[Dream] [Week 8] [Day 7] [Night]
Rated a STRONG R for torture elements and disturbing violence. May or may not be triggery.
This is a dark room where there’s no door and no windows. You don’t know how you got in here or that other guy. But it leaves somewhere: there’s a lonely light bulb swinging around in an oval until there’s a bright circle above you, like a halo. You sit in a hard wooden chair and ahead of you is another person. The light changes constantly, and you can’t see for sure who that person looks like, as it’s a mixture between a full grown man, woman, and a small, androgynous child. Every time the light swings, the face shifts, changes, morphs. Every time it - she? he? shim? hir? - speaks, it is slow, dangerous, and altering constantly, like in those crime-related interviews where the sources had to hide their identity and electronically alter their voice.
“What is your name?”
You smirk like a fool. A changing person is not someone you are afraid of.
“Fox Mulder.”
“What is your name?”
A shrill giggle. This guy just won’t give up, but neither will you.
“Bob.”
“What is your name?”
You grin. He knows nothing, and you’ll ensure its stay that way
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
You bare your fangs. You are an animal and you jump out of your seat and pull the questioner down; into the darkness where not even the swinging light bulb can penetrate.
- - -
You walk in the sunlight. The pavement of the sidewalk blinds you from below, the sun from above. You squint, wishing for the wisdom for sunglasses. The houses are in rows, with their identical plans and garages and all the minivans and cars and trucks. A simple and easy suburbia, crawling with human slaves to the Yeerk Empire.
Next to you, a basketball bounce with its unique sound - twang! twang! - and you turn and you see another kid, another teenager, just like you. A Jewish kid, with dark brown hair cut into a bowler cut that has been outgrown for about a year. He looks strong, capable, someone you see leading a basketball team or leading a group of people out of a building on fire.
He continues to dribble the ball, staring hard at it. Anyone else, they see a kid concentrating hard at his ball, maybe dreaming on being a star NBA player.
But you know better. Those who don’t know see one look at that boy’s face and can only see chronic tiredness. All you see is war, death, and the consequences of leadership. The sun falls, and the shadows on his face darken until you don’t see his eyes anymore.
“My name is Jake,” he says as a tiger roars past behind him.
- - -
“Is your name Jake?” The human-thing gasps. Blood drips from his/her/its lips. You only see its balding head growing strawberry blonde hair rapidly. The rest of the body is in shadow. You can barely see the figure shifting from a skinny man’s body to one of an overweight woman.
You shake your head. “That’ll be too easy.”
“No,” the head agrees, the double chin appearing and fat lips thinning. “You fight to the bitter end, and then some.”
“And some,” you admit. You dip your hand into the person’s mouth, deep enough to coat the entire length. “But I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you what I am.”
On the wall adjacent to the head above, you write a bloody letter.
A
- - -
You are in the woods. The sun is filtered into a pale green color by the treetops. The leafy litter crackles underneath your bare feet, and thorns grab at you from everywhere until you are covered in tiny nicks. You walk on until you see a flash of blue on the corner of your eye.
You turn and see the Andalite. At first appearance, the he looks like a centaur: the upper body and arms and head of human and the lower torso and legs of a deer or a horse. Except, it is entirely covered in light-blue fur, the tail is actually a very long tail of muscle tipped with a deadly scythe that moves so fast it’s becomes a faint blue blur. The human-like arms are frailer, and have many more fingers. The head lacks any hair or any mouth for that matter. The nose is replaced with three long slits and the eyes are large, almond-shape, green in color. On the very top of the head are two long, very flexible stalks, swirling this way and that, as on top of each stalk is a round eye, the pupil also green.
This Andalite is very fast, almost impossible to sneak up on, and very dangerous.
He trots toward you, giving you the secretive Andalite smile you can only see in its main eyes.
{My name is Aximili,} he says, as another Andalite behind him is being lifted up by large-mouthed monster and being eaten alive.
- - -
N
You write this letter in blood on the white wall.
The body underneath you thrashes around soundly, violently, and then it is still. You can see the shoulders now, a little bit of the arms and collarbone. Bare. Naked. Drenched in blood, from the severe head wound you have given to the enemy.
The head speaks, “Your name is Aximili?”
“That’s not even a human name,” you say, correcting the enemy.
“Neither is Bob, when you think about it.” The head spits flesh torn from its woman lips.
“Bob is a completely normal human name, what the hell are you on about?”
- - -
The barn.
It is a big bard, but you can’t claim to be an expert on how barns are supposes to be. Big enough to house a horse and a few goats, plus wolves, opossums, squirrels, big birds of prey - you are surprised it haven’t housed an elephant yet. There’re stalls everywhere, and a huge loft above, half covered by animals, both wild and caged, and the other half by large bales of hay.
Though you wouldn’t be surprised if the barn did house an elephant.
There, in one corner, is a black girl with dirtied overalls and equally-stained gloves. You don’t even want to know what the specks are on her face. She doesn’t look at you at first, concentrating at showing a pill down a raccoon’s throat. The raccoon thrash and growls and snarls, trying to break free from her iron grip.
When she puts raccoon back to its cage, where it tries to spit out the bill, she turns to you. Her face is kind, gentle, intelligent and empathic, and just as dangerous as the enemy themselves.
“My name is Cassie.”
She doesn’t notice two wolves tearing each other apart in the next pen.
- - -
You finish painting the letter I. (Brought to you by the letter M, which you also paint closely next to the vowel.)
There’s an upper torso beneath you. Pale. Large breasts of a woman with implants are morphing to the straight plane of a man’s bodybuilder’s frame. The heart is ripped out by your own claws. You can see pieces of the lungs.
Dipping an entire fist to that cavity, and that hand is dripping blood.
“Cassie is not your name.” The man said, his nose changing from a pig’s snout to a straight, Saxon like nose. The type Nazis will die for. Had die for. And failed, too.
“No.”
“You are nothing like a Cassie.” This enemy likes to state the obvious. It annoys you.
“Thank God for that.” You say as you notice that the blood in your fist is completely gone.
You bend over and reach for the chest again.
- - -
In the field.
There, you don’t see an Andalite or a human. But you know, you know that it is a home. It is a home who is someone in between the species. Or maybe he isn’t?
You look to the sky and you see a large bird. It swoops down, wings narrowed, and lands on to the ground. It caught a mouse. It killed it with one bite of its beak. This bird, this medium-sized bird with its brown and white feathers, red tail feathers, a eternally fierce face and wicked talons. You know what kind of bird it is.
A red-tailed hawk.
A tragedy.
One of the immediate losses taken early on in the war.
The hawk stops eating the mouse, now just guts and bone, and looks up, a piece of mouse flesh dangling from its hooked bill. It stares at you, an angry expression, but its hard to tell if a hawk is happy or angry. Can it be happy?
{My name is Tobias.} The hawk says as he jerks his head and eats the piece of dangling mouse.
- - -
O
R
You write those remaining letters in the blood of this pathetic creature.
Now the only thing you can’t see is the legs. Whatever shifting genitals the person-man-woman-child-thing isn’t going to be noticed, because there’s a gaping, bloody wound inflicted by yours truly. You went a little far and some of the intestines are falling out of the belly as well. But you don’t really care. Not really. It’s hard, so hard, nowadays, to care about others’ pain when you suffer so much, day by day, night by night, every attempt at trying to kill your own mother again and again. You just don’t care. Just don’t.
“Tobias. That’s a kind name. You’re not kind.”
“I never wanted to be kind.”
The baby sneered. “No. You just want to be effective. You the Effective Killer. Murderer. You murderer, you war criminal. You kill innocents.”
You look down at the bloody baby, now turning into a girl in her early teens. “And you enslave them.”
“At least we let them live.” Her blue eyes flash and she gurgles up some blood. Her pretty face is completely covered with dark red streaks now.
- - -
The mall. People come in, people come out. Bags come and go, as people buy their toys, books, music, clothes, food for their relatives, for friends, lovers, bosses, and themselves. Selfless and selfish at the same time, people will take what is needed and get what they want. Take and get. Both similar in grammar rules, you can guess, but different in context. Completely different context.
The one shopper - the one who shouldn’t matter - walks up to you. About your age, maybe a year or two older, she’s wearing a long black dress, with thin straps. Long, blonde hair and a perfect face and a tall body, she is the epitome of a supermodel, more than Yasmine Bleeth, even. She rips the hanging price tag from underneath her armpit and gives you a smirk that others might consider arrogance. But those who know her can recognize her smile as a smile one wears before battle.
She is beauty incarnate.
“My name is Rachel,” she says, as the people around her start to die, severe slashes suddenly appearing on their chests and head, as though a bear has ripped them open.
- - -
P
H
You finished your answer and take a step back away from that hideous human-shifting-thing and the blood-stain wall.
“There. See? Do you see it, Yeerk? That is me. That is what I am.” You wipe your face with your hand, and you smear blood on your cheek and forehead while taking a good look at your work.
A N I M O R P H
The thing just laughs and blood gushes out of its mouth, stomach, chest and inbetween the legs again. The legs appear, but you make certain that he - she - it won’t go anywhere. So you ripped the left foot off. It’s so easy. You’re surprised that the thing isn’t screaming in pain. Not even once. Why?
“Look at you, all smug,” it gushes out. “Thinking telling me what you call yourself is the same thing as giving me your name. It’s similar, but it’s not. Now then,” as it propped its arms up, turning into an old woman with saggy, stinking muscle.
“What is your name?”
You sneer back. “Why should I tell you?”
“You beat me, ripped me apart, torn my foot away, and now I’m dying. I deserve this much. Give me your name.”
“You are not worthy of my name,” you say as you start to morph, muscle becoming more powerful muscle.
“You tortured me. Give me this last dignity.” It brawls like a toddler as it becomes one.
“I don’t torture. I never torture.” A heavy-weight paw, covered in white fur appears. Good Nanook.
“Look at what have you done, Animorph. If this is not torture, then what is it?” The child-turned-bratty-teenager gnashed its broken, red-stained teeth at you.
“A slow death,” you say through the polar bear’s mouth. It speaks with familiarity as a human mouth can. With a swing of a paw, you kill the son of a bitch.
“And my name is Marco.”
[Marco wakes up, briefly. Stares emptily at the Hitomi, hardly awake and automatically reaches for the Hitomi. The feed ends.]
This is a dark room where there’s no door and no windows. You don’t know how you got in here or that other guy. But it leaves somewhere: there’s a lonely light bulb swinging around in an oval until there’s a bright circle above you, like a halo. You sit in a hard wooden chair and ahead of you is another person. The light changes constantly, and you can’t see for sure who that person looks like, as it’s a mixture between a full grown man, woman, and a small, androgynous child. Every time the light swings, the face shifts, changes, morphs. Every time it - she? he? shim? hir? - speaks, it is slow, dangerous, and altering constantly, like in those crime-related interviews where the sources had to hide their identity and electronically alter their voice.
“What is your name?”
You smirk like a fool. A changing person is not someone you are afraid of.
“Fox Mulder.”
“What is your name?”
A shrill giggle. This guy just won’t give up, but neither will you.
“Bob.”
“What is your name?”
You grin. He knows nothing, and you’ll ensure its stay that way
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
You bare your fangs. You are an animal and you jump out of your seat and pull the questioner down; into the darkness where not even the swinging light bulb can penetrate.
- - -
You walk in the sunlight. The pavement of the sidewalk blinds you from below, the sun from above. You squint, wishing for the wisdom for sunglasses. The houses are in rows, with their identical plans and garages and all the minivans and cars and trucks. A simple and easy suburbia, crawling with human slaves to the Yeerk Empire.
Next to you, a basketball bounce with its unique sound - twang! twang! - and you turn and you see another kid, another teenager, just like you. A Jewish kid, with dark brown hair cut into a bowler cut that has been outgrown for about a year. He looks strong, capable, someone you see leading a basketball team or leading a group of people out of a building on fire.
He continues to dribble the ball, staring hard at it. Anyone else, they see a kid concentrating hard at his ball, maybe dreaming on being a star NBA player.
But you know better. Those who don’t know see one look at that boy’s face and can only see chronic tiredness. All you see is war, death, and the consequences of leadership. The sun falls, and the shadows on his face darken until you don’t see his eyes anymore.
“My name is Jake,” he says as a tiger roars past behind him.
- - -
“Is your name Jake?” The human-thing gasps. Blood drips from his/her/its lips. You only see its balding head growing strawberry blonde hair rapidly. The rest of the body is in shadow. You can barely see the figure shifting from a skinny man’s body to one of an overweight woman.
You shake your head. “That’ll be too easy.”
“No,” the head agrees, the double chin appearing and fat lips thinning. “You fight to the bitter end, and then some.”
“And some,” you admit. You dip your hand into the person’s mouth, deep enough to coat the entire length. “But I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you what I am.”
On the wall adjacent to the head above, you write a bloody letter.
A
- - -
You are in the woods. The sun is filtered into a pale green color by the treetops. The leafy litter crackles underneath your bare feet, and thorns grab at you from everywhere until you are covered in tiny nicks. You walk on until you see a flash of blue on the corner of your eye.
You turn and see the Andalite. At first appearance, the he looks like a centaur: the upper body and arms and head of human and the lower torso and legs of a deer or a horse. Except, it is entirely covered in light-blue fur, the tail is actually a very long tail of muscle tipped with a deadly scythe that moves so fast it’s becomes a faint blue blur. The human-like arms are frailer, and have many more fingers. The head lacks any hair or any mouth for that matter. The nose is replaced with three long slits and the eyes are large, almond-shape, green in color. On the very top of the head are two long, very flexible stalks, swirling this way and that, as on top of each stalk is a round eye, the pupil also green.
This Andalite is very fast, almost impossible to sneak up on, and very dangerous.
He trots toward you, giving you the secretive Andalite smile you can only see in its main eyes.
{My name is Aximili,} he says, as another Andalite behind him is being lifted up by large-mouthed monster and being eaten alive.
- - -
N
You write this letter in blood on the white wall.
The body underneath you thrashes around soundly, violently, and then it is still. You can see the shoulders now, a little bit of the arms and collarbone. Bare. Naked. Drenched in blood, from the severe head wound you have given to the enemy.
The head speaks, “Your name is Aximili?”
“That’s not even a human name,” you say, correcting the enemy.
“Neither is Bob, when you think about it.” The head spits flesh torn from its woman lips.
“Bob is a completely normal human name, what the hell are you on about?”
- - -
The barn.
It is a big bard, but you can’t claim to be an expert on how barns are supposes to be. Big enough to house a horse and a few goats, plus wolves, opossums, squirrels, big birds of prey - you are surprised it haven’t housed an elephant yet. There’re stalls everywhere, and a huge loft above, half covered by animals, both wild and caged, and the other half by large bales of hay.
Though you wouldn’t be surprised if the barn did house an elephant.
There, in one corner, is a black girl with dirtied overalls and equally-stained gloves. You don’t even want to know what the specks are on her face. She doesn’t look at you at first, concentrating at showing a pill down a raccoon’s throat. The raccoon thrash and growls and snarls, trying to break free from her iron grip.
When she puts raccoon back to its cage, where it tries to spit out the bill, she turns to you. Her face is kind, gentle, intelligent and empathic, and just as dangerous as the enemy themselves.
“My name is Cassie.”
She doesn’t notice two wolves tearing each other apart in the next pen.
- - -
You finish painting the letter I. (Brought to you by the letter M, which you also paint closely next to the vowel.)
There’s an upper torso beneath you. Pale. Large breasts of a woman with implants are morphing to the straight plane of a man’s bodybuilder’s frame. The heart is ripped out by your own claws. You can see pieces of the lungs.
Dipping an entire fist to that cavity, and that hand is dripping blood.
“Cassie is not your name.” The man said, his nose changing from a pig’s snout to a straight, Saxon like nose. The type Nazis will die for. Had die for. And failed, too.
“No.”
“You are nothing like a Cassie.” This enemy likes to state the obvious. It annoys you.
“Thank God for that.” You say as you notice that the blood in your fist is completely gone.
You bend over and reach for the chest again.
- - -
In the field.
There, you don’t see an Andalite or a human. But you know, you know that it is a home. It is a home who is someone in between the species. Or maybe he isn’t?
You look to the sky and you see a large bird. It swoops down, wings narrowed, and lands on to the ground. It caught a mouse. It killed it with one bite of its beak. This bird, this medium-sized bird with its brown and white feathers, red tail feathers, a eternally fierce face and wicked talons. You know what kind of bird it is.
A red-tailed hawk.
A tragedy.
One of the immediate losses taken early on in the war.
The hawk stops eating the mouse, now just guts and bone, and looks up, a piece of mouse flesh dangling from its hooked bill. It stares at you, an angry expression, but its hard to tell if a hawk is happy or angry. Can it be happy?
{My name is Tobias.} The hawk says as he jerks his head and eats the piece of dangling mouse.
- - -
O
R
You write those remaining letters in the blood of this pathetic creature.
Now the only thing you can’t see is the legs. Whatever shifting genitals the person-man-woman-child-thing isn’t going to be noticed, because there’s a gaping, bloody wound inflicted by yours truly. You went a little far and some of the intestines are falling out of the belly as well. But you don’t really care. Not really. It’s hard, so hard, nowadays, to care about others’ pain when you suffer so much, day by day, night by night, every attempt at trying to kill your own mother again and again. You just don’t care. Just don’t.
“Tobias. That’s a kind name. You’re not kind.”
“I never wanted to be kind.”
The baby sneered. “No. You just want to be effective. You the Effective Killer. Murderer. You murderer, you war criminal. You kill innocents.”
You look down at the bloody baby, now turning into a girl in her early teens. “And you enslave them.”
“At least we let them live.” Her blue eyes flash and she gurgles up some blood. Her pretty face is completely covered with dark red streaks now.
- - -
The mall. People come in, people come out. Bags come and go, as people buy their toys, books, music, clothes, food for their relatives, for friends, lovers, bosses, and themselves. Selfless and selfish at the same time, people will take what is needed and get what they want. Take and get. Both similar in grammar rules, you can guess, but different in context. Completely different context.
The one shopper - the one who shouldn’t matter - walks up to you. About your age, maybe a year or two older, she’s wearing a long black dress, with thin straps. Long, blonde hair and a perfect face and a tall body, she is the epitome of a supermodel, more than Yasmine Bleeth, even. She rips the hanging price tag from underneath her armpit and gives you a smirk that others might consider arrogance. But those who know her can recognize her smile as a smile one wears before battle.
She is beauty incarnate.
“My name is Rachel,” she says, as the people around her start to die, severe slashes suddenly appearing on their chests and head, as though a bear has ripped them open.
- - -
P
H
You finished your answer and take a step back away from that hideous human-shifting-thing and the blood-stain wall.
“There. See? Do you see it, Yeerk? That is me. That is what I am.” You wipe your face with your hand, and you smear blood on your cheek and forehead while taking a good look at your work.
A N I M O R P H
The thing just laughs and blood gushes out of its mouth, stomach, chest and inbetween the legs again. The legs appear, but you make certain that he - she - it won’t go anywhere. So you ripped the left foot off. It’s so easy. You’re surprised that the thing isn’t screaming in pain. Not even once. Why?
“Look at you, all smug,” it gushes out. “Thinking telling me what you call yourself is the same thing as giving me your name. It’s similar, but it’s not. Now then,” as it propped its arms up, turning into an old woman with saggy, stinking muscle.
“What is your name?”
You sneer back. “Why should I tell you?”
“You beat me, ripped me apart, torn my foot away, and now I’m dying. I deserve this much. Give me your name.”
“You are not worthy of my name,” you say as you start to morph, muscle becoming more powerful muscle.
“You tortured me. Give me this last dignity.” It brawls like a toddler as it becomes one.
“I don’t torture. I never torture.” A heavy-weight paw, covered in white fur appears. Good Nanook.
“Look at what have you done, Animorph. If this is not torture, then what is it?” The child-turned-bratty-teenager gnashed its broken, red-stained teeth at you.
“A slow death,” you say through the polar bear’s mouth. It speaks with familiarity as a human mouth can. With a swing of a paw, you kill the son of a bitch.
“And my name is Marco.”
[Marco wakes up, briefly. Stares emptily at the Hitomi, hardly awake and automatically reaches for the Hitomi. The feed ends.]