WHO: Kaden WHEN: A catchup scene - late July, early August WHERE: Burlington WHAT: Life goes on WARNINGS: None
My name is Jake, Kaden thinks, as he walks slowly down the street and drags his hand across fences, bouncing it off letterboxes as he passes quiet, sleepy houses. It’s not my real name. I can’t tell you my real name. If they find out who I am, they’ll kill me.
Bump bump bump – his hand already has a small splinter from the pointed tips of some neighbors’ fence. No six-foot, rusty, chain link fences round here; Burlington’s got picket. And hedges with shapes. His favourite one is a few streets over, two deer, standing together. He kinda loves that, deer made out of hedges. The things some people do with their time – it’s pretty cool.
But most of the time, Burlington has no fences at all, just a front yard, land that wraps all the way around each house. Lots of short grass and stone bird baths, lots of American flags, lots of space between each house so its harder to hear what’s happening inside (Kaden figures). His old neighbors used to fight loud enough that Kaden could hear it in his bedroom, least till their neighbors called the cops, and the day after Cy went over and told them both that if they ever fought loud enough to get the cops called out again he was gonna burn ‘em both in the bath. Kaden had heard that fight from his bedroom, too.
Kaden doesn’t know for sure if the exact same shit is going on in Burlington, but he figures it is, just with bigger lawns and sometimes, hedge-deer. He hasn’t seen any of it in Marcie’s house, but in some of them, sure, it’ll be there. Cycles and unbroken cycles of it. He's not dumb. He knows the poison he grew up with is a worldwide thing.
My name is Jake, only not really. I stole the baby of the god of war and if he finds out I’m alive, I’m toast.
It’s a thought worth freaking out about, but if he freaks out every time he has it, they’ll probably stick him in some rubber room. Over the weeks since he and Marcie arrived here, Kaden's managed to restrain most of his worst freakouts to night, when he can be silent and unseen and devastated about everything without witness. Not always, but... mostly.
Today though, the sky’s clear and hot, the world smells like mowed grass and there’s no hint of human piss or garbage at all, and Kaden is too tired, and the war god danger feels too far away to constantly freak out about. He just keeps bump bump bumping his hand against things as he walks by, thinking about books instead.
There’s a lot of ways his life is like the Animorphs, not that he can tell Cathal that. He keeps thinking it though. The secrecy, keeping his identity quiet cos the enemy is way more powerful than he’ll ever be. He saw what Apollo did to Marcie, firsthand he’s seen a real, proper, unbreakable curse. And he still doesn’t remember what Ares did to him but that doesn’t make the fear of being found any less. They’ll kill him. Ares tried. Hecate turned him into a dog. Sometimes, in the distance, he sees people he knows are dead. He should freak out about this more than he does, but right now, with the sun up, something has gone all disconnected in his brain.
Like, all the shit - memories (or lack of) and fear and unexplainable scars and ghosts and magic - feels like a train in the distance; it’s here, it’s all still here, and Kaden doesn’t know if its getting closer or further away but it’s not close enough to flatten him right now.
Days like today, his life feels about as real as a series of kids books from way before he was born.
The first animal Jake ever morphed into was a dog, only, Jake can remember it. It doesn’t feel like a dream, to Jake. And when Jake morphs back everything heals up, he isn’t left with scars even the goddess of witches and dog-morphing can’t adequately explain to him. Memory wounds, what the fuck?
Jake’s younger than him, too. And Cassie and Rachel and Marco and Tobias. Kaden’s looked it up, and they’re all like, thirteen. If they were fighting a war against invading aliens when they were thirteen, Kaden can cope with Olympians at fifteen, right?
Bump bump bump. Kaden has to stop on a corner to dig out more of a splinter, chewing at the heel of his hand to try and get it.
A thought hits him - Tragos is never gonna get a splinter again - and for a few moments there’s nothing but white noise, a feeling like the footpath is gonna crumble beneath his feet, till Kaden drops his hand from his mouth, leaving the splinter where it is. He walks a little further on, and after a while he’s digging his thumb into the splinter, sending ripples of pain out from the centre.
Tragos couldn’t cope with the Olympians and he was nineteen. He had years on Kaden. He was stronger than Kaden. And he’s still dead and Kaden feels like screaming about it, all the time. Some nights, Marcie laughs with her family, and some nights, Kaden sees Marcie on her phone, smiling to herself as she messages some friend, and it always feels like she’s punched him, right in the stomach. He doesn’t know how to deal with her happiness, it hurts, it hurts like her laugh is rubbing lemon juice into his open wounds, and he wants to scream at her to stop, please please please stop because it hurts, too much.
It hurts too much to think and he doesn’t have it in him to be generous. He doesn’t know why he gets to live when Tragos is dead and he doesn’t know why Marcie gets to be happy when Tragos is dead and it makes him crazy and my name is Jake, my name is Jake my name is Jake he thinks, staring at the sidewalk in front of him, thinking about Animophs to stop himself falling apart. Jake lost his brother, too, Jake’s brother is a Yerk and fighting for the chance to save his brother is maybe the only thing holding Jake together.
Kaden doesn’t know what’s holding him together. It’s a wonder, most days, that he doesn’t step out into the middle of the road and scream and scream and scream.
None of the Animorphs made it past twenty, either.
This is the bedrock of pain and fear that his whole life in built on. But there’s things growing up from those foundations, because life goes on. It freaks Kaden out more than anything that life goes on (especially Marcie’s, faster and faster and faster her life is going on, every smile, every laugh, every day) but freaking out about it doesn’t stop it.
And he doesn’t hate everything. He doesn’t hate that Cathal is weird and enthusiastic about these books, and that Cathal keeps messaging him back about the plot twists and the devastating revelations and the gross transformations that have Kaden hooked. The books have become an excellent way not to think about other things during the night, and the messages that Kaden sends Cathal about them come through at one, two, three in the morning. Sometimes Cathal makes a mention of it, just mild stuff like ‘you were up late’ and Kaden laughs it off and blames the books.
Kaden also doesn’t hate hanging out with Adrian and Leo. They run this Twitch stream and it just eats up the day. Things were tense between Adrian and Kaden for a bit, after Kaden flipped about celebrating one of Adrian’s friend's birthdays, but the tension faded as the days passed on by, and now when he’s hanging out with Adrian it’s kind of like he’s not a massive mess all the time, it’s like he’s not barely a person at all. Sometimes it’s like he’s back with his old friends and nothing’s changed.
Celeste kicks the boys all out of the house one day during the first week of August – a few days after that first pizza at Cathal’s and meeting Blueberry the dog and Jake and Marco and Cassie and Rachel and Tobias and Ax – when all three of them have been screaming at the computer at a volume she deems ‘insufferable’. It’s a slow day in the middle of summer, even the flies are sluggish, and the boys are at a bit of a loss about where to go now. The three of them huddle around Adrian’s phone to finish watching a stream till Celeste sticks her head out of the window and says that if she catches them in range of the wifi again before dinnertime (here it comes, Kaden thinks, bracing) then no one is getting any dessert.
Oh. Well. That’s a novel kind of threat – no violence, just... no ice cream. But it’s serious enough that Adrian puts his phone away and the boys start to wander, following Leo now – he’s had a message from one of his friends and it’s drawing them all down to the basketball courts.
Adrian looks like he’d thinking about peeling off on his own but he says to Kaden, "You wanna go wipe the floor with some thirteen year old asses?" and it surprises Kaden to realise how much he does want that.
It surprises him, how easy it is to pretend to be normal when there’s a whole bunch of kids trash talking each other and everyone is too hot and the smell of BO and Axe is as thick as it ever was back at school.
The heat is painful, though. Kaden keeps shoving his long sleeves up his arms then remembering about the scars and pulling them back down again, but the movement is waking up his body in a way nothing else had, except for maybe the time he’d gone down to the gym with Marcie.
Except, right now on the courts, he doesn’t feel awful, and that day at the gym – the day after the night he’d yelled at the Bellinis and cried all over Marcie – he’d felt awful. If he and Marcie had been alone at the gym, Kaden knew he would have cried. Again. Smacking the bag over and over and pouring his grief and aggression into each hit had almost broken something in him, forced more tears up to the surface. Again. But they’d been surrounded by other people working out as well, so Kaden kept it repressed, and any tears that did escape he swiped away like they were just part of his sweat.
It’s easier to pretend things are normal while bouncing a ball around, though. It isn’t something he’s done much with any of his brothers. And the kids keep talking to him, distracting him; it’s harder to fall into memories when some thirteen year old ginger kid is trash talking his game.
A few of Adrian's friends show up a bit later. There’s Seb who's just turned 16 but isn't beneath playing with Leo's friends, there’s Connie whose blond hair is tipped in faded red and who powers through two energy drinks in five minutes and gets both crushed cans through the net, TK – Teeks – who’s brought along a homemade speaker amplifier and is blasting music from his phone out of it at the edge of the courts, and Teeks sister Tara who spends the whole time bored and trying to wheedle everyone into going to Cinnabon instead.
They do all end up at Cinnabon eventually, and Kaden finds himself in a booth squashed between Seb and Connie answering question after question about life in New York. Teeks is a total weirdo; even inside, he’s wearing a cowboy hat, and though he had Kaden convinced that he did come from Texas with that accent, Connie leans over to him and swears Teeks has never even left Birmingham.
She smells like coconut – and of Cinnabon icing and energy drink – and, well, Kaden finds another thing he doesn’t hate about all this.