Getting close to the end now. And thanks to Mal for suggesting Deidre Greist as the consulting mad scientist who got the ball rolling on repairing the damage.
"Hello?"
"Mrs Caroline Bernstein? My name's Barbara White, and I work for the Fenspace Convention security service." I've learned not to tell non-Fen that 'I work for Great Justice', because they tend to get the giggles. "I have some good news about your son."
A shocked gasp. "Mikey?"
"We found him. He's okay, and he wants to talk to you. I'm gonna put him on now, okay?" I passed the handset to Mike, who looked downright terrified. "Mom?" he whispered.
I slipped out of the empty office we were using to give them some privacy, just in time to hear a torrent of angry Spanish coming from the one across the hall where Tom had been talking to Cataleya's folks. The girl herself came running out of the room a moment later, still ranting, and dashed off in Mikey's general direction.
"Jesus Christ, lady," Tom complained, "what did you say to her?"
Yeah, this was going just great.
Caroline wasn't really taking the news much better. Oh, she was being quieter about it, but I could see it in her eyes on the screen, hear it in her voice as she made the occasional monosyllabic response to Mikey's nervous/excited rambling. Eventually she stammered out that she had to go and cut the connection.
"Nice to see you too, Mom!" Mikey snarled, and punched the screen hard enough to crack it. "Not only does she think I'm a freak, she thinks I'm a stupid freak!" Cataleya pulled him into a hug as he started to cry.
"Maybe she just needs time to get over the shock?" I suggested, knowing it sounded stupid even as I said it.
"Some chance," Mikey grumbled. "As long as I can remember, Mom's wanted me to be normal. Never mind that 'normal' where I went to school is dropping out in seventh grade and becoming a gangbanger. Never mind I got a B-average and the school record for fewest detentions three years running. Heck, I'm dating the hottest girl in the cheerleading squad! What more does she goddamn want?"
"Coulda been worse," Cataleya pointed out. "My mom thinks this is divine retribution for planning to celebrate my quinceañera by trading V-cards with an Episcopalian. Besides, this is Fenspace! You are normal now."
"Hey, yeah." He smiled, as much as his current body permitted. Then he gave her a look. "Were you really gonna go all the way for your quinceañera?"
She giggled. "Maaaaaybe..."
"Speaking of things to do with your bodies," Haruhi interjected, poking her head around the door, "I just got off the phone with Deidre Griest. She's en-route with a bunch of diagnostic gear. We can expect someone from the Nikaido Foundation as well, but AC Peters is otherwise occupied; she didn't say what with and I didn't ask."
Working with Deidre Griest is... Well, kind of an experience. We'd gotten to know her quite well after one of Tom's old war buddies promised to get her doctoral thesis in front of the right people at Cambridge in return for a really big favour. (There was an accident with a nuclear missile submarine, some handwavium the engineering watch-stander swore up and down he didn't put in his duffel bag and a complete CD boxset of The Navy Lark. But that's a story for another time.) She's not what quite you'd expect someone who holds the title of the First Minister of Science of the Sozvezdie Soviet to be like, but almost everything you'd expect of someone who holds the title of Chief Mad Scientist of the Order of St Grimace, except when it's more advantageous and/or amusing to play up the upper-crust Providence accent and mannerisms she's never quite shaken off.
She arrived in a 'waved white van with the VVS logo on it, accompanied by a small horde of miniature anime-girl robots who might or might not be related to the extra special AI whose existence the Soviets are trying -not entirely successfully- to keep on the down-low. Cataleya declared them "the cutest things [ever!" and grabbed one at random to hug it.
"Knew that was gonna happen," Deidre snorted, tugging off a Red Stars baseball cap. This month's hair colour turned out to be white-blonde with pink highlights. "Hi there Babs, Tom. These our patients?"
"Yes ma'am," Adam replied.
"Great. Lemme get my wrench."
"Uh..."
"Relax, kid. If Peterson had half a brain you won't be capable of feeling pain from this."
"I'm open to persuadin' that he didn't," Adam muttered.
"Might as well start with me," Paul suggested. "Ain't got nothin' below my neck 'cept memories anyway."
"Less plastic crap in the way of the interesting parts, too," she agreed, sounding way too cheerful about getting her hands on a new kind of android to take apart. "Let's see..."
"Uh, do you mind if we do this without an audience?" Paul suggested.
"You need to work on that bedside manner now you're finally getting to call yourself a Doctor, you know that?" I sighed.
"Wrong kinda doctor for that, Barbie!"
"You keep calling me that and I'll start calling you Dee," I warned.
"Try it!"
"Why don't we let Deidre get on with her job, hmmm?" Tom suggested. "Frankie just got through to... their dad's secretary, apparently their parents are on Stellvia for a holiday."
"And you need me along for the ride because you're going to spend the trip hiding in the cockpit hoping Leda won't come tear you a new asshole," I replied dryly.
"She's just pissed off that I did more to get Noah and Aki talking again in one afternoon than she has in several years."
"By calling him a shitty father, starting a barfight in Meg's, getting stupid drunk after deciding you were best of friends now," and how the fuck does that work? Honestly, I spent the first twenty-five years of my life living as a man and I still don't understand 'em... "and going on a bar-crawl from L5 to Helium before getting tossed in the drunk-tank."
"Don't knock it, it worked."
You know the really aggravating part? It kinda did.
In the event, we didn't have to go further than the docking bay. Frankie's parents were waiting for us, accompanied by Noah himself. "Haruhi called," he said by way of explanation. "Mr and Mrs Benson, this is Troubleshooters White and Rutley. They were the ones who found your child."
They were older than I'd expected, closer to Tom's age than mine, and had enough taste not to try to blend in by dressing like an upper middle-class Earthsider's idea of a typical Fen. (As if there even is such a thing!) Mr Benson was ISO-standard wealthy white suburbanite on his day off; button-down shirt, sweater and designer jeans. His wife looked vaguely South Asian, and a lot more bohemian in a long denim skirt and floatly green silk blouse. I guessed they had one hell of a "how we met" story.
Social dynamics aside, they reacted like parents everywhere. "Is Frankie alright?" Mrs Benson demanded, sounding scared. "Can we go see faer?"
"And have you got a lead on the bastard who did this?" her husband added.
"Frankie's alive, safe and in pretty good spirits considering all fae's been through," I replied. "Faer condition... Well, it could be a lot better, but we'll talk about that on the way. And the perpetrator's name and picture has been sent to every law-enforcement agency in the system. If he's alive, we'll find him. Now, would you two like to step onboard? We'll take you straight there."
"Frankie wanted to hold the party at ours," Mr Benson told me, staring into his coffee cup. "We've got a pool house bigger than Caroline's whole apartment, could have invited their entire homeroom class. But Michael wouldn't have it, said he just wanted his real friends around him. So they went out for a pizza just like normal kids, and then they were gonna come back to ours and we'd have a huge birthday dinner, with Caroline and Cataleya's parents. But they never came home..."
"It wasn't your fault, Mr Benson. It wasn't anybody's fault except that creep Peterson's. They had a responsible adult with them the whole time, and he did everything he reasonably could."
"I wanted to loan him my taser," Benson muttered. "Sara wouldn't let me, said Adam was too young to be carrying that kind of thing."
"Wouldn't have helped. I saw the backroom where it went down, it wasn't much bigger than a walk-in closet; Adam would've been better off with a quarter-roll, even if Peterson didn't get the drop on him."
"I know, I know," he sighed. "But..."
"What's done is done," I replied. "And what matters is that Frankie is alive, and safe, and no more messed up in the head than I'd expect a genderfluid kid who goes to public school to be."
"Agender," said Benson, with a hint of a smile. "Not genderfluid, agender. And not genderqueer either. Fae gets tetchy if you get your terminology wrong, and never mind the fact you can ask ten GSM people the difference and get fifteen different answers."
"Oh, I know how that goes," I laughed, glancing over at Tom in the cockpit as he carried on an animated conversation with Benson's wife in Hindi. Bringing my resolutely straight cismale boyfriend along as a plus one for a post-Pride march meetup with the rest of my old trans support group wasn't quite the most surreal experience of my life to date, but it's definitely in the top ten.
"Hello?"
"Mrs Caroline Bernstein? My name's Barbara White, and I work for the Fenspace Convention security service." I've learned not to tell non-Fen that 'I work for Great Justice', because they tend to get the giggles. "I have some good news about your son."
A shocked gasp. "Mikey?"
"We found him. He's okay, and he wants to talk to you. I'm gonna put him on now, okay?" I passed the handset to Mike, who looked downright terrified. "Mom?" he whispered.
I slipped out of the empty office we were using to give them some privacy, just in time to hear a torrent of angry Spanish coming from the one across the hall where Tom had been talking to Cataleya's folks. The girl herself came running out of the room a moment later, still ranting, and dashed off in Mikey's general direction.
"Jesus Christ, lady," Tom complained, "what did you say to her?"
Yeah, this was going just great.
Caroline wasn't really taking the news much better. Oh, she was being quieter about it, but I could see it in her eyes on the screen, hear it in her voice as she made the occasional monosyllabic response to Mikey's nervous/excited rambling. Eventually she stammered out that she had to go and cut the connection.
"Nice to see you too, Mom!" Mikey snarled, and punched the screen hard enough to crack it. "Not only does she think I'm a freak, she thinks I'm a stupid freak!" Cataleya pulled him into a hug as he started to cry.
"Maybe she just needs time to get over the shock?" I suggested, knowing it sounded stupid even as I said it.
"Some chance," Mikey grumbled. "As long as I can remember, Mom's wanted me to be normal. Never mind that 'normal' where I went to school is dropping out in seventh grade and becoming a gangbanger. Never mind I got a B-average and the school record for fewest detentions three years running. Heck, I'm dating the hottest girl in the cheerleading squad! What more does she goddamn want?"
"Coulda been worse," Cataleya pointed out. "My mom thinks this is divine retribution for planning to celebrate my quinceañera by trading V-cards with an Episcopalian. Besides, this is Fenspace! You are normal now."
"Hey, yeah." He smiled, as much as his current body permitted. Then he gave her a look. "Were you really gonna go all the way for your quinceañera?"
She giggled. "Maaaaaybe..."
"Speaking of things to do with your bodies," Haruhi interjected, poking her head around the door, "I just got off the phone with Deidre Griest. She's en-route with a bunch of diagnostic gear. We can expect someone from the Nikaido Foundation as well, but AC Peters is otherwise occupied; she didn't say what with and I didn't ask."
Working with Deidre Griest is... Well, kind of an experience. We'd gotten to know her quite well after one of Tom's old war buddies promised to get her doctoral thesis in front of the right people at Cambridge in return for a really big favour. (There was an accident with a nuclear missile submarine, some handwavium the engineering watch-stander swore up and down he didn't put in his duffel bag and a complete CD boxset of The Navy Lark. But that's a story for another time.) She's not what quite you'd expect someone who holds the title of the First Minister of Science of the Sozvezdie Soviet to be like, but almost everything you'd expect of someone who holds the title of Chief Mad Scientist of the Order of St Grimace, except when it's more advantageous and/or amusing to play up the upper-crust Providence accent and mannerisms she's never quite shaken off.
She arrived in a 'waved white van with the VVS logo on it, accompanied by a small horde of miniature anime-girl robots who might or might not be related to the extra special AI whose existence the Soviets are trying -not entirely successfully- to keep on the down-low. Cataleya declared them "the cutest things [ever!" and grabbed one at random to hug it.
"Knew that was gonna happen," Deidre snorted, tugging off a Red Stars baseball cap. This month's hair colour turned out to be white-blonde with pink highlights. "Hi there Babs, Tom. These our patients?"
"Yes ma'am," Adam replied.
"Great. Lemme get my wrench."
"Uh..."
"Relax, kid. If Peterson had half a brain you won't be capable of feeling pain from this."
"I'm open to persuadin' that he didn't," Adam muttered.
"Might as well start with me," Paul suggested. "Ain't got nothin' below my neck 'cept memories anyway."
"Less plastic crap in the way of the interesting parts, too," she agreed, sounding way too cheerful about getting her hands on a new kind of android to take apart. "Let's see..."
"Uh, do you mind if we do this without an audience?" Paul suggested.
"You need to work on that bedside manner now you're finally getting to call yourself a Doctor, you know that?" I sighed.
"Wrong kinda doctor for that, Barbie!"
"You keep calling me that and I'll start calling you Dee," I warned.
"Try it!"
"Why don't we let Deidre get on with her job, hmmm?" Tom suggested. "Frankie just got through to... their dad's secretary, apparently their parents are on Stellvia for a holiday."
"And you need me along for the ride because you're going to spend the trip hiding in the cockpit hoping Leda won't come tear you a new asshole," I replied dryly.
"She's just pissed off that I did more to get Noah and Aki talking again in one afternoon than she has in several years."
"By calling him a shitty father, starting a barfight in Meg's, getting stupid drunk after deciding you were best of friends now," and how the fuck does that work? Honestly, I spent the first twenty-five years of my life living as a man and I still don't understand 'em... "and going on a bar-crawl from L5 to Helium before getting tossed in the drunk-tank."
"Don't knock it, it worked."
You know the really aggravating part? It kinda did.
In the event, we didn't have to go further than the docking bay. Frankie's parents were waiting for us, accompanied by Noah himself. "Haruhi called," he said by way of explanation. "Mr and Mrs Benson, this is Troubleshooters White and Rutley. They were the ones who found your child."
They were older than I'd expected, closer to Tom's age than mine, and had enough taste not to try to blend in by dressing like an upper middle-class Earthsider's idea of a typical Fen. (As if there even is such a thing!) Mr Benson was ISO-standard wealthy white suburbanite on his day off; button-down shirt, sweater and designer jeans. His wife looked vaguely South Asian, and a lot more bohemian in a long denim skirt and floatly green silk blouse. I guessed they had one hell of a "how we met" story.
Social dynamics aside, they reacted like parents everywhere. "Is Frankie alright?" Mrs Benson demanded, sounding scared. "Can we go see faer?"
"And have you got a lead on the bastard who did this?" her husband added.
"Frankie's alive, safe and in pretty good spirits considering all fae's been through," I replied. "Faer condition... Well, it could be a lot better, but we'll talk about that on the way. And the perpetrator's name and picture has been sent to every law-enforcement agency in the system. If he's alive, we'll find him. Now, would you two like to step onboard? We'll take you straight there."
"Frankie wanted to hold the party at ours," Mr Benson told me, staring into his coffee cup. "We've got a pool house bigger than Caroline's whole apartment, could have invited their entire homeroom class. But Michael wouldn't have it, said he just wanted his real friends around him. So they went out for a pizza just like normal kids, and then they were gonna come back to ours and we'd have a huge birthday dinner, with Caroline and Cataleya's parents. But they never came home..."
"It wasn't your fault, Mr Benson. It wasn't anybody's fault except that creep Peterson's. They had a responsible adult with them the whole time, and he did everything he reasonably could."
"I wanted to loan him my taser," Benson muttered. "Sara wouldn't let me, said Adam was too young to be carrying that kind of thing."
"Wouldn't have helped. I saw the backroom where it went down, it wasn't much bigger than a walk-in closet; Adam would've been better off with a quarter-roll, even if Peterson didn't get the drop on him."
"I know, I know," he sighed. "But..."
"What's done is done," I replied. "And what matters is that Frankie is alive, and safe, and no more messed up in the head than I'd expect a genderfluid kid who goes to public school to be."
"Agender," said Benson, with a hint of a smile. "Not genderfluid, agender. And not genderqueer either. Fae gets tetchy if you get your terminology wrong, and never mind the fact you can ask ten GSM people the difference and get fifteen different answers."
"Oh, I know how that goes," I laughed, glancing over at Tom in the cockpit as he carried on an animated conversation with Benson's wife in Hindi. Bringing my resolutely straight cismale boyfriend along as a plus one for a post-Pride march meetup with the rest of my old trans support group wasn't quite the most surreal experience of my life to date, but it's definitely in the top ten.