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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"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?"

"Yeah, I heard about that. It's why Zetta ended up with so many credits, from what I recall." She still thought it was weird. "Just, I don't think that gives you an exact sense of the person whose memories you're viewing, right?"

Aaah, the details she wasn't there to see play out in reality. "The others were split between tasks, but the teams fighting were fighting each other. Which means we were fighting government and CLF, if only seriously against the government. We had a no kill order, but you can guess how long that was followed once our own clones were around."

Marco shrugged. "I don't know. I never used it myself. But Kaya ended up with memories from someone else, but from what I've heard, it didn't make her the same as them. Who knows how the hell it's supposed to work?"

Trying to figure out what made a person a person was more Cassie's area, not his.

"So you were just trying to get the hell out of there?" Which would make sense. Sometimes, you just had to bail.

She wanted to know. Then again, she usually did.

"I'd have preferred just to get out of there from the start. The CLF didn't need us. The government didn't need us. Most of what we stole might not even be usable."

Such a net win.

"That's what the GIA wanted, right? They tech?" Marco said. He scowled. "And as long as they get their hands on it, they don't care what happens to us, apparently."

He stopped, then titled his head, looking at Sakura. "You haven't started healing your leg yet," he said suddenly.

"You haven't started singing." If she narrowed her eyes, glaring at him pre-emptively. "That's not an invitation to start."

Addressing his last statement first. She figured they both knew the implications behind the GIA, much like the creators of their ship. Hell, they'd already mentioned it, and she really didn't feel like feeding into his paranoia -- rightful, shared, or otherwise.

"Unless you want to get thrown out the window."

Sakura speculatively eyed him and the open window.

"I could just morph and fly away if you tried," Marco said, grinning. Okay, he could really morph that fast, but he knew she'd never actually throw him out the window. Hit him with a book maybe, but not that. "But hey, if singing's what you need...well, you asked for it."

And with that Marco leaned back onto his hands, and started singing. And unfortunately for Sakura, Marco wasn't particularly good at singing.

"This is the song that never ends, and it goes on and on my friend..."

Edited 2011-07-31 11:00 (UTC)

Oh, he knew that, did he? Sakura stared at him in disbelief. It was one thing to have people with anything like talent singing at you, even if what they were singing was utter nonsense. It was an entire other thing to have someone with no talent for singing start singing at you.

Some people shouldn't have started singing it, she thought to herself, not knowing what it was, but more than happy to see an end to it forever just because!

Sakura spun back around, using her good leg to support her as she leaned over to grab her pillow. A moment later she was happily introducing it to Marco's face with a thwack that didn't quite pass for good natured. ... Or playful. (Okay, he might have been right about her not tossing him out the window. If she lived on the first floor, all bets would have been off.) "Oh no you don't!"

"Some people, started singing i--argmmmf!" Marco's attempt at singing was quickly cut off by a sudden pillow to the face. He caught the pillow as it fell down. "Hey, you're not supposed to end the song that never ends!" he said, throwing the pillow back at her.

She caught the pillow -- more with her shoulder than anything else. It's not like he had to throw it far. "No, I think the only thing you can do is end it as soon as possible."

Her shoulders were tight with accumulated stress, she was looking more grumpy than amused, and the stupid part was she knew he was right. She just didn't want to deal with it, and above and beyond the reason she told him, she didn't know why. She wasn't used to that much personal self-reflection, if she could have used time to do some of that right now.

"I mean it." Pillow left on the bed she pointed -- very incriminatingly -- at Marco. Then she poked at him, aiming for whatever was convenient. "Right out the window."

"Or you could just stop being an idiot and fix your goddamn leg," Marco said, crossing his arms and prodding her with his foot in retaliation for that poke in the shoulder. He narrowed his eyes.

"Or are you masochistic? Is that it? Do you just want to make yourself suffer?"

"No," she said shortly, shifting back until she'd moved back enough to be sitting. "I'm not masochistic."

She was to an extent, if she wasn't aware of it. Yet she was finding herself in a relative catch twenty-two, if the term didn't exist on her world. (The concept certainly did.) Prove his point in not doing anything, or capitulate to the smart choice but be capitulating.

She was just so tired of capitulating. What about being stupid?

Frowning, she looked away. "I'm not."

"Then why haven't you fixed your leg?" Marco said, raising an eyebrow. "And don't try to give me that 'I need it to remember' crap. You don't need an wound to remember."

Now he was pointing a finger at her, an echo of her earlier gesture. "If you're really not masochistic? Prove it."

Sakura turned back around to look at him, grimacing and swatting at his finger. "You're really annoying, you know that?" By now she sounded a mix of tired and irritated.

Still, he had a point. Mostly. Okay, she'd acknowledged he had a point, and she should probably listen. How do you feel about being an idiot yourself these days?

Without a word, looking away again, she brought one hand to rest over the gauze bandages. After a few seconds, the familiar green glow of her healing chakra manifested. Point to Marco, but like hell was she going to say anything about it.

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