#i realized now that i typoed birth as bitch. how does that even happen -_-

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

How do you think beginning of the series Ax would respond if his rescuers were actually trained child soldiers expected to go into combat at their age?

[Sorry that this is a little off-base from what you requested; I just didn’t feel qualified to write about child soldiers and so opted to write about child fighters instead.]

• Aximili has seen photographs of humans before, of course he has.  He studied the single chapter of his xenobiology textbook that covered them (Yuri Gagarin, the text said, Neil Armstrong, and he did his best to remember) when he found out that he’d be accompanying Elfangor on the upcoming mission to Earth.  Nonetheless, he startles when the five strange creatures emerge from the Dome ship’s airlock, firing his dracon beam in quick succession until they have all collapsed on the floor.

He takes a moment to study them before they awaken.  They have artificial skins covering parts of their bodies, which he knew to expect, but some of them have decorations on the skin itself that are strangely beautiful as well: one of them with long yellow hair has dozens of tiny lines, arranged in groups of five, marked on the skin of its shoulder and upper arm.  Another alien with a larger build and a darker shade of golden hair has what must be thousands of feather etchings covering its arms from wrist to wrist, the pattern continuing across its back as if it is permanently in the earliest stages of a morph to some kind of tan-and-brown bird.

The smallest one, whose skin is the darkest shade of brown, becomes the first to sit up.  As it does so, Aximili registers the words written on the inside of its forearm: no peace without justice.  The alien’s companion (long dark hair, perpetually suspicious eyes) name-drops Visser Three so casually that for a second Aximili panics, nearly taking the alien’s head off with his tail blade before he gets control of himself again.

• Slowly they all relax, and Aximili learns their names.  The big one with the dark hair and just one tattoo—of a tiger sitting calmly looking out at the viewer—is Jake, or Big Jake as the others call him.  His cousin with her dozens of tiny hash marks, her claw-shaped fingernails, and her metal-lined teeth is named Rachel, called Xena.  Tobias, or “Hawk,”  is the one with the wings and the shy grey eyes that almost disappear when he ducks his head enough for dirty-blond bangs to fall over his face, and Cassie (“Gaia”) is the small one with the words on her arm.  Marco, or Mars, has the most, and the most beautiful, ink of all of them: words and shapes and images crowd his shoulders, his legs, his knuckles, the back of his neck.  Dios no dio alas a los alacranes, his left forearm says, and James 2:13 splays across his ankle.

“Ax,” Marco says, when Aximili tells them his name.  “Yeah, let’s call you Ax.  Kinda violent, very edgy, I like it.”  Ax sees another tattoo rolling up his left shoulder: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley.

“You need a second name,” Rachel (Xena?) explains.  “Otherwise no one will take you seriously.”

• And then they give him the news about Elfangor.

“I’ve lost a brother too,” Jake says softly.  “He was killed a few months ago.  Got caught in the crossfire of some random drive-by on his way home from work.”

“We found them,” Rachel says.  She taps the first three tally marks on her arm in a gesture that Ax doesn’t understand at the time.  “We got our revenge.  You want help getting yours, pretty sure Jake’d be happy to take you on.”

«You are their prince, then?» Ax asks Jake.

All of them look around at each other in sudden uncertainty.

“My brother was the one who made sure we had somewhere to sleep, enough to eat, clothes to wear, the time we needed to stay in school,” Jake explains at last.  “If anyone hurt us he’d hurt them, and if any of us got killed he’d wipe out as many people as it took to even the score.  I inherited all that from him, and I’ve been doing my best to do the same.  That what you mean by a prince?”

«Yes,» Ax says.  «That is exactly what a prince does for his warriors.  Very well then, Prince Jake, I will do my best to serve your mission until such time as my cousins arrive.»

• The six of them spend nearly an hour touring the Dome ship, asking Ax questions as they recuperate and as (he can admit to himself) he delays leaving the only tiny piece of home he has left in this strange world.  He tells them what he can about the ship and how he came to be on it, and in exchange they tell him their stories.

Jake and Rachel were both orphaned three years back, all four of their parents killed when the plane they were taking home from vacation went down in the Caribbean Sea.  All five of them—Jake and his brother, Rachel and her sisters—ended up shipped off to their aunt Ellen’s house, at least at first.

“And then Saddler broke Jordan’s arm,” Rachel growls, voice so hard with anger that Ax takes a step back in fear.  “And Aunt Ellen believed that little twerp when he said it was an accident, that it’d never happen again.  Accident my ass.”

The very next day, Tom had stolen their aunt’s minivan and run away with the lot of them to downtown Los Angeles.  He’d worked three or four jobs while Jake and Rachel got in the habit of shoplifting what Sarah and Jordan needed, and together they’d been able to afford a basement apartment in South LA.  He’d never wanted Jake and Rachel to get caught up in the violence the way some of the kids in their neighborhood did, but then no one planned on him getting killed either.

Marco still technically lives at home with his dad, but it’s not like his dad knows what he gets up to all day, and he and Jake started traveling together because they’re safer in a pair than alone.  The two of them brought first Rachel into the group, then Cassie after Rachel realized Cassie had no one else to go home to at the end of the day.  “I’ve been all over,” Cassie says, “or I was until my one foster sister started drowning chipmunks for fun.  Then I punched her a bunch of times. Ran away.  Settled down.”

Rachel jokes that Tobias followed them home after Jake made the mistake of feeding him.  Ax later learns the real story of how they met, and it’s not nearly that cute: it involves Tobias being cornered by three larger boys in an alleyway.  It involves Jake firing two shots from the gun he inherited from Tom, one into the air, one into someone’s leg.

The story of how Tobias ended up as a runaway in the first place is complicated as well.  “My aunt wanted a niece,” he explains with a wry smile.  “Wanted me to wear dresses and makeup, to have nice long hair, to pretend to be a girl so she wouldn’t have to tell the neighbors about my abnormality.  There was this little typo on my birth certificate, see, and everyone’s been real confused about what to call me ever since.”

«I see,» Ax says, blatantly lying.

• They make a run for it, not too much later, and together they survive their first fight against the yeerks.  Over that afternoon Ax’s respect for this odd group of alien children grows steadily: they never leave one of their own behind, they’re very good at hiding fear under anger, and they know how to scan constantly for danger and respond with a second’s notice.  Eventually, with the help of an enormous sentient creature that lives in Earth’s waters, they wash up on the shores of Los Angeles Harbor.

«With your permission,» Ax says, «I would like to take DNA from each of you.  With the frolis maneuver, I can create a human shape that is a unique mixture of your attributes.»

“Then again, maybe you should just take from Tobias and Rachel.”  Marco smiles, but his eyes are colder than ever.  “The cops’ll give you a lot less hassle that way.”

Ax looks around at each of them.  «Human law enforcement will pay less attention to me if I have yellow hair, pale skin, and light-colored eyes?»

Marco laughs.  “Now you’re getting it.  Welcome to Earth, man—you’re gonna fit right in.”

“Just take DNA from all of us,” Tobias says, seeing Ax’s confusion and taking pity.  “We’re all a bunch of rejects anyway, so you might as well.”

• Ax becomes closer to this group of aliens over the next several missions than he could have ever imagined.  They open their home to him, even if that home is a nearly empty room in an otherwise abandoned building that contains a few sleeping bags and hotplates.  They teach him to defend himself as a weak little human, using switchblade and semiautomatic when he doesn’t have a tail blade or claws.

Cassie walks a mile and a half to the nearest yeerk-owned convenience store to shoplift him a dozen cinnamon buns the day he finally contacts his family with news of Elfangor’s death.

Tobias takes Jake and Rachel’s gentle-but-firm scolding about his carelessness with time limits (which has already resulted in half a dozen close calls), but he also asks Ax to teach him how to be better at keeping track of time.

Jordan and Sarah—who know about everything, to Ax’s surprise—don’t know what to make of him at first, but pretty soon they’re bringing home backpacks full of grass clippings so he’ll have something to eat, while he’s teaching them the basics of andalite dance.

• Every time they go out on a mission, they follow the same routine.  Jake solemnly hands Jordan a gun—the only time she’s allowed to handle one—and makes her go over the rules again.  She and Sarah are not to leave, no matter what happens.  She’s not to shoot anyone unless someone tries to attack her, or unless one of them comes back alone without explanation.  If anything happens short of a direct attack, or one of them coming back as a controller, she’s to run to the pay phone down the street and call 911 instead.  If three days pass and she doesn’t hear back from any of them at all, she and Sarah need to get on the next bus to San Luis Obispo and they need to go back to Aunt Ellen’s house.

• “We don’t kill unless we have to,” Rachel tells Ax, after he watches her tear a controller’s throat out.  “But if we have to, we kill.  Got it?”

He learns that that’s their blanket policy: the Animorphs (as they call themselves) don’t mess with other gangs in the area, but other gangs better not mess with them.  They don’t kill randomly, and they don’t escalate, but if they get hurt they will find the perpetrator and hurt him back.

They don’t like killing—well, he’s not sure about Rachel, but the others certainly don’t—but they are nonetheless very good at it.  If caught out of morph, Marco can shoot a hork-bajir-controller’s head off at 200 yards.  Cassie can take down a human-controller with a single jab of an inch-long penknife.

• Each time they make it home alive, Ax watches in fascination as Rachel tattoos two, three, sometimes as many as eight fresh lines onto her rows of tally marks, which by now reach two inches past her elbow and wrap around her forearm.  He’s learned by now that only the first three are pure black, and every one since then is black with a narrow white shadow.

“Black’s for enemies,” Rachel explains.  “White’s for the innocent hosts that get caught in the crossfire.”

Ax assumes at first that they must be a form of penance—each one involves jamming a needle into her soft skin dozens of times and injecting foreign substances underneath the surface to create an off-colored scar—but the longer he knows her, the more he suspects they’re a boast.

• It takes him longer to find out about the row of raised bumps along the back of Cassie’s calf, or what they mean.  “It’s cultural appropriation, probably,” she says with a self-deprecating smile, “but I got it from something they do in Ethiopia to signify growing up.”

She doesn’t make one for every kill, unlike Rachel; her system is more complex.  Ax knows that she does it after all three occasions where they blow up a Sharing location during a meeting, and once after they dump poison into a yeerk pool.  But she adds them at other times as well: when she finally demorphs in the long aftermath of her encounter with Aftran, when Aldrea nearly gets her killed.

“I could show you how to make them, and how to make them stay while you morph,” she offers to Ax.  “It’s not that hard, or it wasn’t after Rachel figured out how her ears stay pierced every time she morphs.”

Eventually Ax agrees to just one mark, encircling his tail where it meets the blade.  The symbol is simple—a curling series of lines whose ends intersect to form a circle—but its meaning is complex.  «The placement’s about mourning, but specifically about respect for the one who is mourned,» he explains awkwardly.  «They meet at the bottom to signify family, and the curl at the top is for a peer, but a peer from whom one has learned much…  It’s not the kind of thing that translates well into words.»

“What you said makes perfect sense to me,” Jake says, bright-eyed.  With Ax’s permission he imitates the pattern around his own left wrist.

• It’s Jake who keeps them all in line, Jake who insists they only shoplift from yeerk-owned businesses and give back the cars Marco steals once they’re done with the mission.  Jake won’t let Rachel kill the girl from their class who called her a white trash bitch, or the boy who wolf-whistled her on the way home, but he shepherds the rest of them outside as she shoots David precisely between the eyes.

Ax catches him sitting on the roof of the abandoned building they inhabit, one night after a raid on Joe Bob Fenestre’s house goes wrong in about eighteen different ways.  L.A. is far too light-polluted and smoggy to see any stars, but Ax knows that Jake is looking for them all the same because he’s done the same thing himself.

«I think he would have been proud of you,» Ax says softly.

“Your brother?” Jake asks, seeming to shake himself out of a daze.

«And yours.»

“You ever wonder if…”  Jake looks down at the concrete of the roof, thinking for a second.  “If every other kid our age trying to hold down a job, or a family, or, hell, an entire freaking gang… If they don’t know what they’re doing any better than we do?”

«Maybe they don’t,» Ax says.  «But most of them find a way to survive anyway, don’t they?»

“Thing is, I’m not sure they do.  Seems like every time I turn around there’s someone else I know getting shot, stabbed, hooked on heroin, thrown in prison…”  Jake smiles faintly, the expression tired.  “We were never supposed to live past twenty-five.  That was half the reason we got involved in this fight in the first place, you know that?  We all knew how to fight already when Elfangor found us, and we all figured that if we were going nowhere fast we might as well take down some aliens along the way.  I don’t think anything’s changed since then.”

«You’ve hurt them,» Ax points out.  «You’ve made Visser Three afraid.  We have.  Six kids, no real training, and we’ve killed more yeerks than most andalite warriors do in a lifetime.»

“But does it solve anything?” Jake asks.  “If the war ends tomorrow we’ll still be a bunch of dead-end trash with no prayer of ever getting a real job between us.  Tobias’ll still be stuck in a body he hates for the rest of his life, Marco probably won’t have his mom back, Rachel… I mean, god, you ever think about what Rachel would do if the war ended right now?”

Ax doesn’t have an answer.

• And as it turns out, he’ll never get one.  Because, turns out, Rachel doesn’t live to see the war’s end.

• Ax knows what to expect when the press gets ahold of their story, or at least he thinks he does.  There are nearly twelve hours of lag time between the yeerks’ official defeat and the first chance to land the Pool ship on Earth, during which time his teammates give him a crash course in all the nastiest sides of the American media.  Therefore, he’s saddened but not surprised the first (or the tenth, or the hundredth) time someone refers to them as thugs, as superpredators, as hoodlums or delinquents.  He understands in advance that when reporters call Eva an “alien” they’re not talking about extraterrestrials, that there’s a reason Cassie and Marco are “un-American” in a way Jake and Tobias are not, and that no one is going to bother to learn Tobias’s real name as long as they can use the one on his birth certificate instead.

However, as cynical as the Animorphs are, even they cannot anticipate just how awful people can become.  No one anticipated the calls for Marco to “go back to” a country he’s never visited.  They didn’t foresee that the baby pictures Tobias’s aunt sold to the press, and his subsequent misclassification, would mean that people suddenly had opinions about Rachel’s “lesbian influence” over future generations.

Just when Ax thinks he’s learned about every type of prejudice that could possibly exist, a heckler asks Jake a question (something about religion and money that Ax doesn’t understand) that causes Marco to punch the man so hard he breaks his own hand, and the lessons in all the ways humans suck start all over again.

• All five of them get a number of offers of adoption from concerned citizens, even Ax and Marco, which is weird because both of them have living parents and perfectly good homes already.

Most of the offers from concerned strangers are horribly condescending, the letters or introductory emails filled with phrases about how these self-righteous souls want to “get these children off the streets,” give Marco “a real home for a change,” help Tobias sort out his “confusion” about gender, and so on.  Marco takes a great deal of delight composing extremely rude responses on his and Ax’s behalf.

Jake’s the only one who shows interest right from the start, but only because he’s got more people than himself to think about: Sarah and Jordan are his responsibility now.  The way Jake approaches the whole process is somewhat off-putting to most prospective guardians, exactly the way it’s meant to be.  The caregivers who expect to meet a helpless war orphan or a traumatized child instead find themselves confronted by a self-assured young man who approaches the contract negotiation process (which is exactly what it is, at least once Jake’s done writing the paperwork and getting a child advocacy lawyer to approve it) with more demands than concessions.  Anyone who wants to have Jake absolutely must adopt Jordan and Sarah as well.  Jake does not consent for their images or any personal information to be shared with the media or the general public.  Any guardian who violates these terms can expect Jake to file immediately for emancipated minor status, and sue for sole custody of his cousins.  The first thirty-seven candidates Jake interviews all leave shouting, sometimes in tears.

Tobias turns down all offers—not exactly hard to do, when half the letters aren’t even addressed to him—and is on the verge of simply becoming homeless again when Ax passes along his parents’ wishes to meet their grandson.  There’s nothing left for Tobias on Earth anyway, so together he and Ax board the first shuttle they can find to take them to the andalite home world.

Cassie delays making a decision for as long as she can, but then one day she receives a letter from a local veterinarian.  The vet, whose name is Michelle, talks about how Cassie is an icon for all African American women, one with whom it would be an honor to share her home.  She and her husband Walter don’t have children, but they do have horses and birds and an entire clinic of wild animals, and if Cassie’s willing to be patient then they’re willing to do whatever it takes to learn how to care for a girl as well… Cassie accepts on the spot.

Candidate thirty-eight is a single woman in her fifties that Jake, despite himself, likes almost right away.  He relaxes a great deal when he finds out she was an involuntary controller during the last months of the war, which means that even if she doesn’t understand what they’ve been through she can come close enough.  The first real glimmer of hope comes when she approves of the contract (mentioning that his aunt would doubtless be proud of the good work he’s done with it) and even suggests a few clauses of her own.  They talk frankly for nearly three hours, during which time the woman agrees to set aside tuition for the highest-quality (and highest-security) private high schools and colleges for all three children.  Jake learns, too, that she had a son who like her was taken by the yeerks during the war: Rachel killed him on the deck of the Blade ship, and his body was never recovered.

• Ax returns to his homeworld, where he is made a war-prince almost before he sets hooves to grass.  Where he isn’t treated as a “controversial figure” and no one whispers about how he is a psychopath and an animal who should be put down.  Where celebrations in his honor are uncomplicated and never met by protests.  Where he and Tobias can be themselves and no one tries to simplify their complications into a story that makes for a good headline.

• Global War I, the history textbooks on Earth call it a hundred years later.  The parallel to World War I is deliberate: just like then, the writers say, there was no reason for it all.  There might have been bad guys, but there were no good ones.  There were no thanks for the people who ended it all, only thanks that it came to an end.  Some kids had something to do with hurting the Yeerk Empire, but their names have since been lost to time.