Categories > Anime/Manga > Gundam Wing > Child of Labored Love
I'm the girl who should have been
0 reviewsTired of living in poverty under the heel of her adoptive mother, a young girl burns her bridges to strike out on her own.
0Unrated
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing? Not mine. Original content? Mine. Can't tell the difference between the two? Then I have done my job.
Warnings: Swearing, mature issues. Heterosexual whatnot. Science. Potential for Homosexual whatnot. Kids being very, very naughty. You have been warned.
I'm the girl who should have been. I'm the daughter whose existence was so necessary, they created me in a lab and had another woman birth me, just so I could live. She was a Dragon as well, my Genji Ma. The day our colony was destroyed, she pressed her hand to her belly, already bulging with my presence, and prayed her thanks to the gods, that she had been chosen to carry the seed of our clan, to further it for one more stolen generation.
I feel stolen.
If it had been a normal birth, we would have died with the rest of our Clan. Genji Ma would have attended, and helped my mother to deliver me. She would have held her sweat-soaked hair back from her face and cried with her when I was placed in her arm to drink her sweetness. I know Genji Ma prayed every day with gratitude that it was she who carried me to term, she who labored to give me life, she who nursed me until my teeth broke. She is a jealous woman, and she would have hated my mother. As a midwife, she might never have been allowed the opportunity to have children of her own- she might have been assigned to nanny me and help my mother regain her feet, then wait upon her like the Dragon Duchess she was. When Genji Ma speaks of my mother, I can feel the hypocrisy flowing from her in heedless waves.
"She was a good woman, always best at housework and embroidery. Your mother was a jewel in the Dragons' eye- she would have been an Empress in China!" But Genji Ma hated my mother. I knew it with every fiber of my being, and I knew she exalted in her victory over the woman I never knew, like a pig delighting in shit and mud.
When I was a small child, Genji Ma told me about our family. Not mine specifically, so much. She didn't know my parents well. My mother was a noble woman, and my father a noble man. That was all I needed to know. "You have noble blood in you, Wumei- three times over!" Genji Ma spat as she spoke, around front teeth big enough for a gopher to chop wood with. Her hand would fling itself in front of my small face and her fingers would shoot up one at a time like daggers. "Born in the year of the Rabbit! Very lucky! Born in the Dragon Clan! Most prestigious Clan in all of China, Earth and Space! Born to the Changs, Dragon Nobility! You are a princess of our people!"
By the time I was seven, I understood that I was also the first, last, and only child of my generation. That made being a princess feel less fun.
We lived on Earth, in mainland China. It suited Genji Ma to stay, although we had few of the connections she insisted we were guaranteed as the last surviving members of the Dragon Clan. I was born safely into the hands of men who had been paid to oversee my earliest development... but when the money ran out, we had to find our own doctors. We sought old family ties, cousins in other clans and people who had left the family sphere generations ago. Genji Ma dragged us everywhere for a while, but her pride made her stop. We settled outside Beijing, and soon I knew my farm animals by sight, sound and smell. What money we'd been granted access to was used for my education, and to buy us a home. It was not as grand as Genji Ma liked to pretend it was. When I was younger, I believed her that we lived in a house much bigger than what 'normal' people had to make do with. I believed that we could have servants if we wanted them, but Genji Ma just happened to like keeping house. I was a fool.
School in the city, starting at age twelve, taught me that we did not live in a mansion, and that everything from my accent to my clothes labeled me a country bumpkin. For that, I hated Genji Ma. I felt she had disgraced us, and from that moment on, I became the worst type of teenager there is: An angry child, rebellious without reason, and hateful.
For the first time, I think I made Genji Ma hate me. It was the red hair dye, the eyeliner, and the black nail polish that threw her over the edge. "What do you do in school?"
"I don't go to school," I shouted without thinking, tired of her constant harping. "I stopped going months ago."
She reeled, as though she had been slapped. Why wouldn't I want to attend the most prestigious girls' school in Beijing? "But you're so good at it! Your music lessons-!"
I laughed cruelly. "I spat in the Violin Mistress' face and she kicked me out. They suspended me. So I stopped going."
"Where do you GO all day?!"
"To the city! To paint my nails and watch bad American movies and wave coyly at old men!" I grinned rakishly; I had stopped thinking. In the years since my childhood, Genji Ma had grown smaller, weaker, less imposing. She had always imposed things on me, from my diet to my heritage. It was her fault that I had no parents. Her fault that we lived in a dump outside the place where everything happened. She probably WAS my real mother, just making up stories about who she liked to think she had been. It was her delusion that the two of us could revive the Chang clan, that I could be a princess and she my aged dowager auntie who saved me from death's reach, whom I would dote upon into her old age and lavish with attention and luxuries.
That woman cowered from me in her own kitchen, her dreams of becoming mother to an empress rapidly shredding. "Wumei!"
"Sometimes I smile at them, Genji Ma," I laughed. "Sometimes I play games with them. Do you know what they want me to do sometimes? They give me things, you know... Like the eyeliner..."
My head snapped to the left. I could feel her ring biting into my skin. A memory drifted through my mind, of Genji Ma presenting the ring to a man in a government building. 'This is the Dragon's seal... I have guardianship of this girl, she is Chang Dragon...' I remembered the shame as we were turned away. Madly, I grinned again.
"Who have you become?" she screeched at me. "Who are you? You are not Wumei, you are not Chang! No child of the Dragon is so brutish! No Dragon child would ever be so selfish, stubborn, stupid-!" I wanted to slap her! I wanted to rip the ring from her finger, make her pay for insulting people who couldn't possibly understand. Instead I ran. I grabbed my book bag and I ran. From the house to the bus station, where I counted my change carefully into a ticket machine, and I lost myself in the streets of Beijing. For a while I considered doing the things I had told her I did... my I had my own pride to protect. Making a mad woman cry was one thing... spoiling myself was another.
Nevertheless... I had no money. And it was so easy...
Warnings: Swearing, mature issues. Heterosexual whatnot. Science. Potential for Homosexual whatnot. Kids being very, very naughty. You have been warned.
I'm the girl who should have been. I'm the daughter whose existence was so necessary, they created me in a lab and had another woman birth me, just so I could live. She was a Dragon as well, my Genji Ma. The day our colony was destroyed, she pressed her hand to her belly, already bulging with my presence, and prayed her thanks to the gods, that she had been chosen to carry the seed of our clan, to further it for one more stolen generation.
I feel stolen.
If it had been a normal birth, we would have died with the rest of our Clan. Genji Ma would have attended, and helped my mother to deliver me. She would have held her sweat-soaked hair back from her face and cried with her when I was placed in her arm to drink her sweetness. I know Genji Ma prayed every day with gratitude that it was she who carried me to term, she who labored to give me life, she who nursed me until my teeth broke. She is a jealous woman, and she would have hated my mother. As a midwife, she might never have been allowed the opportunity to have children of her own- she might have been assigned to nanny me and help my mother regain her feet, then wait upon her like the Dragon Duchess she was. When Genji Ma speaks of my mother, I can feel the hypocrisy flowing from her in heedless waves.
"She was a good woman, always best at housework and embroidery. Your mother was a jewel in the Dragons' eye- she would have been an Empress in China!" But Genji Ma hated my mother. I knew it with every fiber of my being, and I knew she exalted in her victory over the woman I never knew, like a pig delighting in shit and mud.
When I was a small child, Genji Ma told me about our family. Not mine specifically, so much. She didn't know my parents well. My mother was a noble woman, and my father a noble man. That was all I needed to know. "You have noble blood in you, Wumei- three times over!" Genji Ma spat as she spoke, around front teeth big enough for a gopher to chop wood with. Her hand would fling itself in front of my small face and her fingers would shoot up one at a time like daggers. "Born in the year of the Rabbit! Very lucky! Born in the Dragon Clan! Most prestigious Clan in all of China, Earth and Space! Born to the Changs, Dragon Nobility! You are a princess of our people!"
By the time I was seven, I understood that I was also the first, last, and only child of my generation. That made being a princess feel less fun.
We lived on Earth, in mainland China. It suited Genji Ma to stay, although we had few of the connections she insisted we were guaranteed as the last surviving members of the Dragon Clan. I was born safely into the hands of men who had been paid to oversee my earliest development... but when the money ran out, we had to find our own doctors. We sought old family ties, cousins in other clans and people who had left the family sphere generations ago. Genji Ma dragged us everywhere for a while, but her pride made her stop. We settled outside Beijing, and soon I knew my farm animals by sight, sound and smell. What money we'd been granted access to was used for my education, and to buy us a home. It was not as grand as Genji Ma liked to pretend it was. When I was younger, I believed her that we lived in a house much bigger than what 'normal' people had to make do with. I believed that we could have servants if we wanted them, but Genji Ma just happened to like keeping house. I was a fool.
School in the city, starting at age twelve, taught me that we did not live in a mansion, and that everything from my accent to my clothes labeled me a country bumpkin. For that, I hated Genji Ma. I felt she had disgraced us, and from that moment on, I became the worst type of teenager there is: An angry child, rebellious without reason, and hateful.
For the first time, I think I made Genji Ma hate me. It was the red hair dye, the eyeliner, and the black nail polish that threw her over the edge. "What do you do in school?"
"I don't go to school," I shouted without thinking, tired of her constant harping. "I stopped going months ago."
She reeled, as though she had been slapped. Why wouldn't I want to attend the most prestigious girls' school in Beijing? "But you're so good at it! Your music lessons-!"
I laughed cruelly. "I spat in the Violin Mistress' face and she kicked me out. They suspended me. So I stopped going."
"Where do you GO all day?!"
"To the city! To paint my nails and watch bad American movies and wave coyly at old men!" I grinned rakishly; I had stopped thinking. In the years since my childhood, Genji Ma had grown smaller, weaker, less imposing. She had always imposed things on me, from my diet to my heritage. It was her fault that I had no parents. Her fault that we lived in a dump outside the place where everything happened. She probably WAS my real mother, just making up stories about who she liked to think she had been. It was her delusion that the two of us could revive the Chang clan, that I could be a princess and she my aged dowager auntie who saved me from death's reach, whom I would dote upon into her old age and lavish with attention and luxuries.
That woman cowered from me in her own kitchen, her dreams of becoming mother to an empress rapidly shredding. "Wumei!"
"Sometimes I smile at them, Genji Ma," I laughed. "Sometimes I play games with them. Do you know what they want me to do sometimes? They give me things, you know... Like the eyeliner..."
My head snapped to the left. I could feel her ring biting into my skin. A memory drifted through my mind, of Genji Ma presenting the ring to a man in a government building. 'This is the Dragon's seal... I have guardianship of this girl, she is Chang Dragon...' I remembered the shame as we were turned away. Madly, I grinned again.
"Who have you become?" she screeched at me. "Who are you? You are not Wumei, you are not Chang! No child of the Dragon is so brutish! No Dragon child would ever be so selfish, stubborn, stupid-!" I wanted to slap her! I wanted to rip the ring from her finger, make her pay for insulting people who couldn't possibly understand. Instead I ran. I grabbed my book bag and I ran. From the house to the bus station, where I counted my change carefully into a ticket machine, and I lost myself in the streets of Beijing. For a while I considered doing the things I had told her I did... my I had my own pride to protect. Making a mad woman cry was one thing... spoiling myself was another.
Nevertheless... I had no money. And it was so easy...
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