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

Moran Rereads the Animorphs

Book 7: The Stranger

AKA “The PTSD squad sees the future and finally fucking wins a round, the Ellimist shows his not-face, and Rachel antes up her battle morph”

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ladysugarquill asked: Hi! I'm following your Animorphs reread and I just wanted to add to your pain by mentioning that the two lines Tom says in the pool are the last time he will talk to Jake of his own free will IN THE ENTIRE SERIES. You're welcome <3

You.

I like you.

Also, I raise you the fact that Jake does eventually hear Tom–the real Tom–one more time. In Temrash 114’s memories of Tom begging for Jake to be spared.

zarohk asked: So, I'm not totally sure the timelines match up, but do you think that Rachel's sisters (especially Sarah who is younger and more naive) could have watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and decided that Rachel is the Slayer? Goes out at night, all hours, secret boyfriend who only visits her at night, can't tell their single mom, etc.

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

[First of all: the timelines do actually match up quite well.  In #20 there’s a brief mention of David’s dad (of all people) watching Buffy on TV, and although Animorphs started and ended first most of its run overlaps with Buffy.  Second, I LOVE this idea so much.  Rachel and Buffy are two of the people who were massively influential in teaching me and my friends that it was possible to be girly and tough at the same time.  Third… Voila.]

It starts as a way to distract her sisters, on the nights when their mom can’t make it home and their dad is too busy to call—Rachel will put on whichever Buffy episode she’s got saved in the DVR and all three of them will watch it together.  However, all three of them fall in love with the show over time, until they’re catching each episode live: Sarah laughs at all the puns and hums along with the theme song while Jordan waxes poetical about how dreamy Spike and Angel are.  

Rachel just loves Buffy herself, because there aren’t enough girls on TV that can look that fabulous and kick butt at the same time.  It becomes a weekly ritual, one that Rachel sometimes has to miss if Cassie or Jake calls with urgent news, but she’ll put aside anything short of the alien invasion to catch it with her sisters.

*****************

Jordan meets Rachel at the door, which is a bad sign because their mom and Sarah are both asleep and Rachel herself went to bed six hours ago.  The mission was long, nasty, and exhausting, the way they always are, and Rachel’s too keyed-up from the adrenaline rush to think of a proper excuse for why she’s sneaking in.  

She and Jordan stare at each other in silence for a few seconds, Rachel leaning on the door frame, Jordan holding a comic book in both hands as she sits on the end table in the foyer.  Jordan becomes the first one to speak.  “Sarah and I were talking,” she says.  “And I think we figured it out.”  

Rachel feels her stomach churn.  She’s not as careful with her sisters as her mom.  She never has been.  “Figured what out?”

“It’s okay.”  Jordan clutches her comic book a little more closely, expression solemn.  “We won’t tell Mom.”

Rachel crosses her arms.  “Won’t tell her what, exactly?”

Jordan thrusts the comic book at Rachel.  The cover shows a girl—Buffy Summers, judging by the title—holding a wooden stake in one hand and a sword in the other, her blond hair whirling around her as she thrusts the sword at a spike-covered greyish creature in the corner of the frame.  

Rachel takes a step back from the comic, not sure whether to laugh or to cry.  

“It explains everything.  Where you sneak out to almost every night.  Why you’ve got blood under your fingernails half the time when you get home.  Why you’ve got a secret boyfriend who only comes out at night—”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Rachel says reflexively.

Jordan nods, eyes wide.  “Uh-huh.  So you definitely weren’t seen by half the school at last week’s dance with a mysterious guy who has blond hair and is never seen around town.  You don’t have a boyfriend, even though I’ve heard people talking in your room in the middle of the night.  And you always leave your window open, even—especially—when it rains.  Almost like you’re waiting for a secret vampire boy—”

Rachel snorts a laugh.  “Tobias isn’t a vampire.”

Which has exactly the opposite effect than the one she intended.  “Oh my god,” Jordan whispers.  “Tobias as in that guy who disappeared last year? Everyone thought he died—” She gasps.  “Unless he did die.  And now he’s back!”

Much as Rachel wants to laugh and keep laughing until she falls over, she understands that this conversation actually has serious implications.  With effort she sobers herself.  “Look,” she says at last.  “There are things… Things I can’t tell you.  You wouldn’t be safe if I did.”  

She looks Jordan in the eye.  Jordan is taking this conversation seriously—probably more seriously than Rachel herself, for that matter.  “I understand,” Jordan says.  

“As soon as…”  As soon as the war’s over.  “As soon as it’s safe.  I’ll tell you everything.  Right now, there are things I can’t talk to you, or to Mom, about.  But someday I will.  I promise.”  Rachel can’t be more honest than that.  

“Okay.”  Jordan bites her lip.  “I just wanted you to know your secret’s safe with me.  And if you ever need help, like, hiding a body…”

Rachel smiles, overwhelmed with fondness.  “Thanks.”  She yawns.  “Now, if it’s all right with you, Dawn…”

Jordan makes a face.  

“I’m wiped, so I’m going to bed.”  She walks past Jordan and up the stairs to her room.  

“Rachel!”

She turns around.  Jordan is standing at the bottom of the stairs, hugging her comic book against her chest with both hands.  

“On the show,” she says haltingly.  “They say a lot about how slaying’s a dangerous job.  About how most slayers don’t live to be twenty.”  There’s real fear in her eyes, as she looks up at her sister.  

Rachel grins, tossing her hair over her shoulder.  “Really, Jordan, you should learn not to believe everything you see on TV.  After all, it’s just a show.  No vampire’s gonna take me down.”  

****************************

“You know, my sister thinks you’re William the Bloody.”

«Who’s that, a spokesman for Kotex?»

***************************

She doesn’t get much input on the actual headstone; she’s too young for that.  She does, however, manage to put in a special request for the plaque on the statue they erect outside of Washington D.C., a proud grizzly bear rearing up to defend the Capitol.  

Rachel Daniella Berenson, the plaque reads.  She saved the world.  A lot.  

Anonymous asked: I was really struck by something I read in one of your earlier replies to an ask, which was "we’ll never know what Rachel would have done after the war ended", and I wondered if perhaps you may actually have some thought about what might have happened if she did? How WOULD Rachel, who thrived in war, adapt to the mundane life after?

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

Jake

After a while Rachel’s aunt and uncle get so used to her stopping by that they just make her a copy of their house key; it’s easier than answering the door all the time or leaving a window open for her, besides which they’re grateful because she’s there almost every day to bully Jake out of bed and into the world to go do something.  Most days it’s just attending Habitat for Humanity builds in the devastated areas downtown or visiting kids from the local hospital who idolize them both.  Rachel doesn’t mind dragging Jake out of his room at all, because while Tobias is good for taking random college classes or exploring new parts of the country with her, there are still plenty of stupid things that she can only talk Jake into doing.  Together they surf during hurricanes, skydive without parachutes, swim to the bottom of the ocean as orcas and throw themselves off cliffs as birds of prey.  

Rachel doesn’t pretend to understand what he’s going through, because she quite simply can’t—if she even tries to think about what it would be like if it was Jordan or Sarah she’d had to kill during that last battle, she tends to lose the ability to breathe.  But while she can’t give him empathy she can give him this: the scream of wind rushing past their bodies as they hurl toward the ground at nearly a hundred miles an hour, the incomparable thrill of the ground approaching them faster than an oncoming train, the moment of simple euphoria during that millisecond decision to once again open one’s wings and tell death not today.  He doesn’t smile much, and never laughs, but that’s always been true to some extent.  She doesn’t concern herself with making him smile, but with forcing him to gasp for air in his refusal to give up on life, to morph when not doing so would mean drowning in the cold Pacific, to swerve a second away from spattering on the ground.  Because she’s the only one who understands the power of those moments to make them forget everything in the world except the heady rush of being so goddamn alive they can barely even stand it.

Marco

It’s strange, really, how tough and showy they can be around each other most of the time… and how vulnerable they can become when no one else is around.  Rachel’s pretty sure she’s the only one who ever saw Marco cry after they all watched Eva’s body tumble hundreds of yards to its apparent death, and she knows for certain that she’s the only one to whom he says “it’s like we never really got her back at all,” the day his parents announce their divorce.  In public Rachel and Marco become even more themselves, one-upping each other to see who can come out with the most embarrassing story in round after round of interviews and bantering at lightning speed as live studio audiences laugh and cheer.  Rachel gives a hysterical, exaggerated account of Marco’s failed attempt at gatecrashing William Roger Tennant’s award banquet; Marco comes back with a heroic narrative of how his llama-self saved an entire television studio from the crocodile Rachel conveniently forgot to mention she had puked out backstage.  When talking about the time Helmacrons invaded Marco’s nose, they each manage to make the whole mess entirely into the other one’s fault.  

In private, they sit on the back porch of Marco’s primary house once a week and work their way through a bottle of triple sec they’re definitely too young to own.  It’s during those long evenings as the sun sets over the Newport Beach mansions that they air the things to each other they’ve never told a living soul before.  Marco talks about the hard bright-edged joy of watching 17,000 yeerks sucked into space and only being able to imagine their screams.  Rachel confesses to having cried herself to sleep after she and Ax dropped David on that island.  They air their sickest thoughts, lance their most pus-rotted wounds, spew poison at each other because they know that they are both strong enough (hard enough, cold enough, ruthless enough) to take it and give back in turn.

Cassie

Rachel’s honestly not sure how far Cassie would have gotten, politically, if not for her help.  Because that girl might have passion and conscience and common sense to spare, but Rachel’s not sure she’s met a more appearance-clueless person in her life.  The world of politics runs on fashion and makeup, though, especially if one happens to be a woman, and any time Cassie’s about to go tell the United Nations why they need to update the Universal Declaration of Human Rights today to include the hork-bajir and taxxons, or to scold Congress into giving the ex-hosts war reparations and not murder charges, Rachel is there in the background helping.  She shows Cassie the power of stalking into a room in a pair of towering heels, the ways to make a string of pearls or a Chanel handbag into a weapon of power.  Cassie laughs incredulously every time Rachel shows up at her house with a literal truckload of perfectly-tailored business suits and evening gowns, but over time she starts to understand just how much her reputation for being as elegant as she is fierce can work in her favor.  

Rachel, in turn, starts to put out patents for the kind of clothes Cassie would love: comfortable and practical items that can be worn for years without needing replacement.  Rachel figures that if she’s an international trendsetter already (and she is: her line of perfume makes millions every year, while black leotards are debuting on Paris runways) then she might as well have her best friend and the world of high fashion meet in the middle.  Of course Rachel doesn’t explicitly mention that her patent-leather pumps with arch support and heel padding are inspired by the experience of trying on Cassie’s Timberlands, or that her choice of size-16 models for all her advertisements comes from making dresses that would fit Cassie and sizing up or down from there.  But what’s most amazing to her is that the other dressmakers and shoe lines start to emulate her choices, emphasizing the comfort and sturdiness of everything they make even as they tout it as “cutting edge.”  If Rachel has dragged Cassie into being a fashion icon, then it turns out Cassie might just have dragged Rachel into being a social justice warrior along the way.

Ax

Ax seems somewhat dumbfounded when Rachel explains that there’s an Earth tradition that any ship’s captain can perform a marriage ceremony, and that even if there’s no law on the books about this particular power she wants him to do it anyway.  She’s not sure herself how her and Tobias’s small private ceremony (at least, that was the intention) has grown so much, but even she has to admit that somewhere between the 230-person guest list, the custom chuppah to be hand-embroidered by a team of local artists, the five-tier cake imported from a German bakery, and the dress which is personally designed by Alexander McQueen, things might have gotten slightly out of hand.  Ax takes the duties very seriously, practicing the strange mouth sounds he has to recite more than once in advance and promising solemnly that he will not eat any of the cake until Rachel and Tobias have had the chance to cut it.  

He serves as their best man as well (probably breaking with tradition, not that they care) and the speech he makes afterward is surprisingly heartfelt.  «There has been no greater honor in my life than to fight by your side,» he tells them, «and I owe you both my life many times over.  I owe you more than that, of course, for you have made this strange planet my home when I came to you lost and alone.  I am not sure what humans traditionally wish for each other with a bond such as this, so I will wish you this much: may your lives be long, may your battles be easily won, may you be loved and feared in equal measure, and may your chili always be perfectly seasoned.» 

Tobias

It’s not like they get jobs, or hold down formal obligations, or do anything more structured than attend occasional classes at UCSB or consult with the fashion agency that sends Rachel freelance checks.  So there’s really no reason they can’t continue their odd lifestyle, only in the same form at the same time for two hours at most.  At least, that’s how it is for the first several years… and then one day Rachel comes out of the bathroom, a tiny white stick in her hand, and they both realize their lives are never going to be the same again.  Tobias is terrified, of course: he’s been abandoned (voluntarily or not) by two parents, four guardians, and countless authority figures, and he’s got no reason to believe he’ll be any different.  But he knows what the first step will be in committing to raising this baby for real.  And so he morphs human for the very last time.  

In the years that follow, after their daughter eventually gets a little brother as well, Rachel and Tobias become more boring than they ever could have hoped for.  Rachel starts working full-time as a fashion designer, while Tobias finishes an advanced degree in graphic design and gets a job with the marketing branch of the same company.  They go to PTA meetings and teach their daughter softball, buy a sedan with good gas mileage and a two-story house in Mendocino County where the reporters can’t find them.  They still get restless sometimes, leaving the kids with Loren or Sarah for a week or two at a time to go white-water rafting on the Colorado River or to climb mountains in Tanzania, but they always miss the kids enough to come home before long.  They donate thousands of dollars to end world hunger every year, and they fundraise millions more.  Someday they’ll retire.  Someday after that they’ll die.  For now, however, they’re alive, and that’s enough.  

Things that shouldn’t happen in a theoretical Animorphs netflix series, but probably would anyway

natcat5:

Hey since apparently I’m sdkfldkjf in this fandom now or something have a non-exhaustive list of things I think a director/screenwriter would stick into an Animorphs netflix series that they absolutely shouldn’t but would for the drama™ of it all

1. Berenson Brawl

• Oh my god a Rachel vs Jake all out scrap. In the book it never happens except in Rachel’s fever dream. As much as she sometimes chafes against his leadership and the continual narrative suggestion that there’s a simmering desire to challenge him, having them actually fight to be in charge would be a huge disservice to both their characters as well as their relationship. Rachel and Jake have such a solid thing in which they know exactly their roles and how to work with one another, how to be each other’s anchor, leash-holder, or executioner if they get out of line. Having them brawl for leadership would be terrible, but oh my god it would 100% happen in a netflix adaptation. how could it not? there’d be so many on screen arguments, so many instances of Jake pulling Rachel back, that it would just have to culminate into a super-dramatic, brutal, tiger v.s grizzly bear beatdown that takes up like 20 minutes of the episode and has like 3 scene changes as they crash through buildings, trees, etc. 
  
• That said, holy fuck god i would be so into it. Like it’s terrible of me but the second the fight started I’d have to pause to go pop some popcorn and pour myself a glass of wine and get hyped and then settle in for the fucking show. 

2. Traitor Tobias 

• In Back to Before, Tobias gets Yeerked but mostly does not get his brain-controlled self up in anyone else’s business before having his head shot off. That absolutely would not fly in a netflix adaptation. There would 100% be a confrontation between Yeerk!Tobias and Rachel, and it would be tragic, and Yeerk!Tobias would probably be threatening her with a weapon to the temple, and then they’d look into each other’s eyes or some shit, and there’d be this moment of recognition…before someone, probably Ax or Marco, ices Tobias from behind. He collapses and Rachel catches him automatically, holds him in her arms and stares into his empty eyes, not understanding where this profound pain is coming from…
  
• I would be full out weeping. still drinking wine, but also weeping. 
  

3. Honeypot

• If you think we’re getting an adaptation involving spying, subterfuge, and teenagers, and not have one of them have to seduce a potential high ranking Yeerk controller who’s attending their school, you do not understand what old men in media think teenage audiences want to see. Someone’s going to a fancy restaurant with a potential enemy while everyone else hides in ridiculous outfits. 
  
• I would find this acceptable so long as the one on the date is Jake. 
  

3. High School

• Seriously, half the time in the books you forget they were somehow attending school. In a netflix series there would be recurring side characters, and ridiculous club responsibilities that people got sucked into, and the occasional episode climax that takes place at a school football game or pep rally for some reason. it’s the 90s. own the aesthetic.
  
• actually I’d legitimately really be into a slightly more expansive social world for the characters. like show Jake and Rachel and Marco shifting away from their friend groups, even though they’re trying to keep up appearances. have minor characters that notice that there’s something drastically different about their friends. 
  

4. Pair the Spares 

• It’s unavoidable that whenever Jake/Cassie and Rachel/Tobias get affectionate in the same scene, the camera’s going to pan to Marco and Ax standing awkwardly next to each other. Probably, they’d play it up for laughs. But I’m pretty down for out and undeniably bi Marco completely sincerely making passes at Ax whenever the rest of the team starts pairing up. And Ax just ???????? not understanding human courtship rituals. 
• It toes a precarious queerbaiting line but so long as it’s completely clear that Marco is actually bi I’m good with a recurring joke of anytime the established couples get mushy, Marco starts wiggling his eyebrows at Ax
  

(via aethersea)