While I absolutely agree that Lily Potter beat the shit out of snape when he joined the afterlife don’t forget Petunia Dursley.
Lily was estranged from her sister but still trusted her to take care of her son, who was found bleeding and crying on her doorstep after his parents were murdered. Only to find out that they hurt, starved, isolated, lied to, and locked in both a cupboard and then a room with bars on the window the son she died to protect so he could have a better life? I don’t care what the deleted scene said about petunia being sad lily died when she gets to the afterlife it is round two of lily potter MMA smackdown
hi, just want you to know, i think your search isn't working? nothing shows up, even when i use terms i know you've used. thanks for sharing your awesome writing with us, it always cheers me up to read your stories! p.s. i just read your post about amuniasa and it sounds AMAZING!!! keep up the good work!!!1
Ahhh yes, my search function is kind of a little fucker at the best of times. I think it’s because there’s dashes in my url? Things are p thoroughly tagged (although…not always logically) so like…try that? Feel free to ask if you want a specific tag because (ha) I’m a mess and my Tag Page is like 70% complete at any given time. But like, if you wanted all the Alleirat posts I’ve made or something, ‘words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/tagged/alleirat’ should take you there.
And thank you so much it was so gratifying to write it all out!
I’d like to believe that the reason that the Amazons have the most EXTRA fighting style in existence is because they’re a warrior people with no war to fight so instead of just doing basic training like normal people, Antiope is like, “And now I’m going to teach you how to BACKFLIP off of a MOVING HORSE,” because they have to fill their time somehow.
@jollysunflora : The second half of my complete list of modern AU Animorphs headcanons, approximately one per book.
28. “Ax,” Marco says, “How come you can roll out ‘venti dulce de leche dark-chocolate frappuchino extra whip’ without batting an eye, but you giggle every time you have to say the word ‘soy’?”
“It has so many vowel—owl?—sounds, in so little space,” Ax says. “That long sssssssssss, so pleasant on the tongue, but then that odd oooyyy ooy-yah? All in the back of the mouth. Very strange. Sssoooy. Ssususs-oooyaaa.”
“Also, he’s moved on from the frappuchinos,” Tobias adds. “Now he keeps spending all our hard-stolen bitcoins on espresso mack… mach…”
“Espresso macchiato con panna,” Ax explains. “Doppio.”
29. Cassie feels herself sweating as she props the laptop across the room from her, tools laid out and Ax unconscious on the table. She never expected to find a YouTube video on how to perform brain surgery—and to be honest, it’s actually about “how neurosurgeons perform an orbitozygomatic craniotomy,” not intended to be a how-to manual—but it’s the best she can do under the circumstances, and so she’ll follow along for now.
MM3. “That’s the kind of strong leadership we need.” Jake gestures to the full-color television (this year’s latest model) where a program of their current leader plays on a loop. “Keeping the wrong kind of people out of this country, saving America for the right kind of Americans.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Rachel says. She and Tobias and Jake are the only three Animorphs, except when Melissa joins them sometimes, and listening to their “Supreme Leader” blather on gets old sometimes. “All I want to know is whether it’s true that within a few years people will really have phones that plug into their cars. That’d be cool.”
Tobias rubs his eyes against the silk of his wing feathers. They itch constantly, since he doesn’t have a gas mask to wear every time he goes out into the pollution-opaque air outside the way that his human friends do. Jake and Rachel take bets sometimes, idly, brutally, about whether he’s the last raptor left on the face of the planet.
“Magnificent!” Drode appears in their midst, and both the Berensons immediately point guns at his head.
30. Marco is lying on his bed the day after watching Eva fall, staring at a patch of wall above his dresser, when he registers that his phone has been buzzing for a while now. It goes off so many times he assumes he has to be getting a call, but when he checks his notifications he just discovers he’s gotten seventeen text messages in the last hour.
The first is from “Smurfette,” and says “Did you know that there is a type of food that involves baking a cinnamon bun inside of a donut? We must secure as many of these as it is possible for a human to consume, as soon as possible!”
The next one, from “Hawkgirl,” reads: “found out recently that apparently ax still thinks you invented flea powder. i told him that if youd invented flea powder wed all be a lot richer right now.”
“Team Dad” (not to be confused with “Real Dad,” which is how Marco lists Peter) sent along several invitations to team missions on League of Legends this afternoon, along with a threat to have Cassie play Marco’s avatar if Marco doesn’t join in. “we both know that by the time you get back you’ll have only healing attacks and she’ll have trained it to apologize automatically for stabbing people,” Jake adds.
One of the many texts from “Julia Butterfly Hill” suggests that Jake has underestimated Cassie’s diabolical streak, because it’s a screenshot of a clone of his account which has had its name changed to HarambeWasFramed.
The real surprise, however, is the single text from “Xena: Warrior Princess.” It’s a link to an article about a disaster in the local national park and the efforts to clean up the wreckage of an as-yet-unidentified craft which went down in the canyon. Marco has to read it a few times to understand the point she’s making, because it’s all about what’s not there: the article makes no mention of any human bodies being found among the wreckage.
Marco gets halfway through typing a reply to them all which informs them in no uncertain terms that he sees through their transparent attempts to cheer him up and doesn’t appreciate it, but he deletes without sending. He can practically hear his mom’s voice saying it: he can focus on the fact that he’s still surrounded by people who love him, or he can focus on the negative side of everything. And being constantly negative is no way to live.
31. “Sharing this again, because its been 3 months,” Jake’s cousin Brooke posts on Facebook. “Anyone who has any news at all about Saddler, no matter what it is, PLEASE contact my family. Big brother, I dont know if youre still out there, but I miss you. I miss you like crazy.”
Jake turns up his Spotify’s Offspring channel a little louder to drown out the sounds of Tom and his dad shouting at each other downstairs. His eyes flinch past Brooke’s post, but they can’t move fast enough to prevent the thought that flashes across the surface of his mind: Is this going to be me a year from now?
32. Tobias texts Rachel and Jake an article from Audubon.Org, where several birdwatchers are going into ecstasies of scientific fascination at the bald eagle and peregrine falcon seen flying in close formation in a cell-phone video taken near a highway overpass downtown. His only comment is, “Told you so.”
33. In the aftermath, Rachel does a Google search: “PTSD treatment symptoms outcomes.” She reads through the WebMD site, the NIMH page, the Wikipedia link to a DSM-5 entry. She thinks of Tobias’s withdrawn silences, his antipathy toward so much they used to enjoy, but she thinks of other things as well. How exhausted Jake seems any time they’re not on-mission. How badly Cassie flinches when the school bell rings and doors slam. How Ax seems to be gradually losing interest in the things—cooking shows, new condiments, human history trivia, These Messages—that once drew his fascination. How last week Marco flicked an ant off the back of his hand and then went white like he’d just kicked a puppy. How good it had felt when she’d hurt David, spreading the pain around, giving it back.
She catches an Uber to the clinic downtown, filling out forms in the waiting room based on the checklist written on her phone for “how to get tobias an ssri”: Yes, she often feels tense and worried. Yes, her heart often races for no reason. No, she hasn’t thought of ending her life. No, she doesn’t feel out of control when she eats.
She gets as far as developing a cover story—it’s about how she’s never felt the same since her parents’ divorce—but in the hallway to the office she panics and calls Cassie. “Am I doing the right thing?” she asks, after she’s explained.
Cassie is silent for a long time, never a good sign. “I’m not sure an SSRI would work on a bird,” she says at last, “and that’s even if we could figure out a dose that would work without killing him. I know you want to help, and I think you should, but…”
Rachel hears what she’s not saying: but what if her mom asks too many questions? But is this risk really worth it? But what if the psychiatrist (the receptionist, the pharmacist) is a controller? But isn’t it them, and only them, against the world, and isn’t that just how it has to be?
“The war won’t last forever,” Cassie says weakly, and Rachel hates her a little for it. “When it’s over, when we get to tell everyone what’s happening…”
Rachel hangs up. She goes home, morphs, and flies out to the woods.
«You know I love you, right?» she asks Tobias later that evening.
«Of course I do.» He sounds exhausted. She’s never felt more helpless in her life.
34. The Yeerk Peace Movement, as it comes out, has a Twitter feed. It is rather painfully obvious that it has been set up and run entirely by aliens who are doing their very best to communicate with humans, and not quite succeeding. Most of the posts are couplets, for some reason that none of the Animorphs can fathom.
“Want to be On Fleek? When you see someone’s rights threatened, speak!”
“Don’t be a Belieber anymore - end slavery and even the score.”
“#tbt: Remember when we were symbiotes? Give taxxon freedom your sympathy votes!”
“Nickelback is super lame, and keeping involuntary hosts is just the same.”
“Respect your host’s rights today, and make your human into your bae!”
35. It’s Marco who comes up with the idea for how to take down William Roger Tennant. This is a guy, after all, whose cockatiels have their own Instagram account: he runs his fame on the internet.
“It’s simple,” Marco explains. “We start a hashtag—#notsonicetennant—and we make it go viral. All we have to do is film this guy everywhere he goes, and eventually the yeerk will slip up.”
It proves not to be simple after all. Their gif of Tennant twitching madly mid-EPA speech gets overshadowed by the news story about One Direction nearly getting poisoned with spiders at the same banquet. Ax does not understand the concept of hashtag, and keeps adding #notsonicetennant to his retweets of what Marco calls “food porn.” They train one of Tobias’s repurposed GoPros to follow poodle-Marco, but that becomes a meme mocking the world’s most obnoxious stray dog rather than Tennant himself.
The plan finally, finally comes off when they pull out all the stops and just confront him in morph. The smartphones that Rachel rigged up in the surrounding buildings don’t pick up the thought speak, but the audio of Tennant screaming at the aliens to leave him alone comes through just fine.
When the scandal breaks, the internet (in truly predictable fashion) drops #notsonicetennant and starts using #tennantgate instead.
Ax reposts an old photo of Tennant eating a quinoa salad—zoomed in on the salad—and tags it #tennantgate. All of his teammates assure him they appreciate the attempt.
36. “All right, that’s just weird,” Marco says, looking at the final entry in the underwater creepshow they’ve been walking through for the past hour. “All the other ships have been getting more modern as we’ve gone, but this one? Looks like it was made in the sixties, at the latest.”
«The world’s creepiest museum curators are getting sloppy with the placement of bodies as well,» Tobias points out. «There’s no way that many people could fit on a boat that small. They’re practically falling over the sides.»
Jake and Cassie look at each other, seeing the same realization reflected in each other’s eyes. Neither one of them wants to say it out loud.
Jake becomes the one to bite the bullet. “Don’t you get it?” He points to the ragged clothes, the emaciated bodies, the modern smartphone tucked in among the antiquated radio equipment. “They were refugees.”
37. Rachel shuts the window on the library computer as soon as she hears someone walk into the room, but she can tell she was too late by the look on Jake’s face when she turns around.
“Roy Ludvig, huh?” Jake says. “Heck of a name.”
“He was at the T.V. studio when we attacked.” Rachel looks down, picking at her nail polish. “No civilians were supposed to be in danger.”
Jake’s expression softens, as much as it ever does. “And now you’re scrolling through his Facebook, looking for something that’ll let you sleep at night.”
“He’s got a grandson,” Rachel blurts. “Jordan’s age. He…” She shrugs. He’s dead, and it’s more or less her fault.
“Shouldn’t be looking on Facebook.” Jake sets his phone on the library table next to her, taps the screen to bring up an official-looking report. “You should be, say, borrowing my dad’s computer. Sending an email from his account to ask for the guy’s medical records. If you had, you’d know that Mr. Roy Ludvig had a heart condition. That he had maybe a year to live, at most, and doctors said he might die at any old time.”
Rachel looks down at the report for a long time, and eventually looks up at Jake. “Doesn’t make it okay, what I did,” she says. “He’s still dead.”
Jake shrugs. “You don’t have to forget it ever happened, but you do have to live with it. Live, and fight another day.”
38. In the aftermath of Estrid’s visit, Tobias is flying over the boardwalk when he sees a henna artist who clearly smokes way too much pot to be a Yeerk. He gets Ax, they morph human, and both get henna tattoos of Elfangor’s name. (Ax had previously expressed an admiration for the human tradition of commemorating a lost loved one by making markings on one’s body.) They know the tats will disappear when they demorph, but they’re both glad they did it. The artist asks how long they’ve been together, and Tobias says in a scandalized voice, “he’s my UNCLE!” Thus, Tobias succeeds in both of his goals: making Ax laugh, and reminding him he has family here on Earth. Honestly, the reminder doesn’t hurt Tobias either.
39. “You know, not all squirrels are like that,” Marco is fond of saying after a morph goes wrong. “Not all termites are horrifying worker drones.” Sometimes it’s, “You know, some of my best friends are fleas.”
It’s Cassie, however, who gets the last laugh out of that one. «You know, Marco,» she says as they swim away from the wreckage of the helicopter, «Not all ants are like that, right? I shouldn’t say that all ants are killers, right?»
Marco stares at her in silence while the others snicker, watching him war between the two impulses: to keep the joke going forever, and to express his honest hatred of ants.
«Come on.» And now Rachel has joined in on the teasing. «You’re just going to let that kind of besmirching of the ant community stand?»
«Okay, okay!» Marco gives in. «Ants suck. Yes, all ants!»
40. “Our experts have examined the video extensively, and near as we can conclude, this footage is genuine and unedited,” the newscaster says. “Given how viral this video has proven to be, with over two million views since it was posted to YouTube on Wednesday, everyone wants to know: is this footage proof that aliens exist? Is this a publicity stunt for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts sequel? Or, as one YouTube commenter asks, did a Smurf just have sex with a centaur?”
«Potential new ally?» Tobias suggests. He’s already tapping out a search for the original video in his modified tablet.
Ax laughs. «Of course not. He’s crippled. A vecol. Useless. We must respect the privacy of his isolation.»
“You know what? Fuck that,” Marco snaps. He shoves to his feet, posture tight with anger. “Just… Fuck that,” he tells Ax. “I have ADHD. Attention Deficit whateverthefuck. I take a pill every morning to help me function because my brain isn’t good enough to filter stimuli all by itself. I got a fucking 135 on the world’s most boring IQ test and I’m still failing half my classes. I’m a vecol. You think I’m useless, huh? You gonna start refusing to talk to me because of some bullshit about ‘respecting’ my ‘privacy’? Huh?”
«That’s different,» Ax says. «You’re not…» He doesn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence.
«If he’s an exception, I hope I am too,» Tobias says more gently. «I got screened for anxiety disorders as a kid, and I guess we’ll never know if I qualify or not, ‘cause my aunt decided that doctors cost money and if the test said I needed one then she didn’t want to know about it.»
Ax doesn’t answer for a long time. He doesn’t seem to know where to look.
«Let’s go tell the others what we found.» Tobias taps a button to send the video to himself. «We can talk more about this later.»
MM4. Tobias flinches when his phone makes the small ping sound that means he has an alert. The new kid is the easy target in every school on the planet. He wonders what it’ll be this time: another Facebook post where the semi-anonymous account Toby IsALoser tags him in another meme about how he has to pay people for sex because the sight of his body would make any normal girl run away screaming, another unnamed Instagram ping telling him he should kill himself so that no one has to look at his stupid fat face anymore, another Snapchat image of a puddle of vomit with the caption “me when I think of you,” an email with the most disgusting gif anyone could find after a quick search…
It’s not, though. It’s an invite to join a private Facebook group, called The Sharing, with several hundred local members. Most of the names Tobias recognizes are cool older kids from the high school. Intrigued, willing to trust for the moment that this isn’t some ridiculously elaborate prank, Tobias clicks “join.”
41. Jake looks around at the enormous open field, concrete pitted with openings and low hovels of corrugated steel and rebar. He can see for nearly half a mile in every direction before the smog makes it impossible, and the tallest things around are the hunched hork-bajir. “Where are we?” he asks.
Cassie frowns. “This? Jake, this is downtown Manhattan.”
He gapes at her. “What happened to it?”
“Tall buildings are targets for drone strikes,” she says casually, turning away. “The only way to be safe was to go underground.”
42. Marco doesn’t bother going to the house of the guy who photographed them, nor does he try to catch the kid before he uploads the video anywhere. Instead he waits for the image to appear on YouTube, then becomes the first commenter. “Sweet manip!” he says. “Is that Photoshop, or can you do that in free programs like Gimp?”
43. “EarthIsOurs-dot-tumblr-dot-com?” Marco says incredulously. “What does Taylor do there, post pictures of her pet taxxon? Reblog plans for planetary domination?”
«Judging from her archive history, she’s had this blog for many years,» Ax says. «She recently changed the domain name, but some of the content on here is from as early as 2008.»
Jake and Marco get caught up in debating with Cassie about what exactly to send to her, but Tobias just scrolls quietly through Taylor’s old posts. She didn’t lie about being beautiful, he realizes, or about being popular. There’s a long blank period in her tumblr account in mid-2014. And then she posted one selfie—just one—after the fire.
He can’t bring himself to read the names that the trolls call her, or the discussions about how much money they’d have to be paid to have sex with her. But there’s no overlooking the suggestions that she kill herself. The posts are too numerous, too vitriolic.
“Every chick ever to wander onto the internet has gotten that crap,” Rachel says; clearly she’s been reading over his shoulder. “She should’ve developed thick skin, not joined the Sharing.”
Tobias thinks of the Facebook page made at his old school just to discuss the fact that he’s a chubby zit-face, of the posts which eventually overwhelmed his Instagram with death threats. «Yeah, I guess,» he says.
44. It takes a long time for Cassie to get home from Australia, but at least they’re not too worried for most of that time; she texts them her location and a brief description of the insanity that landed her in the Outback as soon as she gets in contact with Yami’s family.
45. “None of this makes any sense,” Peter says. “I’m hallucinating, or you’re delusional, or else—”
Marco sets his phone in Peter’s lap. “Check the timestamp, Dad. I took that six months ago.”
Peter stares at the phone for a long minute, and then slowly looks up at Marco. At a clear loss for words, he tilts his head back toward the screen.
“I know.” Marco laughs, the sound wet with tears. “That blond wig looks terrible on her. But it’s really her, Dad. I swear.”
46. “So they’re going to get the U.S. embroiled in another war,” Marco says. “And this one with a country that can actually fight back.”
«Seems like,» Tobias says. «Only why bother with all the secrecy and political wrangling? Why not just send a couple mean tweets to Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un? That’d probably do the job just as well.»
“No, it wouldn’t.” Jake runs a hand through his hair, looking around at them all. “The yeerks need a total war. Everything the U.S. and its allies can pull out, against everything China and its allies can muster. Our military has gotten too used to sending drones to fight its wars, to ‘tactical strikes’ against insurgents. If the yeerks want half the species annihilated, they have to do a lot more than poke a couple of egos.”
47. “News flash,” Marco says. “Your average suburbanite ain’t gonna accept a seven-foot-tall alien for a neighbor. You know the number of times my mom’s been asked for proof of citizenship before she was allowed to vote or cash a paycheck or buy a car? How many times she’s been pulled over by cops while driving the speed limit with her seatbelt on? And she’s a regular old human being. Toby’s right—the hork-bajir have a whole other fight coming if we ever win the war.”
48. Rachel feels the blood drain from her face when she opens the Facebook message and sees the name attached. David’s Facebook account has been defunct for almost two years now; there’s no one left who would want or even be able to access it from the outside. Should be no one.
Miss me? the message from David’s account says.
Who are you? she types with shaking fingers. What do you want?
I know what you did. I’m coming for you. I’ve got friends all over the place and they’ll find you. They’ll kill you. Amazing the allies you can get, when you know where the bodies are kept. On the internet, no one knows you’re a—
Rachel hits “block.” She tells herself that the screaming nightmares she has all that night and into the next are the product of having a stressful life, she’s an Animorph for pete’s sake.
She doesn’t stop shuddering every time she gets a message for the next two weeks, but she never hears from whoever (It wasn’t David. It couldn’t have been.) it was ever again.
49. They stagger away from yet another hopeless fight, all of them injured, half of them missing limbs or bleeding to death. Dragging their damaged bodies behind the first dumpster they find, they demorph, remorph, and force their minds to focus long enough for the long flight home. It’s only when Rachel is in owl morph, staring around the dimly lit alleyway, that she sees the security camera pointed directly at their location.
«They must not check it that often,» Marco says without much hope. «Or else they’d be out here already to come looking for us.»
«Doesn’t matter,» Tobias says harshly. «It had a perfectly clear view of all your human faces. And that building is owned by the yeerks.»
They all stare at each other in dull shock as the realization sinks in. They always knew this moment was coming—they could only be so careful for so long—and yet, on some level each of them hoped it never would.
«Take one more night to be with your families,» Jake says at last. «We evacuate everyone in the morning.»
Jake loses his phone, again, somewhere amidst all the chaos. This time around he doesn’t bother to replace it. It’s not like his mom is going to be wondering where he is, not anymore.
50. “So,” Jake says, “this is going to sound crazy, but—”
“Aliens are invading the planet, and you’re the only kid terrorist who can stop them?” James suggests. “We do have wifi up here, you know. You’re Jake Berenson, right? You’re all over the conspiracy theorists’ forums right now.”
“Um.” Jake runs a hand through his hair, starts again. “Yeah, pretty much.”
James nods. “In that case, you’ve got thirty seconds to convince me your story’s not a load of crap before I call security.”
51. Ax secures their wifi in something a billion times better-hidden than Tor. With that reassurance, they all end up starting blogs.
Marco’s is a rambling string of wry comments about everything from the invasion to his parents’ science projects. Sample post: “Insider source (aka my mom): Visser Three has morphed human and eaten AN ENTIRE BAG OF MARSHMALLOWS in one sitting, ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION. Pass it on!”
Jake’s is the place that people go to find out how they can help, and to get his reassurance that the help means something. Sample post: “As Barack Obama says, ‘We the people recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom without a commitment to others is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.’ This fight will never be over just as long as we keep supporting each other. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you all for the KickStarter donations.”
Rachel’s has beauty tips for the American girl on the run, light and self-deprecating enough that you often don’t notice the undercurrent of desperation. Sample post: “If you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, try fixing your hair using reflective surfaces such as pots, ponds, or pieces of Bug fighter wreckage. Alternately, just say ‘fuck it’ and never look at yourself again.”
Cassie’s tells people how to stay safe, and how to keep their environments safe as well. Sample post: “Everyone please remember, it’s important to stock enough food and water for family pets as well as humans when retreating to an apocalypse bunker!”
Tobias’s has a lot of good-natured grumbling about everyday life in the valley. Sample post: “In other news, my girlfriend’s mom is currently arguing with the smartest being on the face of the planet about where to put the new latrine facilities. Sorry Naomi, but my money’s on Toby.”
Ax’s has a lot of food reviews, of course, but again there’s that undercurrent of desperation, almost like he’s trying to convince someone else (or maybe even himself) that humans are worth saving. Sample post: “Marco assures me that there are no less than 23 distinct flavors contained within every sip of Dr. Pepper. Just think of the years of experimentation and innovation it must have required to produce a drink which can inspire 23 different reactions from human taste buds, all at the same time. Truly inspired genius.”
52. They run drills upon drills for what to do in case of a drone strike. Using any morphs they have that can dig or build—mole, taxxon, elephant, beaver—the Animorphs create an extensive network of tunnels and shelters, posting guards at all times to keep their eyes on the sky. The hork-bajir valley doesn’t show up on satellite imagery, which they only know thanks to Peter’s definitely-illegal fact-gathering missions on the darkweb, but they don’t know for sure whether an overhead camera would be subject to the same strange perceptual distortions they all experience when flying there as birds. They nearly lose their precious secrecy when Naomi sends several emails from her work account, claiming she’s being held hostage and asking anyone who will listen to come rescue her. Eva generates a hasty follow-up from the same account asking people to ignore “the prank that I now realize was in poor taste,” but none of them are sure it worked for the next several days.
53. Rachel makes one last post on her nearly-extinct Instagram account. This time the scrap of paper she uses appears to be torn from the back of a food label, but the penciled script is as intricate as ever. It reads “Who wants to live forever? —Freddie Mercury, 1986”
54. After it’s all over, Tobias retreats, he hides, but he keeps a thread of communication open. Cassie shoots him an email with the subject line “Hawk patient with intermittent aggression and lethargy—any idea what could be causing it?” Marco sends him idiotic memes that now feature the Animorphs’ names and faces. Ax asks for constant updates on the new wing of Taco Bell being built downtown, and repays the favor by leaking confidential information about the search for the Blade ship.
And then he gets one of the stranger emails he’s ever received. It’s an offer of a full legacy scholarship to Harvard University (which has just found the means to explain some inconsistencies in the records of one “Alan Fangor,” who graduated in the ‘80s) in exchange for Tobias teaching one class per semester on any subject of his choice. He agrees, with the stipulation that all his classes be online.
The resultant course (Ornithology 442: An Insider’s Perspective) is like nothing the students who participate have ever seen before. Tobias will write out rambling treatises on Why Blue Jays Suck or All the Ways Hawks Are Superior to Eagles with a thought-speak-to-text recorder. He’ll deliver online lectures from a shaky webcam pointed into a nonspecific tree, occasionally wandering off for hours at a time to go hunting. Students who ask him personal questions about Rachel get regurgitated mouse skeletons Fed-Exed to their campus mailboxes. Essays that don’t demonstrate much effort get feedback such as “even I can tell this sucks and I have a seventh-grade education” or “my grandmother could make better sentences than this AND SHE’S AN ANDALITE WHO DOESN’T SPEAK ENGLISH.” Assignments include “find one bird fact in a textbook and explain why it’s a load of crap” or “go film a Boston pigeon until it does something interesting, I dare you.”
Nevertheless, enrollment is so popular that Harvard has a three-year waiting list and charges students an extra $500 just to sign up. When Tobias finds out about the extra fee, he promptly video-calls the Intrepid, gives Ax remote access to his computer, and explains why he needs Ax to convert the course illegally to a MOOC. Harvard University fires him for breach of contract; Yale hires him on that very same afternoon.
UM HI. So I'm the one that sent the ask about the magical gf things and I have a confession. I already knew it was from your magical book and was kinda subtly hoping you would talk about it?!?!?! I"M SO SORRY but like I said I'm so invested in this crap and would read the entire frikin thing. ALSO I LOVED THE EXCERPT. And now I'm leaving before I disgrace myself any further.
WAIT NO DON’T LEAVE
SO HERE’S IRONY FOR YOU: you came in and didn’t want to bug me so you asked in like a sideways way, BUT I DIDN’T WANT TO BUG YOU, so I didn’t talk about it. (I’m a mess, I’m sorry, y’all gotta be explicit about this stuff because I have no self-confidence.)
BUT ON THAT NOTE let’s talk about perceptions of sex and romance in Alleirat? Like? I’m into it?
So you know the code of chivalric love, where like the fair and pure maiden is adored from afar by the knight and on the one hand it’s kind of cool but on the other hand it’s predicated on the fair and pure maiden who can’t reciprocate or even really acknowledge what’s going on? I like that first half but the second half bothers me like FUCK so I made a better version.
In Alleirat, sex and romance are considered linked, but not intrinsically so–having casual sexual partners is fine as long as your partner is aware and good with it, and sexual experimentation is considered normal (even expected) between the ages of like 16 and like mid-to-late twenties. (People who are like ‘I am gay/straight and I am EXCLUSIVELY gay/straight and I have never experimented with another gender’ are considered weird and kind of to have missed out? Like, they’re thought of as…having skipped an important life stage? Societies Are Problematic, is my point here.) Monogamy is common, but not mandatory, and conditional monogamy (which I’m about to get into) is pretty normal.
So, the courtly love arrangement, which is called amuniasa. Like, say that you are a woman and you work closely with another woman, and you fall in love with her. And you’re very much in love with her (commitment is Serious Business in Alleirat and cheating is considered an actual crime) and you tell her as much. Now she has two options. Either she can take you up on it and you can attempt a relationship, or she can acknowledge the honor you’re doing her with your feelings and declare herself amiasa, or ‘the beloved.’ Then you have the choice to remain committed to her as amdri (the lover). Some basic rules of amuniasa include:
Amuniasa is generally given the same level of importance as marriage, and there are a very short list of reasons that are considered valid to dissolve it.
Amdrin and amiasan are permitted, but not required, to engage in other romantic and sexual relationships. It is common and accepted for someone to have both a spouse and an amdri/amiasa, although it’s not frowned upon if someone devotes themselves wholly to their amiasa.
Brenneth’s right-hand during their previous stint in Alleirat (Krei The Tree Lesbian’s mother Torei) was Brenneth’s amdri, and never took another romantic partner during the remainder of her life. Brenneth and Torei are held up as sort of the Platonic ideal of devotion and amuniasa. (Krei’s coloring also suggests that her father looked like Brenneth, but she never met him.)
The amiasa has a limited period of time to change their mind (often one year), and leading your amdri on with hints that you might one day return their feelings (or with sex) is considered incredibly cruel and dishonorable, and is a valid reason to dissolve the relationship. (Your amdri is functionally off limits for sex for this reason.)
Hassling your amiasa and trying to force them to return your feelings is not permitted and is a valid reason to dissolve the relationship. It can also get you arrested, sent out of the city, or placed under what basically sums up as a restraining order.
It is standard for the amdri to give gifts to their amiasa, or to perform great deeds in their name if they’re in a position to do so (also a thing that Torei is considered the ideal of). Alternatively, an amdri might cook for their amiasa or perform another kind of service, like braiding hair, tending children, etc. This is because Alleirat views service and gift giving as a mandatory core of every romantic relationship (…this extends to orgasms), not because the amdri is viewed as in any way subordinate or servile to their amiasa. The amdri considers it a privilege to perform service and give gifts, and the amiasa recognizes the honor being accorded to them.
It’s actually not common for amdri and amiasa to continue working closely unless it’s necessary, as it’s believed that this is unfair to the amdri. They interact largely socially and on their own terms, to the extent that the amdri is comfortable with–this might be several visits in a week, or the amdri might travel quite a distance. (Torei is considered an outlier, as she took a position as the captain of her amiasa’s guard and proceeded to live, work, and spend all her time with Brenneth for four years. …there are songs about Torei’s devotion and selflessness and disregard for her own pain, is what I’m getting at here.)
It IS common for your amdri or amiasa to know your children, if you have any, and is generally considered their de facto guardian in the event of a disaster.
It is NOT UNHEARD OF for someone to executively decide not to even try to have a relationship and act as an amdri without telling their amiasa. This is generally because they believe they have no chance with the other person and that their attention would make their amiasa uncomfortable, such as a man falling in love with a lesbian, or someone falling in love with someone aromantic. This is considered fine, but it also means that you have no formal claim on the other person.
This can also be because they have a terrible (justified) guilt complex and believe that the other person could never reciprocate as a result of four years of mutual attempted murder. Not that I’m in any way vagueblogging about any of my characters here.
ANYWAY THIS HAS BEEN A PRIMER ON LOVE AND ROMANCE IN ALLEIRAT, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK OTHER QUESTIONS.
if you think you’re “enlightened” or “modern” for mocking religious people for believing in god/gods, the afterlife, reincarnation, prayer, etc., then i hate to break it to you but you’re actually just an asshole
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.
