The Fine Line

Disclaimer: Simba, Simba, what do you see? Everything the sun touches, will someday be yours.....**cough** ahem, everything your eyes see, process and transfer into thoughts of words and story, is mine. I own all rights, and you cannot take them without permission. Everything contained herein is, however, completely fiction. Any resemblance to real or imaginary people and places is purely freaky coincidence.

A/N: on to chapter 5 where I will start including both halves each chapter, please, please review! I need reviews!


(Vincent)
And so I spent the next six years living in what was incorrectly called my aunt’s ‘Tokyo House.’ Tokyo Building would have been a better name since it was 28 stories tall. Though truthfully we only occupied the last five and the rest were offices of the company she worked for. I was given a ‘room’ that made up the whole of the 23rd floor, because as Aunt Jem explained, she was hardly ever home anyway and she’d rather I wrecked my own things then hers. I think I saw my aunt a total of five times for the first three years I lived there. I don’t know if that was because she wasn’t actually in Tokyo, or because she didn’t want to change her lifestyle to include a teenager who couldn’t party and play all night long like she did because he was studying for midterms, but I didn’t mind. I liked having the time alone to think…and to practice piano.
I was told later by one of my aunt’s psychiatrist friends that most people who had gone through something as traumatizing as their mother dying would probably completely rid themselves of anything that reminded them of the experience, but I redoubled my efforts to learn how to sing and how to play the difficult and intricate pieces mom loved most. I entered, and won, every competition I could, and with an international business tycoon like my aunt as a guardian to foot the plane bill, that was quite a few. I was even asked several times if I wanted to sign a contract with this musical company or that record business but I always refused. I knew, because Aunty Jem told me, that when I graduated I was expected to join the Company and they would decide where I went to college, if I went to college. I didn’t mind. I still had a lot of pent up anger at him that I needed to get rid of and as a bodyguard of one of the higher ups I would get to kick as much ass as I wanted and get paid a doctor’s salary to do it. Before I learned that little tidbit I’d wondered why Robert had put up with Helga and my Aunt, always assuming that he was secretly in love with one of them or something. (Which he is, with my Aunt, and he’s even the father of my two cousins) Now it made more sense and didn’t seem like such an unreasonable option.
That didn’t mean that I neglected my studies of course. Hell, even if I had wanted to slack off and enjoy the life of the rich and famous, Jem’s Tokyo associates wouldn’t have let me. I may not have seen my aunt very often, but she assigned me my own personal bodyguard (who was more like a babysitter) that reported my every move to her. In addition to Frank, the guard, there was also a whole squadron of completely unnecessary maids and butlers just waiting to report any misbehavior to dear old Aunty Jem, not to mention all of her ‘friends’ dropping in every other day to see ‘how I was getting on’ with life in another country, and my cousins, Butterfly and Anna, and their husbands, Jeremy and Osiris respectively, also swinging over whenever they wanted and helping me with all sorts of projects. Because Butterfly and Jeremy were in a rock band together and because Osiris and Anna were goth punks, most of these projects involved dropping splatterable items from high distances and making jars of peanut butter explode. So, really,(explosions aside) I had no choice but to be an honors student/student council president/president-of-various-clubs. Again, I didn’t mind. Mom had been just as strict with my studies.
At first, it hurt a lot to think of mom, but slowly, and with a lot of forced therapy sessions with Jem’s friends, I stopped breaking things every time someone mentioned her. Of course, I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry at him. Perfect Aaron. I still blamed him for everything (because it was easier then blaming myself, according to the psychiatrists) but my greatest desire did stop being to strangle the life out of him the next time we met, so I guess I had made some progress. Still, I knew that if I ever did see him again I probably wouldn’t be able to stop myself from breaking his nose or maybe just a few fingers. I thought he deserved it just for being so god damned perfect.
So, I graduated at the top of my class, which must have pissed everyone off because I was just a stupid American, signed a massive contract with the Company Guard and then I settled back to wait for assignments. I was part of the Company now, and what the Company wanted, the Company got.

The Company, originally known as Maher International, was what some people called a mafia, others a syndicate and yet others a sanctuary. I, like Frank, called it a job. They paid well, they took care of you and your family and unless you were part of ‘the guard’ the work you did was completely normal. You made shoes, pies, computer programs, ant farms; anything they needed from you. The Company pulled the strings behind everything from public libraries to the United Nations and they had offices in every corner of the globe. Working for the Company meant your life was set and you didn’t have to worry about anything ever again.

The Company was run by two people known most commonly as ‘The Bosses.’ The most well known ‘Boss’ was Lilliana Maher. She had inherited the company from her father Ian Maher when she was 18. Only certain employees knew all of the details behind her young ascension to power, but it was said among those more inclined to racy gossip that her parents had been assassinated by someone who wanted the Company, and Lilliana, for himself. When I first started at the Guards, I didn’t believe that side of the story, but after a few years of having to intervene for lesser members of the Company during minor power struggles, it seemed less crazy. Either way, she was a great business leader, but she hadn’t always been.
Because Lilliana had been so young when she had taken over, and didn’t know the first thing about running such an intense business, she had given half of the company to someone who had been a mentor and friend after the death of her parents. I didn’t know until I was summoned to the top floor a few months after graduation to sign my contract that the ‘someone’ was my aunty Jem. Apparently there were a lot of things I didn’t know about my Dad’s side of the family. I saw a lot more of her after that though, since she gave me all of my assignments personally.


(Aaron)
After 7 years of only hearing my brother speak to tell me someone was going to die, his sudden aptitude for the spoken word was a bit shocking…or maybe it was all the things he was telling me. Like how our parents weren’t really druggies; they had been researchers in the chemical development division of a place he kept calling ‘The Company’ with capitals and emphasis. How what had appeared to be a drug overdose was actually a result of some experiment they had been working on since I was born. Unfortunately, the fumes created by the chemicals they were testing had side effects similar to taking mass amounts of narcotics, and, according to Matthew, the paramedics who had found our parents had mistaken the lab equipment for a highly sophisticated ‘meth lab.’ Since it was apparently well known to everyone except me that our parents worked for The Company, the police assumed that they were making and selling drugs for use in The Company. That’s why they sent us to CPS instead of following our parents’ will which clearly stated that Jem was our guardian if anything should happen to them.
Then there came the real fun stuff. Apparently, Matthew was not really my brother, but he said even our parents hadn’t known that. He said that yes, Susan and Harold had been expecting a baby, but because of some dangerous bit of research, Susan had gone into labor early and the baby was stillborn. The shock of whatever it was that caused the pre-term delivery also caused Susan to suffer some mild amnesia. She remembered she had been pregnant, but she didn’t remember giving birth and she didn’t remember that her baby had died. Harold didn’t know either because he had been in isolation at the Company’s lab for a week. Jem, who loved our parents very much, knew that the loss would probably send our (by this point) very unstable parents into a nasty downward spiral they wouldn’t recover from and she couldn’t let that happen. Their research was too valuable to the company and they were her friends after all.
Matthew didn’t tell me all of the specifics, but he did say that another baby had been born pre-term in a different part of the Company hospital that was….confidential. That baby had survived, but the mother had not, and apparently had not been expected to for some reason that he wasn’t telling me. So, Jem took that baby and planted him squarely in Susan’s arms when she came to, saying that he was the baby Susan had delivered. Of course my mother didn’t know that was a lie and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t want to, from what I remember of her. She was just glad she had a healthy, living baby in her arms, even if he did seem a bit odd and didn’t look a thing like her or her husband.
The special day-care Matthew went to was full of kids like him, born in that same confidential hospital wing, so that was why he knew Jem and why he knew that Susan and Harold weren’t his parents. It was apparently essential to his ‘training’, whatever that was. He said he didn’t mind never knowing his real mother, because he had understood the whole time that he wasn’t supposed to know her. That confused me, but I was still having trouble making my brain work correctly. I had always known and accepted that Matthew as different, I just didn’t know how different and I still didn’t. He wouldn’t tell me anything about those other kids, or about why he was so strange. He said that it was privileged information and if Jem wanted me to know it then she would tell me herself.
Then of course, he told me as much as he could about Jem and The Company, which wasn’t much. He had only been three at the time after all, and how a three year old processed this information was something else he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. What he could tell me was that The Company was huge. They were all over everything that went on in daily life, but no one knew it. They were huge on free-will, so they didn’t tamper with government very often, though apparently they were a big part of the UN just to keep things peaceful.
Jem was one of two people who owned The Company and had been the more important of the two until Lilliana Maher, the original owner, was able to take more responsibility, because Lilliana had inherited the company when she was only 18. He said that Jem was more like a babysitter then anything else, in that she had been essential to the growth and development of the Company while the real ‘mom’ had been away. Lilliana still relied on Jem for a lot of things though and the two of them were quite good friends. He also warned me that even though Jem and Lilliana were in charge of a multinational corporation, and even though they were both mothers (Jem had twin girls who were married and somewhere in their twenties and Lilliana had a five year old daughter and an infant son) they acted a lot like teenagers with the keys to daddy’s car when they weren’t on the clock. They looked a lot like teenagers too, but he said that was because of The Company and wouldn’t say anything else. I guess they tested all the new beauty product breakthroughs….
He also told me that he intended on calling the number Jem had given him the next day. He explained that he really didn’t have a choice, because technically he was The Company’s property, and the card was just a gesture, but I could stay with Clara if I wanted. As if I really had an option. He may not have been related to me, but he was still my little brother and I still wanted to take care of him, even though he clearly didn’t need it (being the super-genius experiment that he was). I also didn’t really like the way he said ‘property’ and decided I needed to go, to make sure they weren’t just going to lock him in a little cell and leave him there for the rest of his life. Of course, if that was going to happen, there wasn’t much I could do about it; but all the same, I wanted to be there for him.
So the next day he called the number on the card. I could hear Jem’s excited fast paced voice on the other end and a loud bass beat in the background. It sounded a lot like she was screaming at us on a cell phone at a rave. I guess it was her day off. She gave Matthew directions to a building in Los Angeles and the number of a bank account she had set up for us as well as the number of a driver who would pick us up as soon as we were ready. She told him not to worry about Clara because she had somehow already gotten the legal paperwork out of the way. All we had to do was go to the building and talk to someone named Becky who was Lilliana’s personal assistant and would take care of everything else including getting me a job within the Company ‘guards’ that I would start when I graduated high school. Well…that sounded simple enough….how difficult could it be to be a security guard? For some reason when I said that, Matthew started to laugh. That should have been my first clue.
The ‘guards’ weren’t security guards. They were bodyguards. An elite class of bodyguards that each of the higher up employees was assigned as well as any businesses under the Company’s protection or any visiting friends or dignitaries that were somehow considered to be in danger. Every one of the Guards had gone through rigorous weapons and combat training either before or after joining the Company and each of them could quite easily and single-handedly take out ten or twenty attackers, depending on how long they’d been with the Company and the weather conditions…. They took all of their orders from a seriously scary character named Alexander Lupus who was Lilliana’s guard and husband. The first time I saw him I was instantly reminded of the silent muscle man that had knocked out Vincent and thrown him around like he weighed less then a feather pillow; they both had the same sort of ‘I’d rather be riding my Harley’ attitude and clothing preferences. It was hard to believe that this burly blond biker was also the husband of a blue blood CEO who probably thought thrift stores were an urban legend, but I had seen them together with my own two eyes.
Alexander took a special interest in my training, probably because Jem had told him to, so every day after school I had to report to the Company Guard private gym for a workout session with him. Sometimes that was it, but other days he took me to a guard safe house to train with all sorts of really outdated weaponry like crossbows, or to a shooting range the Company owned to get me certified on every gun he could. He taught me karate, tae kwon do, jujitsu, kung fu, and a whole bunch of others that I am positive he made up on the spot just to torture me. He insisted on making me take yoga classes with the preppy teenage daughters of the Company to increase my agility. I’m pretty sure I was the only one who learned anything in that class because those girls spent the entire time staring at my ass since he also made me wear the men’s spandex workout uniform that hadn’t been used since the 80’s. This was, coincidentally, the last time any male had taken that class.

During school holidays and summer break he had a guard who used to be a CIA spy follow me around stealthily and attack at random intervals to teach me to keep my guard up at all times. This guy took his job a little too seriously though, because I was quite often attacked in the shower or in the middle of the night when I was sound asleep and sometimes he forgot that school was back in session and would jump into the middle of my math class with a fully loaded magnum. They were blanks of course, but I still got in a lot of trouble once everything was explained to the principal.

Just after graduation, I was officially instated as a guard. Matthew and I were moved from a small apartment complex in Los Angeles the Company owned to an upscale suite hotel in Long Beach that was used only by unmarried Guards. I was given an assortment of firearms and knives as well as my ‘official suit’ which I was supposed to wear on duty unless given permission to do otherwise by the person I guarded. Usually they told me I didn’t have to wear it, but occasionally I guarded a few people who figured that having a recognizable bodyguard meant less attempts on their life, and they were right more often then not.