18-Sep-2003
Title: My Lives
Author: Marika (Marika_89@hotmail.com)
Archive: www.gwaddiction.com (thank you!)
Category: AU, light angst
Pairings: 1x2, 3x4, 5xS
Warnings: maybe some cursing and a little violence
Spoilers: probably for most of the series, eventually
Notes: sequel to My Dads, following Julia
Feedback: please? I'd especially like some constructive criticism
Disclaimer: I don't own GW at all
Julia crept forward slowly, choosing each spot where she placed her hands and feet with care. If she slipped, it was over.
She was in a fairly narrow air vent, about a meter high and the same wide. The entire floor of the vent was covered with pressure sensors, hence her current position - a good foot above the floor, braced with her hands and feet against either wall, working her way to the end of the shaft. A normal human probably would have been near collapse from the strain - she was just beginning to sweat.
<Which is a good thing, since these damn sensors are so damn... well, sensitive, that they probably get set off by spiders all the time,> Julia grumbled to herself. Then again, she hadn't seen so much as a spider's web the whole time she'd been here. So maybe they had some way of keeping bugs and rats out of their building. She should find that out for Tousan, he'd appreciate it.
<Focus, Julia,> she told herself. She was nearing the end of the vent now. Even in the darkness, she could clearly see where the vent took an abrupt 90 degree right turn.
She stopped about a meter in front of where the right wall ended. Now came the tricky part: she had to extract a meter-long device from where it was strapped to her back, all without ever touching the floor. She moved as close to the ceiling as she could, braced herself with both feet and one hand, then carefully reached back with her free hand to loosen the exposed straps.
They'd planned well, and it came free pretty easily. Then she reached up over her shoulder and started pulling it free. It wasn't easy, but she managed to get it completely free of the straps and held it in front of her, perpendicular to the floor.
Now came the tricky part. She moved forward, supporting herself with three limbs, until she came to the nearly-invisible line in the wall that marked where the lasers were planted. Well, it was nearly-invisible for *her*, which meant that no one else would be able to see anything. When she was just in front of the line of lasers, she discovered that she could feel the energy in the air in front of her.
<Hmm, could be useful, I'll have to keep an eye out for that.> She placed the long metal tube flush with the wall, then pressed a button on the side, and the bar fastened itself to the wall. She pressed it again, and a seam appeared in the tube, then it split itself in half, with a thin rod holding the two halves apart. That rod extended until the two halves of the tube were pressed against opposite walls. Julia searched with her hand, and finally found a second, recessed button in the surface of the tube.
There was an almost imperceptible whirring as the mirror inside the tube was moved by a mechanism concealed behind it, and the mirror slid out over the lasers. At the same time, an identical mirror was extended over the lasers on the opposite wall, interrupting them and reflecting them back on themselves so they weren't triggered.
After a second, Julia carefully stuck her hand into the space previously occupied by the laser sensors. Nothing happened, and she breathed a silent sigh of relief.
She moved forward again and braced herself in the corner beyond, then pulled a fat cylinder from a pocket on her thigh. One end was fastened to the wall with a powerful magnet. Then she squeezed the cylinder twice in rapid succession. A second magnet with a steel cable attached to it was shot out of the other end of the cylinder. The impact it made when it hit the wall at the other end of the passage she'd just traversed seemed very loud.
She tapped the mike of the headset twice, signaling the rest of the team to follow on the path she'd just created. In the darkness at the end of the vent, she could see figures moving. They were all wearing nightvision goggles, an option she'd chosen to ignore, since she'd found they cut down on her vision.
As one of the men started to shimmy down the cable, she turned her attention to the next corridor. In this one there were only a few lasers, so she could finally rest her arms and legs by putting her feet on the floor. Although, to be honest, she had almost forgotten the awkward position she crouched in. She shook out her arms and legs, just to be safe, then stretched until the first man arrived. He handed her a spray bottle, and she sprayed it's contents into the passage, making the lasers temporarily visible.
"I'm going to go set up the next cable," she whispered, and he nodded once, sharply, and Julia gave herself a mental kick. <No unnecessary speech,> she reminded herself. <And he already knows the plan.>
As quickly as she could, Julia crept down the hall, silently thanking her sensei for teaching her shikko(1). Otherwise, walking that far in a crouch would have been rather awkward.
This vent ended in another ninety-degree turn, this time straight up. Another pocket produced two small circular discs, each about five inches in diameter and a half-inch thick, with handles on one side. She tested one, pressing it against the wall and twisting the handle until it was parallel to the floor. It stuck to the wall like it had been glued there. She twisted the handle until it was perpendicular to the floor, and it instantly released.
<OK, it worked.> That was reassuring, given that she was about to put all of her weight on them. She reached up as far as she could and locked the first circle to the wall. She pulled herself up, then placed the second disc and released the first. In this way she proceeded upwards at a fair pace.
After about twenty meters, she stopped. If she was remembering correctly, on the other side of the metal wall was one of the vents that actually ran through the building, as opposed to the one she was in now, which only ran around the outside of the building. The only way to get from one to the other was through some very large fans which were more booby-trapped then Julia wanted to think about. So she wasn't even going to try, she was going to go around them entirely.
She fixed one of the discs to the wall opposite her, clipping a line to it for the others to use to climb up. Then, very, very carefully, she extracted the small explosives from her belt. She attached them to the wall in a circle, double-checking to make sure that the shielded sides were facing her. According to what she'd been told, the shields would contain the explosion and direct them towards the wall. She arranged the explosives well below the disc with the gently swaying cable beneath it, so that she wouldn't compromise the wall where it was attached. She could hear the others climbing up below her.
Julia checked, then double-checked, then tripled-checked the explosives. Then she braced her feet as wide as she could, well above the level of the circle, turned her head aside, raised on arm to protect her face, then she triggered the five-second countdown.
As soon as her finger depressed the button, she realized her mistake. The disc was clear of the explosion. The line was not.
<Shit!> She pulled her feet in slightly, and instantly dropped a meter, before she stopped her rapid descent by pressing against the wall with her feet again. She lunged forward, grabbing at the line. Her grasping fingers closed around the cable as the timer hit two, and she gave the metal a desperate jerk, trying to get enough slack in the line to wrap around her hand.
The timer hit zero.
The explosion wasn't all that big, but she felt the heat of it blister her hands, and a piece of hot metal shot past her, opening a thin cut on her cheek, narrowly missing her eye.
Most of her attention was focused on the cable, which suddenly tightened painfully around her hands as the line above was severed and the weight of six full-grown men landed on it.
"What the hell happened?!" said a voice in her ear.
"Don't move!" she hissed, then put all of her concentration into not dropping them. Somehow, she had to get the line from where it was, hanging from her hands between her legs, up to the disc.
Then she had to tie it there somehow.
She sighed. A meter and a half had never looked so far. How did she get into this mess?
<Stupidity, of course. It's always my own stupidity.
Focus, Julia,> she scolded herself. She couldn't sit here forever.
First of all, she had to move the cable. She looked down at it, the gently swaying line disappearing into the darkness that even her eyes couldn't penetrate. It seemed very heavy.
<Stop that!> she scolded herself again. <You can bench press a car, you can lift six men.>
She closed her eyes and focused on her hands, telling herself over and over that she could do this, blocking any thought of failure from her mind. And she lifted.
It was heavy, but not as heavy as she'd expected, and it got easier as her confidence grew.
Her 'powers' (as she now thought of them) were weird that way - the more confidence she had, the better they worked.
Slowly, she raised the cable, past her legs, her belly button, her torso... now it was eye level, and her arms began to feel heavy. She wasn't used to this kind of sustained effort. It was one thing to punch or lift something, one quick, focused effort. It was something different entirely to try to sustain that sort of power for a long time. Worse, the metal against her back, which she was using to brace herself, was beginning to bend outwards from the force she was exerting. <Shit.>
"Hold on," she muttered, and yanked on the cable, jerking it upward. She raised it to the level of the disc and gained herself a second of slack, which she used to thread the cable to through the handle on the disc. Then all of the weight was on her again, and the metal where her feet were planted buckled outwards.
But at least the cable was in place now. She pulled, and got a little more to work with. She tied a clumsy not, then flattened it with her hands, so it wouldn't unravel. Only then did she sigh in relief, and shake out her hands, trying to relax tense muscles. "You OK down there?" she whispered.
"Yes. Barely," came the tense reply in her ear. "What happened?"
"Stupid mistake. It's ok now," she replied.
"The mission?" the voice prompted.
"Oh!" Julia eyed the nearly meter-wide circular hole in front of her. "Successful," she reported. "Watch out, the edges are sharp, and I compromised some of the structural integrity up here," she said, looking at the footprints she'd left in the metal wall. She moved her feet out of the deep indentations she'd made.
Then, supporting herself entirely with her hands, she slid her feet through the hole, then pulled the rest of her body through.
She landed harder than she'd intended, and winced at the sound she made, echoing down the vent. Then she realized she could hear her own heartbeat thudding in her ears. <Damn it.> She carefully dialed down her hearing to normal (for her) levels.
By then, on of the men had caught up with her, and she gave him a hand through the hole. "You ok to continue?"
She nodded, wishing they weren't wearing the night vision goggles, so she could see his face, see if he thought she was doing all right.
"All right, you know what to do. We've got this level, you're going to scout the next one," he reminded her unnecessarily.
She nodded again, then started knee-walking down the vent, wincing every time one of her feet made a slight noise. She'd dialed up her hearing again, listening for any sign they'd been found. She heard more voices than she liked, than there should be at this time of night, but the noise the men were making made it impossible to tell any more, not without stopping what she was doing.
Julia closed her eyes as she approached the opening in the ceiling that would be her path upwards. There was a dim light filtering down from it, painful to her eyes, which she'd adjusted to the almost complete darkness.
After dialing down her vision a little, Julia looked up.
Now she remembered why she was the only one who was continuing upwards. There wasn't a chance that any of the guys would be able to squeeze in here. It was going to be a bit of a squeeze, even for her.
She stood fully upright (for the first time in almost twenty minutes), then wedged herself into the narrow vent and started inching her way upwards. After a minute she realized it was much easier to just suspend herself using her arms and legs and then just crawling upwards by moving only one limb at a time.
She neared the vent where the light was coming out, dimmed down her vision until it was no longer painful to look at the light, then peered into the room.
It was empty, and the dim light was coming from a computer terminal that someone had left on. Well, she could always come back and enter the building itself through here, if she couldn't find a better spot.
Julia continued climbing.
She'd barely made it another two meters when the noise exploded around her. Men shouting, the thundering of feet reverberated off her overly-sensitized ears. She let out a shriek herself, clapping her hands over her ears in a futile effort to lessen the sensory input. She shut her eyes, trying to eliminate the possibility of a white-out as she frantically tried to dial down her hearing.
She didn't think it was working - she could still hear a sort of white static, like a loud hissing, when she wasn't distracted by the stabbing pain in her head.
Suddenly she became aware of an odd smell. She looked up, her eyes adjusting automatically so that things took on a crystalline clarity, so that she could see a faint mist coming out of tiny holes in the walls. It was drifting down towards her. Gas.
The hearing problem disappeared entirely in the face of this new problem. Terror had a funny way of doing that to her. She sucked in a deep breath and held it, then slid down, back to the vent. She braced her back and arms against one side, then slammed her feet through the vent and *pushed* with her arms.
She went flying through the vent, sliding across the carpeted floor on her side. <Going to have rug burn there,> thought that idiotic little part of her brain that came on under stressful situations. She was still holding her breath.
Then someone shouted, "Now!" and the lights were switched on.
This time Julia managed to keep from crying out as for the second time in two minutes she suffered a severe overload, but that didn't keep her from doing a pathetic imitation of a vampire, throwing her arms over her face, trying to block out the light.
Now she dialed down her eyesight to something approaching normal, while focusing her other senses on her surroundings. She counted six... seven... no, eight heartbeats, and the smell of oil, the kind the Preventers used on their guns. <I'm surrounded.>
Julia cautiously opened her eyes, and was unsurprised when she saw a number of unfriendly-looking men in black uniforms standing in a circle around her. At least they didn't have their guns drawn, although every one of them was armed. She slowly pushed herself a little more upright, and grimaced as the right hand of every person in the room immediately went to the guns on their belts.
<Shit.>
"How disappointing," said a familiar voice. Julia's head snapped around as Lady Une stepped out from behind some of the soldiers, a displeased frown on her face, trailing a desk-worker of some sort. Julia swallowed.
"Yes, very disappointing," Lady Une repeated, glancing at the man beside her, who blanched and shot a murderous glare at Julia.
"Sergent, that will be enough, thank you very much," Une said in a soft voice.
One of the soldiers, outwardly no different than the rest, saluted her. "Sir!" Then, turning towards the rest of the men, he barked. "All right! Form up and move out!" They obeyed, and as they left, Julia rolled to her feet.
Only after they had all left could she convince herself to relax.
"What happened?" she asked Une directly. "How'd you catch us?"
"The explosive you used to punch through the wall to the inner vents was just strong enough to trigger some of the sensors," she replied, and Julia nodded.
"I wondered about that. I think I might know a way around it." Julia paused for a second to collect her thoughts, then continued, "Why'd you wait so long to grab us? It was, what, seven or eight minutes between when I triggered the explosives and when you grabbed the guys?" That wasn't really a question. She could go back and count her heartbeats if, for some reason, she didn't know how long it had taken. Which she did. Along with everything else, she had a sort of internal clock that always told her what time it was, no matter how distracted she got. So far her primary use of this 'power' was in knowing how long it was until the end of boring classes when there wasn't a clock in the room.
"We thought it best to wait until we could get all of our men in position," Lady Une replied. "As long as you weren't doing any damage..." She trailed off for a moment, then glanced at the man standing beside her and continued, "Still, your team did get quite far into the building, more than far enough to cause some serious damage, if you'd wanted to." The man beside her alternately paled then flushed as Julia nodded.
"What is your analysis, Mr. Grosser?" she asked, finally turning to look at the man.
He visibly blanched, then muttered, "I agree, sir."
"Then I think an apology is in order, don't you?" she said, phrasing the question in a way so that it was not a question at all.
When he turned a positively poisonous glare on her, Julia briefly wished that Lady Une wasn't so much on her side, but that didn't keep her from feeling a surge of fierce satisfaction at being proven right. A few weeks ago, she'd been walking through one of the public offices when she saw some of the building plans for Preventers' Headquarters lying out on someone's desk. Just lying there, where anyone could see them, or worse, just take them. She'd mentioned it to Lady Une, and it apparently filtered back down to the boss of the guy who'd left them out, and he read the guy the riot act. The guy defended himself by saying that it wasn't a breach of security, because the plans wouldn't help anyone get in.
Eventually word of that got back to Lady Une, who asked Julia to try to prove that one way or another. (Well, she was going to ask other people, later, but she let Julia have first shot, since she discovered the first breech.)
Julia, treating it like any school assignment, had come up with an... um, invasion plan, for lack of a better word, then realized that she'd assumed that the people would have her abilities. She would have changed it, except that Une had spotted it too, and Wufei. Wufei had been pestering her for weeks that she needed to hone her skills in something approaching a real situation (not lifting small cars in hangers, that didn't count), that that was the only way she'd find out if she really had control of her skills. And she had to admit, after that whole almost-disaster with the explosives, she was feeling a little more confident. The thought of what could have happened still terrified her, though. If she hadn't realized in time...
She jerked her mind away from that train of thought. She wasn't ready to think about that yet. In the end, Grosser had somehow found out that she was running a simulated attack, and had been... somewhat derogatory, to put it nicely. Julia had been determinedly polite in the face of his rudeness, taking out her irritation on an unoffensive punching bag in the gym, but just because she refused to let it show, didn't mean that he wasn't getting to her.
"I'm sorry," he muttered, flushing bright red.
Julia fought the urge to smirk. <I am a mature, responsible adult-type person.> "It's fine," she said casually, to which he frowned more. <Maybe that wasn't the right approach.>
"Julia," Une said, distracting her. "I'm going to need to debrief you, then you should probably get cleaned up. You don't want to hit the streets looking like that."
Julia looked down at the black jumpsuit, dirty from crawling around in vents for over an hour, actually burned away in a few places, and distinctly not at all normal. She grimaced. "You might be right about that."
Julia closed the door to her room as quietly as she could, and crept into the darkness towards her bed.
"Out all night again?" said a voice from across the room.
Julia flinched, glad her expression wasn't visible in the dark. "Deb... sorry, I tried not to wake you."
Debra, her second roommate, sighed. "I told you when I moved in, Julia, that I always wake up when the door opens. I don't mind that. What I do mind is seeing my seventeen-year-old roommate coming in at dawn for the fifth time this month!"
Julia grimaced. She tried to keep her visits to the Preventers during daylight hours, but sometimes, like tonight, she'd needed a longer stretch of time than was available around her class schedule, at least during normal hours. Plus, in some instances (again, like tonight), it was better to limit the number of people who saw one of Julia's experiments. Holding them in the middle of the night certainly cut down on the number of potential gawkers.
She couldn't tell Debra any of that, though, so her roommate continued to operate under the mistaken assumption that Julia was out until all hours drinking, partying, spending time with boys, or some combination of all three.
In truth, Julia had little interest in any of them. She'd quickly discovered that it took an incredible amount of alchohol to get her even mildly buzzed, enough so that it was financially impractical to pursue drinking as entertainment. She could and had attended a number of parties, but with everyone else drinking (and getting drunk), she discovered that it wasn't much fun being the only sober person at a party. And as for guys... the ones she would have been interested in were generally turned off by her age, not wanting to date a child. The ones who were interested in her because of her looks (who never bothered to find out her age) were not the type that she would choose to spend time with.
"You can't keep doing this," Debra continued. "I don't care how much of a genius you are, sooner or later it's going to catch up with you!"
Julia sighed. Sometimes having a roommate who was actually a decent person and who gave a damn was a distinct disadvantage.
"I'm sorry," she repeated.
"Cover your eyes," Debra instructed, then flicked on the light. Despite the warning, Julia still flinched slightly at the light even through her closed eyes, but the warning was still appreciated.
Debra got out of her bed and walked over to Julia. She fought down a smile at the outfit Debra was wearing. The bright red and orange tie-dyed shirt wouldn't be so bad on it's own, but it clashed rather badly with her blue and red striped pajama pants, and even worse with her neon-green striped hair. Oh well. It was better than last week, when she'd somehow managed to dye bright pink spots into her jet-black hair. They'd only showed when her hair was immaculately combed, which was seldom, but it had looked odd almost all the time.
"Don't tell me you're sorry," Debra said pleadingly. "Just promise me it won't happen again."
Julia winced again. "Deb, I'm not going to lie to you, and I can't promise that it isn't going to happen again. But... I can tell you this... it isn't what you think. I'm really sorry, but I can't tell you what it is, but it's not anything bad."
Debra stared at her and backed up a step. That was the closest she'd ever come to telling Debra the truth. Normally she just avoided the issue or gave a lame excuse.
After a long silence, Debra sighed and climbed back into her own bed. "OK, if you say so, I'll trust you. But, if you ever need anything, you'll let me know?"
Glad of a promise she could make and keep, Julia agreed, then climbed into her own bed, acutely aware of the fact that they both had to get up in a little less than three hours.
Debra shut off the lights, but Julia wasn't all that sleepy yet. She adjusted her eyes until she could see perfectly well, then gazed at the poster on the ceiling directly over the bed. It was an abstract three-D cube-maze, with water coming out of some of the tubes. It was also the sort of thing that didn't bear too close examination, or it would give you a headache, because half of the water was flowing the wrong way, and some of the tubes had no beginnings. Julia rather liked it. (2)
Having a roommate who cared could occasionally cause trouble, but it beat the alternative any day of the week. That thought led immediately to her first roommate, Sandra. Blond hair, blue eyes, utterly fixated on clothes... and herself. Julia had just about nothing in common with her, and although she knew, intellectually, that Sandra had to be very smart to get into this college, Julia held her in contempt. The feeling was mutual.
Julia could have handled just not getting along with her roommate, but Sandra went out of her way to make things difficult for her. She played all of her music extremely loudly, loud enough that it was physically painful for her to be in the room, and never warned her when she turned on the lights, despite repeated requests from Julia.
But the worse was at night. Julia had nightmares. It was only normal, after everything she'd been through, or so everyone told her. It wasn't all that bad, now it was down to only once every couple of weeks. But when she'd first come to college, she'd had nightmares two or three times a week. Sandra hadn't appreciated being woken up so often, and had taken to roughly shaking Julia awake whenever *she* woke up. Julia wouldn't have minded - it wasn't as if she wanted to experience the dreams in their entirety - except that Sandra kept shaking her. It wouldn't have been so bad if she'd thrown a pillow or something, but no, she had to come within arm's reach. Julia started having new nightmares - that Sandra would wake her up, but she'd react to whatever was in her dream and break Sandra's arm - or worse - before she woke up completely.
It was this that finally persuaded Julia to send (numerous) letters to the director of housing, until several months later, Sandra finally moved out. Julia had been less than amused to discover that Sandra had filed a complaint about *her*.
A few days later, Debra had moved in. Debra could, at times, be just as fixated on her appearance as Sandra was, but somehow it didn't but Julia as much. Maybe it was because she didn't talk about it as much, or maybe it was because when Debra started experimenting with her appearance, the result was always fun to look at. In any case, Julia knew almost immediately that Debra was a distinct improvement over Sandra.
She didn't realize how much of an improvement until a few weeks later, when Debra started dragging her to various social engagements and club meetings, which Julia had mostly avoided in the past. So she had ended up as a member of a couple different clubs, and with a group of people she could hang out with, even if she still didn't have any close friends.
Oh well. That wasn't really anything new. Altogether, things were pretty good.
And she really ought to get a little sleep before she started class the next morning.
With a sigh, Julia rolled over and attempted to clear her mind and sleep.
End Part 1
Sorry for anyone who thought that I'd done anything too terrible to Julia at the beginning of this chapter. Briefly toyed with the idea of doing a prologue that ended at the first break, but decided I wasn't quite sadistic enough for that. Hope that you liked it, though.
The good news and bad news. I know that I haven't posted anything in... oh, about forever, and unfortunately I'm not going to be able to do much in the next several months. I just entered my senior year of college, and we're required to write a thesis, plus there's this whole entering the real world thing in 9 months that I'm worrying over. So... just so everyone knows, I'm not giving up on any unfinished stories (just The Others, I think, besides this one) - I almost have the next chapter of The Others finished, and the next of this one, but I don't know when I'll have the time to keep working on them. Thanks to everyone who's hung in there!
Marika 9/17/03
Notes:
1. Shikko is a method of basically walking in a crouch, the theory
being that any move you can perform standing can also be performed
on your knees, complete with foot movements. Not the easiest thing
to get used to, but it looks really neat.
2. Here are some examples of the type of picture I'm talking
about. I love them, but they do give you a headache after a while.
http://www.eyetricks.com/puzzles/chess.htm
http://www-cgrl.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/clipart/impossible.tribar.gif
http://www.studiolens.nl/fotografie/030-impossible.jpg
http://www.sendafriend.com/Illusions3/images/waterfall2.jpg
http://www.heritagemadison.org/optical.htm
(I really had too much fun finding those!) :)
(:./marika/mylives1)
