#THAT'S ANIMORPHS BAYBEEEEE

[deflare]

If you want some companion listening, I highly recommend the podcast "Morph Club", which goes through each book one by one and talks about the plots, the themes, and their feelings about them as adults.

There's also "Fandalites", which I have not listened to, but one of the hosts is Jenna Stoeber, so I really should now that it's been a few years since I listened to "Morph Club".

I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.

[vegalocity]

Fluff 2,13 and 16 with ironbull

Dialogue meme

2. “It’s you, it always has been.”

13. “I didn’t think it was possible to love someone this much.”

16. “Can you just please hold me?”

Animorphs AU baybeeeee

--

Niu Mowang was better than to think himself prone to night terrors.

He’d simply had enough sleep for the next few centuries. He’d slept enough beneath that damned mountain. The fact that when he’d last gotten any real sleep he’d woken with his body moving without him, piloted by another, was beyond the point.

That thing didn’t sleep at all when it was in his head. It simply rested his body while it tried to force him into compliance. How fervently he struggled to regain control of even his own base motor functions when the creature mocked his attempts.

‘Earthlings just don’t know when to give up’ it had cooed in amusement. ‘We Yeerks know better than to pick fights we won’t win’

He’d known it was just taunting him, trying to make him give up.

What bothered him was that it had nearly succeeded.

It wasn’t the arrogance of the invading force on his body, it’s claims that it had broken dozens, hundreds, of spirits and he was nothing new.

Nor was it the sensation of feeling it rummaging around in his mind looking for memories to fool his family with but always coming up short, unable to fake the passion behind it, His wife pulling away surprised and upset when the being in his mind was unable to fake affection for her even behind closed doors. Saying all the right words, the ‘my princess’es the ‘my sun and sky’s, but no amount of ‘I didn’t think it was possible to love someone this much’ could disguise the hollowness beneath. Leaving him to watch his wife pull away from him more and more as, to her, it seemed obvious that he just… didn’t love her anymore. But that didn’t break him, if anything it made him more determined to regain control. It had made him so determined to regain himself so he might make these weeks of uncertainty fall by the wayside.

It was when the Yeerk stopped trying as hard to fool his princess and his son that that time came close. It had realized that he wouldn’t stop trying to wrest back control, and he had felt its control wane just a hair, not much, for only a moment he’d felt his hand curl into a loose fist when he’d bade it to and found his passion reignited to continue the fight.

But then the Yeerk spoke to him.

‘I suppose i won’t be able to keep this charade up forever’ he could remember the boredom in the internal voice. ‘Your son is too intelligent, and your wife far too powerful.’ he’d laughed, finding himself agreeing with the being and for once being thankful that it could read his thoughts, so it could know how he pictured its gruesome death and extraction from him thanks to his son putting together some sort of device, while his wife easily restrained him with her wind.

‘I Suppose she’d make a wonderful gift for Visser Four. Surely a demon so powerful would make as great a vessel as you have been, bull king. But your son- i worry his fire magic would overwhelm any whom tried to infest him, perhaps we should just kill him.’ it cooed

‘Tell me bull king,’ the Yeerk hissed in his mind ‘How much force would be necessary to snap your son’s neck with these massive hands? Not very much i would suspect. I wonder if he’d recognize what happened before his cognitive faculties shut down.’

How ashamed he was, to admit that the creature, Visser Two as it had called itself, had almost gotten him to give up. How he’d known, and it had known, that he would agree to stop fighting it in exchange for his son’s life and his wife’s freedom.

He’d never thought he’d be thankful to see the little thief when he’d arrived, but when he’d told the two of them directly that there was something controlling him, when the Yeerk had dropped its guise entirely and attacked, he’d found himself more at ease, hoping for once that he would be defeated.

‘Three days’ the little thief had told them. ‘Three days, and the thing in his head will starve itself out’

It had been a week since those three days had been up. A week since he’d regained control of himself, and felt Visser Two die. He’d seen those brief flashes of other creatures from beyond the stars,creatures he didn’t even know existed before but now knew their names, their voices, and how hard they’d screamed and cried in their own minds as the Visser broke them.

Niu Mowang didn’t need to sleep anyway. He was just fine without it. There were a lot of things he had to make up for anyway and he could use the extra time. He’d gotten a fair bit of information from the Yeerk as it had died, things it wasn’t intending on letting slip yet had been drawn out in the starvation fueled delirium, things he’d simply overheard as it piloted his body, and things he wasn’t sure if even the Yeerk had known he’d found out about. Probably important things. He now had a strikingly complete knowledge of his former captor’s biology, how their technology is mostly re-tooled from their enemies, a species called Andelites, and the limitations of possessing a host. Among many other things that might come in handy.

After all, how would their family be able to take over this world if it was already being taken over? The Little thief and his ilk knew something about all of this already, otherwise he wouldn’t have known about Kandrona starvation, and the approximate three days necessary for it to become fully terminal, so should they be on the same side by that account? He couldn’t stomach the idea of actually working with the simian so soon after being freed from the imprisonment he’d put him under, but if they were, say, tangentially on the same side for the span of pushing back the threat to their world would that be something he could handle?

He was still pondering the answer, a letter that was meant to be sent as missive to his former sworn brother resting before him unwritten, when he realized he wasn’t alone in the room any longer.

“My king.” His princess seemed to practically float across the floor as she approached, for all he knew she was, her skirts covered her feet, so if she was using her wind to be a bit more dramatic than usual he wouldn’t know.

“My princess.” it was a mistake the second it left his mouth and the watched the faint tightening of his wife’s mouth at the summoned memory. It was the only term of endearment the Yeerk had been willing to use, and it had used it almost exclusively when Iron Fan had been more skeptical about his possession and it was trying to manipulate her into letting it go. He wasn’t sure if it was the actual memory of him struggling for control as the Yeerk tried to make a swipe at his wife to clear the exit path, or simply the fact that she’d believed him for long enough to be wrong that was grating on her. But either way he should probably avoid it for a time.

“Are you well?” is what he settled on.

She waved a hand dismissively yet still settled herself at his side with a sort of weariness that had quickly grown familiar. “Yes Yes, I simply found myself restless.”

“It seems as though that’s running through the whole household.” He agreed easily. The only one of them who’d been sleeping consistently had been their boy. And ‘consistently’ was still a level of exaggeration with him as well.

His love hummed against him and he could practically feel her exhaustion as she slumped against him a bit. Her hair felt strange against his arm (he still maybe wasn’t quite used to the heightened sensations of the world around him without his fur as a buffer between the two) but he didn’t dare shift and disturb her, lest she try to wake herself up again.

She placed one of her hands on his side and pulled herself even closer, until they were practically one being, nuzzling into his side in a show of intimacy that Niu Mowang knew MUST be due to her drowsy state.

“My love?” A far safer affectionate term to use, and sure enough his wife simply hummed, quickly falling into a doze.

“Can you please just hold me?” she mumbled against his side, already half asleep as if soothed by his very presence. And damn if that didn’t make him internally melt.

He shifted and shrunk down a bit, just so she’d be more comfortable as he pulled her up to rest in his lap. He could go pretty small of he really focused on it, but he settled on a size just small enough that she could tuck her head into his neck but still sit comfortably in his lap, his arms around her middle.

Within minutes his wife was asleep.

It occurred to him only then that she was lying about her own insomnia, and had used it as an excuse when she’d awoken and realized he wasn’t in bed with her.

It had been… difficult… to have his body taken over by Visser 2, and forced to watch as the alien piloted his body without him. To watch the extraterrestrial try and ultimately fail to convince his family of a sincerity it didn’t have. To ultimately see it decide to try and infest his wife with another of his kind and murder his son until their own enemy had to intervene to subdue him and tell them how to solve it.

But, he wondered not for the first time how it must have felt to be on the other side of it. What silent suffering did his princess have to go through when, to her knowledge, it had felt as though he’d suddenly, and without warning, fallen out of love with her. As if he could ever even conceive such a world.

The debate over the missive lay forgotten as he tightened his grip just so on her elegant form, rested his chin against her midnight black hair. He may have had his fair share of flings in the past, but the very idea that he could ever fall out of love with this woman was absolutely absurd.

“It’s you, it always has been.” he huffed against her hair.

The love of his life hummed and nuzzled into his neck, and for the first time since he’d been freed, Niu Mowang felt peace.

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