Anonymous asked: If you are in the mood to write pain (and, really, when aren't you in the mood to write pain): Rachel/Tobias during the early war
*mean cackling* So when I’m in a very particular mood about the little girl I used to be and how much she was screwed over, I tend to take it out on my characters. Ergo, I am banned from touching my Alleirat story until our houseguest leaves, and will instead be writing Animorphs because how much worse could I make it. Sorry. And since this got pretty long and also there’s not exactly loads of Animorphs fic, I crossposted it to AO3. If you like Animorphs, maybe comment on that shit or something.
here we stand (with our arms folded)
It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since the disastrous attack on the Yeerk pool, the sun still over the trees at the edge of the forest where it butted up against Cassie’s farm. The horse she’d morphed, whose quick legs had saved Cassie and one single woman the night before, was loose in the field, and Rachel was cross-legged on a crate in the barn as Cassie murmured to a wounded rabbit. Rachel felt dazed, with exhaustion and shock, as if every blink and turn of her head demanded a fresh calibration of her brain, a new moment of I’m alive and nothing is okay. She’d spent an hour in the shower after getting home, with the water as hot as she could stand, but she could still feel the grit of the Yeerk pool floor on her palms and feet, and kept expecting to catch a glimpse of Hork-Bajir blood on her human teeth in the mirror.
Cassie didn’t seem much better, her hands still where she would usually be smoothly going through her tasks and her voice mindless nonsense, as if she was as numb as Rachel. The silence wasn’t quite tense, but there was an unmistakable taut feeling that kept even the noisiest patients subdued and quiet.
“Did Jake say why he wanted to talk to us?” Rachel finally asked, and Cassie glanced up, shaking her head.
“No,” she said.
Rachel nodded and sat quietly for another moment, fidgeting her fingers over the seam of her jeans and trying to hold the anxious question tightening her chest behind her teeth. Letting out a breath that carefully didn’t shake, she asked, as casually as she could manage, “Have you talked to Tobias today?”
Cassie paused for a longer moment at that, considering, and her eyes were more focused when she looked up. “No, I haven’t,” she said, and offered Rachel a small smile, an attempt to reassure. Cassie was good at that, Rachel thought distantly, at being reassuring—Rachel had never mastered the trick of it. “But I’m sure he’s fine. We’re trying not to stand out, remember? We didn’t exactly run in his social circle before, there’s no reason he would have come to find us today.”
Chewing at her lip, Rachel tried to feel reassured. It didn’t take, and she said, “I didn’t even see him at school, though. What if he’s hurt, or–”
“Rachel,” Cassie said, peeling off her heavy work gloves and closing the rabbit’s cage. “Calm down. I barely knew Tobias’ name until…yeah. He’s good at blending in with the crowd, I’m sure you just missed him.” She walked over and pushed at Rachel’s legs until she dropped them to let Cassie perch beside her.
Cassie’s close-cropped hair crinkled against the skin of Rachel’s neck when she pillowed her head against Rachel’s shoulder—the same shoulder Tobias had perched on the night before, before they went down into the Yeerk pool, Rachel couldn’t help but think. Rachel tucked an arm around Cassie’s shoulders and rested her cheek against Cassie’s hair, trying to feel more at ease. She and Cassie had sat together and watched movies and talked like this for years, Cassie taking cheerful advantage of Rachel’s taller frame to curl up against her side, and under any other circumstances, Rachel would feel calmer just being able to smell her best friend’s cocoa butter and hay scent.
Rachel hadn’t felt calm since the construction site, and couldn’t begin to imagine what would repair her.
“I would have noticed him,” Rachel muttered, low enough that she wouldn’t have minded if Cassie had pretended not to hear her.
Cassie straightened up, a curious glint showing through the layers of weary shock in her eyes, and opened her mouth. She was cut off by a quiet knock on the barn door.
“Come on in,” she said, a note of forced normality in her voice. “It’s just me and Rachel in here.”
“It’s us,” Jake said, pushing the door open and preceding Marco through. He offered them both a faint smile, but Marco, uncharacteristically, looked downright grim. “We need to talk.”
“What’s wrong?” Cassie asked, shifting to stand, and a shadow swept over the dirt floor before the red-tailed hawk swept through the door, flared, and landed neatly on an empty cage.
“Oh, God, Tobias,” Rachel said, jumping to her feet so quickly a caged fox squalled in surprise, eyeing human and hawk alike with suspicion. “We were worried, we didn’t see you at school.”
<Sorry,> Tobias said, sounding startled. <It, um. It didn’t occur to me.>
Cassie stood, more slowly but just as serious. “Jake, what’s going on?”
<It’s not Jake’s fault,> Tobias said at once, and when they turned to look at him, he flared his wings, ruffling the feathers uncomfortably. <I…> He trailed off and Jake sighed.
“Tobias was trapped in the Yeerk pool,” Jake said after a moment, and Rachel, in all her years of knowing her cousin, had never heard his voice so heavy. Not even the revelation that Tom was a Controller had weighed on him so clearly. “It took him more than two hours to make it out.”
There was another silence, uglier and darker than the one that had hovered between Rachel and Cassie, and Tobias was the one to break it.
<I’m stuck,> he said bluntly, and hesitated. <I’m sorry.>
“Don’t be sorry,” Rachel said automatically, and although she recognized her voice in the air, she didn’t seem to be the one speaking. Her body seemed to be outside her reach—somehow, until this precise moment, she didn’t think the reality of their situation had quite sunk in. The dazed exhaustion from before started to clear, and left something hot and bitter and vengeful in its wake.
“It’s not your fault you were stuck down there,” Cassie said quietly, and thank God for Cassie, who could always say the right words as Rachel stood and tried to wrestle her voice into obedience. She could feel her body again, imagined grit and all, and it was trembling with the need to hurt someone for doing this to him. She knew that feeling, the burn in her gut as if something toxic wanted to eat through her skin, but now there was the wicked murmur at the back of her mind that she could, and it shook her. “Even if you’d been human going in, you’d have been stuck. And you saved me.”
Her words cut through the tight-wound air like a blade, and Jake let out a deep breath, his shoulders slumping as he leaned back against a sturdy wooden table. Marco shoved his hands in his pockets, and Cassie sat down on the crate again. Rachel, hands knotted into fists to keep them from shaking and not quite sure that she could bear to sit just yet, leaned against the nearest empty cage to where Tobias had perched.
The five of them looked around at each other for a moment, trying to decide what needed to be said. “What are we going to tell people?” Marco asked.
“Try and give a crap about the situation for a minute, Marco,” Rachel snapped, the heat flashing into something cutting for a moment. She regretted the words the second she’d spoken them, and Marco bristled at her.
“No, Marco’s right,” Jake said, intervening smoothly. He was looking at the ground, near Cassie’s feet, with the wrinkle between his brows that said he was thinking hard. “We have to find a way to explain where Tobias went, we can’t tell anyone.”
<You’ll have time to think it over,> Tobias offered, and he sounded like he was trying to make the situation easier on everyone. <Probably a week or two, at least.>
“Dude, you’re missing,” Marco pointed out. “Like, milk-carton-kid missing. We have maybe another day, you can’t file a missing person’s report for a full twenty-four hours.”
<My uncle won’t notice for a while,> Tobias said, pragmatic and blithe. <He’ll probably think I’ve run away, or that he sent me back to my aunt and forgot about it. Just tell everyone you don’t know me very well, they won’t suspect anything.>
The fire in Rachel’s chest changed, going bright white-hot, and she felt her lips twist into a snarl as she pushed away from the cage at her back. It clattered, and voices called, but she ignored both—she needed out, she needed to be somewhere where it didn’t feel like she was a heartbeat from punching someone she cared about, her best friend or her cousin or even Marco.
The sun had started to drop behind the trees, outside, and the air was cooler, less stifling than in the barn. It cooled something in her throat, unwound a bit of the tension in her shoulders as she skirted around the wall to the back of the barn, where the shadows of the trees stretched across the field. Not for the first time in the last week, Rachel wished she’d let Jake convince her to do karate rather than gymnastics, when they were both six and he didn’t want to do it alone—punching something would be really gratifying right now. Instead she pressed her back against the wood of the barn and blinked against the burn behind her eyes, fingernails cutting into her palms.
Nothing was fair. Nothing had been fair, not ever, and she couldn’t do anything about it. Their attack on the Yeerk pool was a failure, the Andalites were God knew how far away, and Tom, her cousin, who hadn’t questioned her sudden habit of turning up unannounced during the divorce and had just handed her whatever book he’d been assigned lately for school ‘because Jake only reads comics and boring-ass war stories sorry-for-the-language-Rache’, was a Controller. And now, God, now Tobias was stuck as a hawk, sweet gentle Tobias who she’d always smiled at in the halls and worried about when he showed up with bruises. She’d tried, when she saw him getting into trouble with the bigger guys at their school, had dropped a murmur in Jake’s ear and been relieved when she saw her trustworthy, reliable cousin towering over two guys with Tobias behind his shoulder.
And now he wasn’t ever going to be that sweet gentle kid with the solemn eyes and sad smile again, and he believed, really believed, that no one was even going to miss him.
Rachel wanted to kill something. Maybe Tobias’ uncle, or his aunt, or his absent parents, but she’d settle for a punching bag if one made itself available. Maybe the gymnasium had one.
Rachel wasn’t sure how long she’d stood there, eyes fixed on nothing and hands clenched so tight it hurt, but the flicker of movement in the corner of her eye startled her. Red and brown—Tobias, fluttering down to land on the fence near her.
“Sorry,” Rachel said, barely a whisper, and he cocked his head.
<That’s what I was going to say,> he said, almost teasing. But he was serious when he spoke again. <I am sorry, Rachel.>
“You don’t need—I’m not angry at you!” she burst out, and found she was breathing hard, the hot thing in her chest shaking to pieces without an outlet. “I’m just angry.” She closed her eyes and scrubbed at them with one hand, catching a stray drop of salt water and dashing it away before more could follow it.
Tobias didn’t say anything as Rachel tried to swallow down the acid in her throat, and she was briefly, desperately, grateful for his silence. She needed it, needed the space to get herself under control again.
“You shouldn’t be the one being nice to me about this,” she said at last, when she thought her voice was reliable.
Tobias was quiet for another moment, then he said, <I don’t think so.> Rachel looked up to meet the fierce eyes of the hawk, and he continued, slow and careful, as if unsure about his words. <It didn’t occur to me that you would worry, if I wasn’t at school, or I would have told you this morning. I don’t…> He ruffled his feathers again, a vague approximation of a human shrug, something vaguely sheepish. <I don’t have anyone else to miss me, as a human. I’ll figure it out, like this.>
“I’d miss you,” Rachel said without thinking. “If you just up and disappeared.”
Tobias’ voice was quiet, almost shy, when he answered. <I’d miss you too.>
“It’s not fair,” she said. “This whole stupid war and your whole stupid family and this whole stupid two-hour limit. None of it’s fair, and I can’t do anything about it, and I’m just—angry.”
<I think that’s doing something,> Tobias said, thoughtful. <Being angry. I’ve never had anyone angry for me before, except Jake that one time.>
“It’s not enough.”
<I know,> Tobias said, and fluttered into the air again, this time landing on her shoulder. His talons were a careful set of pricks against her skin, not quite painful, more…itchy. He was lighter than he looked, but a comforting weight on her shoulder nonetheless. Rachel tipped her head slightly to touch her cheek against his wing, as she had before the Yeerk pool. <Let’s go do something more, then.>
