I don’t know if you’re still doing the aus thing, but what would have happened if one or all the animorphs had some kind of disability that doesn’t heal with morphing so ax has to get over his ableism since the begging?

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

<I know,> Elfangor says inside their minds, and Marco jerks around in surprise, one hand coming up to the side of his head.

What the fuck? he signs to Jake. How the fuck…?

Jake frowns. Aliens? he answers at last, and adds a shrug.

Marco laughs, surprising the others.

In fact, Rachel finds herself surprised by a lot of aspects of Marco over the next several days. It turns out he’s snarky, and not just snarky but funny as hell while he’s at it. It never even occurred to her that she could be in the same class as a kid since the first grade and yet know so little about him by simple virtue of them having no languages in common. Sure, Jake will translate for him sometimes, as will the professional interpreter the school pays to help him with classes, but it’s not until he gains the ability to thought-speak that she realizes he never shuts up.

In the eyes of half their school he’s just that sad, silent kid who lost his mom, excluded from most of their conversations so casually and so completely that she never knew until she thought to look about the constant running stream of sarcastic comments he keeps up where only Jake can understand. She never knew about his tendency to babble when nervous, never knew about his weird and inappropriate sense of humor, never knew about his crazy skill with math and gaming. Never knew him, period. She prides herself on not judging based on appearances, but it appears she has all along.

When she starts learning ASL—when they all start learning, simply because they all spend so much time together—there are other revelations as well. For instance, Marco has nicknames for them all: hers is the sign for television’s Xena, Tobias’s is the motion for “bird” nearer the forehead where one would normally indicate “boy,” Cassie’s is one she can only describe as “crazy tree,” and Jake’s is just the letter J twice held at an angle to indicate that he is ridiculously large. He invents their term for yeerk—a hand held in the shape of a y with a finger wiggle to indicate antennae or fins—and taps it against his right temple to mean controller. Rachel doesn’t understand the motion he keeps making which looks almost like have-animal-warp until he finger-spells out A-N-I-M-O-R-P-H and makes a sweeping gesture at the five of them sitting around Cassie’s barn.

Osprey eyes are hands-down the coolest thing Marco has ever experienced. Sure, the ears are interesting too, since apparently they can hear even more than most humans are able to perceive. Although, to be honest, he finds the sounds somewhere between distracting and startling much of the time, especially before he gets the hang of flying while also being assailed by tree rustles and highway rumbles and bird calls. The eyes, though. He can literally read the lips of a person standing an entire mile away. He can tell everything that’s happening around him with a single glance. He can make out individual words written on signs and ads and ATMs while he coasts so far above them that he can also see half their town all at once. With these eyes he could probably drive a car and carry on a conversation and read a book all at the same time, assuming that this morph actually had hands to talk with. Seeing as a bird isn’t nearly enough to make the fear and death and blood and general awfulness okay, but it does go a long way toward making up for all the bad.

Marco doesn’t let any of the others into his apartment, even though they’ll use Rachel’s and Cassie’s and even Jake’s place fairly regularly. Jake already knows about how Marco’s dad sits there, unmoving, eyes so unfocused he cannot possibly be reading the closed captions on the television that constantly plays in the living room, but Marco hopes to keep the others from finding out. Honestly Marco has no idea what Peter does all day; the books in the apartment always have the same layer of dust when Marco cleans, the computer’s always left open to whatever IM chat he was last using with Jake, and the disability checks sort of keep them afloat so that Peter doesn’t have to work.

Later, Marco will marvel at the sick brilliance of it all. The yeerks didn’t want to bother using Peter as a host, not when their eugenics-nazi-ableist bullshit prevents them from seeing him as useful. Instead they took Peter’s primary link to the hearing world, and enslaved her, and warped her, and finally killed her.

For now, he steps between his father and the television as soon as he gets home. He asks: you eat? the way he always does. Peter’s eyes slide away, slide shut. Marco wants to puke-scream-cry every time his father does this: shutting him out, turning him off, making him nothing.

It’s shameful to admit, but Jake seriously considers leaving Aximili at the bottom of the ocean for a good couple of seconds there. It seems to take for-freaking-ever for the four of them to explain to the new kid that humans usually talk by sound, that Marco doesn’t perceive sound, that there’s a second language with gestures which Rachel and Cassie are still learning and they’ll be happy to teach Aximili, that Marco can understand and use thought-speak just fine but understanding and using sound-speak requires some guesswork on his part, that the condescending way Aximili describes ASL as “adorably clever” is Not Okay, that Marco took about two milliseconds to switch from fingerspelling A-X-I-M-I-L-I to making the short chopping motion for “axe” not because he’s confused about Aximili’s name but because he’s saving time and nicknaming people is a thing he does, that they’re willing to respect Aximili’s culture only up to a point and if he ever uses the word vecol again then Cassie will probably punch him even before Marco does, that they have no intention of keeping Marco in isolation and also no interest in ever hearing that suggestion ever again…

We need smurf-kid? Rachel asks the others, echoing Jake’s thoughts.

Marco smirks at the moniker, and then shows her how to switch from smurf-kid to the sign that approximates eyes-on-horns, which is what he and Jake have been using to mean andalite. And then he turns to Jake, with a request for translation.

“We are, all of us, not ideal,” Jake says slowly, working off Marco’s hands but glancing at the andalite kid every so often for confirmation. “We are children, we are not familiar—” He stops when Marco shakes his head and repeats the motion, mouthing the word this time along with the sign. “We are not experienced,” Jake says. “Not with battle, not with aliens, not with…” He hesitates, and then, “Not with knowing what is right and what is wrong to do.” Marco shrugs—that wasn’t precisely it—but after a second he nods to tell Jake that he’s close enough. “We are the only people who can fight the yeerks. We are not andalites, but we are willing. I am willing to help, willing to fight, willing to die. That would be—No, that should be,” Jake corrects, “enough.”

Marco stops talking, makes another small motion with no direct sign. Jake can read his expression enough to know what he means: that he gave it his best shot, and now they’ll see.

Aximili considers this for several seconds. <You fight the yeerks?> he says. Marco tilts a fist, but then switches to nodding instead. <You are willing to die to ensure that every being in this galaxy can live free from enslavement?> Aximili asks. Again, Marco nods. <You wish to protect this planet and avenge Elfangor?> Another nod.

Jake shifts in place, wondering whether they’re going to be here all night—or at least however long it takes for the yeerks to find them—when Aximili finally steps forward, lowering his tail blade. <Very well,> he says. <I would be honored to fight and die by your side, until such time as rescue comes for us all.>

On their way home after leaving the newly-dubbed Ax in Tobias’s care, Marco says to Jake: Ax speaks… extra sounds on every word?

Extra sounds, Jake confirms, sighing. Every word. Very distracting.

Not a bother to me, Marco says smugly. He’s lying, of course, because the wacky way that boy talks makes reading his lips a friggin’ nightmare, but he does it just to get Jake to roll his eyes and smile.

The first time Marco hears his mother’s voice, he’s thirteen years old. The first time he hears it only through weak gorilla ears and yet wants to close his entire being around the memory of that sound. The first time he hears it, it’s shaping commands and orders that Eva would never give, because the first time he hears it, he’s already too late for it to be her voice anymore: Visser One is choosing the words that her lips and tongue and throat all form. The first time he hears her voice, a hatred so cold and so all-consuming fills him that he will never be able to hear her voice again (not even when Eva is once again the one speaking her own words) without some echo of that feeling twisting just below his heart.

<This is music? Seriously, Jake? THIS is what everyone keeps talking about all the time? This is atrocious. I want my goddamn money back.>

<We didn’t pay, remember? We snuck in. After you were the one who was like ‘let’s morph dogs, Jake, just this once. It could be the fate of the world, Jake. I’ve never heard music before, Jake. It’s just one concert, Jake, and it might be the only concert I ever get to hear. We could die at any minute, Jake.’>

<Don’t quote me to me, you screech-loving loser.>

<It’s not screeching, it’s The Offspring—>

<Yeah, well, right now The Offspring are screeching enough to offend me to the depths of my tiny doggy soul.>

<You know, if you pay attention to the lyrics, they’re actually pretty cool.>

<Nah, man. If you like the lyrics so much, then just read the lyrics. Don’t pay somebody to scream them at you.>

<There’s also guitar, and percussion, and backup singing…>

<Uh-huh. Enjoy your bloodcurdling warbles, dude. I’m off to go find cute concertgoers to pet me and feed me popcorn some more.>

It’s ridiculous for Marco to feel like some part of his very self is under threat when he spends a few hours a week, every week, hearing. It’s ridiculous that he’s never quite comfortable with the way that Tobias and Ax “talk” with something really more like verbal speech than ASL or text. They all change. They all become different things. Marco’s been a wolf, a housefly, a dog, a gorilla, and a dolphin, for Pete’s sake. That doesn’t mean he is secretly an animal deep down.

And it doesn’t mean he’s betraying his own culture by using a tool that—among other things—usually comes with sound perception. It doesn’t. Honestly. He’s such a melodramatic brat sometimes that he annoys even himself.

While running from the veleek, Marco and Jake work out a hasty set of signals—Jake taps Marco’s elbow to mean he has to go slower to let the death monster keep up, and his shoulder to mean he should go faster or they’re all gonna die—and Marco pretty successfully ignores everything but those two taps. There is a lot of other gesticulation from the passenger seat, and from the few glimpses he catches out of his peripheral vision there’s a fair amount of yelling too, but he’s only got the two eyes and needs to point them both at the road. Besides, it’s only three trash cans. Okay, five. Okay, maybe more like fifteen. But trash cans are replaceable, right?

Later, Jake will be able to point to the day, the hour, the minute, the second he knew it wasn’t going to work with David. It was less than ten minutes into their explanation of Animorphs and yeerks. Marco tapped David on the shoulder to ask him to repeat himself where Marco could see his lips—and David, very deliberately turning his face away toward the rest of the room, said “Oh my god, is he always like this?”

<…so then this girl goes, ‘do you like opera?’ And I’m seriously staring at her for like six and a half seconds, wondering how I managed to misread her lips into the word opera… But then she repeats herself!> Marco has been ranting for what feels to Tobias like half an hour now. <And sure enough, she said opera. Opera. As in three freaking hours’ worth of—>

<Marco,> Tobias says patiently, <Remember the part where we’re supposed to be on surveillance duty, here?>

<Yeah, yeah, watching this lady like a hawk. Which I am. And she has some opera name…>

<Aria.>

<Exactly!> He wheels around to get a better angle on the hotel room where she’s shut herself in the bathroom, yet again. <And this girl’s name was Marian. And this is her idea of a first date: three hours of sitting in a room where it’s too dark to have a conversation, squinting at people on a stage off in, like, New Zealand to try and follow a plot that’s going to be incomprehensible no matter what I do, because they’re not talking, they’re singing it!>

<So my maybe-cousin’s maybe-fake name was what got you on this track. Good to know.>

<Anyway, just in case she’s called Aria because she’s some kind of opera freak, I’m telling you now man: don’t let her talk you into going. Opera. It’s a trap.>

<Hang on…> Tobias tilts a wing so that he can wheel around and look directly at Marco. <You actually went on this date?>

<A girl asked me out. Not the other way around. What was I supposed to do, refuse?>

<Uh, how about suggesting something other than opera for the first date?>

<Yeah, yeah, like you’re so smart. Now he tells me this. Anyway, the moment was way too high-pressure for me to think of that kind of response, and the night of… Well, it was a good nap at least. Even if I did apparently snore during some of it.>

Tobias can only imagine. <You can rest easy, man. I am most definitely not going on any dates with my cousin, and I’m also probably not going to be doing three hours’ worth of anything human at any point in the near future,> he drawls. <If she even is my cousin,> he can’t resist adding. <If my dad’s brother even had a daughter. If my dad even had a brother. If my dad’s even dead and not—>

<Hey, it’s Ax!> Marco says, apparently too self-focused to listen to Tobias’s whining. <Or the world’s most lost harrier. Wait here, I have to go tell him that if a girl asks him to the opera then he has to run for his life.>

Visser One knows they are human. She already knows, and she is about to die, and Marco is in gorilla shape. Which is why he does it: he lifts his right hand, palm out, middle and ring fingers folded down, other three fingers extended. Marco sees her eyes widen in shock, her lips start to form around his name, and then she falls. She screams, and he screams along with her.

<I’m telling you,> Marco explains to the others, <there’s no point in messing around with trying to get the roach’s vibratey-feeling to make sense as words. If we’re eavesdropping, we’re mostly going to be better off just reading lips.> Which turns out to be easier said than done, Rachel is quickly discovering. Sure, she excels at Marco’s training technique of turning off her television’s sound and deciphering the actors without closed captions, but in practice it proves to be a lot more hazardous.

<But what do I do if a controller spends the whole time talking with a hand in front of their mouth?> Rachel asks.

Marco considers, antennae twitching. <In that case you’re screwed.>

<But what if the person’s got, like, massive facial hair?> she says.

<Once again, you’re screwed.>

<What if the person spends the whole time looking down while talking?>

<Yeah, you’re screwed.>

<But if they’re just mumbling a lot?>

<Rachel, you do know how I’m going to answer that question by now, right?>

<This is annoying,> she grumbles. <And frustrating.>

<Gee, you THINK?> he says, half-laughing. <I had NO IDEA!>

The first time Marco hears his father’s voice, he’s sixteen years old. The first time he hears it he registers surprise, because he didn’t mean to morph and yet he has a gorilla’s ears and a gorilla’s fists and a gorilla’s slow-burning rage. The first time he hears it, his father is screaming in wordless rage and fear as four controllers force his head closer to the surface of the portable yeerk pool. The first time Marco hears his father’s voice, he is just barely on time.