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lilacsolanum · 7 years

Note

For your headcanons meme: Darwin and/or Madra (Sorry if this is a repeat)

THIS MADE ME SCREAM WITH DELIGHT even though I didn’t really have headcanons about Darwin and Madra so I had to THINK OF THEM, sorry this took me so long, also sorry this is kind of more of a fic(?) about Eva but Darwin and Madra are there, it’s just what happened when I started brainstorming. And also sorry to everyone who is particularly sensitive to horror of getting infested because CONTENT WARNING: THIS IS A LOT OF THAT!!!

Send me a character and I’ll write 10 headcanons!

As soon as Eva heard Marco’s voice, both she and Edriss went quiet. There was a certain calmness shared between the two of them, a revelation and a premonition. They both knew how resilient the “Andalite” bandits were, and they both knew how carefully Marco had played Eva’s rescue. Her son never played impulsively unless the odds were somewhat in his favor. They knew that Edriss would die, and Eva would be saved.

Edriss did something in that moment, something she had never really done before. She opened up the connection between them, and let Eva see through Edriss’s brain in the way Edriss always could Eva.

In the height of her starvation induced insanity, Edriss’s memories were scratched and imperfect. Human faces had crooked Gedd teeth or blood red Taxxon eyes or had no faces at all. Sound was distorted, mixing with memories of Eva’s own Edriss induced screams. Languages were were a harsh, unnatural, jumbled mess, but because Edriss understood them, Eva understood.

Eva saw Edriss seeing a blue sky and feeling sand whip across her face. She felt the unspeakable pleasure of writhing beneath Hildy Gervais and knowing he was Essam. She felt the hardly suppressed joy of those increasingly rare moments when ten-year-old Marco would put his head in his almost-mother’s lap. Through it all, she saw two ever shifting images, two faces that Edriss was desperately trying to build with her tortured, fragmented mind.

She saw Darwin, and she saw another young girl, and it did not take someone of Eva’s abilities and wit to figure out that she was Madra.

Edriss couldn’t quite give her exact addresses, but Eva managed to pick out street names through the flickering images. She picked out street numbers, and she saw the city maps Edriss showed her, and she figured it out.

Edriss managed.

Eva replied.

–

Edriss had send her twins to two separate places, both far from Santa Barbara, but not too far. She still liked to visit them. Through Edriss’s jagged memories, Eva learned she would take temporary hosts, then pose as some sort of teacher or doctor or friend and talk to Darwin or Madra. This explained away Edriss’s odd day trips. At least once a year, Edriss would tell Peter and Marco that Eva was going to some kind of retreat with her friends. Then, she would find some guileless junkie in the seedier areas of the city, and convince them to get in Eva’s car. She would then go to a Yeerk controlled gas station, drug the addict, and blindfold herself. One of Edriss’s trusted lackeys would drive them to some cabin. There, Edriss would set up a television with a feed to the outside of Eva’s house. She would explain that the house was set up with explosives, and if Eva tried to run and attempt to find her way back to Santa Barbara, her lackey would wait until both Peter and Marco were home and hit a button. Eva would always, always promise to behave. Edriss would wash her new host’s body, make it presentable with make-up and expensive outfits, and leave.

This would continue even after Eva’s “death,” though the temporary host was often presented to Edriss by the lackey rather than Edriss risking getting caught out in the city herself. Eva watched what happened to her bright, beautiful boys in the aftermath of her false death. Edriss found joy in her pain, and once bugged the inside of Peter and Marco’s apartment, just to torture Eva more. They ended up moving, and Edriss never found the time to bug the new place. Then, Peter got his shit together, and Eva started delighting in Marco and Peter’s progress. Eva never bugged their new places. If she had, the Animorphs would have been found out within weeks. To this day, Eva freezes with the nearness of it all.

When Edriss returned to the cabin and reinfested Eva, she would kill the temporary host. Eva knew the blood on her hands didn’t really belong to Eva, but her nightmares didn’t.

—

Edriss was obviously going to infest Darwin and Madra one day, that much was clear. But Edriss wanted to control the infestation, make sure that her children were given to high ranking Yeerks that Edriss trusted. That was why she found parents that lived so far away. When Eva thought back to it, she had a feeling Edriss was priming two of her subordinates to take Darwin and Madra, a Sub-Visser Forty-Nine and a Umlash 979. Edriss had always a strange and sickening parental attachment to those two. She forced both of them into human hosts, even if Umlash had a strong attachment to Hork-Bajir. Edriss would occasionally call one of them into her quarters simply to talk, or to give them a gift, or to offer them sweets. Once, she forced Sub-Visser Forty-Nine to lay xir head in Edriss’s lap, and Edriss stroked xir hair while singing in Korean.

Gom semariga hanjibe isseo. Appa-gom, eomma-gom, aegi-gom.

Eva could still hear her voice singing tunelessly, her tongue perfectly enunciating words in a language Eva did not recognize.

Eva had never understood it, but neither had her chosen surrogate children. Eva could feel their hesitance, sense their bafflement, but somehow Edriss could not. Eva suspected Edriss turned off the connection she had to Eva in those moments. She was living out some fantasy, and Eva did not belong in it.The first and only time Eva had mocked Edriss for these meetings, Edriss silenced Eva with drugs, pumping their body full of hallucinogens and then disconnecting herself from the effects. Eva never said anything about it again.

–

At first, Eva did not want to find Darwin and Madra. They were not her responsibility, because she was not Edriss. Edriss was her captor, her slaver, and she had said goodbye to her when she crushed Edriss in her hand. However, after a few months of perfect strangers seeing her and breaking down in grocery stores, Eva accepted that Edriss was part of her. It was not a happy acceptance, but it was an acceptance that would allow Eva to move forward with her life.

Eva couldn’t shake the idea that if Edriss was part of her, then so was Alison Kim, and so were her children. While Eva doubted her ability to help Darwin or Madra in any meaningful way, she knew Eva herself would never feel truly at peace until she tied that loose end. They were not her responsibility, but without Alison or Edriss, no one would ever take responsibility for them. They were not her children, but they would grow and they might wonder about their birth mother, and Eva was the closest thing they would ever have.

She wouldn’t speak to the kids. She would, however, set up some arrangement with the parents.

It was happenstance that the Yeerks had found Darwin at all. As it turned out, Darwin’s mother wanted to pursue television writing, so Darwin’s father got a job at the University of California Santa Barbara. They moved to a suburb somewhere between LA and SB. The commute was killer, but there weren’t a lot of colleges that needed a professor of medieval literature, so Darwin’s father took the Santa Barbara job with grace. Darwin’s father was the sort of young, hip college professor that drew trust from his students, something an unfortunate controller managed to zero in on. It was child’s play to use The Sharing to draw Darwin’s father into The Pool. Darwin’s father became Avis 2771, and Avis was fond of taking Darwin on walks. One day, a man stinking of unwashed clothes, urine, and liquor approached them. It would have been annoying but otherwise unremarkable if the man had not directly asked Avis if he was a Yeerk.

Avis took the man home and got as much of a coherent story from this “Spacey” as he could. Between Spacey’s half sentences and the fact that his mouth was the same shape as Darwin’s, Avis managed to piece together some of the story.

Avis went to Visser Three immediately, hungry for a promotion. They infested Darwin, and formulated a plan to use Darwin against Visser One. Avis became Sub-Visser Eighty-Seven.

By the time Eva found the family, they were all in post-Host recovery. They had all gone through it, and were very supportive of one another. They had moved closer to Santa Barbara to allow Darwin access to other post-Host children.

They were doing everything right, and that warmed Eva’s heart. It was more than she could say for her own family.

—

She set up a meeting with them through the school, making sure she saw the parents without Darwin. She knew the sight of her would be a bit much for a ten-year-old child.

“I know you know who I am,” she said calmly. “And I know you know the origin of your son. You may also know by turning on the television at any given moment of the day that my son is currently making me more money than I can spend. Would you like a college fund for the boy? Perhaps a new house?”

Darwin’s parents agreed to the college fund, but said they were happy with their current home. They didn’t want to disrupt Darwin’s life too much. They told her Darwin didn’t really understand his parentage, and that his memories of being a host were spotty at best. Eva was more than happy to hear it.

—

Madra was harder. Madra had been sent to a sweet but dangerously naive family, the sort of family that defined themselves by white fence standards and didn’t seem to have soul. Eva hated the mother especially. She was the sort of woman Eva would meet at her old churches, before she found a community that truly understood and delighted in the pure joy of Jesus. These women were more into the idea of absolution than they were in living the radical Word, and Eva had never liked them. She could see hypocrisy in the woman’s exact shade of Stepford red lips, could read lies in the shape of her eyebrows. This woman had probably stood in front of her church and proclaimed God told her to adopt, and most likely found more joy in the attention for her “sacrifice” than she found joy in the actual child. Eva had a feeling that if she tried to tell this woman her adopted daughter was the product of a sick Yeerk marriage, the woman would simply call the police. The father wasn’t much better. He made ball-and-chain jokes about his wife, and spent as much time away from his spouse and their children as he possibly could.

She would need a different tactic. She would also need a different face.

—

She thought about asking Marco. She knew her son had a few alternate human morphs, and she didn’t blame him. Her son couldn’t walk outside without getting mobbed these days, and if he had the ability to disguise himself beyond a wig and sunglasses, Eva was all for it. Only she knew he wouldn’t like that she was finding and supporting Edriss’s lost children. Marco was far, far more sensitive about Edriss than Eva. Eva had lived through being infested, and she found power and healing in being frank about it, because she had been in her mid thirties and had decades of experience to hold her up. Marco had lived through a hell of his own, with all of thirteen scant years to help him. He tried to bury his nightmares by acting like it had been a fun adventure. When Eva spoke about Edriss, Marco bristled. Eva understood why, and knew that forcing him to think like her wasn’t going to help him heal. She just made it clear she would support him, and when Marco did open up, it was always to her. If she wanted him to continue to open, she had to never, ever tell him about Darwin and Madra.

So she called Jake.

—

Marco never shut up about how Jake never returned his calls (and his tears over the situation were one of those rare moments he only showed his mother) but Jake got back to Eva almost immediately. Perhaps because it was very, very odd for Eva to reach out to Jake at all. They had been close before the infestation, but after Eva’s “death” and their shared time in the Hork-Bajir Valley, they weren’t exactly on speaking terms. It wasn’t malicious, it was just that Eva tried to reach out to Jake multiple times, but between her lack of stability and his, every outreach ended up awkward and went nowhere.

Still, she had been Auntie Eva, and sometimes she had even beenmom, so Jake returned her call. When she explained the situation, Jake immediately agreed to help. There was a sort of desperation it, a need to give what he could to those affected by a war he didn’t start, but accepted blame for. Eva would have contacted Jean about it, but Jean was afraid of her these days, and all Eva could do was wait it out.

Eva fed him a story, and Jake fed it to Madra’s mother. Jake appeared as himself, which was much easier for Stepford Mom to swallow than Eva would have been. Jake was a good guy in the invasion story, and his face was only associated with stories of triumph. Eva’s face did not have the same association.

Jake (through Eva) spun a tale of a sacrificial woman who aided the Animorphs when they needed her most, who had made Jake promise to help out her daughter and her son. Madra was delighted at news of a long lost twin, the secret fantasy of nearly everyone. Jake agreed to set up trust funds not only for Madra, but for her two siblings (biological children of her adopted parents.) It was a happy story, full of closure. The family took pictures with Jake.

—

Darwin and Madra met for the first time in a McDonald’s. Madra taught Darwin how to dip fries into a milkshake. They played in a ballpit, giggling and free

Eva was there, in her wig and sunglasses. She whispered to Darwin’s parents, and they agreed not to tell Darwin and Madra the truth until they were eighteen.Eva didn’t plan on finding out how that went down.

I did what you wanted me to, bitch, she thought to a blissfully empty place inside her. Your children are happy and safe. Now rot.

#animorphs #zarohk #eva #madra #darwin #yeerk horror #I don't think I technically put up the ten headcanon meme #but I did reblog someone's about Jake #so I think that's what this is????#if it's not if it's some other thing I reblogged #bro I'm so sorry #I'm so sorry about the way I am #but so many of y'all can send me asks I'm so here for it

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