Chapter Text
My name is Aftran Nine-Four-Two of the Hett Simplat Pool.
I am not human. I am a Yeerk. I am a small creature a human would compare to a slug. I am blind and nearly deaf except to a narrow range of ultrasonic frequencies which allow for a bare form of sonar. I have a strong sense of smell and a weak sense of touch. I have a sense that humans do not – the ability to sense electricity, especially the electrical currents of other creatures, provided they are nearby.
That is it. In my natural state I am limited to the confines of a Yeerk Pool, a watery sludge bathed in the light of Kandrona that we Yeerks need to survive. Hett Simplat was small even to a Yeerk, carried aboard a Pool Ship through space. The Pool I most normally feed in now, the California Pool, is larger, but still not enough. Even the greatest Pools of the Yeerk homeworld are smaller than some Earth lakes. If I had remained in Hett Simplat then my whole life would have been spent in an area smaller than a human apartment building.
But Yeerks have one more ability. I can enter a host creature, envelop myself around the creature’s brain, and take control of them. Their limbs, their eyes, their voices. I can open their mind and see their every thought, their every memory, learn everything they ever knew. I become their Controller. We Yeerks have taken many other species as our own. There are Hork Bajir Controllers, Taxxon Controllers, Nahara Controllers…and now, increasingly, we are creating Human Controllers.
The victim is fully aware of everything happening to them. They can see everything I do with them, hear everything around them. They can still taste and smell and feel. But they can’t control themselves anymore unless I allow it. I can make them suffer by forcing their minds down into a tiny corner of their psyche, suppressing them like an adult holding an infant underwater – the experience is about as pleasant. Or I can force them to relive their most terrible memories or endure their worst nightmares. The host is a slave, in a way more total than any chains or whips could make them.
I am a parasite. And I have recently begun to realize that I am also a monster.
But I’m trying to change, thanks to my current host: a twelve-year-old human girl named Cassie.
Seven months ago, I had first taken Cassie as my host. My role as a Human Controller had been to assess the students of the middle school, use Cassie to evaluate them from the perspective of a peer and identify those likely to join the Sharing, an organization – a cult – that we Yeerks have established on Earth in order to convince its members to give up their independence and desires and belong to something more. To submit to us and become voluntary hosts. Over the course of a month, I had identified around half of Cassie’s class as likely candidates to be initially targeted by the Sharing club that my superiors established within the school.
But over the same month, I had a crying twelve-year-old girl in my mind, begging me to give her just the tiniest portion of her life back. This was a new experience for me: I had possessed two previous hosts, and neither of them had ever had lives. Both had been born and bred as slaves to the Yeerk Empire.
At first, I had simply done as I was taught to do, suppress Cassie, threaten her, punish her. But it was…difficult. To constantly suppress a host is exhausting for a Yeerk, and I’d never had to do it for any length of time before, and the creature I was punishing and threatening was a child who had already been alive for nearly as long as I had, knew what she was trying to take back from me, knew fully what I had taken from her.
I had transferred from being a soldier to infiltration because I had grown tired of constant battle and struggle and fear and pain. Now as I occupied Cassie it looked like I hadn’t given up fighting at all. I was going to be spending all my time fighting Cassie, suppressing her, tormenting her, trying to get her to stop fighting me and just submit, even as she constantly struggled against me, tried to regain her limbs and her voice and her life. And the prospect of waging weeks or months or potentially even years of battle inside of her head…
So, I cut her a deal. I agreed to let Cassie control herself, sometimes. I had expected to simply tolerate it, give her control in situations that didn’t matter to me – at school, mostly – so I could control things the rest of the time. I hadn’t expected to find myself enjoying it, sitting in her mind, observing and experiencing what she did without forcing it. I hadn’t counted on finding myself invested in her life, reveling in her emotions, enjoying watching her successes, helping her move past her failures. Working together with her, and wanting what was best for her.
Host sympathy. One of the greatest crimes a person can commit. The punishment is slow, agonizing death by Kandrona starvation, and constant torture of both ourselves and the hosts we occupy the whole time.
That was what I had been fighting for. That was the empire I had been helping to build, a nation that treated the smallest act of compassion as a capital offense.
As I said: I am a monster.
But I’m trying to change.
Yeerks don’t sleep the same way humans do. Even as Cassie lay on her stomach in bed, mouth hanging open and drooling a little as she slumbered, I was in a semi-conscious state, resting as I nestled against her mind – not simply in the sense of being coiled and sunken physically into her brain, but also my own psyche pressed against hers. I was still aware of everything around Cassie through her available senses, but in this resting state my natural control over her was at its weakest, and my own thoughts were slow and muddled.
Cassie was dreaming. I couldn’t help but know what she was dreaming of. I’d promised her to stop reading her mind, and I did my best to keep that promise. But for my people, reading a host’s mind is a natural, sometimes unconscious action, and especially when resting it can become difficult to even realize we’re doing it, or even to separate our thoughts from that of our host. The thoughts and images simply bubble up and flow from them into our own minds and can feel like our own. It’s probably the closest a person can come to being controlled by their host instead of the more natural state of affairs.
It can lead to strange ideas entering our minds. Right now, I imagined what it would be like, to be in Cassie’s body, but to show up to school naked. I could see myself covering her body, and I imagined myself apologizing to the teacher, feeling mortified, and making excuses – that I was running late, that it had slipped my mind, that I’d needed to rush to the Pool. And all around me, of course, if this were to happen, the students would be laughing at Cassie, pointing at her, talking about the idiot who’d somehow forgotten clothes…
But then it occurred to me that I only really cared about school as an institution due to the fact that Cassie needed to go to it. And furthermore, while I was fully aware of human nudity taboos and could easily follow them, I didn’t really get them or care about them. If I did take Cassie to school naked, I might pretend to be embarrassed, but I wouldn’t actually feel it.
That was when I realized that Cassie’s dream was entering me, that my musings hadn’t fully been my own. I roused myself a little, pulling back from Cassie’s dream, closing myself off to that part of her mind. Cassie, herself, remained asleep even as I rose to full consciousness within her, and wondered what time it was. Her eyes were closed but some light was coming through her lids, so I knew the sun was up.
This part of inhabiting a host, being fully conscious while they were fully asleep, can actually be fun – you get a chance to try and move them without waking them. It’s a delicate balance of very gently accessing the right parts of the brain, slinking through their subconscious mind to trigger movement. Any overt control would be noticed and cause the host to be roused, and so instead a person has to rely on influence and little mental ‘pokes’ to their host’s mind. It’s time-consuming – the simplest actions can take minutes to achieve – though it also gives us something to do while the host body sleeps but we don’t. It’s a game, essentially.
I’ve known some people who had enough practice and skill to make their hosts actually sleepwalk, but the most I was confident I could do was just a few moments of moving a single limb or triggering one small reflex. All I did, over several minutes, was make Cassie turn her head, and then open one of her eyes. Her room was already bright, the clock on her nightstand reading 5:55 AM – the sun had just crested the horizon.
Five minutes to Six? I just might…
I closed Cassie’s eye, and convinced her mind to wiggle her body a little closer to the edge of her bed. Then I moved my focus to her arm. With her eyes closed I had to rely on her senses of touch and spatial awareness to slowly move her arm up from beneath her bedsheet. Her limp hand lightly pressed against the wood of her nightstand. I began to lift her arm to the clock…
BREEET! BREEET! BREEET! BREEET!
Too slow. Cassie’s conscious mind rose up from within her and I withdrew my control of her. She let out a groan and opened her eyes, squinting against the light, and saw her alarm going off. She reached out and pawed at the alarm clock, switching it off, achieving in seconds what I’d failed to do with her unconscious body over the course of five minutes.
I chuckled a little, though I kept it to myself. Cassie had won this round. Or Cassie’s alarm, at any rate.
“Why…do I even still have that?” Cassie mumbled as she began to wake up more fully. The human brain could go from inactive to alert in moments, when necessary, but absent a stressful awakening they tended to come-to only slowly.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Cassie continued, closing her eyes, hugging her pillow to herself. “You’re here. You don’t even sleep. You could wake me up.”
<Host habits can be worth keeping.> I said, conveying my thoughts directly into her mind rather than using her voice to respond to her. <At least that’s what my instructor told me. I’m supposed to be mimicking a human, after all.>
Cassie wiped her mouth, then let out a long sigh and heaved herself out of bed, stretching and rubbing her eyes. I sat back in her mind, experiencing it as her body and mind both gradually came out of their inactive states. Heart rate increasing, blood flow speeding up, neurons in her brain taking on a different cadence to the way they fired and sent signals to her body. Without having to control her and be inhibited by a lethargic brain and stiff muscles, I could focus wholly on an experience that was like coming alive. It felt good.
Cassie made her way to her home’s bathroom, closing the door behind her and locking it. When I’d first started letting her control herself again for much of her day, she’d done everything in this small room quickly, flush with embarrassment about my presence, the fact that I saw and smelled and felt everything she did, because for some reason humans did not want others to observe basic bodily functions. It hadn’t taken her long to just accept that I was there, however. Neither of us really had much of a choice in the matter.
“Any weird dreams?” Cassie asked me as she turned on her shower and took off her pajamas. The shower would muffle the sound of her voice, so she could speak up just a little in here. Cassie preferred speaking to me out loud whenever she could.
<Yeerks don’t dream,> I said. At least I assumed we didn’t, but then again humans often seemed to forget their dreams within seconds of waking, as Cassie had just done. For all I knew my people did dream while we rested, but were even more efficient at forgetting them.
“I meant did I have any?” She stepped into the shower. Lukewarm water hit her skin, firing her nervous system up more, sending tingles through me.
I considered Cassie’s question. She accepted that I sometimes just couldn’t help but see her dreams – essentially experience them for myself – but she’d made it very clear that certain dreams common to a human of her age, if I saw them, I was not to talk about. The trick was finding out exactly where her line was, and it didn’t help that it seemed to shift depending on her mood.
<You were naked in school. The students were laughing at you and the teacher wasn’t buying your excuses for why it had happened.>
Cassie chuckled a little as she let shower soak through her, the water heating up to the temperature she preferred. From her mind I felt just a little embarrassment, but mostly amusement. Unlike thoughts and memories, her emotions could not be blocked or ignored at all, and Cassie had long ago come to terms with that as well.
“God. Is that all? The go-to-school-naked one?”
Evidently this didn’t cross the at-times nebulous line. Cassie must have sensed my slight relief – while I was relaxed, she could sense my emotions just as easily as I could hers – and chuckled again.
“Aftran, you see me naked every day. I’ve gotten used to that.” She let out a sigh, pressing her head to her shower’s wall for a moment, the cool tile playing an interesting contrast to the hot water.
<I know that,> I said, slipping a little more into her sense of touch so that I could enjoy the contrast more. <But you can be a little weird about it sometimes. Like if I’d told you that Jake was also there – >
“Was he?!”
She kept her voice down, but I got a full burst of panic and mortification as she recoiled from the shower wall. And it made me laugh.
<See? See? That’s what I’m talking about! All I do is say that an imaginary version of a boy you like was there …>
Cassie calmed down, getting back to cleaning herself, starting with her hair, which she’d had cut short recently. I sensed annoyance with me, but it was a passing thing.
<Though for the record, no, I didn’t see him,> I added.
“Good. That’s good.” The bundle of emotional impressions that came off of her from that was too much for me to feel like untangling. I just let it wash away with the shower water as she finished cleaning her hair and moved on to the rest of her body, which she no longer hesitated to do with me around because…well, again, I wasn’t going anywhere.
I also just didn’t care that much. Cassie didn’t like the comparison, but to me all the particular details of the human body were like the details of a particular vehicle. I viewed what humans did in bathrooms in the same way a human might regard what happened to a car in a mechanic’s shop. That I could feel everything was nice, but it wasn’t coming from the sort of place that Cassie’s species was hardwired to think it was.
Cassie enjoyed longer showers, which was part of why she got up early for a child her age who otherwise didn’t really care much about her appearance. By the time she stepped from the water the skin of her fingertips had started to ‘raisin’ a little. Drying off was simple, and, towel wrapped around herself and pajamas in hand, she stepped from the bathroom and back towards her room.
Or she started to. She’d barely put her foot out the door when her parents’ room opened and her father Walter stepped out, already fully dressed. Not that it was really her father anymore. Cassie might have panicked or frozen, but I was faster than her instincts. Instantly I seized her whole body out from under her, without a single outward physical sign.
“Derane,” I said with Cassie’s voice, keeping it low and uninterested as we crossed the hall.
“Aftran,” The Yeerk named Derane Three-One-Three said, using Walter’s voice, pushing past us. Given that he was already fully dressed, he probably didn’t plan on using the shower himself.
“You’ll be riding the bus to school from now on,” Derane said.
<What?> Cassie asked from within her own mind.
“What?” I echoed, stopping outside of Cassie’s room. “Derane, you can’t – does a bus even drive by this place?”
“Yes.” Derane didn’t even turn Walter’s head to look back at his host’s daughter as he proceeded towards the house’s kitchen, passing out of sight.
I stared, considered going after him to get more of an explanation, but decided that I shouldn’t do anything while my host was naked, her embarrassment would be too much of a distraction. I brought us back into her room and slipped control back to her. She stumbled a little at the sudden return of her limbs, but much less than she might have half a year ago. We'd been practicing.
Cassie quickly cast the towel aside and scrambled to clothe herself, grabbing the necessary garments (and two I personally considered unnecessary, but humans had their own ideas) and donning them quickly, then heading out and down to the kitchen. I took control back before we reached the bottom stairs.
“Derane, what do you mean I’m riding the bus? Is there something wrong with the…truck…?”
Derane turned to look at me. He had grabbed a glass and filled it with water, and two slices of plain white bread. He was eating the latter without toasting it and without putting anything on it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Eating,” Derane said, after swallowing his bread.
“Just…bread?”
Derane smiled at me. I knew from Cassie’s memories that Walter was capable of many different smiles – gentle, mischievous, happy. Only since Derane had taken him over had a new smile been added: cruel.
“It’s wholly unpleasant,” Derane said, and then he drank back the water in several huge gulps. “Or, it will be after a few weeks of just this.”
<Aftran,> Cassie said, as panic rolled off of her <Aftran you have to – >
<I know,> I said. I tried to send her some feelings of reassurance.
“Derane,” I said aloud, “human bodies can’t survive on just bread and water. Especially not ones that perform a lot of physical activity.”
“Yes, Aftran, I am aware,” Derane said, “I am not an idiot. Still, I think a few days of malnutrition pain will make him more pliant.”
I grit Cassie’s teeth as I walked into the kitchen. “Derane, normally, what a person does with their body doesn’t matter. But when you hurt yours this openly, it sets off mine.”
Derane just shrugged. “I don’t see how that’s my problem. Which is, incidentally, why you’re taking the bus to school. Walter extracted some pleasure from his daughter kissing him goodbye outside the school – even if it was you doing it. So now he’s lost that.”
<Aftran! He’s – he’s torturing my dad…>
I gripped Cassie’s body a little more firmly. I couldn’t let the tears she wanted to shed fall.
“I don’t see the point of this. Suddenly getting on a bus will look suspicious – ”
“No, it won’t!” Derane laughed, crossing his arms. “It happens all the time. You can just make up some excuse about being a growing girl and wanting to be independent of Walter.” He leaned forward a little. “If you’re telling me that you don’t think you can deal with your own host…”
I rolled Cassie’s eyes, because I had to. “Please.”
“Then I don’t see why I should care.” Derane ate the other slice of bread. “You’re not in charge of me, Aftran. This is your first infiltration assignment.”
“It’s yours too!”
And Derane just shrugged his shoulders again, and then turned and walked out the door to the house.
<Aftran?> Cassie asked. <Aftran, can’t you…go get Odret! Isn’t she technically in charge of this whole thing?>
Odret Two-Five-Nine inhabited Cassie’s mother, and she was. In fact, she was the reason why this family was infested at all. Visser Three, the leader of the invasion of Earth, had wanted easy access to animal species of the planet, since his host body was an Andalite and he could therefore morph into any animal whose DNA he acquired via touch. As the head veterinarian of a major zoo in the invasion’s staging ground, Cassie’s mother Michelle had been identified as a target. The invasion had also called for inroads into one of the local middle school’s student body, and since Michelle had a daughter, that was why Cassie was seized.
Walter had been an afterthought – no reason to take mother and child but not father. Given the quality of his Controller, it showed. Even before I had started to seriously examine who I was and what I was doing, breaking and torturing and tormenting a host had been a chore to me. A broken host was just easier to deal with, but I didn’t enjoy it. It was just a thing I had to do until I moved on to other tasks. As long as my host was quiet and pliant, there was no reason for me to hurt them and no benefit to doing so.
Derane enjoyed it. He enjoyed hurting Walter. For him, there didn’t need to be a point to inflicting pain – or rather, the pain was the point. The problem was…
<He’s not doing anything wrong – >
<What?!>
< – by the Empire’s standards,> I turned Cassie around, walking her up to her kitchen counter, laying her hands on it and staring out a window, at what had once been a corn field back when Cassie’s home had been a genuine farm.
<If I go to Odret,> I said, <she’ll ask why it’s her problem. And as long as Derane is still capable of doing whatever he needs to do to pretend to be your father, it isn’t. I can’t tell her ‘because my host doesn’t want to see her father hurt’. That’s my problem to deal with.>
I pressed against her mind, making sure she could feel my sincerity and my pity. She didn’t try to move away from me. I felt terror for her father, and hatred that I assume was directed at Derane, but also a small amount of gratitude as she slowly moved her own mind against me. A sort of mental hug.
I wanted to give Cassie her body back then, allow her to cry, but I heard movement from upstairs – Odret coming down. I pulled away from the counter and went over to the fridge, looking inside, trying to remember if there was any particular breakfast that Cassie liked – one that wouldn’t require much preparation since I didn’t know when the school bus would be by.
Odret came down the stairs; unlike Derane, she seemed to have bathed, and her longer hair was still wrapped in a towel.
“You spoke to Derane?” Odret asked.
“I did,” I said. And then for Cassie’s sake, I added, “did he mention the part where he’s going to be starving his host?”
“He did,” she said, as she began to prepare a pot of coffee. “I advised against it but ultimately if the body starts failing that’s his problem.”
I heaved an annoyed sigh with Cassie’s breath, even as I felt Cassie cringe within her mind. That was exactly what I’d expected her to say. I had only one more angle to play.
“Look, I know this is my first infiltration assignment,” I said, as I settled on waffles from the freezer and pulled out a pair, setting them in the toaster. “But I was a soldier for years. The idea of deliberately inhibiting your own host’s physical abilities? It’s like…like draining half your Dracon beam’s battery before charging into battle.” I looked at Odret directly, right into Michelle’s eyes. “It’s inefficient. And stupid.”
Odret Two-Five-Nine was not a person that anyone would ever accuse of developing host sympathy. She was a veteran infiltrator, with more than a dozen previous hosts to her name across several campaigns on different worlds. But the same skills that made her an ideal spy also meant she was skilled at recognizing others’ talents – such as recognizing my concern for combat readiness, born from years of serving the Empire in battle.
Odret met Cassie’s gaze, before she let out a small sigh of her own. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I’ll tell Derane that he has to at least feed his host.” She shook her head. “Honestly, I thought I’d just wait until he realized that he was going to be feeling all the pain as well, but Derane strikes me as the type who’ll endure anything as long as someone else has it worse than him.”
I felt Cassie’s spirits rise, just a little. I gave her a small mental nudge.
<There is no way I can do anything about Derane not wanting to drive us to school, though,> I said.
<I know,> Cassie said. Worry remained, but relief also spread through her mind. <I know.>
I could feel gratitude as well, but she didn’t express it in words, because in that strange emotional way she also didn’t feel grateful at all. She shouldn’t have needed to be grateful to me, because her parents – and herself – shouldn’t have even been in this situation.
I wasted a few more minutes with Odret, talking shop about the invasion, but after eating waffles and drinking coffee I took us out to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic, the animal hospital that Cassie’s father ran and which Derane was required to as well to keep up the charade of everything being normal. With Derane out there, I couldn’t allow Cassie to control herself, instead needing to do her morning chores of cleaning the animal cages, feeding the animals, and aiding Derane in administering medication.
Things were tense between myself and Derane as we worked, but we managed to avoid squabbling, even though Derane hated this job. Given a choice he probably would have euthanized every animal who came to the Clinic, but luckily for them – and for Cassie’s mental wellbeing – Odret had commanded that Derane was to maintain the same level of success that the Clinic had possessed before the family’s infestation.
After about an hour, Cassie had to head inside to finish getting ready for school. And also, so that she could spend a few minutes just sitting on her bed and hugging her pillow. She didn’t cry, but I was still silent, giving her as much mental space as I could.
“Aftran?” She finally asked.
<Yes?>
“Derane doesn’t even want to be here. Couldn’t he put in for a transfer?”
<It doesn’t normally work like that. You get an assignment. You don’t get promoted out of it unless you do well in the assignment. And even then, you don’t normally transfer hosts unless it’s necessary.>
I rippled a little across Cassie’s mind, and she shuffled a bit on her bed in an unconscious echo. <I was a little of a special case. I’d helped Iniss One-Seven-Four once, and it helped her get promoted to being Sub-Visser Twenty-one. She owed me a favor, so I got…>
“Me.”
<Not you specifically,> I said quickly. It was the truth. <But out of a combat position. But…Derane is young. Younger than me. Your father is his first host. He doesn’t have any favors to trade. And, no offense…>
“But living on a farm and being a veterinarian isn’t going to let him stand out,” Cassie said. She nodded, and hugged her pillow tighter. It was a new habit, or at least I hadn’t seen her hugging her pillow for comfort in any of her memories back when I hadn’t cared if she wanted me to see them or not. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had made the habit develop, though.
Eventually, though, she got back to getting ready for school – fortunately, unlike many girls her age, Cassie didn’t care much for makeup or style, so we didn’t have to spend any length of time sitting in front of a mirror and applying face paint or lip gloss or whatever else. ‘Getting ready to go out’ for Cassie just meant putting on (usually but not always matching) socks and shoes and looking outside to see if it was likely she’d need a jacket, then grabbing her backpack – it was starting to look tattered from overuse – and heading out.
I took over control for walking us through and out of the house, and for the way down her driveway. Our agreement was that, with a few exceptions, I would control her when close to other Controllers, so as to make sure that none of them realized what I was doing, that I had developed sympathy for my host and was trying to work together with her.
But Cassie got to control herself at school – there were still few Controllers there – and when she was among her friends. Technically speaking, our agreement did not cover what to do on the bus, but it seemed natural enough to extend Cassie’s school-and-friends time to it.
So once we reached the end of the driveway, I leaned Cassie back against a fence post.
<Okay,> I said, <One...two...three.>
I released control, and Cassie resumed it. There was no outward sign at all, not even a twitch or slight stiffening. We'd gotten good. At some point Cassie might not even need the count at all.
<So how long are we going to be waiting here?> I asked.
“Well, when I went to elementary school I took the bus,” Cassie said, keeping her voice low. “My elementary school started at about nine, and the bus came by at eight-twenty. Middle school starts about an hour earlier, so I’m hoping the bus comes by an hour earlier too.”
We probably could have waited a good portion of those in her house. But…Cassie’s house wasn’t really a home anymore, not for her. Not while two of my brethren enslaved her parents.
Cassie didn’t own a watch, so I don’t know how accurate her guess was. It was long enough that I was just starting to wonder if she was wrong, when around a corner a yellow school bus turned and started making its way down the road. Cassie waved it down, and the bus stopped fairly close to right in front of her, the doors swinging open.
“H-hi,” she stammered to the driver once she’d climbed aboard. “Um. I’m supposed to take the bus from now on…”
“Yeah, your folks let the school know last night,” the driver said. “What happened?”
“Um, well…you know…I’m a growing girl!” Instantly I was blasted by her realization of both how stupid she sounded and how she’d said it far too cheerfully. She quickly turned away and started heading down the bus’s aisle, blood rushing through her face and heating up her cheeks, something that only wasn’t visible because of her dark skin.
<Aftran, where were you for that?> She demanded as she looked for an available seat, and tried to ignore a number of kids on the bus staring at her for being new.
<What do you mean, where was I?>
<I’m bad at lying!>
<You absolutely are not.>
<I’m bad at lying on the spot, I mean. I need to rehearse!>
The only reason why I didn’t assume control of Cassie’s eyes in order to roll them was because it would have looked strange. I did, however, spot a familiar face at the same time she did, in a seat that still had an open spot. And she must have gotten a flash at what I intended to do.
<Wait no Aftran – >
I slipped into control of her body, and stopped her in front of the seat. “Um, hi, Jake,” I said to the tall-for-his-age, brown-haired boy sitting there and looking up at me – well, Cassie – in surprise. I said it exactly how Cassie would have.
“Can I sit here?”
“Uh – I mean…y-yeah!” Jake said, moving his backpack onto his lap. I sat down.
<Aftran! What did you do?!>
<Got you a seat,> I said. <Hang on, I’ll hand control back over.>
I slid back from Cassie, who stiffened a little at the sudden release, but not in a way that I think anyone noticed. No one else on the bus was paying attention and Jake was too busy trying not to be flustered.
“Hi,” Cassie said again.
“Hi,” Jake echoed. He cleared his throat. “So, uh…taking the bus from now on?”
“Yeah,” Cassie was staring very intently at the seat in front of her. “Because, um…reasons.”
Jake laughed a little, which made Cassie giggle herself. The awkwardness bled away, just a bit.
I gave Cassie a gentle, hopefully encouraging nudge, then settled back into her mind. Focusing on just listening to the kids around the bus with her ears, or looking through her eyes. And I focused on Cassie’s emotions. There was annoyance, which I assume was directed at me, but there was also the mixture of embarrassed, unsure attraction that Cassie felt around Jake.
It wouldn’t really pass beyond that, of course – which was my fault. Cassie could grow comfortable with the idea of me being around her even while bathing or using the toilet, because she had no choice, but she was considerably less comfortable with the idea of trying anything with Jake as long as I was in her head. She thought of it as voyeuristic.
But then again, the attraction was still there. And after this morning, I think she needed something to distract her from her thoughts of Derane, and I was willing to gamble that sitting next to Jake on the bus was something that would do so. Cassie knew full well that I was doing this, of course, and while she may have been annoyed with me in the moment, I knew from experience that she’d appreciate it later.
The day hadn’t gotten off to a great start. But maybe that would change.