featherquillpen:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

• “You know that old joke,” Temrash 114 says, pacing up and down in front of them, “about how the babysitter keeps getting calls from some asshole who wants to kill her, and eventually she figures out that, all along, the calls were coming from inside the goddamn house?”  Tom’s face twists, expression cold with anger.  “That’s what my life feels like right about now.”
• “It wasn’t a joke, you dumbass,” Rachel mutters, “it was a horror story.”
• Temrash 114 shrugs.  “Depends on your point of view, I guess.”
• “Won’t you get in trouble, then?” Marco asks, expression still sharp despite the blood painting a line from his scalp to his chin.  “If Jake was here the whole time and you didn’t even know it?  Doesn’t that make you a raging moron?”
• “Jury’s still out as to whether we should infest your dad,” Temrash 114 says calmly.  “I could just shoot him in the head, save Visser One a lot of trouble with her host.”
• Marco clearly doesn’t know what Visser One has to do with anything, but he snaps his mouth shut all the same, face very white.
• Jake tunes out everything they’re saying, because it’s not important.  What’s important—so important that he can’t even think around it—is that this is all his fault.  He can’t believe he was stupid enough, when Marco said that Tom was a controller, to insist on making sure.  To refuse to believe what he was hearing in the middle of that Sharing meeting, to have to get closer…
• No one looks twice at a dog, he’d said.  Unless, of course, the someone was Tom, and the dog was Homer.  Unless Jake was stupid enough to wander straight into the loose gathering of controllers on the edge of the beach in the hope that the words he was hearing from his brother’s mouth would somehow prove illusion up close.
• Jake was the first one caught, but the roundup after that was brutally fast: they found Marco and Cassie because Tom knew to look for them, whereas Rachel had tried to morph and fight back and Tobias had dived from the sky in an effort to save her.  They’re all tied up for the moment while over a dozen controllers point various weapons at them and two people in the next room (the andalite-controller and a human whose voice sounds familiar for some reason Jake can’t place) shout at each other over what to do next.
• Jake’s lying the closest to the door, a short ways away from the others—the yeerk inside Tom kicked him over there in disgust—so he can see as hork-bajir-controllers lead his parents, Rachel’s sisters, even Tobias’s uncle toward the stairs that lead down to the yeerk pool.  He’s vaguely aware that there are tears running down his face, but he tries his hardest to tune out everything except some possible way to get them all out of this.

• Rachel is lying a few feet away from Jake, twisting constantly against the duct tape around her wrists.  The only morph she has so far is a horse from Cassie’s barn, but horses can kill people.  She could take a few of them down before they managed to catch her…
• She feels a cool hand rest on her ankle, and discovers that Tobias is watching her through wide grey eyes.  He can speak volumes with a tiny shift of expression, wearing his emotions on his sleeve in a way that makes some part of her desperate to draw him close and protect him.  Right now it’s not hard to tell what he’s thinking: that he knows what she’s planning.
• Glancing upward at Chapman—or more specifically at the dracon beam in Chapman’s hand—he shakes his head just a tiny bit.
• Rachel jerks her ankle out from under his hand.  Wasn’t he the one who was going on yesterday about how they have to avenge the andalite who died for them?  
• “We live,” Tobias hisses, voice drowned out by the shouting in the next room and by Marco, who has started loudly asking questions about one of the voices they can all hear.  “We live and fight another day.  We’ll have another chance, okay?”
• Gritting her teeth, Rachel nods.
• It’s a decision they all live to regret.  Their bodies rapidly become hosts for high-ranking vissers and sub-vissers, their faces and their voices used in the most horrific possible way.
• Essak 1275, who gets Jake’s body, acquires every Earth morph that catches his eye and a few dozen from other planets as well.  He gets reprimanded a couple of times, since it’s getting harder and harder to contain Jake during feedings (still not as difficult as Alloran, but no one tells Visser Three to stop), but the yeerk also gets results.  The complaints stop around the time he uses Jake to kill and eat over forty leerans while in the shape of a lerdethak.  
• Marco stops walking—stops of his own accord—the first time they send Visser Twenty-Three into a meeting with Visser One.  Eva’s face does something strange and unquantifiable for several seconds before Edriss wrestles it back into harsh neutrality.  “Get ahold of yourself, won’t you?” she snaps.  Marco’s eyes close, and Akdor 1154 nods.  
• Rachel screams death threats and other useless words as Visser Eight uses her face and voice to draw in their tenth victim this month.  Melissa Chapman, Brittany Grant, and T.T. Malcolm are controllers already.  Allison Valencia and Beth Hammond both attend Sharing meetings regularly, and they’re thinking of becoming full members.  Rachel’s the most popular girl in her entire class; it’s like taking candy from a baby.
• To everyone’s surprise, it’s Cassie who gets the reputation for being the rebellious host.  Niss 240 aims a dracon beam at a suspicious-looking bird; Cassie jerks it to the side.  Niss starts in on a recruitment pitch; Cassie causes her to collapse on the floor.  There’s talk of simply killing Cassie, as reluctant as everyone is to give up on a morph-capable host (and an estreen at that), but the incidents stop happening after Cassie gets transferred to Aftran 942’s control.  In fact, Aftran herself seemingly falls off the face of the Earth for a while, because no one seems to know where she is or what she’s up to a lot of the time.
• Tobias morphs, one time when Odret 177 is feeding and he’s temporarily unsupervised in the cage, and nothing the controllers do can get him to turn back.  He sits there calmly and watches as they fire dracon beams at him, as they throw hot acid on Rachel and Jake, as they threaten to kill his uncle and then carry out their threat.  They zap him with picana, with a low-level shredder blast, finally with a nervous system manipulator, but nothing works.  He screams, he fights back, he throws himself against the bars of their birdcage until he breaks his own wings, but he doesn’t demorph.  Two hours and fifteen minutes into the process, the controllers admit defeat: one of them pulls out a handgun.  Tobias dies free.  
• Essak 1275 starts being sent on hunting expeditions.  He’s mostly close-mouthed about what he’s hunting, but all of the highest-ranked vissers know: there’s at least one andalite loose somewhere on Earth.  
• Reports are conflicting as to whether it’s just one or if the one has support—some of the rumors that trickle in from Nikto 770’s scans of the human media indicate there might be as many as three—but they all know that unless this andalite’s getting help from the humans, there’s no way he’ll blend in for long.  The andalite or andalites, meanwhile, have already taken out a water supply ship and a ground-based kandrona supply.
• One day Jake reaches through the bars separating the hosts’ cages and grabs Tom on the arm.  “Tell the others,” he says.  “There are andalites bandits here, and they’re fighting back.  Don’t give up.  Don’t ever give up.  Not while there’s still hope.”
• Tom’s eyes widen.  “You mean…?”
• “I mean the yeerks aren’t winning this war as cleanly as the vissers want everyone to think,” Jake says.  “Tell everyone you can: the andalites are out there.”
• One day Aftran strides into the yeerk pool, Cassie’s chin held high, an unfamiliar young man walking by her side.  Slowly, almost casually, they make their way over to the specialized reinforced cages used to hold the morph-capable hosts.  Threatening to kill one Animorph if the other makes an escape attempt seems to work fairly well, so Jake and Rachel are currently chained up across from each other and guarded by four hork-bajir-controllers apiece.  Cassie’s hand drops to brush along each cage as she walks by, and as she touches first Jake and then Rachel two tiny red dots fall from her sleeve.  
• Jake finds himself staring in amazement at the tiny ladybug that crawls slowly across the surface of his hand.  He doesn’t know about the hours Cassie and Aftran and Gafinilan spent experimenting in order to discover that ladybugs have the eyes and the wings to get around in a hurry, while also having all toxic creatures’ calm insouciance which renders them easy to carry around.  He doesn’t know that the bug on his hand traveled here inside Cassie’s mouth to defeat the Gleet Biofilters, or that this is the final execution of a plan which was months in the making.
• He does, however, know what to do.  Concentrating hard on the feel of six tiny feet even now resting on the curve of his index finger, he feels the little beetle sag into relaxation.  Across the way, a minuscule point of red falls from Rachel’s arm as she finishes acquiring her own set of DNA.  
• «Please be calm,» an unfamiliar voice says inside their heads.  «My name is Aximili, and I am here to help.  Prince Cassie is about to set off a diversion.  When she does, we need both of you to morph as fast as possible and move toward the northwest exit of the yeerk pool.»
• Rachel lifts her head up, shorn hair sliding away from her face, and actually grins at Jake.  “Let’s do it.”
• The diversion, when it comes, is brutally simple: Aximili starts the sequence that will drain the yeerk pool for cleaning.
• Every controller in the vicinity immediately rushes to try and stop him, including the ones guarding Rachel and Jake.  They both morph fast and morph small, shrinking out of their restraints as they become hard-shelled and six-legged.  Jake takes off for the spot where Cassie is rushing the cages, tiny wings beating hard against the stale kandrona-polluted air, but Rachel goes in a different direction entirely.
• Jake and the others might be focused on trying to grab a handful of the hosts and run for it, but Rachel’s here for revenge.  She buzzes over the heads of two human-controller guards who never even look up, slots through a tiny crack in the door of the holding cell on the far side of the yeerk pool, and trundles through a crevasse in the two-foot-thick cinderblock walls of the holding chamber.  This is where Visser Three’s loyal sycophants hold any monster whose DNA he’s planning on acquiring—and right now the chamber is full.
• When she demorphs on the floor, she finds herself face-to-face with an octopus-like creature.  If an octopus had a hard exoskeleton and several rows of sharp teeth, that is.  If an octopus was fifteen feet tall and had claws on the ends of its tentacles.  If an octopus had a gaping jaw and more clumsy limbs than it knows what to do with.  
• “Hello, gorgeous,” Rachel whispers, and the creature attacks.  
• She throws herself out of the way of its stabbing claws, dodges a snaking tentacle, and finally flings herself on top of one of its limbs.  The creature immediately grabs her, but that’s exactly what she wanted; she presses her skin against its lumpy body (and gasps in pain—this thing feels like it’s made of acid) and the creature goes limp, dropping her to the ground.
• Rachel jams herself into a far corner focuses on her brand-new set of DNA, ignoring the creature (rancor, her inner Star Wars geek decides to call it) as it continues to do its best to eat this strange invader to its territory.  As she swells and hardens, she finds herself gasping in pain—the poor rancor is not adapted to Earth’s atmosphere—but doesn’t let that deter her.  The real rancor makes another attempt to grab her and rip her in half, so she reaches out and, with a single delicate tentacle, enters the code on the keypad next to the door that will let them both into the hallway.
• Cassie finds herself frozen in shock for several seconds as two aliens—each one the size of a semi-trailer—burst out of a side hallway and immediately start tearing apart every controller within twenty yards.  «How do you like me now?» one of them shouts in a very familiar voice, and laughingly tears the roof clear off an enclosure holding a dozen hork-bajir hosts.
• The hork-bajir explode outward in every direction, most of them running for the nearest exit, but several stop and begin slashing at controllers.  One male hork-bajir who can’t be more than two years old takes a dracon shot to center mass and goes down, weakly crying out in pain; four adults jump on his attacker and begin tearing the man to shreds.  Tom and Melissa Chapman are standing back-to-back, firing at anyone who gets too close as they guard the base of a staircase where hundreds of humans and hork-bajir are streaming toward freedom.
• Jake, now in some kind of simian-reptilian morph, has broken into a weapons depot and is throwing dracon beams to newly-freed hosts left and right; every minute, the number of deadly beams lancing through the air increases exponentially.  «Don’t shoot at anyone who doesn’t shoot at you first!» he keeps saying, but not everyone is listening.  Friendly fire is everywhere.
• Aximili is out of morph and badly hurt, hooves sliding in the growing pool of his own blood as he uses his tail to fend off two hork-bajir-controllers even as both hands continue to fly across the controls of the yeerk pool maintenance computer.   A hork-bajir female Cassie doesn’t recognize is going from cage to cage and releasing ever-more hosts, while a taxxon-controller has set off some kind of alarm that is bringing hundreds of controllers running from every direction to join in the fray.  Rachel is grabbing double handfuls of human-controllers and flinging them across the room to land in wet heaps; even as Cassie watches she calmly lifts a taxxon and stuffs it into her mouth as it writhes and screams and pain.
• Meanwhile, the water level on the yeerk pool is slowly but steadily dropping.
• Cassie hears a soft moan of pain and anguish come from the back of her own throat.  She’s not sure if she or Aftran is the one making the noise.
• And that’s when Visser Three bursts into the cavern, followed closely by Visser Twenty-Three in Marco’s body.  «We got two more morphers!» Jake shouts.
• Visser Three takes in the scene all around him, says several very bad words, and then turns two eyes toward his lieutenant.  «Kill them!» he orders.  «Visser Twenty-Three, kill them all!»
• Marco’s head cocks to the side in thoughtful consideration.  His hand goes to the dracon beam at his side, and lifts it just far enough to fire a single shot on full power that takes Visser Three’s head off at the shoulders.  “Oh, did I forget to mention?” he says, grinning.  “Visser Twenty-Three’s been dead for almost a week now.  The Peace Movement says hi, by the way.”
• Cassie considers the possibility that in freeing him she created a monster.  Aftran privately agrees.  
• «ANYONE WHO’S NOT A CONTROLLER,» Jake bellows in a voice worthy of Visser Three.  «STOP FIGHTING.  LET’S BLOW THIS POPSICLE STAND!»
• Rachel rips a drop shaft clear off the wall, creating a huge opening into the incline beyond.  She flings the broken tunnel at a group of taxxon-controllers, laughing when four of them burst open on impact and the others go into a feeding frenzy.  Humans, hork-bajir, and the occasional taxxon or gedd are fleeing in every direction now, leaving the Animorphs’ own force dramatically reduced.   
• Even as she watches, the real rancor grabs a man running for the exit and eats him alive.  The beast has gotten in among the hosts now, and—enraged as it is from the constant pain of Earth’s excessive gravity and insufficient nitrogen—it’s killing indiscriminately.  «Sorry,» Rachel says vaguely, and then she wraps one of her own tentacles around the rancor’s neck.  The ensuing battle is nasty but brief, and at the end of it Rachel’s the only monster left in the cavern.  
• Three hundred, four hundred, maybe more hosts have already made it outside.  Marco has morphed gorilla, and he’s swinging between cages ripping the locks off the few dozen full ones that remain.  So far Jake, Cassie, and the handful of hosts assisting them are holding the line, but with every second that goes by the proportion of controllers to non-controllers shifts in favor of the yeerks.  
• «Let’s go!» Jake calls, collapsing the line steadily backward.  There are still hundreds of freed hosts loose in the cavern, still hundreds in the cages, but there’s nothing else to be done to save them.  He and Cassie and the others are retreating shoulder-to-shoulder, hosts dropping steadily under dracon fire but being replaced all the while by more volunteers from behind them.
• Marco lopes over and joins their bubble, bellowing a challenge all around.  The andalite kid who managed to drain almost half of the yeerk pool stumbles over as well, tail flashing out at opponents with blinding speed.  Rachel is still halfway across the cavern, but she seems fine, and it’s not like anyone is daring to get close to her. 
• Jake is ten feet from the stairs, then five feet, closing the bubble all the while, when someone breaks from the line of hosts and sets off running in the wrong direction.  «Get back here!» Jake shouts.  «Now!»
• Tom actually takes the time to pause and flip Jake off, and then turns and keeps running.  He disappears from sight amid the fracas.
• Jake feels like someone ripped several feet of intestine out of his stomach, but he cannot linger on it.  «Cassie, get to the surface and start doing crowd control,» he says.  «Ax—mind if I call you Ax?—give her cover.  Rachel, get over here!  Everyone else, up the stairs now.  Marco and I will cover your retreat.»
• Several more people run past the line, heading toward the stairs.  Jake doesn’t know if they’re controllers or not, and he can’t bring himself to care at the moment, too concerned with making sure that the yeerks don’t break through to the hosts behind him.  He moves steadily backward until one of his feet hits the bottom-most stair, and then he starts to demorph.  It’s just him and Marco now against about forty taxxon-controllers, both of them bleeding heavily.  There’s no sign of Rachel, or of Tom.  Marco slips; Jake yanks him to his feet.  Jake doesn’t even register the whamwhamwham of gunfire until he looks down and discovers a red hole just above his left hip.  He drags himself up another stair, clinging tight to the railing.  He’s not even fighting back anymore.  Now he’s just a human shield for the hosts behind.
• And then an enormous grey-brown tentacle sweeps away almost twenty controllers in one go.  Rachel simply flings herself forward onto the enemy line, crushing people with her bulk.  She’s missing three limbs, dragging herself on the other five, but she’s still moving.
• Tom bursts through the hole in the line she created, carrying a human shape over his shoulder and dragging what looks like a child by the wrist.  He shouts something at Rachel, who starts to demorph, still crawling toward the stairs.
• Jake makes it outside—with his team more or less intact, no less—even if Marco is mostly carrying him for the last several yards.  He morphs amidst a crowd of hosts who are milling around outside of the shopping mall as if looking for direction, demorphs again as the entire herd starts a mass exodus toward the government buildings at the center of town.
• They make a very strange picture, this enormous procession of newly-freed slaves marching through the center of town.  Many of them are bruised or bloodied.  Almost all of them are dull-eyed with shock.  They form an unbroken column that stretches nearly two miles in length, this collection of over a thousand humans and hork-bajir and other aliens.  Whatever else happens, this is too big for the yeerks to cover up.  There are too many of them for the yeerks to recapture them all.  The whole block tower is about to come toppling down.
• It’s as they’re standing outside while Cassie and Aftran and Ax storm the mayor’s office with news of the invasion that Jake catches Tom again.  “What the hell were you thinking, going back like that?” he demands.  “If you’d been killed—if you’d been taken again—”
• In silent response, Tom lowers the woman he’s still carrying to the floor.  Jake registers in shock that it’s their mother, currently unconscious.  “I couldn’t just leave her,” Tom snaps.
• “Yeah, and what if she’s still a controller, huh?” Jake says.
• “Get off his case,” Rachel tells him.  She’s holding onto the kid that Tom grabbed as well—it’s Sarah.  In this case there’s no question about whether Sarah’s still a controller, given the bruising grip Rachel has on her wrist and the fact that Sarah’s fingernails have already left bloody scratches all over both her sister’s hands.
• “Three days from now it’ll be a moot point.”  Tom stands up, crossing his arms.  “Are you seriously going to tell me I should have left her there?  Are you telling me you’re in charge here or something?”
• “Of course he’s in charge,” Rachel says, as if this is something everyone agreed upon in a committee.  “That doesn’t mean he’s perfect all the time.”
• “Wait, what?”  Jake’s pretty sure he missed something.
• Ax takes that opportunity to stick his head out the door and say, «Prince Jake, the human mayor and Prince Cassie are ready for you now.  They’d like you to make a statement.»
• “All right, fearless leader, guess you’re needed inside.”  Marco slaps Jake playfully on the arm.
• Jake turns to Tom as a last resort.  “Please tell them I’m not in charge of anything,” he says.
• Tom frowns, thinking it over.  “You did pretty good back there, midget.  I think I’d be ready to follow you to hell and back with only moderate levels of insubordination.”
• Jake slowly turns in a circle, registering just how many people are looking at him.  Realizing that he’s ragged and barefoot and filthy with dried taxxon guts, but that everyone from the mayor to Cassie to the huge battle-scarred andalite standing over her shoulder is looking at him expectantly.
• “If I’m leading this revolution,” he says at last, “Rule number one: nobody’s calling me ‘prince.’”
• «Absolutely, Prince Jake,» Ax says, utterly solemn.

Honestly, this may be my favorite of your AUs yet. I am a sucker for any canon divergence that centers the Peace Movement.