Archive of Our Own ^beta

He should have been used to this, but he wasn’t. Not when his feet were new every time he morphed. There was a bright side: he’d never have to worry about gross calluses. Less bright: running in the forest until the fresh baby skin on your feet was ripped to shreds was probably less pleasant than calluses.

He should have been used to this, but this time was different. Twigs cracked underfoot, leaves crunched; it was familiar. But usually the sound was multiplied by all their running feet: Jake’s heavy stomps, Rachel’s long strides, the quick patter of Ax’s hooves. 

Why was he alone? 

It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting away. In the end, it was the only thing that ever mattered. Whatever damage they did to the Yeerks was insignificant, but they had to get away every single time. They had to survive so they could plan the next strike, the next superficial wound that would never take down the monster, so they could get to the most important part again: running away.

The trees thinned out ahead of him. The rustling leaves and snapping twigs and uneven forest floor gave way to a gravel road. The rocks still bit at his bare feet, but each crunching step took him further away from the danger in the woods. He left it behind until it was so distant that it didn’t even matter anymore. There was still a hard pit of dread at the bottom of his stomach, but it didn’t feel like danger anymore. It felt like an obligation he hadn’t agreed to. Every Yeerk infiltration, they willingly walked into their own executions, and somehow this felt worse. 

He was still running, his breath heaving, sweat dripping down the back of his neck, soaking through his white dress shirt.

Dress shirt?

Marco looked down at himself and noticed for the first time his black tie, his white shirt, his neatly-pressed black pants with dirt and debris caked into their dragging hems because, for some reason, he was still wearing no shoes.

He stopped running and looked ahead, really looked, instead of watching the ground to make sure he didn’t trip. Gradually, gravel evened out into pavement, widened into a road, and at the distant end of the road was a parking lot. Marco started walking, even though he didn’t want to, and as he got closer he saw cars parked in neat rows, and then people milling about in front of what would have been a picturesque lodge if he didn’t feel bile rising at the back of his throat.

He wasn’t lost. He wasn’t being chased. He was late.

He stood in front of the sign pointing the way to the reception, face hot with secondhand embarrassment. 

Welcome to Our Wedding
We’ve Done the Math for You 
Peter + Nora = Forever

Marco weaved between the women in dresses holding tiny glasses of wine, the men in suits with finger foods on toothpicks. He didn’t recognize them and they didn’t acknowledge him. They all looked exactly the same anyway: just blank smiling faces thinking about nothing but free drinks and how it was so nice that Peter was finally able to move on from the tragic loss of his wife. Marco swallowed the poison and pressed forward through the thickening throng of people and toward the back of the lodge. How did these two huge nerds even have this many friends?

He scanned the crowd and breathed a sigh of relief almost immediately. Big Jake was always easy to spot in a crowd, even from behind, even wearing the same identical suit as all the other men. At least he wore it well.

Marco tapped Jake on the upper arm and forced a grin almost all the way up to his eyes. Jake tensed and balled his hands into fists, but he mostly unwound when he saw it was Marco. He returned Marco’s smile: the one that gave out before it made it all the way there.

“You hanging in there?” Jake asked.

“Better than a kitten on a poster,” Marco said, bitterness narrowing his throat so his voice came out less sincere than he was going for. Not that it ever sounded that sincere.

Jake gave a single pathetic half-laugh, which was all Marco deserved. “Have you seen Peter yet?”

Marco felt a muscle in his jaw tighten, so he smiled wider. “Have I told you how sexy you are in a suit?”

Jake crossed his arms and his sleeves went tight around his broad shoulders. “Last time I wore a suit, you said I looked like I was ready for a flood and my buttons were going to pop any second.”

“And that’s why you shouldn’t have made Rachel invite me to her bat mitzvah, and also why you should have shopped out of your dad’s closet.” Marco looked him up and down pointedly. “Like you did this time.”

“So does that mean you think my dad is sexy?” Jake wrinkled his nose a little at how  he’d even said it.

Marco felt the corner of his mouth curl, and suddenly he was a little bit more himself. “Only when he’s wearing those short shorts he puts on when he does yardwork.”

“God.” Jake tried to tuck some of his hair behind his ear but it flopped back across his forehead. Back when all it meant was that Jake was a little flustered, Marco used to think that was cute. Now he associated it with high-risk plans and tense discussions about what to do with the Yeerks in their families. He missed the days when life was simple and Jake was just cute.

Marco pursed his lips. “Guess I’m gonna try to find my dad. You get back to mingling. I know you’re the life of the party.”

“Just wait until the dancing starts,” Jake deadpanned.

“Be careful, I might not be able to hold myself back.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Bye, Marco.”

Marco turned to scan the crowd, and when he looked back to where Jake had been, he was gone. Marco hadn’t expected that he actually would go and mingle. Maybe he’d fooled someone at the open bar into thinking he was like thirty and his inhibitions were breaking down. Well, if anyone deserved to get drunk illegally at his best friend’s dad’s wedding, it was Jake.

Marco stood on his tiptoes and squinted. He still didn’t spot his dad, but his eyes locked onto a cascade of curls glowing gold in the late afternoon sun. He almost didn’t recognize her from behind because she’d been straightening her hair since sixth grade, but of course she’d mastered taming it into big beautiful spirals that fell gracefully down her shoulders in the meantime. What else should he have expected? Her coral dress brought out her tan, and her matching pumps made her look eight feet tall. She seemed to get even taller as he approached her, and for a second he thought that when he closed the distance, he would only come up to her knees.

It wasn’t quite that extreme, but it might as well have been when Rachel looked down at him and her perfectly arched eyebrows shot up and then furrowed into a grimace. “Why are you so sweaty?”

Marco swiped the back of his hand across his forehead and frowned at the lingering moisture. He stood up straighter because maybe at his full height, he didn’t have quite as many things to be embarrassed about. He still barely reached her shoulder, so maybe that actually made it worse. He cleared his throat. “I just happened to run into Nora’s cute niece and… well, you know, a gentleman never tells.” 

“Uh huh.” She planted her hands on her hips and looked down. “And you forgot to put your shoes back on afterwards?”

Marco’s eyes shot down to his dirty feet then back up to Rachel, who was, at this point, ten feet tall. “Obviously, I’m connecting with nature. You should try it. I hear it’s a good way to chill out those murderous impulses.”

“Oh, hey, does that mean you want to join us on our next hike?” Cassie appeared from behind Marco and sidled up to Rachel, passing her a small glass of some kind of dark red punch. She smiled at Marco, her eyes twinkling. “Since you’re so into nature and all.”

Now even Cassie was messing with him. This was truly the greatest day of his life.

“It’s not like Rachel’s into nature,” Marco scoffed. “She only goes with you to have an excuse to put together cute outdoor looks.”

“And that’s a valid reason.” Rachel took a swig of her punch and managed to look absolutely glamorous while she did it.

“Have you seen your dad yet?” Cassie asked.

“Wow, the question of the hour! No, I can’t find him. You got any tips, as an empath?”

Cassie put her fingers up to her temples and closed her eyes. “I see… Hold on, I’m getting something… I see that he and Nora are over there where all the photographers are.” She opened her eyes and grinned. Rachel almost spit her punch back into her cup and managed to look absolutely glamorous while she did it.

Marco buried his (still-sweaty, somehow) face in his hands. He didn’t even have a comeback for that. “Thanks,” he managed.

“When you’re done talking to your dad, Ax is looking for you too.”

“Got it.” Marco put up a hand in a half-assed sort of wave. “Well ladies, it’s been a blast. Enjoy the free drinks, have some crudités, whatever that is—”

“It’s a veggie platter,” Rachel interrupted.

“—and you’re welcome for inviting you.”

Cassie laughed. “Thanks for inviting us.” 

Marco backed away from them theatrically and bumped straight into a man he’d never met. It was so weird how none of the attendees were any of Peter’s college friends he used to play D&D with, or his old coworkers, or friends from back when he and Eva went to church while Marco slept until noon. The unfamiliar man spilled some of his drink down the front of his suit, but he didn’t even react, he just carried on with his conversation.  

“Hey, try not to get sweat on the guests!” Rachel said, flipping her curls over her shoulder in just such a way that they caught the sunlight, and Marco could swear she had a halo for a second.

He made his way toward the gang of photographers and finally saw his dad. Rocking impatiently, his hands in his pockets, Marco waited on the sidelines for a break in the photo op. Peter, who Marco had secretly always thought looked a little unfortunate in profile, with his weak chin and pointy nose and thick glasses, was smiling so broadly that none of that even mattered. If Marco had been the kind of guy who got happy for other people, he’d have smiled too, but he wasn’t really, and especially not right now.

“You look great, Dad,” Marco said begrudgingly, before a wave of ice washed over him from his throat to his muddy toes.

Peter turned toward him and pulled Nora around with him. The space between them… well, there wasn’t any. Their faces were connected by skin stretched thin, fading from Peter’s pale complexion to Nora’s dark brown in splotches. Their features were twisted where the skin strained, the corners of their mouths reaching for each other, dribbling slightly. Nora’s curly hair, styled more ornately than Marco had ever seen her wear it in class, crept over Peter’s thinning scalp like vines taking over an old house. They shared their wide body like conjoined twins, Peter’s tuxedo melting into Nora’s white gown like a coffee stain.

Marco’s stomach turned and he forgot how to breathe. 

“Thanks, kid,” Peter said, and his slurred words stretched the side of Nora’s mouth open. “Uh, you too. Have you been running?”

Marco choked out a horrified laugh. This grotesque dadmonster with a side of “what the fuck happened to her” thought that he looked messy. Marco couldn’t even look at whatever this was. He fumbled for an excuse to make an escape, and then he noticed Nora shift like one of those lenticular holograms that change when you look at them from a different angle. If he looked closely, her hair was straighter, her skin was lighter, her eyes were sharper. If he looked closely, her pulled face was both a nightmare and a wish.

Marco’s eyes burned, and he felt so sick he had to cover his mouth. He shook his head and backed away, not even able to babble out a “sorry Dad, I have the sudden urge to vomit.”

He turned and ran, knocking into people and pushing past them. They dropped their drinks and their hors d'oeuvres slid onto the ground. None of them reacted, they just kept talking about the flowers and the venue and the weather. Incredulously, Marco glanced up at a woman whose dress he’d smashed sludgy camembert into. Her face was blank, except for a too-wide smile. Not blank as in expressionless, blank as in no eyes, no nose, all lipstick and teeth.

A hand wrapped around his wrist and Marco shrieked. 

“I know that this human ceremony is very exciting, and that you are happy to see me, but you do not have to voice your delight so loudly,” Ax said in that airy way where no one was sure if he was joking, but Marco generally assumed he was.

Marco let out a long breath and pulled it sharply back in. Every therapist he’d ever had one session with before refusing to go back had recommended the deep breathing and counting to ten, but Marco was too impatient for that. The best he could do was rough panting while he tried to get Ax to come into focus. His freckled skin, his big hazel eyes, his soft lips, his coily hair that Cassie had styled into twists, the fitted suit that Rachel had expertly dressed him in. Marco’s breath stalled in his throat again.

Ax let go of Marco’s hand, looked down at his own, and rubbed his fingers together. “You are moist.”

“I know!” Marco screeched. “What is going on?”

“We are at your father’s wedding to your teacher, and there is a marvelous snack table. You told me I am not allowed to partake, but I wanted to seek your supervision to try what Tobias calls ‘canapés.’”

Marco threw his hands up. “Fine, you can have the food! Go crazy! What do I care?”

Ax bit his lip, failing to hold back his delight. Marco’s stomach fluttered, which did his lingering nausea no favors. Disregarding Marco’s persistent dampness, Ax took his hand again and dragged him to the hors d'oeuvres table. Ax piled his plate high and led Marco toward the drinks, where Tobias was standing. 

It wasn’t Tobias like Marco had ever seen him. He was huge—a hawk the size of a person, standing on scaly legs so long they looked like stilts. From his beak hung the mangled corpse of a mouse, actively dripping viscera. He was also wearing a suit jacket and a bow tie. 

‹It’s a beautiful wedding,› he said.

“This is delicious!” Ax said, his voice muffled. “Marco, you must try this!”

Marco glanced over, and Ax was reaching something toward him. He looked down at Ax’s plate. Mixed in with the cheese on crackers and slices of kielbasa were bits of flesh, pieces of fingers, sharp black shards that Marco recognized as broken Hork-Bajir blades. Without even looking, Marco smacked whatever was coming toward his face out of Ax’s hand.

Ax blinked and a smile slowly spread across his face. With his now-free hand, Ax brushed his fingers gently down Marco’s cheek. Marco stiffened and his face went hot. 

“This is hard for you. You are handling it with honor,” Ax said, looking down at Marco deeply, penetratingly. Again, like a shifting lenticular hologram, when Marco squinted at him, Ax’s eyes changed from normal, human hazel to enormous, shining emerald green, slit pupil. His Andalite eyes peered out of his human face, and somehow Marco was still breathless, his heart still racing, his chest still hot.

Ax leaned down then, his face coming closer and closer to Marco’s. He should have flinched back, he should have pushed Ax away, he should have, he should have… But he didn’t want to. He tipped his face back, closed his eyes, and shifted up to his tiptoes. 

As their lips would have met, instead Marco felt smooth, flat skin under his. He opened his eyes and Ax’s giant Andalite eyes stared into his. He pulled back and saw that Ax’s mouth had disappeared. Andalite eyes. No mouth. Completely human otherwise.

Ax reached down and grabbed a cup of punch from the table, brought it up to where his mouth had been, and tipped it up. The red liquid dribbled down the front of his white dress shirt, echoing the bloody mouse hanging from Tobias’ beak.

Marco turned to the punch bowl and gazed into it. He could swear that he saw something in the bottom of it. He leaned forward over the table and brought his face close to the liquid, close to the dark shadow that somehow felt deeper than the bowl could have gone. It looked like it reached all the way through the table. It looked like it went deeper than the ground itself. 

Something shot out of the punch bowl, something black and rope-like. Marco had been an eel. It felt like an eel, smooth and slick, but much thinner and with a strong grip. Marco knew because it wrapped itself around his wrist. He pulled his arm back, but another of the slippery tendrils wrapped around his other arm, then one around his throat. They pulled.

Marco pitched forward into the punch bowl. He shot down headfirst like a torpedo, the tendril tightening around his throat. He gasped in a mouthful of... punch? Water? It didn’t have a taste, and it was somehow clear and red at the same time. Down, in the distance, he could make out a huge shadow, the edges indistinct. All he could see were long, thin tentacles writhing all around the nebulous mass, looking like some kind of impossibly large germ.

Marco tried to struggle, but his arms were pulled tight and his legs had never been strong in the water anyway. He couldn’t breathe. He’d gasped in a mouthful of punchwater and his lungs were heavy. He needed to morph. He needed to fight. Something to breathe the water. Something to cut himself loose and maybe hurt the visser enough to escape.

He started to morph. His brain was going foggy, but he was changing. His arms became longer, more muscular. Blades shot out of his wrists, his elbows. Hork-Bajir. He was becoming a Hork-Bajir. Guess after the day he’d had, he felt like fighting. 

He pulled at the slick tendrils, trying to twist them so that they looped around his wrist blades and he could free himself. But he wasn’t strong enough yet. And his arms were getting longer and longer. He didn’t remember Hork-Bajir arms being this long. He didn’t remember Hork-Bajir being able to breathe underwater either, but he wasn’t suffocating. 

Marco kicked and launched forward with more thrust than he expected, even from powerful Hork-Bajir legs. He rammed into the monster elbows first, leaving trails behind his elbow and wrist blades. He screamed. He didn’t have a whole lot of practice in his Hork-Bajir morph, but he didn’t think he was clumsy enough to stab himself. 

He pushed through the pain and grabbed onto the visser, digging his wrist blades into either side to keep himself steady. With each blade that penetrated the visser’s flesh, Marco twisted away from the pain in his side, in his neck. The momentum of his writhing body sent the two of them spiraling deeper. 

He meant to clench his jaw to keep from screaming, to keep from gasping in lungfuls of punchwater, but he didn’t need to. The feeling was far away. 

He couldn’t give in. If this was it, he was going to keep fighting. He wrapped another pair of arms around the visser, burying in row after row of blades, screaming in his own head. It was like he was tying himself up with barbed wire.

Another pair of arms?

He didn’t have eyelids, so they couldn’t snap open, but the same dramatic effect was there. He wasn’t in a punch bowl. He wasn’t giving Visser Three a passionate danger hug. He wasn’t a human, and he wasn’t a Hork-Bajir.

Marco flopped around. His head?—his body?—most of him was in what sounded like a puddle on the carpet next to his bed, but some of him was still hanging over the side of his mattress. What was he? 

He tried to turn over and felt another stab. His body jerked away from the pain like rolling over a half-rotted carcass. He had eyes on either side of his body, and now that they were both uncovered, he could take himself in. He was a murky dark green color, muddied with dull red splotches. He was amorphous, boneless, spread out in all directions across his dirty laundry like a fleshy, misshapen spider web. There was something Hork-Bajir about him. His flaccid arms and legs looked muscular in some way, like how a Stretch Armstrong still looks kind of muscular when it’s about to pop. He had blades, but way too many, running up along the length of his limbs like the teeth of a saw. Each of the limbs were tipped in either a dinosaur foot or hand, but they were all soft, floppy, and elongated, sort of… tentacle-y? Were there ten of them? There were probably ten of them.

Marco tried to take a deep breath, and he heard a sound like the air slowly being let out of a wet balloon. He could barely breathe, and when he tried to move so that his lungs weren’t being crushed by his own flab, he would stab himself, jerk, and stab himself again from another direction. What should he call this abomination? Hork-Basquid? Giant Squork?

He couldn’t sigh, but he wanted to. He thought he was over this. He’d worked so hard to perfect his emotional control. He was Mother Teresa. He was the Dalai Lama. He was Commander Spock.

With a sloppy squelch, all ten deboned chainsaw legs pulled back into him and twisted together into the normal number of arms and legs. When his body settled, he became acutely aware that he and the carpet around him were absolutely soaked.

He sat up and finally let out that sigh. At least there was a bright side. 

Squid blood is blue. Hork-Bajir blood is green. If this didn’t come out of the carpet, no one would know it was blood.

Still, this wasn’t the kind of wet dream he was used to having.

It’s unsanitary, but who hasn’t ridden the bus with their whole face pressed against the window? It’s nice and cool, and sometimes your head gets heavy. Maybe not as heavy as when you’re half giant squid, half Hork-Bajir, and you have no water and also no bones, but that’s not as universal an experience.

Marco was somewhere between sleep and death when the bus stopped, and if it hadn’t been the end of the line, he’d probably have ridden all the way back to the transit center. He dragged himself off the bus, and walked to Cassie’s with his eyes so nearly closed, his eyelashes were doubling as sunglasses. Was this what a hangover was like? If it was, Marco was never going to get drunk.

It wasn’t the stupid combo morphing that had thrown him off. Of course he was annoyed that he’d done it again, but the dream was eating at him even more. For one, he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep, and it wasn’t because he’d spent an hour on his hands and knees quoting Ax’s favorite OxyClean commercial to himself while he scrubbed. What would his excuse be for their new dingy green towels and the huge stain on his floor? “Sorry, Dad, I suddenly got really into tie-dye, but it turns out I really suck at it, and also I’m colorblind. How did we not know sooner? If you think about it, Dad, that’s on you.”

He was over the whole marriage thing. He really was. Nora had been living with them for months, and anyway, he was in a completely different headspace after saving his mom and choosing to let Visser One live. He had bigger things to worry about than running into his math teacher on the way to brush his teeth, including if his rabies had cleared up. 

Somehow, even though he felt like hot garbage, he’d arrived early to the meeting. Cassie was there, of course, and so were the two nerds who lived in her backyard. Tobias, as usual, was up in the rafters, picking fleas out of his bird armpit. It had been a while since Marco had noticed how long birds of prey’s legs are. When they’re perched, they look normal, but if they lean forward, you can tell they look like they’re wearing your mom’s khaki capris. Not Marco’s mom. Marco’s mom was fashionable. But the idea of a mom’s capris. 

He wanted to put the dream out of his mind, but when he saw Tobias’ long bird-ankles sticking out of his feather capris, he couldn’t help but remember what he’d looked like in the dream, his scaly legs as long as human legs and mouse guts dripping down his chest. The bow tie had been pretty funny, though.

Ax was in human morph, wearing only his skintight morphing outfit like it was totally normal that one of Cassie’s friends had stopped by after jazzercise. Cassie was next to him—well, her butt was up in the air next to him, because the rest of her was bent down into a large cage. 

“What do you want me to do?” Ax asked her, leaning forward.

“I just need you to hold him.” Cassie sat back on her heels, bundling something tightly to her chest. She stood up and handed it carefully to Ax. It was a tiny baby deer wrapped in a blanket. It kicked and tried to get away as she passed it between them, but Ax put one hand under the deer and used his other to wrap the blanket more tightly around it. Cassie kept her hands under the deer until it was clear that Ax was holding it safely, then squeezed his hands in hers and turned back around to grab the deer’s medication. Ax looked down at the deer with a tender expression that Marco had only seen… well, in the dream he’d just had. It turned out that Marco had a pretty accurate imagination.

You know how when girls look at pictures of male celebrities holding puppies, they say things like it makes them spontaneously ovulate? Whatever the dude version of that was, it was happening to Marco. He just stood in the doorway of the barn, transfixed, while Cassie turned back around to squirt a tube of medicine down the deer’s throat. Marco couldn’t care less about the deer.

“It is fascinating,” Ax said, cradling the deer closer as Cassie massaged its throat to make sure it swallowed the medicine, “how closely these Earth animals resemble my people, and are yet so different. I have seen many mother deer and their young, but this is the smallest. At this size, a young Andalite would still be in their mother’s pouch.”

Marco kind of tuned out what Ax was saying because he didn’t really care that Andalites were apparently marsupials, even though Cassie was rapt. Marco was listening to him, but he wasn’t listening . Instead, he was thinking about how it had been a long time since he’d really heard Ax play with sounds. He still went a little hard on the plosives, but it wasn’t anything a pop filter couldn’t help. Marco zeroed in on Ax’s mouth, noticing how its corners turned up when he gave the fawn’s head a final stroke as Cassie put it back in the cage.

He tried not to remember the way Ax’s lips looked as they closed in on his, or the welling disappointment he’d felt when they hadn’t—  

“Marco.” 

A jolt of electricity jumped up Marco’s spine and he grabbed the door frame, ready to climb it like Spider-Man. Jake was standing behind him, his head tipped to the side and his brow furrowed. Rachel stood beside him, radiant in a floaty white sundress and combat boots. She was somewhere between sympathy and laughing at him, which meant she must have been in a good mood. Marco leaned back against the barn and put a hand up to his chest to feel his heart pounding. Rachel couldn’t help herself and the laugh slipped out, soft tendrils of hair shaking free of her loose bun like she’d styled it that way on purpose.

“You okay?” Jake asked. “We’ve been standing here waiting for you to go in for like, two whole minutes.”

Rachel planted her hand on her cocked hip. “I thought we had an unspoken agreement to wait it out, but I guess Jake wasn’t receiving my cousin ESP waves.”

Jake pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just want to start the meeting.”

“You’re not funny anymore.”

“I was never funny. But scaring Marco is funny. Usually. Seriously, are you alright?”

Marco wasn’t a liar. Lying was a tool, and there were times when, life-or-death, he had no other choice but to use it. He wouldn’t just lie to Jake, his best friend and commander, especially when he’d already learned his lesson and definitely needed to tell him he’d had a mixed morph relapse.

“I’m fine.”

Maybe Marco was a liar.

Jake shook his head and walked past him into the barn. Rachel followed, and she grasped Marco’s hand to pull him along behind her. She snatched her hand away and grimaced down at him. “You’re so clammy!” 

Marco frowned down at his hands and rubbed them together. They weren’t that clammy. Everyone took their seats around Jake, and Marco climbed up onto an empty cage away from everyone else. Cassie glanced at him questioningly, but then Jake started talking.

It wasn’t like Marco didn’t think what Jake had to say was important. It’s just that these meetings were the same every time. We have to do this. This isn’t going to cripple the Yeerks, but it will slow them down. It’s going to be dangerous, but we can’t let that stop us. Sure, you listen to the seatbelt speech the first time you ride a plane, and then after that you just enjoy the miming and rate how fashionable the flight attendants’ uniforms are.

Marco didn’t believe that dreams have some kind of deeper meaning, or that they’re your subconscious trying to tell you something. But he was looking at Jake and picturing him holding a baby deer and wondering if it would do it for him. Maybe it would have a year ago. That was about when Marco had accepted that his crush on Jake was at least as strong as his crush on Rachel. On some level, he’d gotten a crush on Rachel because she reminded him of Jake, but safer and more acceptable. Now the thought of Rachel being safer than anyone made Marco want to laugh. He tried to picture Rachel with a baby deer, and it made him scared for the deer.

If the dream had a meaning, which it didn’t, maybe it was about things that Marco knew he couldn’t have. He couldn’t have hope for his mom and dad anymore, even if there was some way to save his mom. His dad was happy with Nora, and his subconscious was showing him, very literally, that they were together, even if he found it revolting. He couldn’t have Jake, no matter how into him he’d been and how attractive he still found him, because Jake wasn’t Jake anymore. Jake was the war. Same with Rachel. He probably would never stop thinking the Berensons were hot, but the line between hot and scary was thin and they’d both crossed it, and then lapped it, and then circled it fast enough to turn back time and make Marco reconsider ever having a crush on anyone. Clearly Marco’s crush instincts couldn’t be trusted.

Clearly.

It wasn’t like the dream had been some kind of revelation. Ax was a mix of Jake, Rachel, and Marco himself. Cassie was in there too, and Marco could admit that Cassie was cute. Ax was a Captain Planet of people Marco wouldn’t mind kissing. The only thing the dream had taught him was that he’d definitely prefer him to have a mouth if they did. Not that they ever would. Things Marco knew he couldn’t have, after all.

Marco settled his eyes on Ax again. In human morph, Ax was usually doing something on a spectrum of gross to embarrassing, and it was easy to forget that this cute, weird boy was actually a trained soldier who was also an alien. Maybe that was the difference. Maybe it was the fact that Ax could still be fun, at least some of the time. Even though right now Ax was focused intently on Jake, taking in the details of the plan like the soldier he was, if someone gave him a cupcake, he’d have frosting all over his face in seconds. At some point in the last couple years, Marco had decided that was hot, and that’s how you know war changes people.

“Marco!” 

Marco jumped, and his eyes snapped to Jake. Jake also always looked annoyed with him, and that was another reason he mostly wasn’t into Jake anymore.

“Are you even listening?”

“Yeah, of course. ‘We have to do this. This isn’t going to cripple the Yeerks, but it will slow them down. It’s going to be dangerous, but we can’t let that stop us.’”

Jake rubbed his hand over his face and through his hair. He tried to sweep his bangs behind his ear and they fell over his forehead. It wasn’t cute. “I said that you’re going to be the point man on this one.”

Marco swallowed. “Right. Got it.”

A cold wave of reality crested over him. He’d been more focused on the stupid dream than the fact that he’d practically made himself into calamari in his sleep and had spent most of the morning trying to clean up his body’s homemade marinara sauce. Jake trusted him. Whatever the plan was, it was going to depend on him. And here he was debating which of his friends were more likely to make out with him rather than murder him. Obviously, if it wasn’t for Bro Code, Marco should have been practicing mucking out stables to get ready to be Cassie’s perfect house husband. Maybe the danger was some of the appeal after all.

Marco didn’t stop the meeting to catch up on what was going on. He didn’t admit he was having morphing problems again. As much as he wanted to, he didn’t freak out. Not on the outside, anyway. He kept it together until everyone was gone, even Cassie. 

When he felt sure that no one would hear him, he buried his face in his hands and screamed. It was muffled, but the animals still rattled their cages and squawked in protest.

‹’Seriously, are you alright?’› 

Thought-speech is weird. Usually you sound like you do in your head, like your internal monologue. At least, that’s how Marco rationalized why everyone sounded slightly different in morph. You still sound like yourself, but you can imitate people. Tobias mimicking Jake in thought-speech was a little more convincing than if Tobias tried it in human morph. Jake had already gone through puberty.

‹Doesn’t it suck when he says that?› Tobias dropped back into his normal voice, and his tone was clearly trying to build some kind of camaraderie. ‹If you were, he wouldn’t have asked. It’s just pressure to get over it.›

Marco looked up at Tobias. He’d forgotten to rate him on the kissable scale, just like he’d forgotten to make sure he’d flown away. He was like a four, but Marco could bump it up to a six if Tobias could actually make him feel better. Tobias was funny sometimes. He at least knew better than to ask Marco if he wanted to talk about it.

“Why are you hanging around here?” Marco tried to make his voice sound like he hadn’t just startled every animal in a five hundred foot radius. He thought he sounded pretty casual. “Didn’t you see what a good mood Rachel was in? Bet she’d put out if you got her alone.”

‹Wow, Marco, thanks,› Tobias said sarcastically. ‹Now I know if I ever need a wingman, I can turn to you. Even though you’re the worst at flying.›

“I’m the worst at a lot of things,” Marco muttered. “And that joke sucked. I thought you had potential.”

‹Do you wanna come back to the scoop? Aren’t you and Ax almost done with Final Fantasy VIII?›

“We’re on disc two. We’re literally going to die before we finish Final Fantasy VIII.”

‹You know what I love most about you? Your optimism.›

“And I love how upbeat and not depressing you always are. We both have so many great qualities.”

‹We could go out. I found twenty bucks outside the drive-thru ATM,› Tobias suggested. He paused for a beat and added, ‹You and Ax could go alone if I’m too depressing for you.›

“Am I that shitty?” 

‹I mean…›

“Wow, you’re so good at making a guy feel better.”

You can’t really sigh in thought-speak, but there’s a definite feeling of it. You can’t really whisper, either, but Tobias could pull it off. ‹Okay. So. You know how you dared Ax to unscramble the uh… you know. The adult channels. ›

Marco laughed and shook his head. Sometimes he surprised even himself. “Wow. I did do that, didn’t I?” 

‹Yeah, and he did that. So like. If you wanted to check that out, uh. I’d leave.›

“What, not interested? The girls need feathers or something?”

‹Ax is my uncle? Kinda weird.› Tobias paused. ‹And no, I’m not really interested. I mean, have you seen birds of prey mate? Way cooler.›

Marco gaped up at Tobias.

‹That was a joke.›

“Right. I definitely believe you.” Marco slid off the top of the cage and brushed his jeans off. “Not really feeling like explaining the Playboy channel to Ax today, even if I am the only person with enough experience to do it.”

‹Yeah, I can buy that you’ve experienced more porn than most people,› Tobias scoffed. ‹I’ll stop bugging you, but really, you can hang out whenever you want.›

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Marco walked out around the side of the barn and waited for Tobias to fly out the loft doors and disappear into the distance. He wasn’t heading for his and Ax’s territory, so maybe he was going to go find Rachel. Part of him thought, “at least someone can be happy,” and then another part laughed because this was Tobias he was talking about.

Marco stripped off his jeans and t-shirt and kicked off his dollar store flip-flops. He’d lost so many pairs of sneakers at this point that he was pretty sure his dad thought he was selling them on the street. It was cute how Peter apparently thought Marco’s Skechers were worth something.

He’d felt too bad to morph when he’d had to leave that morning, but now he felt too bad to deal with the bus and walking home. He’d woken up a little. His hands felt more solid, and the world around him felt more real. But now he had to worry about taking the lead on a mission when it turned out he was still in the running to audition for the live action adaptation of CatDog . He just had to keep trying and he’d be living his dream.

He started morphing osprey, and his eyes changed first. It was like at the optometrist, when you sit at that weird lens contraption and the doctor goes “better one, or two?” Except it just kept getting better and better until he could see every leaf on every tree, just like when you get new glasses, if your new glasses let you see every leaf like a mile away. Not that Marco needed glasses. Marco was too cool for glasses.

He was shrinking. He felt his nose and mouth push out and harden. His skin changed from smooth and light brown to that pale pink, plucked-chicken texture. This was the point where the feather pattern would usually start to appear, but you can never predict how a morph will go. This morph felt weird, though. He’d morphed osprey probably a thousand times and he’d never felt things shifting around quite like this. He’d never seen his nasty bald chicken wings stretch out so far, and bend in quite this way. And they’d never grown fluffy little paws at the end. 

Marco groaned. At least no one’s lives were at stake. At least it wasn’t a high-pressure situation. Then again, if he was randomly blowing morphs just on his way home, how was he going to handle spearheading a mission? So that wasn’t really a relief. At least he was just becoming a puppy bird. He could handle that.

His lower face was bone-hard and gray and on its way to becoming an osprey beak, or maybe a dog muzzle. Or maybe it would split in half into two thick cylinders tipped in curved fangs. Maybe then four more elongated chicken wings with too many joints would burst out of his sides. Marco tried to make an involuntary “ugh!” but the sound that came out was more of a choking squawk. 

So he wasn’t becoming a puppy bird. It turns out spiders have fluffy little paws. How cute.

Suddenly, the world exploded like he’d had his blinds only part way open and he’d pulled on the string. It took a second, but everything came into focus. He was able to see slightly behind, straight up, in front of him, all at once, all with his hyperacute osprey vision. Every detail, every motion. He could see the pits and splinters in the wood grain behind him. He could see the tiny red mites crawling around on the side of a trough out in Cassie’s horse field. Birds of prey aren’t meant to have eight eyes. Whatever tasty blended cocktail of bird, human, and spider brain he had wasn’t built to process that.

Marco’s head swam and his stomach lurched, and he saw every grain of sand hurdle toward him as he faceplanted into the dirt. He flailed his eight nasty, too many-jointed chicken limbs and wriggled like he’d been hit with a heavy spritz of Raid.

‹Fuck.›

Sometimes Marco did things that could be considered questionable, and he just didn’t tell anyone. Jake didn’t know he’d stolen a basketball jersey out of his dirty laundry and slept with it under his pillow until he was 14. His dad didn’t know that he’d been hacking his grades for over a year. Nora didn’t know that he’d been slipping Euclid a quarter of one of his dad’s xanax every once in a while. 

He wished he’d had the foresight to just not tell Jake how he’d followed his mom into Sutherland Tower back when he’d first found out she was still alive. He could have even just left out the part about morphing that guy, Mr. Grant, to gain access to the building. If Jake hadn’t known about all that, Marco’s life would have been so much easier now.

It was the same old story: the Yeerks had set up a base of operations in the building. Tobias had been tracking about a dozen of the employees to and from Yeerk Pool entrances all around town. Jake, Rachel, and Cassie had checked the rooftop access they’d infiltrated before and then scoured the building for any other ways in. Every nook and cranny had been bug-proofed. They had no choice but to go in right through the front door. Ax had hacked the security system and reprogrammed one of Marco’s dad’s old company badges to gain access, but they would still need the biometrics of one of the employees. That’s where Marco came in. As long as Mr. Grant still worked there, Marco had the fingerprint, and theoretically, he kind of knew where he was going. 

He was the point man.

They had all gathered down an alleyway a couple blocks down from the building. Marco was taking deep breaths behind a dumpster, his fists balled up tightly in his oversized t-shirt. He was great at releasing tension. He was the best at relaxing. He was absolutely unconcerned that, yet again, his friends and the fate of the world were counting on him, even though he was the least reliable of all of them. He couldn’t blow this morph. He completely believed in himself. He started morphing.

“It’s hideous!” 

Rachel was holding up the outfit that Cassie had brought so that Marco would pass as a real professional businessman. “What is this color? It looks like the couch we couldn’t get rid of in my great-grandmother’s estate sale. You know where that couch is now? A landfill. That’s where this suit belongs.”

“Well, it’s not like I could take something he still wears! I had to go digging in the very depths of their closet. It takes a lot for my dad to retire an outfit.”

“This hurts me to look at. It’s actively damaging my psyche. I’m going to go home, and I’m going to have nightmares about this suit.”

Marco stepped out from behind the dumpster. He never thought he’d be so relieved to be a balding white guy. Some kids want to grow up to be like their dads, but that had never been Marco. “If it bothers you so much, Rachel, why didn’t you bring one of your dad’s suits? Oh, wait…”

Rachel looked Marco up and down, her expression absolutely unimpressed. Divorce didn’t even register on the trauma scale anymore. “You could have brought one of your dad’s, if he had any besides the one he wore to his wedding.”

“He also has the one he wore to my mom’s funeral,” Marco shot back. “Come on Cassie, hand me the dead lady’s upholstery your dad’s been hanging onto since 1976. I look like my doctor told me to start doing light exercise to keep my blood pressure in check.”

Marco had felt safe and secure not listening during the meeting, because he could count on Jake to repeat the plan compulsively until something went wrong and they to make the rest up on the fly. Marco could have been listening ten percent of the time and he’d still know what he was supposed to do. Go right in the front door like he belonged there, get Ax to the security room, let him do whatever hacking he needed to do, sabotage their plan, get out of there. Cleanest mission yet. Cassie had pointed out that if Mr. Grant was the only person in the security system when their operation got shut down, then maybe that wasn’t such good news for him. But that was clean enough for Marco, and it was clearly clean enough for Jake.

Marco straightened out his oversized lapels and Jake dropped a cockroach down the back of his shirt. Marco felt Ax’s nasty little feet skitter down his neck, and he shuddered. He took a deep breath, held it, and started walking up the steps to the tower’s entrance. This was the mission. This was all he had to do. Just morph Mr. Grant, get in, get out. He’d finished the morph, just as planned, and now he couldn’t mess anything else up.

“Don’t jinx yourself,” he muttered.

‹What?› Ax asked from somewhere down the back of his shirt.

“Nothing.”

Marco started toward the rotating door he’d come through when he’d followed Visser One into the building.

‹The front door doesn’t work at night,› Tobias said. ‹There’s a side door off to your right with keycard and fingerprint access. I’ve only seen the Controllers I’ve been tailing use it, so… hopefully your guy is infested.›

‹Oh, yeah, we only want the best for him,› Marco snarked back at him. It was weird to use thought-speak in human morph, but Marco knew it was possible because Ax did it sometimes. Usually when he’d shoved six chicken nuggets into his mouth at once but still wanted to tell Marco to stop channel surfing because he thought Miss Cleo had a storyline and he didn’t want to miss the next episode.

Marco went around to the side entrance. There was a badge reader and a fingerprint scanner to the right of the door handle. Marco looked up and around, checking to see if there were any Dracon beams built into the walls or the portico, ready to zap him into dust. Just because he didn’t see any didn’t mean they weren’t there. 

He took the badge out of his pocket and swiped it on the badge reader. Seeing Peter’s dorky smile from ten years ago made Marco’s stomach twist a little. He hadn’t seen it since his mom died. Not until recently, and now he was smiling for someone else. Even if the thought of it made him purse his lips, he still hoped he’d get to see it again.

Marco pocketed the badge and pressed his finger into the scanner. His breath caught in his throat while the little black imprint shifted around on the screen. His hands weren’t the steadiest. It took longer than Marco would have liked, but finally the display went green and said ACCESS GRANTED.

He opened the door and walked into a wall of air conditioning. He stepped into the huge lobby of the Sutherland Tower. It was different at night, but it was also just different. For one thing, they’d tightened security. The guard station was still where it had been, but instead of just a flash-your-badge-and-walk-past situation, there was a plexiglass partition and another biometric scanner to gain access. He’d already made it through the first security checkpoint. Even so, he still looked at the faded picture of his dad circa-1990 and hoped it wasn’t the last time he’d see his face.

The plexiglass door slid open. Apparently, things weren’t going great for Mr. Grant. Marco let out a sigh of relief. At least his probable enslavement was working out for one of them.

There was a building directory next to the elevator. Marco scanned it from bottom to top. He couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that he had the right floor, but based on the organization of the other floors, and assuming the Yeerk operations probably weren’t listed on the directory, he could make some guesses, and maybe they would make it out by the time people started actually rolling in to work. He pressed the button for his first guess and held his breath. The floor indicator lights flashed as the elevator lifted, just like you’d expect an elevator to do. Marco let out his breath right before the button for their floor lit up, and he really should have saved the relief for when it actually did.

The elevator stalled with a weak whir and the lights flickered off. Most people probably haven’t been in much scarier situations than being stuck in a pitch-black elevator. Personally, it took more than that to scare Marco. The additional details of the elevator probably having stopped specifically to prevent this very infiltration plan, and the likelihood of armed guards of various species being on their way added a little spice to it, though. Scary Spice. 

‹What is happening?› 

“Oh, you know,” Marco said casually. “Another Tuesday.”

‹It is Friday.› Marco was sure he felt Ax crawling up his neck, and he had to fight the impulse to slap him. ‹Have we reached our destination?›

“Well. We’re probably within a few feet of it, if I had to guess.”

With a fluorescent hum, the lights flickered back on, about half as bright as they had been. Marco stared up at the floor indicator lights. They stayed dark. The elevator didn’t move. The doors didn’t open. Marco pressed the “door open” button. Then the “door close” button. Then he pressed the button for every single floor. His finger hovered above the “emergency call” button like it was the trigger of a gun he was pointing at his head.

Marco saw movement in the corner of his eye. Ax was demorphing. He almost didn’t realize when Ax was fully Andalite again, because his head came up past Ax’s shoulder in this human morph. If he was Cassie, maybe he’d have been able to do something subtle, like just take the height from that morph, leave the hair loss. But he was Marco, and apparently that meant he was more likely to get worked up over Ax again and accidentally morph a ManHorse. Who knows, maybe it would be a happy accident. Maybe Ax would see four legs and two arms and make the best of it. Too bad Marco was more likely to morph a reverse centaur. A horse body coming out of a man’s neck would probably be way less sexy. 

‹What is happening?›

“The elevator’s stuck.”

‹What does that mean?›

“It’s stuck. Doesn’t that happen with Andalite elevators? I know you have elevators. I’ve seen how you and stairs get along. You’re not friends.”

Ax ignored him. He leaned forward and pressed each button again, as if Marco just didn’t know how to press buttons. Then he pressed them each in order. Then he put each of his fourteen fingers on a button and pressed them all down at once. He didn’t have enough fingers for all of the buttons, so he alternated back and forth to the buttons he couldn’t get, like he was playing Beethoven’s Fifth.

“You need some help there? I could let you borrow ten more fingers, if you think that’s actually going to work,” Marco said in a forced-light voice that wasn’t as successful as it would have been if it had been his own. One of Ax’s stalk-eyes snapped around and Marco could swear it was glaring at him. 

Marco didn’t see the point of staying in morph. It’s not like if the Yeerks burst in on them now, he could make the excuse that he’d come back to work because he’d forgotten to press “send” on an email. “Oh, that Andalite? I don’t know him. We just happened to be going to the same floor.”

By the time Marco was back to his normal, cute self (and Cassie’s dad’s ugly suit was bunched around his ankles and wrists), Ax was pressing buttons frantically, shifting his hooves, twitching his stalk-eyes. They’d been in worse situations, but Marco couldn’t remember the last time that Ax seemed this rattled.

“Hey,” Marco said, trying to get his attention. “Look on the bright side. At least we’re not in Mission Impossible and about to get slammed into spikes on the ceiling. Or it could be Speed and a terrorist could be trying to blow us up.” It seemed like Ax wasn’t listening, so he said under his breath, “It could be You’ve Got Mail and I could be your shrill, annoying girlfriend.”

Ax slapped his hand flat into the control panel and swept his tail around close to the ground. Marco jumped backwards to dodge his blade, and his feet got tangled up in the long, baggy pants. He had to grab the handrail along the back wall of the elevator to keep from crumpling up on the floor. 

“Dude! What’s wrong with you?”

Ax clenched his hands into fists and pulled his tail in close to his body. ‹I’m fine,› he said unconvincingly. Unlike Marco, Ax had always been a liar. He just wasn’t as good at it. He took a breath so deep that it sounded like four regular breaths strung together. ‹Do you have any ideas?› 

Marco kicked off the ugly pants and shrugged off the ugly suit jacket. He left the dress shirt on, and it came down past his bike shorts. “I dunno, Ax, escaping an elevator can be ‘risky business.’” He held his arms out for Ax to appreciate his joke and also his bare legs, but he just blinked his big, green eyes blankly. “You’re really not keeping up with me today,” Marco muttered.

He slipped his fingers into the seam in the door and pried it open with little resistance. “The inside doors are just held together with magnets,” he explained. 

The car door opened onto the concrete blocks of the shaft wall, the bottom few inches of the door to the floor above them just visible at the top. Marco’s brow furrowed. The mechanism to open the floor below them, the easiest way to escape, would be several feet down, and the one to open the floor above would be about eight feet up. He glanced at Ax to gauge whether he should make a joke about how this was pretty much the worst position for them to be stuck in. Ax’s ears were tucked down and his weird nostrils were flaring with each quickened breath. Marco decided to keep it to himself. 

Marco started unbuttoning his oversized dress shirt. “You okay, Ax-man?” 

Ax shifted his hooves and planted them more steadfastly. ‹I am a trained warrior, but there is only so much that mental discipline can do to combat an instinctual response,› he almost admitted. ‹I am dealing with it.›

“It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone your secret weakness,” Marco said, his words a little muffled as his teeth filled up his mouth. “Don’t worry, I’m gonna get us out of here.”

‹Optimism? From you?›

Yeah, optimism, Marco thought to himself. That’s me, Mr. Optimistic.

He concentrated hard on each part of the gorilla. His gorilla. His hulking shoulders, his sloped back, his thick, leathery hands. He concentrated on how Ax was so scared that he could feel it in the air. He had to hold it together. He had to be a gorilla. For Ax.

Maybe it was in his head, but he almost felt like he was in control of the morph, like he was Cassie or something. Not literally, of course, because his muscles still rippled and bulged like that scene from Akira , and his fur took way too long to come in. But it felt right. It felt like every time this gorilla had saved his butt. 

The morph finished, and Marco smiled, baring his two-inch-long incisors. ‹And that’s the power of positive thinking.›

Ax crossed his arms and squinted in a very human way, clearly not understanding why Marco was so pleased with himself for doing something he did several times a week by this point. But Marco didn’t need a cheerleader. Marco had this.

Marco braced himself on the handrails in the back corner of the elevator and hopped up, gripping the bar with his feet. He stretched his long arms up and pressed up into the ceiling to balance himself. When he felt steady, he walked his hands forward and flattened them against the emergency escape hatch. 

He’d expected it to pop open. It didn’t budge. Marco pushed until his huge biceps were shaking. He felt something give and his heart leapt to his throat. The metal of the hatch buckled outward like a blister. Marco gave it another go, driving his huge ham shank fists into the depression in the steel. 

Nothing.

‹I can’t believe the movies lied to me. I’ve never felt so betrayed,› Marco lamented, landing knuckles-first and starting to demorph.

Ax looked up at the hatch like it was a Taxxon’s gaping maw about to come down on him. He dropped into a striking position and spread his back legs apart. The muscles in his legs twitched, his tail coiled. He struck, faster than Marco could see, and he only knew that Ax’s blade had slammed into the escape hatch because he’d made a sharp dent in the middle of the bigger dent that Marco made. The clash was so loud, the air vibrated. Ax’s knees buckled, and he shuddered from head to toe. He wound his tail all the way around himself, looping it around the base of his torso. Marco didn’t know if it was because he’d hurt himself or if it was to metaphorically hold himself together.

‹TOBIAS!› Ax screamed. Marco winced. Thought-speech isn’t loud; it isn’t sound.  But it can still fill your mind and push everything else out. Marco shook his head, but before he could get his thoughts back in order, Ax screamed again. ‹TOBIAS! PRINCE JAKE!›

“Hey!” 

Ax went still and, for the first time since they’d gotten stuck, turned to look at Marco with his main eyes. 

More gently, Marco said, “You gotta calm down. We’ve been in tighter spots. Like, literally. We’ll get out of this one too. In the meantime, why don’t you morph something else?”

Marco realized he should have given Ax some suggestions, because he recognized the familiar signs that he was morphing human almost immediately. The part of him that wanted to be a good friend almost told Ax that he should probably put his Andalite preconceptions aside and morph something less intelligent. The part of him that couldn’t stop thinking about every movie and TV show where the elevator doors opened and the people inside were straightening their clothes was telling him that this could be an opportunity. The part of him that was neither of those things, that was rational, was saying he should probably stay focused on escaping the elevator. 

But it’s not like Marco was feeling great about being trapped in a box either. Alongside the mental image of Ax pressing him up against the elevator wall that kept intruding into the beautiful conception of his getaway plan, even more bright and in-focus was the video reel of the elevator finally lurching up to the next floor, opening onto a waiting unit of armed Controllers. The way Marco saw it, there were three options: he could wait quietly for the Yeerks to capture and torture them, he could come on to Ax and maybe not die without ever even kissing someone, or he could come on to Ax and Ax would kill him, which would probably be more merciful than what the Yeerks would do. So really, what did he have to lose?

Ax was human now, his back against the wall and his legs pulled up to his chest. It was easier to see his fear. Marco couldn’t really sympathize with unsteady hooves and a twitchy tail, but now Ax was pale and curled up and small and Marco understood that.

He could figure out how to get them out in a minute. He slumped down the wall next to Ax.

Up to this point, Ax had two settings: the cute, dorky, funny kid and the hard soldier who did what he had to do. Marco had never really seen them bleed into each other to this extent before, and Marco had never really seen the side of Ax that was sad and scared and would give anything to just be normal. Those were Marco’s three settings, too. He scooted closer to Ax until their shoulders touched.

Ax turned his head toward Marco, resting it on his knees. He blinked slowly and his furrowed expression softened a little. ‹I’m glad it’s you who is here.›

Marco swallowed. He hadn’t expected that. He was glad he had a lot of practice keeping his face neutral. “Yeah? Why?”

‹Because. If it were Prince Jake or Rachel, I would have to conceal my weakness. If it were Tobias or Cassie, they would attempt to console me.› Ax paused and, like slow motion, he worried his lower lip between his teeth. ‹You allow me to feel what I feel. Thank you.›

Marco blinked and tried to look like he wasn’t staring at Ax’s lips. Staring into his eyes wasn’t better. “Yeah? Well. Uh. I’m not doing it on purpose.”

“I know,” Ax said, switching from thought-speech to regular speech. Ax sighed deeply, and then he laid his head on Marco’s shoulder.

Marco went perfectly still. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his face. The longer they sat together, Ax’s soft curls brushing against his neck, the warmth of his cheek against his skin, the louder Marco’s heartbeat got in his ears. At this point, Marco was one hundred percent certain that Ax could hear it too. 

Marco was the kind of person who rehearsed every potential conversation. That’s how he always had jokes loaded up. Anticipate everything someone might say, have something witty or at least annoying to counter. That’s how you have the upper-hand. That’s how you win the conversation. This scenario? Marco was scrambling to run through all the possibilities of his next move like it was opening night and he didn’t know his lines.

“Tobias is very important to me,” Ax continued after a full two minutes and sixteen of Marco’s seconds. “He is not only my shorm , he is my family. But of all of our other comrades… my human friends… I owe you the most.”

“Yeah?” Marco’s voice cracked for the first time since, well, like six months ago. Things take time. He cleared his throat. “What do you mean?”

“You have shown me human culture. You are not patient, but you don’t assume that I am too alien to understand, and you are no more impatient with me than you are anyone else. No one besides Tobias seeks me out to just spend time with me.” 

Sometimes Marco could convince himself that he had chill. But if he had chill, he would have just let Ax have his moment. He would have just appreciated that his stupid crush was snuggling with him. If he had chill, he’d be better at shutting up. The fact was, no matter how delusional Marco could be, especially about himself, “chill” was actually not in his wheelhouse.

“So,” he said in a very chill voice, “hypothetically.”

Ax hesitated. “Hypothetically what? Do you have a plan?”

“Yeah, no, not really,” Marco admitted, and it was probably the most truthful he’d been in a long time. “Hypothetically. What if this is it?”

“That is not a reassuring hypothetical.” Ax pulled his legs a little closer to his chest and inched slightly closer to Marco. “I thought it would be easier to deal with this confined space in my human morph, but I’m still… feeling tense.” 

“That’s shocking. We’re such simple creatures. So, uh. Here’s a riddle: What do Cordelia and Xander in Buffy , and Misato and Kaji in Evangelion , and that episode of DS9 where Bashir and Ezri get together for a hot second have in common?”

“We were eating Flaming Hot Cheetos when we watched them together.”

“That was quick and specific.” Marco pursed his lips. “We eat a lot of cheetos, huh?”

“They are your favorite.”

Marco’s heart was pounding in his throat. Ax was snuggling him. Ax could be himself with him. Ax knew his favorite snack. Maybe he wasn’t crazy. Maybe the dream had meant something, after all.

“It’s not cheetos.” 

Ax lifted his head off of Marco’s shoulder to study Marco’s face. “They are all bad for each other.”

“That’s true… Sort of applies. Not what I’m getting at.” Marco felt his “ you’re making a huge mistake ” Spidey-sense go off. He never listened to it. Marco would have made a terrible Spider-Man. “So, they’re uh, stuck together. In close quarters. Mortal peril.”

Ax squinted, then he frowned, and then his eyes went wide. He clambered backwards so quickly and ineptly that he hit the floor. He scrambled to his feet. ‹You are an alien.›

Marco shrugged. “So are you.” So chill. 

He stood up and took a step toward Ax. Ax backed up past the open elevator car doors and jumped when his back touched the concrete wall of the shaft. He wrapped his arms around himself like he was walking through a haunted house. He’d already felt trapped, and now he was trapped in a new and different way. Marco couldn’t take it back now.

‹You’re saying you are attracted to me?›

“It’s not you specifically! I’m into… well, I’m not picky.”

Ax sneered. ‹That is very flattering. Persuasive, even.›

“Hey, good sarcasm! Look at you, you’re so good at being human now, it’s only natural that I’d notice. I mean, I’m a fifteen year old boy, you know how it is.”

‹I don’t, actually. While I have nearly perfected my ability to pass for human, it has not gone so far that I find them interesting in any way beyond academic.›

“Listen.” Marco heard his voice shift into the tone that was reserved for pre-imminent death jokes. That was a good sign. He held up both hands, each with two fingers crossed. “Here’s Jake and Cassie. And here’s Rachel and Tobias.” He wiggled his thumbs. “Only so many options left.”

‹There are no such options.›

“Then why did you trick Estrid into kissing you in human morph?”

‹Estrid is an Andalite!› He frowned. ‹And I didn’t trick her.›

“But you’d already thought about it when you decided to do it.”

Ax’s mouth fell open, and then he snapped it shut. Marco couldn’t hold back a triumphant smirk. ‹I am intrigued by human sensory experiences. You know this.›

“Yeah, but what if she hadn’t been there?”

‹Then I would not have done it.›

“Is it because I’m a guy?”

Ax shuddered violently, like his body was trying to shake away his fury. Marco had never seen him this angry in human morph. At least at this point, Ax was distracted from his claustrophobia. 

‹Humans really are so simple.› Blue fur poured over Ax from his head to his hooves. Limbs spurted out of either side of him and he was on all fours in an instant. Marco had never seen him morph so fast. ‹You know nothing about my people.›

Thought-speak was Ax's first language, and he had better control than the rest of them. Sometimes Rachel's rage leaked through and Tobias just had a lot of feelings, but Ax almost never betrayed his emotions. He couldn’t hold it in this time, and his words had an acrid bite of actual loathing, with notes of hurt and betrayal underneath. Marco opened his mouth, a rare apology on his lips. Ax whipped his tail and his blade slammed into the side of the elevator with a piercing metallic ring. Marco jolted and bit his tongue. He hissed back a breath.

‹This conversation is over.›

Marco pressed his tongue against his teeth and swallowed the blood.

There was only so long that Marco could stand angry silence. His usual M.O. for breaking tension, dumb jokes, wasn’t exactly the best idea at this point. So he pivoted into problem-solving. He’d been wasting too much time. If he’d just stayed focused, maybe they would have already been out of this mess. Maybe they’d have completed the mission. Maybe his friendship with Ax wouldn’t potentially be in shambles. If only he wasn’t such a shameless opportunist.

Marco got down on all fours in front of the open elevator door. He pressed his palm against a concrete block and traced the seam where it met the next block. He stuck his arm down between the edge of the elevator floor and the shaft wall. There were five inches, maybe. He tried to peer down and see how far down the next floor was, and what the interlock mechanism looked like. He couldn’t really see anything.

Mostly Marco didn’t care that he didn’t really know anything about animals. That was Cassie’s job. But sometimes he could admit that some basic Encyclopedia Britannica knowledge could be helpful. He was pretty sure that cobras didn’t constrict their prey, they spit or something. But how strong were they? He’d just have to find out.

Marco raised back up onto his knees and took a few deep breaths. He tried to clear his head. He tried not to think about how they were trapped, or about how they could be captured, or about the giant squork or the osprider, or about how Ax was still fuming in the corner, disgusted with him. Turns out thinking about not thinking things is still thinking them. 

A couple more deep breaths. He’d morphed Mr. Grant. He’d morphed the gorilla, no problem. He had a plan. He was going to save them. He had to. And when he did, Ax would forget all this happened.

The bones in his arms slurped up into his body, leaving behind floppy muppet arms on either side of him. They quickly shriveled up into him, and so did his legs. He fell onto his stomach, his face planted flat into the elevator floor. So dignified. He was getting longer, but he wasn’t getting any slimmer. In fact, he seemed to be getting fatter. Instead of brown and black scales creeping across his skin, pink blotches flared up like a rash. Fine, white hair sprung up on the pink patches, and the patches grew until their edges met, until he was covered in pink, slightly fuzzy, human skin. 

He was a ten-foot-long fleshy tube with a stranger’s face. He writhed around helplessly and rolled halfway over so that his nose wasn’t smashed into the floor. He couldn’t actually move. He had a soft old man’s belly, not the muscular ridges that allowed the snake to slither. 

Cobras can’t see a ton of colors, but they can see blue, so Ax stood out in stark relief from the grayish-green of the rest of the dimly-lit elevator. Even though Marco had been friends with Ax for almost three years, he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of all Andalite expressions, but some of them were obvious. Ax was furious.

‹This is still happening?› Ax’s thought-speech was like the sound of ripping paper. ‹You told Prince Jake that you didn’t have this problem anymore!›

Marco still had a human face, so he tried to shrug and play it off. He didn’t have shoulders, though, so he just kind of flopped the way a bug on its back does. “I guess it’s just a thing about me? You know, a special talent, like Cassie has.”

‹It is literally the opposite,› Ax seethed. ‹Why would you agree to this if you knew you were still compromised? This mission was contingent on your performance.›

“That’s why!” Marco hated that he had to try to defend himself with someone else’s slightly hissy voice. It was a lot easier to win sympathy when he knew how to sound cute.

‹You sabotaged us to protect your pride,› Ax said coldly. ‹You are unbelievable.›

Marco was trying to go full cobra. Or maybe he was trying to demorph. All he was managing to do was flail, and Ax wasn’t helping. It’s not like he didn’t know that he was letting everyone down. It’s not like he didn’t know that he was a liability to potentially every future mission if this was a thing that just happened. It’s not like he didn’t know— 

‹Be still!› Ax shouted. 

Marco tried, but he was also trying to morph, and calming himself was going just as well. His spine flexed, his sparsely-haired belly rippled, and he rolled into the cold steel wall of the elevator. His face was sandwiched in the corner between the wall and the dirty carpet. He couldn’t see Ax, but he heard him sigh deeply.

‹Marco. I understand that this situation is very stressful for the both of us.› Ax was doing his best to sound comforting. It was apparently something neither Marco nor Ax were very good at. ‹...even if this particular aspect of it is your own fault. And highly disturbing.›

“Was it totally necessary to add that last part?” Marco mumbled into the floor. 

‹I believe it is called foot-and-mouth disease.›

“Nope, it definitely isn’t.”

‹ Marco ,› Ax repeated. ‹I’m sure that part of your distress is due to our… misunderstanding. If it is any consolation, we will move on from this. We are soldiers and… such things happen on the battlefield.›

Marco froze, and then he made a concerted effort to roll over so he could see Ax’s face. Ax grimaced at the sight of his middle-aged man face plastered onto the front of his ten-foot-long uncooked sausage body. At least he’d broken through his anger. And beyond the superficial disgust at Marco’s morphing disaster, he could see the fear trickling back in. Ax’s stalk-eyes flitted around, and his hooves were restless. He’d wrapped his tail around himself again.

Finally, for Ax, Marco started to demorph. The morph from human to human was barely anything, so all that really seemed to happen was the return of his arms, legs, melanin, and clothes, and about a year’s worth of pilates. When it was done, Marco was lying flat on the ground, panting. It wasn’t like he’d never morphed this many times in a row, but maybe combo-morphing was his Limit Break. His anti-Limit Break. 

He craned his head back to look at Ax. It was nice to have a neck again. “Hey. Thanks.”

Ax shifted his hooves more closely together and leaned up against the wall to make it less obvious that he was shivering. ‹I said what I had to.›

Marco looked back up at the ceiling and tried to ignore that he felt like he’d been dunked into a bucket of ice water.

This time Marco accepted the awkward silence. He accepted that Ax was basically radiating bad vibes. He accepted that this elevator was his new home, and the floor was his bed. He thought about suggesting his plan to Ax—Ax had a rattlesnake morph, he could slither down the shaft and try to engage the door lock mechanism below. For once in his life, he decided to not say anything. He’d gotten over his rabies, but he couldn’t morph away his chronic “foot-and-mouth disease.”

Marco had actually kind of started to drift off when he was startled awake.

‹Ax? Marco?›

‹Tobias!› Ax stood up straight and let his tail swing back behind him.

‹Okay, yep, got you. Man, this building is tall. I’ve been flying up and down it yelling for you, and you know how hard it is to get lift at night—›

‹I do know,› Ax interrupted. Marco sat up and didn’t know whether to smile or frown. At least Ax was being terse with everyone. ‹We are trapped in the elevator. Please tell Prince Jake.›

‹Oh, we’re on it, don’t worry. Be right back—›

Ax put a hand on the side of the elevator. ‹Don’t leave!› 

‹It’s okay, Ax-man. I’m not going anywhere,› Tobias said gently. ‹I know what floor you’re on now. I need to tell Jake and Rachel about the elevator. Seriously, I’ll be right back. I won’t leave you.›

Ax was looking up at the corner of the ceiling like he could see Tobias there. One of his stalk-eyes was focused on Marco. Marco attempted a relieved smile. Ax pretended he didn’t see it. 

Tobias, true to his word, was back after a couple minutes. ‹Alright guys, pick a bug and get down to the first floor, your backup has arrived.›

Ax stepped forward towards the door and began to morph. As he shrunk down to Marco’s level, he locked eyes with him. ‹Do not. Mess this up.›

Marco felt a tingle run down his spine, and he wasn’t sure if it was fear or something else. He closed his eyes, crossed his fingers, and started morphing. He didn’t think Ax was seriously threatening him, but after everything else, he definitely wasn’t about to test it. Thankfully, his morphing ability agreed. 

A few minutes later, they were both flies, and they were zooming down the elevator shaft. Somewhere far away, Marco knew that there was a possibility for this to be fun, but between the morph exhaustion and the fear and his utter inability to control any aspect of himself all night, he just wasn’t feeling it.

‹We have reached the bottom of the shaft,› Ax reported mechanically.

‹Stay clear of the door,› Jake ordered.

There was a thunderous trampling sound and then a deafening crash as the elevator door exploded inwards. It was dented, and the gap between the doors was probably big enough for a fly to escape, but just for good measure, a long pair of claws slipped into the gap and, with a screech, Rachel used all her grizzly strength to widen the gap to about a foot across. Marco zipped out, past Jake’s rhino morph, and through the shattered plexiglass security checkpoint. 

‹Prince Jake, we can still complete the mission.› Ax sounded normal, like he hadn’t spent the last couple hours vacillating between terror and rage and disgust.

‹We can’t. The Yeerks will be crawling all over us any minute. Retreat.›

‹But I can—›

‹Retreat.›

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

Rachel fell down onto all fours and barreled out the rhino-shaped hole Jake had left in the side of Sutherland Tower. Marco wondered vaguely how the Yeerks were going to spin this one. 

They all met up with Cassie and Tobias back at the dumpster where they started. Tobias took off to keep watch. They would probably hear the Yeerks coming, since they’d be disguised as cops, but Tobias had his role and he’d rather lean into it than get the failure speech. Everyone else demorphed, and they were all back to human or Andalite by the time Marco was one-foot-tall and still craving the hotdog stand leftovers that were rotting in the dumpster.

‹Guys, I swear it’s not my first time, I just have performance anxiety,› he said. Rachel rolled her eyes.

When he was finally human, Marco’s head was swimming. He would be pissed if he passed out, because he really felt like he’d been rolling around on the ground enough lately. Cassie noticed, because of course she did. She gave him that look, and she put her hand on his shoulder to make sure he was steady. Marco shrugged her off, and she gave him space. Cassie would never learn to mind her own business, but at least after three years, she’d sort of learned when to back off.

Jake had noticed too. His arms were crossed and he had on that face he’d started making the first time Marco had said “fuck” and hadn’t stopped making every time Marco needed a dad and his real one wasn’t around. Like everything else, the war had twisted it. In another life, his old dad Jake would have been saying things like “Marco, I know you snuck into the house drunk tonight,” but instead it was like, “Marco, I know you caused the deaths and/or enslavement of hundreds of innocent people tonight.” When your Dad Friend becomes your General Friend, suddenly it’s a lot more than “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

“We’re done here tonight,” Jake said. “Cassie, Rachel, go home. I’ll update you on the plan when… if there is one. Marco, Ax, stay here.”

Ax’s ears had already traveled up his head and started becoming the dumb-looking feather ears of the great-horned owl. They stayed that way for longer than they had to, but he kept his face impassive, reversed the morph, and stood at attention.

Rachel looked down at Cassie, her eyebrows high and her lips pressed thin before she started to morph owl herself. Cassie frowned and gave Jake a significant look before she, too, went owl. When they were gone, Jake turned his General Dad gaze back to Marco.

“You look like crap,” Jake said.

Marco choked out a mirthless laugh. “Wow. Taking applications for a new best friend. It’s a very choice job. No benefits besides my endless charm and wit, but I assure you, the pay is also nothing.”

“Not now. There’s something going on with you,” Jake accused. Marco met his glare the same way he’d have stared down his real dad. Stared up. Whatever. “Something has been going on with you. I know when you’re lying.”

Marco felt the tension winding up his back and through his shoulders, the heat in his throat. He didn’t show it. He didn’t break eye contact and said evenly, “I’m not lying.”

“Not saying anything is still lying, Marco.”

‹It is morphing exhaustion,› Ax interjected. Jake turned around. Marco exhaled as silently as possible and gave Ax a “what are you doing?” look behind Jake’s back. Ax kept his main eyes on Jake. One stalk-eye was flitting around between either end of the alley. One was pointed straight at Marco. ‹He has morphed many times tonight while undertaking several escape attempts. That is why he ‘looks like crap.’›

“Thanks, Ax,” Marco said, making sure to sound sarcastic but locking eyes with Ax’s stalk-eye to convey that he really meant it. It swiveled away. Ax had always been a liar, and he probably wasn’t proud of it, but Marco was. Proud and stunned.

Jake glanced back at Marco, who had snapped back to composed while his back was still turned. Jake wasn’t buying it, but Marco could tell he was too depleted to deal with both of them. 

‹Do you need anything else from me, Prince Jake?› 

“Go on.”

Marco’s impulse was to say Ax’s name, to get him to look at him, to get anything from him, but Marco had done enough listening to his impulses tonight. Maybe he’d learned a valuable lesson. Too bad the lesson would turn back into a pumpkin at midnight.

Without a word or a glance, Ax flew off on silent wings, back toward Cassie’s farm and his forest.

Jake narrowed his eyes. “I know Ax was covering for you.”

Marco swallowed. “Yeah. Busted.” He ran his hand through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. 

Jake’s whole body sagged with relief. “Finally. What’s going on?”

“I should have already come clean,” Marco admitted. He sighed and crossed his arms like he did when he was trying not to seem vulnerable. “I was just… afraid. You’re really important to me, you know? I don’t know what I’d do if you couldn’t trust me anymore.”

Marco looked down at his bare feet. They were covered in the grime of the dirty alleyway. He chewed his lip and waited for Jake to say something.

“And…?”

Marco looked up into Jake’s deep brown eyes and tried to summon up every feeling he’d ever had for him that hadn’t been tainted by death and blood and everything they’d lost. “Jake, I need you to know that I’m bisexual. I hope that doesn’t change anything between us.”

Jake squinted, and then he shook his head in disbelief. “Are you serious?” Jake ran both hands over his face and pulled back his bangs in frustration. “Literally everyone already knows that.”

“Ax didn’t.” Marco pressed his lips together and pretended like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. “I came out to him in the elevator.”

“Why would you—wait.” Jake’s expression darkened. “Was he not okay with it?”

“No, no! He supports me. Or, he’s neutral. I guess Andalites don’t care about that kind of stuff.” Marco touched his chin. “Or you know, maybe he did know. I can’t believe I’ve been worried about it all this time. This is such a relief!”

“Are you seriously trying to tell me that’s it? Come on. It’s the middle of the night, we’re not wearing pants, and we’re going to get busted by the Yeerks.”

“I also need you to know that I stole your Magic Johnson jersey and slept with it under my pillow until last year. Sometimes I smelled it.”

Jake grimaced and leaned away from him. “Ugh, Marco! Gross!” 

“Jake, I need you to accept me,” Marco begged.

“I do. Ugh. Go home .” He started morphing owl, muttering to himself, “God. At least I know where it went.”

Marco looked away while Jake morphed, waiting for him to finish up and go. Of course Jake wasn’t going to let him off the hook. ‹Morph, Marco.›

“I’m, uh, I’m gonna walk,” Marco muttered. Jake, a two-foot-tall, fuzzy matryoshka doll with giant angry eyes, glared at him. Marco could tell he was about to give more orders, so he cut him off. “Look, I almost passed out a few minutes ago. I’ve morphed eight times tonight. Are you going to carry me home?”

‹Fine. Don’t get caught.›

Marco watched Jake fly away. He waited until he’d disappeared completely into the darkness before he started his barefoot trek through the back alleys. Compared to real strategizing, real infiltration plans, real escape routes, figuring out a way home was a piece of cake. Even when the police sirens started wailing back towards Sutherland Tower, Marco held the map of the downtown backstreets steady in his mind, alongside alternate paths for each turn and crossway. After a night of failures, it felt good to know that he could do at least one thing right.

Marco kept close to the sides of the buildings and avoided all but the streets that no one with any common sense would go down in the middle of the night. He turned a corner, then he sucked in a sharp breath and bit back a curse. He leaned up against a brick wall that was probably covered in piss and lifted his foot up. He tried not to cringe when he saw the curved shard of glass jabbed deep into his heel.

He should have been used to this, but he wasn’t. Not when his feet were new every time he morphed.

Marco hissed a breath out through his teeth, yanked the glass out, and just kept walking. He’d morph the wound off tomorrow. He didn’t have the patience to deal with a minor injury like a normal person would.

There was really only one thing he’d actually learned tonight.

Dreams don’t mean anything.

Art by the wonderful Ace. Check out their blog for more cute art!

(view in full size, this art is too powerful)
Art by the incredible Moe! Check out their blog, they draw many things! Check out their webcomic, it has very diverse and endearing characters and scifi AND cryptids, two great flavors that go great together!