked out for childcare and she's part of that, but he's a well-mannered little thing when she's brought him around." She laughed again. "Well, he is until his mother pointedly takes off the gloves, as it were. He listens for permission before getting up to mischief, which is more than I can say for most four-year-olds."

Lin nodded, even as he fumbled for a memory. Tai. He… was mostly sure he was supposed to recognize that.

"In any case, pie sounds perfect," Relena decided, walking past them for the door down to the kitchen. "Introductions too, if she's here."

"I… think they were out playing with Mai's dog, earlier," Lin admitted, striding ahead of her to get the door and lead the way. "That was almost an hour ago, though."

"Are you coming with?" Jake asked curiously as they entered the antechamber, holding the office door open.

"Oh, I should think so," Leia agreed happily, apparently setting her things down and following. "I wanted to check Mailin's wounds in any case."

Right, ER doctor. That's handy. "I think I did okay at this last round of bandaging," Lin pointed out. "But I'm not sure how well it held up to her shower. The guy who sewed her back up said stretching too much could be a problem, but so far so good."

"I'm a little surprised she's listening," Jake noted. "Her medical history is…"

"Pointed?" Leia suggested, sounding amused. "It made for an interesting read, I'll admit."

Lin groaned. "I was really hoping some of those stories were exaggerated," he admitted. That was the thing with Mai; half her stories were absolute bullshit, but all too often it wasn't the half you expected to be made up. "She doesn't seem half so bad right now as she'd have me believing is her norm."

Jake snickered again in that way he and Mai had been for the past month, ramping his suspicions right back up, and the major rolled his eyes, palming the second door open to reach the stairs. Laughter and indistinct happy chatter drifted its way up to them as he led the way down. "Is Raina what you two have been giggling about, then?" he asked accusingly.

His… ex-superior grinned broadly down at him. "You remember how I immediately knew who she was talking about when she said she had someone for the catering position?"

That was probably a decent hint, but he wasn't appreciating it. "You do your homework?" he suggested sullenly.

The other man just snorted at him. "Sure. Let's go with that."

Damn it. "I'm at least going to find out right now, right?"

"Yep."

"I'm beginning to wonder if I should be worried," Relena admitted, voice skeptical. "The dramatics are a bit much."

"They are, a bit," Jake agreed. "That doesn't make me not want to pull out a camera, though."

"And your phone is…?"

"…On the bathroom counter."

"You never forget your personal armory," Lin pointed out dryly. "And yet a mobile phone is impossible."

"Anathema," Leia agreed warmly. "You should have seen him when we were teenagers – he wouldn't let Treize or I have ours within a kilometer of any of our meetings."

"They're a liability when it comes to location and stealth, and old habits die hard," Jake defended immediately. "Just because those reasons have become less of an issue doesn't mean the instincts are bad. A cell phone functions in the first place by triangulating with satellites, the network always knows where each device is, and ghosting that trail takes an immense amount of effort."

"Which would be far more problematic if the phone companies didn't have insane security," Lin argued back.

"Why do you think they have that kind of security in the first place? It was reactionary. And if I can do it, so can other people."

"All of this," Relena countered, "is avoiding the fact that those problems don't actually apply to us, and you've yet to list the advantages."

"I was trying to win the argument," Jake returned, voice full of barely contained laughter. "You're not helping. Also, give me your phone."

Mai's voice floated up to them, in German, though for some reason she was affecting a heavier accent than usual. "The trick of it's the butter. The quality of the fruit doesn't matter much so long as you prepare it right, but the butter you can always taste."

"I'll have to remember that," a deep male voice returned in the same language, humming out a contented noise. "Not that I bake much, but this is good enough that it might be worth a try."

"It's true across the board," Mai assured him. "If you're not a baker, pie is probably a bit much." Then, with a more natural accent she added, "She has some simpler recipes if you really want to try something on your own later – more beginner stuff."

A little boy's voice then. "Trick?"

"Trick," Mai repeated. "Tèijì, chhal… That one's the same."

"No, I know, but how do you trick butter?" the child asked in English, sounding confused. "It's… butter."

A handful of different voices boomed in laughter before Mai started talking fast in… something he didn't recognize. It had enough loopy, round sounds that he could tell it wasn't German or romantic, and he could tell it wasn't Mandarin or Japanese either, but… that was about as far as he could figure.

"Look! Am'ma, schau dir das an!" another young voice called abruptly, sliding from English back into German.

"Ooh, nice," the male voice from before complimented warmly… and Lin was almost positive that was Jack, now that they were closer. "I like the colors. I wouldn't have thought of that."

"The normal ones are boring," the child – female child, he was mostly sure? – informed the man seriously. Her accent was a little clumsy, but her grammar was spot on. "And best is blue."

Okay, well, mostly spot on. "And blue is the best," Jack corrected easily. "Is blue your favorite color?"

"Only sometimes."

"It is today," Mai announced dryly. "Ask her again next week. Let me see too, Azaria."

Lin frowned. The heavier accent was back in the German part of that comment, which was just… odd for her. His best friend was one of those people who could change her accent on a dime in any of the languages she spoke, but this seemed a little nonsensical.

"Oh, here, I'll take him," Mai offered. "What are you looking for?"

A sigh, and then Cassie Noin was saying, "Thank-you. And I don't know, just something other than water…"

"There's hot water already if you want tea, Cass," Des added. "And the powders for a few other things too. Not real cider or cocoa, but they still taste pretty good."

"Oh! Cider does sound nice," the woman decided, audibly perking up. "I think I remember where the mugs are…"

"Atta!" the little girl called. "Mai, don't you want to see?"

"Absolut," Mai returned cheerfully, all trace of an accent gone. "Just give me one second… Ooh, yes. That's… four different shades?"

"Three," the girl corrected, sounding proud. "This one is a mix, see? The… the box didn't have a good middle one, it was too red."

"Shame on them," Mai announced in amused tone… and the thick accent again. "Good thinking, fixing that."

"How can it not have all the colors?" the little boy cut back in. "It was a big box. You shouldn't have to mix with…" He hesitated. Then, in English, "I don't remember 'crayons'."

"Bunstifte," Mai offered. "Or malstift. And there are many more colors than just sixty-four, Tai." A short laugh. "Your sister is going to be an artist, though."

The accent shifted again, but Mai immediately said, "Maybe she will. Do you want to color too, or stay with Am'ma?"

…There was something wrong with this picture. They were nearly to the bottom of the stairs now, but he twisted to give Jake another suspicious look. The conversation had clearly gone over Relena's head, her German was rudimentary at best, and he didn't know about Leia, but Jake was grinning even more broadly than before… and he knew he was supposed to recognize the name Tai. Mai had said it before but he didn't remember which story he'd belonged to, and he was positive she'd never mentioned a woman named Raina, at least not directly. And most of Mai's stories didn't involve kids, with the exception of-

Aw, shit. He raced down the last few steps and strode into the kitchen, taking in the crowd. Jack turned towards him from where he was standing at the edge of the island closest to the pantry with a mug in one hand and Des was with his wife over by the big hot water dispenser set up in the opposite corner. Something that smelled sweet and alcoholic was simmering on the stove and Mai stood near it, the youngest Noin cradled against her chest. A little girl with dark, curly hair that looked maybe six or seven stood near her holding the page out of a coloring book that they'd clearly been talking about.

The last person in the room was standing hip to hip with Mai and had one arm wrapped around a pre-K kid sitting on the counter that he assumed was Tai. Her hair was long and loose, down to her elbows without any of her daughter's curls – straight like Mai's, and the same shade of mid-range brown so long as you didn't count the blonde highlights strung through it. Her skin was a few shades darker and her figure was very different, more matronly and not nearly so muscular… but the delicate gold-wire glasses on her nose didn't hide the fact that she had the exact same face as the woman standing next to her.

"Lin!" Mai called out happily, grin absolutely wicked. "Hey! Come meet Raina!"

The only kids Mai's stories ever really mentioned were the niece and nephew she'd half-raised after her sister was widowed in the war.

She'd never said anything about being a twin, though. An identical twin, no less.

Said twin, for her part, was definitely amused, but it was more subdued; she looked more put upon than anything. "Hi," she offered – and yeah, it was no wonder he hadn't been able to tell them apart from the next room, because while there were enough physical differences between the women that he'd never mistake them for the other, their voices were exact.

"Oh… Hello," Relena greeted, coming around him with a smile.

Raina's smile widened, and there it was again, that moment of déjà vu, before she stepped away from the counter and held out a hand for the princess to shake. "Don't worry," she confided. "I'm the good twin."

"That was never up for debate," Mai immediately pointed out. "I told you, they know me."

"I do remember the warrant officer's reaction when he first saw me," the other woman returned dryly before focusing back on the princess, who had taken up her handshake. "It's a pleasure to meet you," she offered sincerely. "My sister hasn't been so happy as she is in your service for years now, and I promise you won't regret giving me this opportunity."

Relena offered up one of her most genuine dazzling smiles. "I'm sure you won't; you came highly recommended, after all." Her smile turned a little mischievous as she drew back. "Even if she left out a few details."

"It's not nepotism if she has the skills to back it up," Jake added conversationally as he came up behind Lena, reaching around to tuck his hands into the front pockets of her jeans as she smiled and relaxed back into him. "Having a true character reference can be invaluable."

And… yeah, given that casual little display of trust – and the way Raina only raised one brow in surprise before smiling indulgently – Lin supposed he got the point. He'd seen the woman's resume when they were still in the middle of the hiring process and if anything, she was overqualified. Then given how likely is was that someone who was going to be managing all their food, especially as the compound continued to grow, would stumble on all manner of secrets, the same as the Fonne sisters… Loyalty and discretion were absolute musts. Part of what made the Fonnes so trustworthy, beyond being old friends of Jake, was that there was no possible conflict of interest with them, the same way none of the new iteration of the guard had compelling history with other factions, even friendlies. Addie and Daniella were a little extreme in that they had no one outside of their little family, but… Well, neither did he or any of the American guys, and the Ministry move had closed the loop on the Morettis again, so maybe it wasn't that extreme of an example.

Mai had noted a number of times that her sister's family was all she had. Her mother had left when she was little, her father had died before her sister married, no aunts or uncles on the Marrakesh side and no care if she had any on the maternal side… the brother-in-law had been raised by an aunt that had strongly disapproved of his choice in wife, to the point that they'd estranged. Mai had been between tours when he'd died and had chosen to go into the reserves…

If that little boy was four, then he would have been under a year old when that happened, so no wonder, if the two sisters were all the family the other had left. No wonder, that one would choose to pack everything up and follow the other once it was clear she'd settled into a permanent position. He'd seen the way Rome and Kelly consistently pulled the other into their own orbit almost instinctively, looking after each other, and they weren't twins.

When he thought about it like that, there was even precedent already; Mai brining her sister into the fold was the third sibling set they'd gained since moving to Germany, and more and more these days, somebody's sibling was the last bit of family they had. Des and Jack were part of a nearly missing generation, but… he didn't remember exactly how generation classes worked, but Mai and Rome might actually count for that too. He thought he remembered someone saying once that he was at the older edge of his generation, and he'd been born in 177. Even if he was loose about it and said his set started in 172, that meant the oldest of the most populous adult age groups now was only… twenty-six or twenty-seven? That didn't seem right, but even in high school they'd talked about how so many had died by the late 50's that they started accelerating the school systems to boost the work force again. Except the fighting between factions both on Earth and in space hadn't stopped, it'd just gotten worse, to the point where it had gotten normal for women to outnumber men four to one and even then.

Shit, Rome had turned thirty-two last May. He was two years older than his sister but Kelly had started school earlier so they went to school only one year apart, so she was thirty, and he usually forgot that Mai was so much older than him, but he knew she was between the Moretti siblings for age. And if he was right about the 172 cutoff… Dave was twenty-eight. Vaughn was twenty-seven, and they'd all heard about how his entire town had been massacred when he was ten.

…Rome and Mai were part of the missing generations; probably Dave too. Military as soon as they were old enough to join too, and really… he supposed it said something that they were examples of non-nobility that both made it into the officer ranks and lived to see the Fall.

…With the Fall, how long is it going to be before Jake and I get looped into the next layer of the missing generations? He did enough of the paperwork for census and all the various RLTT projects to be aware that even now, as soon as you started looking at anyone over the age of twenty, the male population plummeted – maybe really as soon as you looked at anyone over eighteen. Part of the socioeconomic push behind reintegrating all the Cambyses victims was that, so long as they were sane, bringing them back into the fold would bring the male to female ratio for twenty and up back down to five to one, instead of seven.

"Being able to leave out the details and still get the right point across is an important skill," Mai argued, grin still a mile wide as she shifted Lyle into the crook of one arm. "Jake knew who I was talking about."

"And Jake was sure to process all the paperwork personally, so as not to ruin the surprise," Lin pointed out dryly, reaching out his own hand to Raina. "Hi. I've heard enough about you to know we'll get on just fine." He flicked his eyes pointedly over to Mai. "Just not by name, hence the surprise." It had always been 'my sister this' and 'my sister that'.

It was definitely going to take some time to get over that smile déjà vu, but it was reassuring too; Mai was his best friend. "Same back at ya," she answered, accent thickening as she shook his hand. "Though you might not appreciate some of your nicknames."

"Pretty sure I'm aware of most of them," he pointed out, crossing his arms. "She tell you about the whole 'Typhoon Marakesh' thing?"

"She's very proud," Raina affirmed, mirroring his body language as her smile shifted into an equally familiar smirk.

"Hey, don't forget!" Mai interjected, coming up next to her and bumping her with one hip. "Your sister's trying to prove you're trustworthy, here, you can't go spilling embarrassing stories."

Raina put on a thoughtful look, one finger to her chin as she leaned to one side and looked at Mai from the corner of one eye. "Are you saying they don't know ab-" She broke out into a delighted laugh that was different from Mai's as the other woman bumped her hard enough to stumble sideways. All the same, she winked at Lin, taking another step back. "I'd have to sit and think, actually, my sister's something of an exhibitionist…"

"She also lives close enough to short-sheet your bed again," Mai reminded her.

"Your sister can absolutely come up with better pranks than that if you try it," she returned sweetly.

"So can yours," Mai groused, lazily kicking at the other woman's ankle.

"Cute as this is, I'm taking my godson now, before either of you start actually getting creative," Jake announced, sweeping in to claim the baby before making a quick retreat over to Jack, eying his cup. "How was your flight, old man?"

"Oh, typical. I got randomly selected for full search and inspection, just like usual. I think I'd be less offended if they just said it was because I had a record, instead of the whole pomp and ceremony of disclaimers they don't mean." He took another slurp of his drink before offering it to his son. "Almost makes me want to get a fake ID again, just to avoid the hassle."

Raina laughed again and darted to one side, pulling her daughter between herself and Mai. Immediately, the girl pulled the largest puppy dog eyes and fat lip Lin had ever seen and held out her artwork at her aunt in a supplicating sort of motion… that largely hid the face Raina was making at her twin.

…Apparently this was an old game.

"Mm," Jake murmured appreciatively. "I mean, if you really want I could-"

"I'm joking. I mean… I'm mostly joking. It's fine."

"It's… kinda shitty, though."

The girl – Azaria, someone said? – was actively pressing the paper into Mai's face now, giggling through some kind of protest as Raina threw… something small and edible at her, given the way her son bounced over to catch and eat one.

"Jake, if I ever get caught doing something like that, I… It's fine. It's just a hassle, is all."

Because whether or not Jake says it's accurate, Jack has a rap sheet listing terrorism, Lin mused. Given the current political climate and the rampant campaign for increased military presence, getting caught red-handed in that kind of lie could lead to something nastier than another arrest on his record. His son could get any charges dropped and maybe even scrub the record, but that was assuming it didn't escalate before Jake got word of it. People were a little jumpy with their trigger fingers, right now.

Though now that he thought about it, Jack had handled the colonel in one of his rage fits better than Dave, despite not having been active in at least a decade and Mitchell being very much in his prime. He could think of a few reasons why that comparison probably wasn't fair to the younger man, because Jack had expected the fight and Lin had watched the switch flip without any warning on David, but… it had still happened. Though, chances are that Jack wouldn't fight authority. Not if he's stayed out this long… Shit, he'd probably stayed out to make sure he couldn't get his kid taken away from him again, and it was pretty fucking sad that he hadn't managed to keep him at any point in spite of giving up something that had clearly meant a lot to him.

That family was just a freaking train wreck.

"Bwaha!" Mai declared, holding her nephew up in front of her by the armpits, facing away, and if he hadn't seen her casually pack her giant dog around, he'd wonder how she could handle that much weight so far from her center of mass and still maneuver. "Human shield!"

Tai, for his part, was wiggling enough that anyone else probably would have dropped him by now, giggling… before extending his own arms to try tickling his sister, who shrieked and ran.

Mai darted after her, and Raina was left behind, grinning broadly…. Before starting to use the side of her foot to sweep up whatever she'd tried to start a food fight with. Using her hands to do the same with those on the counter, she called, "Mr. Miller, did you want any marshmallows in your cocoa? The counters are clean, but I'm not good with re-bagging these either."

"This tastes like it already has a few in there," Jake noted… still drinking from his father's mug, actually.

Jack's grin wasn't quite so disorienting as Raina's, but it was still close enough to Jake's to be eerie, when he was relaxed and happy like this. "I'm good," he decided. "I didn't think I was going to be able to finish that anyway. It was good, but…" He tipped his head from side to side, trying to find the words.

"It's different," Lin filled in, reaching over Raina's shoulder to steal a couple marshmallows, popping two in his mouth. Like the synthetic chocolate flavoring that had gotten so popular after the shortages of the Fall, these weren't really what he remembered from his childhood either… but not in a bad way, really. He wasn't sure if he'd even prefer the old stuff, if they were both put in front of him.

Jack shrugged in agreement as he picked up a stray bit of pastry crust left on an empty plate in front of him before turning to offer Lena and easy smile. "Nice to see you again, Princess."

"Relena," the woman corrected absently, walking along the line of pies sitting on the counter, eying the labels. "We're past the formalities, aren't we?" Tossing a grin over one shoulder, she added, "This is supposed to be family time, after all."

Nice, Lin decided, popping another bit of sugar fluff into his mouth as he watched both Miller men's body language loosen and warm up a bit more, even as Lena turned to start peppering Raina with questions. Train wreck or not, if anyone could mellow that mess out, it was probably her.

oOo


oOo

November 21st 198 – Thursday – China

"Welcome home," Xiu Juan greeted warmly, going up on her toes and hooking an arm around Kailì's neck to plant a kiss on his cheek. Pulling away, she gave Wufei a critical once-over before raising both brows, smirking. "I'd say you clean up well, if you weren't being such a wretch about it."

He didn't even bother gracing that with an eyeroll. The annoying thing about so much of Mrs. Lao's sharp remarks was that they were poignantly true. "It was a monumental waste of time," he pointed out instead, reaching up to struggle with the damn noose he'd let her husband loop around his neck that morning. "And if no one helps me get rid of this fucking thing in the next ten minutes, I'm cutting it off."

The woman rolled her eyes, patting Kailì patronizingly on the same cheek she'd just kissed before coming to stand in front of him and batting his hands away so she could work on the knot. "Whine, whine," she mocked, nimble fingers making quick work of the torture device Kailì had laughed at him for struggling with for the entire past hour. "I can't believe you'd never worn a tie before. You are eighteen years old, fully schooled and a successful businessman! How is that even possible?"

"Why would anyone willingly give up a high collar for something your rivals can strangle you with?" he argued back, glowering at the ceiling and trying not to move. He'd hated all the ceremonial costumes he'd been forced into over the years as well, but at least none of them had been actively hazardous.

"Try too long to make sense of fashion and you will effectively lobotomize yourself," Kailì warned, tucking a fresh toothpick into his mouth. "It's all herd movement anyway."

He debated asking Xiu Juan to hit the man for him, but figured she would refuse on principle. "And the point of it today was…?"

"Impressing the head bull, of course. Corporate types are narcissistic enough to interpret mimicry as flattery instead of mockery."

Wufei smirked almost in spite of himself at that, then let out a deep breath in relief as the damn tie slithered free. "Thank-you."

She gave him the same mocking pat on the cheek as she had Kailì and smiled wickedly at his grimace. "You need to learn this."

Except he really didn't. "There's more than one way to be formal," he argued. "I was promoted to head a department today, and despite how everyone forgets, I'm foreign. I can afford a little eccentricity now." Sometime this week he was going to go find a seamstress and have some overly ostentatious changshan made just so that today could never repeat itself.

For the most part, he appreciated the more modern dress everyone here preferred. It was practical, and he'd gotten used to having his neck free during the war. It had been a little embarrassing, how he had dreaded losing that freedom upon going back to a desk, only to find that no one cared if he kept a few buttons undone. Shui wore t-shirts with stupid jokes on the front of them most days, and Kailì wasn't much better. With him it wasn't absurd science jokes most of the time, but the pressed shirt he put on top always had the sleeves rolled up, almost never had the top four buttons done, and was often thin enough that you could see shadows of the the design underneath.

…In hindsight, there was probably a reason Xiu Juan had packed for him when he went to Europe. Left to his own devices, Lao might work in ripped jeans and one of the cartoonish 'World's Best Dad' t-shirts his daughters gave him. For all that the Lao women would wear the sort of minuscule shorts that would have given Master Shirin a fit as regular clothing, at least Yu Zi had never tried showing up the lab in them.

Then again, Master Shirin had been offended that his preferred mission uniform exposed his clavicles, so he wasn't sure if a woman exposing her legs was nearly so sexual as he'd been led to believe. Meilan's leggings had done less to conceal the shape of her than Yu Zi's shorts, and no one had said anything about that. He'd seen Kailì spin his daughter right back into her bedroom to change over a shirt that wasn't even half so tight as what his wife had preferred on more than one occasion too, even while he took no issue with loose athletic tops that gaped open at both neck and side, provided she was wearing a sturdy bra.

…Herd movements. Maybe he'd give that a little more thought later, when he was less irritated. He had just made lead engineer on a new development large enough to be declared its own department. He probably could just do as he liked, instead of trying to conform to a non-existent dress code in order to be accepted.

He'd earned that over the past three years, hadn't he? He was still foreign and didn't really believe he'd ever be anything else no matter how similar the culture was, but he'd been accepted.

They wouldn't have listened to him, if that wasn't true. He was sure of that.

"Bàba!" Lien shrieked, running around the corner and launching herself into Kailì's waiting arms. Jia Li and Yu Zi followed at a slower pace as the man laughed delightedly, lifting his youngest up to touch noses before comically draping her over one shoulder like a duffel bag so he could pull Jia Li against him in a hug.

Yu Zi gave her siblings an amused smirk before focusing on Wufei instead. "How'd it go?"

He smirked. "I promise to not treat your father too harshly when he fudges his deadlines."

His friend's answering grin was as sharp as her mother's laugh, even as Kailì huffed. "It was one time! Does anyone ever ask how many deadlines I've crossed early?"

"Your new boss is old enough to be your son," Yu Zi crowed, even as she came closer to give Wufei a hug. "Congrats. I knew you could do it."

"And make your mother carry a child at seventeen?" Kailì argued, a full caricature of outrage even as he bounced his four-year-old into more shrieking laughter. "Absurd. He is not young enough to be mine, thank-you very much!"

…He forced himself to breathe normally, despite feeling winded. That…

He must have done something to give himself away anyway – probably with his face – because Yu Zi was frowning. "'Fei?"

He shook his head, pulling away from her, but offering a tight smile to show it wasn't an insult. "It's nothing," he dismissed. "I just remembered something, that's all."

She pursed her lips suspiciously, but nodded, letting it drop.

…He'd lost count of the number of lectures he'd been given when he'd refused to consummate his marriage – refused to even discuss it with Meilan beyond letting her know she could blame him, if the elders pressed. They had only been married for three months, and he might have turned fifteen a week after the wedding but she'd still been fourteen when she died, and still there had been those imperiously nosy demands for an heir and they had expected

Why had they done that? He could understand demanding the marriage for all that they had been miserable, tying them together in a way they couldn't undo, but why force that too? They had already taken away the choices either he or Meilan could have made, and he knew the colony only survived because of Long leadership; they had chosen him like a fucking stallion at a market stall because of his martial potential and his grades, and intellectually he could even appreciate that they were trying to do the best thing for their people's future, but… it had still been his life. Their lives.

Even if Meilan had been willing, losing that much control, giving up everything he'd fought for in his doctorate for an isolated life as husband and father at fifteen had been unthinkable. And he very much doubted that Meilan would have been willing, despite the poison the elders had tried filling his ears with. If nothing else, he'd known damn well what Yi Hsuan would never have wanted for her daughter, and calling it 'marital duties' didn't change the nature of what they were suggesting.

…If they'd only been a little more reasonable, he and Meilan could have gone back to his university after the wedding and gotten a two bedroom apartment off campus. They could have learned how to live with each other on their own terms while still pursuing their personal goals – there had been excellent dojos there, beautiful gardens, so many things… So many of the little things they had fought about hadn't even been real, just built up resentment. They'd fought over important things too, but he'd been so angry by then that he hadn't even wanted to listen, it had sounded too much like what the elders kept saying, and…

If they hadn't been effectively put on house arrest until they got an heir on Meilan, trapped in the ancestral seat, the first colony of their cluster, Master O and the elders would have been the only ones there when the Alliance and OZ came. They would have heard from Master Shirin later about how they had evacuated, and maybe Meilan would have been upset at the loss of the biosphere, but it could've been rebuilt. Master O probably would have stayed deep in his little bunker for the handful of weeks it took to be sure the corrosive gas was clear before transferring his still unnamed gundam to another likely site; he might have even brought it to Wufei and invited him to help finish it, like he had before Meilan died. Xutao had been his prime candidate, after all, and it would have been time to start familiarizing him with more than just sims.

…Except, they'd already been planning to drop A0206 the following year as part of the original awful plan of Operation Meteor. So he couldn't have rebuilt it for Meilan. And Xutao had always been a follower, never a leader, he probably would have done Meteor the way the Foundation intended, like Master Shirin and O had tried to browbeat him into… and Meilan would have hated him if he hadn't put a stop to that. She would have.

And OZ had followed the Alliance that day because they wanted to come in with MS and slaughter them personally, instead of using the gas. Nataku had been right, that day – evacuation wouldn't have worked, and eventually, they would have found O's bunker. Even if they hadn't been home, once OZ found a half-finished gundam nothing would have stopped them from-

Yu Zi rested a hand on his shoulder, brows drawn together. Her eyes darted to the side one moment, making sure her parents were still occupied, before she softly asked, in English, "Do you want to go? I can make something up."

Almost involuntarily, his eyes darted that way too. Kailì was holding Lien upside down now, and she was making such a racket that he very much doubted Yu Zi had needed to switch languages to keep her mother from overhearing, but…

…If Master Shirin and the other elders had had their way, he might have had a child just a few months younger than Lien. Young as she was, with how limited A0's medical resources always were, Meilan might not have even survived the birth… and he knew himself well enough to realize he would have become a mirror of his own cold, distant father. Nothing like Lao. Maybe with Meilan he could have found a balance despite his resentment, Xiu Juan reminded him of her so much some days, but…

"'Fei?"

The adults in their lives had treated them like things, vessels for their plans instead of people, and he'd never really thought there was another way. It had just been that way… but there was no reason why the Long dynasty had to stay intact. What difference had it made? The A0 cluster spun on without any remnant of Long blood. Why had it mattered?

Maybe there was a good reason the Laos' ancestors had banished his people to space.

He looked back at Yu Zi, worried for him and willing to lie to her family for him out of nothing but friendship for reasons that she didn't understand, just because she hoped it might offer some small modicum of comfort. His friend. He hadn't realized it before coming here in the wake of the Fall, but… he'd never had friends before. Not really. He hadn't truly understood the concept. He'd been too young to understand even half of the emotions Meilan stirred in him, and they had always been twisted by the roles their families had forced them into… but with the way their last conversation went, he liked to think that maybe they could have become friends, given time.

No matter what had come after, she'd shown him how to care again. At least a little.

It was easier to summon a true smile for Yu Zi than he would have thought. "I'm fine."

Her expression drew long, going from concerned to unimpressed even as she tightened her grip on his shoulder. "Uh huh."

He smiled in spite of himself; he hadn't heard anyone say that since Duo, and he hadn't realized she'd picked up nonverbal slang along with improving her general English while she was on the amplifier tour. "I am," he insisted, reaching up and gripping her wrist once in acknowledgement before pulling away. "Old memories, is all."

That was all it had to be. He wasn't there anymore. He'd left, then left again when Master Shirin's pride once again overruled the wellbeing of his people… and they didn't have him anymore. He might feel foreign here sometimes, but that wasn't always bad.

Kailì would never sell his children off for some nebulous greater good. Xiu Juan was married to someone who loved her more than his career, more than anything at all, except perhaps the family they had made together. Wufei had always known, growing up, that he would have to fill out his wants within the firm lines of his father's plans and he'd been happy for the honor, but… Yu Zi was free to choose, knowing Kailì would support her whatever she did. He hadn't really believed it at first, thought it only a facsimile of choice while he guided her onto the appropriate path, but… It wasn't.

Even if he and Meilan had been able to give the elders the children they wanted, their lives would have been chained to the traditions too.

…He'd wear the damn tie again, regularly, if it meant those traditions stayed dead.

Yu Zi considered him for another long moment before shaking her head and letting it go. "Alright, if you say so." Smirking, she held up one finger in reprimand. "Just remember that I offered to help, mm?"

Oh. That was an idea that should have already occurred to him; he really was wrung out from meetings. "I could use a different favor?" he suggested with a smile, tucking his hands in his pockets and resting his weight back on his heels.

She gave him a doubtful look this time, though she didn't lose the smirk either. "You never ask for favors."

He… was willing to claim that as a cultural barrier too. "I took the concept a little too seriously," he admitted. "A favor for a favor." The Laos and Shui were the first people he'd ever felt he could leave an open-ended promise with and not have it haunt him. The casual aspect of it still struck him but… that was probably a problem of word choice, and it having had different meanings in A0.

Or it was more about him not having had real friends in A0. It probably wasn't cultural. Xutao had tried to ask for and give favors over frivolous things – Wufei just ignored him.

Yu Zi's smirk widened, and she shifted her weight to one side, crossing her arms. "Now I'm curious."

He rolled his eyes at the dramatics. "I'm the new head of Integrated Energy Conservation," he reminded her. "And I haven't gotten any new clothing in the past two years." It wasn't just the tie issue; all his favorites were wearing embarrassingly thin.

She snickered. "Well, I suppose you can't ask Shui for help."

It was a little reassuring to know he wasn't the only one who thought that. "I don't think Shui knows how to dress impressively," he stressed. "I need casual too, but," he hesitated, and grimaced before admitting, "I don't have a good sense for normal, here." It had been almost three years, and the rules still didn't really make sense.

Then again, he'd spent most of that time locked in his bedroom or lab space, so maybe it wasn't so bad of an excuse as it sounded.

"Mm, you've always kinda done your own thing," she agreed, looking thoughtful.

That sounded more complimentary than he'd expected. "Different is still fine," he noted. "Just… maybe more on purpose instead of finding something that doesn't feel awkward."

Yu Zi smirked again, eyes lit up with interest as she thought that through. "So… socially acceptable for work, impressive… easy to move in, so you don't have to change to practice your forms…" She eyed the way he'd managed to get two buttons of his collar undone even before Xiu Juan had relieved him of the tie. "And you've always liked letting your neck breathe, huh? Those tanks you wear for undershirts are practically boat neck."

The undershirts he wore these days were the only clothing he had left from the war. They were too worn for any other use, but he'd been loathe to give them up. "I don't know what that means," he noted. "But if I could get away with my shirts being that style, I would do it." He wasn't sure if the bared clavicles issue was just Master Shirin, or if everyone had thought the same thing but been too intimidated to say it. Sally had never knocked on his door on Peacemillion again after the one time he'd answered it shirtless, but that might have also had something to do with having had a naked blade in hand.

Noin had given him dark looks for that and started waking him with air sirens through the intercom instead, but he wasn't sure what they'd expected when they pounded on his door in clear panic. He'd been ready to deal with a threat on short notice – what else had they wanted?

"Okay, give me a day or two and I'll see what I can do for ideas, and then we can get it done," Yu Zi decided. "There's more commercial in town than ever now, with the ration laws lifting, but I know of a couple shop girls who'd be happy for the custom to sew things up from base fabric. You never go anywhere anyway, so it's not like you don't have the credits for it; something from them will last longer too. It might be best to hit a depot first to confirm taste, though."

That solved more problems than he'd realized he even had. "Thank-you."

She grinned. "Should we drag Shui along and try to make him look like less of a university dropout?"

He let out a brief laugh, getting a clear image of the look his roommate would get on his face if he realized what they were doing beforehand. "Tempting."

"He's going to be a division head, isn't he? Like my dad?" At his nod, she crossed her arms. "Then yeah, we should find him some khakis, if nothing else. Which one did you give him?"

He decided not to point out that he wasn't sure what 'khakis' were either. He could guess, and that was close enough. "Manufacturing," he answered. "Kailì's taking Domestic and Commercial." It had been a toss-up, before he realized that Shui had no real life context for living conditions outside of the handful of apartments he'd lived in. His structural and conceptual understanding was sound, but his common sense when it came to realistic needs was missing. "It should be fine with our current scope, but we've got a shortlist of candidates if we need to break his into smaller pieces."

Xiu Juan inserted herself back into the conversation with a sharp smile. "Not taking Cái or Sovann along too?"

Kailì wrapped his arms around her shoulders before he could answer. "The amplifier project is hardly closed," he pointed out. "It's likely we'll even kick something back their way on occasion."

"It's just stable," Wufei agreed. "And no longer critical. Less research-based, and more troubleshooting and management." The last round of surveying around the country had shown little in the way of improvement with the last handful of changes… and they were getting the job done.

Maybe he had come to his realization about the need to change his personal priorities a little late, but the fact that it was time to move on was convenient, if nothing else. "Sovann is taking Kailì's spot as lead engineer, but Cái is aware that he'll be taking the reins more often than not." Sovann… didn't like people, after all, and the amplifier project had an entire fleet of technicians to manage. Human resources handled most of the interpersonal needs over the engineers' heads, but someone still had to teach the senior flock enough about the machines that they could repair them in the field.

In a pinch, the three of them would still be available for consultation, and he suspected they'd be pulled back into the old project at least a handful of times during the next European tour. Or at least, Kailì and Shui will be.

As if reading his thoughts, Yu Zi frowned. "Dad has a shortlist, but you don't?"

"I don't know any of the military engineers well enough to make one yet," he admitted. And everyone they've suggested so far is an idiot. "I'll have to figure it out in the field." As it stood, he had a large pool of junior engineers that he thought he could make good use of, even with the massive range of projects he needed to initiate, and unless he was pleasantly surprised, he could promote promising ones from there.

He'd always preferred a heavy workload anyway. He'd make it work; even with the blow-up in Italy, he had enough time to get his feet under himself and bring the local military up to standard.

…If it got too intense, Shui had enough of the right background to catch up and hold his own. More people could be found to handle the increased industrialization China was seeing now – too few were trained in colonial methods of energy optimization, and Kailì's specializations were too rigid, too narrow, to convert so far.

His friend had a determined twist to her mouth now. "We are definitely including Shui, then."

Wufei's mouth twitched into a smile without permission. "Stop that." He knew she had reached that conclusion because he'd ranted about the different viewpoints and held Shui up as a good example so many times – because he'd been making sure she understood the principles the same way, because before too long she might be one of his junior engineers – but it still felt as though she was reading his thoughts.

She puffed out an amused breath, flipping her hair as she turned to walk into the kitchen. "No."

…That about summed up his life lately, didn't it?

"Wufei! Wufei, I haven't shown you my new kata yet! Can you check it? Bàba's too nice."

…He couldn't really complain. "He's too nice because he cheats," he informed the eight-year-old solemnly, gesturing for the living room, where they could clear a space.

"If it's a real fight, she'd better cheat!" Kailì hollered after them.

Wufei smirked, giving Jia Li a secretive smile. "He's also not wrong." Starting to push the couch further away from the television, he added, "Still, it's best to know how to do a thing before you try to break its rules."

The girl looked more like Kailì than her mother and older sister, but her answering smile was still wicked. "So I can break them better, right?"

He didn't bother fighting back a laugh at that. "You should always aim to excel, yes."

Xiu Juan's delighted cackle was more than worth the pillow she threw at his head for that.

oOo


oOo


Retrospect


oOo


Thoughts? Jack and Des's scene is originally from the previous chapter and…. Well, we have a lot about the older characters and overall culture in this chapter, don't we? Lot of background/history and emotions, and finally we're kicking the engine into gear on this damn revolution. Would love to hear back from you guys, but you know. I'm not dead. Commentary from the peanut gallery just spins my thoughts out faster, and it's convenient for the muses.

I swear, everyone just had to dive down the rabbit hole on this one, and most of them were actual surprises for me – Jake and Odin I absolutely thought were both going to sidestep and deflect the issues entirely, but they were actual grown-ups, holy crap. Jake didn't even freak out, though I'm still a little floored that Marie and Odin managed to have another one of those conversations via text of all things. Then Wufei decided he needed a fresh cameo at the last minute and… Well, we made it to page 49 and 31k, so I'm not really complaining.

Next up is Ch. 22 Ignition Sequence. I don't have a bunch pre-written this time, but I'm back into the headspace where I'm scrambling for a pen to choreograph scenes every time I have a free ten minutes, so hopefully we'll continue full steam ahead. Sorry for all the delays leading up till now.