Title: Between II - The Long Walk 5/10

Author: ebonbird (ebonbird@hotmail.com)

Rating: PG

Summary: This is the sequel to "Between" which is

available @ http://ebonbird.tripod.com/stories.htm.

Though based upon episodes 89-104 of Gatchaman I this

story only loosely follows those events.

Contributing tunes: Time Has Come Today - The Chambers

Brothers; Pusher Man - Curtis Mayfield; Spanish Eyes - Back

Street Boys; Never Can Say Goodbye - Jackson Five; All I

Want - Angel Moon; Plenty - Sarah McLachlan; Mighty Love -

The Spinners; Gymnopedie 1, 2 and 3 - Eric Satie; Could I Be

Your Girl - Jann Arden; Ooh Child - The 5 Stairsteps; Paint It

Black - The Rolling Stones.

Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me. They

are used without permission. Tatsunuko, Co. Leave me

be, this is flattery.

Comments & Criticism: yes, please.



Thanks to BeckyD, Lori McDonald, Naa Dei-Nikoi, John

Duffin, Sal, Stephanie Wilson, Wildcat & Kim Wylie

for beta-reading and encouragement.



******************

5.



In Nambu's offices Jun worked fast, kneeling on the floor

in front of his desk. Her tapered fingers, stained and

scarred, their short nails buffed to a high shine, tapping

command codes into the terminal via the alpha numeric

spider designed to bypass the touch identification

function of the keypad while the other hand, writing so

fast it was cramping, took notes.



Nambu gave Jun free run of his offices, the picture in the

lowest left hand drawer of his desk the reason why. The

frame was oval, badly spot-welded metal, not quite hiding

the ragged edges of the photo. The child was filthy, three

but looking eighteen months because of malnutrition.

She'd been tied to a rusted out highchair, waste running

down her legs and pooling on the ground. She had

enormous eyes and her smile, despite the squalor, was

sweet.



Jun knew the story behind the picture well, having

overheard it enough times when Nambu was assuring an

associate of her loyalty and discretion.



The picture had been torn out of a group shot of girl

children left to die in a state run orphanage.



She'd been his cappuccino-a-day baby. A little girl he'd

sponsored after seeing an advert that featured hundreds

of abandoned children who could be clothed and fed for

the price of a cup of coffee each day.



Not many people traveled far from home in that part of

the world in those days. Gangs, unexploded mines, sky-

rocketing fuel costs and dead roads and bridges that

were not going to be rebuilt by any two-year plan made

travel untenable for most. Only armed forces engineers,

relief workers, and non-governmental organization

visionaries like Kozaburo Nambu, went on impromptu

road trips.



Nambu had been hard at work on a damn in the lower

Jupiter valley when he realized that he wasn't more than

a hundred klicks away from the Small World facility

where his little girl lived.



Nambu was unexpected, and he wandered the grounds

before stumbling on the room where girls had been left to

die. The smell had hit him first, and the silence. Little

children shouldn't have ever been so quiet. Nambu told

people it was fate that he found her when he did. That

he'd fallen in love with the purity of her smile. That even if

she hadn't been the girl in the photograph back in his

home in Utoland, he'd have still rigged a baby-sack out of

his shirt and put her in it.



Via satellite uplink, Nambu called in many favors and

shut that orphanage down. The scandal was in the

papers and on the net for weeks, and in the end, Jun was

a ward of Kozaburo Nambu, and Nambu was a key

investor in a new children's relief organization with offices

and facilities all over southeast Asia and Utoland.



Jun, no last name, none was recorded and Nambu never

gave her one, was an arrow in his quiver, a living weapon

forged to act on his command. Her education, her skills,

her experience were a reflection of his values and needs.

Jun did not begrudge him this. She had only to look at

that picture in his desk and imagine her life without him.

But in the course of 36 hours Jun had discovered that

she could deny Joe nothing. Even if, especially if, he did

not ask. And so, hastily, heart in her throat, stomach

churning with what she knew to be betrayal, she excised

all digital evidence of Joe's flight from headquarters.







******************

end 5/10







"I hate women who say pretty=stupid.

They're really misogynistic men in drag."

~~~BeckyD



ebonbird's fan fic cache http://ebonbird.tripod.com

the storm archive http://ebonbird.tripod.com/stormarchive.html





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