(no subject)

[queenofzan]

posting fic on dw like it's 2005 (i cannot remember if i ever actually posted fic on lj)

uh ethan of athos fic? twenty years later? about elli quinn? it is my firm belief you get the children you deserve

Admiral Elli Quinn was in her forties and in charge of a successful, but highly stressful, mercenary company, when her office door opened one day without prior notice, and a young man introduced himself as her son.

There was a time a cis woman like Elli couldn't have been surprised by offspring she didn't recognize without serious memory loss involved, but the invention of the uterine replicator had leveled the playing field for "surprise children". Besides, she'd known intellectually that she had children; in her younger and highly sentimental days, she had donated an entire ovary to a doctor too gay, too religious, or both, to propose having children with her in a more conventional way. He had assured her other men on his single-gender planet would make use of her genetic contribution as well, and she'd have a hundred sons she could never know.

Eli sat down in the chair across her desk from her, without an invitation. Unlike her ninety-nine other sons, highly theoretical and possibly numbering even more than ninety-nine, Eli was the son of a man she knew. He also, unlike the other ninety-nine boys raised on Athos by strangers, knew she was his mother.

"It wasn't hard to find you," he told her, very earnest for a young man who had managed to sneak his way to a mercenary admiral's private office. "Getting here was the difficult part."

"It's supposed to be," Elli said. Part of the appeal of giving Ethan Urquhart an ovary instead of an introduction to sex with women was never having to do any of the work of parenting. She'd been a soldier and a spy her whole life, and never gave much thought to children. Her contraceptive implant had only been removed to be replaced with a newer model. But here Eli EQ-1 Urquhart was, a rather attractive mix of her features and Dr. Urquhart's, unmistakably her relative. "How far behind you is your father?"

He shrugged. "A week or two," he said. "Maybe more if the Council can't agree on if he should be allowed off-planet again. Terrence might be here sooner."

Elli frowned. Terrence Cee, out in the wider galaxy again? "Why would Terrence follow you?" she asked. They wouldn't have put that telepathy complex into new cultures, would they?

"He'd Dad's D.A.," Eli said. "My other dad, on most planets, I think."

That calmed her, somewhat. The question remained of why Cee would go to Athos in the first place, but she couldn't say she was surprised Cee had succumbed to the obvious attractions of Dr. Urquhart. He'd clearly longed for the kind of domesticity he'd had with his wife, before her death. "So I take it you didn't have paternal permission for this field trip," she said. He shook his head. Perhaps Cee's influence accounted for the clever infiltration of her perimeter. Surely her troops were not so naive as to believe a teenager had to be harmless. She leaned back in her expensive padded and molded chair, without which her back acted up even more. "Why did you come here?" she asked.

"I want to join your company," he said. Some of her skepticism must have shown on her face, or somewhere, because he immediately said, "Athos's army is almost exclusively an emergency rescue force. With survival training. There's nothing to see, much less anything to do."

She probably shouldn't have been surprised her son was a thrill-seeker. That sounded an awful lot like the reasons she'd had for joining up, to get off of Kline Station. Sure, Kline was more exciting than Athos, but just as devoid of unfamiliar sights. She sighed. "How old are you, anyway?"

"Nineteen," he said. Well, Ethan had certainly been eager to start a family. He must have started the replicator as soon as the census ship landed. Unfortunately, that also meant Terrence was a legal adult both by Athosian law, and those of Jackson's Whole, which was where her fleet hailed from on the paperwork. There were few laws there that affected the running of the fleet, but that one certainly did.

She considered her options. Obviously, keeping him here where his parents--his real parents, the ones who'd raised him, not just contributed an ovary toward the project--where his family could find him was the best option. She didn't want to be responsible to Ethan and/or Terrence for losing their kid; she'd have to help track him down again anyway. Just as obviously, though, she couldn't let him join up. This was no kind of life for a kid, and it took years or battles to convince them of that. It was one thing to direct her troops into war zones for money; maybe she could have done it if Eli had shown up and joined under a false name, not introduced himself, but she couldn't send her son into battle. It sounded downright Barrayaran, and while she'd take their money, she wasn't about to change her citizenship.

What would Miles do? No, he was Barrayaran enough to send anyone willing to battle. What would Admiral Naismith have done, if he'd been any more than a figment of her and Miles's combined imagination?

Well, what did the deadbeat or absent parent always do? Make the good parent make the decision. Stall until Ethan, or Terrence, showed up to drag him back home and let them have the fight.

"You'll have to take some tests," she said. "I don't let someone risk their life without some idea they might survive."

"Okay," he said easily. "Do I get a bye for any of them for getting past your security without setting off any alarms?"

It was going to be a long week until one or more of his fathers showed up.