Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

readera asked: For the softer world Animorphs, any pair. M, L, O, and T. T is made for Ax, though. Have you heard of the podcast Morph Club Cast? It is two nerds rereading all of Animorphs. All of them, even the spin offs!

For some reason this ask got lost in the shuffle a billion years ago, but I am actually for real doing all of those prompts for the Animorphs because I have no sense of self-preservation.  I specifically have already completed O: No no, we aren’t breaking up!  You didn’t let me finish.  I’m gay for YOU. (And I’m queer for math!)  It has tragic gay Andalite smoochin’.  L and M are still up in the air and I’m considering having T be someone teaching Ax to cook, AKA The grand adventure of “NO AX THAT’S NOT FOOD”.  N is going to be a Firefly AU, though.

AND YES.  YES I HAVE HEARD OF MORPH CLUB.  I LOVE THEM DEARLY.  I DON’T KNOW IF MEGAN OR CAREY HAVE TUMBLR ACCOUNTS, BUT IF THEY DO, SOMEONE TAG THEM.  IN THE EVENT THAT EITHER OF YOU SEE THIS, I SCREAMED FOR REAL WHEN I DISCOVERED YOUR PODCAST AND I LOVE IT TO BITS AND FUCKING PIECES.

princehal9000:

ok but what if

the tolkien dwarves invented the printing press

give me that fic

I never thought about it, but, I mean…of course it’s the dwarves.  

The elves would never think of it, fading out of Middle Earth with their perfect memories entirely intact, bearing the lore of ages in their own lifetimes.  Elrond would never think to write down the story of his life, for all that it stretches back to the Silmarils’ crafting.  When they do write things down, they believe in taking the time to inscribe the words with their own hand–no one knows the hard truths of permanence and impermanence like the Firstborn, and if you are going to take the time to make something ephemeral into something lasting, you do it right.  And besides, Quenya and Sindarin and forgotten Noldorin, all are made with elaborate curling letters, intended more to be written with a brush tip or a calligrapher’s pen than printed for clarity.  A printing press would never capture the fluidity quite right.

The race of men…well, they’re still trying to recover.  The great kingdoms of the human race–hard Gondor and broken Arnor, wild Rohan and poor shattered Harad to the South–took the brunt of the Ring War hardest of all.  Even the strongest of them is left in fragments.  New rulers, damaged walls, burned cities.  Not many have time, in those first years–and it does take years–to worry about the lore that might have been lost or muddled by water and fire and falling stone, not when there are still leaderless orcs roving and people starving as they try to stretch the harvests.  By the time they do, they’re trying to piece together what they used to have.  No one thinks twice about trying to piece it together the way it was, and the way it was, was handwritten.  Someday the race of men will be great innovators, reaching toward the stars with sure hands and bright eyes.  Now, though, the race of men is enduring, is rebuilding and making alliances, trying to prevent the losses of the war from reappearing ten, twenty, a hundred years down the line.  They are doing well, at enduring–pragmatists, grim and tough and determined–but they hardly have the time for mechanical marvels that don’t aid building, speed farmwork, or otherwise smooth the path.

The hobbits persist in being stubbornly hobbitish.  Oral history is what they do, and their memories for family ties and dramatic gossip could give the oldest Eldest a run for their money.  Who’s going to bother to write down the story of the time Athella Proudfoot–no, not that one, the other one, Odo’s great-great-great aunt–drank half the tavern under the table, got up on the bar, did a jig in nothing but her bloomers, and then settled in to drink the place dry?  (And still looked fresh as a daisy, if quite a bit less sober, the next morning.)  No one, because anyone you ask knows the story of everyone who ever did anything worth knowing the story of.  What do the hobbits care for legends and lore?  They know who they are and where they come from, songs and stories and all, and there’s a certain level of strength in that.  Strength enough to walk into Mordor, strength enough to reclaim the Shire.  

The dwarves…the dwarves are a people who once had libraries, sweeping and beautifully full of knowledge.  The libraries in Khazad-dum have rotted, by now, ransacked by orcs and goblins or burned entire by Durin’s Bane.  Books and scrolls, illuminated with precious metals and expensive inks by the finest scholars, are worth nothing to a dragon, nothing but fuel for amusement, things to send sparking.  The library where Dis learned to read, where Thorin and Thrain before him learned statecraft, are nothing but ash.  The Iron Hills, Ered Luin, those places were filled by a people seeking refuge.  Few dwarrows snatched tomes as they fled Erebor.  Fewer still kept them at the ruin of Azanulbizar.  The dwarves escaped their ancestral homes with the clothes on their backs and scraps of bread baked on stones, with the pyres of the burned dwarves still smoldering behind them.

It’s a survivor of that flight who scratches down the first idle plans.  She remembers seeing Dain Ironfoot, barely more than a child–but then he seemed such a grown-up to her, at the time, when she was still a beardless babe only just walking–bloodied and limping on a crutch as he stood up to claim the leadership his father had left in his wake.  Dain and Thorin, young dwarrows still, but already old with the weight of the world.  She remembers that better than the dragon, better than the battle.  Her mother died in Ered Luin, but not before writing a poem for the burned ones, a poem for the two dwarves who had surrendered their own youth for the sake of their people.  She can’t stand the idea of her mother’s poem being lost, the way so many things were lost in flight after flight.

That dwarrowdam dies, an old dwarf in her bed with her loved ones around her, and it’s her best friend’s daughter who comes across the plans, many years later.  Yes, she thinks, looking at the levers, at the vague notes about possible lettering methods, yes, that could work.  

It doesn’t work, at first.  It doesn’t work a lot, really, but the dwarves are a stoneheaded bunch and not in a rush to be put off by a few petty failings.  Or by a total collapse of the base mechanics, the first time she tries to pull the lever.  The dwarrowdam unearths herself from a pile of metal and gears and wood, with the help of a few other folks who heard the complicated crash and weary cursing, and starts again. 

It takes most of two years and a lot of brainstorming–first with her friends, then with her guild, then with any poor fool careless enough to wander into her workshop–but the scribe-machine works.  She shrieks and bursts into tears when the first page comes out crisp and clean and beautiful, and sprints into the great hall waving it triumphantly over her head.

The paper says, in kuzdh runes, plain and clear, We are Mahal’s children, and we are yet unbroken.

words-writ-in-starlight:

Today I went to a restaurant, a newer place in town.  It filled a building that had stood empty for three years, and before that, it was a Denny’s. The tables were clean and the accents were blue, and the waitress’ eyes were wide and edged with white.

I told my dad, sitting at the new table, that the aura of the Denny’s lingered.  He asked when I had been to the Denny’s in town—never, I said, but all Dennys’ are the same place, you know?  There are many doors, but they all open to the same strange otherworld, a place where another plane of existence opens at the right hours of the night.  

The Denny’s was gone and has been for years, but it stuck to the walls and whispered from the speakers when the music paused.  The bar was untended in the middle of Happy Hour.  When we walked in, the hostess stand was empty.  Our waitress had a sharp note in her voice, strained, and her lips moved strangely around her words, and her eyes were ringed white, like a startled animal.  She was a pretty girl, just a few years older than me—I might have gone to school with her, but I didn’t recognize her, and she didn’t seem to know me.  When she walked away, the faint shadow of a red-shirted figure seemed to cling to her back like mist.  Hi, I’ll be your server tonight, she said with a perfect toothy smile, and I heard the rapid welcome-to-Denny’s-can-I-take-your-order in my mind before she kept talking, can I get you anything to drink to start.  

I wonder what she’ll dream about tonight, our waitress with the white-ringed eyes and the unfamiliar face. If she dreams about her job, but decked out in another primary color and filled with the transient souls who end up there at odd hours.  No one goes to Denny’s, someone told me once, you just end up there, usually at late hours and with a mild degree of confusion about what brought you to their door.  If she dreams about the red-shirted shadow, and about how that stranger arrived for work one day—another day, another dollar, a waitstaff lackey of the boss but also a keeper of the door to an elsewhere—to find their job simply closed, the sign gone overnight like it had never been.  We don’t know what happened to the Denny’s in town.  It didn’t even go out of business, it just stopped, like a hand had flicked a light switch and taken the whole building with it.

I wonder if she’ll dream about doorways and dark lots.

The walls were decked with black and white photographs, of serious faces and beautiful landscapes, so neatly tiled that there was never more than a hand’s breadth of clear wall in some places.  Their eyes didn’t follow you, and the water didn’t ripple out of the corner of the eye, but there was something…close about them, I told my mom.  Like you might pass your hand over the front and then reach through, past the paper and ink to the otherplace just beyond.  Not a trap, if you were clever, but a gateway, which is almost the same thing.  Cut off from the other Denny’s doors, I told her with a smile, the restaurant had to find new ones.

Ginger ale and a burger. The food wasn’t a binding contract—the terms of the deal are set out at the beginning, at a restaurant, even at a Denny’s.  You come and they serve you, you pay and they allow you to leave.  Our waitress brought us the check without a fuss, not so much as a wheedling don’t you want dessert to keep us there.  Deal observed.  I looked out the window as my mom pulled out a credit card, overheard part of a conversation about checks.  No, we don’t take checks, cash or credit. Checks aren’t signed in blood, I mused, but then neither is credit.  Digital lifeblood, maybe, a new bond for a new age, modern contracts to match a modern elsewhere.  Deal kept.

I don’t think I would want to dine and dash, at that restaurant, in those walls.

Two crows spent almost forty minutes on the grass outside, idly strutting through the all-day dew that still clung.  They chattered at each other, and eyed the window where I watched them, black eyes like drops of intelligent ink.  I looked outside every few minutes, and every time I expected to see another view, something new, something other than the shoe store and the vast expanse of pine trees. It was the feeling of lying on my back on the ground with my eyes closed and feeling the planet spin beneath me, but the stars being the same when I looked again.

When we walked outside, the pearly grey sunlight-behind-clouds had faded to a sulky, dull twilight, and there was fog wrapping thick around the restaurant. The parking lot was empty save for our car and two others, even though there had been several more families inside. We laughed about the old Denny’s in town, about how it had lost its hold on this reality, and didn’t talk about the empty bar or the wide-eyed waitress or the way the kitchen was so quiet, even though every staff member was supposed to be behind the swinging doors.

The Denny’s in town is gone, died quietly in the night without so much as a flatline.  But I think it might be haunting its replacement.

On the one hand, I want Brenneth to have a horse with an appropriately impressive name, something suitably legendary.

On the other hand…I feel like she might just call him Asta (’Horse’) and leave it at that because she would know that it drove Crispin to distraction.

Anonymous asked: please, tell me more about death and the gay barista. where does death get her hair done? why does death like iced chocolate? has death ever considered a netflix subscription?

oh, and one more: has death read the princess bride? does death like the princess bride?

Here are five headcanons about Death and Sephie the gay barista!  (…are they headcanons if it’s my own stuff?)

ONE

Sephie has never seen someone with hair like Death’s.  It’s as thick as sheep’s wool, but perfectly obedient, sleek curls that pile up around her shoulders like snowfall.  Hours of styling, even in a salon, could never reproduce it.  They’re sitting in one of Death’s gardens–phosphorestent blossoms cast an eerie blue-white light over the sleek black walls and the cataract of precious gems pouring into a false river of opal and lapis lazuli and sapphire–and Death’s head is in Sephie’s lap as she plays with the curls.  Sephie stretches one white lock out and it springs back, and Death opens an eye, smiling when she sees Sephie grinning.

“Is it so amusing?”

“Yes,” Sephie says, delighted.  She pulls out another curl and cocks her head as Death opens her other eye.  “Why don’t you dye it anymore?”

“Dye it?” Death repeats, blinking.  Sephie nods, and it takes a moment before her question seems to click in Death’s mind.  “Oh!”  Death laughs a little.  “No, I didn’t dye it.  What color did you like best?”

“The red was nice,” Sephie says, bemused.  Death smiles at her and closes her eyes, and Sephie watches as each hair begins to change, deep venous scarlet seeping through each strand from the scalp until her lap is full of riotous red. Death opens her eyes again as Sephie huffs out a breath of surprise and rakes her fingers through the newly colored mass.

“Do you like it better like this?  I can appear however I choose, this is simply,” Death gestures down at herself, “my preference.”

“I love it,” Sephie says, bending down to kiss Death’s hairline and reveling in the electrical shock of the contact.  “However you want to wear it.  Surprise me.”

TWO

“Where does the food come from?” Sephie asks, evaluating an apple.  It’s crisp and red and perfect, and she knows that when she bites into it, it will be sweet and delicious.  “Why do you even keep food here?”

“The fruit comes from my orchard,” Death says from her throne.  A bowl of pomegranate seeds like drops of blood frozen in crystal rests in her lap, and her fingertips are stained with their juice as she pops one at a time into her mouth.   “And I keep food here because I like it.  And because you like it.”

“You mean those trees actually grow fruit?” Sephie asks, startled.

“Of course.  The rest of the food, I do what I can.  My sister brings me gifts sometimes.  She knows I love Earth food.”

“You mean she knows you have a terrible sweet tooth,” Sephie says, pointing at Death with her apple, and Death smiles, holding out the shallow bowl of pomegranate seeds toward her.  Sephie returns the apple to a dish that she suspects might be solid diamond and walks forward, until Death can neatly pull her into her lap in place of the bowl.  “You can’t fool me,” Sephie says, reeling in the pomegranate seeds to pop a few into her mouth.  They burst cool and sparkling over her tongue.  “I served you iced chocolate every day for years.”

“I do love chocolate,” Death confirms, and stretches up to peck a kiss on Sephie’s lips.  It tastes like pomegranates.

THREE

Sephie doesn’t actually know how many rooms are in Death’s citadel, but then again, Sephie is dead, and has thus reached a state of Zen acceptance about all things.  So when she opens a door one morning and finds a library with shelves twenty feet high, she doesn’t ask a lot of questions.

Death finds her quite some time later, comfortably stretched on a reclining couch upholstered in emerald green with a small tower of books climbing beside her.  Slinking onto the couch beside her, Death coils catlike into the empty spaces left on the surface and insinuates her head onto Sephie’s belly, curls–amber gold today–spilling over them both.  Sephie giggles and laces one hand into Death’s curls, lowering her book.

“What are you reading?”

“I have no idea.  It’s called Resenting the Hero, it’s great.”  Sephie gestures around her at the library.  “What is this place?”

“My library,” Death says.  “I’ve only just added it.”

“Only just?”

Death shrugs against Sephie’s side.  “I never thought to add something purely for the sake of leisure before.  Sometimes spirits spend time in my gardens, or my orchards, but this…”  She looks up at Sephie through her lashes, almost shy.  “This is my own space.  And yours, of course.”

Sephie spends a few moments working very hard not to melt through the couch at that, then clears her throat and says, “Have you ever considered a theater room?”

“A…theater room?” Death says musingly.  “Would you like one?”

Sephie laughs.  “Well, it might be nice to watch a movie together.  You would like The Princess Bride–it’s a classic.”

“I shall look into it at once.”

FOUR

Sephie’s favorite room in the citadel is a cave–or rather, it seems like a cave.  The walls drip with rubies and topaz, garnet and carnelian and amber, the ceiling laden with stalactites, and the floor stacked with pillows in a deep bowl shape.  Bringing a light inside turns the jewels into leaping, frozen fire, and casts fractured glints and glitters across the pillows.

Death doesn’t begrudge her a thing, is more than willing to give Sephie anything she asks for, and when she learns of Sephie’s affection for the place, it begins to mysteriously fill itself with gifts.  Bouquets of glowing flowers from the gardens, blankets and cushions of a fineness that Sephie never saw in life, sweets and books and bowls of pomegranate seeds and apples and cherries.  Death is always shy, when she comes to the fire-crystal room, and insists firmly that it is vital that Sephie have her own space.

Death shouldn’t be so endearing.

But stretched on the floor of Sephie’s fire-crystal room, turning her hair different colors as Sephie feeds her pomegranate seeds, it’s quite undeniable.

FIVE

Death doesn’t sleep.  Sephie doesn’t need sleep, anymore, but Death doesn’t seem to be capable of it.  So Sephie is a little startled to find that Death keeps a bed chamber, well, if palely, lit and ornamented with the same pristine jewels as the rest of the citadel.  The bed is soft and comfortable, a canopied thing with blue and green jewels inlaid in the black stone corner posts, and piled deep with pillows, and the bedside table is stacked with books and one of the shallow bowls of fruit.  Sephie doesn’t need sleep anymore, but more than once she has taken a nap in Death’s bed, purely because it’s so pleasant, and she often wakes up to find Death curled up beside her, eyes open but breath steady and calm.

This is not one of those times.  Death, after a long series of hearings and judgments in her audience chamber, comes to find Sephie in a garden with her usual unerring efficiency.

“Come with me,” Death says, and Sephie–oh, of course Sephie does.

Curled up with her head on Death’s chest, Sephie feels the low crackle of lightning through her nerves, the unmistakable feeling of power from being close to Death.  Death’s hand is tracing Sephie’s jaw as she sorts through the books on the table with the other, and Sephie hums, a pleasant sound vibrating deep through her chest.

“Read to me,” Sephie commands, and Death laughs, the sound even more inhuman at close range, before pulling her hand back with a book.  It’s a plain paperback, with a black and red cover embossed with gold lettering.

“Have you read Sunshine yet?” Death asks, amused, and Sephie smiles.  “I did recommend it to you.”

“You did,” Sephie agrees, and nestles deeper into the pile of cushions  as she tucks an arm around Death’s waist.  Even skin-to-skin, Death has no heartbeat, and her chest only rises and falls so that she can speak, but Sephie has gotten past finding it strange–it is calm, soothing, a level of peace that Earth never offered.

Death kisses Sephie’s hair and opens the book.  “Part One,” she begins.  “It was a dumb thing to do, but it wasn’t that dumb.  There hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake in years…”

Anonymous asked: tell me more about the Animorphs DnD Au. I really just need an AU where they don't suffer and just have a good time

My buddy, me too right this second.  For those of you who are not aware, that comment is buried somewhere in this recap of Book 7.

All right, so, like, here’s a basic breakdown of how it all goes down.

It starts with Jake’s big brother Tom, who, like, listen, his parents went “keep an eye on your younger brother after school on Fridays” and Tom went “that’s cruel” and his parents went “don’t be an ass” and Tom huffed like a teenage asshole and rolled his eyes and went “FINE.”  So he decides that if he’s going to be mandatory babysitter for like four hours on Friday afternoons he’s going to do something amusing with his time, and he asks Jake if he knows anything about DnD.  Jake goes “nope!” with good-natured interest because this is his big brother, and Tom’s like “GREAT we’re going to do that recruit your friends”.  And Marco’s in on the spot because he’s a fucking nerd who’s probably done reading on DnD even though he’s never been able to actually play a campaign, and Rachel agrees on behalf of herself and Cassie because she’s exasperated with Jake and Cassie and this is an opportunity to force them to spend multiple hours together.  (Cassie is unexpectedly the major sticking point here, but her parents are like “PLEASE HAVE FRIENDS AND A LIFE OUTSIDE THE BARN” so ultimately she ends up going.)

On the first day, as they’re leaving school, Rachel grabs Jake by the arm and points subtly over his shoulder.  “Hey,” she whispers, “isn’t that Tobias?”  It is, in fact, Tobias.  Actively in the process of maybe fighting a bully for his backpack–if Tobias loses his backpack, no way is his uncle buying him a new one, and he’s also going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble, so yeah he’s gonna fight for it.  Jake and Rachel don’t know this at the time, but listen, Berensons are Berensons in any universe.  Jake ambles over, all cheerfully broad shoulders and stocky build just starting to settle into ‘teen’ rather than ‘kid,’ and silently menaces the bullies into stepping down.  And then he kind of subtly kidnaps Tobias to go with them.

(Ax moves into town a month later.  He’s living with his much-older brother who used to be a soldier and now he’s done with that and working as a computer…person.  Full disclosure, I don’t know that much about Comp Sci, but Elfangor Shamtul is a programmer and he’s the rising star.  Ax is living with him because *waves hand* better schools maybe?  IDK.  That’s how Ax shows up, and they kind of adopt him because he’s new and he joins their campaign.)

Tom, because he’s kind of a dick, declares that he won’t tell them anything about the plot, except that they all have to dual-class as modified Druids.  

(I have added a cut because this got kind of long.)

Keep reading

Anonymous asked: Do you mind doing Max from Mad Max Fury Road for the headcanon meme?

Hell yeah headcanon meme.  Full disclosure: I have not seen the other Mad Max movies, and I am Out Of It right now.

A: what I think realistically

It takes time for Max to return to the Citadel for good—time to feel less like he’s breaking apart at the seams when people speak to him—but that’s not to say he doesn’t return.  He hasn’t had what he might call Real Feelings in long time, longer than even he really knows, but bending over Furiosa in the truck, cupping the nape of her neck in rough hands made gentle through sheer desperation, feeling her flesh hand clutch at him as she tries to say bring them home—he knows, in this blinding stroke of insight, exactly how screwed he is.  He let this woman touch him, let her help him, let her rest a rifle on his shoulder and without thinking twice trusted that she wouldn’t turn it on him.

He leaves the Citadel, with a bike loaded with water and rations and ammo.

He comes back again with a kid on the back of his bike and a grenade belt and a new set of points on his map, and wordlessly turns the former over, keeps the second, and shows them the latter.

The next time he comes back, he has a truck and no explanations and no kids, but he shows up two days ahead of a small exodus of desperate people who need help—we were told that there was water—and who have this story about how the man in the truck got sucked into their drama and then told them about the Citadel and never gave his name.  Max is gone by the time Furiosa hears this story, and she sighs, and sets about finding these people something to do.

This is how it will be, then, she decides the third time the hail goes up from the watchtowers—incoming! Incoming!  It’s the Road Warrior!  Get the Imperator!

She sighs, and walks down to meet him.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Everyone expects Max, having returned properly to the Citadel, to immediately take on a role of prestige and grandeur.  He’s the Road Warrior, the man who helped save the Sisters and Furiosa from Immortan Joe’s grip, the man who’s been sending them survivors and bringing them supplies, the man who was a blood bag and a hood piece and survived a great sandstorm.  Obviously he’s instantly going to be promoted to the highest role save for Furiosa and the Sisters themselves.  Alternatively, they would also accept ‘concubine’ as a reasonable answer, but they understand that the Sisters might not be comfortable with that.

Um…except he’s not.  He runs supply missions still, sure—sometimes he and Furiosa run them together and everyone knows that’s Serious Business—but as far as the majority of the Citadel is concerned, Max’s main job is…furniture?  It’s his honor, of course, they always rush to add, his honor to be favored by the Imperator, but they have questions.  

Furiosa can just reach out a hand, getting ready to leave on a mission, and snap her fingers at him, and Max will appear beside her as if by magic so that she can balance herself on his shoulder to get her boots on as fast as possible. When they’re out on the Wastes, Furiosa gestures behind her and Max compliantly sits down on the ground so that their backs are pressed together as a support.  Trying to plot a map by spreading it awkwardly out on her hand, Furiosa gruffly calls him over and he lets her spread it out against his back, an impromptu table.  At her absolute most relaxed among the Sisters and no one else, Furiosa will sit on the floor in front of Max (in a chair in deference to his leg) and use his thighs as a lounge chair/throne.  One time when she was heavily concussed and a little blood-loss-y, she dropped onto a pallet with a huff and wordlessly flapped her hand at Max until he came over and took a seat where she could use him as a pillow.

Max jumped out of his skin the first time she did this (he isn’t aware that Furiosa spent three days psyching herself up to be able to lean against him and fix a boot), but like…he’s good with it.  This is a kind of physical contact he is learning to be good with.  

And of course, he tells Furiosa in his slow, quiet way, it’s his honor to be favored by the Imperator.

Furiosa thumps him in the shin, but doesn’t get up.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

It’s just so distressing to think about how Furiosa is almost certainly unconscious by the time Max tells her his name.  His most precious secret, given to this woman as a gift, and she…she doesn’t hear him.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Max is an immortal fey avatar of the desert and Furiosa is becoming an immortal fey avatar of green places and they’re soulmates. It is what it is.

Unrelatedly, I really like the idea that Furiosa, Imperatrix of the Immortan Joe, is a ‘blackthumb’ of far greater skill than Max, while Max is significantly better at sewing and clothing repair than she is.  Furiosa has to know every inch of the War Rig and that means that she HAS to help maintain it, and the War Rig is undoubtedly one of the most advanced pieces of machinery they’re working with.  Obviously when she’s driving it, she can’t do repairs, but Furiosa is an A-grade mechanic.  Max…just finds it kind of restful to do minute peaceful repetitive tasks like sewing, and, having done them A Lot to keep his clothes intact, he’s gotten pretty good.  Furiosa, on the other hand, has assembled her outfit in significant part out of the ruins of a wife’s outfit, all long strips of fabric wound and pinned in place, and more than that she holds status and doesn’t care for repetitive tasks.  She’s competent, but doesn’t care for it.

readera asked: For the ask meme. I am surprised no one has said any animorphs yet. cassie. or any of the animorphs really. I'm not picky, lol.

I raise you: a handful of mid-war Cassie/Jake headcanons because that’s what I have feelings about right now.  For this meme.

A: what I think realistically

Cassie isn’t oblivious to the toll the war is taking on Jake—far from it.  He shows up to her barn sometimes when he can’t sleep, sits in the hayloft or quietly organizes cabinets, and Cassie starts making sure to be the first one into the barn in case Jake’s fallen asleep there.  (One time she is unsuccessful about this and her dad wanders in to find Jake asleep in the hayloft—he scrambles and blurts out a blatant lie about having gotten in a fight with Tom the night before and Cassie tries really hard not to cover her face because.  It’s a mess. Jake is a passable liar by virtue of necessity, but he gets jumpy whenever he’s confronted by coming up with legitimate reasons to be at Cassie’s other than wanting to see Cassie.)  Sometimes, when Cassie can’t sleep either, she wanders out to the barn herself—if Jake happens to be there, conveniently available for company and quiet conversation about dreams and nightmares, that’s nothing more than a coincidence.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Cassie is largely unaware of the fact that she’s viewed with a high degree of bitter, bitter jealousy by a lot of the other girls at her school and not a few of the boys.  Jake is a good-looking, level-headed, friendly person, who is widely known at the school as a Catch.  This is somehow made more of a thing due to the fact that he just.  Doesn’t notice.  (This is canon, don’t even fight me on this, three girls ask him to that dance in book 29.)  Jake smiles at Cassie and talks with her in the halls and doesn’t even pick up on other people hitting on him, and therefore several of those people are deeply frustrated.  It’s made worse because what are they going to do about it. Cassie is an angel, it’s not like they can even really hate her for it, and even if they did, God help the person who decides to fuck with Rachel’s best friend.

Incidentally, no one is more frustrated with Cassie and Jake than Rachel. Guys!  Go on a date!  Watch a movie!  Hell, just get together at someone’s house and cuddle!  G O D.  She literally cannot believe how unsmooth Jake is, it causes her physical pain, and Cassie, sweetie, hold his hand, do it for Rachel, she is dating a bird and she is having more success than these idiots.

She despairs of them, she really does.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Cassie and her mother used to be really close—like, they told each other everything. It kills Cassie to lie to her, constantly, incessantly, unavoidably, for three years.  Cassie screams in her sleep, and she tells her mother nothing.  Cassie cries for three days, and she tells her mother nothing. Cassie develops an overwhelming phobia of termites, and she tells her mother nothing.

She wants so much to be able to tell her mother the truth about just one thing, and so when her mother asks if she can ask about Jake—hesitantly, because Cassie is so withdrawn these days—Cassie barley even pauses to feel embarrassed.

“Of course!” Cassie blurts, and her mother smiles a little, almost shy.

“Well,” she says, sitting down beside Cassie, “are you two dating?”

“Um…sort of,” Cassie says uncertainly.  What does one even call her relationship with Jake these days?  On the one hand, no, they don’t exactly go on dates that much, despite Rachel’s best efforts, and there’s still that level of mild discomfort with, like, the concept of being a couple, but on the other hand…they’re so far past dating it’s not even funny.  

“Sort of?” her mother laughs, amused.  “Well, have you kissed him?”

Cassie feels herself blush and opens her mouth to say yes—but stops.  If she says yes, her mother will want to know when and how and…and Cassie can’t tell her. Can’t say yes, we kissed on another world.  Can’t say yes, and I cried into his shoulder because I thought he was dead.  Can’t say yes, I kissed him because we were facing death and I was afraid I’d never get the chance again.

Honestly, she can’t say yes at all.

So she looks away and says, “No.”

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Right so it’s technically post war but THIS FIC.  Canon ending can suck a dick.

Also, give me an AU where everything is fine and Cassie is a morph dancer who performs on street corners like a busker (she’s the equivalent of a Julliard-trained violinist whose day job pays well and who plays in subways for fun) and Jake sees her transforming into an osprey and falls in love on the spot.