Five-Finger Discounts: Parisian Edition

[sixthanimorph]

Who: David, Cassie, Perry Dawsey, Will Parry, and YOU
What: David says screw the rules, I can morph! and goes on a thieving spree. Punctuated by disapproving wardens and oblivious Animorphs!
When: Tonight and backdated to today.
Where: Paris, France; 2020
Warnings: Pfft.

Comments

2 P.M. - Cassie (1/2 because apparently I wrote way too much for LJ lol)

[lovefornature]

When David rejects her apology, Cassie merely nods slowly in acceptance. "You may not want it, but the apology will still stand. I'm sorry for everything that happened, David. I truly am."

Then she slides up to her own feet, and looks him directly in the eye. "But you need to wake up." Her words are sharper, now, as if to say pay attention, yet her voice is empty of any actual anger. "You still don't understand how incredibly dangerous it was back then, how incredibly desperate the situation on Earth was, how screwed over, at that point, we all were. And how much of a struggle, day by day, it was to get up, to know that and to still go and fight. To know that at any moment, the Yeerks could find out our identity and kill us or infest us, or do the same to our families. To still try, even after hours and hours of exhausting missions and morphing, to keep going even through the absolute terror and horror and panic, to know that even through all this we could only ever barely make a dent in the Yeerks' invasion, could only try to maintain and still continually lose footing in the war. To even experience all that, again and again, and then go back and continue fighting. So if you think we did all that to be heroes, that we fought in a war that we had next to zero chance of winning just for some fame, then you're missing the point completely.

"We never chose to be sucked into that war, not anymore than you did. We never wanted it, we never asked for it." Then, with a little more emphasis, "I never wanted it. I never wanted to hurt anybody or to see anyone be hurt." And that'd been part of her struggle, for all those three years. To endlessly wish there was a peaceful way out. "But the Yeerks gave us no choice. Out of all the planets in the universe, out of all the places they could've chose, they chose Earth. And every day since I learned that, and every day since, I wished it hadn't been that way. And it's not your fault that you found the blue box and got sucked into the war, like we did. It was never something we ever wished on anyone else.

"We had families back then, too, before it all, and we had school and we had normal lives. Just like you did. And we could've stayed ignorant and tried to ignore what was going on around us and let the Yeerks take us all one by one. Because, you know what? We were kids, then, too. Hell, we could've run scared and blamed it on how utterly and completely futile it all seemed. That would've been the easy route. That would've been the selfish route.

"But what did we do instead? We fought. We didn't turn away from it." Although Cassie knew that there had been more than one time where she (and others) had wanted to quit, had come so close to quitting forever, to turning their back on the war. Those had been some of the lowest times, but even then--in Cassie's case--there'd been a light to it. She'd found Aftran, she'd freed that little girl Karen, and she'd made the first peace between Yeerk and human. She'd realized that it was possible, and that not everything in war was completely black or white. "We faced up to it, we met it head on, because we had to. Because we understood that there was more at stake than just ourselves, that we had responsibilities that we had to meet even if we didn't want them. Even if we never asked for them."

Re: 2 P.M. - Cassie (2/2)

[lovefornature]

There's a trained calmness to her overall expression as she speaks, but there's also an abundance of emotion visible in her eyes. "We were all lost, we were all scared, David. So no, we couldn't leave you to the Yeerks, we couldn't leave you to a horrible fate like that. That wouldn't have been the right thing to do. Instead, we chose to give you the power to fight back, to take control, to take responsibility. We picked you up because we had faith in you." Cassie takes in a light breath. "I had faith in you, David. And maybe I couldn't give you your parents back or your old house or your normal life back. But I gave you somewhere safe to be, somewhere to go. It wasn't enough, I understand that, it could never be enough. But it was what I could give."

Then Cassie runs both hands against her cheeks, through her hair, and gives him a troubled look. "The Andalites didn't really help. They wanted to blow Earth up because they thought it'd eliminate the Yeerks as a threat if they did. If we hadn't intervened, if we hadn't done what we'd done, then Earth would've been completely destroyed. And Jake." Her voice goes a notch quieter. "Jake... hasn't been the same person, because of what happened. He took everything that happened, all the weight of the war and all the bad things that happened during it, on his shoulders. And he carried that, even all the years after the war. He didn't even really care about how the rest of the world saw him."

2 P.M. - Cassie (1/2)

[sixthanimorph]

Several times as Cassie speaks David opens his mouth with an objection or rebuttal, but Cassie just keeps going. And the more she says, the more he wants her to just shut up. She's saying all the things he doesn't want to hear. Things he doesn't even want to think about, things that run completely counter to the image of the Animorphs he's constructed for himself. Things that make his conviction in what he did, his certainty that he'd had no other choice, waver. And he doesn't like that.

"You all had the power to walk away," he says slowly at last, every syllable vibrating with anger. "You had the choice. As much and Jake and you and the others liked to talk about how you didn't, you did. You could have said at any time you'd just leave the war to people who are supposed to fight and went back to being normal kids. But you didn't do that, because you didn't want to. Jake and Rachel, they got off on the power. You... I didn't think you did. But I didn't think you could do a lot of things that you did."

"Damn it, don't look at me like that, you had a choice!" he all-but-yells, drawing stares and attention he no longer cares in the slightest about. They did. She did. They didn't have their homes and their families ripped away from them, didn't have to sleep in a drafty barn or get treated like the outsider. And yet, what Cassie says about fighting instead of running, that touches a nerve. It sounds uncomfortably like something Tim or Dick or John would say. Has Cassie already talked to them? Told them about me? His heart races at just the thought.

The calmer Cassie gets, the louder and more emotional David becomes. That emotion in her eyes is far too easy for David to see as pity, and like Marco, he's always found pity's sting to be intolerable. "And don't give me that shit about having 'faith' in me either! I couldn't even go out on my own for one night without Jake coming down on me and threatening to kill me! You're hypocrites, all of you. And you most of all, standing there and acting like you all were doing the right thing when Jake threatened me and Rachel threatened my family and the both of them decided to trap me in a living hell!"

He wishes it was anyone but Cassie. If it was Jake, Marco, Rachel, he'd have punched them by now. He would have attacked. But there's something about Cassie that makes him hesitate, even now. It was why, out of all the Animorphs, she was the only one he didn't go after that terrible night. It was why he'd retreated when she showed up in her own whale morph instead of continuing to fight.

"Just... just go home, Cassie," he whispers, his voice quivering. "The Barge doesn't need you. I don't need you. Go preach to someone who doesn't know what you're all about."

2 P.M. - Cassie (2/2)

[sixthanimorph]

Unaware he's even doing it, David brings his hands to his head, to try to still the throbbing pounding there. It's the suffocating feeling of his fight-or-flight instincts kicking in. If he doesn't get away soon, he's certain he'll lose control and try to attack the one Animorph who had ever showed him any kindness.

So he begins to morph. Right there, right in full view of the Seine and all the passengers around. No one notices for a few seconds, but when the beak emerges people start screaming. David doesn't care. He keeps morphing, his clothes falling around him as he races to morph the golden eagle. He has to get away from Cassie right now, that's all he knows. The moment his wings emerge and he's capable of flight he takes off unsteadily, a misshapen bird that everyone around Cassie's gawking at.

He doesn't look back.