[I love this idea!  For everyone else: OP refers to this dream AU.]

• Tobias walks downtown.  He walks.  It seems to take an illogically long time, and the people.  Greenpeacers and Symbiotes and tourists and panhandlers: they all want a piece of him.  At least most of them only want money or signatures or signatures guaranteeing money.  The tourists want to steal a piece of his soul with their Nikons and click-phones and tablets.  They want to catch him with his mouth open or his eyes closed or his self showing.  That way they can bring those bits of him home in flash drives and paw over them with grubby fingers, to stack Tobias Fangor Mid-Yawn up next to Jude Law Walking and Patrick Swayze Eating Hot Dog in order to see how he compares.

• The New York Public Library is a glowing oasis of escape, just as the Harrison Memorial Library was in his youth.  He veers left up its stairs, brushing an absentminded hand over the plinth of the nearest lion statue.  (Later, a tabloid reporter will ask him about the significance of this gesture, which Tobias until that very second didn’t know he did every time he enters the library.  The rest of the world fights ravenously over the smallest scraps of gristle that might give them some tiny piece of Tobias no one else has yet decoded.)

Strange, how the reading rooms with their four-story ceilings can feel so open and airy while the actual sky outside so often presses him down into suffocation.  Tobias wanders for a time, trailing fingers across spines and absently checking dustjackets for interest.  The tourists are here, too, of course, as are the panhandlers, but the forced vow of silence keeps everyone in line.

When Tobias goes up to the desk with Margaret Atwood and Avi, Emma Donoghue and Zora Neale Hurston, he fidgets and delays the inevitable before he passes his card to the girl behind the desk.  She’s not one of the steel-eyed librarians who will watch anyone come and go without comment, but a bright-lipsticked teenager whose mouth goes wide with predictable surprise when she reads his name.

Tobias stands still for her scrutiny of his face, not bothering to imitate any human expressions of pride or embarrassment or politeness.  But he does twitch a little when he sees her looking down, memorizing the titles.  It might take time, but some internet stranger will later analyze that constellation of four novels and arrive at a conclusion about his personality or preferences, his leanings or his life.

“Have a nice day!”  The girl fidgets as she says it, trying to make a good first impression on an important person.

“Thanks, you too.”  Tobias attempts a small smile, only to watch the girl withdraw, pulling into herself in hurt or fear.  He has a reputation for being cold and unfriendly, and he supposes that this reaction means he still hasn’t mastered the basics of human politesse.

He doesn’t fidget, doesn’t feel much of anything.  All his impressions are first impressions, and everyone who sees him has more power than him to define who he is.

• Tobias has dreams of fighting and falling and tearing talons into human flesh; he awakes and Rachel holds him tight as they whisper to each other.  Tobias has dreams of being trapped on the landing of a Manhattan high rise, unable to make his way down to the next floor and escape the building because of a tiny gap ten feet across and fifteen feet down, desperate simply to fling himself into space out of sheer frustration; he awakes to find Rachel’s hands curled into claws in her sleep, and shakes her gently awake.  Tobias dreams of flying; he slides out of bed and steps out onto their penthouse balcony until he can once again breathe.

• “How are you doing?” reads the subject line of Loren’s email.  She sends some variation on this inquiry twice a week.

Tobias clicks to open it.  It’s full of her usual chatter about work (she’s running a campaign to get braille editions of all popular books released the same time as standard printings), about her latest dog (Gordon, or is Xavier the dog and Gordon the boyfriend?), about how her date went last night (either Xavier-the-boyfriend peed on her carpet or Tobias has his names confused), and about how she really enjoyed that Octavia Butler person Tobias recommended last time.

Glad you’re doing well, he writes, and if you liked Octavia Butler, you might want to give Marge Piercy a try.  He stares at it for several more seconds, wishing he had more words to give, wishing they could talk of things deeper than fiction.  He hits send.

• The office on the ninety-seventh floor of the Eight Avenue office building was a gift from Rachel, and also a hint: it’s been almost six months since Tobias became human full-time, over a decade since the end of the war.  It’s high time he got a job.  It’s high time he did a lot of things.

Tobias sits in the ergonomically impeccable desk chair with both feet propped against the window like he’s a little kid, alternating between reading novels and watching the pigeons with a predator’s focus.  Reebok paid him $500,000 for the shoes he wore twice, and Dartmouth College thought it worth their time to spend almost $10 million on getting a kid with no high school diploma to talk to their graduating students.  Rachel sells fashion designs, writes part-time for a feminist magazine, and volunteers for the Coast Guard.

Tobias doesn’t see the point in acquiring more money, or expending more effort.  Not while Danielle Steele keeps putting out novels.

• “Andy Schloss is suing you for defamation of character,” Tobias’s agent, Alex, tells him.  She tries to be gentle about it.  Tobias sags in relief, the smile coming naturally this time.

The whole thing was an accident, really.  Someone asked Tobias about Jake in an interview.  Grateful for the chance to talk about their “lost Animorph,” whom the world seemed to have forgotten at the moment of his death, Tobias had told the story of how he’d first met Jake.  All it took was one mention of the first name and then-grade of the kid who’d been holding Tobias’s head in a toilet at the time, and an international harassment campaign had crashed down on poor Andrew J. Schloss like a goddamn tsunami.

Tobias sent Andy a formal apology around the time that a 100,000-signature petition had called for him to be charged with assault and attempted murder.  Andy apologized with genuine contrition during the television appearance where Tobias also condemned the company that fired Andy and the housing complex that threw him out for bullshit reasons.  Only one assassination attempt came close enough to be newsworthy, but judging by the number of death threats Andy still receives there have probably been others.

“Can we just, like, plead guilty?” Tobias asks Alex.  “Tell them I made it all up?”  He’s tired of this whole mess.  He didn’t mean to ruin the life of a guy he hardly knows.

“In this case, it would be a matter of offering no contest,” she says.  “We’ll settle out of court for the full amount.”

She was a controller for almost six years.  She gets it.  It’s part of the reason Rachel and Tobias chose her to… do whatever it is that a talent agent does.  They’re biased heavily toward the company of their own: they hired Collette to manage their finances, they live upstairs from Kelly and James, they call Eva embarrassingly often for advice on How To Adult.  Talking to civilians is exhausting sometimes, like using a translator to communicate through a language barrier.

“We saved the world,” Rachel says more than once, sounding angry with herself.  “We should live in it.”  (This was the same excuse she used for all those years, trying to get Tobias to be human.  Tobias knew what she meant, and yet neither of them listened.)

• People keep giving Tobias stuff, now that he’s human: drawings, cars, sunglasses, statues.  Moon rocks and diamonds.  He’ll keep some of it around, but donates most of it — Picasso oil paintings and elementary school drawings of lopsided birds alike — to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the condition that they can keep the Van Goghs and Klimts if they agree to display the seven-year-olds’ art as well.

• “Gimme your wallet!” the kid shouts, gun wavering and sliding in his hands.

It’s the middle of the night, and this is what Tobias gets for cutting through Central Park on a 3:00 AM run to the corner store for more hummus.

The kid’s got baggy jeans and a shining-white shirt.  Easy to spot, easy to run down.  Amateur.  Prey.  He’s more scared than Tobias, visibly so, and no wonder.  Avi wrote of a mouse holding a single porcupine quill aloft to try and fend off an owl, and that’s the image that comes to mind as Tobias stares the boy down.

“Yeah, okay,” Tobias says.  He’s got a full belly and a well-lined nest; he can afford to let the occasional baby rabbit live.  Projecting every motion, he extracts his wallet and counts out seven twenties to hand to the kid.  He remembers what it’s like not to know where one’s next meal is coming from, to have no choice but violence to secure food and home and safety.

• Later, when Tobias tells the story to Rachel, laughing — he’s pretty sure the gun wasn’t even loaded, judging by the way the kid held it — she isn’t amused at all.  She paces the room, running her hands through her hair.  With a

wham

that makes Tobias jump, she hurls one of the many art pieces they’ve been gifted at the wall.  Silently, Tobias gets a broom and dustpan.  He nudges the drywall plaster and fragments of a $70,000 YBA sculpture with the broom until Rachel suddenly sits down across from him.  He abandons the attempt and scoots across the floor to her until she can press their bodies together, tension-filled, shaking hard.

“You could have died,” she whispers into his hair with hard anger, tears on her cheeks.  “That little fucker could have shot you and you’d have died.  You aren’t— I can’t—”

“I’m not unbreakable anymore,” Tobias says for her.

Rachel takes a long time to breathe, and hold him close, and calm herself down.  At last she mumbles, “I’m sorry I broke our tiny castrated man.”

“I hated that stupid thing anyway.”  Tobias preens her as he speaks, running fingers through her hair to gently work free the harsh pins and gel that hold her elegant updo into place.  “We only got it because we were too polite to refuse, remember?”

“It did have a penis coming out of its mouth.”  Rachel’s tone sums up the whole of modern art.  “I caught Jade playing with it the last time she was here.”

Tobias makes a noise somewhere between amusement and horror.  Jade is Cassie and Ronnie’s oldest daughter, currently five years old and deeply opinionated on every conceivable subject.

“I hate not being able to protect what I love.”  Rachel, as always, just says aloud what the rest of them are afraid even to think about.  “I was supposed to protect Jake, keep him safe, and I didn’t even notice that he’d gone off on his own and left James in charge until…”  She doesn’t bother to finish.  They both watched Jake die horribly on the Pool ship’s comm screen.  “It should’ve been me.  If he’d sent me, I wouldn’t have hesitated.  I’d have killed that fucking yeerk in an instant and Tom right along with it, and I’d have found a way out afterward.  If I’d figured it out in time, I could’ve protected him.”  She stares into space, jaw clenched, eyes unfocused.  “I could have, if he’d just let me.”

“I’ll be safe,” Tobias tells her.  “I promise.”

• Nike pays Tobias to appear in one of their commercials.  Tobias, in a deliberate fuck-you move, donates 100% of his fee to ending child labor.  He auctions off the t-shirt he wore in the commercial for a further 10 million, also headed straight for UNICEF’s campaign to shut Nike down.

• They host Rachel’s aunt and uncle for Rosh Hashanah.  They host Rachel’s aunt and uncle for Yom Kippur.  They host Rachel’s aunt and uncle for Thanksgiving.  Jake killed Tom and then he died and left Rachel with a pair of albatrosses: Jean who clenches her fists and talks incessantly about how the yeerks never should’ve been allowed to get away with becoming nothlits when the humans could have annihilated them instead, and Steve who spends most of dinner and prayer service silently crying into a napkin.

It’s uncharitable of Tobias to dread their visits.  It’s reprehensible that he hopes for bad weather during the holidays to keep them away.  It’s disgusting how often he feels the urge to snap at them to let it go and move on.

He has a poker face that could clean out a Vegas casino.  Every time he assures them that it’s no trouble at all, that their company is a pleasure, he’s pretty sure they actually believe.

• During the eleventh anniversary of the end of the war, Tobias and Rachel go upstate.  They’ve learned.  Last year the celebration — spaceships swooping overhead in mock battles, fireworks exploding close enough to rattle their teeth — left them both huddled under the kitchen table shaking and waiting for it all to end.  On that day Rachel got plasteringly drunk for the first time since her wild days immediately after the war when she and Melissa Chapman used to go out partying and bar-fighting almost every night.  On that day Marco called for the first time in almost a year, scared out of his mind and unwilling to admit it where L.A. was putting him through the same hell, allegedly in their honor.

This year, they pack rifles into their SUV and drive to Stuyvesant to go deer hunting.  It probably seems like a paradox to the press, a pair of committed vegetarians who also hunt, or it would if either of them bothered to tell anyone.

The truth is, of course, that they know there’s a respect in killing an animal with one’s own hands, in acknowledging a death.  They won’t eat factory-farmed meat, but they will eliminate one or two of the state’s overpopulated deer with a careful shot apiece.  They will strip every ounce of meat off their kill for venison burgers and flank steak, donate the head to a guy who uses them in his art (no accounting for taste), and spread the offal where wolves and raptors can eat.  They will take satisfaction in a clean kill, and they will scratch an itch neither of them wants to admit they have.

• As always, Ax spends his first night of shore leave sitting on a Bed-Stuy rooftop with Tobias, a greasy bag of fast food resting on the concrete between them as they watch sunlight give way to neon glow.  It’s something Tobias loves about the city, one of the reasons he doesn’t think he’ll ever leave: in New York, you can’t see the stars.  There is no full dark, no time even at night when the sky opens up to reveal the hideous void beyond Earth’s safe bubble of atmosphere.

“The older I get, the more questions I want to ask him,” Tobias says, apropos of nothing.

Ax doesn’t bother to ask who “him” is.  Instead, he finishes swallowing the eight or nine White Castle fries he’d just stuffed into his mouth and says “I, too, feel this way at times.”

“Like…”  Tobias leans back a little, takes a long pull off his soda in preparation.  “Do you ever get used to being odd and clumsy and human?  If so, how much longer is it gonna take?  How did he figure it out, when he didn’t even grow up this way?”  He glances over at Ax.  “Or, like, how’d he feel about people naming Dome ships after him and also being so obsessed with him being this hero that he wasn’t allowed to be himself?  How’d he find a way to balance all that?  Did he even like it here, or did Mom just offer him the only chance he had to get out of the war?”

“To hear most of the arisths talk, you’d think he had a ten-foot tail blade, could thread a fighter through a Soola tree with three eyes closed, and morphed faster than most estreens.”  Ax smiles, easily, without using his mouth.  How he can be so honest with a human face and yet Tobias cannot is a perpetual mystery.  “The truth was, he taught me much about flying and fighting, but…”  He bites his lip in consideration.  “I suppose ‘nerd’ would be your word for it.  He cared about xenogeography, more than any warrior was supposed to.  He was never any good at keeping himself aloof from other species the way we were taught to do.  Too curious, I suppose, for proper warrior conduct.  He cared too much.”

“About Earth as well?” Tobias asks.  I cannot say that I love you, his will had said, because I do not know you.  And it hurts more than Tobias wants it to.  Did he care about us? Tobias longs to ask.

Ax hesitates.  “Will you keep this a secret, my shorm?”

“I swear it.  Even from my prince.”  Tobias knows the formal words because Ax has taught him.  There is, of course, no risk that Jake will be asking either of them to disclose anything ever again.  Still, his being dead does not nullify who he was.

“There was a photograph inside my brother’s fighter.  I only found it because…”  Ax smiles a little at the memory, although it’s a sad smile.  “I was young.  I went exploring where I had been told not to go, because I had been told not to go there.”  Almost meditative, he chews and swallows another wad of fries.  “There was a photograph.  It was the latest technology, preserved through permanent markings that could not be erased through data corruption or power breakdown.  Printing, you’d call it.  I was fascinated, more by the printing than by the photo — it was just a portrait of the two of us and our parents from a few years ago.  I took it out of its frame… and found another photograph underneath.”

Tobias feels himself straighten up in sudden interest.

“I don’t believe it was Loren, not if I recall it correctly.  But it looked like her, which must have been why he chose it.  A human, one with long blond hair in a braid, with her arm around a dark-haired man with his face turned away,” Ax says.  “It had to have come from one of the many sets of Earth artifacts — magazines and garments and electronics — which an aristh would have been forbidden to touch and a war-prince could have accessed easily.”

“So what was it, if not a photo of her?” Tobias asks.

Ax thinks, tilting his head.  “I believe an advertisement, in retrospect.  Perhaps for cigarettes.  There was information printed on the photograph about the virtues of smoking.  Perhaps it was for tourism, for she sat at the base of a beautiful waterfall.  I never asked.  I knew that I had seen something personal, and so I put it away and left no sign I had been there.”

“Then…”  Tobias fiddles with the end of his straw.  “Then he did learn to love it here.  In spite of…”  He stops, lowers his hands.  “Because of humans.”

“As you said, we cannot now ask.”

They sit chewing in silence for a time.

“They are a strange species, and an imperfect one, like all other species.”  Ax tilts his head down to look at the constellations of streetlights and window glows.  “And yet humans, for all their flaws, are the only known creators of the french fry, the Coca-Cola, and the tiny burger made out of vegetables.  They are easy to love.”

Tobias doesn’t have it all figured out, nowhere close.  He’s a high school dropout with a half-broken brain and a habit of patrolling their apartment in the middle of the night to check for bobcats.  But he’s got warm food, a soft bed, and people around with approximately the same weird set of neuroses.  There’s nothing to stop him from devouring the world’s stories and its food, its cultures and its idiosyncrasies.

Wow and here I thought you shipped Chazel…

birdthany replied to your post “The last Hunger Games book was a mistake. Finnick and Prim didn't...”

I will kill Peeta with my bare hands he was such a fucking predator he had a crush on Katniss and then manipulated the situation where she'd have to pretend to be into him and then he does the same fucking thing forcing her to pretend a pregnancy in the second book hes an entitled motherfucker and I hate him

arcanicdragon: Grips on tight.

birdthany: Come to talk you out Pearl Pot Everybody loves chicken, right?

first of all as a fellow jewish lesbian i COMPLETELY understand your hesitation slash hatred of marvel. they’ve done some shit and as far as i can tell they’re not gonna stop anytime soon :(

tl;dr and in general (bolded are best for entry level stuff!):

x-23

all new wolverine

excalibur

generation x vol 1 and 2

xforce vol 1

daredevil vol 3 and 4

young avengers

hawkeye (fraction run)

new x-men

storm (2014)

magik (1983)

x-men vol 4

new mutants, all volumes including dead souls

x-men season one

runaways

x-factor investigations (i have beef with peter david and this series but it’s also really good :/ )

more in depth: