Jake Berenson (mynameisjake) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2011-04-26 12:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | jake berenson |
Who: Jake and Anakin
When: April 27th, afternoon
Where: Abandoned store in a fairly bug-free zone
What: Morphing a killik, metalinking, feeling the strong desire to be one with the bugs
Warnings: None so far, will update.
Marco would have told him he was insane, Jake thought with a grim smile as he poured the last salt line down in front of the door to the sporting goods store where he’d taken shelter while he waited for Anakin. There would have been some cursing and that face that said despite being my best friend I think you are probably, actually retarded in some section of your brain no one has yet thought to test. Ax wouldn’t have questioned him, he didn’t often, but there might have been a delicate inquiry as to whether ‘Prince Jake’ remembered what he had said about his last experience with a hive mind. Rachel— his hand tightened on the chalk he was using to copy a protective ward he’d seen on the complex window but the thought was already begun—would have just grinned fiercely and nodded, ready for anything as ever. It was impossible to imagine what Tobias would have said any more. Cassie would have said… he threw the chalk down, the ward complete, and moved to look out the window, scanned the empty street for the teenager he was supposed to meet. Anakin was young, sixteen or seventeen, but Jake was the last person to judge that too young for a fight. He sounded like he had a good plan. Honestly it sounded like he had the only plan. So it was the plan Jake was going to follow, enable even.
It was strange, being here, for more than the obvious reasons (like Superman and Princess Leia which had not yet stopped being incredibly cool), strange to be in a war but not the leader, not even a terribly invested party. Jake might have balked at fighting at all, might have tried to protest to a probably disinterested group of fellow displaced people that he had already fought his war. Then he thought of Rachel nodding seriously and smiling and turning to the screen in her final moments. He thought of Tobias and his years of silence. He thought of his brother and he knew that he hadn’t really earned the right to refuse anyone help. He hadn't earned that right and, more importantly, he'd finally learned that turning into a recluse didn't do anyone any good. In his more optimistic moments he thought of this place as a penance. Maybe this was his second chance, given by the seal or the Ellimisit or some as-yet-unknown alien who enjoyed messing with former Animorphs. Either way, maybe he could do it right this time. Maybe he could fight on the right side, make a difference, without any more names on his conscience. It made it easier that he wasn’t a leader here, and that he didn’t know any of these people and didn’t particularly want to. If his friends had been brought here he would have been responsible for them, but so far whoever decided these things seemed content to leave them out of it. He hoped it would stay that way.
He moved away from the window, no sense in drawing the bugs if Anakin wasn’t there yet, and mentally shuffled through the catalog of morphs he knew by more-than-heart, engraved into his DNA as they were. Ant? he thought, I should be prepared and that’s the last time I tried… but he shook it off, excused himself by remembering that this ant’s hive wouldn’t even exist in this reality. It was back home and probably long dead given their life spans. It wouldn’t be preparation for morphing the killik he’d a, it would be a potentially disastrous and pointless experiment in what happened when you isolated a component of the hive mind from the hive. House fly he decided at last, no reason for the bugs to care about a fly. Which, he thought with a small smile as he fixed the DNA sequence he wanted in his mind, was a funny way of phrasing it.
He fell forward as the morph began, too out of practice to have remembered to brace himself in this unfamiliar position. He only morphed, these days, as a class demonstration. I’ll have to start practicing again he thought to distract himself from how he must look, legs being sucked back in, eyes bubbling out and fracturing, tiny black hairs sprouting from his skin and all of him shrinking rapidly until…[woo!] He couldn’t help the reflexive burst of thought speech as the fly’s speed kicked in and he zoomed at what felt like one hundred miles per hour at the nearest wall only to bank just in time, the world’s tiniest, most grotesque bullet. Right, not the time for fun.
He landed on the ceiling and peered downwards with his insect-eyes, waiting for Anakin.