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such-a-random-rambler · 6 days ago

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How would the series have played out if David hadn't betrayed the group?

• For a long minute, Jake and David stare each other down in the middle of the hotel room, the breeze from the broken window making the only movement as it rustles their hair. “Fine,” Jake says at last. “Spend the night. But we’re going to talk about this in the morning, and this is not happening again.”

“Yes, sir.” David smiles mockingly.

When he rejoins Tobias and Ax outside, he can feel the questions in their stares.

«I’m not going to push this one,» he says grudgingly. «He just lost his family, his home, everything he knew…»

«Poor poopsie,» Tobias snaps.

Jake stops talking. He’s addressing a kid who constantly survives being trapped in a whole other body and one who lost most of his family the day he crash-landed on this foreign planet. Tobias is right: if they could both adjust, then David should be able to as well.

Sometimes he hates being in charge. «Look,» he says, «I don’t love this either, but he’s one of us now and we’re going to have to learn to work with him. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if you and Marco hadn’t learned to get along. We never would have gotten anywhere if Rachel and I still got in fistfights every time we disagreed the way we did in elementary school. I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to get along with David, okay?»

• «One of you is the human child named David—»

Tobias cuts Visser Three off mid-sentence. «Don’t be ridiculous. We would never resort to using a human child to do our dirty work. Who do you take us for?»

Undeterred, Visser Three tries again. «Then you should tell David that I have his parents, that—»

This time, he’s cut off when David sinks four-inch fangs into his back leg and starts chewing. He morphs, they fight, they escape—barely—before the human authorities get there.

David gloats the whole way home, until Marco says «Don’t get cocky, kid,» in a voice that’s not quite gentle but not quite harsh either. It seems to do the trick, because David shuts up for the time being.

• David moves in with Erek’s family. It’s not a perfect solution, definitely not a long-term one, but it’s what they can manage for the moment. It ensures that at the very least David can sleep in a bed and get three meals a day, that (although Jake would never admit to this motivation) he has someone to keep an eye on him any time he’s not with the main group.

Marco conveniently forgets to mention, as he’s moving David in, that the nearly-omnipotent androids can’t actually defend themselves or even harm anyone at all. David will no doubt figure it out sooner rather than later, but in the meantime having Erek casually demonstrate his ability to lift an entire refrigerator one-handed during David’s first hour at the Kings’ doesn’t hurt anything.

• After that, they get into the habit of meeting less often, or in smaller groups. Rachel or Marco will often go out into the woods to meet Ax and Tobias there, or Jake will stop by Cassie’s or Marco’s place on his own. They don’t admit to themselves that they’re avoiding whole-group meetings because there’s no way to meet like that without inviting David along… But nevertheless, that’s what’s happening.

• “So then he’s like, ‘Marco hits on you all the time, and you never get all PMS on him.’” Rachel paces up and down, gesticulating wildly, while Jake watches from his seat on the bottommost bleacher of the school gym as if this is a one-woman sporting event. “Which, no kidding, because let’s start with the fact that Marco doesn’t use terms like ‘all PMS’ when I tell him to take a hike. And don’t get me started on the way that little twerp looks at me. It’s—”

“Yeah,” Jake says very quietly. “I’ve seen.”

Rachel growls, throwing her hands up. She pivots on the far end of her cycle, hair flying around her, face red. “He’s such a perverted, disgusting, small-brained cromagnon bastard. And hellooooo, I have a boyfriend already, which even if I didn’t, still wouldn’t be grounds for comments like…” She drops her voice, jutting out her jaw in an exaggerated parody. “‘Do you always have that leotard under your clothes, Rachel? Do you even wear underwear at all?’”

Jake flinches. “Jesus, he said that?”

Rachel crosses her arms. “No, I just made that up because I love talking about my fucking underwear with my fucking cousin.”

Jake holds up both hands defensively. “I didn’t mean to question you. I just…” He props his hands on his knees, burying his face in his hands. “I’ll talk to him,” he mumbles into his fingers. “Again.”

“You’ve tried talking.” Rachel sounds less angry now. She knows he’s just a lost kid like her, that he doesn’t have a magical solution. “We both have. We’ve talked to him, like, a dozen times now. It doesn’t stick.”

Jake rubs at his forehead with enough force it’s as if he’s trying to press his brains into a new shape with his fingertips. “What should we do, then?”

They stare at each other in silence for a long time. They’ve both had the talks, of course they have; they know why it’s important to tell an adult if anyone says something to make either of them uncomfortable. And that’s the crux of it: they want to tell an adult. They both want to give this one to a grown-up to handle, because it’s too grown-up for them to know what to do.

“I’ll talk to him again,” Jake says at last.

Rachel sighs. “I’ll do my best to ignore it.”

It’s not a solution, not remotely. It’s also all they have.

• They start going on missions as two semi-separate smaller units. Jake gets very good at the strange algebra of what their team dynamic has become. He will usually pair himself and Cassie—sometimes Ax as well—with David. He’ll send Rachel, Marco, and Tobias out as their own unit. Sometimes he takes a break from David’s constant cycle of complaining, taunting, and gloating, and will guiltily give himself a mission with Rachel’s team instead. More often he’ll let Cassie or Ax, or even both, join the other team while he takes point on handling David. Tobias and David can work together, if the mission absolutely requires it. Marco and David cannot, no matter how dire the situation is. Rachel and David are out of the question.

One consequence of this strange arrangement is that they all regularly take breaks from the missions at times. They get out of the habit of being a team, a family; instead, they are a ragged collection of whichever three or four or five people can be spared to attack tonight’s Kandrona shipment or next week’s Sharing recruitment event.

It’s not a solution. It’s also the best thing Jake’s got.

• Jake is halfway to his room when his mom calls out. “Honey? Your friend stopped by.”

He freezes, turns, and finds David sitting in his living room. David is talking in a low voice to Tom, whose yeerk is feigning interest only half-heartedly. Jake charges through the door so quickly that both of them look at him in surprise, drawing him up short halfway across the room.

“You’ve got a great family, you know that?” David puts a little too much emphasis on each word. “You’re really lucky. You know that, right?”

Jake shepherds them both upstairs as quickly as he can. “What are you doing here?” he demands, once they’re alone.

David’s eyes immediately fill with crocodile tears. He spins the lie that Jake was expecting, even if he didn’t know to expect it from this direction: he misses having a family, he just wanted a normal evening, he doesn’t have the chance to eat a home-cooked meal every night the way Jake does, is it so wrong…

Jake watches him talk, nodding as if he believes this. Jake knows by now that this is just how David is: he’s the kind of kid who loves nothing better than to pour a puddle of gasoline on the floor and then inch matches ever closer to its edge, for no other reason than to watch other people’s anger and fear.

David could ensure that Jake, too, ends up living at the mercy of the hork-bajir or chee as his entire family are enslaved, if he even survived that long. All it would take are three words whispered in Tom’s ear. David’s proving to Jake, and to himself as well, that he has that power, and he’s willing to use it.

“Stay for dinner,” Jake says at last. “But if you ever show up at my house again, don’t expect my parents to let you in. I’m having a conversation with them both after you leave.”

• “I’m sorry,” David says for the fortieth or fiftieth time as they trudge away from their very next mission. “I really am. Okay? It was an accident. You know that, right? It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

“We know you didn’t mean it.” Cassie’s tone of voice is kind on the surface, but its undercurrent suggests that she’s just as tired of listening to his whining as everyone else.

They had been cornered back there, outnumbered and outfought by a dozen hork-bajir. If all seven of them had been present, they might have had a chance. As it was, they were all seconds away from dying even before, somewhere in the heat of battle, David’s slashing claws had opened Jake’s left flank to the bone. Jake had collapsed on the floor, bleeding to death from severed arteries. David had suddenly snapped into hero-mode and fought off the three hork-bajir that menaced them before dragging Jake to safety. The fact that Cassie had walked around the corner at that exact second was probably a coincidence. Probably.

“Jake hates me, doesn’t he?” David whines. “It was an accident. Anyway, he’s fine now, and I said I was sorry. It was just an acc—”

«Yes,» Ax snaps suddenly. «It was an accident. A very foolish, sloppy accident. Warriors who cannot tell friend from foe in the heat of battle are more dangerous to their own allies than to their enemies. Any aristh who is so careless with his tail blade so as to injure his own prince does not deserve to have a tail anymore.»

“Ax…” Jake takes a deep breath, trying to massage the headache out of his temples without much luck. “He knows he screwed up, okay? It’s not going to happen again.”

• The algebra changes again, after that incident. Ax is so disgusted with David’s very existence he can barely stand the sight of him, and doesn’t exactly keep this a secret. Jake starts taking Tobias with him and Cassie as backup on David-wrangling duty. It’s not fair to Tobias, not remotely—David bullies him worse than anyone but Rachel. But Tobias has an utterly horrifying amount of experience in grinning and bearing it, and so he does.

Jake isn’t sure how long it’ll be before it’s just him and Cassie and David. Or just him and David. He apologizes before each mission and after each nasty comment to Tobias and Cassie, even though they know perfectly well it’s not his fault.

While all Jake’s energy is taken up elsewhere, Rachel leads a raid on a television studio that gets a random bystander killed. She and Marco fight about it afterward; their shouting match seems mild by comparison to some of the rows David has started, since no blood gets drawn.

• Jake dreams every night, and it’s always the same dream. He slinks through the forest on cat feet, ethereal as fog, following a distant flash of yellow fur. When he catches his prey he digs teeth and claws into all the soft places that mane cannot protect, until there is nothing but meat on the ground. He sits looking over the shattered corpse on silent haunches, and then moves on.

He feels guilty every time it happens, but not that guilty. They’re the only good dreams he has left.

• They’re all there, when it happens. The basement garage has flooded with dozens of controllers from four or five different species, and the seven of them are not enough. They’ve given up on trying to get to the computer files they came for; now they’re just battling with everything they’ve got to get to the exit.

Rachel is a monster of unstoppable rage, slashing blindly at everything that comes within range of her claws. When she goes down, Marco rushes to help even as Jake and Ax make a hole in the surrounding troops with desperate brutality. When David goes down across the room, Tobias tries to help. Really, he does.

Jake gets the industrial garage door open long enough that first Cassie and Ax, then himself and Tobias, can race through. It’s Marco who makes the call, shouting for Jake to shut the door before any hork-bajir can get through and leave the others to fend for themselves.

Cassie and Tobias are both shouting at Jake to go back for Rachel and Marco. Somewhere inside, David is screaming for help even as Rachel continues raging at the controllers. But he knows Marco made the right call, and he reverses the course of the door.

It slams shut. Jake watches it, and he doesn’t let Cassie past him to reopen their teammates’ only exit. Inside, some of the screams are audible not just to their ears, but inside of their minds.

Five minutes pass, as they wait outside, still able to hear the animal and alien screams inside. Hours pass, in the span of those five minutes.

Later, Jake won’t ask Rachel or Marco what happened during those five minutes. No one will.

When the door starts to slide up once more, they all tense—until the enormous black-furred hand catches the underside and swings it upward. Marco is half-dragging Rachel, who has even more blood around her claws and mouth than before but is also oddly subdued.

• «David?» Tobias asks.

«Dead.» Marco doesn’t sugar-coat it.

• Jake drags them all away from the scene of the battle, because no one else has the presence of mind to do anything but stand there and shiver in shock. Cassie nearly gets run over when she stops in the middle of the street to puke her guts out on the asphalt. Rachel’s face is so pale in the streetlights she looks faintly green. Silent tears streak Marco’s face, and he makes no effort to wipe them away. It’s a warm California night, but they are all, to a one, very cold.

Funny, how quickly they fall back into their old constellation of all working together to hold each other upright. Jake can’t form sentences; it’s Ax who morphs him and fakes a call to his parents with some excuse to spend the night at Marco’s. Cassie pulls herself together enough to call Rachel’s mom and explain the sleepover they are going to have tonight as if she’s an adult talking to a child and not the other way around. Tobias disappears over the rooftops; Ax morphs at top speed and follows.

• That evening, Cassie will smother Rachel in every blanket she owns and give her hot chocolate besides. Ax will coax Tobias into morphing andalite once again, and together they will perform the ritual of death. Marco will shepherd Jake home and make bright excuses to Peter, never showing the slightest sign of concern even when Jake doesn’t say a single word all evening long.

That night, Jake’s dream is like nothing he’s ever experienced before. He’s not a tiger, or even a kid; he’s a grown man living in yeerk-owned New York City. After he makes a choice, he asks the presence which has sent him the dream: Why?

BECAUSE, the power answers. YOU JUST MADE THE CHOICE WHICH WILL SAVE THE WORLD.

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