Animorphs fic: SNAFU
Jul. 22nd, 2006 02:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
onemuseleftHappy Birthday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sidara!
Title: SNAFU
Fandom: Animorphs
Pairings: Jake/Marco, Rachel/Tobias
Spoilers: vague references to The Beginning.
Warnings: Rated R for language, violence and adult situations.
"Dude, I haven't slept in two days and you haven't bathed in a lot longer than that. Don't count on the power of love and friendship to save you."
"The power of love and friendship?" Tobias repeated. "What is this, Sailor Moon?"
"Our lives," Jake said, "are more like Pokemon."
"Get real," Marco said. "It's more like, like-" he flailed briefly. "Teen Titans."
"I get to be Robin," Jake said immediately.
Tobias hooted. "Marco's Beast Boy!"
Marco gave in to temptation and smacked the back of Tobias' head. "Hey, Beast Boy rocks. Great personality, versatile powers, a hot boyfriend with lots of muscles."
"Contrary to your own personal theories," Jake interjected, leaning against the wall. "Beast Boy and Cyborg are not actually sleeping together. They just act like they are."
SNAFU
Situation Normal: All Fucked Up
"You boss is an idiot," Marco snarled. He ground the words out like they hurt, like he wanted to throw them at something or someone.
Jake leaned back against the wall, his legs splayed out in front of him, taking up more of the hallway than was technically his share, although no one seemed particularly inclined to ask him to move. Probably had something to do with the blood drying on his BDUs, or the way he hadn't quite yet managed to loose the deathgrip he had on his handgun. "The general has to make very difficult decisions sometimes," he said, and it was a sign of how tired he was that he almost thought that might be the end of it.
Instead Marco hunkered down beside him, balanced on the balls of his feet, elbows braced against his knees. "Your boss is an idiot," he repeated, his voice low and intense. "Your general sent four good men to their deaths because his ego wasn't being fed."
"You don't know that." Jake let his head fall back against the wall and tried not to think too hard about those four men. "We don't know the whole story. There may be information we don't have."
"He killed them. His own people. Because he could, because it would make him a fucking hero." Marco was vibrating with hostility, anger and a few other emotions. His voice was tense but controlled, but his hands were shaking slightly, and Jake could see emotion, raw and ugly in Marco's eyes.
It was a sign of the tension they'd all been under lately. Usually Marco was better at disguising his feelings.
"Tomlinson was the only guy on this base even half as smart as me. Feretti had two daughters. Carson used to stop by the labs and bribe me with junk food and booze if I'd let him test the experimental weaponry." Marco's voice was starting to lose a little of its steadiness and Jake closed his eyes, wishing he would stop. "Riley – Justin was our fucking friend-"
"And I watched him die," Jake said hollowly.
One of Marco's hands grabbed the side of his head, pressed against his ear, caught in his hair, and tugged until Marco's head was pressed against his, and Marco's breath was hot and unsteady against the side of his face. "He pulled three guys out of there with two bullets in his chest and half his blood on the floor. He saved Tobias, he saved you and I'll love the son of a bitch forever, Jake. But he never should have had to do that because none of you should have been there."
Jake ignored the sideways glances they were getting; most of the personnel on base knew them, knew what they'd been through together, how close they were. It wouldn't be the first time they'd PDA'd and it wouldn't be the last. "It was a set-up," he breathed, letting some of the weight slip away with the admission. "As soon as we walked in, it was over. We were set up."
"He knew," Marco whispered into his ear. "God, Jake, he knew. Rachel's people radioed in less than an hour before he sent your team out. They set the whole thing up hoping that you'd be the one they sent in. They wanted you to come, Jake. They were ready for you. And that bastard sent you right to them."
"I thought we blew our cover," Jake said, sounding tired and hollow, void of any emotion. "I thought I did something wrong. Made the wrong call. Got everyone killed," he added, almost as an afterthought.
"Your boss is an idiot," Marco repeated.
****
He let Marco manhandle him to the infirmary for the required check-up, the familiar routine helping to ground him a little. He got a clean bill of health and an appointment with the base shrink, which Jake decided to put off for the time being. He'd probably appreciate the opportunity to defrag later, but first he wanted to talk to Rachel and Marco.
They wouldn't let him see Tobias, insisted that he go to his quarters and get some rest.
He had quarters on-base that he rarely used. They were comfortable, and spacious, all things considered, far nicer than what most of the officers there had, even the ones who hadn't been handed their rank as an act of desperation. Jake used them mostly as an office, and occasionally, when they were on an alert, or a mission was on stand-by, as a place to rest. Rarely, though. He preferred to sleep at home.
Anyway, while everyone from the President to the UN Security Council was willing to cut him a whole lot of slack, he figured taking his very male lover to bed here on base would be frowned on, and after most missions all he wanted was to know that Marco was within reach.
And right now, he couldn't be certain that they could talk on-base without being overheard.
Rachel met them at the front door of Marco's house, lips drawn into a flat, tight line. She greeted Jake with a hug, gave Marco a searching glance, and locked the door shut behind them. "Ax sent one of the asrith over, someone he trusts. No bugs, no cameras, and he left something that's supposed to make it impossible for us to be overheard, as long as we don't shout, and we stay within fifteen feet of the device."
"How's Tobias?" Jake asked, because at the moment that was more important.
Rachel hesitated. "He'll live."
Jake nodded. "I need to change." He held out a hand unnecessarily.
"Go ahead." Rachel waved him away. "Take a shower, too, please."
He showered and dressed while Marco sat on the bed, on leg drawn against his chest and his chin resting on his knee, and watched him with an intensity bordering on fear.
"Tell me what happened," Jake said. He grabbed the first comfortable sweater he could find and tugged it over his head.
"Rachel has the whole story," Marco replied. "She'd be able to answer your questions better."
"I know. I want to hear your voice." Jake stepped into his jeans and concentrated on not losing his balance, as his exhaustion started to catch up with him. "I thought I might not hear it again."
"I love you."
"I know. Talk more."
"I'm going to kill the general. I don't care who he is. I don't care what his job is. If I'm ever given the opportunity, I will kill him." Marco didn't move, his gaze didn't waiver, but Jake could feel his lover's control stretched paper-thin.
Jake crossed the room in three steps, lifted Marco's head and kissed him. He put everything he had and everything he'd almost never had the chance to say into it, cupped Marco's face in his hands and breathed from him until he felt the weariness start to ease away into something more comfortable.
"Rachel has a story to tell me." Jake said into the silence that had settled over them. "And we have some planning to do, because if what happened today wasn't treason it was something damned close."
"I'm going to kill him," Marco repeated, and they were close enough that his lips brushed against Jake's throat when he spoke.
"I'll help you," Jake promised.
***
The Planetary Security Guard was the creation of the UN Security Council in the days after the second Yeerk invasion. A general was appointed in each represented country, and each general had under him several captains. The captains led teams consisting of two or more squads, each led themselves by a lieutenant. Smaller countries had only a few teams. The United States had more than thirty.
Jake's team, the LA team, under General Crawford, consisted of three squads, each containing about a dozen men. It was the largest team in the country, rivaled only by the NYC team, which had three squads as well, but fewer men each.
Crawford had always been a problem, as far as most of the Animorphs were concerned. He was an angry, close-minded man who didn't much care for off-worlders, thus not endearing him to the Andalites, and he was wary of anyone with the morphing technology. He also subscribed to the belief, held by many who'd been spared the experience, that anyone who'd been used as a host by the Yeerk was a security risk. Jake, an alien-loving Animorph who'd been taken as a controller during a yeerk POW's botched escape attempt at the end of the second war, was high on the general's shit list. This annoyed Rachel and Tobias, who also worked with the general, though not so closely, and worried Marco. Not that Jake particularly cared, because as long as the general did his job, and let Jake do his own, things were cool.
Things were not so cool anymore.
"He sent my squad in on recon," Rachel explained, sitting cross-legged on the recliner and looking less like a covert operative than like a girl Marco had once had a crush on. "Fact-gathering. Kind of unusual, but hey."
Rachel had been a member of Tobias's squad before they married, then Justin's afterwards as a nod to the anti-fraternization regs which couldn't be entirely waived, even for a couple of people who'd saved the world. Only recently she'd been given command of the third squad in Jake's team, a move which had been hotly contested by several higher-ups because of the aforementioned fraternization regs. Jake, who knew both of them could take care of themselves, and better yet, knew that they both knew it, had quietly insisted. The UN had conceded after a quiet battle of wills in which Jake had made the off-hand remark that he'd always wanted to visit the Andalite homeworld, and if he couldn't choose the officers he trusted to back him up, well, a five year sabbatical off-world would be a nice rest.
Marco considered it a mixed blessing, since Rachel caused easily 60% of the trouble she found herself in, but at least this time she would be armed while dealing with it. And he knew Rachel, who had almost as many reasons as he did for wanting Jake alive and unharmed, would watch his back and keep him in line where others, too mindful of his rank, wouldn't.
Today was not the first time she'd saved Jake's life.
"I thought your squad did most of the grunt work," Marco said, dropping onto the couch and using Jake's chest as a pillow. "SWAT-esque? Marine-ish?"
"Marine-ish?" Jake repeated in amused voice while Rachel snorted.
"Normally, Tobias's squad handles recon," Rachel agreed. "There's no definitive roles assigned, but most of the people on my squad are ex-Marines. Hand-to-hand combat experts, explosives experts. But we know how to use binoculars just as well as the next guy, trust me."
"Not that I'm implying anything," Marco said with a grin.
"Of course not," Rachel said dryly. "Shut up, Marco."
Jake tightened his grip around Marco's waist, and he scowled briefly over his shoulder. "Stop taking her side."
"The General told us recon had already been done," Jake said quietly. "There were photographs of the compound, aerial surveillance, records of phone calls in and out, recorded conversations taken with a parabolic mike. Everything we would've expected in a briefing."
"Days old," Rachel said flatly. "He had Captain Harper's recon squad in there early this week. You won't get anything about it in the official records, but off the record Dave Mitchell told me everything. They went in under Kendall-"
"They made Kendall a squad leader?" Jake said. "And a recon squad leader? He's as stealthy as a starving Taxxon outside Texas Steakhouse."
"That's kind of alliterative," Marco said. "Not bad, off the top of your head. So this Kendall's a schmuck?"
"I wouldn't have him on my team," Jake said flatly. "I'm surprised Harper hasn't had him transferred to Antarctica by now."
"Harper can barely stand him, but according to Mitchell there's a lot of pressure coming from higher up to keep Kendall around." Rachel leaned forward. "Listen, Harper's been in Beijing for the last sixteen days, meeting with UN officials. One of his squad leaders, Lieutenant Neilsson-"
"Who was in charge of recon," Jake interrupted.
"Exactly. Neilsson died last week."
"Of heart troubles, I thought."
"Yeah, I imagine being shot through the heart is trouble of a sort." Rachel paused a moment to let that sink in. "Mitchell's got no proof, but he's almost positive Harper doesn't know about it."
"That Neilsson was shot?" Jake asked. "Why haven't I heard about this? The entire base would have heard about it by now."
"How," Marco asked quietly, "did a man get shot in the heart without anyone knowing?"
"His team knows," Rachel said disgustedly. "They were ordered to keep it quiet. They're not allowed to talk to anyone about what happened on that mission."
Jake sat forward as much as he could with Marco half laying on him. "They went on a mission with their captain in another fucking country? Who the hell authorized that?"
"Crawford," Rachel said flatly. "He sent them in. And when Neilsson died, he's the one who ordered them to keep quiet. Harper doesn't even know what happened."
"Son of a bitch," Jake said, and Marco could hear by his voice that he was furious. "Harper's going to lose it when he finds out."
"What did they find?" Marco asked.
"As far as Mitchell could tell, it was a Yeerk cell, recently abandoned." Rachel leaned forward, her voice dropping slightly so as not to carry outside the range of Ax's security device. "They found signs that the cell had been temporarily abandoned, but that the Yeerk had every intention of coming back. Supplies and weaponry were still on site, the power hadn't been cut, the computers were running. No Kandrona supply, but that only means that they'd been living off a portable."
Marco glanced at Rachel from beneath half-lowered lids. "You think they cleared out because they knew Mitchell's squad was going in?"
"Mitchell thinks so." Rachel nodded, her expression hard and serious. "And I agree with him. It's too much coincidence otherwise. They cleared out so Kendall could take the squad in and get recon photos of what looks like an abandoned base. Then, since Harper was out of the country, General Crawford decided not to send them on an insurgence mission-"
"They sent Neilsson out to get shot," Jake 's voice was a rumble in his chest, a soft vibration beneath Marco, carrying every ounce of the other man's anger. "Obviously he was just using Harper's absence as a convenient excuse to get my team in there."
Rachel nodded. "I think so, Jake."
"And then he takes your squad – with all the ex-Marines and close-quarter fighters – and sent you off on recon," Marco finished the thought. "Leaving Tobias's recon people and Riley's squad to invade. Will anyone call him on that decision?"
"Probably not," Jake said tiredly. "It's not unusual to take advantage of what is supposed to be an easy mission to shake the squads up a bit. He'll be able to say that he thought this was going to be a cakewalk, so it was a good opportunity to get Rachel's team some downtime, and get Tobias's people in the thick of things for a refresher course."
"But you told him that things had gone wrong."
"Yeah," Rachel said. "But he timed things too well. By the time I managed to get a report in that the base was no longer abandoned, Jake had already started moving in. Crawford could claim I just got the intel to him too late for it to do any good."
"So where does that leave us?" Marco asked.
Jake's arms tightened around his waist, and a puff of breath against the top of his head was as close to a sigh as Jake would get. "You want to help me commit mutiny?"
Rachel smiled, a slow, dangerous expression reminiscent of a predator.
****
Jake very rarely interfered with Marco's handling of a given situation, mostly because they were so often in agreement on how things should be handled that anything basic – like, say, getting a maid in once a week because they were both slobs in the kitchen, or having all their bills automatically paid every month by the bank because neither one of them could be counted on to make paying the phone bill a high priority – tended to just get done. There were larger areas that were best left in peace whenever possible; Crayak and the Ellimist; Rachel's turning-back-time stunt; Jake's refusal to talk to his family even after they'd (eventually) come crawling back for forgiveness (probably Naomi's doing); Cassie. But even then, it was a mutual agreement to let sleeping dogs lie and all that rot.
In war, Jake had been the leader and he'd been pretty good at it. They'd not always been as good at following, but really, there was only so much you could have expected from a bunch of adolescents. It was in war where Jake and Marco had clashed most often.
Sometimes Marco still wondered if Jake ever got around to forgiving him for being willing to kill Tom. He suspected that if Tom had lived through the war, it would have been easier for Jake to deal with. But he's never asked, and Jake's never offered and there are enough dark memories that push to the forefront of their minds and nightmares every day that Marco doesn't feel like digging up ones that could have been. Anyway, he doesn't want to know.
This was not a war, but it felt like one.
Neither one of them felt safe in the house that night. Marco could see it in the tense press of Jake's lips, the way he held his back and shoulders almost rigidly straight, the way all three of them glanced around them at any sound outside. Rachel, tired and worried, had called the base to check on Tobias one more time – he still wasn't allowed visitors – before crashing in the guest room.
"Dinner?" Marco asked half-heartedly, but Jake didn't have any more of an appetite than he did.
They locked the house up before they went to bed, double-checking everything and setting the alarm system that they almost never used (with the hours they kept, it was too common for one of them to come home in the middle of the night and set it off). It was still twilight outside, not dark enough for them to need the lights to make their way to the bedroom.
It was just light enough that Marco could see Jake's face as he leaned in to kiss him, stretched across the bedsheets, loose-limbed and warm. He ducked his head to kiss Jake's throat, licking the hollow point where Hork-Bajir blades had slit his throat half-open and trailing slow, open-mouthed kissed across Jake's shoulder. His knees pressed against either side of Jake's hips as he ran his palm over the smooth lines of Jake's stomach where two bullets had left him gut-shot and bleeding out.
"I love you," he said, settling on top of Jake, not bothering to brace himself on his elbows, just pressing Jake into the mattress, his weight holding him in place. He ran his tongue over Jake's chest, caught a nipple in his teeth as Jake spread his legs a little to let Marco settle between them.
Fingers slid into his hair, Jake wrapping curls around his hands, cradling Marco's head as he urged him up. Marco ran his tongue over Jake's teeth as their cocks slid together, all heat and friction, and the slow build to completion.
Afterward he pushed himself up until he could look down and meet Jake's eyes. "He tried to kill you." Jake's eyes were nearly black in the darkness. "I'm going to make sure he can't ever do that again." He waited, because this was war and he and Jake couldn't afford to be on separate game plans.
Jake touched the side of his face, pressed his thumb against the corner of Marco's mouth. "I love you, too."
****
Tobias was awake when they finally let Marco in the infirmary to see him. Propped up in a hospital bed and hooked up to an IV and a heart rate monitor, he looked tired and drawn. Some of that was from the surgery to remove a bullet from his shoulder. Some of it was from the painkillers, which hadn't completely worn off.
"You look high as a kite," Marco greeted him cheerfully, dropping into a chair beside the bed and waving off the nurse who had bustled over upon his arrival. "They've got you on the good stuff, huh?"
Tobias glared at him, which Marco took as a good sign that he was rallying. "The nurses here are evil. I've been stuck in this place for three days-"
Marco held up four fingers.
"Four days? Great. And I think I've been conscious for about twenty minutes. Fifteen of which were spent in a debriefing, might I add."
Marco quirked an eyebrow but otherwise didn't react to that. So they'd been debriefing Tobias already? "Crawford's been by to see you?"
"Yeah. Big guy himself."
"He doesn't really strike me as the type who visits the troops in their sickbeds, you know?" Marco said.
"He's not," Tobias said flatly. "Which makes me all kinds of nervous."
"Well, I'm sure it's nothing," Marco said cheerfully. He beamed at Tobias's suspicious glare and reached down to grab the duffel bag he's set by his feet. "I brought you presents," he chanted in a sing-song voice. "Were you a good little patient, Tobias?"
"No." Tobias grinned.
"Excellent! You deserve a reward." Marco flipped open the bag and pulled out a notebook computer. "Wireless internet, babe. Cause we all know how you get without your porn." He ignored Tobias's breathless laughter and hauled out his next present. "And an economy-size bag of snickers bars. Because you'll never get healthy living off hospital food."
"You love me, you really love me." Tobias accepted the computer eagerly, bracing it against his thighs and flipping it open.
"Has Rachel been by?" Marco knew she had, but the nurse was still lingering, listening in rather obviously, and Marco wondered if Crawford had ordered her to do so.
"Yeah, she was the other five minutes of consciousness." He sobered abruptly. "She told me about Justin and the others."
Marco nodded slowly, anger churning in his gut that he tried to keep off his face. "Justin saved your life, man. Saved Jake and Brad Leatton, too. He's getting a medal. Posthumously," he added almost as an afterthought, and he saw Tobias watching him closely.
Marco was a hell of a liar, but his team could read him like a book.
"They're not letting me out to go to the funeral," Tobias said, eyeing Marco carefully. "You'll give Terry my condolences?"
"I will." Marco watched Tobias fiddle with the computer while the nurse resorted to cleaning things she'd already cleaned. "Man, we need to get you morph-capable again. I'd forgotten how much sitting in a hospital sucked."
"Yeah," Tobias said dryly. "Tell me about it. I'm a nothlit, Marco. Unless the Ellimist shows up and offers to change the laws of physics for me, I'm not going to be morphing anytime soon."
"Too bad," Marco sighed theatrically, and flicked his eyes to the nurse. Tobias followed the gaze and frowned, lifting his eyebrows. Marco nodded. "Cause morphing has some serious advantages, you know."
"Like healing?" Tobias said grimly, one hand pressed absently against his abdomen where thick bandages covered the healing surgical incision.
"That too." Marco grinned with lots of teeth.
Tobias groaned. "Marco, if you're talking about using morphing powers while you're having sex I don't want to know about it. Ever."
"I wonder if it's bestiality if there's human consciousness involved," Marco mused thoughtfully.
"Ah, geez, Marco."
"You'd be amazed how many uses a squirrel's tail can-" The sound of the door shutting behind the nurse cut him off.
Tobias laughed, holding his sides. "Man, you're evil. That poor woman's going to be thinking about that for the rest of her life, you know that?"
Marco shrugged. "It got her out of here. Good thing, too, cause my next idea was to offer you a blowjob."
"Let us all be thankful, then," Tobias said dryly. "Why'd you want her out of here?"
"Can't a guy want some privacy?" Marco pushed himself out of the chair and settled on the edge of Tobias's hospital bed. "Gimme that. And I'll have you know, I give excellent blowjobs."
"I used to be your roommate, remember?" Tobias surrendered the computer and broke into the bag of Snickers. "That's how I know Jake's a moaner."
Marco smirked as he opened the computer's word processing program and began typing. 'Crawford set you up. Base not abandoned and he knew it' "Speaking of Jake," he said conversationally. "I'm thinking of asking him to marry me."
Tobias choked on a hunk of Snickers bar.
Marco plopped the computer back on Tobias's lap and glared. "See if I ever share with you again."
Tobias gagged slightly and fell back against the pillows. "You gotta warn a guy, Marco! Geez! I mean-" he skimmed over what Marco had written and hesitated, briefly enough that anyone overhearing would assume he was just getting his breath back. "I mean, seriously, I just had surgery! You can't drop stuff on me like that!" His fingers tapped out a brief message and he shoved the computer back to Marco.
'What are we going to do?' Good. They were all on the same page. Marco grinned as he typed a quick response. 'What we always do.' "If I'd known you were so easily startled I'd have made sure to break the news a little more delicately. Next time I'll have a fainting couch ready for you."
Tobias accepted the computer back with a dirty look. "Okay, seriously? Have you been smoking something? You're gonna ask Jake to marry you?"
"And what's wrong with that?" Marco demanded.
"You're the one who told me Jake was never going to marry you." His fingers rested on the keyboard a moment before he typed one brief message and passed it back.
"That was six years and a war ago. Shit's changed since then." Marco read the single line and grinned. "Though some things haven't."
Tobias grinned at him. "Seriously?"
"Yeah. Seriously."
"I'll be damned. If he goes crazy long enough to accept, I want to be Best Man."
"Sorry, Tobias. I already asked Rachel. You can be the flower girl, though."
Tobias grabbed another Snickers Bar, tossing one to Marco as he settled back against the blankets. "Do I get to pick my own dress?"
"Sure. As long as it fits with the eggplant and mauve color scheme I've got picked out." Marco hit the delete key, carefully erasing Tobias' last message, 'Chaos and mayhem it is.' Then he broke open the Snickers bar and tore off a chunk. "When are they letting you out of here?"
"Haven't said." Tobias made a face. "Considering this is only the first day I've been awake for any amount of time…"
Marco nodded. "You're gonna be all right." He didn't say Because too many people I liked have died already this week, but Tobias could read between the lines.
"Yeah," Tobias nodded. "I'm gonna be fine."
****
The cab pulled up to the curb outside the governor's mansion and the cabbie tapped the bulletproof glass to signal their arrival.
Rachel stared out the window through half-closed eyes for a moment, before leaning forward and pushing a hundred dollar bill through the thin slot in the glass. "If you're still here when I come out, there's another hundred in addition to the fare."
The driver grabbed the bill and grinned at her over his shoulder. "You'd have had me for fifty, you know."
She smiled back as she slid out of the car. "Why pay discount for first rate service?" she shot back.
The cabbie tossed her a brief salute, and reached forward to flip on the hazard lights.
The governor's mansion was brand new, like most of the state and local government buildings. The mansion had been taken over by the Yeerk in the early days of the second invasion, and it hadn't survived the fighting. It had been rebuilt with the kind of speed rarely seen from government contracted jobs, exactly as it had been before the war, but it was too shiny, too white, too new.
Like a lot of things, in the wake of the war.
Rachel pulled her sunglasses out of her purse and slid them on.
The security checkpoint at the front gates of the property was also something new since the war. Two uniformed guards – National Guard troops, usually – manned the gates with a walk-through metal detector, a guard dog trained specifically to sniff out the fluid of the Yeerk pools, and a portable retinal scanner. There was a booth, inside which there would be a satellite uplink so they could check IDs and confirm that any visitors were welcome ones.
Both guards, Rachel couldn't help but notice, paused briefly when they saw her coming.
The dog didn't stir as she approached, boots clicking on the concrete sidewalk. She had her ID out as she approached, handing it to the first guard before he could ask. He vanished inside to confirm it was valid, while the second guard approached with the retinal scanner. She glanced at him over the top of her glasses, raising a brow.
"Procedure, ma'am," the guard held the device steady for her. "If you could lean forward, and look directly at the red dot, please."
She slid the sunglasses down her nose and leaned forward. Retinal scanners were minimalistic security, really. They didn't warn of Yeerk possession, they didn't detect someone in morph, and nowadays those were the two things people in power actually needed to be warned about.
Although, Rachel mused as she focused on the scanner, with all the militant anti-alien groups cropping up across the planet, maybe the normal humans were just as much a threat as the rest.
"Thank you, ma'am." The guard checked the readout on the scanner and hit a few keys, transferring the result of the scan to his partner inside the booth. If her ID and retinal scans didn't match up, an alarm would be raised and she'd be placed under arrest for falsifying identity documents. And just in case she tried to resist arrest, more than two dozen armed guards would appear on the scene within moments of the alert.
Rachel wasn't really expecting problems; Crawford didn't know they were planning anything, and it was too early for anyone else to have become involved. That didn't stop her from planning exactly how to take these two out before reinforcements arrived.
"Lieutenant. Berenson-Hawke?" The first guard, a younger guy, about Rachel's age with bright blond hair, jogged out of the booth and handed her ID back. "The governor wants to know if there's anything the problem, ma'am?"
"No, not at all." Rachel laid it on as thick as she dared, flashing bright white teeth and flipping her hair over her shoulder. "I'm just hoping to drop in on an old friend. You know, catch up on old times."
Blondie presented her with a visitor's day pass on a beaded chain that she could slip over her head. The word "Executive" was printed across the top in big blue letters. "Well, ma'am, is there anything we could do for you?"
"Well." Rachel slid her glasses down and crinkled her eyes at him. "Would it be too terribly much for you could call ahead and ask Cassandra Wilkinson if she has time to join me for lunch?"
Ten minutes later she was being escorted through the halls of the governor's mansion by a peppy young intern named Shelly who kept tripping over herself trying to keep up with Rachel's longer stride. "Ms. Wilkinson was in meetings all morning," Shelly-the-Intern gasped out, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a potted tree. "She's been meeting with local animal rights advocates-"
"Really," Rachel said. "Cassie?"
"Oh yes!" Shelly-the-Intern managed to miss the point entirely. "Ms. Wilkinson is very concerned with the ethical treatment of animals. She's preparing an argument to convince the governor to take a harder stand against animal cruelty and increase legal repercussions against people who mistreat any animal. Domestic, feral or wild," she added conscientiously.
That came as something less than a total shock. Rachel was amused, but not surprised. "Cassie's always been very dedicated to animal rights." They were approaching a staircase. "Are we going up?"
"Hmm? Oh, yes! Ms. Wilkinson's office is on the third floor." Shelly-the-Intern sounded slightly out of breath as she jogged up the stairs trying to keep up. "The governor is just a few doors down. He consults with Ms. Wilkinson very frequently."
Rachel rolled her eyes behind her glasses as she trailed her hand over the banister and jogged up the second flight of stairs. "I take it you and Cassie work together a lot?"
"Oh, not very often," Shelly-the-Intern demurred breathlessly. "I'm only an intern. I just work here for the summer. If I'm lucky I may be able to make some connections for after college."
"Connections are very important," Rachel agreed. She paused at the top of the stairs for a moment and hid a grin when Shelly-the-Intern gave a little sigh of relief. "So which office is Cassie's?"
"Rachel?"
Rachel turned at the sound of her name, sliding her glasses off in one smooth motion. "Cassie!"
Cassie looked just like Rachel remembered, though better dressed, and she'd grown her hair out a bit. She looked composed and professional, except for the battered knapsack slung over one shoulder, and the hesitant smile that crossed her lips. "They told me you were downstairs. I didn't even know you were in Sacramento."
"I caught a ride in. Hadn't seen you in a while!" Rachel thought she might be pouring the enthusiasm on a little too hard, but it wasn't entirely feigned. It had been nearly a year since she'd seen Cassie, since she'd taken the job here with the governor. And even before that, they hadn't seen much of one another.
Rachel could blame it on being married, but she didn't really spend any more time with Tobias now than before. She could blame it on work, because being a member of an elite planetary defense military squad was a pretty time-consuming occupation with no set hours, but she'd never had a lot of free time before. She could blame it on Jake, and the lingering weird he and Cassie had going on between them, but she'd had a decade to adjust.
No, she'd avoided Cassie. Cassie had avoided her right back. None of it had anything to do with weddings or Jake (well, maybe a little, but not in the teen-romance sense) or jobs, even, because it wasn't like they couldn't afford a plane flight or a long-distance phone call.
"I missed you," Rachel said. And she was only a little surprised to realize how much she meant it. "I was hoping you'd have time for lunch."
Maybe Cassie was surprised by that too, because she stopped for a moment before she said, "I know a really nice soup and sandwich place just a few blocks away. I think they won't miss me around here for a while."
"Sounds great," Rachel said quickly, because she just knew Shelly-the-Intern was about to say something about how desperately "Ms. Wilkinson" would be missed. "I'm starving. Please tell me they serve meat."
Maybe a year wasn't too long, because Cassie threw back her head and laughed. "They serve meat. Red and mooing, just the way you like it."
Rachel bared her teeth in a grin. "Shall we masticate?"
Cassie shook her head and led the way, leaving Shelly-the-Intern behind. "I hate it when you say that. It makes me think of something out of a National Geographic documentary on predators."
It felt good to laugh. "I am something out of a National Geographic documentary on predators."
Cassie looked over her shoulder and grinned. When Cassie smiled it was with her whole face. "Well, keep your teeth in while we're at the watering hole, Simba. I can trust you in public, right?"
Rachel pretended to think about it. "Will there be any gazelles?"
"Not likely."
"Then I'm good. Lead on! I sense onion soup and roast beef in my future." Rachel smirked. "And I bet we won’t have any trouble getting a cab."
***
The sandwich shop was crowded and stuffy, so they ordered to go and Cassie led the way to a local park just a few blocks down. They claimed a bench near the duck pond and spread out their lunches on paper takeout bags and munched quietly.
Cassie scooped the last of her hummus up on her pita and watched the ducks splashing. "So why are you really here?"
Rachel looked up. "I came to see if you could help us with something."
Cassie nodded, mostly to herself. "I figured. What's happening?"
"Four days ago, a military commander in the Planetary Security Guard deliberately attempted to murder one of his captains. Possibly his entire team." Rachel scraped the bottom of her cup, getting the last soggy bits of bread and cheese out. "I can't prove it yet, but there's a very strong chance that this commander is in contact with Yeerk rebels."
Cassie glanced over at her. "You'd better start at the beginning."
Rachel ran her through the last few days, starting with what Dave Mitchell had told her and ending with the team's narrow escape. "The Yeerks had cleared out at a suspiciously convenient time, and then came back at the one time when no one was watching," Rachel said flatly. "I suspect that Crawford has been in contact with them and arranged the whole thing."
"That's a serious accusation," Cassie pointed out. "Besides, Crawford hates aliens. He can't stand the Hork-Bajir or the Andalites. Why would he be willing to work with the Yeerk in any way?"
"The Yeerk can look human," Rachel said. "That might make it easier for him to get over his xenophobia."
"He's a hateful man," Cassie said doubtfully. "For him to work with the Yeerk there'd have to be something huge at stake for him."
"Like a presidential nomination?" Rachel asked quietly.
Cassie glanced at her sharply. "There are rumors he's planning to run."
"Not rumors," Rachel told her. She shook her head. "Apparently he planned to make a big announcement at the award ceremony a year ago, planning on using Jake's notoriety as a platform, but Justin and Tobias found out about it. Marco says Justin threatened Crawford into keeping his mouth shut."
Cassie wiped her mouth with a napkin, her eyes dark and serious. "And now Justin is dead because of something Crawford did?"
Rachel could feel her nails digging into her palm. "Yes. And nearly Jake and Tobias with him."
"That's very suspicious." Cassie stared at the water. "Circumstantial. But suspicious."
"At the very least, Crawford's been observing this cell long enough to know their actions. Either way, he deliberately sent our team in and now four people are dead and three more are in the hospital."
Cassie looked away as a young guy selling breadcrumbs and birdseed came by. Rachel bought a bag of breadcrumbs and gave him a twenty. "Come on," she said, gathering the remnants of their lunch at pitching them in a nearby trashcan. "Let's feed the ducks."
Cassie sighed and crumbled a handful of breadcrumbs into the water. "You do realize that this is about the most clichéd meeting place in the entire city, right? Everytime someone wants to have a secret meeting, this is where they go. I'd be very surprised if half the city weren't watching us right now and thinking 'there's two Animorphs having a clandestine meeting'. We should be wearing trenchcoats and fedoras." She rubbed the crumbs off her fingers. "And we shouldn't be feeding the ducks breadcrumbs. It's bad for them."
Rachel popped a breadcrumb into her mouth and crunched cheerfully. "I knew you'd say that. I was just wondering how long it would take."
****
Tobias was slumped down in his wheelchair, in a position that must have been uncomfortable considering he'd just had surgery, with a surly expression on his face. "Patch Adams you are not."
"Bite me," Marco said cheerfully, manfully ignoring Jake's barely-muffled snicker. "Patch Adams took one look at your whiny bitch ass and ran screaming for the hills. Now shut up before we leave you on the curb."
"You'd never," Tobias scoffed.
Marco rolled his eyes over Tobias' head and resisted the urge to give the wheelchair a good shove. "Dude, I haven't slept in two days and you haven't bathed in a lot longer than that. Don't count on the power of love and friendship to save you."
"The power of love and friendship?" Tobias repeated. "What is this, Sailor Moon?"
"Our lives," Jake said, "are more like Pokemon."
"Get real," Marco said. "It's more like, like-" he flailed briefly. "Teen Titans."
"I get to be Robin," Jake said immediately.
Tobias hooted. "Marco's Beast Boy!"
Marco gave in to temptation and smacked the back of Tobias' head. "Hey, Beast Boy rocks. Great personality, versatile powers, a hot boyfriend with lots of muscles."
"Contrary to your own personal theories," Jake interjected, leaning against the wall. "Beast Boy and Cyborg are not actually sleeping together. They just act like they are."
Marco shot him a wounded look. "Oh, sure. Ruin my dreams."
Jake lifted a single brow. "If you're dreaming about cartoon characters I must be doing something wrong."
"Oh, no," Marco let his voice drop. "You're doing everything right."
Jake smiled at him and leaned forward and Marco grinned before meeting him halfway in a slow, lazy, open-mouthed kiss that made Tobias squirm and complain that they were setting his recovery back a week.
"Get used to it," Jake said, his breath warm against Marco's mouth before he winked and leaned back against the wall. "Cause you're staying with us until you're on your feet again."
"What? No!" Tobias straightened in the wheelchair and hissed as he pulled his stitches. "I have my own house! I can recover there!"
"Rachel's still in Sacremento," Jake said reasonably. "We can't leave you alone less than a week after you've been shot."
"Yes you can!"
"Suck it up, Tobias," Marco said unsympathetically. "We're going to take care of you and you're going to like it or else. Where the hell is Ax?"
With a resigned sigh, Tobias dropped his head back. "I can't believe you let Ax drive your car."
Marco smirked down at him. "I didn't. Are you crazy? I don't let my mother drive my car. I let him drive Jake's car."
Jake sighed. "I just bought that car."
"Yeah, well," Marco said unsympathetically, "it's not like you can't afford a new one."
Jake shook his head. "If Ax wrecks my car, you're buying me a new one."
The screech of brakes and a sudden sweep of too-bright headlights – Ax had the brights on – cut off Marco's response, which was just as well. A dark green Mazda rx-8 slammed to a stop immediately in front of them, and the passenger side window rolled down to reveal a beaming Ax in human morph.
"I can't believe you drive a Mazda," Tobias said.
"Hey," Jake objected. He took Tobias' arm and tried to help him up and into the car. Tobias didn't seem in the mood to help. "I like this car. I have fond memories of this car."
"You've had this car for a week, Jake," Tobias said. "How many memories could you possibly have?"
"At least three," Marco told him, pulling the back door open as Jake manhandled Tobias up and out of the wheelchair.
Jake snorted and Tobias frowned. "What?"
"Nothing," Jake said, getting Tobias settled. "Put on your seatbelt. I'm going to return the chair."
Marco slid into the front seat. "We clear, Ax?"
Ax waved at Tobias in the rearview mirror. "I made certain I was not followed. We will be able to talk freely in the car." He pointed to a small black device, not unlike a garage door opener, clipped to the visor above his head. "This will effectively neutralize any listening or recording device."
Tobias glanced over as Jake returned and climbed into the back seat beside him. "What's going on?"
"Strategy session," Jake said grimly. "Don't talk too loud, and make sure no one can see your face. We'll talk in detail when we get to a safer location."
"Rachel's not in Sacremento for a conference, is she?" Tobias asked. He didn't sound angry, though he was glaring at the back of Marco's head.
"She's gone to talk to Cassie and see if we can get any help from the governor's office if the shit hits the fan." Marco twisted around in his seat. "Sorry for the story, man, but there were too many people listening in to everything we said while you were in the hospital."
"Nah, it's cool." Tobias let his eyes slip shut as he sank into the car seat. Jake's car really was comfortable. He was tempted to just flop over and spread out, let them wake him when they got back to the house…
The next thing he was aware of was Jake shaking him awake. He was kind of fuzzy on getting into the house; though he was awake enough to recognize they were at Marco's place – technically Jake's too, probably, for all that Jake still kept the crappy one bedroom he'd been living in since after the prison break. Marco's place was nicer though, and got cable.
He was deposited gently in the comfortable chair, which he could hear Marco bitching about briefly, and Jake's voice telling him to shove it. Ax hovered nearby for a minute, offering to get him something to drink, but Tobias waved him away. He actually could have used a cold drink to help wake him up, but Ax still didn't always grasp the basics, and Tobias couldn't afford to go back to the hospital because his best friend had accidentally poisoned him by giving him a glass of dishsoap or something. Voices faded in and out with his awareness for a while, until Marco said something in a tone of voice Tobias, as his former roommate, had heard plenty of times before and realization dawned.
"Oh my god," Tobias said. "You had sex in the car."
Everyone looked at him kind of funny for a minute, except Marco who was having a technogasm over the toys Ax had brought.
"What?" Jake said, and the look on his face said he was trying to figure out why, of all the things they were discussing at the moment, his sex life was suddenly one of them.
"In the car!" Tobias said. "Oh, God. I was sitting in that car!"
"But not as the sex was occuring," Marco said, "which is why you get no sympathy. Can we please focus on the murdering asshole who is trying to kill us with a vast government conspiracy?"
Ax nodded. "That is much more interesting conversation."
Jake pulled a face. "Thanks for the back-up, Ax. I think."
"You've only had that car for a week, Jake."
"Ten days," Marco said. "And seriously, Tobias, you're about two conversations behind the curve right now. Can we get back on topic?"
tbc
sidara!Title: SNAFU
Fandom: Animorphs
Pairings: Jake/Marco, Rachel/Tobias
Spoilers: vague references to The Beginning.
Warnings: Rated R for language, violence and adult situations.
"Dude, I haven't slept in two days and you haven't bathed in a lot longer than that. Don't count on the power of love and friendship to save you."
"The power of love and friendship?" Tobias repeated. "What is this, Sailor Moon?"
"Our lives," Jake said, "are more like Pokemon."
"Get real," Marco said. "It's more like, like-" he flailed briefly. "Teen Titans."
"I get to be Robin," Jake said immediately.
Tobias hooted. "Marco's Beast Boy!"
Marco gave in to temptation and smacked the back of Tobias' head. "Hey, Beast Boy rocks. Great personality, versatile powers, a hot boyfriend with lots of muscles."
"Contrary to your own personal theories," Jake interjected, leaning against the wall. "Beast Boy and Cyborg are not actually sleeping together. They just act like they are."
SNAFU
Situation Normal: All Fucked Up
"You boss is an idiot," Marco snarled. He ground the words out like they hurt, like he wanted to throw them at something or someone.
Jake leaned back against the wall, his legs splayed out in front of him, taking up more of the hallway than was technically his share, although no one seemed particularly inclined to ask him to move. Probably had something to do with the blood drying on his BDUs, or the way he hadn't quite yet managed to loose the deathgrip he had on his handgun. "The general has to make very difficult decisions sometimes," he said, and it was a sign of how tired he was that he almost thought that might be the end of it.
Instead Marco hunkered down beside him, balanced on the balls of his feet, elbows braced against his knees. "Your boss is an idiot," he repeated, his voice low and intense. "Your general sent four good men to their deaths because his ego wasn't being fed."
"You don't know that." Jake let his head fall back against the wall and tried not to think too hard about those four men. "We don't know the whole story. There may be information we don't have."
"He killed them. His own people. Because he could, because it would make him a fucking hero." Marco was vibrating with hostility, anger and a few other emotions. His voice was tense but controlled, but his hands were shaking slightly, and Jake could see emotion, raw and ugly in Marco's eyes.
It was a sign of the tension they'd all been under lately. Usually Marco was better at disguising his feelings.
"Tomlinson was the only guy on this base even half as smart as me. Feretti had two daughters. Carson used to stop by the labs and bribe me with junk food and booze if I'd let him test the experimental weaponry." Marco's voice was starting to lose a little of its steadiness and Jake closed his eyes, wishing he would stop. "Riley – Justin was our fucking friend-"
"And I watched him die," Jake said hollowly.
One of Marco's hands grabbed the side of his head, pressed against his ear, caught in his hair, and tugged until Marco's head was pressed against his, and Marco's breath was hot and unsteady against the side of his face. "He pulled three guys out of there with two bullets in his chest and half his blood on the floor. He saved Tobias, he saved you and I'll love the son of a bitch forever, Jake. But he never should have had to do that because none of you should have been there."
Jake ignored the sideways glances they were getting; most of the personnel on base knew them, knew what they'd been through together, how close they were. It wouldn't be the first time they'd PDA'd and it wouldn't be the last. "It was a set-up," he breathed, letting some of the weight slip away with the admission. "As soon as we walked in, it was over. We were set up."
"He knew," Marco whispered into his ear. "God, Jake, he knew. Rachel's people radioed in less than an hour before he sent your team out. They set the whole thing up hoping that you'd be the one they sent in. They wanted you to come, Jake. They were ready for you. And that bastard sent you right to them."
"I thought we blew our cover," Jake said, sounding tired and hollow, void of any emotion. "I thought I did something wrong. Made the wrong call. Got everyone killed," he added, almost as an afterthought.
"Your boss is an idiot," Marco repeated.
****
He let Marco manhandle him to the infirmary for the required check-up, the familiar routine helping to ground him a little. He got a clean bill of health and an appointment with the base shrink, which Jake decided to put off for the time being. He'd probably appreciate the opportunity to defrag later, but first he wanted to talk to Rachel and Marco.
They wouldn't let him see Tobias, insisted that he go to his quarters and get some rest.
He had quarters on-base that he rarely used. They were comfortable, and spacious, all things considered, far nicer than what most of the officers there had, even the ones who hadn't been handed their rank as an act of desperation. Jake used them mostly as an office, and occasionally, when they were on an alert, or a mission was on stand-by, as a place to rest. Rarely, though. He preferred to sleep at home.
Anyway, while everyone from the President to the UN Security Council was willing to cut him a whole lot of slack, he figured taking his very male lover to bed here on base would be frowned on, and after most missions all he wanted was to know that Marco was within reach.
And right now, he couldn't be certain that they could talk on-base without being overheard.
Rachel met them at the front door of Marco's house, lips drawn into a flat, tight line. She greeted Jake with a hug, gave Marco a searching glance, and locked the door shut behind them. "Ax sent one of the asrith over, someone he trusts. No bugs, no cameras, and he left something that's supposed to make it impossible for us to be overheard, as long as we don't shout, and we stay within fifteen feet of the device."
"How's Tobias?" Jake asked, because at the moment that was more important.
Rachel hesitated. "He'll live."
Jake nodded. "I need to change." He held out a hand unnecessarily.
"Go ahead." Rachel waved him away. "Take a shower, too, please."
He showered and dressed while Marco sat on the bed, on leg drawn against his chest and his chin resting on his knee, and watched him with an intensity bordering on fear.
"Tell me what happened," Jake said. He grabbed the first comfortable sweater he could find and tugged it over his head.
"Rachel has the whole story," Marco replied. "She'd be able to answer your questions better."
"I know. I want to hear your voice." Jake stepped into his jeans and concentrated on not losing his balance, as his exhaustion started to catch up with him. "I thought I might not hear it again."
"I love you."
"I know. Talk more."
"I'm going to kill the general. I don't care who he is. I don't care what his job is. If I'm ever given the opportunity, I will kill him." Marco didn't move, his gaze didn't waiver, but Jake could feel his lover's control stretched paper-thin.
Jake crossed the room in three steps, lifted Marco's head and kissed him. He put everything he had and everything he'd almost never had the chance to say into it, cupped Marco's face in his hands and breathed from him until he felt the weariness start to ease away into something more comfortable.
"Rachel has a story to tell me." Jake said into the silence that had settled over them. "And we have some planning to do, because if what happened today wasn't treason it was something damned close."
"I'm going to kill him," Marco repeated, and they were close enough that his lips brushed against Jake's throat when he spoke.
"I'll help you," Jake promised.
***
The Planetary Security Guard was the creation of the UN Security Council in the days after the second Yeerk invasion. A general was appointed in each represented country, and each general had under him several captains. The captains led teams consisting of two or more squads, each led themselves by a lieutenant. Smaller countries had only a few teams. The United States had more than thirty.
Jake's team, the LA team, under General Crawford, consisted of three squads, each containing about a dozen men. It was the largest team in the country, rivaled only by the NYC team, which had three squads as well, but fewer men each.
Crawford had always been a problem, as far as most of the Animorphs were concerned. He was an angry, close-minded man who didn't much care for off-worlders, thus not endearing him to the Andalites, and he was wary of anyone with the morphing technology. He also subscribed to the belief, held by many who'd been spared the experience, that anyone who'd been used as a host by the Yeerk was a security risk. Jake, an alien-loving Animorph who'd been taken as a controller during a yeerk POW's botched escape attempt at the end of the second war, was high on the general's shit list. This annoyed Rachel and Tobias, who also worked with the general, though not so closely, and worried Marco. Not that Jake particularly cared, because as long as the general did his job, and let Jake do his own, things were cool.
Things were not so cool anymore.
"He sent my squad in on recon," Rachel explained, sitting cross-legged on the recliner and looking less like a covert operative than like a girl Marco had once had a crush on. "Fact-gathering. Kind of unusual, but hey."
Rachel had been a member of Tobias's squad before they married, then Justin's afterwards as a nod to the anti-fraternization regs which couldn't be entirely waived, even for a couple of people who'd saved the world. Only recently she'd been given command of the third squad in Jake's team, a move which had been hotly contested by several higher-ups because of the aforementioned fraternization regs. Jake, who knew both of them could take care of themselves, and better yet, knew that they both knew it, had quietly insisted. The UN had conceded after a quiet battle of wills in which Jake had made the off-hand remark that he'd always wanted to visit the Andalite homeworld, and if he couldn't choose the officers he trusted to back him up, well, a five year sabbatical off-world would be a nice rest.
Marco considered it a mixed blessing, since Rachel caused easily 60% of the trouble she found herself in, but at least this time she would be armed while dealing with it. And he knew Rachel, who had almost as many reasons as he did for wanting Jake alive and unharmed, would watch his back and keep him in line where others, too mindful of his rank, wouldn't.
Today was not the first time she'd saved Jake's life.
"I thought your squad did most of the grunt work," Marco said, dropping onto the couch and using Jake's chest as a pillow. "SWAT-esque? Marine-ish?"
"Marine-ish?" Jake repeated in amused voice while Rachel snorted.
"Normally, Tobias's squad handles recon," Rachel agreed. "There's no definitive roles assigned, but most of the people on my squad are ex-Marines. Hand-to-hand combat experts, explosives experts. But we know how to use binoculars just as well as the next guy, trust me."
"Not that I'm implying anything," Marco said with a grin.
"Of course not," Rachel said dryly. "Shut up, Marco."
Jake tightened his grip around Marco's waist, and he scowled briefly over his shoulder. "Stop taking her side."
"The General told us recon had already been done," Jake said quietly. "There were photographs of the compound, aerial surveillance, records of phone calls in and out, recorded conversations taken with a parabolic mike. Everything we would've expected in a briefing."
"Days old," Rachel said flatly. "He had Captain Harper's recon squad in there early this week. You won't get anything about it in the official records, but off the record Dave Mitchell told me everything. They went in under Kendall-"
"They made Kendall a squad leader?" Jake said. "And a recon squad leader? He's as stealthy as a starving Taxxon outside Texas Steakhouse."
"That's kind of alliterative," Marco said. "Not bad, off the top of your head. So this Kendall's a schmuck?"
"I wouldn't have him on my team," Jake said flatly. "I'm surprised Harper hasn't had him transferred to Antarctica by now."
"Harper can barely stand him, but according to Mitchell there's a lot of pressure coming from higher up to keep Kendall around." Rachel leaned forward. "Listen, Harper's been in Beijing for the last sixteen days, meeting with UN officials. One of his squad leaders, Lieutenant Neilsson-"
"Who was in charge of recon," Jake interrupted.
"Exactly. Neilsson died last week."
"Of heart troubles, I thought."
"Yeah, I imagine being shot through the heart is trouble of a sort." Rachel paused a moment to let that sink in. "Mitchell's got no proof, but he's almost positive Harper doesn't know about it."
"That Neilsson was shot?" Jake asked. "Why haven't I heard about this? The entire base would have heard about it by now."
"How," Marco asked quietly, "did a man get shot in the heart without anyone knowing?"
"His team knows," Rachel said disgustedly. "They were ordered to keep it quiet. They're not allowed to talk to anyone about what happened on that mission."
Jake sat forward as much as he could with Marco half laying on him. "They went on a mission with their captain in another fucking country? Who the hell authorized that?"
"Crawford," Rachel said flatly. "He sent them in. And when Neilsson died, he's the one who ordered them to keep quiet. Harper doesn't even know what happened."
"Son of a bitch," Jake said, and Marco could hear by his voice that he was furious. "Harper's going to lose it when he finds out."
"What did they find?" Marco asked.
"As far as Mitchell could tell, it was a Yeerk cell, recently abandoned." Rachel leaned forward, her voice dropping slightly so as not to carry outside the range of Ax's security device. "They found signs that the cell had been temporarily abandoned, but that the Yeerk had every intention of coming back. Supplies and weaponry were still on site, the power hadn't been cut, the computers were running. No Kandrona supply, but that only means that they'd been living off a portable."
Marco glanced at Rachel from beneath half-lowered lids. "You think they cleared out because they knew Mitchell's squad was going in?"
"Mitchell thinks so." Rachel nodded, her expression hard and serious. "And I agree with him. It's too much coincidence otherwise. They cleared out so Kendall could take the squad in and get recon photos of what looks like an abandoned base. Then, since Harper was out of the country, General Crawford decided not to send them on an insurgence mission-"
"They sent Neilsson out to get shot," Jake 's voice was a rumble in his chest, a soft vibration beneath Marco, carrying every ounce of the other man's anger. "Obviously he was just using Harper's absence as a convenient excuse to get my team in there."
Rachel nodded. "I think so, Jake."
"And then he takes your squad – with all the ex-Marines and close-quarter fighters – and sent you off on recon," Marco finished the thought. "Leaving Tobias's recon people and Riley's squad to invade. Will anyone call him on that decision?"
"Probably not," Jake said tiredly. "It's not unusual to take advantage of what is supposed to be an easy mission to shake the squads up a bit. He'll be able to say that he thought this was going to be a cakewalk, so it was a good opportunity to get Rachel's team some downtime, and get Tobias's people in the thick of things for a refresher course."
"But you told him that things had gone wrong."
"Yeah," Rachel said. "But he timed things too well. By the time I managed to get a report in that the base was no longer abandoned, Jake had already started moving in. Crawford could claim I just got the intel to him too late for it to do any good."
"So where does that leave us?" Marco asked.
Jake's arms tightened around his waist, and a puff of breath against the top of his head was as close to a sigh as Jake would get. "You want to help me commit mutiny?"
Rachel smiled, a slow, dangerous expression reminiscent of a predator.
****
Jake very rarely interfered with Marco's handling of a given situation, mostly because they were so often in agreement on how things should be handled that anything basic – like, say, getting a maid in once a week because they were both slobs in the kitchen, or having all their bills automatically paid every month by the bank because neither one of them could be counted on to make paying the phone bill a high priority – tended to just get done. There were larger areas that were best left in peace whenever possible; Crayak and the Ellimist; Rachel's turning-back-time stunt; Jake's refusal to talk to his family even after they'd (eventually) come crawling back for forgiveness (probably Naomi's doing); Cassie. But even then, it was a mutual agreement to let sleeping dogs lie and all that rot.
In war, Jake had been the leader and he'd been pretty good at it. They'd not always been as good at following, but really, there was only so much you could have expected from a bunch of adolescents. It was in war where Jake and Marco had clashed most often.
Sometimes Marco still wondered if Jake ever got around to forgiving him for being willing to kill Tom. He suspected that if Tom had lived through the war, it would have been easier for Jake to deal with. But he's never asked, and Jake's never offered and there are enough dark memories that push to the forefront of their minds and nightmares every day that Marco doesn't feel like digging up ones that could have been. Anyway, he doesn't want to know.
This was not a war, but it felt like one.
Neither one of them felt safe in the house that night. Marco could see it in the tense press of Jake's lips, the way he held his back and shoulders almost rigidly straight, the way all three of them glanced around them at any sound outside. Rachel, tired and worried, had called the base to check on Tobias one more time – he still wasn't allowed visitors – before crashing in the guest room.
"Dinner?" Marco asked half-heartedly, but Jake didn't have any more of an appetite than he did.
They locked the house up before they went to bed, double-checking everything and setting the alarm system that they almost never used (with the hours they kept, it was too common for one of them to come home in the middle of the night and set it off). It was still twilight outside, not dark enough for them to need the lights to make their way to the bedroom.
It was just light enough that Marco could see Jake's face as he leaned in to kiss him, stretched across the bedsheets, loose-limbed and warm. He ducked his head to kiss Jake's throat, licking the hollow point where Hork-Bajir blades had slit his throat half-open and trailing slow, open-mouthed kissed across Jake's shoulder. His knees pressed against either side of Jake's hips as he ran his palm over the smooth lines of Jake's stomach where two bullets had left him gut-shot and bleeding out.
"I love you," he said, settling on top of Jake, not bothering to brace himself on his elbows, just pressing Jake into the mattress, his weight holding him in place. He ran his tongue over Jake's chest, caught a nipple in his teeth as Jake spread his legs a little to let Marco settle between them.
Fingers slid into his hair, Jake wrapping curls around his hands, cradling Marco's head as he urged him up. Marco ran his tongue over Jake's teeth as their cocks slid together, all heat and friction, and the slow build to completion.
Afterward he pushed himself up until he could look down and meet Jake's eyes. "He tried to kill you." Jake's eyes were nearly black in the darkness. "I'm going to make sure he can't ever do that again." He waited, because this was war and he and Jake couldn't afford to be on separate game plans.
Jake touched the side of his face, pressed his thumb against the corner of Marco's mouth. "I love you, too."
****
Tobias was awake when they finally let Marco in the infirmary to see him. Propped up in a hospital bed and hooked up to an IV and a heart rate monitor, he looked tired and drawn. Some of that was from the surgery to remove a bullet from his shoulder. Some of it was from the painkillers, which hadn't completely worn off.
"You look high as a kite," Marco greeted him cheerfully, dropping into a chair beside the bed and waving off the nurse who had bustled over upon his arrival. "They've got you on the good stuff, huh?"
Tobias glared at him, which Marco took as a good sign that he was rallying. "The nurses here are evil. I've been stuck in this place for three days-"
Marco held up four fingers.
"Four days? Great. And I think I've been conscious for about twenty minutes. Fifteen of which were spent in a debriefing, might I add."
Marco quirked an eyebrow but otherwise didn't react to that. So they'd been debriefing Tobias already? "Crawford's been by to see you?"
"Yeah. Big guy himself."
"He doesn't really strike me as the type who visits the troops in their sickbeds, you know?" Marco said.
"He's not," Tobias said flatly. "Which makes me all kinds of nervous."
"Well, I'm sure it's nothing," Marco said cheerfully. He beamed at Tobias's suspicious glare and reached down to grab the duffel bag he's set by his feet. "I brought you presents," he chanted in a sing-song voice. "Were you a good little patient, Tobias?"
"No." Tobias grinned.
"Excellent! You deserve a reward." Marco flipped open the bag and pulled out a notebook computer. "Wireless internet, babe. Cause we all know how you get without your porn." He ignored Tobias's breathless laughter and hauled out his next present. "And an economy-size bag of snickers bars. Because you'll never get healthy living off hospital food."
"You love me, you really love me." Tobias accepted the computer eagerly, bracing it against his thighs and flipping it open.
"Has Rachel been by?" Marco knew she had, but the nurse was still lingering, listening in rather obviously, and Marco wondered if Crawford had ordered her to do so.
"Yeah, she was the other five minutes of consciousness." He sobered abruptly. "She told me about Justin and the others."
Marco nodded slowly, anger churning in his gut that he tried to keep off his face. "Justin saved your life, man. Saved Jake and Brad Leatton, too. He's getting a medal. Posthumously," he added almost as an afterthought, and he saw Tobias watching him closely.
Marco was a hell of a liar, but his team could read him like a book.
"They're not letting me out to go to the funeral," Tobias said, eyeing Marco carefully. "You'll give Terry my condolences?"
"I will." Marco watched Tobias fiddle with the computer while the nurse resorted to cleaning things she'd already cleaned. "Man, we need to get you morph-capable again. I'd forgotten how much sitting in a hospital sucked."
"Yeah," Tobias said dryly. "Tell me about it. I'm a nothlit, Marco. Unless the Ellimist shows up and offers to change the laws of physics for me, I'm not going to be morphing anytime soon."
"Too bad," Marco sighed theatrically, and flicked his eyes to the nurse. Tobias followed the gaze and frowned, lifting his eyebrows. Marco nodded. "Cause morphing has some serious advantages, you know."
"Like healing?" Tobias said grimly, one hand pressed absently against his abdomen where thick bandages covered the healing surgical incision.
"That too." Marco grinned with lots of teeth.
Tobias groaned. "Marco, if you're talking about using morphing powers while you're having sex I don't want to know about it. Ever."
"I wonder if it's bestiality if there's human consciousness involved," Marco mused thoughtfully.
"Ah, geez, Marco."
"You'd be amazed how many uses a squirrel's tail can-" The sound of the door shutting behind the nurse cut him off.
Tobias laughed, holding his sides. "Man, you're evil. That poor woman's going to be thinking about that for the rest of her life, you know that?"
Marco shrugged. "It got her out of here. Good thing, too, cause my next idea was to offer you a blowjob."
"Let us all be thankful, then," Tobias said dryly. "Why'd you want her out of here?"
"Can't a guy want some privacy?" Marco pushed himself out of the chair and settled on the edge of Tobias's hospital bed. "Gimme that. And I'll have you know, I give excellent blowjobs."
"I used to be your roommate, remember?" Tobias surrendered the computer and broke into the bag of Snickers. "That's how I know Jake's a moaner."
Marco smirked as he opened the computer's word processing program and began typing. 'Crawford set you up. Base not abandoned and he knew it' "Speaking of Jake," he said conversationally. "I'm thinking of asking him to marry me."
Tobias choked on a hunk of Snickers bar.
Marco plopped the computer back on Tobias's lap and glared. "See if I ever share with you again."
Tobias gagged slightly and fell back against the pillows. "You gotta warn a guy, Marco! Geez! I mean-" he skimmed over what Marco had written and hesitated, briefly enough that anyone overhearing would assume he was just getting his breath back. "I mean, seriously, I just had surgery! You can't drop stuff on me like that!" His fingers tapped out a brief message and he shoved the computer back to Marco.
'What are we going to do?' Good. They were all on the same page. Marco grinned as he typed a quick response. 'What we always do.' "If I'd known you were so easily startled I'd have made sure to break the news a little more delicately. Next time I'll have a fainting couch ready for you."
Tobias accepted the computer back with a dirty look. "Okay, seriously? Have you been smoking something? You're gonna ask Jake to marry you?"
"And what's wrong with that?" Marco demanded.
"You're the one who told me Jake was never going to marry you." His fingers rested on the keyboard a moment before he typed one brief message and passed it back.
"That was six years and a war ago. Shit's changed since then." Marco read the single line and grinned. "Though some things haven't."
Tobias grinned at him. "Seriously?"
"Yeah. Seriously."
"I'll be damned. If he goes crazy long enough to accept, I want to be Best Man."
"Sorry, Tobias. I already asked Rachel. You can be the flower girl, though."
Tobias grabbed another Snickers Bar, tossing one to Marco as he settled back against the blankets. "Do I get to pick my own dress?"
"Sure. As long as it fits with the eggplant and mauve color scheme I've got picked out." Marco hit the delete key, carefully erasing Tobias' last message, 'Chaos and mayhem it is.' Then he broke open the Snickers bar and tore off a chunk. "When are they letting you out of here?"
"Haven't said." Tobias made a face. "Considering this is only the first day I've been awake for any amount of time…"
Marco nodded. "You're gonna be all right." He didn't say Because too many people I liked have died already this week, but Tobias could read between the lines.
"Yeah," Tobias nodded. "I'm gonna be fine."
****
The cab pulled up to the curb outside the governor's mansion and the cabbie tapped the bulletproof glass to signal their arrival.
Rachel stared out the window through half-closed eyes for a moment, before leaning forward and pushing a hundred dollar bill through the thin slot in the glass. "If you're still here when I come out, there's another hundred in addition to the fare."
The driver grabbed the bill and grinned at her over his shoulder. "You'd have had me for fifty, you know."
She smiled back as she slid out of the car. "Why pay discount for first rate service?" she shot back.
The cabbie tossed her a brief salute, and reached forward to flip on the hazard lights.
The governor's mansion was brand new, like most of the state and local government buildings. The mansion had been taken over by the Yeerk in the early days of the second invasion, and it hadn't survived the fighting. It had been rebuilt with the kind of speed rarely seen from government contracted jobs, exactly as it had been before the war, but it was too shiny, too white, too new.
Like a lot of things, in the wake of the war.
Rachel pulled her sunglasses out of her purse and slid them on.
The security checkpoint at the front gates of the property was also something new since the war. Two uniformed guards – National Guard troops, usually – manned the gates with a walk-through metal detector, a guard dog trained specifically to sniff out the fluid of the Yeerk pools, and a portable retinal scanner. There was a booth, inside which there would be a satellite uplink so they could check IDs and confirm that any visitors were welcome ones.
Both guards, Rachel couldn't help but notice, paused briefly when they saw her coming.
The dog didn't stir as she approached, boots clicking on the concrete sidewalk. She had her ID out as she approached, handing it to the first guard before he could ask. He vanished inside to confirm it was valid, while the second guard approached with the retinal scanner. She glanced at him over the top of her glasses, raising a brow.
"Procedure, ma'am," the guard held the device steady for her. "If you could lean forward, and look directly at the red dot, please."
She slid the sunglasses down her nose and leaned forward. Retinal scanners were minimalistic security, really. They didn't warn of Yeerk possession, they didn't detect someone in morph, and nowadays those were the two things people in power actually needed to be warned about.
Although, Rachel mused as she focused on the scanner, with all the militant anti-alien groups cropping up across the planet, maybe the normal humans were just as much a threat as the rest.
"Thank you, ma'am." The guard checked the readout on the scanner and hit a few keys, transferring the result of the scan to his partner inside the booth. If her ID and retinal scans didn't match up, an alarm would be raised and she'd be placed under arrest for falsifying identity documents. And just in case she tried to resist arrest, more than two dozen armed guards would appear on the scene within moments of the alert.
Rachel wasn't really expecting problems; Crawford didn't know they were planning anything, and it was too early for anyone else to have become involved. That didn't stop her from planning exactly how to take these two out before reinforcements arrived.
"Lieutenant. Berenson-Hawke?" The first guard, a younger guy, about Rachel's age with bright blond hair, jogged out of the booth and handed her ID back. "The governor wants to know if there's anything the problem, ma'am?"
"No, not at all." Rachel laid it on as thick as she dared, flashing bright white teeth and flipping her hair over her shoulder. "I'm just hoping to drop in on an old friend. You know, catch up on old times."
Blondie presented her with a visitor's day pass on a beaded chain that she could slip over her head. The word "Executive" was printed across the top in big blue letters. "Well, ma'am, is there anything we could do for you?"
"Well." Rachel slid her glasses down and crinkled her eyes at him. "Would it be too terribly much for you could call ahead and ask Cassandra Wilkinson if she has time to join me for lunch?"
Ten minutes later she was being escorted through the halls of the governor's mansion by a peppy young intern named Shelly who kept tripping over herself trying to keep up with Rachel's longer stride. "Ms. Wilkinson was in meetings all morning," Shelly-the-Intern gasped out, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a potted tree. "She's been meeting with local animal rights advocates-"
"Really," Rachel said. "Cassie?"
"Oh yes!" Shelly-the-Intern managed to miss the point entirely. "Ms. Wilkinson is very concerned with the ethical treatment of animals. She's preparing an argument to convince the governor to take a harder stand against animal cruelty and increase legal repercussions against people who mistreat any animal. Domestic, feral or wild," she added conscientiously.
That came as something less than a total shock. Rachel was amused, but not surprised. "Cassie's always been very dedicated to animal rights." They were approaching a staircase. "Are we going up?"
"Hmm? Oh, yes! Ms. Wilkinson's office is on the third floor." Shelly-the-Intern sounded slightly out of breath as she jogged up the stairs trying to keep up. "The governor is just a few doors down. He consults with Ms. Wilkinson very frequently."
Rachel rolled her eyes behind her glasses as she trailed her hand over the banister and jogged up the second flight of stairs. "I take it you and Cassie work together a lot?"
"Oh, not very often," Shelly-the-Intern demurred breathlessly. "I'm only an intern. I just work here for the summer. If I'm lucky I may be able to make some connections for after college."
"Connections are very important," Rachel agreed. She paused at the top of the stairs for a moment and hid a grin when Shelly-the-Intern gave a little sigh of relief. "So which office is Cassie's?"
"Rachel?"
Rachel turned at the sound of her name, sliding her glasses off in one smooth motion. "Cassie!"
Cassie looked just like Rachel remembered, though better dressed, and she'd grown her hair out a bit. She looked composed and professional, except for the battered knapsack slung over one shoulder, and the hesitant smile that crossed her lips. "They told me you were downstairs. I didn't even know you were in Sacramento."
"I caught a ride in. Hadn't seen you in a while!" Rachel thought she might be pouring the enthusiasm on a little too hard, but it wasn't entirely feigned. It had been nearly a year since she'd seen Cassie, since she'd taken the job here with the governor. And even before that, they hadn't seen much of one another.
Rachel could blame it on being married, but she didn't really spend any more time with Tobias now than before. She could blame it on work, because being a member of an elite planetary defense military squad was a pretty time-consuming occupation with no set hours, but she'd never had a lot of free time before. She could blame it on Jake, and the lingering weird he and Cassie had going on between them, but she'd had a decade to adjust.
No, she'd avoided Cassie. Cassie had avoided her right back. None of it had anything to do with weddings or Jake (well, maybe a little, but not in the teen-romance sense) or jobs, even, because it wasn't like they couldn't afford a plane flight or a long-distance phone call.
"I missed you," Rachel said. And she was only a little surprised to realize how much she meant it. "I was hoping you'd have time for lunch."
Maybe Cassie was surprised by that too, because she stopped for a moment before she said, "I know a really nice soup and sandwich place just a few blocks away. I think they won't miss me around here for a while."
"Sounds great," Rachel said quickly, because she just knew Shelly-the-Intern was about to say something about how desperately "Ms. Wilkinson" would be missed. "I'm starving. Please tell me they serve meat."
Maybe a year wasn't too long, because Cassie threw back her head and laughed. "They serve meat. Red and mooing, just the way you like it."
Rachel bared her teeth in a grin. "Shall we masticate?"
Cassie shook her head and led the way, leaving Shelly-the-Intern behind. "I hate it when you say that. It makes me think of something out of a National Geographic documentary on predators."
It felt good to laugh. "I am something out of a National Geographic documentary on predators."
Cassie looked over her shoulder and grinned. When Cassie smiled it was with her whole face. "Well, keep your teeth in while we're at the watering hole, Simba. I can trust you in public, right?"
Rachel pretended to think about it. "Will there be any gazelles?"
"Not likely."
"Then I'm good. Lead on! I sense onion soup and roast beef in my future." Rachel smirked. "And I bet we won’t have any trouble getting a cab."
***
The sandwich shop was crowded and stuffy, so they ordered to go and Cassie led the way to a local park just a few blocks down. They claimed a bench near the duck pond and spread out their lunches on paper takeout bags and munched quietly.
Cassie scooped the last of her hummus up on her pita and watched the ducks splashing. "So why are you really here?"
Rachel looked up. "I came to see if you could help us with something."
Cassie nodded, mostly to herself. "I figured. What's happening?"
"Four days ago, a military commander in the Planetary Security Guard deliberately attempted to murder one of his captains. Possibly his entire team." Rachel scraped the bottom of her cup, getting the last soggy bits of bread and cheese out. "I can't prove it yet, but there's a very strong chance that this commander is in contact with Yeerk rebels."
Cassie glanced over at her. "You'd better start at the beginning."
Rachel ran her through the last few days, starting with what Dave Mitchell had told her and ending with the team's narrow escape. "The Yeerks had cleared out at a suspiciously convenient time, and then came back at the one time when no one was watching," Rachel said flatly. "I suspect that Crawford has been in contact with them and arranged the whole thing."
"That's a serious accusation," Cassie pointed out. "Besides, Crawford hates aliens. He can't stand the Hork-Bajir or the Andalites. Why would he be willing to work with the Yeerk in any way?"
"The Yeerk can look human," Rachel said. "That might make it easier for him to get over his xenophobia."
"He's a hateful man," Cassie said doubtfully. "For him to work with the Yeerk there'd have to be something huge at stake for him."
"Like a presidential nomination?" Rachel asked quietly.
Cassie glanced at her sharply. "There are rumors he's planning to run."
"Not rumors," Rachel told her. She shook her head. "Apparently he planned to make a big announcement at the award ceremony a year ago, planning on using Jake's notoriety as a platform, but Justin and Tobias found out about it. Marco says Justin threatened Crawford into keeping his mouth shut."
Cassie wiped her mouth with a napkin, her eyes dark and serious. "And now Justin is dead because of something Crawford did?"
Rachel could feel her nails digging into her palm. "Yes. And nearly Jake and Tobias with him."
"That's very suspicious." Cassie stared at the water. "Circumstantial. But suspicious."
"At the very least, Crawford's been observing this cell long enough to know their actions. Either way, he deliberately sent our team in and now four people are dead and three more are in the hospital."
Cassie looked away as a young guy selling breadcrumbs and birdseed came by. Rachel bought a bag of breadcrumbs and gave him a twenty. "Come on," she said, gathering the remnants of their lunch at pitching them in a nearby trashcan. "Let's feed the ducks."
Cassie sighed and crumbled a handful of breadcrumbs into the water. "You do realize that this is about the most clichéd meeting place in the entire city, right? Everytime someone wants to have a secret meeting, this is where they go. I'd be very surprised if half the city weren't watching us right now and thinking 'there's two Animorphs having a clandestine meeting'. We should be wearing trenchcoats and fedoras." She rubbed the crumbs off her fingers. "And we shouldn't be feeding the ducks breadcrumbs. It's bad for them."
Rachel popped a breadcrumb into her mouth and crunched cheerfully. "I knew you'd say that. I was just wondering how long it would take."
****
Tobias was slumped down in his wheelchair, in a position that must have been uncomfortable considering he'd just had surgery, with a surly expression on his face. "Patch Adams you are not."
"Bite me," Marco said cheerfully, manfully ignoring Jake's barely-muffled snicker. "Patch Adams took one look at your whiny bitch ass and ran screaming for the hills. Now shut up before we leave you on the curb."
"You'd never," Tobias scoffed.
Marco rolled his eyes over Tobias' head and resisted the urge to give the wheelchair a good shove. "Dude, I haven't slept in two days and you haven't bathed in a lot longer than that. Don't count on the power of love and friendship to save you."
"The power of love and friendship?" Tobias repeated. "What is this, Sailor Moon?"
"Our lives," Jake said, "are more like Pokemon."
"Get real," Marco said. "It's more like, like-" he flailed briefly. "Teen Titans."
"I get to be Robin," Jake said immediately.
Tobias hooted. "Marco's Beast Boy!"
Marco gave in to temptation and smacked the back of Tobias' head. "Hey, Beast Boy rocks. Great personality, versatile powers, a hot boyfriend with lots of muscles."
"Contrary to your own personal theories," Jake interjected, leaning against the wall. "Beast Boy and Cyborg are not actually sleeping together. They just act like they are."
Marco shot him a wounded look. "Oh, sure. Ruin my dreams."
Jake lifted a single brow. "If you're dreaming about cartoon characters I must be doing something wrong."
"Oh, no," Marco let his voice drop. "You're doing everything right."
Jake smiled at him and leaned forward and Marco grinned before meeting him halfway in a slow, lazy, open-mouthed kiss that made Tobias squirm and complain that they were setting his recovery back a week.
"Get used to it," Jake said, his breath warm against Marco's mouth before he winked and leaned back against the wall. "Cause you're staying with us until you're on your feet again."
"What? No!" Tobias straightened in the wheelchair and hissed as he pulled his stitches. "I have my own house! I can recover there!"
"Rachel's still in Sacremento," Jake said reasonably. "We can't leave you alone less than a week after you've been shot."
"Yes you can!"
"Suck it up, Tobias," Marco said unsympathetically. "We're going to take care of you and you're going to like it or else. Where the hell is Ax?"
With a resigned sigh, Tobias dropped his head back. "I can't believe you let Ax drive your car."
Marco smirked down at him. "I didn't. Are you crazy? I don't let my mother drive my car. I let him drive Jake's car."
Jake sighed. "I just bought that car."
"Yeah, well," Marco said unsympathetically, "it's not like you can't afford a new one."
Jake shook his head. "If Ax wrecks my car, you're buying me a new one."
The screech of brakes and a sudden sweep of too-bright headlights – Ax had the brights on – cut off Marco's response, which was just as well. A dark green Mazda rx-8 slammed to a stop immediately in front of them, and the passenger side window rolled down to reveal a beaming Ax in human morph.
"I can't believe you drive a Mazda," Tobias said.
"Hey," Jake objected. He took Tobias' arm and tried to help him up and into the car. Tobias didn't seem in the mood to help. "I like this car. I have fond memories of this car."
"You've had this car for a week, Jake," Tobias said. "How many memories could you possibly have?"
"At least three," Marco told him, pulling the back door open as Jake manhandled Tobias up and out of the wheelchair.
Jake snorted and Tobias frowned. "What?"
"Nothing," Jake said, getting Tobias settled. "Put on your seatbelt. I'm going to return the chair."
Marco slid into the front seat. "We clear, Ax?"
Ax waved at Tobias in the rearview mirror. "I made certain I was not followed. We will be able to talk freely in the car." He pointed to a small black device, not unlike a garage door opener, clipped to the visor above his head. "This will effectively neutralize any listening or recording device."
Tobias glanced over as Jake returned and climbed into the back seat beside him. "What's going on?"
"Strategy session," Jake said grimly. "Don't talk too loud, and make sure no one can see your face. We'll talk in detail when we get to a safer location."
"Rachel's not in Sacremento for a conference, is she?" Tobias asked. He didn't sound angry, though he was glaring at the back of Marco's head.
"She's gone to talk to Cassie and see if we can get any help from the governor's office if the shit hits the fan." Marco twisted around in his seat. "Sorry for the story, man, but there were too many people listening in to everything we said while you were in the hospital."
"Nah, it's cool." Tobias let his eyes slip shut as he sank into the car seat. Jake's car really was comfortable. He was tempted to just flop over and spread out, let them wake him when they got back to the house…
The next thing he was aware of was Jake shaking him awake. He was kind of fuzzy on getting into the house; though he was awake enough to recognize they were at Marco's place – technically Jake's too, probably, for all that Jake still kept the crappy one bedroom he'd been living in since after the prison break. Marco's place was nicer though, and got cable.
He was deposited gently in the comfortable chair, which he could hear Marco bitching about briefly, and Jake's voice telling him to shove it. Ax hovered nearby for a minute, offering to get him something to drink, but Tobias waved him away. He actually could have used a cold drink to help wake him up, but Ax still didn't always grasp the basics, and Tobias couldn't afford to go back to the hospital because his best friend had accidentally poisoned him by giving him a glass of dishsoap or something. Voices faded in and out with his awareness for a while, until Marco said something in a tone of voice Tobias, as his former roommate, had heard plenty of times before and realization dawned.
"Oh my god," Tobias said. "You had sex in the car."
Everyone looked at him kind of funny for a minute, except Marco who was having a technogasm over the toys Ax had brought.
"What?" Jake said, and the look on his face said he was trying to figure out why, of all the things they were discussing at the moment, his sex life was suddenly one of them.
"In the car!" Tobias said. "Oh, God. I was sitting in that car!"
"But not as the sex was occuring," Marco said, "which is why you get no sympathy. Can we please focus on the murdering asshole who is trying to kill us with a vast government conspiracy?"
Ax nodded. "That is much more interesting conversation."
Jake pulled a face. "Thanks for the back-up, Ax. I think."
"You've only had that car for a week, Jake."
"Ten days," Marco said. "And seriously, Tobias, you're about two conversations behind the curve right now. Can we get back on topic?"
tbc
