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

Anonymous asked: Why the hell did Rachel have a picture of Tobias? ( Also, Tobias??? Just.. Tobias??? Tring to make the best out of a bad situation Tobias???? Coming into this I thought Marco was going to be a favourite but my heart is breaking for this boy.(halfway (?) through Book 3)

Right, so, welcome to my kingdom of fairly elaborate headcanons about Rachel’s very quiet, mostly ignored crush on the shiest, most anxious bully target in school.  She never talks about it to anyone, really.  Not even Cassie knows.  The laws of middle school are pretty absolute, and Rachel runs in radically different circles from soft-spoken Tobias, new kid Tobias, everyone-knows-his-uncle-hates-him Tobias.  Shows-up-at-school-for-breakfast-with-ill-fitting-clothes-and-bruises-from-bullies Tobias.

Rachel’s a tough kid, but even she’s not sure if she’s tough enough for that.

All the same, though, she drops a whisper in Jake’s ear–Big Jake, her gentle giant of a cousin–and suddenly the bullies start to back off, under threat of seeing Jake’s easygoing smile appear over Tobias’ shoulder with a “Hey, guys.  What are we talking about?”

Tobias never knows.  Rachel never tells him.

That’s not the point, though.  By the time Rachel decides that fuck everyone, she’s so fucking over this, if she wants to go hold some dumb skinny dork’s hand she’s gonna do it and fuck the haters–well, they walk home through a construction site.  She does hold Tobias’ hand, but it’s because he’s crying so hard he’s shaking trying to be silent, and the Andalite, the dying Prince Elfangor, is screaming in their heads and God, what else can she do except hold onto Tobias and pray?

The next day, Rachel looks across the circle of her friends and meets Tobias’ eyes, soft and light brown flecked with gold in the sunlight.  She’s never been close enough to see the glints of precious metal there.  His jaw is set hard, no trace of his nervous smile, and he’s standing up straight for the first tine in her memory and the two of them are immediately, viscerally agreed.  They are going to war.  The others can stay or go, but Rachel and Tobias.  They are doing this, because this is what they are.  Who they are.  

They go to war and it’s worse than anything Rachel’s ever lived except for how it’s not and the next day Tobias….

Tobias isn’t at school.  He’s invisible.  He blends in with the crowd.  That’s what Cassie tells her, tries to reassure her.  They might have just not noticed him.

Rachel would have noticed him, she thinks.

So.

The point is.

When she finds out that those soft gold-brown eyes and that nervous smile and those bony stubborn shoulders are gone for good, Rachel goes and finds the one place that might have a picture of Tobias.  He drew, you know, pretty well, and she goes to the art teacher and lies her ass off about looking for pictures of the after-school art club.  (She knows that Tobias was at home to sleep, almost nothing else.  Everyone knew.)  The art teacher is an easy mark.  Rachel is a sweet kid, a top student, a good girl.  Rachel walks away with a small collection of photos, and finds one that’s mostly Tobias, looking shyly up at the camera that had interrupted his work.  Brown eyes flecked with gold, a nervous smile.  She can’t stand the thought of forgetting what he looks like.

What he looked like.

She keeps the photograph.

Anonymous asked: 7 and whoever you want

7: I do not believe in love at first sight.  But god damn. (Look at you.)

Two things.  First, it’s a very dangerous thing to say ‘whoever I want,’ because I go straight for the niche fandoms that I love the most. Thus: Animorphs.  Second!  It has come to my attention that I accidentally swapped two prompts—this line is actually prompt 17, and prompt 7 got used for the Sith!Padme AU.  Because I’m a fucking disaster area and my brain likes to pull switches like that on me.  (Math classes suck for this exact reason.)  But like the Sith!Padme AU is done?  And I was halfway through this by the time I realized, so I am VERY sorry but I’m doing this.

Tobias could give you the exact moment he fell in love with Rachel, as a bruised thirteen-year-old kid in a body he barely remembered.  Love at first sight was a fairy tale, but he could give every detail of the moment—it was like light being struck from a match, casting everything in a fresh glow.

Admittedly, he remembered everything about that night in the construction site, about Elfangor’s serious eyes and Visser Three’s terrible morph and the desperate giddy feeling in his chest of yes, yes, I knew it, there’s more to this world.  Which made a lot more sense, in retrospect, but of course at the time he just knew that something had clicked into place.  While everyone else was standing around being awestruck and wondering, Tobias had been too busy feeling a wash of relief that, oh God, he wasn’t crazy, there really was something else and it was exactly as spectacular as he had always believed it would be.

But even in that chaos, Rachel had been like a beacon.

He’d had a crush on her from the moment he arrived in town, of course, but then he could guarantee that about every boy at their school agreed with him, save the ones who were related to her.  He could list five girls off the top of his head who were probably head over heels for Rachel, having a crush on her wasn’t anything special.  She was clever and funny and fierce, her beautiful face was almost an afterthought.

And Tobias had needed something bright and strong to hold onto, and just being around Rachel, in the line of her sharp eyes, was a good start.

So it never did shock him, that he was in love with her.

It wasn’t her grip on his hand as they watched Elfangor die, although he was sure everyone would be shocked to hear it.  That was just…Rachel, scared half to death and still with strength and ferocity to spare.  She clutched his hand because it made her feel better, to steady someone else, and God Tobias had needed it.  He’d almost bolted right then, run back to the Andalite’s side, because he barely had a life to live anyway and he’d felt something from Elfangor’s thoughts he’d never felt before.  Some messy tangle of regret and pride and grief, all centered around a bright hard thing that made affection look like small fry. The loss of it hurt like broken glass in Tobias’ throat, sharp and bloody.  And it was Rachel’s grip on his hand as he cried that kept Tobias hidden behind the wreckage, kept him sane enough to live through the night.

But it was later, that it really hit him.

They were running and, at the time, Tobias had desperately wished for wings.  It was almost funny, now, but probably only to him—he’d never told the others how often he wished he could fly away, before he got a new appreciation for the dangers of wishes.

Here was something else the others never knew: he had three cracked ribs that night. There was no way, even with adrenaline pumping ice through his blood, that he would be able to outrun the Hork-Bajir on their tail.  Tobias’ forgotten human body was tall, but skinny and out of shape, not strong like Cassie or fast like Jake, he was slow and hurt and shocky.  And he had a moment of strange clarity, as if he could see the future as clearly as the Ellimist ever showed it to them.  He would die, and it would be awful, but the others would live and that would be…good.  They had people who would miss them, and he didn’t.  They would live to fight the Andalite’s war, maybe save the world, and Tobias would get to rest.

And then Rachel, tall, athletic Rachel who could probably have outpaced every last one of them, even Jake, slowed, and dropped back.  She was shouting, arms outstretched with a wild, ecstatic look of challenge on her face.  Tobias could only catch about one word in three, but they were…vivid.

That was the moment.  Tobias, tearing across the rough ground of the construction site with impossibility on his heels.  Rachel, screaming curses in death’s face in order to protect the people she cared about. It was more like being struck by lightning than anything so polite as falling in love, but.

Goddamn.

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. 

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