Genetics

My father isn't the most supportive of the theory of colonization after Mars.  Or aliens.  Or anything that would get me close enough to telling him what I've discovered about myself and my mother.

My parents divorced when I was 2.  It was a violent time, filled with screaming and shouting and physical violence.  I can remember my mother holding me when I was born, I can remember smacking my head against a coffee table, I can remember learning how to talk, but when it comes to life with my father, my mind draws blanks.  All I see is a haze of red, some guy who most definitely wasn't my father but looked like him, and all I hear is the noise.  The clearest memory is of this man standing over me where I'm laying on my back, crying and squirming because I hear Mom screaming, and he has a knife above me.  Then Mom throws herself over me and shouts, "You can take me but not my baby!"  He looks at us, lowers the knife and leaves.

I grew up learning to not trust my father, and that was the only memory I carried of him.  I do remember looking at his picture when I was little and asking if he was going to come home tonight.  Mom would start sniffing and she'd tell me very quietly that he doesn't come home anymore, he has other places to be.  I asked for a few times but then decided he really wasn't coming home.  I saw him a few times, once when I was three, once on my seventh birthday and once on my eighth.  Then we moved and I never saw him again until three years ago when I found him on Facebook.

But Jake.... Jake explained a LOT of things to me, and the more I looked into it the more I discovered what he was saying is true.

My father had a double.  Almost all of us have one; mine got pregnant over a year ago so I don't think she has her job anymore.  Jake was Tristan's double.  And my father's double was the one who tried to kill me and my mother.

There is a continuous pattern with Gorans and half-breeds that Tristan and I are coming across.  Every Goran and half-breed we've found has been taken from their father.  Some were taken from both parents.  My father loved us so much, he loved my mother with every fiber of his being.  I was his gift, his pride, his absolute happiness.  But when he had to go on missions, when he had to save lives (and Mom didn't know because he was in the Organization, which has remained secret for over 20 years), his double stepped in and attacked us, tried to kill us.  Dad would come home to a mess and to Mom yelling at him to get out, to leave us alone, and he didn't understand what had happened.  Mom says that whenever he held me, I would start crying hysterically.  It broke his heart that I didn't know him.

He left for a long while, where to know one knew.  They were divorced, Mom was so hurt and angry and confused, and there was a man in church who offered to help take care of us.  He moved in so fast, so cleverly, and they were married only 6 months after my father left.

3 months after the wedding, Dad returned to fix things with Mom.

I remember that day.  For some reason it stuck in my mind for the rest of my life.  He walked down the small hill to the church sanctuary where Mom and I were sitting outside.  I hugged him, I was so happy to see him, I knew it was my daddy.  He hugged me back and told me he wanted to talk with mommy, and I ran to tell my stepfather that my daddy was here.  I didn't know.... Had I known then what I know now, I would have begged Dad to save the day, make Mom go back with him, for everyone's sake just fix it all.  But I was so innocent, so trusting.  The three of them stood, talking, and I just wanted to be with my daddy.

"Honey, you shouldn't call me daddy anymore," he told me before he left.

"Why not?"

"Because...."  I couldn't tell something was wrong, but he was trying very hard to smile and be a good friend.  "You can call me Clarky.  Want to do that?"

I wanted to call him "daddy" but I also wanted to be his good girl, so I nodded.  I tried it out but it seemed strange.  He waved to me before he vanished over the hill, and something inside me just felt wrong about the whole thing.

Well, long story short, in the span of ten years my stepfather turned out to be an abusive bastard who we had to run from, now with my little sister (for whom I am grateful, despite the idiotic mistake of marrying the guy), and to make matters worse it has recently come to light that he may have been abusing her in the worst ways.

After all hell broke loose with the douchebag (who shall remain nameless), I started looking for my father.  He HAD to be better than this.  But nothing came up, no records, no trail, nothing.  At some point it was thought that he may have died.

Jake was the one who told me.  Actually I think it was more of a slip that turned into a lengthy explanation.  According to the stories, my father became a trainer for new recruits into the Organization, teaching them how to fight and survive with strength and skills, brains and brawn.  One of his students was a young boy, rebellious and stubborn, who quickly became a favorite.  They bonded, and my father became like a father to him.  Tristan admired, looked up to and trusted him, and my father made sure to make him the best in life and in war.

All that time, he was right here.  I was looking for him all over the world and the whole time he was only a few towns away.  When I moved, so did he.  When my family moved across state about 8 years ago, to Tristan's hometown (talk about fate...), my father requested to become a regular agent and to work with Tristan in the area.

They refused.

Jake said that the fear has never been about what I can do or who I am, it's about what I could do and who I could become.  If I learned from my father, I would be unstoppable.  I am the only agent we know if who does not have a tracking device imbedded in the neck; one switch can literally turn a person off and drop them like flies, but not me.  My father always said that he obeyed God's law above man's, he would obey commands only up to a point.  I had broadcasted the same morale, and without knowing my own father.  I guess people connected the dots and discovered my father's traits, everything that made him incredible, was genetically passed to me.  And this time, there was Goran blood mixed in.

To this day I will swear that my father's double is the guilty one.  It took Tristan a long time to entertain the thought that my father might actually be innocent of our commander's family slaughter.  I can't imagine the horror and pain of coming home to find your wife and two small children murdered.  Even moreso, I can't imagine in a million lifetimes my father committing the act.  They had his fingerprints, his DNA, everything to convict him of genocide.  But my father, my real father, would bawl his eyes out if he hit a rabbit on the road.  How in the world could he harm a family, let alone children?

They gave him two options.  Erase his memory of everything, including his years of work, and live a normal life as a civilian, or imprisonment/execution.  He took the memory loss.  Now he has a beautiful wife and two small children, a great job and our relationship is amazing.  When we found each other after so many years, we spent Thanksgiving together and it was one of the best times of my life.  He was my father, my dad, my daddy again.  And he wanted me to call him all those names, and when I did his eyes would sparkle with emotion and I knew everything was right again.

Now when I need to talk to him, to find out what he knows, he skirts the issue.  Tristan and I determined long ago that the memory loss either failed or was complete bull.  He won't say it, he tries not to let on, but Dad knows waaaaaayyyy more than he admits.  He has perfect aim with my little brother's nerf gun.  I'm pretty sure average medical techs do not know how to shoot the petals off a daisy across the room with a sucker dart.

Can I tell him what I can do?  Should I?  I need my father, I need to know if he knew about my mother all along, if he can train me how to control myself so I don't blow up a bank or whatnot.  He worked with Tristan and Sean and Elijah and so he KNOWS how to handle who and what we are.

I just don't know if he will.