trans_9 | when did this place become like home? [closed]

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when did this place become like home? [closed]

They'd gotten back. In the end, that's all it felt like. A group of thirty had gone to a planet, have things gone poorly since being greeted, then found themselves lied to, exploded, and abducted in the same twenty-four hours. Then they'd set up a confrontation that'd taken days to reach fruition, broken into teams to achieve mission objectives that were, at heart, still not entirely the mission, and ended up in a fight involving clones of themselves, clones of people on Galilee, and the clones who ran everything under the guise of not having been clones at any point at all.

Here she'd thought Orochimaru had come up with a convoluted way of attaining immortality.

Still, they were back, she didn't have any official duty to file anything, she ached and hurt like hell, and after the shower she'd just taken (she'd discovered far more bruises, nicks, cuts, and really taken a look at the big burn on her upper thigh) she was ready for some selective downtime before reporting back in for duty at Medical Bay proper. She figured she needed to look at the Active Crew registry, too, after hearing mention of a recent pod release.

It just felt like effort she wanted to postpone spending for a good half hour nap or something, to take the edge off the uncertainty of walking into open combat with this group of misfits in the future. They'd survived, but they'd been lucky. No one'd been unscathed, and they weren't even facing the Ohm. Four days on one world, and this is how they'd come out?

Walking gingerly into her room, towel wrapped around her, she contemplated reviewing the files Kanner had left on the datapad she'd found in her medical kit. Different from any of the ones they had on ship, but there none-the-less. Actually...

Sakura looked over to the medkit itself, part of what she'd dragged back without paying attention once everyone had been sorted out to where they needed to be. It reminded her to do the responsible thing and finish dressing her wounds, if part of her grumbled and knew that the only reason she wasn't doing this in Medical Bay was a stubborn wish to be disassociated from the alien (familiar, she couldn't lie anymore) environment for a little while longer. "I hate breaking new boots in."

Yes. Focus on the simple realities. "The blisters you get are so annoying." She moved toward her bed after closing the door firmly behind her.

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Marco didn't really know anything about what had happened on the mission, but he had seen that message over the omnicomms. He knew what it was like to have a mission go disastrously wrong - he'd had that happen to him enough times - and even without knowing the details, it was pretty clear that that mission had gone to hell. So hey, it couldn't hurt to go see how Sakura was going after right?

Okay, and maybe he'd been worried. Just a little.

At least now that she'd mentioned it, he did actually know where she lived. Morphing osprey, he'd flown over to the teahouse. He didn't know exactly which room was hers, but that didn't really matter - through one of the windows he could see her walking to the bed.

In a towel.

...Why was he here again?

Wait. As awesome as it was that Sakura was wondering around in a towel, the osprey's eyes couldn't miss that burn. Or that large bruise. Or all those scratches. Marco shifted his wings slightly, feeling unsettled. The Animorphs had been in plenty of battles, and had certainly had plenty of gruesome injuries. But morphing had always fixed them. They'd never had to wait for them to heal. And he didn't really like the idea of Sakura being injured.

<Nice towel,> he said finally. He had come here for a reason, after all, and he was pretty sure that just flying in would not go down well. <Can I come in?>

Sakura jerked up, sliding one foot back to balance in a ready position when she heard Marco talking in her head. The burst of adrenaline through her system at the unexpected contact left her more awake (and on edge) than she'd been a moment before.

"Marco?" It's disconcerting knowing he could be there without her realizing right now. Not that he was the only one.

She clutched at her towel, frowning. "I'm not dressed," she groused, then glowered. He was outside, but where? Peering out the window, it took her a while to spot something familiar (and unfamiliar for what she usually saw when looking out her window). "Just wait a minute, pervert."

Her statement lacked any real heat to it, since she didn't believe it was intentional. More coincidence than anything else.

Of course, just -- ugh, she didn't want to walk back to the bathroom to get dressed in what she did have that hadn't gotten messed up on mission. Sakura nabbed her shorts and loose shirt, muttering as she took to the only corner that had any room in it and was out of visible range from the window. She hoped. Not that she'd strictly mind smacking someone upside the head for being a perverted idiot, but the adrenaline was winding down, leaving her more antsy than anything else.

Stifling a yelp as she dragged cloth back over her burnt skin, she sighed. Pulling her shirt on, she called out, "You can come in if you can hear me, birdy!"

Hey, Marco might not be a ninja, but when it came to being able to stay hidden? It was hard to beat an Animorph.

Unfortunately though, while he could see her really well, the osprey's hearing wasn't good enough to make out what she was saying from this distance. He could see her lips moving, so she was saying something, but Marco couldn't tell what. But then she disappeared from the window - had she gone off to get dressed?

<Uuuh, was that a yes or a no?> he called out after a moment. <You know ospreys might have good hearing, but it's not that good. I can't hear you.>

Sakura rolled her eyes, muttering a few things to herself when she went back to her window and leaned out. "Come here, featherbrain," she muttered, smiling nice and big (tired, tired, tired) and making a very obvious come here motion with her hand.

At least she felt it was an obvious come here motion. "Let's hear what's on your mind today."

Ah, so she had been getting dressed. Which mean no more towel. Marco had liked the towel. He mourned it's loss.

And yup, that motion was obvious enough. Marco folded his wings and dived, rushing forward towards the window. Right before he reached it, he extended his wings, pulling up sharply to land on the ledge.

Sakura stepped back and away from the window when she caught sight of Marco starting his dive. She waited, one hand on hip, for him to land. When he didn't say anything, she pushed some of her damp hair out of her face.

"Come in," she reiterated, looking from the bird on her sill to the medkit she wanted to play with. Did it have anything other than the gauze bandaging she was prepared to put on herself? "If you wouldn't mind demorphing, that'd be nice," she added as an afterthought. She knew it was ludicrious, but responding to voices in her head right now was a little too invasive and a little too crazy to sit well on her mind.

Even if she knew in this case she wouldn't actually be crazy. Sakura moved toward the medkit, picking it up with a grunt and bringing it up on top of the dresser. "How've things been on ship?"

Marco shrugged, which was always an odd gesture on a bird. <The usual,> he said as he hopped down onto the bed (hey, there wasn't that much room on the floor! Her room was tiny). He started to demorph. <We got a weird Tapestry thing that can supposedly tell the future, podpop, et cetera, et cetera. But for once no one went psy--> Marco's thought speak cut off, and he had to wait until he'd demorphed enough to keep going. "For once no one went psycho and tried to kill everybody. Made a nice change."

Finished up the morph, Marco sat on the bed and cocked his head at Sakura. "Somehow I don't think your mission went so well though," he said dryly.

"A tapestry that tells the future?" Sakura looked back over her shoulder, then away again. Really, watching morphing was never mind-soothing. She activated the biolock, amused that it seemed to need nothing more than her pressing her thumb against the mechanism to pop open with a soft hiss.

"Sometimes technology has its perks." She scanned the contents again, picking up what looked like some kind of gauze. Not cottony, so it was what she wanted to use.

Turning back toward Marco, she shrugged her shoulders. "No one died," she said politely. "None of the crew at least." She made her way around to the other side of her bed, taking a seat close to the end and twisting around to get both her legs up on it. She hissed at the rub against her injured thigh, pulling the edge of her shorts up to take the pressure off the burn. "The cloned pretty much all of us, you know? Which is more weird than dangerous when it comes to people like me. Some programmed training so they know how to operate a gun doesn't do much when you face anyone with actual battle experience, but in cases like Kon? Kang? Anyone more than an average human? Things get sticky pretty quickly. It was a fun parting surprise."

Glossing over most everything else, more or less. "The GIA ordering us down there's pretty suspect. I can't say they would have worked with us for sure if we'd been their dirty task force, but..." She started wrapping her leg, lips pressing into a thin line. "I think they would have found loop-holes out of holding up their end of the bargain. We kill a few leaders of their only obvious opposition, an entire multiversal fighting force gets rights and ins to technology that can regenerate entire people? Rebuild brains?"

Sounded sketchy enough to her; especially knowing what they did by the time they left. "Was that really just four days?" She wasn't actually asking Marco, more wondering out loud how it had felt so much longer. Ugh.

"Apparently," Marco said. "Or at least it claims to. In my experience though, anyone that tells you what the future is is saying that because they're trying to get you to do what they want."

He watched her treating her burn, wincing. Okay, so normally he wouldn't complain at all about seeing her thighs. But that burn didn't look nice at all. Except...there was something odd about this. "Why aren't you using your glowy-chakra thing to fix that?" he asked. "And you can bet that's subject. I knew we couldn't trust the GIA. They're just like the Andalites." Marco scowled. It wasn't a surprise, but it was definitely a confirmation of what he'd suspected. To the GIA, they were pawns, and they didn't give a damn about what happened to the ship.

He fell silent for a moment. "They cloned you?" he said after a moment.

Sakura snorted at his estimate of fortune telling. "The only telling of a future I've ever heard is a prophecy most people forgot about that was misapplied once or twice before the most recent round. Even if it's an honest thing, understanding what and when it's talking about is up in the air. How much of what you do is dictated by what you expect you have to do? Is it much of a decision by then?"

She thought about Naruto, winding the gauze loosely around one more time. One hand glowed a soft green as she cut through the gauze with chakra, coinciding with his question on the subject. "It's a reminder," she said after a moment. It seemed like she might just skip past any further explanation. "I was slow enough to get hit, or distracted enough. We don't have guns where I come from, you know? Nothing like them, really. Techniques and things, and projectile weaponry, but lasers?"

This was all part of the war in a sense made real past Galilee, to the Ohm, and to everything else. "I can't afford to forget that."

As simple as that, and as complicated. What couldn't she afford to forget?

"The Andalites?" Switching subjects was fairly easy for her, considering she didn't know how or what to verbalize past what she'd already said. Sakura was a physical learner. It was part and parcel of how she lived. "What'd they do to you?"

The cloning made her pause again, looking directly at Marco for the first time in this conversation. "Yeah," she said, their faces -- her face -- flashing through her mind. "A couple times over. I'm not really sure why. Shock value, maybe? I knocked them all out early on in the fight. Dragged them out of the area too." She sounded so casual, if the way she was frowning didn't support the casual nature of her statement. She looked -- worried.

"Sakura, that's bullshit," Marco said pointedly. "You think you need a scar to remind you? You know that I don't scar. No matter what happens to me, once I'm back to normal every possible trace is gone. I've been burned by Dracon Beams, I've been bitten in half, I've had my whole face ripped off. Do you honestly thing I'd need a scar to remember that? Do you really think I'd ever forget? I wish I could. You leave that untreated, the only thing you'll do is make it harder for you to react next time, because now you've got an old injury to deal with on top of everything else."

War was hard enough without putting yourself through even more pain just to remind yourself.

"The Andalites were fighting the Yeerks too," Marco said flatly. "Before they even came to Earth. They wanted the Yeerks gone, at any cost. And as far as they were concerned, we were just a 'primitive' race who couldn't really be allies. Or equals. And if it meant destroying the Yeerks, they were perfectly happy to kill us all."

Marco looked straight back. "So you saved them," he said. She was frowning - why was she frowning? Did she regret saving them? Was she just disturbed from having fought someone from her own face? From her DNA being stolen?

Edited 2011-07-30 05:47 (UTC)

Sakura blinked at him, tucking her chin in defensively. She wasn't letting herself scar, if that's what he was focusing on. Taking her time to heal a wound naturally wasn't making it a debilitating anything -- it wasn't -- just --

She burst out laughing, bringing her hands up over her mouth because she really didn't want to, but it was so absurd. "Don't start sounding so reasonable, Marco," she got out when she could. It was muffled by her hands. "I might start listening to what you say."

Admittedly, in this case it wasn't a bad idea. It took her a moment to settle down, stop from wanting to giggle because he'd really said what Tsunade would say. "I'm not going to scar. Wrong kind of reminder. Besides, look at me! Count how many scars you do see." Not that she'd really give him the chance. "Since I turned fourteen, there's only been one major one, and it's the one that did kill me. More or less."

She made a wishy-washy motion with her hand. "I'm not talking about letting myself scar. Not like that. Besides, you seem to know as well as I do that scars aren't really about things on the outside." She poked at him with her foot. "They're in here," she said, tapping her forehead, "And in here." This time, she tapped over her heart. The actual heart, which was a little less symbolic. "You just learn to deal with them, I guess. Or something like that. We're supposed to ignore we have any."

She straightened up, pulling on her lecturing facade, if she wouldn't have recognized it as such herself. "A shinobi must never show emotion. In some villages, that gets tied up with never feeling anything either. You can't scar if you don't let yourself feel. Memory alone doesn't make it something you really understand as being unforgettable." The lines dividing apathy and depression, ruthlessness and disconnect. "I'm healing slowly, not refusing to heal at all. There is a difference."

She's spent years perfecting that difference.

"Besides, you tell me things like that now? What are dragon beams? When were you bitten in half? What -- or who -- tore your face off? How often did you guys have to rely on the fact you heal like you do just to make it through to the end?" She had a feeling the answer was 'fairly often.' Sakura wasn't accusing, but she was asking. In a way she was pressing, too, which might have been unfair, but tossing things half at her when she had no context and was left scrambling to really understand meant she asked when she might otherwise hold quiet.

"Have you been waiting for something like that the whole time? From the Daligig? The GIA?" He had a sort of crippling advantage, having been involved in a war between different species, from different worlds. An advantage for context, but crippling for the ways it formed his paranoia. it was the mindset she found in older shinobi back home. I've seen it before. Every instance afterward has the potential to be the same.

"I didn't save anyone. I got them out of the line of fire, but for all I know, they woke up, and were government property. How exactly is that saving someone? If they're lucky, the CLF founds them and pulled them in, so at least they die some point in the future with a choice to fight or not fight. If they stay with the government, that's not a choice. They come with preprogrammed lifespans. If they're soldier class, and no one screwed with programming, that's ten years. If they survive that long." Hence the frown. What was she saving them from? Had she saved them from anything in the first place?

Marco blinked. Okay, he was a funny guy (naturally!), but that wasn't exactly something he'd expected to get a laugh. But hey, for once she seemed to actually be listing him, so he quirked half a smile. "Healing slowly when you can heal completely right now is still stupid, you know. With our luck, we'll get attacked tomorrow by giant killer chickens from outer space or something."

The half smile disappeared, to be replaced by an incredulous look. "Never show any emotion? Seriously? Okay, not showing any emotion in front of the enemy makes sense, but never? Come on. That's just ridiculous." Seems like every time he talked to Sakura, he found out another insane thing about her world.

And of course, she was back to pestering him with questions. "What do you expect, a full report on every single incident that happened in three years of war? Jeez. How come you never told me about whatever apparently killed me before? But if you insist, Dracon Beams are Yeerk energy weapons, I gotten bitten in half by a shark on one of our really early missions - that was a fun way to learn that morphing actually does fix injures, let me tell you - and it was a Hork-Bajir Controller that took off my face. Well, my beak really, since I was in Hork-Bajir morph at the time. They were one of the species that the Yeerks enslaved." Marco shrugged. "Those battles were never really pretty. It was six of us against the entire Yeerk invasion. And just demorphing to heal wasn't so simple. Being mid-morph makes you vulnerable, and we couldn't afford to ever let the Yeerks see who we really were."

He scowled at the description of the clones. It was just the same as what the Yeerks did; controlling people, enslaving them. Forcing others do bend to your will. "You gave them a shot. Not much of one, maybe, but it's better than nothing." He paused. "We tried to not kill Controllers, when we could. They'd still be enslaved, but I guess we always hoped that maybe one day..."

"Then tomorrow I'll heal my leg like magic and tell you how right you were in the first place. If we get a sudden influx of giant killer chickens from outer space." She held up a finger. "But if I then kill one, you get the honor of helping figure out if it tastes like chicken." A small smile, since she was so sure he'd like the sound of that.

That turned into a frown soon after. "It is ridiculous. It doesn't work. Even people who've been conditioned to repress all emotion relearn how to get in contact with their emotions. They don't get it right all the time, but people want to feel connected." Sai had, Naruto had known that, Sakura had guessed it seeing his book. He'd been looking for a connection for a long time. Am I? She knew the answer to that.

Just really, really weird it'd ended up with talking to Marco, of all people. And that she still was. She tried wrapping her head around the why, finding it hard to lock on to any given reason.

"I did," she said, brow furrowing as she frowned. "Kind of. That was Sasori? You remember, the puppet master, with the forest of arms? I might have not really gone into detail... Or much of any detail." Okay, he did have a point. She sighed. "It's not like I did with anyone back home who I wasn't reporting to, either. Naruto didn't need to worry about it. The Hokage only got a full report because she's the Hokage." And her master, but the two weren't intrinsically related.

Listening to him, she fell quiet. Really, it was an act of listening. She didn't interrupt, and she barely nodded to acknowledge his statement at the end. What she might have said, That must have been frightening, she doesn't. It's obvious. In a way, a given, and she'd already seen the effects that kind of hiding reflex had on Marco -- likely on Rachel, too. On any of his friends. "You, Rachel... Ax?" She bit down on her lip, wondering, and then spoke up a little more. "Jake. And two others, right?"

Someone had learned how to use the Omnicomm a bit more effectively.

"Hope's the one thing that's hardest to lose. When you do, what exactly are you fighting fore?" When you lost hope, what were you fighting for?

"No thanks. You can eat your own alien chickens," Marco said, smirking. "Course, if you wait until tomorrow to heal your leg, you could find that those valuable minutes you had to spend healing your leg were all that it took for the chickens to get you. So how about you heal it now? Plus, if you don't I'll have to keep complaining at you until you do. And I can complain with thought-speak, so you'd never be able to escape it."

Well, that made a nice change. "Nice to know there are some things from your world that you realise aren't normal," he said, amused.

"No, you didn't go into detail," he said, rolling his eyes. "You certainly didn't mention anything like 'by the way, I died during all of this'. And if your friend didn't know all the details, the you don't need to know all the details about what I did during the war either." There might be a few things he'd mention to her - more than he would to anyone else - but there would also be things that he'd never, ever, want to talk about. To anyone.

He paused, narrowing his eyes at her slightly. He knew she'd met both Ax and Rachel, so her knowing about them was no surprise, but... "How do you know about Jake?" he said, suspicious. As far as he knew, she was completely useless with an omicomm.

"Fall down seven times, get up eight," he quoted under his breath, almost saying it to himself more than to Sakura.

"You'll get bored. Besides, it's amazing what you can ignore with a well trained pain threshold." Sakura had a high tolerance for complaining -- high in that she was liable to start yelling back and throwing things at him if he didn't shut up, no matter what his form. Or maybe selectively chosen due to his form. Yes. High tolerance indeed.

Stubborn, meet stubborn. Just over a stupid subject right now.

"Only some? There's a whole lot more. Just because none of it makes sense to you doesn't mean some of it also doesn't make sense to me." She rolled her eyes.

"Was dying. The dying stopped for various reasons. And they never asked, either, so it's not the same." If she still would gloss over details for their sake, and wouldn't talk about other things for similar reasons. Naruto pointedly didn't want to hear her out on these kinds of subjects. Kakashi was as impossible to talk with as ever. Tsunade... was an instructor. Not a friend.

Actually, she didn't want to think about her relationships with people from home at the moment.

She gave him an evaluating look, the leaned forward, starting to work on healing her feet. The blisters wouldn't do her any good, even if she were running around barefoot. "I'd been getting lessons in working on the Omnicomm," she said, a kind of nonchalant introduction, "After the clock mess was solved, but before Galilee. Jake was pretty vocal on the boards, or whatever you want to call them, at one point. Then he was talking about Tom, and looking for more from either one of them turned up with a few interesting exchanges. Namely, how you and Jake used to eat birthday cake together growing up. Maybe that it got you sick, too, I don't really remember. It's not a big leap to go from the network of people who know you and your mother, and know Jake, and know Tom was a controller, to wonder if what you and Jake's cousin have going on isn't also linked to Jake."

Still conversational. This is what I gleaned, but I'm not calling it true or false. This all just from reading. You tell me, Marco.

She barely caught his quote, looking at him oddly before shaking her head and smiling. Six kids against an alien empire was a bizarre, hard to grasp concept. On top of that, six untrained kids, who ended up using themselves as weapons in a way that should have left them all dead if not for the unique properties of morphing. Only if they were hiding it -- it was because -- they were... aah, but did it matter, here and now? Maybe on a kind of personal, nosy level, but she was being invasive enough. Quid pro quo demanded too much back and forth she wasn't sure she was up to.

She was, quite suddenly, so damn tired.

"Bored? Barbie, do you know how much time I've had to spend running surveillance on known Controllers?" Marco said, shaking his head. "Nothing to do but fly around and hope they do something interesting, no games, no television...that's boring. Annoying you all day? Way more fun, beleive me." A wicked grin emerged. "I could sing The Song That Never Ends to you. Aaaaaaaaaall day long..."

He rolled his eyes at her attempts to distinguish between being dead and dying. "I kinda got that you didn't actually die. The fact that you're currently walking around alive was a bit of a giveaway there. And you didn't ask, you complained that I hadn't already told you all this before."

Marco did remember that message Jake had sent out. At the time it had been needed. Needed so that the crew would know who Iniss was. What he was. But the fact that Sakura was able to find that, piece together a little more about how the Animorphs worked just from that, was another reminded of just how vulnerable they were now. If she could find that out, others could too. An irritated expression flashed across his face for half a second. "Jake's my best friend," he said shortly. "You been having fun researching him, have you?"

Maybe she'd figure things out on her own, but Marco wasn't going to around giving information on Jake out to anyone. Not ever.

Her blank look at the mention of this song was superseded with a sort of half shrug. "You'd be surprised," she said, thinking of all the exceptions to what really should have been an ironclad rule.

Sakura finished with her other foot, narrowing her eyes at Marco. She turned away, settling her legs over the edge of the bed and pushing up to stand. "That wasn't complaining." She said it before, and she meant it. She didn't expect people to tell her their stories. If they were going to drop details without context, they could deal with her asking about it.

She expected people would shut her down or redirect conversation -- or tell her -- when she was crossing lines. "I wasn't researching him." She stretched, arms over her head. Aaah, her shoulders were tight again. She needed to work on that. "But it is out there, if you're looking for it."

Which had been her point in saying anything at all. One of her points. She was telling him, which for her was an accomplishment in itself.

What more context did she need? He'd fought in a war. Wounds happened. It wasn't too hard to make a guess about how.

"With you, everything is research," Marco said, rolling his eyes. He still looked a little disgruntled though. Not so much at her knowing this. Just at the fact that this information on them was out there in the first place, for anyone who could use an omnicomm to find.

He watched her get up. "So what did happen on that mission anyway? Apart from it all falling apart and people getting cloned all over the place, that is."

Edited 2011-07-31 01:56 (UTC)

Sakura had a driving need for a lot of context. Usually, she had next to none.

Letting her arms drop back down to her side, she frowned out the window. Her expression was more neutral when she half turned back toward Marco. "Do you want the detailed version, or the summary?"

Marco shrugged. "Summary's fine." He could always ask for more information if he needed it.

She nodded, clasping her hands in front of her. It was a little defensive, if not as much as if she'd crossed her arms over her chest. She wasn't entirely closed off.

"You know about everything up to when we lost comm contact. That night the hotel was bombed. Right before the explosions, half the team was kidnapped by the CLF, Clone Liberation Front. They spoke with the leaders, and ultimately contact was reestablished between both groups. It took a few days to set up the means to get into the hospital and tag machinery, get the ship, and get the teleportation pads in order, but then it boiled down to staging a confrontation between government and CLF using the crew as a focal point. They revealed the clones of us right about the time the memory upload was successful. We fought them down, got on the teleport pad, got on the ship, and got off world."

She shrugged. "I can explain what the memory upload was, if you want."

"Nah, I think I can guess," Marco said. "I've seen something similar back in my universe. You remember that Iskoort from XaXing?" He still couldn't beleive that Guide had showed up there. With a mustache.

"Who won the confrontation? And who were you fighting - the government, the CLF, or both of them?"

"The one buying everything? Probably nail clippings," she muttered, though really, why hadn't she thought of that?

Two inches of hair was probably enough.

"I was tagging things for teleporting out of the hospital. By the time I was involved in active fighting, it was after the government released our clones." Thus just the government, if she hadn't been enamored of being kidnapped by the CLF.

"What?" Marco said, blinking. What the hell was she going on about nail clippings for? "No, I mean they buy and sell memories. They have this viewer thing that lets them see other people's memories."

Marco frowned, trying to get a picture of what had happened. "So you were just fighting the government's clones, is that it? But what about generally? Did the others end up fighting for the clone rebellion?"

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