trans_9 | Katzenjammer [Open]

Entry tags:

Katzenjammer [Open]

Aside from the comatose state she reached after Cassie finished her post-exorcism first-aid, sleep hasn't come easily to Eva since the possession. What little she's gotten has been interspersed with nightmares, so it's while all the Animorphs are sleeping that she slips out of Cassie's house and finds herself at the Drunken Dragon.

It's all too much. Too much going through her head and too much space alone in there. When she woke up it was because she was thrashing in her sleep and accidentally smacked her head into the bedpost. She found that she was clawing at her scalp while she dreamed.

She needs to feel a little bit out of control again, by her own doing, because that means less control that other people can take away from her. And she needs to dull the knowledge of how many bad memories she dredged up for Marco by going and getting herself possessed.

"Wine. Whatever you have. Keep it coming," she says, then, as if clarification is necessary, "I'm going to get drunk."

(( OOC: Open post but since Eva's going to be bemoaning the state of everything everywhere, please poke me first if you want to throw a character she's never met before at her. ))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'll be fine." He did feel a little dizzy, but it was helping. He could talk easier with the faint buzzing in his head.

"I don't understand why they made all their egomaniacs the leaders. Iniss used to say the people who led were the people who were either smart enough to get there, or the ones with the highest body count. Or both. He didn't even want to speculate on the relative sanity of the Council. I think at the middle, they're all scared of getting enough power to get noticed, but not enough to gain protection. Worst position to occupy, apparently."

"Alright. You shouldn't do more than two. Your mother would be very angry at me," she says as she takes another drink. She's tipsy enough that she ends up bumping the jug on her chin on the way up.

"Ugh, Sub-Vissers. I think there were a few years in there where we were going though them like potato chips. The Council was relatively sane, I thought, if political. And if you got past how their answer to everything was 'torture it to death'. They weren't very imaginative," she says darkly. Edriss had one of those sentences and Eva still bears the scars.

"I thought you said my mother trusted your judgment." Just a hint, barely noticeable, of a typical teenager. A quietly sly smile, a tiny hint of sass. But it faded quickly. "I won't push it past this. Not unless I really ant to black out."

He fell silent as she discussed the Sub-Vissers and the council, merely listening. "Yeah. Iniss stayed away from Visser Three. He almost got me once, just me. Before Iniss. I had to get six stitches and we had to really work up an explanation for mom. Fell off those stupid stairs, headfirst. They're not very imaginative, Yeerks. Or at least I haven't met any that are."

"And she'd be very upset if it turned out she overestimated me," she says with a smirk.

"Ugh. Edriss blamed everything from stairs to muggings to car accidents. I think Peter thought I'd just been cursed with phenomenally bad luck for about a year before she discovered sedatives." And if only he'd had any idea of the bad luck. "Where'd Esplin get you, if you don't mind me asking?"

He laughed. "I'm sure you're doing fine."

He took another sip, letting the alcohol rest on his tongue for a moment while he considered. "He didn't really get me so much as he backhanded me off the staircase. You know the big one in the pool? Well, the Bandits' attacked and things got a little insane and I had the bright idea to fight back armed with nothing but my fists. It didn't go so well. Cracked my head on the way down. Temrash ended up making some excuse about roughhousing on the beach and a rock under the sand. Chapman backed him up." He lifted his hair back, showing the faint line of scar tissue. "Considering the thing was flinging fireballs, I got lucky." His brow furrowed, something tickling the back of his brain. Pieces trying to fall together.

"Funny, that was the first night the bandits attacked...."

A tiger, an elephant, a horse, a gorilla and a hawk. Nothing exotic, nothing not of Earth. There had never been a morph that wasn't of Earth.

Five, not the six that would later show up, no young Andalite.

Rachel could morph, he'd been avoiding thinking about the Bear Incident, but Rachel could, knew how. Jake knew she could. So did Marco.

There had been kids at the construction site where Elfangor died. They'd never found them, but they had been there.

Rachel could morph.

Oh god he was going to be sick.

He'd been falling, he'd been mid nose-dive, but he'd sworn someone had called his name.

Oh god.

"...oh god what did he do..."

"Eh. Some days. Probably not tonight," she says, waving her hand a bit.

She listens intently, remembering back when she first heard of the Andalite bandits, how they'd excited Edriss more than than they'd excited her. Edriss saw a thorn in Esplin's side, Eva saw yet more aliens turning Earth into their battlefield, and probably a short-lived one at that. And then when they'd started eluding Visser Three more and more, she and Edriss came to have a shared affinity for them, if for entirely different reasons.

But her reminiscing is set aside when Tom suddenly loses track of his sentence. "Tom? Tom? Are you alright? Should we go outside and get some air?"

He must be realizing something, but she can't figure what it is yet. She puts a hand to his shoulder. "What is it?"

Jake. Jake and Rachel and Marco. Three kids he remembered learning how to climb highchairs together. Their first day of first grade. Three kids he'd watched grow up.

No.

No, no, it just wasn't possible. They couldn't. It couldn't have been them. No.

What sort of person recruited a bunch of kids to do his dirty work? Why had Elfangor been so determined to be a god damned martyr that he hadn't just morphed before the Yeerks got there.

Why them? Why not some other kids, kids he didn't care so much about.

He dropped the glass against the table, not really caring if it fell over or not, pressing his face into his hands. They'd almost died, countless times. He could remember it.

Oh god.

"It's them. It's Marco and Jake and Rachel and those others kid. He-they-it's them."

Jake knowing was one thing, Marco knowing was one thing. His kid brother and almost adopted kid brother and his baby cousin going to war at the tender age of thirteen just made him want to cry and scream and punch an Andalite in the face. No matter how fatal such an action would probably prove.

Oh, crap. If Tom knows, it's possible Iniss will soon enough. Thank God he's not there now to take that information as soon as Tom realizes it.

But that's a secondary concern, as pressing as it is. Right now Tom's distress is her primary focus, and she doesn't know what she can do to ease that blow. She remembers how hard it was to accept when she realized, how hatred and worry had filled her up to the brim. It had given her hope, but it had also given her so much sorry, so much to worry about and to mourn.

What can she do besides put an arm around Tom and feel tears start to roll down her face? She can't go back and pull them away from the war. She can't undo all the corrosion the war left on them. God, even taking it out on Elfangor would accomplish nothing. Her baby's still paranoid and damaged. The children - children - will still have lived through unspeakable horror.

No way to undo. Nothing any of them could have done to stop it. No way to have protected them.

No way to have protected Tom, either. Holding him is practically a mockery, but she does it anyway because she can't find words for that kind of grief.

That was the be all end of things, wasn't it? They couldn't tell him, because the moment it all got put together, Iniss would know. It had been what Iniss had trained him for, mind sharp and observation skills very carefully bolstered over the years he had spent with the Yeerk.

The moment Tom figured something out...

His little brother. His little brother had gone to war. Suddenly all the awkward questions and the slipping grades and the late night excursions and dislike of the Sharing made perfect sense. And wouldn't it have just burned Temrash that it had all happened under his nose?

He turned into the hug, feeling like sobbing himself. He was supposed to protect them.

That was his job, he was the big brother, he was supposed to protect them.

There simply weren't any words, nothing but the cracked "Why them?" muffled against her shoulder.

He had tried to protect them, and all along, he'd been fighting a losing battle, hadn't he? How could he protect Jake from a war he was just as much a part of, if not more, than the controllers were?

Eva wishes she had an answer for that. Fate, maybe. Bad luck. Random freakish coincidence. Sinners in the hands of an angry god. She doesn't know. Possibly she doesn't want to.

"I don't know. I don't know," she says, voice shaking, failing to stem the tears. "I don't know who'd do that. I don't know. I don't know."

She made a bargain with Edriss, leave my family alone and I won't give you trouble. She'd held her end of the deal. It hadn't made a difference. Her kid came back to her scared and scarred up, even if the morphing removed the physical wounds. His friends were a menagerie of the walking dead and corpses. Maybe he was dead in her timeline.

Just another casualty in the war waged on bodies. Children and their helpless mothers.

He'd made a deal with Iniss. Don't hurt Jake, don't hurt my mom and dad. Iniss had broke it or verged on breaking it sometimes when he was at risk. But he'd kept it. Four years after becoming a controller, Jake and his parents were still free.

He had thought it was enough. He had tried so hard, and another space alien had been too busy undermining everything he'd done by sending his brother into a war.

"It's not fair." He was shaking, shoulders trembling, face dry because he'd forgotten, for the moment, that he could cry.. "I wanted...I wanted to protect them...I tried so hard."

Jake's eyes, Marco's eyes, Rachel's eyes. They'd gone to war. Whatever innocence he'd tried so hard to protect was gone.

Eva actually laughs at that, a joyless, harsh, phlegmy, bitter laugh. "Oh, I know. Don't I know it. I know it." It's only the thought that ran through her head every day of her pitiful half-life as a host. Only the thought that plagued her every day of her life now, as she tries to navigate the foreign land of her freedom, the upturned terrain of her family. "It's not your fault, Tom. Nothing we could do."

Not that that makes it any better. She tries to take a drink but spits it back into the mug because her throat's too tight to allow for swallowing. Either way, she doesn't break the embrace around the shaking boy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Katzenjammer [Open]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject