Animorphs/Roswell Crossover: "Those Who Favor Fire"(Rachel, Michael)
Title: Those Who Favor Fire
Fandom: Animorphs, Roswell
Characters/Pairing: Rachel Berenson, Michael Guerin
Word Count: 3178
A/N: One-shot…though my muse is now giving me crazy Marco/Isabel plot bunnies. Uh-oh.
***
-timeline notes-
Sometime after Animorphs # 37. Sometime before the arrival of Tess and the events of the Roswell Season 1 finale-I’m thinking after the episode Independence Day.
It veers into AU from both points.
This fic also assumes that the Animorphs’ and the Roswellian’s universes are one and the same, so some strange world/mythology-merging was at work here.
I wanted it to be a drabble. My muse took one look at Michael and at Rachel and did not want it to be anything near a drabble.
***
Those Who Favor Fire
Their escape begins in endless roads and mirages and stinging afternoon skies-
.
.
He rides through border after border and has no idea where he ends up, or how far from Roswell he finally is.
There’s a road underneath him. Better yet, there’s blue and hope above.
(His powers surge up, blazing the space around his skin.)
.
.
Her parting words are to no one in particular, eyes pointed above, arms flaring into an eagle’s wings.
(She goes. It’s the easiest thing in the world--it’s what comes after that isn’t kind to her.)
___
Michael fights not to yell the first time he sees her morph. Streetlamps explode, and the nearest window shatters into glass dust, and this is where it gets really interesting.
She gasps, a thought and a voice deep inside his head, echoing What the hell was that?, and okay, that was her voice in his head, this just keeps getting better and better.
He stays steady on his feet despite the damn bear that’s metamorphosed right before him; watches how she transforms back into the golden-haired girl. Michael links his trembling hands together, forcing himself to stay steady as she gapes at him.
When he’s composed enough, he says with some satisfaction, “Oh, now we’re talking. You have your freak powers. I have mine.”
(Correction: this is where it gets really interesting.)
___
They’re standing on opposite sides, sending identical glares into the space between, and he’s colder than cold when he recalls everything she told him just a few days ago.
“Dammit,” he mutters and jerks his voice up to his idea of menacing. “Look. You tell me that these, these Yeerks are some kind of alien practical joke.”
For a moment, she forgets to be outraged, and she bursts out laughing. But he isn’t done.
“How hard can that be! Tell me that your freak show display right there is Maxwell’s stupid idea of teaching me a lesson!”
Now he’s more than aware of how terrified he really is. He knows what fooling himself is like.
But what she’s told him-the world being more warped than it already was; the darkness that has long crept into every possible corner without any of them knowing a thing-this is not what he saw coming when he left Roswell.
“Right,” she retorts. “Don’t you think I haven’t considered that you might be one of them? That, that this-that you’re part of Crayak’s deal to get to the rest of us?”
“Who’s ‘them’, what’s a Crayak, and who’s…Rachel,” he explodes, her name like a curse. “Who and what the hell are you?”
___
It goes on and on and on for almost three hours, at which point he (lets her think that he) wants a stalemate.
“You’ll come with me?” her voice is edgy.
“Gee, you think?” he snaps and goes for the kicker. “Don’t lie- you were planning to follow me around anyway. Make sure I’m really not working for the other side.”
She scoffs but lifts an eyebrow, impressed for the first time and he gives points to himself for being right. The look turns hard far too fast and she says, “Don’t even think of adding an ‘or else’ to that. Fine, let’s get out of here. First lesson- the Yeerks are everyone and everywhere.”
Against his better will-which nobody trusts anyway- he follows her.
(He still will not believe her, about Yeerks, about Controllers, about the aforementioned ‘other side’. It takes some terrifying days before he has no choice.)
___
Rachel never put faith in what she deemed to be the stuff of summer movies: a girl (warrior) going out on her own and finding a kindred spirit in the big bad world?
Never mind that. Back to reality, back to blood and war and space and everything in between.
And yet here she is, voluntarily sundered from the fight she’s known, in search of another fight to call hers. Here she is, not knowing whether to curse or praise whatever higher power sent this Michael guy her way.
She knows how to take alien lives with a jolt of her non-human limbs, to strike apart walls and melt silently into the hard-to-get places, all by virtue of the hidden power lying alive in her blood.
This is what she’s seen: He gets around on a motorbike. He can alter matter endlessly; cause far-off objects to ignite; make things shatter, just with one palm in front of him. He’s a renegade
This is all she’s seen, this is all she’s given. He looks at her, suspicion flushing his face, and she wars with the possibility of Controllers and Vissers and spies.
Marco’s accusing voice floods her head, and she shuts it down because for once, she knows what she’s doing.
(At least, that’s what she tells herself)
This is what she senses: Michael’s running away. Like her. He can barely rein himself in. Like her. He's lashing out at the world entire. Exactly like her.
He’s the wilder side of something he was born to. He’s broken away from it, and look what he found.
(If he isn't who he says he is, she's promised herself that he won't even live to regret it.)
The Yeerks are out there, and they’re both caged up in here. He sets his teeth, and asks her, what next?
She’ll make this work.
___
It doesn’t take too long for them to step forth.
In three days’ time, she tracks down a covert Hork-Bajir Controller operation and he comes along to see for himself, plain disbelief and eventual horror spilling across his face.
Her blood rises and rises, and oh, forgive her, but it’s missed this. She bites down hard to take hold of it and all of a sudden, there’s a grip on her shoulder.
The next thing she knows, she’s asking him if he’s up for it.
Something simmers reckless in his grin, his eyes.
It’s what she needs. She surges forward, with Michael’s curses and warnings lost to the wind.
___
He’s right on Rachel’s heels, swerving and veering to keep himself hidden and he’s never felt more exposed and more dangerous in his life. So this is what it was like, for Isabel, for Max. Karma’s a bitch, Guerin, he thinks grimly.
And then he thinks of what Rachel tells him that these things have done, have destroyed, who they’ve enslaved, what they might or might not have taken from him, and the energy lights to a flame and blasts out of his body.
He feels all alive.
___
So.
She’s with an an(other) alien-humanoid boy who can make things explode and they’ve all but decimated an entire Yeerk base, taking countless Controllers down with them. They’ve probably saved this city from being taken within, from being a first to fall.
She shoves aside the thought of what Jake(and Tobias, always Tobias) would do if he ever found out. When the specifics of what they’re fighting for come into the light, she flinches away with a knot in her throat.
Rachel doesn’t hold down the laugh that rips out of her.
Michael stares at her, as if he didn’t just upend an army of aliens with one swipe of his hand, make half a Bug fighter explode.
She demorphs as they skulk in shadows. Below, embers leap and metal topples, a swath of their fiery handiwork blazing straight through the Yeerks’ base.
“Swell,” Michael mutters, a slow smirk working its way across his face
___
It went this way in Roswell: Michael had been in search of a better, brighter place, ever since waking cold in the desert night.
Now, this is how it goes: he’s been running from what he called the play-world, from the nearest place to home that he’s ever had, and now he faces the possibility that every inch of that life before was building on darkness and lies.
Everyone’s the enemy, he’d once told Max. Maybe something out there was listening. Maybe something out there has the sickest sense of humor ever.
He paces for an hour in the dully-lit hotel room they’ve decided to ‘borrow’ (and no, they’ve got no time to fight over how bizarre that is). The walls blink red then black as he sweeps erratic palms over them.
He didn’t even know he could do that.
Rachel finally interrupts his heavy footsteps with a cough. “Hey. Say something. And cut that out.”
He screeches to a stop, and the words come hard and fast. “Get lost for a while, and maybe I will!”
The tacky ceiling lamps vibrate, then hit the floor
She draws an impatient sigh out. He holds his hands open, and transfers heat from his skin, to the dust-laden air. Maria, Max, Isabel, and everyone else shutter backwards and forwards in his head; visions of alien Controllers blur and bleed violently.
And he rasps out, “I’m not going back.”
“And-?” She sounds almost hopeful, and that should piss him off.
“And?” he repeats “And I’m no longer entangled with anyone, see. I’m not indebted to anyone.” He pauses on a tremor and finishes hard with, “I’ve never gone anywhere as far as that before, but it was something. It was something, Rachel. Don’t even think that I won’t fight, not after this. ”
She goes visibly rigid and hits him with, “I still don’t know that I trust you.”
He snaps up to meet her eyes, his laugh ringing bitter. “Well, shit.”
“I know you can’t possibly be a Controller,” she forges on, the glare still holding him. “But if this is gonna work out, you have to tell me what else you are.’
There’s a burn in the back of her eyes now, a little too familiar for comfort. He sighs in disdain.
“Oh, right, because you haven’t seen for yourself. I’ve told you. Antarian. ‘Not from around here.’ Alien.” The last word weighs his voice in a way he hates.
“Like, all-the-way alien?”
“You got another hour?
She rolls her eyes, spreading out both hands, like a mimicry of his powers. “I’m stuck with you, aren’t I?”
Yet again, he’s in a motel room with a wayward blonde and the sky’s fallen down, maybe for both of them. They’ve got nowhere else to go.
What the hell.
Michael sends a chair scooting over, kicks both feet up on it.
He goes straight to the start.
___
There’s a lesson here-being drawn together isn’t the worst that could happen. She’s been learning that ever since she touched her hand to the morphing cube.
Michael’s story sinks in; and it’s as though his very existence is striking, clawing out at her.
Suddenly, he’s the broken, abandoned boy, but also the cold-blooded fighter.
(He is Tobias, but he is also her, Rachel, and she doesn’t know if she should laugh or cry or run.)
She does none of those things. She doesn’t even say, ‘I’m sorry’. She winds both arms around herself, protects nothing.
When he’s done, he cuts her with a look. “Now, you.”
That she can do.
___
“I couldn’t keep being their bad guy, I just…couldn’t. But, but I’m not Cassie. I can’t not give whatever on earth I’ve got, to fight this.”
Rachel winds down three quarters of her story, arms still folded tightly across her. I’m just like you, she still doesn’t say. Instead, an attempt for breath and then it all spills over.
“I’m still in this, Michael. You have got to know that.”
His hands clasp tight together and she watches detached, as he drains electricity from the ceiling light.
“Think I can live with it,” he says after the silence folds around them, arm slapping hard on her shoulder and she jolts.
“Hey,” she mutters in warning, but she tingles with drained relief. There are wisps of ghosts in her mind, names she hasn’t even told him.
“For now, anyway,” he corrects swiftly. “You owe me more,” and he holds her gaze, his own cards laid out and dealt with.
And she likes that; it’s just her style. Impulse then, is what makes her say it.
“So, the girl. You never did tell me her name.”
He laughs with a quiet she never expected, and the overhead light flickers.
“Maria,” he says. And now she has to hold up her end of a deal they never made.
“And mine -” she swallows. “His name is Tobias. I only wish-if only he were here-”
She doesn’t know where that came from; too late to undo it. Her vision goes hazy, and she sprawls forcefully onto her bed. From this side, this slanted angle, Michael looks inadvertently stricken, and oh no, it isn’t as though they’re talking about people whose fates they don’t know.
“But they aren’t here.” she’s near whispering and this is stupid but who gives a damn now? “But - they’re still fighting, same as us, and they’re still out there and they aren’t gone. They’re not. And that’s all I keep in mind.”
“So do I,” he says in a low voice. “Would you believe that?”
She doesn’t answer anymore.
He makes the lights go out.
___
He still doesn’t ask her about the exact circumstances why she left the Animorphs(god, he doesn’t know what loser would come up with that name-but those five plus her have been saving a world so maybe he should lay off). He’s beginning to get the picture, anyway.
One mission renders him bleeding and sweat-soaked, slightly burned and in a very bad mood. An eagle flies in through the hotel window in record time, reshapes and twists, until it’s a wary Rachel sitting with hands in her lap, watching him bleed straight on the sheets. The sunlight flares defiant and pure behind her, and he looks away.
However long this takes, he will never be settled with the image of this girl, a bit like Maria, something like Isabel, twisting and metamorphosing into something else, and then all the way back again.
Instead, he clicks open the emergency kit she stole, swallows his ire and mutters, “You didn’t have to.”
“No? You look like hell.”
“You know what I mean.”
He looks at her. She looks at him, right back at him, as though she doesn’t understand what she’s turned him into.
___
After one too many nights of ‘crash and destroy and get the hell out of there’, he gets exactly what she’s so scared of, why she tracks him so furiously when they infiltrate, why she fires thought-speak at him even as Controllers fall to her hands. See, given the collection of fire and cells and blood that Michael is, the Yeerks would strike gold if they ever get a hold of him.
He’ll never own up that he’s twice as scared stiff as she is.
One close call, and he casually says that if ever he’s caught, he’ll just off himself; a dead body’s useless in the Yeerks’ hands, isn’t it?
Her mouth hangs open in real shock and he won’t look at her for the rest of the mission.
Later, though, when they slink back into the shadows, she’ll hit her knuckles to his arm, hard, and say, “I won’t let them, you idiot.”
In the pitch darkness, he laughs silently. At whom, he isn’t entirely certain.
___
On nights when they lie awake on opposite sides of a room, he goes on about beings like him in some other sky, a linked fate with his ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and something else they were meant to do. And she wishes he wouldn’t say so much, wouldn’t deluge her with this reckless hope.
She wishes he hadn’t had so much to lose. (Like me, you’re just like me.)
But right before they drift to sleep, he says, “No way I’d reel them into all this. There’s no way.”
And it slams her but she’s grateful that he can cut himself off so ruthlessly.
An unreadable look slips over him if she brings up Cassie, or Jake, or Marco, or Ax; who they are, the inner wars they carried. She stops at Tobias, stops before she gets under her own skin and that’s that.
She’ll leave it to Michael to figure out how she turned into the darker side of them all.
“I didn’t just split, you know.” she whispers one night. “It was more than that.”
In the dark, he makes a rough, jarringly sympathetic sound.
Sometimes his glazed determination trips her into guilt. She thought she faulted herself for nothing but here it is. He drops her glimpses of the Michael who’d been dying to get out of Roswell and into brighter worlds, and now it’s as if he’s a ghost, not ready to give up his hold on life yet.
Maybe she’s the one who killed him, the final blow.
Or maybe metaphors were never really her thing.
Ghost, huh? More of a poltergeist, muses the Tobias-shaped figure in her dreams. She curls up on her side, eyes still open.
___
But here they are. After all their routes fall in to place, they’re still themselves.
She keeps a calculating eye on the enemy she knows, and lets their weaknesses crawl to the surface, and maybe a little into her blood, into his.
When she elaborates on what those things have done, it gets a rise out of him like no other. He cages his focus on the Yeerks’ system and latches onto the most insidious ways to wreck with it.
She snaps her fingers while he talks and contemplates rapid, blazing mayhem one too many times. He raises eyes to the sky and strikes her with the endless flaws in her scheme; she gets him right back if they work on the tricky part where he’ll come to tilt the odds of the fight without being seen or caught.
After which, he contemplates chaos.
They’re both rebels, they’ve both got causes, so they’re forced to duel, take steps forward, steps back, until they’ve got it all down.
And synced together, thinking together, fighting together, they shatter the way clear and they don’t look back.
___
(They both know: the Yeerks were never prepared for this.)
___
One day, they will find themselves, all the way back.
Nothing will be as it was, but this time, they will have swayed the course of things to come-
___
-So he steals her line whenever he can, saying it for everyone they left behind; everyone they can fight for; everyone who has to be out there, fighting the way they are-they can’t begin to think of it any other way.
Michael drawls it out in the calm before every battle, at the same time Rachel says it, laughing careless as she does.
Let’s do it.
Two paths cross, two leaps to the finish; and on the day they all stand together, the world will change-
___
-And when they both look up, the sky will still be there.
***
Fandom: Animorphs, Roswell
Characters/Pairing: Rachel Berenson, Michael Guerin
Word Count: 3178
A/N: One-shot…though my muse is now giving me crazy Marco/Isabel plot bunnies. Uh-oh.
***
-timeline notes-
Sometime after Animorphs # 37. Sometime before the arrival of Tess and the events of the Roswell Season 1 finale-I’m thinking after the episode Independence Day.
It veers into AU from both points.
This fic also assumes that the Animorphs’ and the Roswellian’s universes are one and the same, so some strange world/mythology-merging was at work here.
I wanted it to be a drabble. My muse took one look at Michael and at Rachel and did not want it to be anything near a drabble.
***
Those Who Favor Fire
Their escape begins in endless roads and mirages and stinging afternoon skies-
.
.
He rides through border after border and has no idea where he ends up, or how far from Roswell he finally is.
There’s a road underneath him. Better yet, there’s blue and hope above.
(His powers surge up, blazing the space around his skin.)
.
.
Her parting words are to no one in particular, eyes pointed above, arms flaring into an eagle’s wings.
(She goes. It’s the easiest thing in the world--it’s what comes after that isn’t kind to her.)
___
Michael fights not to yell the first time he sees her morph. Streetlamps explode, and the nearest window shatters into glass dust, and this is where it gets really interesting.
She gasps, a thought and a voice deep inside his head, echoing What the hell was that?, and okay, that was her voice in his head, this just keeps getting better and better.
He stays steady on his feet despite the damn bear that’s metamorphosed right before him; watches how she transforms back into the golden-haired girl. Michael links his trembling hands together, forcing himself to stay steady as she gapes at him.
When he’s composed enough, he says with some satisfaction, “Oh, now we’re talking. You have your freak powers. I have mine.”
(Correction: this is where it gets really interesting.)
___
They’re standing on opposite sides, sending identical glares into the space between, and he’s colder than cold when he recalls everything she told him just a few days ago.
“Dammit,” he mutters and jerks his voice up to his idea of menacing. “Look. You tell me that these, these Yeerks are some kind of alien practical joke.”
For a moment, she forgets to be outraged, and she bursts out laughing. But he isn’t done.
“How hard can that be! Tell me that your freak show display right there is Maxwell’s stupid idea of teaching me a lesson!”
Now he’s more than aware of how terrified he really is. He knows what fooling himself is like.
But what she’s told him-the world being more warped than it already was; the darkness that has long crept into every possible corner without any of them knowing a thing-this is not what he saw coming when he left Roswell.
“Right,” she retorts. “Don’t you think I haven’t considered that you might be one of them? That, that this-that you’re part of Crayak’s deal to get to the rest of us?”
“Who’s ‘them’, what’s a Crayak, and who’s…Rachel,” he explodes, her name like a curse. “Who and what the hell are you?”
___
It goes on and on and on for almost three hours, at which point he (lets her think that he) wants a stalemate.
“You’ll come with me?” her voice is edgy.
“Gee, you think?” he snaps and goes for the kicker. “Don’t lie- you were planning to follow me around anyway. Make sure I’m really not working for the other side.”
She scoffs but lifts an eyebrow, impressed for the first time and he gives points to himself for being right. The look turns hard far too fast and she says, “Don’t even think of adding an ‘or else’ to that. Fine, let’s get out of here. First lesson- the Yeerks are everyone and everywhere.”
Against his better will-which nobody trusts anyway- he follows her.
(He still will not believe her, about Yeerks, about Controllers, about the aforementioned ‘other side’. It takes some terrifying days before he has no choice.)
___
Rachel never put faith in what she deemed to be the stuff of summer movies: a girl (warrior) going out on her own and finding a kindred spirit in the big bad world?
Never mind that. Back to reality, back to blood and war and space and everything in between.
And yet here she is, voluntarily sundered from the fight she’s known, in search of another fight to call hers. Here she is, not knowing whether to curse or praise whatever higher power sent this Michael guy her way.
She knows how to take alien lives with a jolt of her non-human limbs, to strike apart walls and melt silently into the hard-to-get places, all by virtue of the hidden power lying alive in her blood.
This is what she’s seen: He gets around on a motorbike. He can alter matter endlessly; cause far-off objects to ignite; make things shatter, just with one palm in front of him. He’s a renegade
This is all she’s seen, this is all she’s given. He looks at her, suspicion flushing his face, and she wars with the possibility of Controllers and Vissers and spies.
Marco’s accusing voice floods her head, and she shuts it down because for once, she knows what she’s doing.
(At least, that’s what she tells herself)
This is what she senses: Michael’s running away. Like her. He can barely rein himself in. Like her. He's lashing out at the world entire. Exactly like her.
He’s the wilder side of something he was born to. He’s broken away from it, and look what he found.
(If he isn't who he says he is, she's promised herself that he won't even live to regret it.)
The Yeerks are out there, and they’re both caged up in here. He sets his teeth, and asks her, what next?
She’ll make this work.
___
It doesn’t take too long for them to step forth.
In three days’ time, she tracks down a covert Hork-Bajir Controller operation and he comes along to see for himself, plain disbelief and eventual horror spilling across his face.
Her blood rises and rises, and oh, forgive her, but it’s missed this. She bites down hard to take hold of it and all of a sudden, there’s a grip on her shoulder.
The next thing she knows, she’s asking him if he’s up for it.
Something simmers reckless in his grin, his eyes.
It’s what she needs. She surges forward, with Michael’s curses and warnings lost to the wind.
___
He’s right on Rachel’s heels, swerving and veering to keep himself hidden and he’s never felt more exposed and more dangerous in his life. So this is what it was like, for Isabel, for Max. Karma’s a bitch, Guerin, he thinks grimly.
And then he thinks of what Rachel tells him that these things have done, have destroyed, who they’ve enslaved, what they might or might not have taken from him, and the energy lights to a flame and blasts out of his body.
He feels all alive.
___
So.
She’s with an an(other) alien-humanoid boy who can make things explode and they’ve all but decimated an entire Yeerk base, taking countless Controllers down with them. They’ve probably saved this city from being taken within, from being a first to fall.
She shoves aside the thought of what Jake(and Tobias, always Tobias) would do if he ever found out. When the specifics of what they’re fighting for come into the light, she flinches away with a knot in her throat.
Rachel doesn’t hold down the laugh that rips out of her.
Michael stares at her, as if he didn’t just upend an army of aliens with one swipe of his hand, make half a Bug fighter explode.
She demorphs as they skulk in shadows. Below, embers leap and metal topples, a swath of their fiery handiwork blazing straight through the Yeerks’ base.
“Swell,” Michael mutters, a slow smirk working its way across his face
___
It went this way in Roswell: Michael had been in search of a better, brighter place, ever since waking cold in the desert night.
Now, this is how it goes: he’s been running from what he called the play-world, from the nearest place to home that he’s ever had, and now he faces the possibility that every inch of that life before was building on darkness and lies.
Everyone’s the enemy, he’d once told Max. Maybe something out there was listening. Maybe something out there has the sickest sense of humor ever.
He paces for an hour in the dully-lit hotel room they’ve decided to ‘borrow’ (and no, they’ve got no time to fight over how bizarre that is). The walls blink red then black as he sweeps erratic palms over them.
He didn’t even know he could do that.
Rachel finally interrupts his heavy footsteps with a cough. “Hey. Say something. And cut that out.”
He screeches to a stop, and the words come hard and fast. “Get lost for a while, and maybe I will!”
The tacky ceiling lamps vibrate, then hit the floor
She draws an impatient sigh out. He holds his hands open, and transfers heat from his skin, to the dust-laden air. Maria, Max, Isabel, and everyone else shutter backwards and forwards in his head; visions of alien Controllers blur and bleed violently.
And he rasps out, “I’m not going back.”
“And-?” She sounds almost hopeful, and that should piss him off.
“And?” he repeats “And I’m no longer entangled with anyone, see. I’m not indebted to anyone.” He pauses on a tremor and finishes hard with, “I’ve never gone anywhere as far as that before, but it was something. It was something, Rachel. Don’t even think that I won’t fight, not after this. ”
She goes visibly rigid and hits him with, “I still don’t know that I trust you.”
He snaps up to meet her eyes, his laugh ringing bitter. “Well, shit.”
“I know you can’t possibly be a Controller,” she forges on, the glare still holding him. “But if this is gonna work out, you have to tell me what else you are.’
There’s a burn in the back of her eyes now, a little too familiar for comfort. He sighs in disdain.
“Oh, right, because you haven’t seen for yourself. I’ve told you. Antarian. ‘Not from around here.’ Alien.” The last word weighs his voice in a way he hates.
“Like, all-the-way alien?”
“You got another hour?
She rolls her eyes, spreading out both hands, like a mimicry of his powers. “I’m stuck with you, aren’t I?”
Yet again, he’s in a motel room with a wayward blonde and the sky’s fallen down, maybe for both of them. They’ve got nowhere else to go.
What the hell.
Michael sends a chair scooting over, kicks both feet up on it.
He goes straight to the start.
___
There’s a lesson here-being drawn together isn’t the worst that could happen. She’s been learning that ever since she touched her hand to the morphing cube.
Michael’s story sinks in; and it’s as though his very existence is striking, clawing out at her.
Suddenly, he’s the broken, abandoned boy, but also the cold-blooded fighter.
(He is Tobias, but he is also her, Rachel, and she doesn’t know if she should laugh or cry or run.)
She does none of those things. She doesn’t even say, ‘I’m sorry’. She winds both arms around herself, protects nothing.
When he’s done, he cuts her with a look. “Now, you.”
That she can do.
___
“I couldn’t keep being their bad guy, I just…couldn’t. But, but I’m not Cassie. I can’t not give whatever on earth I’ve got, to fight this.”
Rachel winds down three quarters of her story, arms still folded tightly across her. I’m just like you, she still doesn’t say. Instead, an attempt for breath and then it all spills over.
“I’m still in this, Michael. You have got to know that.”
His hands clasp tight together and she watches detached, as he drains electricity from the ceiling light.
“Think I can live with it,” he says after the silence folds around them, arm slapping hard on her shoulder and she jolts.
“Hey,” she mutters in warning, but she tingles with drained relief. There are wisps of ghosts in her mind, names she hasn’t even told him.
“For now, anyway,” he corrects swiftly. “You owe me more,” and he holds her gaze, his own cards laid out and dealt with.
And she likes that; it’s just her style. Impulse then, is what makes her say it.
“So, the girl. You never did tell me her name.”
He laughs with a quiet she never expected, and the overhead light flickers.
“Maria,” he says. And now she has to hold up her end of a deal they never made.
“And mine -” she swallows. “His name is Tobias. I only wish-if only he were here-”
She doesn’t know where that came from; too late to undo it. Her vision goes hazy, and she sprawls forcefully onto her bed. From this side, this slanted angle, Michael looks inadvertently stricken, and oh no, it isn’t as though they’re talking about people whose fates they don’t know.
“But they aren’t here.” she’s near whispering and this is stupid but who gives a damn now? “But - they’re still fighting, same as us, and they’re still out there and they aren’t gone. They’re not. And that’s all I keep in mind.”
“So do I,” he says in a low voice. “Would you believe that?”
She doesn’t answer anymore.
He makes the lights go out.
___
He still doesn’t ask her about the exact circumstances why she left the Animorphs(god, he doesn’t know what loser would come up with that name-but those five plus her have been saving a world so maybe he should lay off). He’s beginning to get the picture, anyway.
One mission renders him bleeding and sweat-soaked, slightly burned and in a very bad mood. An eagle flies in through the hotel window in record time, reshapes and twists, until it’s a wary Rachel sitting with hands in her lap, watching him bleed straight on the sheets. The sunlight flares defiant and pure behind her, and he looks away.
However long this takes, he will never be settled with the image of this girl, a bit like Maria, something like Isabel, twisting and metamorphosing into something else, and then all the way back again.
Instead, he clicks open the emergency kit she stole, swallows his ire and mutters, “You didn’t have to.”
“No? You look like hell.”
“You know what I mean.”
He looks at her. She looks at him, right back at him, as though she doesn’t understand what she’s turned him into.
___
After one too many nights of ‘crash and destroy and get the hell out of there’, he gets exactly what she’s so scared of, why she tracks him so furiously when they infiltrate, why she fires thought-speak at him even as Controllers fall to her hands. See, given the collection of fire and cells and blood that Michael is, the Yeerks would strike gold if they ever get a hold of him.
He’ll never own up that he’s twice as scared stiff as she is.
One close call, and he casually says that if ever he’s caught, he’ll just off himself; a dead body’s useless in the Yeerks’ hands, isn’t it?
Her mouth hangs open in real shock and he won’t look at her for the rest of the mission.
Later, though, when they slink back into the shadows, she’ll hit her knuckles to his arm, hard, and say, “I won’t let them, you idiot.”
In the pitch darkness, he laughs silently. At whom, he isn’t entirely certain.
___
On nights when they lie awake on opposite sides of a room, he goes on about beings like him in some other sky, a linked fate with his ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and something else they were meant to do. And she wishes he wouldn’t say so much, wouldn’t deluge her with this reckless hope.
She wishes he hadn’t had so much to lose. (Like me, you’re just like me.)
But right before they drift to sleep, he says, “No way I’d reel them into all this. There’s no way.”
And it slams her but she’s grateful that he can cut himself off so ruthlessly.
An unreadable look slips over him if she brings up Cassie, or Jake, or Marco, or Ax; who they are, the inner wars they carried. She stops at Tobias, stops before she gets under her own skin and that’s that.
She’ll leave it to Michael to figure out how she turned into the darker side of them all.
“I didn’t just split, you know.” she whispers one night. “It was more than that.”
In the dark, he makes a rough, jarringly sympathetic sound.
Sometimes his glazed determination trips her into guilt. She thought she faulted herself for nothing but here it is. He drops her glimpses of the Michael who’d been dying to get out of Roswell and into brighter worlds, and now it’s as if he’s a ghost, not ready to give up his hold on life yet.
Maybe she’s the one who killed him, the final blow.
Or maybe metaphors were never really her thing.
Ghost, huh? More of a poltergeist, muses the Tobias-shaped figure in her dreams. She curls up on her side, eyes still open.
___
But here they are. After all their routes fall in to place, they’re still themselves.
She keeps a calculating eye on the enemy she knows, and lets their weaknesses crawl to the surface, and maybe a little into her blood, into his.
When she elaborates on what those things have done, it gets a rise out of him like no other. He cages his focus on the Yeerks’ system and latches onto the most insidious ways to wreck with it.
She snaps her fingers while he talks and contemplates rapid, blazing mayhem one too many times. He raises eyes to the sky and strikes her with the endless flaws in her scheme; she gets him right back if they work on the tricky part where he’ll come to tilt the odds of the fight without being seen or caught.
After which, he contemplates chaos.
They’re both rebels, they’ve both got causes, so they’re forced to duel, take steps forward, steps back, until they’ve got it all down.
And synced together, thinking together, fighting together, they shatter the way clear and they don’t look back.
___
(They both know: the Yeerks were never prepared for this.)
___
One day, they will find themselves, all the way back.
Nothing will be as it was, but this time, they will have swayed the course of things to come-
___
-So he steals her line whenever he can, saying it for everyone they left behind; everyone they can fight for; everyone who has to be out there, fighting the way they are-they can’t begin to think of it any other way.
Michael drawls it out in the calm before every battle, at the same time Rachel says it, laughing careless as she does.
Let’s do it.
Two paths cross, two leaps to the finish; and on the day they all stand together, the world will change-
___
-And when they both look up, the sky will still be there.
***