peishathebookity reblogged
Anonymous asked:
Probably crack and a result of staying up way too late, but how do you think an AU where Peter dated and married Naomi instead of Nora would go?
This officially goes on the list of “ships I never considered before, but now that you say it I can kinda see it.” Peter’s clearly got a competency kink, between Eva and Nora. Naomi deserves better than Dan. They’re both overworked single parents who try to do what’s best for their kids, and don’t always succeed. Peter’s good at the nurturing and hug-giving and supportive side of things, not so much at the day-to-day practicalities. Naomi’s excellent at making sure everyone is fed and sheltered and keeping up in school, not so much at the touchy-feely stuff. Yeah, I can see it.
Anyway:
- They meet through the PTA, naturally. Naomi’s there to stage a formal protest about the high school’s suspension of late-bus service, and Peter’s there because this is the once-a-month night out of the house that Marco keeps scheduling for him. Naomi makes a sarcastic comment about the U.S. government’s idea of “sufficient funding”, Peter jumps in with a one-liner about science grants, and four hours later they’re still companionably trashing the NSF over their third round of bake sale brownies. Peter makes the first move, of course. Naomi sets the time, the venue, the curfew, the transportation, and the expectations for the night, of course.
- Jake thinks this is the funniest thing that has ever happened to him in his entire life. The more both Marco and Rachel call him to complain about their respective parents, the funnier he finds it to be.
- Both Naomi and Peter are pleasantly surprised at how well their kids get along. They were both vaguely aware that Marco and Rachel knew each other through school, but neither one is prepared for the instantaneous companionable banter the teenagers fall into the moment Peter first brings Marco over to meet Naomi.
- The first four or five times Marco comes around Rachel’s house for dinner, Jordan hides under her hair and watches him in enraptured silence. After about two months’ worth of this, Rachel drags Marco aside after an Animorphs meeting and has a stern conversation with him.
- Neither of them will tell the others what they talk about, even though Ax expresses concern at the brilliant red shade both their faces have taken on and Cassie gives them a knowing smile. Technically Tobias overhears the whole thing — the others tend to get so caught up in hawk eyes that they forget all about hawk ears — but he’s nice enough to keep his silence.
- The next time Marco’s over at Rachel’s house, he lets out a seven-second belch after downing an entire can of Mountain Dew in one go. Over the next ten minutes, he insults Jordan’s favorite boy band, picks his nose in front of everyone, claims he’s going to die alone because girls are gross, and (to Rachel’s quiet shock) too-casually acknowledges his raging crush on Brad Pitt.
- Anyway, it works like a charm. Jordan gets over her crush pretty quick after that.
- “You didn’t have to go quite that hard in the paint, you know,” Rachel says to Marco much later. “Pretending to like Brad Pitt, I mean.”
- Marco is lying on her bed, looking through one of her back issues of CosmoGirl with the air of a forensic anthropologist picking apart the dismembered remains of a human sacrifice. “What?” he says, back in that too-casual tone. “I can appreciate a good pair of lips, no matter what type of human being they grow upon.”
- Rachel spins around, looking away from the mirror where she was fixing her hair. Marco is now staring at the magazine as if trying to detect a coded message between two lines of the spread comparing different brands of eyeliner.
- “No matter what type?” she asks.
- Marco lifts his chin. He doesn’t back down, and he doesn’t laugh. There’s a defiant set to his smirk, and the careful confidence in his expression is betrayed by the slight trembling of his fingers clenched around the Cosmo.
- Their parents are engaged, that’s all. And it’s not something he’s ever told anyone… but he also thinks it’s maybe the sort of thing that one tells one’s siblings.
- “So you do agree with me and Cassie about Jeremy Jason McCole!” Rachel says triumphantly.
- Marco gags so hard he risks straining his own throat muscles. “I have taste! You, clearly, have none.”
- If Jordan still has any romantic interest in Marco at all even after the you’re going to be step-siblings news broke, it disappears the instant that Naomi announces Jordan and Sara are going to be sharing a room from now on, because Marco and Peter are moving in with them. A week later, Jake’s mother has a stern conversation with him about the extent to which he’s been running up their phone bill. He grumbles that he didn’t ask to be everyone’s agony aunt, but that doesn’t get him out of being grounded.
- Marco teases Rachel endlessly when he figures out why she leaves her window open every night, even — especially — when it’s cold or rainy outside. But he also helps cover for her and Tobias without being asked, and one night in gorilla morph he deforms the oak tree out in the back yard so that a sheltered branch rests directly underneath her windowsill.
- Rachel stops in the door of Marco’s room the day after the confrontation with Visser One outside the fake hork-bajir valley. She doesn’t bother to knock. He didn’t bother to shut the door.
- Marco’s sitting in the narrow space between his bed and the wall, staring at the blank blue paint in front of his face. His knees are drawn up to his chest, his hands limp at his sides.
- “They didn’t find a body,” Rachel says, blunt as ever, standing over him. “I know that’s not good news or anything. But I also figured you had a right to know. There’s no sign of Vis— Of her body.”
- Marco squeezes his eyes shut, hard, but still can’t stop the tears. “Shit.” He lets his head fall back against the bedspread. “Shit.”
- Hesitating only a second, Rachel scoots in next to him. She doesn’t try for a hug or anything stupid like that, but she sits shoulder-to-shoulder with him. She’s the kind of person given to stillness, but she stays put as he struggles to breathe and swipes his sleeve across his face time and time again.
- “It’s never going to end, is it,” Marco says at last, when he’s got enough air for words.
- Rachel shrugs. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”
- “Shit,” he whispers again. “Shit, shit, shit.”
- “You wanna play Sega?” she asks. “Not think for a while?”
- Marco shakes his head violently. “I just need some space, okay?”
- “Sure.” She stands. “I’ll tell my mom not to expect you for dinner.”
- Their parents are downstairs cooking. Laughing. Arguing companionably over one of Naomi’s cases. Every clink of dishes, every fond word, feels like a spike driven under Rachel’s fingernails right now. And if that’s how she feels…
- “Anyway, I know you think I’m a crazy psycho killer, but for what it’s worth I think you made the right call.” She says it sharply, standing to go. Marco doesn’t respond, not that she expected him to, and she yanks his door shut when she goes.
- Peter doesn’t try to be Rachel’s dad. But he helps her with homework and shows up to her gymnastics meets and acts more excited than she is when she aces a history test. He asks her what she wants to study in college, not whether she’s going or how they’re expected to pay for it. He doesn’t try, and he does pretty well anyway.
- The Animorphs meet in Rachel’s room almost as often as they do in Cassie’s barn. It’s more centrally located, even if it doesn’t have nearly the selection of morphs right at hand. Jake and Cassie both have preexisting excuses for showing up several times a week, and Tobias and Ax never bother using the front door anyway. Marco’s also taken the time to confirm that no one in the house is a controller, so it saves everyone a little peace of mind.
- Rachel wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. No, that’s not it; she’s screaming in her sleep, and then Marco snaps the light on and wakes her. He sets a glass of water on her nightstand. Tilts the alarm clock so she can see the time. Pokes her in the arm to remind her that she’s human, at least for now. When it becomes obvious that she’s not going to talk about it, he turns and leaves without ever saying a word.
- “I need you,” Marco says into the phone, middle of the night, apparently apropos of nothing. “They took my dad.” He gives the address, and then he hangs up.
- He and Rachel have come to a decision, without discussion, without niceties like consulting Jake, by the time they’re done fighting off the half-dozen controllers who were dragging Peter toward the portable yeerk pool. Rachel demorphs as Peter watches. Marco goes through the explanation the first time, then the second.
- Midway through the third round of attempts to convince Peter he’s not crazy, Rachel gives up. She herds both Peter and Marco into the backseat, and drives back to the house. “Pack for a long trip,” she tells them both, and goes upstairs to tell her mom.
- Maybe, Jake concludes, exhausted just at the thought, they could’ve kept going if it was just his parents, or just Cassie’s. But Rachel and Marco can’t both disappear without rousing too much suspicion, and getting rid of just one of them will put the yeerks on the tail of the other. “I guess it’s time,” he says. “Better get ready to tell our own parents, then.”
- By the end of that day, Rachel’s and Marco’s blended family is in the hork-bajir valley. By the time two days have passed, Jake’s and Cassie’s families are there too, even if Tom is currently secured with about a half-mile of duct tape and will need to be babysat by several hork-bajir for the next three days. A week after that, Tobias shows up with Loren in tow. One hellish mission later, and Visser One is dead, but her host is rapidly recovering.
- Naomi and Eva circle each other like a pair of housecats thrust into the same room, at first. They’re prim and aloof and wary, unable to know what to make of each other. Peter helps exactly nothing by retreating from the conflict entirely, busying himself with an elaborate irrigation project the hork-bajir don’t actually need his help with. But he can’t escape them forever.
- One night, all three of them get roaring drunk on some kind of regrettable fermented-bark thing, and finally have it out. Peter makes a passionate speech or two about his love for them both before retreating into morose silence. Naomi’s sixth drink ends in her making an elaborate attempt to draw up a timeshare contract over who will keep Peter on which night.
- Eva slams a hand down on the table, and they both fall silent. She won’t share, she announces quietly, and she won’t be with a man who cannot choose. She’ll find her own way.
- Her own way, as it turns out, is even worse than Marco could have possibly imagined.
- “Why?” Marco cries, flopping on the ground in the middle of the next Animorphs’ meeting. “Why, why, why does this keep happening to me?”
- “Pretty sure we’ve been over this before, back when it was your dad, and concluded it’s not about you,” Jake says. “Anyway, the yeerks —”
- “No!” Marco sits up. “We have more important things to talk about than yeerks. Tobias, back me up on this!”
- «Uh, yeah.» Tobias looks over at Rachel. «By the way, all those times you talked about how weird it was when your mom started dating again… Sorry for not being more sympathetic. Now that I’m in your shoes… It’s really weird.»
- Rachel sniffs. “You only met your mom like a month ago. It’s still worse for me.”
- “And it’s worst of all for me!” Marco has flopped back over. He emits a noise something like a wookiee being murdered. “Please someone acknowledge that it’s worst of all for me!”
- Cassie pats him on the back of the head. “It’s worst of all for you,” she says.
- “Thanks,” he says into the grass.
- “Okay!” Jake throws up his hands. “Marco’s mom and Tobias’s mom have a thing going. Now do we have it out of our systems?”
- «Personally, I think Loren and Eva are most compatible,» Ax says.
- «Nobody asked you,» Tobias snarks. «And Jake, just imagine for a second if it was your mom who was macking on—»
- “Nope!” Rachel says loudly. “Nobody is thinking about anyone’s mom and anyone else’s mom. Or dad. We are ignoring it, we are pretending it’s not happening, we are carrying on as Marco and I have been for over a year now, we are killing yeerks.”
- “Yeah, like I was saying.” Jake rolls his eyes. “There are aliens invading the planet, remember?”
- “The horror,” Marco mumbles, still facedown in the grass. “The horror!”
- Cassie gives him another sympathetic pat on the back of the head.
Now we just need some way to get Cassie related to everybody else!
Cassie is going to marry into this family in this timeline, thus completing the bizarre multi-headed ouroboros of connections the Animorphs have to each other
I didn’t even think of that! Yes, this must happen, even if it’s just Cassie marrying Jake several years down the road.
Y'all are doing incredible work out here also “Even if it’s just Cassie marrying Jake” oh my god the shade of it all
What happens when they finally all get to meet Ax’s parents? (Let’s just pretend for the sake of straight up having a good time right now that Rachel lives)