How would the series have played out if David hadn't betrayed the group?
For a long minute, Jake and David stare each other down in the middle of the hotel room, the breeze from the broken window making the only movement as it rustles their hair. “Fine,” Jake says at last. “Spend the night. But we’re going to talk about this in the morning, and this is not happening again.”
“Yes, sir.” David smiles mockingly.
When he rejoins Tobias and Ax outside, he can feel the questions in their stares.
«I’m not going to push this one,» he says grudgingly. «He just lost his family, his home, everything he knew…»
«Poor poopsie,» Tobias snaps.
Jake stops talking. He’s addressing a kid who constantly survives being trapped in a whole other body and one who lost most of his family the day he crash-landed on this foreign planet. Tobias is right: if they could both adjust, then David should be able to as well.
Sometimes he hates being in charge. «Look,» he says, «I don’t love this either, but he’s one of us now and we’re going to have to learn to work with him. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if you and Marco hadn’t learned to get along. We never would have gotten anywhere if Rachel and I still got in fistfights every time we disagreed the way we did in elementary school. I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to get along with David, okay?»
«One of you is the human child named David—»
Tobias cuts Visser Three off mid-sentence. «Don’t be ridiculous. We would never resort to using a human child to do our dirty work. Who do you take us for?»
Undeterred, Visser Three tries again. «Then you should tell David that I have his parents, that—»
This time, he’s cut off when David sinks four-inch fangs into his back leg and starts chewing. He morphs, they fight, they escape—barely—before the human authorities get there.
David gloats the whole way home, until Marco says «Don’t get cocky, kid,» in a voice that’s not quite gentle but not quite harsh either. It seems to do the trick, because David shuts up for the time being.
David moves in with Erek’s family. It’s not a perfect solution, definitely not a long-term one, but it’s what they can manage for the moment. It ensures that at the very least David can sleep in a bed and get three meals a day, that (although Jake would never admit to this motivation) he has someone to keep an eye on him any time he’s not with the main group.
Marco conveniently forgets to mention, as he’s moving David in, that the nearly-omnipotent androids can’t actually defend themselves or even harm anyone at all. David will no doubt figure it out sooner rather than later, but in the meantime having Erek casually demonstrate his ability to lift an entire refrigerator one-handed during David’s first hour at the Kings’ doesn’t hurt anything.
After that, they get into the habit of meeting less often, or in smaller groups. Rachel or Marco will often go out into the woods to meet Ax and Tobias there, or Jake will stop by Cassie’s or Marco’s place on his own. They don’t admit to themselves that they’re avoiding whole-group meetings because there’s no way to meet like that without inviting David along… But nevertheless, that’s what’s happening.
“So then he’s like, ‘Marco hits on you all the time, and you never get all PMS on him.’” Rachel paces up and down, gesticulating wildly, while Jake watches from his seat on the bottommost bleacher of the school gym as if this is a one-woman sporting event. “Which, no kidding, because let’s start with the fact that Marco doesn’t use terms like ‘all PMS’ when I tell him to take a hike. And don’t get me started on the way that little twerp looks at me. It’s—”
“Yeah,” Jake says very quietly. “I’ve seen.”
Rachel growls, throwing her hands up. She pivots on the far end of her cycle, hair flying around her, face red. “He’s such a perverted, disgusting, small-brained cromagnon bastard. And hellooooo, I have a boyfriend already, which even if I didn’t, still wouldn’t be grounds for comments like…” She drops her voice, jutting out her jaw in an exaggerated parody. “‘Do you always have that leotard under your clothes, Rachel? Do you even wear underwear at all?’”
Jake flinches. “Jesus, he said that?”
Rachel crosses her arms. “No, I just made that up because I love talking about my fucking underwear with my fucking cousin.”
Jake holds up both hands defensively. “I didn’t mean to question you. I just…” He props his hands on his knees, burying his face in his hands. “I’ll talk to him,” he mumbles into his fingers. “Again.”
“You’ve tried talking.” Rachel sounds less angry now. She knows he’s just a lost kid like her, that he doesn’t have a magical solution. “We both have. We’ve talked to him, like, a dozen times now. It doesn’t stick.”
Jake rubs at his forehead with enough force it’s as if he’s trying to press his brains into a new shape with his fingertips. “What should we do, then?”
They stare at each other in silence for a long time. They’ve both had the talks, of course they have; they know why it’s important to tell an adult if anyone says something to make either of them uncomfortable. And that’s the crux of it: they want to tell an adult. They both want to give this one to a grown-up to handle, because it’s too grown-up for them to know what to do.
“I’ll talk to him again,” Jake says at last.
Rachel sighs. “I’ll do my best to ignore it.”
It’s not a solution, not remotely. It’s also all they have.
They start going on missions as two semi-separate smaller units. Jake gets very good at the strange algebra of what their team dynamic has become. He will usually pair himself and Cassie—sometimes Ax as well—with David. He’ll send Rachel, Marco, and Tobias out as their own unit. Sometimes he takes a break from David’s constant cycle of complaining, taunting, and gloating, and will guiltily give himself a mission with Rachel’s team instead. More often he’ll let Cassie or Ax, or even both, join the other team while he takes point on handling David. Tobias and David can work together, if the mission absolutely requires it. Marco and David cannot, no matter how dire the situation is. Rachel and David are out of the question.
One consequence of this strange arrangement is that they all regularly take breaks from the missions at times. They get out of the habit of being a team, a family; instead, they are a ragged collection of whichever three or four or five people can be spared to attack tonight’s Kandrona shipment or next week’s Sharing recruitment event.
It’s not a solution. It’s also the best thing Jake’s got.
Jake is halfway to his room when his mom calls out. “Honey? Your friend stopped by.”
He freezes, turns, and finds David sitting in his living room. David is talking in a low voice to Tom, whose yeerk is feigning interest only half-heartedly. Jake charges through the door so quickly that both of them look at him in surprise, drawing him up short halfway across the room.
“You’ve got a great family, you know that?” David puts a little too much emphasis on each word. “You’re really lucky. You know that, right?”
Jake shepherds them both upstairs as quickly as he can. “What are you doing here?” he demands, once they’re alone.
David’s eyes immediately fill with crocodile tears. He spins the lie that Jake was expecting, even if he didn’t know to expect it from this direction: he misses having a family, he just wanted a normal evening, he doesn’t have the chance to eat a home-cooked meal every night the way Jake does, is it so wrong…
Jake watches him talk, nodding as if he believes this. Jake knows by now that this is just how David is: he’s the kind of kid who loves nothing better than to pour a puddle of gasoline on the floor and then inch matches ever closer to its edge, for no other reason than to watch other people’s anger and fear.
David could ensure that Jake, too, ends up living at the mercy of the hork-bajir or chee as his entire family are enslaved, if he even survived that long. All it would take are three words whispered in Tom’s ear. David’s proving to Jake, and to himself as well, that he has that power, and he’s willing to use it.
“Stay for dinner,” Jake says at last. “But if you ever show up at my house again, don’t expect my parents to let you in. I’m having a conversation with them both after you leave.”
“I’m sorry,” David says for the fortieth or fiftieth time as they trudge away from their very next mission. “I really am. Okay? It was an accident. You know that, right? It was an accident. I’m sorry.”
“We know you didn’t mean it.” Cassie’s tone of voice is kind on the surface, but its undercurrent suggests that she’s just as tired of listening to his whining as everyone else.
They had been cornered back there, outnumbered and outfought by a dozen hork-bajir. If all seven of them had been present, they might have had a chance. As it was, they were all seconds away from dying even before, somewhere in the heat of battle, David’s slashing claws had opened Jake’s left flank to the bone. Jake had collapsed on the floor, bleeding to death from severed arteries. David had suddenly snapped into hero-mode and fought off the three hork-bajir that menaced them before dragging Jake to safety. The fact that Cassie had walked around the corner at that exact second was probably a coincidence. Probably.
“Jake hates me, doesn’t he?” David whines. “It was an accident. Anyway, he’s fine now, and I said I was sorry. It was just an acc—”
«Yes,» Ax snaps suddenly. «It was an accident. A very foolish, sloppy accident. Warriors who cannot tell friend from foe in the heat of battle are more dangerous to their own allies than to their enemies. Any aristh who is so careless with his tail blade so as to injure his own prince does not deserve to have a tail anymore.»
“Ax…” Jake takes a deep breath, trying to massage the headache out of his temples without much luck. “He knows he screwed up, okay? It’s not going to happen again.”
The algebra changes again, after that incident. Ax is so disgusted with David’s very existence he can barely stand the sight of him, and doesn’t exactly keep this a secret. Jake starts taking Tobias with him and Cassie as backup on David-wrangling duty. It’s not fair to Tobias, not remotely—David bullies him worse than anyone but Rachel. But Tobias has an utterly horrifying amount of experience in grinning and bearing it, and so he does.
Jake isn’t sure how long it’ll be before it’s just him and Cassie and David. Or just him and David. He apologizes before each mission and after each nasty comment to Tobias and Cassie, even though they know perfectly well it’s not his fault.
While all Jake’s energy is taken up elsewhere, Rachel leads a raid on a television studio that gets a random bystander killed. She and Marco fight about it afterward; their shouting match seems mild by comparison to some of the rows David has started, since no blood gets drawn.
Jake dreams every night, and it’s always the same dream. He slinks through the forest on cat feet, ethereal as fog, following a distant flash of yellow fur. When he catches his prey he digs teeth and claws into all the soft places that mane cannot protect, until there is nothing but meat on the ground. He sits looking over the shattered corpse on silent haunches, and then moves on.
He feels guilty every time it happens, but not that guilty. They’re the only good dreams he has left.
They’re all there, when it happens. The basement garage has flooded with dozens of controllers from four or five different species, and the seven of them are not enough. They’ve given up on trying to get to the computer files they came for; now they’re just battling with everything they’ve got to get to the exit.
Rachel is a monster of unstoppable rage, slashing blindly at everything that comes within range of her claws. When she goes down, Marco rushes to help even as Jake and Ax make a hole in the surrounding troops with desperate brutality. When David goes down across the room, Tobias tries to help. Really, he does.
Jake gets the industrial garage door open long enough that first Cassie and Ax, then himself and Tobias, can race through. It’s Marco who makes the call, shouting for Jake to shut the door before any hork-bajir can get through and leave the others to fend for themselves.
Cassie and Tobias are both shouting at Jake to go back for Rachel and Marco. Somewhere inside, David is screaming for help even as Rachel continues raging at the controllers. But he knows Marco made the right call, and he reverses the course of the door.
It slams shut. Jake watches it, and he doesn’t let Cassie past him to reopen their teammates’ only exit. Inside, some of the screams are audible not just to their ears, but inside of their minds.
Five minutes pass, as they wait outside, still able to hear the animal and alien screams inside. Hours pass, in the span of those five minutes.
Later, Jake won’t ask Rachel or Marco what happened during those five minutes. No one will.
When the door starts to slide up once more, they all tense—until the enormous black-furred hand catches the underside and swings it upward. Marco is half-dragging Rachel, who has even more blood around her claws and mouth than before but is also oddly subdued.
«David?» Tobias asks.
«Dead.» Marco doesn’t sugar-coat it.
Jake drags them all away from the scene of the battle, because no one else has the presence of mind to do anything but stand there and shiver in shock. Cassie nearly gets run over when she stops in the middle of the street to puke her guts out on the asphalt. Rachel’s face is so pale in the streetlights she looks faintly green. Silent tears streak Marco’s face, and he makes no effort to wipe them away. It’s a warm California night, but they are all, to a one, very cold.
Funny, how quickly they fall back into their old constellation of all working together to hold each other upright. Jake can’t form sentences; it’s Ax who morphs him and fakes a call to his parents with some excuse to spend the night at Marco’s. Cassie pulls herself together enough to call Rachel’s mom and explain the sleepover they are going to have tonight as if she’s an adult talking to a child and not the other way around. Tobias disappears over the rooftops; Ax morphs at top speed and follows.
That evening, Cassie will smother Rachel in every blanket she owns and give her hot chocolate besides. Ax will coax Tobias into morphing andalite once again, and together they will perform the ritual of death. Marco will shepherd Jake home and make bright excuses to Peter, never showing the slightest sign of concern even when Jake doesn’t say a single word all evening long.
That night, Jake’s dream is like nothing he’s ever experienced before. He’s not a tiger, or even a kid; he’s a grown man living in yeerk-owned New York City. After he makes a choice, he asks the presence which has sent him the dream: Why?
BECAUSE, the power answers. YOU JUST MADE THE CHOICE WHICH WILL SAVE THE WORLD.
What if Tobias hadn't gotten stuck as a bird in the first book? Alternatively, what if one of the others had gotten stuck in morph?
Their first mission. The Yeerk Pool. Tobias is crouched in a hidden alcove above the hork-bajir cages, shaking from head to talons, longing for this nightmare to end. Every molecule of color in the battle, every whisper of sound in between the screams, assails his enhanced senses with so much force that he thinks he’s going mad. There’s no way out. There’s nothing he can do. He doesn’t know if any of the others are even still alive out there.
And then a clawed hand touches his talon. Tobias nearly startles into taking off, but stops himself when he realizes that one of the fierce-looking hork-bajir has reached up through the slats in the ceiling of the cage to get his attention.
“Hruthin,” the hork-bajir says. “You go. We make yeerk look.” He’s male, enormously strong, and his sire and dam called him Jara Hamee. His bloodline is one which produces more seers than any other. Tobias doesn’t know any of this. All he knows is that he has gone from having no hope to having a tiny thread.
Tobias takes off, beating the air as hard as he can with wings made strong by terror. The yeerks would spot him, but from behind him there is an enormous CRASH. Half a dozen hork-bajir have thrown themselves against the front of a cage all at once, tipping it clear over to smash on the ground. All the controllers are running in that direction.
Tobias never finds out what happened to them. Later, even after they free several hork-bajir, he’ll never see Jara Hamee again.
Afterward, he can’t stand the thought of going back to his uncle’s place, not when he doesn’t even know if the others are okay. He walks for a long time, the streets silent and so very flat. Eventually he finds himself outside Jake’s neighborhood. He morphs again, flies up to tap at Jake’s window. When Jake sits up, Tobias pretends not to see the tear tracks’ dried salt residue on his skin. They talk for a long time, sitting side-by-side on the end of Jake’s bed, and then Tobias leaves.
He goes back to wandering until the library opens at 7:00 the following morning. The librarians are used to seeing him there for several hours a day; they don’t mind when he slumps on one of the reading room couches for a nap. Afterward, he checks out a battered copy of The Witches for the fourth or fifth time and takes it to school with him, just to see whether it’s still scary after everything that’s happened.
Rachel becomes the one to ask Tobias out, as they’re coming out of Algebra together one afternoon. She’s normally so confident that it takes him a while to figure out that she’s just as nervous as he is. They go out to a movie, get dinner afterwards, kiss twice on the long walk home. When Tobias shyly asks her why she asked, she laughs. “Because,” she says, “we could die at any moment.”
When Tobias starts having strange dreams, he takes forever to mention it to Jake, but when he does Jake admits that Cassie has been having the same dreams. They all morph dolphins together and go to find Ax.
Inside the Dome ship, Tobias becomes the first one to greet the strange new andalite. He follows Ax around for over three hours, pestering him with questions about everything from how andalites eat to what that configuration of the pond and the tree is called. Ax is cagey about the details of most of the technology, but far more willing to let Tobias poke at the strange plants and to translate the writing which covers the hatches and floor.
Later, Ax takes DNA from all five of them. His resultant morph is a little taller, a little rounder-faced, a little more floppy-haired. It’s still beautiful enough to turn heads everywhere he goes.
Tobias and Rachel kiss before every battle, and they kiss after each time they demorph after having survived another fight. Marco usually makes loud gagging noises while Jake and Cassie blush and avoid each other’s eyes.
For three days, while Jake’s tied up out in the woods starving out a yeerk, Tobias has a mom and a dad and a brother and a dog. For three days, he learns what it’s like to have someone lean over and kiss him on the forehead before he goes to sleep. For three days, he walks through the halls of his school without fear, and half the people in his grade wave or shout hello as he passes. He eats three home-cooked dinners during which someone asks about his day and actually listens when he answers. He wakes up on three different mornings to the scent of toasting bread and the soft sounds of Jake’s parents singing along to the radio in the kitchen.
There are reminders, of course, that it’s all a lie. Tom looks sharply at Tobias when Tobias gets up to duck into the bathroom to demorph for the third time in one afternoon, and Tobias feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Mr. Feyroyan stops talking in surprise when Tobias casually comes out with an answer to an Algebra problem that (he realizes too late) Jake probably wouldn’t have known. Once Tobias gets caught out between classes an hour and fifty-seven minutes into his morph and no bathroom stalls free, and barely makes it in time.
The reminders aren’t enough to stop Tobias from wondering, just sometimes, what would happen if he left the morph just a little too long.
The first time Rachel takes Tobias home to meet her mom and sisters, it doesn’t exactly go according to plan. Naomi’s eyebrows raise when Tobias mentions the name of the street he lives on, and they draw together into a frown when he admits that he doesn’t so much have a curfew as he has a tendency to check in on his uncle every few days to make sure the old fart hasn’t yet drowned in his own vomit.
Jordan, who is old enough to discern her mother’s barely-concealed snobbery but young enough to lack all tact, bluntly asks whether Tobias is from “the wrong side of the tracks,” because “Rachel’s not allowed to date guys from there.”
The quality of the conversation doesn’t exactly improve from there on out, especially not after Rachel throws a blob of rice at Jordan and starts shouting at her mother.
It’s an ordinary Tuesday when Tobias snaps. For everyone else it is, anyway; for the Animorphs it’s the morning after a nasty, exhausting battle where they were an inch from dying eight times over while struggling to destroy the Anti-Morphing Ray. Andy Valentino shoves Tobias up against the wall of lockers full-force on his way down the hall—and Tobias shoves back.
Tobias isn’t sure how it descends so fast from there, just that he is sick to death of being shoved around and picked upon by everyone from cosmic powers to twerps like this, just that it feels so good to cut loose, to take a hit and then hit back. Andy’s got friends on the lacrosse team, though, and before Tobias knows it the fight has become three against one… And then Rachel flings herself on Tap-Tap from behind, and now it’s two against three.
Half the school is watching them, or that’s what it feels like; they’re back-to-back, flinging wild punches at anything that gets too close, and there’s an entire circle of chanting losers surrounding them.
Their teammates are drawn by the noise, because of course. Jake sends Cassie to find a teacher and Marco to make sure that Principal Greene beats Chapman to the scene. He’s planning on staying put and trying to disperse the crowd himself—but then Evan Murphy gets both hands around Rachel’s throat and before Jake knows it he’s already waded in to fling him off.
The three of them are fighting half the lacrosse team by now, and they’re just about holding their own. They fight like wild things, like savage creatures, unafraid to dig teeth or nails into tender places, unafraid to fight dirty. They have no technique, no training, but that doesn’t matter, because they don’t go down. These kids can fight through severed limbs and bullet holes and punctured arteries. Compared to what they’re used to, a few cracked ribs or concussions are nothing at all.
John Spencer lands a punch that sends Tobias slamming back into the nearest locker so hard that he bounces off, ears ringing. He spits two of his own teeth at John in a spray of blood and flings himself forward again, feeling all the while like he’s watching the battle from an enormous distance. Andy throws himself onto Jake’s back and Jake rolls forward to fling him off with catlike grace; Andy hits the ground with breath-stealing force and doesn’t get up. Rachel roars like an animal, paste-on nails snapping like claws as she jabs them into the soft meat of the lacrosse captain’s chin and stomach.
Mr. Tidwell isn’t the first teacher on the scene, but he—or maybe Illim—is the first one brave enough to wade in and drag Jake away from Sean Richardsen. After that Ms. Paloma gets between Rachel and Evan, and Tobias has the good sense to back off before Chapman has to force the issue. They all get dragged to the office—or the ones who aren’t due for a trip to the nurse’s or E.R. do—and interrogated for the next two hours. The Animorphs don’t talk; the lacrosse team does. Rachel and Jake each get a month’s suspension, whereas Tobias (who everyone knows doesn’t have irate parents who will come to his defense) gets ten weeks.
Jake’s mom shouts, literally, until she loses her voice. He listens, he nods, and he agrees with every word she says without irony or guile. He knows how irresponsible it was to get involved.
Rachel’s mom cries when she gets the call, which in its own way is even worse. She asks Rachel if this is because of the divorce, voice so tired that Rachel falls over herself to come out with denials.
“Ten weeks, huh?” Tobias’s uncle says. “They better not expect me to feed you during ten weeks’ worth of no free lunches.”
Tobias lies to his uncle about it being in-school suspension, and spends most of the next two and a half months hanging out in Ax’s scoop during the day. The other four come by as often as they can, bringing Pop-Tarts and class notes and homework and Lunchables and news. Ax, who Tobias barely knows, takes Tobias flying more than once to try and map yeerk pool entrances.
Marco handles the situation with his usual style: he makes jokes about it being a crime to keep nerd-boy from throwing off the grading curve for so many days on end. His class notes tend to be filled with rambling asides (his summary of the themes and motifs in Great Expectations contains four pages’ worth of marginal notes on how Dickens is a bombastic moron who was clearly hoping no one would notice all those impossible coincidences) but at least he takes notes which are more-or-less coherent.
Jake, on the other hand, has an approach to most classes which consists of zoning out for up to 20 minutes at a stretch before jerking back to reality long enough to scribble down a few key phrases that sound like they might be on the test later. (His summary of the themes in Great Expectations is just “death, talking gravestone, class struggle… prison ship = class… card names = class… word choice = class… Which class?… wittles = ??? [probably class].)
Tobias winces every time he sees Jake during that first week, because whereas Rachel can just tape her no-longer-broken fingers and redraw her bruises every morning with eyeshadow, Jake definitely can’t get away with making his broken nose or spectacular pair of shiners disappear without his dad especially asking too many questions. Tobias himself stopped and fixed his concussion and broken teeth on the way home from school; he has no one in his life who will ask awkward questions.
After that, they all fall into a pattern of doing each other’s homework to save time for missions.
Jake completes everyone’s take-home U.S. history quizzes, Cassie writes up several different versions of the same Biology experiment, and Rachel regularly performs a small miracle by writing five different essays that actually argue five different positions on whatever novel their English class has to read that month.
Marco might grumble about filling out page after page of Algebra problems, but not only does he have a knack for math but he also has the easiest job, since he can find each answer once and then simply copy it four times.
Ax’s primary contribution to the group effort consists of writing gushing reviews of the bad cooking projects Cassie and Tobias churn out for Home Ec.
Tobias bats cleanup for the rest of the team, finishing Rachel’s and Cassie’s French assignments in between Jake’s Econ homework and Marco’s Art History projects. If Marco is doing the least work (even when he occasionally fills in for Jake or Tobias on their Spanish work), then Tobias is doing by far the most. He insists he doesn’t mind, and he really doesn’t; of all of them, he’s the only one still making an effort to learn things despite the war.
Tobias coasts into his own neighborhood one afternoon with a whopping 90 seconds left before he’s trapped in morph. He’s tested that boundary before, teased his finger close to the edge of that particular candle flame, but he’s not planning on going over today. That’s why he lands behind the sparse cover of an empty dumpster and demorphs in the alley between houses—and the woman walking her dog catches him there.
Tobias straightens up, fully human, heart pounding, wondering how on earth he’s going to talk his way out of this one. The dog is whimpering in fear—or maybe in eagerness to eat the strange bird-human creature—and the woman says softly, “You all right there?”
Tobias is about to stammer out some kind of excuse when he registers, with a guilty rush of relief, that the woman’s not actually looking at him as much as she’s tilting her head in his general direction. That her dog is wearing a service vest. That the handbag over her shoulder has a collapsible white cane sticking out of its pocket. That she hasn’t taken off her sunglasses, even though they’re standing in a dark alleyway in late evening.
“I’m okay,” he says, stepping toward her. In the glow of the streetlight he’s suddenly assailed with several other details: the round curve of her cheeks, the slope of her shoulders, the blond hair still thick between the scars. The long nose he’s seen in the worn photograph next to his bed at home. The pointed chin he sees in the mirror every morning.
He opens his mouth to ask if her name is Loren. What comes out instead is “Mom?”
Right, so, there’s been some interest in this? So here, this is like a 1.5K snippet that I wrote yesterday, a conversation between the main character (Brenneth) and Crispin, with a little bit of Krei (the Tall Tree Lesbian) at the end there. I think this is…pretty much self-explanatory, but here is the ‘Earth is where the trouble comes from’ novel explanation.
Crispin
was in the last cell to the left of the door, with the wall beside him, and on
the side facing the entrance—no windows.
His hands were bound with fresh apas
cord, the wrists pressed together tightly enough that he could struggle if he
attempted to break free. He seemed in
good health, uninjured from what I could see.
His hair was even clean, the curls falling around his face like copper
wire in the lantern light.
Crispin,
I thought with a bitter rush of guilt, probably had not been given the luxury
of fine soaps and a private bath.
He
seemed to catch the thought on my face and pointed at me. “Hey, none of that,” he said in his most
commanding voice.
“Don’t
tell me what to do,” I said automatically, and scowled when he grinned at
me. “And don’t be an ass, I’m trying to
help you.”
Crispin’s
good humor faded, leaving a small, sad smile behind as he glanced me over, eyes
lingering on the spike in my hair and the new belt around my hips. “They got you a sword,” he noted quietly, and
my hand dropped to the pommel at my side, smoothing over the unornamented
hilt.
The
weight of the sword was a strange dual sensation—it was intrinsically familiar
and reassuring to the part of my that had hated to walk unarmed for a decade
and a half on Earth, but my muscles didn’t remember how to compensate for it,
had never learned how to walk without bumping the scabbard with my leg. I was feeling the ache from the time I had
spent in the training grounds, trying to force my body to accustom itself to
the weight of a blade again, and I would pay for it tomorrow. My palms would blister and my legs would tremble. For the first time in years, I felt like a
stranger in my body again, hating the way that my hands hurt from the hilt and
the way my shoulders complained bitterly at me.
The sword was a small token comfort against it.
For the fic you'd never write: Diana/Steve Rogers "Running Parallel, but Never Meeting (Until Now)"
(YES GOOD)
AO3 summary: By the time she sits down at his table, Steve thinks he’s aspired to be this woman for his entire life.
Actual summary: As a little boy in New York, Steve hears from his mother, who was a nurse in the Great War, about the people she worked with. A man in a greatcoat, his sleek black hair tied into twin braids, runs into them one day and she hugs him and introduces him (the Chief, Stevie, he kept us all smiling) and he tells Steve fantastic stories about a woman who could charge a trench all on her own.
Steve grows up and remembers her and tries to join the Army and gets the 4F stamp a lot before Erskine finds him. He asks Erskine, curious, about what inspired the super soldier formula, and Erskine tells him about his sister’s daughter, who lived in a little village in Germany and who saw a woman in a black cloak and armor demolish an entire occupying battalion. (Diana hears about the man who saved a child by using a taxi door as a shield–no sharp edges–and she smiles as she lays out a map and tries to decide where to go, where the war needs her most. This…this is a worse war.) Steve thinks about the woman, about the shield the Chief described (the Chief is in his sixties, now, but he still keeps the soldiers smiling), as he breaks into a HYDRA prison with a dinky tin shield, and again when he picks a vibranium disc rather than Howard’s high-tech alternatives. (Diana hears about Captain America and laughs a little–they have started to call her Wonder, the Wonder Woman, so she can’t laugh too much–and wishes that the war didn’t need her so much elsewhere, so that she could meet him.) Steve and the Howlies pass through a little village in Germany one day, and there’s a picture in their tavern, in a place of honor, like a shrine, of a woman in armor looking stern and triumphant, with a much-younger Chief at her shoulder, and it makes Steve smile. (Diana wanders to the States, after the war is over, because she has heard the tragedy of Steve Rogers and she wants to see the place that produced that man, and she meets a woman with sad eyes and dark curls. They talk about their respective Steves and kick some ass and maybe one time Peggy kisses her and maybe Diana kisses her back.)
Diana arrives from her job in London (it’s hideous, but she’s used to it) three days after the Chitauri destroy a huge portion of New York. She works for two weeks straight, moving debris, searching for the missing, reuniting families, doing whatever she can to help, sleeping for as little time as she can manage. The Avengers are out helping too, and she smiles to see them, even when Tony Stark treats her like something of a fool and Dr. Banner mistakes her for a patient.
She goes to an old diner that she remembers from the last time she was here, in Brooklyn (Peggy always said to start in Brooklyn, in New York), and sees a blond head propped on a fist and she smiles, slipping into the booth opposite him.
“Hello, Captain Rogers,” she says, and he startles to attention.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I–oh my God,” he blurts. “You’re her!“
Is your magical gf's thing from your fantasy book? Sorry if this seems rude but I am like SO invested in your novels from what you've given us.
NEVER RUDE NEVER RUDE NEVER RUDE
ALWAYS TALK TO ME ABOUT MY NOVELS
And yes, my magical gf’s are from one of my fantasy novels, which I generally call Alleirat because I’m a lazy fuck who doesn’t title things until the last available second. This novel is also called the “Earth is where the trouble comes from” book, which sums it up pretty well. The Very Tall Tree Person is the right hand woman of the main character, and the Smol Death Machine…um, starts the novel as the bad guy buT IT’S A NOVEL ABOUT REDEMPTION AND IT’S NOT HER FAULT AND I LOVE HER V MUCH.
Anyway, for those of you who don’t know what’s going on: THIS is a basic rundown of the story, and THIS is some basic outlining of the way magic works, and this and this are about the couple in question. The novel is currently like 35K and I’m doing it for Camp NaNoWriMo.
And like, IDK y’all I feel guilty forcing my weird original stuff on you, but if you’re interested I could post a section I wrote yesterday that I’m…pretty pleased with.
I just got back from watching Wonder Woman and I’m 110% sure that Antiope was gay and the woman who screamed when she got shot was her lover. I’m only stating facts here.
Can we all just take a moment to appreciate the pitch perfectness that was setting Wonder Woman during WW1? I mean, at first I was like…WWI? Why WWI? There was no clear cut bad guy in WWI. It was one of the most tragically pointless wars in human history.
But then I realized that was the point. In WWII it’s easy to point at Hitler and the Nazis and say, that’s them! that’s the bad guy. Just KILL THEM AND BE DONE WITH IT.
But the Point of Wonder Woman is that people, all people, are part of the problem. From Steve Trevor, who’s people, my people, massacred the Native Peoples, to the teenage German soldiers putting gas canisters on a plane, EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS MIX OF GOOD AND BAD CHOICES, and a victim and a perpetrator of choices that lead to death and suffering and tragedy.
And that makes Diana’s choice to keep fighting for peace even better. Because she’s not out to defeat one big bad and get it over with. She’s out to fight for peace, and that is a war that will NEVER end. How is that not 10000 times braver than just killing one person and ending a war?
It is Tolkien’s long victory, the victory you only see after the end. And that fight is braver than anything else you can do because it is step by step, day after day, choice after choice.
I watched Wonder Woman on its premiere and none of my friends have watched it yet - it's absolutely killing me not being able to talk about it in case I spoil it for them! But I just want to say that it is such a beautiful movie and the message it conveys is brilliant. Gal and Chris were a great casting and the acting was so so so heartbreaking. I am in awe. And I am not the same person that walked into the theatre.
Oh my God, dude, same, that movie was so…electric. Like, it felt like a jolt of lightning right to the heart. Everything was so beautifully saturated and powerful and the women were treated so phenomenally well and the heroism was so sincere and the relationship between Steve and Diana was so unbelievably good. I haven’t felt so purely and authentically loved by a movie for quite a while.
The Actual Summary: A series of vignettes, focusing on Will and Elizabeth making their supernatural long-distance relationship work, + life/death circumstances.
It would feature: -Elizabeth murdering a man, tying his corpse to her rowboat, and then placidly waiting for Will to show up -while heavily pregnant -Elizabeth dropping actual messages in bottles into the sea, but weighting the bottles down with something heavy, so they sink instead of bob. -Will can’t send the bottles back, but shell-shocked survivors of wrecks at sea often seek Elizabeth out after being rescued, drawing thick letters wrapped in oilskin out of their coats and pressing them, terrified, into her hands -In this way Will and Elizabeth conduct a passionate, piecemeal argument about whether Henry should be allowed to go to school in England, as he begs to, or whether he should stay away from that godforsaken country where Will has no jurisdiction, and therefore cannot save his life at sea/check up on him/see him, and anyway isn’t Elizabeth building Libertalia, hasn’t the British Navy set a sizable price on her head? Why would she want him to live in that awful place anyway, and Elizabeth would fiercely argue that her aunt Mary is a perfectly trustworthy person, it’s not like she’d be sending Henry to strangers, and also she is trying to build Libertalia and it requires an awful lot of goddamn bloodshed and it’s really no place for a twelve year old, so why not let him do what he wants and get an education???? etc. -Henry learns the tie-a-bag-of-rocks-to-your-feet-and-hope-for-the-best trick from Elizabeth -Jack and Elizabeth stay on friendly terms while Henry is a baby. Jack and Will stay on friendly terms while Henry is a baby. Only then Jack gets into a scrape and tries to use his relationship with Will as leverage, and it doesn’t work because Will has a sacred duty, and Jack makes an aborted attempt to steal Will’s heart which Elizabeth never forgives, and Will ends up bailing him out of the scrape and thereby somewhat neglecting his duty anyway, which is part of why he’s all barnacley at the beginning of the movie, and Elizabeth never forgives that, either. -Mostly though I want Jack to kiss Elizabeth, and for it to mean something, because the Turners are definitely in a casual friends-with-benefits-but-maybe-there’s-something-else-there relationship with Jack Sparrow, and then for Jack to steal the key to the dead man’s chest from where it hangs around her heart, and for Elizabeth to shoot him for it, when she finds out. There’s a pink knotted mess of scar tissue on Jack’s left shoulder, just above his heart, courtesy of Lizzy. -probably other stuff involving Norrington, who is first mate on the Dutchman and who starts off pining for Elizabeth and then gradually starts pining for Will, too -probably Henry falls overboard as a toddler, and between one swell and the next he’s picked up by a bright-eyed woman with a wicked smile, a woman who comes from seemingly nowhere, and she laughs at him and presses a kiss to his forehead before handing him up from the waves to his mother, who looks dead panicked, like he’s never seen her before -this is the plot of five fics, not one -it’s because this is just the AU I’ve been building in my head since 2007 -and there’s enough basic material here for six seasons and a movie
another fave part was during the siege of veld, steve remembered the amazons fighting style and used it to support diana during the fight and yelled “shield” and she immediately knew what he was trying to do to help
as a high school freshman, i was in love with a senior boy. his name was something like, but not exactly, harry. my high school did have a handsome boy who was older than me named harry—although, now that i’m writing this, i’m remembering that actually his name was dylan.
were there any harrys in my grade? were there any harrys in my school? there had to have been. that’s a pretty common name.
“why are we still talking about this?” you’re asking.
the answer is: i don’t know! i can’t stop! my brain is a nightmare!
a n y w a y, whatever. the point is, my whole freshman year, i was in love with not-harry (actual not-harry, not the not -harry who was in fact dylan). he was very tall, and more importantly, he was very sweet to me, a pigeon-toed and badly socialized fourteen-year-old who really believed she looked good in low-riding boot-cut jeans with leopard print patches on them. not-harry and i met because he was the student waiter at my lunch table, and we stayed acquaintances because of a peculiar and excellent thing that happened to me, which was that for the entirety of my high school career i was not in my school’s lunch attendance system.
the thing you have to understand for any part of this story to make sense is that my boarding school had a lunch system where most days you had an assigned seat. every other lunch period, you were seated at an arbitrary table in order to like, help you make friends or something. student waiters would bring your food.
there was a rotation freshman year in which every student had to be a student waiter, and if you were good at it, you could stay on and make money.
i was so not-good at it that they took me off rotation early, which feels pretty on-brand for me.
for whatever reason, i was never assigned a table. in the land of seated lunches, i was king.
some people might have used this opportunity to sit with their friends or maybe with a teacher from whom they wanted to hassle a better grade, but i was a simple child and all i wanted to do was have many opportunities as possible to ask not-harry, who always remembered my name and never called me out for knocking things over all the time, to bring me the vegetarian option.
the teacher assigned to that table was a teacher that i never had, and never bonded with, and was constantly perplexed as to why i always insisted on sitting at his table and then never spoke to him.
“so weird they keep assigning me here,” i would say, and mr. wilcox would answer, “but they didn’t. i have the list. you aren’t assigned to sit here.”
“so weird,” said i.
the other great benefit of not having an assigned table at lunch is that i did not have to go to lunch. i could go to nap.
alternatively, i could go back into the kitchen and cajole the cooks to give me extra dessert, which i also did all the time. they made these peanut butter and chocolate bars that slammed. i kept some hidden in the freezer wrapped in paper towels because i am never more like a dragon than when somebody asks to share food.
everybody who knew that i existed knew that i was in love with not-harry. my school was very small, and probably even people who didn’t know me could have pointed at me and said something like, “whatever that girl’s name is, she’s in love with not-harry, who is tall and cool and has lots of friends.”
let’s break here to talk a little about not-harry. i, of course, was miserably uncomfortable in my own body, extremely uncool, and hadn’t yet figured out the difference between being sarcastic and just being mean. also, i once wrote and recorded a song called, “sweet like elk bladder,” which is something i don’t exactly regret but am also not exactly proud of. and if it sounds like i am being unkind to tiny baby molly, please know that despite being objectively unbearable, i love her. she was trying her best, and would improve rapidly between the ages of seventeen and twenty. she was a late bloomer.
but, at fourteen, if i could boil down my whole personality it would be: your least favorite cousin.
you know the one.
you don’t have to tell anybody who it is, just visualize them in your mind.
that was me.
not-harry, on the other hand, was devon sawa in little giants. he was sean biggerstaff in harry potter. he was what’s-his-face in a walk to remember. (you know. not matt damon but the guy that kind of looks like matt damon?)
not-harry:
in high school freshman molly’s fantasy of who not-harry was, he played the guitar, is what i’m saying.
i do want to say, in my own defense, that i was aware of how out of my league not-harry was. it’s not that i thought i had a chance with him. first of all, he had a girlfriend, who was blonde and beautiful and also very nice, which was rude because it meant i couldn’t even spitefully dislike her. she played field hockey and once helped me pick up an armful of books when i inevitably dropped them.
secondly, i have never in my life expressed an emotion and even if he had been moved by my letter, i am confident that if he’d approached me about it i would have simply sprinted away at top speed.
thirdly, like, a bird can love a fish but where would they live, you know what i’m saying?
anyway, all this exhausting set up is to say that i was obsessed with not-harry, and he did not know who i was except probably to have noticed that i was assigned to his lunch table a lot.
“she’s actually not. i don’t know why she’s here all the time.” - mr. w, still not getting any answers.
every year for valentine’s day, my school would do this fundraiser thing where you could buy carnations and have them sent to your friends (or, you know, if you were the kind of person who got asked out, you could send it to your babe or whatever. that…wasn’t really a concern for me).
or, of course, some people sent them anonymously to people they liked.
“no,” you’re probably saying to yourself. and i get it!!! i get it. looking back at my own self, i am also saying, “no.”
that’s a pretty common theme, for me.
i think that i knew, at the time, that it was a bad idea. i kind of remember thinking to myself, this is a bad idea. i know that this is a bad idea. and then immediately following it up with, yeah but how bad of an idea can it really be?
pretty bad, molls!!!! preeeeetty, pretty bad.
you know, looking back, i think that the worst thing wasn’t even sending the carnation. like, that’s pretty embarrassing, but not end of the world embarrassing. but i didn’t just send it, i sent it and i included a note, and that note said, with painful earnestness, “this is the closest i’ll ever get.”
god. god!!! i know!!!
like, what??? was i thinking?? what a horrible, creepy, incredibly vulnerable thing to just put in the universe!!!! lil’ baby molly, somebody is going to read that. he, and all his friends, are going to know that you have feelings. feelings are embarrassing. we’ve been over this.
honestly, at the time, i think i was kind of just like … screw it. you know? i was young. i knew high school was going to be the time in my life where i was the least likeable person i’d ever be. everybody knew i had this huge embarrassing crush on him, so, like, what was the worst that could happen? you only live once!!! you might as well just be the most embarrassing person you can be.
obviously, i did a complete 180 on that opinion the second it was too late to take it back.
as soon as the carnations went out i started making plans to dig myself a hole and quietly die in it.
everybody knew it was me. i mean, everybody. not a single person saw that note and was like, “gee, i wonder who sent this. could it be the awkward, long-armed monster child that spends the entirety of lunch drooling at not-harry with her chin in her tiny troll hands? haha, no. that’s crazy! it must have been someone else. what an unsolvable mystery.”
i fruitlessly tried to talk my way out of it. i sent an email to my entire grade that i am deeply grateful has been lost to the internet abyss that said something like, “hey just in case anyone was wondering who sent that carnation to not-harry, uh, it wasn’t me. i’m not saying anyone thinks it was me, but if they do think it was me, it wasn’t. they’re wrong. i definitely didn’t send a carnation to not-harry. that would be weird, and am i weird? no. as this email proves, i’m a normal person who does normal things only.
“normal things only,” is going to be the name of my autobiography, and it’s going to be a bald-faced lie.
in hindsight, this wasn’t even the most embarrassing moment of my high school career, though it certainly ranks. but it does hit a very specific and tender part of my memory: high school molly was so young, and so earnest, and so terrible at everything, but she was trying so hard. you know? when i think about myself writing that horrible note, i remember thinking, “obviously he is not going to read this and dump his beautiful, kind girlfriend to date me,” but i also remember thinking, “…yeah, but he might.”
i feel like this attitude toward things has lowkey been a guiding principle in my life, and possibly all of human history, for better or worse: this isn’t going to work, but it might.
humans are such heartbreakingly optimistic creatures, even when we try not to be. think of all the times that we have done things just to do them. just to prove we could! just to do something impossible. we are impossible animals who do impossible things.
like, people built airplanes!!! how dumb is that? people built airplanes and gave humans wings, even though it definitely wasn’t going to work, except that it might, and it did.
i like the idea of that, i think. every once in a while, it does. it does work. against all odds.
to be clear, in this particular instance, it did not.
not-harry never talked to me about it, because not -harry took one look at me and probably realized that i had enough problems. i know he got it, because i watched him get it in the lunchroom. i chose not to sit at his table that day, because i was an idiot but i wasn’t stupid. i knew i didn’t have the acting chops to keep a straight face when he opened it.
not-harry looked at the note, and then looked around like, “what the hell kind of john-hughes-movie loving moron sent me this?”
we locked eyes.
dear god, i thought to myself, if he puts the note away and no one ever talks to me about it again i swear i will find a new table.
not-harry held the note up. i looked at it, and then back at him. i don’t know what my face was doing, but i can only assume i looked like little foot in the scene where he realizes the thing he thought was his mom was just his own shadow.
very slowly, and very kindly, not-harry put the note in his pocket.
“i haven’t seen you at lunch in a while!” mr. w said to me months later, in passing, and i did the sign of the cross as i said, “so weird!” and kept walking.
(i looked not-harry up on facebook just now, and he’s still beautiful, and i still love him. reader, should i friend him? probably not, right? it’s probably a bad idea.
James McGraw grows up being told that he’s lucky, so lucky, he has three soulmates and it’s wonderful. Everyone tells him that the world has so much love for him.
Thomas and Miranda meet and she has his words on her skin and she doesn’t care that he has someone else’s because HE doesn’t care, and they’re so happy, and then they meet James McGraw, who has them both, and Miranda tells herself (and it’s truth, at the time) she can live with this, she can live with being James’ soulmate while James is Thomas’ soulmate. Because James adores them both. And God, she loves Thomas, and he loves James, and James loves her, so it’s all okay. They lie in bed and giggle together like children, wondering about the third line of words on James’ skin.
Things go horribly awry. Miranda is still one of James’ three soulmates, but he is not hers and she cannot quite stand to call him hers when her soulmate is gone and her soulmate’s soulmate is sinking into dark water.
James meets his third soulmate. It is a strong contender for the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s certainly in the top five. James swears to himself that he will never, ever let on the truth.
John Silver meets his soulmate. It is certainly the worst timing he has ever experienced. Captain Flint, scourge of the seas, doesn’t bat a goddamn eye, and Silver decides that this match must be unrequited, because the universe hates him so goddamn much. When Madi, proud Madi with her unmarked skin, touches the words and asks, an unusual tender moment, he tells her (and it’s the truth, at the time) that his soulmate bond is unrequited.
At some point the truth comes out. There is angry sex. I do not have the plot figured out past this.
Other miscellany: Anne Bonny is Jack Rackham’s soulmate and he is also in Something (no one is crazy enough to call it love) with Vane. Anne is in love with Max, whose soulmate is Eleanor, much to Max’s profound distaste. Eleanor and Max had the potential to be the only functional soulmate bond in this whole mess until Eleanor fucked it up, because Max is also Eleanor’s soulmate. Anne’s soulmark leads her to a man who is actually a woman who has Anne’s words on her ribs, and Jack is only a little bitter that Anne is not bound to him as visibly as he is bound to her. Anne has never shaved her head, and so they do not know that words are written, neat and small, at the base of her skull.
*slides in* you're probably gonna hate me: Xavier/Erik, "Stumble into my Arms"
(I don’t actually…ship this…which I know makes me weird…so here, have another Real Dark Thing)
AO3 summary: “It’s going to be okay, Charles,” Erik says quietly, brushing dark curls away from where tears have started to dry under Charles’ closed eyes. “You’ll see.”
“He’s a madman, Erik,” Charles says dully, past caring if Apocalypse hears them.
“He’s going to fix us,” Erik swears, like a man clutching to the last thread of his own reason. “You and me, Charles, he’s going to fix us.”
“Go to hell,” Charles says, and turns his face away when Erik bends down to pick him up from the ground.
Actual summary: It starts with a missing scene that’s like 98% Erik being obsessed with Charles and Charles being in mourning for the man he used to know and also the whole entire planet. Apocalypse lied to Erik about why they needed Charles and Erik is shattered, pretty much clinging to Charles as his last anchor point. So when he discovers that this plan doesn’t end with Charles converted to his viewpoint and by his side, Erik goes off the fucking rails. The fight is a lot shorter, since Charles is in better shape and Erik doesn’t do a heel-face turn halfway through. On the other hand, Erik is in pretty bad shape, mentally and emotionally speaking, and his worldview is pretty well shattered, after the battle. Jean rebuilds the house herself, alone, and the fic ends with Erik broken on the floor of Charles’ reconstructed study begging for forgiveness. Charles presses his lips thin and does not answer.
If you want bonus pain feel free to imagine this as a soulmate AU.
I just want to say that the decision to have a nude bathing scene that’s 100% a Vulnerable And Confused Love Interest Scene ft Steve Trevor was a good one.
I love the idea of all of those animorphs crossovers, but especially the star wars and avengers ones.
HONESTLY I MIGHT WRITE THEM.
But like for a preview:
STAR WARS: General Leia somehow ends up on Earth and has a Very Grim Conversation with Jake that’s mostly about brothers and warriors and how to live through living through battles and loving someone who doesn’t carry that weight half so harshly. Alternatively, Rogue One is caught by the Death Star’s blast wave and shunted across a universe, and the Animorphs find them broken and bruised and Cassian and Jyn look into their eyes and see themselves. Chirrut and Baze call all of them ‘little brother’ and ‘little sister’ and it makes Rachel prickle. The Animorphs go from six to eleven (Chirrut morphs a mountain lion and Jyn morphs a wolverine, I don’t have the others sorted). K2 doesn’t make it to Earth at all. Rogue One still dies for the cause. The End.
AVENGERS: I have two ideas here.
The obvious, in which the Animorphs get a “gift” from the Ellimist (”DOES HE OWN A DICTIONARY” Marco demands) and are sent to a world the Yeerks never touched and pop up RIGHT in the middle of the Battle of New York and handily freak out the Avengers. Especially Steve, who almost has a heart attack at the sight of a teenaged girl in a leotard sprinting at him and shouting “Toss me”, and literally almost gets his head cut off when he watches her vault off his shield and turn into a fucking grizzly on the way down. Tony almost throws up when he sees a gorilla get disemboweled and start turning back into a teenager as a bunch of people yell <No medics, no medics, someone protect his head!>
The one I haven’t really seen yet, in which the War happens a little later (like it ends maybe 2001) and thus the Animorphs are only about 26 when the Avengers are formed. Still pretty young. SHIELD kept the whole Yeerks thing under wraps (so. many. NDAs.), so imagine the Avenger’s surprise when the late Phil Coulson is replaced with a young dude build like a football player who tells them to call him Jake, and who introduces his team of equally young people plus one bird as their new backup.
Both of these include Marco and Tony basically talking shit about each other incessantly, Bruce and Cassie talking in soft honest tones about how it feels to be afraid of yourself, Tobias and Clint making horribly unfunny jokes about their childhoods, Steve taking it upon himself to make sure Jake actually talks about the stress of leadership and about how afraid he is of getting someone killed (Bucky and Tom get compared…especially if this is still a thing post-WS) and Natasha and Rachel being really weird friends where mostly they spar. Oh, and also Ax and Thor bonding about Poptarts.
I also saw Wonder Woman today and I feel like there’s a great AU where that crossover also happens.
For the fic thing: "men died for you (i bet you liked it)" for Borgias. Fuck me the fuck up.
Ao3 Summary: “Him,” Lucrezia says softly, and nods her head at the man across the room. Tomorrow he’ll be dead, she thinks, and masks her shiver with a bright smile.
Actual Summary: AU where Micheletto isn’t hired to kill Cesare at that banquet. Instead, he’s hired to kill Lucrezia after her marriage to Giovanni Sforza, and winds up swearing fealty to her instead.
This fic features: -Lucrezia attempting to poison Lord Sforza’s wine, which is how she stumbles across Micheletto attempting to poison her wine, which is how she ends up shoved against a stone wall with a dagger at her throat, Cesare’s lessons in self-defense meaning she has a knife pressed to the big vein in Micheletto’s thigh. “God, you’re fast,” she says, with the same false laugh she gives the French king in canon, the one that’s charming and sweet and full of bravado and masking utter terror. “I don’t think even my brother has someone as fast as you.” -Lucrezia in her nightgown with her gold hair falling all around her, knees tucked up to her chest, sitting on the edge of her bed, with Micheletto on the floor. Covered in blood. Having a quiet conversation about Saint Paul and marriage and the evils of being compelled to marry where the heart and flesh are unwilling. -Lucrezia doesn’t hook up with Paolo. She doesn’t know he exists. Lord Sforza is dead in the ground, and Pesaro is hers. -There is no baby. -Lucrezia doesn’t allow Cesare to poach her assassin. -Cesare is deeply, deeply suspicious of the assassin his little sister brought home from Pesaro. Micheletto falls in lust with him more or less at first sight, but his loyalty is already given. -Lucrezia realizes Micheletto is in love with Cesare before he does, although obviously he’s aware of the lust. -Micheletto realizes Lucrezia lusts after Cesare before she does, although obviously she’s aware of the love. -Lucrezia is deeply impressed by watching Micheletto garotte a watermelon -Cesare is deeply distressed and deeply turned on by watching Micheletto garotte a watermelon and then watching Lucrezia stick her pink thumb into the meat of the severed fruit and lick off the juice.
AO3 summary: It’s not a gin joint and it doesn’t belong to him and she’s not the love of his life. Some days he’s not even sure they’re friends. They fuck anyway. (PWminimalP, Angst, Longer War AU, Unsafe Insane and Consensual, Light Bondage, Blood)
Actual summary: It’s about year six of a war that burned them all out about year three. They’ve managed to keep their secret through increasingly brutal means over the years. Rachel and Cassie haven’t spoken except on missions since Rachel killed a member of the Yeerk Peace Movement in order to keep them from giving the Animorphs up. Jake looks like the walking dead and hasn’t smiled–really smiled–since they failed to save Jake’s parents. Tobias is less human than ever since Rachel left him, and morphs Ax more often than he morphs his old body (his old body is barely fourteen, glaringly young among the others).
Marco and Rachel aren’t dating. Marco is still their tactician and their sense of humor, but their sense of humor is bitter and cutting, and when Rachel kisses him, she bites until his lips bleed and ties his hands with rough cord, he fights her and leaves bruises and cuts. They don’t have a safeword. Rachel needs to feel in control and Marco needs to feel like he’s not the one guiding Jake’s hand on the trigger. It’s a bad system, but God they need it and if anything happens…well, they can just morph it away, and wash each others’ blood from their hands.
MORAN I WATCHED WONDER WOMAN TODAY AND IT MADE ME CRY IN THEATERS! I said "fuck me up diana" so many times. And Charlie was one of my favorite characters out of their little outfit. (Besides Steve) Which story do you think is the most tragic out of theirs?
MY DUDE I’M A HARD BITCH, HEART OF STONE, THE WHOLE NINE YARDS, AND I CRIED LIKE MULTIPLE TIMES. I COULD WATCH DIANA JUST FUCKING WRECK PEOPLE ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR A YEAR.
And….mmmm, that’s a good question. On like a strictly impulsive level, I’m going to say Diana, actually, just because…the loss of that innocence, the loss of that belief that humanity has the potential to be intrisically, truthfully Good, is a tragedy on a fairly legendary level. Like, the world is lesser.
That being said…I’m going to say Sameer. The Chief, as he points out so articulately, has lost a great deal on a cultural level (I was so pleased that they actually addressed that), but he knows everyone. I loved the shot of him wrapping his arm around the German kid at the end, treating the Germans with the same familiar affection that he gives to the Allies. Charlie, we don’t learn a whole lot about, but clearly he starts the movie with very few people to his name–he actually comes out of this whole thing with two new friends and a goddess buddy and also Etta who I think would be highly entertaining and very good for him.
But Sameer…Sameer is clearly close to Steve far more than the others, and more to the point he’s not going to be…super well accepted by the Allied forces. As he says, he’s the wrong color–the Allies just fought against the Ottoman Empire, and Sammy would be easily mistaken for an old enemy. He doesn’t have people outside this weird motley little gang, and Steve was his friend, Sameer is always the first one to shout for Steve, to start running after him, to WORRY. So anyway. Give me all the fic of Sameer and Steve being old friends and Sameer and Diana sitting quietly together as Sammy drinks and Diana listens to all his old stories about Steve that no one else is really in a place to hear. But Diana craves that knowledge, needs to know more about Steve in a way that scares her, and Sammy needs to talk, about his friend who died a hero and who no one will ever remember except for this woman, this goddess who’s sitting on the floor with him with tears clinging to her eyelashes, and if he tells her everything, every detail, and Diana lives on with Steve’s memory in her heart then maybe he won’t quite be dead.
(Original game started by the puckurt comm mods here)
OMG THIS SOUNDS LIKE A LOT OF FUN
hey, anybody want to play this game? I would say anything goes, but….I have an inbox full of star wars asks from the last time I did a meme, and, like, science fiction has waned in my heart* while historical fiction is waxing, so: black sails, borgias, pirates of the caribbean, or any other historical drama you’ve seen me mention and want to toss my way for the sake of surprise?
Have you read Robin Mckinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood? And if so what where your thoughts?
MY BUDDY.
I HAVE.
Right so I think I’ve mentioned my overwhelming obsession with Robin McKinley’s writing once or twice. And I love Outlaws of Sherwood! This is a Good Ask!
All right, so for those of you who haven’t read the Outlaws of Sherwood and don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s Robin Hood. The basic premise is that Robin accidentally kills someone of a higher status than him and, in the process of hiding him from the Sheriff’s men, his best friends Much (the son of a miller) and Marian (the daughter of a Saxon nobleman) convince him that someone has to take a stand against the regime. As such, people who are being taxed to death or who have had their homes taken leave with him and hide out in Sherwood Forest. As the plot progresses, their gang grows, and the standard robbing-of-rich-feeding-of-poor proceeds, Guy of Gisborne shows up, and so it goes.
The major difference between this and most Robin Hood interpretations is that (*gasp*) Maid Marian has a real personality! She’s a fucking firecracker! She’s an expert markswoman–Marian is the legendary archer of the Outlaws, and goes to contests in a green hood under Robin’s name. Marian is a tactician and a fighter and a woodsman AND she teaches all the men how to sew a goddamn shirt. MARIAN IS THE TOTAL PACKAGE. She and Robin bicker all the time and she nips it right in the bud when he gets stupid and overprotective and there’s this stunning scene where Marian and Robin are sitting together under a tree and Marian falls asleep on him and Robin just like “my arm is going numb and there’s a tree root digging into my hip but if I sat here for the rest of my life I would be happy, I want to marry this woman under any circumstances if she’d take me.” And honestly same. Anyway. I digress.
All right, so here’s My Thoughts about Outlaws of Sherwood, and they can basically be summed up as “what a good” but also as “this is such a good way to balance the realistic and the hopeful in this story.” Because like, okay, Robin Hood is a popular story to retell, but, especially in more recent versions, they get really…determined to be ‘realistic,’ which turns into some pretty profoundly grim stuff. BBC did a Robin Hood show a while back and I passionately hated it–Robin was a womanizing nobleman who treated his manservant Much very poorly, Marian had a REAL WEIRD love triangle with Robin, who was kind of a dick, and Guy of Gisborne, who was a presumptuous pushy pseudo-rapist, and the Merry Men were a nominal saving grace until Marian was murdered at the end of the first season. At that point, I just fucking bailed and googled how it ended–spoiler, it ends with Robin, after a fuckbuddies relationship with a villain, being poisoned and dying while Nottingham burns. And here’s why I had an issue with that: Robin Hood, most basically, is the product of a society that was just dead exhausted by the Crusades and the class division between the Normans and the Saxons and the general state of the world that they went “What if someone had the option to not be us” and it was a thing of HOPE. The idea of Robin as a chivalrous outlaw and Much as a loyal friend and Marian as a charming maiden just rebellious enough to ally herself with someone outside the law started as a story about hope. A story about the potential to do something to save the people being crushed under the weight of a nobility that didn’t give a good goddamn about them. A story about the idea that someone might care about them.
BBC’s asshole Robin and indecisive (and fridged) Marian and browbeaten Merry Men aren’t loyal to that idea. Nottingham being burned to the ground as Robin dies just says “rebellion is pointless and the little people will always be victims of the system no matter what anyone does.”
B U T. You know what is loyal to that idea, that core of hope? OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD. Robin is the cynic, here, the pragmatic influence to Much’s ready optimism and Marian’s fire-bright idealism, but even Robin…he loves his people, even if he doesn’t love the dream. He would rather live to fight tomorrow than die a martyr, but when a young man in ridiculous red clothes shows up lost and alone in Sherwood Forest, Robin can’t help but care about him. Much is a devoted friend, not just to Robin but to all the Outlaws, and the one whose idealism bears up under the worst the world has to throw at it. Marian is proud and fierce and the one who turns dreams and love into real action.
You wanna know why Outlaws is my favorite Robin Hood retelling? Because it walks the line between honesty (life as an outlaw sucks! they’re hungry and cold and they’re horribly wounded in the last battle against Gisborne! Robin is scared and/or exasperated 99% of the time and the other 1% is pretty much that one scene with Marian!) and joy. Outlaws loves its characters and its story and its hopes and its dreams, genuinely enjoys the hell out of itself, and that means that it feels like Robin Hood. I don’t like stories tangled up in their own shadows and darknesses, I like stories that can balance the darkness with some light. And that’s what Outlaws of Sherwood feels like. It feels like a forest–the shadows are deep and green and frightening, and the sunlight is so, so bright.
Listen, us tiny folks are only small because our spectacular-ness is condensed and distilled down into its purest essence. Compliment your boyf on the purity of his awesomeness.
my favorite part of hamlet is at the beginning when they see the ghost of hamlet sr for the first time
and the guards are like “Horatio, you go talk to it! You went to college!”
and Horatio is like “Yeah! I did go to college! I will go talk to the ghost!”
like. where did horatio go to college. did he go to ghost college
YES, ACTUALLYYES HE FUCKING DIDBC
(a) EVERY COLLEGE THEN WAS GHOST COLLEGE bc ghosts were widely believed to be Real™ n thus scholars learnt abt them. moreover, as everybody knows, ghosts only communicate in Latin; Latin is the scholastic language. Horatio is a scholar, thus both knows abt ghosts and knows Latin, so it is very reasonable to assume he will b able to ask this one what up (as obviously sth must b up 4 it 2b wandering around, why else wld it b here, gawd, this is like. the most basic of basic-level shit)
(B) WITTENBERG WHERE HORATIO STUDIES WAS LIKE. T H E MOST SPOOPYOF GHOST COLLEGES bc they were alllllll about theology n the supernatural n shit so SUPPOSING HORATIO WILL KNO HIS SHIT ABT GHOSTS IS IN FACT A THOROUGHLY SENSIBLE ASSUMPTION
this has been said before but i am fucking adding it again bc it HACKS ME TF OFF when ppl reblog the post w/o commentary as if OP jsut fucking checkmated Shakespeare when in fact all they managed to do was fail at the most basic historical contextualisation of this scene n make a fcuking fool of emselves lmao
this feels less like a “checkmate, Shakespeare” moment than a “fuck was this dude on, this shit’s surreal” moment
personally I kinda love the complete effect of “thing that made sense when originally written appears hilarious/fascinating/weird as balls to people who don’t have that context, and then context is made known to them and it’s like a whole new level of supercool”
it’s like the circle of life for shakespeare plays. “lol have the college guy talk to the ghost because as a college guy he has the necessary experience” transmutes into “every college was ghost college in shakespeare’s time” and the whole effect is awesome.
just gonna add a bunch of things here bc i love this moment in the play actually and it’s really interesting! because shakespeare was p smart.
marcellus and bernardo have seen the ghost before but they go to horatio with this information before they go to, say, anyone who actually fucking lives there
given hamlet’s reaction to horatio showing up in the next scene we can be pretty sure that no one knew horatio was even coming to elsinore (unless maybe claudius and gertrude invited him without telling hamlet and the soldiers got to him before they could work on him like ros&guil, but a) that’s a stretch and b) horatio’s relationship with the family outside of hamlet is seriously up for debate and a big question to answer for that role)
so like… how did m&b even find horatio to tell him about the ghost and why was it him they told? clearly they want to get validation before going to someone Important but the circumstances of this arrangement are RULL WEIRD
(the ‘you went to ghost college’ line isn’t just about horatio being able to speak to the ghost bc he’s been to ghost college, it’s about having a SCHOLAR validate what they saw, so when they go to someone with power to do something about it they can push horatio to the front and say ‘the learned rich guy thinks there’s a ghost too please actually listen to us’)
when they DO go to tell hamlet it’s basically just a bff reunion + btw ghost so clearly they did some strategizing after this scene as to how best to broach that topic (it’s horatio that says ‘it’ll probably speak to hamlet’ but if it had been someone different would they have thought ‘it’ll probably speak to gertrude’? that they go to hamlet with it is BECAUSE horatio is there so like… again i come back to how did they find him)
PEOPLE P MUCH ALWAYS CUT THESE LINES BUT BOTH THE SOLDIERS AND HORATIO ASSUME THE GHOST IS THERE BECAUSE OF THE WAR WITH NORWAY, NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIS DEATH– it would’ve been a HELLA PLOT TWIST when he started talking about murder in 1.5
wittenberg was also famously associated with dr. faustus and martin luther, which the audience at the time would have known, which is part of why it was the most spoopy
we don’t know horatio went to wittenberg at this point. like we the reader know, we the people putting on this play know, but we the audience don’t know. it’s actually a cool ‘aha’ moment in the next scene when claudius brings up wittenberg and you’re like AH YES, GHOST COLLEGE
we also have no idea what horatio and hamlet’s relationship is like so when horatio shows up in the next scene and hamlet goes from ‘i hate everyone’ to ‘OMG UR HEEEEEEEEEERE’ with this dude we only know as ‘new in town’ and ‘intellectual’ we know that hamlet will believe him about the ghost and that (because we’ve already been over how he’s level headed and smart) he’ll be there to help us out with our lead who’s not quite all there which is a p cool setup by billy
why is the ghost just like wandering the battlements? it’s pretty heavily implied he won’t speak to anyone but hamlet so why doesn’t he just go to him? the haunting rules for the ghost are all over the place and again that’s like a serious conversation you have to have with the actor, what the heck is he doing here
TBH THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THIS SCENE, THAT A LOT OF LIKE SUPER ESTABLISHED SCHOLARS AND DIRECTORS STRAIGHT UP FORGET: this scene is here at least partially to establish that the ghost is objectively there. there is some sort of fragment of spirit wandering the battlements that looks like the dead king and it wants something. it only TALKS to hamlet, and when it shows up later gertrude can’t see it, but the first thing we learn in this play is THERE IS A GHOST. shakespeare takes great care to make sure we know we can trust our eyes with it. our ears perhaps not, but the play is not from hamlet’s pov. we start with marcellus and bernardo, and grounded loyal horatio, saying ‘what the fuck what is this ghost doing here’. the mystical bit isn’t what’s up for debate
also ‘thou’rt a scholar, speak to it horatio’ is fucking hilarious and no one ever plays it as a joke
like why isn’t this ALWAYS staged as marcellus and bernardo hiding behind horatio and pushing him at the ghost and him going ?!!!?!?!?!?!? i just got here and you have swords what the fuck is wrong with you
I can’t say I agree that broiling those Yeerks was tactically necessary. The Animorphs ended operations like the hospital all the time without slaughtering the unarmed.
First of all, since I’m realizing that it is, in fact, NOT immediately obvious, all of my backlogged Animorphs commentary was written on total sleep deprivation and thesis-powered anxiety, so my rhetoric is not always as clear as maybe it should be. That said, let me add real quick that ‘necessary’ in this context =/= morally or ethically ‘good’ in any way, nor does necessary mean…like, the best available outcome? If that makes sense? It just means ‘the action that the characters believed to be needed in order to both survive and accomplish their goal.’ I should have been clearer about this in the original post and that’s on me, but, again, sleep deprivation is one hell of a drug.
But like hear me out here. Because the potential for this hospital is…frankly horrific, in this book. If the Animorphs didn’t take steps to definitively end the plan, if they had just run for it (because let’s be real…by this point in the series they really haven’t had a definitive win, they’ve mostly just lived through some battles), they would have felt complicit in the massive enslavement potential for the hospital. The hospital is a revolving door of war crimes and human rights (beings’ rights?) violations. Whether or not they would be right to feel that complicity is a different conversation (and a short one because they’re six people, everything else aside they’re only six people against an army, they’re not complicit just because they couldn’t perform a miracle), but they would absolutely feel it. So in the moment, they have to do something more than run, because they can’t face the idea of just bailing on this mission. And in the moment, under the gun, this is all Jake can think to do. They don’t have the materials to destroy the hospital to any respectable degree (even an elephant could only do so much and they don’t have any other big wrecking-ball morphs yet, like the rhino), they don’t have the materials to stop the closing through any tangentially proper channels (like they stop the logging venture in the woods with the superpowers of Skunks And Bureaucracy), and even if they did just wreck the hospital…that would kill a lot of people. It would probably kill all the Yeerks in the pool, too. The casualty count of this was always going to be high, and Jake…this is the thing that establishes Jake’s stance most viscerally.
Jake is ultimately a utilitarian general to the fucking bone, I think I talk about this in a later book, but that means that he takes a very specific viewpoint on casualty count. Lowest casualties of ‘his side,’ highest casualties of ‘their side,’ and this is a rare opportunity to have all the casualties be Yeerks, rather than a potentially innocent host. He sees this as the only available way to both accomplish their goal (he knows they’re all high ranking Yeerks who presumably can’t just be magically replaced, meaning it will get them a better delay on the Hell Hospital) and get all of his people out alive–as brutal as it sounds…it’s a distraction. Jake could have made it really quick, electrocuted the pool or something similar that would kill all the Yeerks cleanly, but he’s gambling that the staff will be in such a desperate rush to try to save the Yeerks in the pool that the Animorphs will be able to get out, so he drags it out. He makes similar plays throughout the books, and again, they’re not morally or ethically ‘good’ nor are they the best available outcome…but that’s not really the point.
So like…yeah, that’s my logic. They absolutely do get out of situations like that without similarly atrocious acts on other occasions…but it’s a loss. It always means they lose that round. Their wins are awful. Hell, right in the next book, they literally take steps to starve every Yeerk in the vicinity to death. Destroying the Kandrona is the equivalent of poisoning every water supply for a human army (removing a critical substance without which survival is impossible), which is prohibited under the Geneva Convention. If a guerrilla squad did something like that in an Earth war they would IMMEDIATELY be slated as war criminals–not soldiers. And yet…the destruction of the Kandrona is necessary, because it’s all the Animorphs can think to do to buy themselves that critical bit of extra time, to strike even a tiny blow against their enemy. It’s not the morally sound play. This is why Cassie struggles so much throughout the war–she’s the only Lawful Good player on an entire Chaotic Neutral team. The Animorphs more often than not don’t have a morally sound option available to them, which is…frankly sort of the point.
