She was in between nannies at the moment, which meant that Lady Anne had found no practical choice other than to bring her ward back to the office with her after physical therapy.

    And the Preventer offices were... Marimeia was quite sure that if any of its members actually left the building to go home at the time he or she was supposed to on paper, her or his coworkers would gather immediately, asking "are you sick?" and "are you sure you're all right?"

    Moreover, while Preventer did all sorts of valuable and necessary work, none of the valuable and necessary work at its headquarters was the sort that is interesting for someone else to watch. A person can only watch someone else read messages, for instance, for so often before becoming heartily bored with the whole situation.

    Marimeia was heartily bored.

    She had done her homework. She had read ahead all the way through her language arts textbook -- and been less than impressed with the general quality of the stories in it. She had even done her math homework.

    Marimeia held math to be on the same level as physical therapy -- necessary evils, true, but with no other redeeming value. They were not fun. They were boring. Physical therapy HURT.

    She did them, of course. She had to do the math if she wanted to go on with the accelerated schooling. She had to do the physical therapy if she ever wanted to walk again.

    But it didn't mean she couldn't complain. Loudly.

    Except when Anne was in a meeting.

    As she was now.

    Having left Marimeia to sit in her office and stare at the indifferently healthy potted plant.

    Marimeia was booooorrrrrred.

    Anne did not like to be disturbed during meetings, unless it was something Direly Urgent.

    Asking "Can I wander around the building and see if Mr. Chang or somebody has time to speak to me?" was almost certainly not Direly Urgent.

    So Marimeia didn't bother to ask before laboriously turning her wheelchair around and taking off.

    She could actually get a pretty good speed going in the long straight hallways, too. It was too bad that she had the folding wheelchair and not the automated one -- the combination of long deserted corridor and miniature "car" would have been irresistible.

    She slowed down to a "decorous pace" well before reaching Mr. Chang's door, of course.

    Anne was... maternal, Marimeia had decided. Relena-nee had said once that Lady Anne was a fairly autocratic brand of maternal, but Marimeia couldn't really recall anyone who'd been maternal to her before, so she didn't exactly have anything to compare Anne-maternality with.

    Marimeia rather liked it.

    Relena-nee was big-sisterly, if that was a word, or older-female-cousinly, which almost certainly wasn't a word but ought to be. Often a rather distracted sister or cousin, of course, one who didn't always have time for her --- but she was used to people not having time for her. Relena-nee, at least, did her best to make time to talk to her, to listen and commune without letting her own job suffer.

    "Even if they only expect you to be a figurehead," Relena had said over one hurried dinner of leftover turkey casserole -- Anne had let her cook go the first or second time Preventer had had to slash its budget -- "they drop all the tools in your lap, and you can't help but learn how they work as you go through the motions of using them. And once you learn just what you can do with them -- just how much total idiocy and stupid senseless accidents and unintentional mistakes you can smooth over and almost make disappear -- just how much you can HELP -- well, how could I ever put them down?"

    "I should hope you at least do for long enough to eat and sleep," Anne had said tartly. "Human beings were not meant to function on a twenty-eight-hour workday."

    "I thought you said my father did that a lot," Marimeia had said.

    Anne had looked even more like the pre-Rocket Age usual picture of a librarian or lady schoolteacher, even without the hair buns. "Treize-sama should not have been doing so, either. If it hadn't been for the war, he would probably have had a nervous breakdown."

    "Is that when you think you're a banana tree?"

    "No, Mari-chan, of course not. It's when you collapse and your hands are shaking too badly to hold a pen and you look at words and they don't make sense, and you have to go away for a long time and rest because you feel like a rubber band that's been stretched far too tightly for far too long."

    "Have you had one, Anne?"

    "Three. And they didn't get better as they went along."

    The following weekend they had taken the day off, all three of them, and gone to a metropark to sit by the lake and feed the ducks and gambol over the playground as if all three of them were Marimeia's age. They'd even had a thing there called a tire swing, and Relena-nee had pushed her around and down and up and sideways until the young woman had declared that she'd be sick to her stomach if she had to watch Marimeia for ten more seconds. Poor Relena-nee; it must be awful to have such an oversensitive stomach.

    But Mr. Chang wasn't like them -- well, he was a man, of course, but it was more than that. He didn't treat Marimeia like a daughter, or a sister, or a cousin. Mr. Chang was impressive. He was brave and honorable and loyal to people instead of principles and a good fighter with a sword, and he respected her, Marimeia. She would have forgotten all about walking ever again and chewed the fingers off her left hand before doing anything to lose that respect.

    She could have watched him for a whole hour -- even if he were doing boring office stuff, he had his own habits of doing it. He never made extra movements -- just smooth, flowing ones that got the job done, probably something he'd learned in sword practice. He tapped his seal against the surface of the ink pad, rather than press it deeply in. Every so often, he slid two fingers under his pigtail and rubbed them in small circles, probably to keep from headaches -- Marimeia had tried it once, and it really did make her head feel better, less tired.

    And so she rolled herself very quietly to his doorway, raising a hand to knock before realizing that the door was already partly open and that voices were coming from it.

    "You don't know." Mr. Chang sounded disgusted and as if he didn't believe it.

    Whoever else was in the room, their answer wasn't loud enough for Marimeia to hear anything more than a murmur.

    "Well, find out!" Mr. Chang had made a whip of his voice. "Presumably that is within your limited capabilities?"

    The murmur this time sounded Small and Sorry, like Rabbit when Tigger finally found him.

    Obviously Mr. Chang was busy with *important* stuff, and wouldn't have any time for her, Marimeia.

    She sighed and rolled on down the hall, hoping to find somebody who wasn't too busy.

    Two corners, one awkward flight up in an elevator that really wasn't big enough for a wheelchair to turn around in, and half a corridor later, she heard music.

    The song sounded as if it was moaning "Livin' in the fridge," which was perfectly ridiculous, so she rolled closer to see what it really was.

    As she drew nearer to an open door, she could hear that the singer was crooning "Can't stop the mold from growin'... LIVIN' IN THE FRIDGE," which still didn't make sense.

    So she peered around the door, and was treated to the sight of Duo Maxwell somehow managing to lean back in one of those uncomfortable one-legged wheeled chairs (although having his feet up on the desk was probably helping), tapping one heel in time to the music, crumpling up paper into balls, and tossing them in the general direction of the wastebasket.

    "What on earth are you doing?"

    He almost doubled up, nearly fell off the chair, and only kept himself from doing so by some very jerky acrobatics that involved his hands and hair flailing like wild things and made Marimeia very glad she wasn't in the room, much less range.

    "Sh-eesh, Mari-chan! Give a guy a heart attack, why don't you?"

    "I'm bored," Marimeia said, more in explanation than apology.

    "What a coincidence," Duo said. "So am I."

    "I don't have a nanny yet and I have to wait in the office and Anne's in a meeting and Mr. Chang and everyone are busy."

    "They called us down here to interview us and keep putting it off and rescheduling it and thinking of more stuff after the meetings are over and Hilde's convinced that the salvage yard will magically convert itself into The Utter Chaos Under My Bed if she isn't there every second and decided to go buy picture frames -- do you have any idea how boring picture frame stores are?"

    "They can't be boringer than Anne's office." Marimeia rolled into the office.

    "That's not a word, and yes they can."

    "How do you know?"

    "Words ending in '-ing' are actually verbs disguised as nouns," Duo said mock-pedantically, "and you can't stick '-er's onto verbs. Oh, this one's not as good." He tapped a button on his computer, and the song obligingly changed from the eminently forgettable whatever-it-was that had replaced the fridge thing to a chorus of "Harvey, Harvey, Harvey the Wonderhamster."

    "I meant about the stores."

    "I've been there."

    Duo was -- he was rather like Uncle Freddy in the book about the summerhouse, Marimeia thought, or maybe Hakubi Washuu, except for being a guy -- a large obstacle, but not one that couldn't be gotten over.

    He wasn't respectable. Wait, that sounded wrong. He was grown up, but he wasn't a grown-up grown-up. He was fun. He was interesting. He -- he Thought of Things.

    "Duo?"

    "Yes?"

    "Tell me a story."

    "A story?" Duo shut the music off, swung his feet down, and straightened up, laying a finger beside his lips. "Hmm... okay, this is the story of Prince Dorothy and the Dear Little Valkyrie."