back on my bullshit

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

Bruce: I don't know.

TV Show Host: Oh don't be coy--

Bruce: No, I seriously don't know. I GENUINELY don't. I was actually hoping for some advice? I can't seem to get rid of my money.

TV Show Host: '...Get rid of'?

Bruce: I've tried raising salaries, investing in infrastructure, forcing green initiatives, donating to charities, paying extra taxes--

TV Show Host: "........Extra" taxes??

Bruce: --doing giveaways, setting up trust funds, naming multiple inheritors--

TV Show Host: I'm sorry, can we back up a bit? I think I've lost the thread of this conversation...

Bruce: Listen, I made a bet with a reporter from the Daily Planet ten years ago that I could legally get my net worth down under one billion,

TV Show Host: That's... a very cute joke, Mr Wayne, I,

Bruce: --and the deadline is COMING UP in a few MONTHS,

TV Show Host: what

Bruce: --And not only am I not even CLOSE, I'm still in the GODDAMN TRILLION Range--

TV Show Host: oh dear god he's not joking.

Bruce: I keep shoveling money out the door and it keeps showing back up inside!

Bruce: I've updated EVERY public building in Gotham but THAT DIDN'T EVEN MAKE A DENT in my SALARY--

Bruce: I dumped money into R&D but my company ACCIDENTALLY INVENTED TECH THAT'S NOW TURNING A PROFIT--

Bruce, grabbing the mic: I WANTED TO BUY THE JUSTICE LEAGUE AN INTERSTELLAR BASE ON MARS BUT THEY WOULDN'T LET ME

[The tv crawl at the bottom of the screen reads: Wayne Enterprises stock rises 13%]

Bruce: WHAT'S A GUY GOTTA DO TO LOSE MONEY AROUND HERE

TV Show Host: Perhaps we could sit down,

Bruce: I'D SAY SOMEONE SHOULD TRY TO ROB MY ACCOUNT BUT I HAVE A SNEAKING SUSPICION THAT MY INSURANCE WOULD PROBABLY COVER IT BECAUSE LAST YEAR I TRIED TO PAY OFF THE JOKER TO TAKE A VACATION, AND THE NEXT TIME HE GOT ARRESTED, ARKHAM REFUNDED THE MONEY,

TV Show Host: Sir, please,

Bruce: --ACTUALLY, LET'S TRY IT! WHAT'VE I GOT TO LOSE, A COUPLE TRILLION?

Bruce: ALRIGHT GUYS LISTEN UP, MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS 555-

[Screen goes blue] ["Apologies, we are experiencing technical difficulties; MoneyTalk will be back on air shortly"]

Lois, sitting at home watching the TV: ...So.

Lois: A bet with Bruce Wayne, huh?

Most people at their schools assume the Berensons, all five of them — Tom and Jake, Rachel and Jordan and Sara — must be siblings.  They tend to move around as a pack, they do everything together, and the girls are over at Jake’s house for dinner three or four times a week.  Rachel’s the one who tells the other guys to shove off when they’re making fun of Jake for being a klutz.  Jake’s in the habit of sitting with Jordan at lunch if she doesn’t have anyone else.  Tom tutors Sara in math.  Used to tutor Sara in math.  He’s been acting odd, lately.

Rachel’s mom has been acting odd for the better part of two years.  “It was a bad divorce,” says Jake, parroting his dad’s excuse, anytime someone asks him.  “You wanna shut your trap, or do you want me to shut it for you?” says Rachel, if anyone asks her.

Anyway, Jake’s parents help out as much as they can.  They have ever since they found out just how thin Rachel was spread: making or ordering every meal in the house, supervising Sara’s homework, folding laundry, forging her mom’s signature on report cards, trying to do well in school in spite of it all.  They do half the work of keeping the girls alive, and Rachel does the other half.

Naomi does enough – paying bills, showing up for PTA meetings, smiling brilliantly at the neighbors, excelling at her job — that no one ever quite puts their finger on anything she’s doing wrong.  Her kids show up to school every day well-dressed and well-groomed, and it’s not as though she’s really neglecting them.

Dan calls twice a week.  “How are my favorite girls?” he says, every time, line crackling from the long-distance connection to New York.

Rachel plasters a smile on her face, knowing he’ll hear it in her voice.  “We’d love for you to come visit soon,” she tells him.

And then she turns the volume up on the headset all the way, tilting it down so that she and Sara can both hear his response.  She knows already that her dad will renew his promises to come at the end of the month, even knows that he really does mean it when he says that this time nothing can keep him away.  But if there’s a hurricane in the Keys, a late cold-snap in Seattle, then she knows better than to trust he’ll put his girls above his job.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” Sara breaks in, leaning close to the phone.  “You love us, right?”

“I do, baby girl,” Dan says.  “More than anything.”

It breaks Rachel’s heart, just a little, every time Sara asks.  Because she knows why Sara is asking: she’s waiting for the day when Dan starts answering that question half-heartedly, or stops answering it at all.  Just like their mom.

“You’re doing well?” Dan asks.  “You’re looking out for each other?”

It’s just Rachel and Sara, on these calls.  Jordan hasn’t talked to their dad in six months, and honestly Rachel can’t blame her.

It’s easier to hate their dad.  His love is imperfect, but it’s trustworthy.  Dan can absorb Jordan’s resentful silence and still call to wish her luck before a swim meet.  Naomi comes with no such guarantees.

Rachel and Jake don’t even talk about it; they just walk home from the mall together.  Given the amount of time they spend together, they’ve managed to get most of the attempts to kill each other out of their system, and they’re practically best friends.  Jake’s friend Marco is with them, and Cassie’s as dependable as a rock of course.  There’s a cute guy Rachel doesn’t know with floppy blond hair trailing behind Jake, but she doesn’t question his presence.

Rather, she doesn’t question him until the next day.  Until after they’ve all met an alien and watched him die.  Until after she’s watched Cassie become a horse with this strange new technology.  Until they’ve all met up in Cassie’s barn, and the new kid has popped out with the incredibly stupid suggestion that they all go start fighting in a war.

“Are you insane?” Marco demands, beating Rachel to the punch.

“Why, you scared?”  Tobias crosses his arms defensively.  “You want that andalite to have died for nothing, huh?”

“It’s not like that,” Rachel says, overtop whatever cruel thing Marco’s about to come out with next.  “Some of us have other people depending on us.  Some of us can’t just go dying for some alien’s war.  Some of us have families at home—”

She realizes, too late, how this all sounds.  Registers the stricken look on Tobias’s face.

“Whatever,” she snaps.  “Die if you want to.  I don’t care.”  And then she turns and storms out of the barn.

Tobias comes to find her, the next day after school.  He runs up to her and falls into step on her way to the bus.  “Hey, uh.  Jake told me about… Your mom.  And your sisters.  And I just wanted to say, uh, I’m sorry.”

Rachel stops, spinning to look at him.

Tobias ducks his head, like he half expects her to take a swing at him.

“First of all, my family is none of your fucking business, and Jake doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to my mom.”  Rachel inhales slowly, drawing on the patience she’s had to learn in order to get Sara to do math homework.  “Second… I am, you know.  Scared.”

“You weren’t scared of those hork-bajir,” Tobias whispers.

Rachel laughs so hard she throws her head back, hair cascading over her shoulders.  “I’ve never been more scared in my life.  I cried — I actually cried — because I was so scared.”  She tilts her head back down to look at him.  “And when I get scared, I get mad.  And sometimes when I’m mad, I say stupid things I don’t mean.”

“You didn’t look scared.”  Tobias shrugs.  “You looked…”  He flushes.  “I just mean, you and Jake ran right at it.”

“Yeah, that’s another thing I do when I’m scared.”  She smiles.

But she stops smiling, when he tells her what Marco’s been saying about Tom.

They walk all the way back to her house together.  Tobias doesn’t want to go home, doesn’t provide a reason for why.  Rachel knows better than to press.  They’re still talking there at the end of her driveway — maybe Rachel doesn’t really want to go home either — when they both startle at the brilliant flash of a camera.

“Jordan,” Rachel groans without looking over.

“What?”  Jordan rolls the wheel along the top to line up another shot, motion sharp with sullenness.  “It’s a free country.”

“Don’t you have homework you’re supposed to be doing?” Rachel asks.

“Doesn’t Mom have a rule against boys in the house?” Jordan shoots back immediately.

She doesn’t, not anymore.  Naomi hasn’t bothered to enforce any of her own rules since…

Since the divorce, Rachel tells herself again.  It was a difficult divorce.  That’s all it is.  It’s not something Rachel herself said, or did, to make her mom stop loving them.

Sometimes, a small shameful part of her wishes it had been something she’d done.  Then at least Rachel would know.  Then she could control it.  Then she could figure out a way to stop it from happening ever again.

“My sister is a brat,” Rachel tells Tobias archly.  “I don’t have to take her to CVS to develop the photos if you don’t want.”

He smiles, shakes his head.  “It’s fine.  I…”  He blushes, bites his lip adorably.  “Really, I don’t mind.”

“One mission, huh?” Rachel asks Marco.  They’ve just come from the Gardens, and she still thinks he’s an annoying brat, but she thinks that maybe she understands him better now than she ever has before.

Marco peers up at her.  “Just the one.  Save Tom, get out.  We look out for our own, right?”  He grins.  “And we both know Jake’s too much of a dummy to try and do this alone.”

She laughs.  “We’re the dummies who know what a bad idea this is and are doing it anyway.  Jake…”

“Jake thinks we can win.”  Marco says it like that’s all anyone really needs to know, to understand how naïve Jake is.

Only it’s not just one mission, because that one mission goes to shit.  Because now it’s not Tom she’s fighting to save; it’s Tobias.  Because if she’d been paying attention, if she’d been faster or tougher or slower to retreat when Jake gave the order, then she might’ve been able to save him.  And so she has to keep fighting, because she has to find a way to get Tobias back.  Before he gives up on her too.

Rachel can’t say for sure why it’s so important to her to check in on Melissa Chapman.  Why she has to risk everything infiltrating this house in particular, and then infiltrating it again.  At least, she doesn’t admit to herself why… until she’s sitting in Melissa’s room.  Until Melissa’s crying into her cat fur.

“I don’t know what I did,” Melissa tells Fluffer McKitty.  “I don’t know why they stopped loving me.”

Every fluffy white hair on Rachel’s body stands up.  She thinks of how familiar it felt, to walk into that kitchen downstairs and see Ms. Chapman washing the dishes in apathetic silence.  To hear Mr. Chapman’s casual dismissal, when Melissa begged him for help.

«Tobias,» she whispers, in private thought speak.  «When we get out of here… I think I need your help with another mission.»

Tobias is good.  He’s very good.  «Just call me the Red Baron,» he jokes, and Rachel would laugh if she could.

It takes him less than a week to confirm.  Naomi leaves the house once every three days, and goes to the car wash downtown.  She stays in the car wash for over an hour, in spite of her car being parked outside.  If you listen closely with hawk’s ears just over the south entrance, you can hear the screams of the hosts trapped below.

“Thank you,” Rachel says, the words bitter.  And, “please, don’t tell the others.”

He doesn’t.  Not until the strange being called the Ellimist comes to them, and offers to save their families.  All they have to give in exchange is the entire rest of their species.

“I’m in,” Rachel says, half a second before Jake and almost at the same time as Marco.

“They’ll destroy the planet.”  Cassie looks from one of them to the other, tears in her eyes.  “Not just our neighbors and friends.  Every single being on the Earth that they can’t enslave or eat.  We’re talking about billions of lives here.  Billions.”

Marco shrugs.  “Never met these billions.  They’re not my concern.”

Ax looks uncomfortable, shifting in place.

“Come on,” Rachel tells him.  “It might not be your planet, but you’re still part of the team.  So spit it out.”

«It is not possible for me to spit without first morphing…»

“You have an opinion,” she says impatiently, “even if you’re not saying it.”  Ax is one of the smartest people she’s ever met.  He almost certainly figured out what she meant based on context clues — which means he’s stalling.

«I believe that, if my brother were given the choice between my saving his life, and my continuing to fight the yeerks… He would choose to have me fight.»  Ax shifts again, stepping back so that Tobias is now halfway between him and Rachel.  «That it would be the most honorable way forward, to continue to fight.»

“Don’t make a decision just for my sake,” Tobias says to both of them.  Human Tobias.  The Tobias with grey eyes and ten fingers that she’d almost forgotten.

“He’s right.”  Marco smiles cruelly, the hypocrite.  “Rachel backing down from a fight?  Methinks Xena has a cruuuuush…”

“It’s not about me,” Tobias snaps, “it’s about her mom!”

This draws Marco up short.  He opens his mouth halfway, appearing at a loss.  Everyone’s stunned into silence.

Jake looks at Rachel.  “Because your mom’s one of them.”

She blinks at him.  Breathing hard.  Biting down on all the mean things she wants to say to Tobias.  “You knew?” she asks.

Jake shakes his head.  “Not until right now.  But…”

But it fits, is what he’s saying.  Given Naomi’s behavior.  Given what he knows about Tom.

“Mine too.”  Marco’s voice is quiet and hoarse.

“No, Rachel’s mom isn’t dead, she’s a controller,” Cassie explains.

“Yeah.”  Marco’s jaw is clenched so tightly the words barely come out.  “And so is mine.”

Well, Rachel thinks, at least now they’re not all looking at her.

They turn down the Ellimist’s offer.  They blow up the ground-based Kandrona.  They get attacked, by a beast like a sentient tornado, and the entire time Rachel cannot even remember who she is.  It takes her nearly three days to get her memory in order, and she’s still shaky but figures it’ll have to do when she staggers home at the end of it all.

Jordan wrenches the front door open, takes one look at Rachel, and slams it shut again so hard the walls rattle.  Rachel stands there on the step, absorbing the blow.  She’s been gone three days.  Three days during which Jordan and Sara have, somehow, been getting by on their own.  Her stomach hurts.  Jordan’s right to be mad.  Jordan’s way too young to be looking after herself, much less Sara as well.  (Jordan’s older than Rachel was, when she became the only real parent in this house, but that thought does not occur to her.)

Rachel flinches when the door swings back open, but this time it’s Sara running outside to fling herself into Rachel’s arms.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sara says, and Rachel’s stomachache quadruples.  “I’ll be good, I promise, I’ll be so good from now on.  You won’t have to worry about us, just please please stay.”

Rachel’s scared, terrified, in the face of her sisters’ fear.  So she does what she always does when she’s scared.  She runs straight at the problem.

“Jordan, get back here,” she says.

“I’m not talking to you.”  Jordan has stopped halfway up the stairs, her back to Rachel.  Her shoulders hunched to hide the tears.

“Fine.”  Rachel glances outside to confirm what she already knows: their mom’s car is gone.  They’re alone.  “You just have to listen.  Because I’m going to explain where I’ve been all weekend, and then I’m going to explain what happened to Mom.  And then all three of us are going to sit down, and we’re going to figure out a way to help her.”

It’s not clear that Jordan does listen to her, not at first anyway.  But then Rachel starts to morph, and Sara shrieks something about Pokémon, and all of a sudden she’s paying a hell of a lot of attention to what Rachel is trying to say.

They don’t come up with a plan to save Naomi, not that night anyway.  There’s nowhere to hide her, nothing they can do to keep the yeerks from targeting all three of them the instant their mom disappears.  But Rachel feels the closest to her sisters that she has since this whole thing began, and she’s not ashamed of how much she cries as they sit snuggled up against her and all fall asleep on the couch to a Buffy rerun.

Jordan and Rachel are up early the next morning, leaving Sara in her bed.  They sit across the table from each other and split a plate of Pop-Tarts, the way they do every morning.  The sugary toaster pastries started as a way for Rachel to bribe Sara enough to get her off to school in the mornings — sister of the year, Rachel is not — but nowadays they both use it as a way to insist to themselves and each other that there are perks to living essentially without guardians.

“Go though it one more time,” Rachel says.

“If you’re ever gone for more than an afternoon, cover for you with Mom,” Jordan recites.  “Some excuse about a school thing or you being off with a boy.  If you’re…”  She hesitates.  “Ever gone for more than two days in a row, call Jake.  Make sure not to say anything incriminating on the phone in case Tom’s listening, but ask him to come over.  If he knows anything about you, he’ll tell us in person.  If he doesn’t, he can still make sure we’ve got groceries and protection.”

Rachel makes a go-on gesture when Jordan stops talking.

“If Jake is gone as well.”  Jordan sighs, clearly reluctant even to think about it.  “And if I can’t get Cassie or Marco either, I’m to catch the bus to Cassie’s place and walk straight north into the woods until I reach the creek, and then follow the creek until I get to a plywood structure full of photos of cinnamon buns.  If that’s empty too…”  She shakes her head.  “This is nuts.”

“If all six of us are missing…” Rachel prompts.

“I take Sara and run for it.  Straight to Uncle George’s house.  I get Uncle George to buy us plane tickets to see Dad.  I claim that it’s Mom’s fault you’re gone, and I use the first excuse I can to make sure I watch Dad continuously for three days in a row.”

“Good,” Rachel says.

“No.”  Jordan pushes to her feet, chair scraping the floor.  “No, none of this is good.  This is so, so, so messed up.  This is the most messed-up thing I’ve ever…”  She shakes her head.

“Yeah,” Rachel says.  “I agree.  Now go over it again.”

They go on more missions.  Rachel drags home after a slugfest with Visser Three, and Sara meets her at the door with a mug of hideously sweet but well-meant hot chocolate.  She crawls into her own bedroom window after fighting evil forestry, and is greeted by a crowbar-wielding Jordan who nearly brains her before realizing who it is.  Her house collapses, and Sara blurts out to their dad that it’s because Rachel turned into an elephant.  Dan laughs it off, and Rachel sighs in relief for more than one reason.

No more, Rachel thinks, no more, when she gets home from a hellish week of sabotaging the World Leaders’ Conference and being sabotaged in turn by David, only to find Sara shrieking in the upstairs bathroom and Jordan blotchy-faced with tears.

“What happened?” Rachel asks.  It comes out as a growl, and she just cannot muster the energy to care.

“There was a thing.”  Jordan’s hands are shaking.  She grabs Rachel to pull her upstairs.  “Sara got scared and squashed it with a shoe.”

“You mean a bug?” Rachel says acidly.  All this is over a spider?

Jordan shakes her head, hard.  “It grew,” she tells Rachel.  “Really big, really fast.  And there was too much blood, after Sara stomped on it.  And…”  She stops walking.  She looks like she’s fighting the urge to be sick.  “When Sara killed it… I think it screamed.”

Rachel runs past Jordan then, for the bathroom upstairs.  Sara is stranded on the far side of the mess on the floor, screaming and crying so hard that she hiccups between hoarse wails.

There is, indeed, a lot of blood mixed into the half-flea mess on the floor.  There are crushed insect legs, but there are bone fragments as well.  Clearly visible between the antennae is half of a human tooth.  A single strand of blond hair is glued to the floor by the dark blood that surrounds it.

I think it screamed.

Rachel tugs a bath towel down over the mess, gets Sara outside, and jerks the door shut behind her before vomiting on the floor.

“We don’t have to worry about David anymore,” Rachel says, the instant Cassie picks up the phone, and she refuses to say anything more.  Let Cassie draw her own conclusions.  Let Cassie, and all the others, judge Rachel for what they think she has done.  Let her friends think her a monster.  If Sara never knows what she did, then Rachel is fine with anything else that may come.

Rachel doesn’t send a chee mimic to her house, even after the one-afternoon trip to Visser Three’s grazing spot turns into a two-day trip to the Arctic.  Instead, she trusts in her sisters, and does them the courtesy of not lying to them.

Instead, she asks the chee for a very different favor.

Naomi dies in a head-on collision with a retaining wall after her car jumps the curb on a rainy night.  All three of her daughters, strapped into the backseat, die along with her.

That’s the official story, anyway.  The one that everyone except six Animorphs, a handful of chee, and the alleged occupants of the car are led to believe.

They shut Rachel’s mom into a back room.  Jake insists on taking a turn to guard her like the noble self-sacrificing idiot he is, and most of the chee do shifts as well.  No one lets Rachel or Jordan or Sara in to see her, which is probably for the best, until at last the three days are done.

Rachel stops at the door of Naomi’s room, right elbow gripped in her left hand.  Jordan’s on her left, Sara on her right.  Flanking her, but also half-hidden behind her.  She asked to see all of you, Erek said, and Rachel didn’t know when the moment came that she would be so afraid.

“My girls,” Naomi whispers, eyes filling with tears.  “Oh, my beautiful girls.”

They run to her then, or anyway Jordan does and she drags the other two with her.  Naomi pulls them close, arms trembling but unfaltering.  She whispers all the things they have so longed to hear: I love you.  I never stopped loving you.  I’m so proud of you.  I’m here now, and I’m never leaving.

Rachel leans her head on her mother’s arm, and lets herself be held.  Lets herself cry.

“You’re my little girls,” Naomi says, again and again.  “My beautiful, beautiful girls.”

They’re not, though, Rachel knows.  They’re monsters, all three of them, killers and liars and thieves.  They’re sharp-edged broken beings, and they’ll never be little girls again.

There will be other moments, after this one.  Moments when Naomi finds that Sara runs to Rachel, not to her, when in tears over a math assignment or a cruel boy at school.  Moments when Jordan will laugh outright when Naomi tells her to go to her room.  Moments when she’ll discover that there is no sheltering Rachel, not anymore, and maybe there’s no need to parent her either.  Moments when it will become clear that Rachel is her own woman, long since, independent and fierce and calloused and scarred.

tobias is the boy she falls in love with and by boy i mean hawk because he used to be a sweet-natured dork from a very broken home but he got stuck in "morph" (hence animorph) and now lives permanently as a red-tailed hawk which it is implied he did at least partially on purpose to escape his hellish home life. he struggles immensely with what humanity means to him anymore and how "human" he still is vs how much he is truly a bird of prey, for a number of reasons, including that in order to retain the power to morph and stay in the war he can never permanently become human again, and he has made the choice to keep fighting.

i search for "entry level jobs". i am shown listings for things like "military intelligence officer", "senior veterinary surgeon", and "forklift engineer".

i search for "jobs in bookselling". i am told that there are 9 bookselling jobs in my area. when i read the listings, 8 of these 9 jobs are care assistant roles and the 9th is a pyramid scheme.

i search for "jobs within 5 miles of my location". i am shown jobs that are on the other side of the country.

i type in "proofreading". i am shown listings for "ai training".

i search "creative industry jobs". half the listings are for finance companies and the other half require a degree in data science.

i receive an email. "based on your profile, indeed thought you would be a great match for this opportunity!" the linked job requires a degree that i do not have and 5 years of experience in a field that i know nothing about. the email does not explain why this opportunity would be "a great match".

i receive an email. "based on your profile, indeed thought you would be a great match for this opportunity!" in the body of the email, it warns me that i will not be able to apply for the job it has sent me because i do not meet the criteria.

i apply for a job with a temp agency. i never hear back. 2 weeks later the agency website goes down and never comes back up again.

i apply for a job. 6 months later i get a stock email telling me my application has been unsuccessful.

It's in employers searching for you.

Look at the job listings you like. Rewrite your resume to look good for the people who wrote those job listings. (Don't lie, but check their phrasing, check their skills requirements, highlight the features they're looking for, and so on.)

I don't think I've ever gotten a job by applying at Indeed. I've gotten several from having my resume there when someone was looking.'

Update your resume every two weeks. Even if you're just changing a comma or adding and removing a space at the end of a paragraph. Employers can see when the resume was updated, and they tend to assume anything that's been there longer than a month is probably not relevant anymore - you already have a job.

(You will get a regular trickle of "job offers" from real estate sales companies. Ignore these. I tended to reply with "I have no interest or skills in sale, but I'm good with document management. Do you have any jobs that focus on that and don't involve customer outreach?" I never heard back from them, which was the desired result.)

When you get contacted about a job: Ignore everything about experience & education required. Look at what the job actually does, and figure out if you think you can do that. If so, tell them you have the skills to do the job.

The skills/education requirements are set by idiots who look at "who did this job most recently, and what were their skills?" So that's "what we expect from someone who's done this job for 3+ years."

the email does not explain why this opportunity would be "a great match".

You matched a couple of keywords they're looking for. The algorithm that does these suggestions does not notice things like "I lack several things this job requires"; it just checks "ooh you have 5 words that this job wants!"

If you're consistently getting bad matches for a particular kind of job, review your resume and see if you can figure out which words are getting hit for those, and if you can reasonably remove them. (Sometimes you can't. I do document processing, which sounds close to "data processing," so... I get offers for database coding, which I can't do. I ignore them.)

Your goal for your resume is not to get you a job. It's to get you an interview. Your goal with the interview is to get you a job. Your resume is only incidentally relevant at that point. The purpose of the resume is to convince someone, "I want to talk to this person about this kind of job." That's all. The details should all be focused around "If I were hiring someone for my dream job, this is the list of details I would be looking for."

The most value you're likely to get from the job listings is "these are the currently trendy phrases."

I remember reading a study where a therapist was helping people with similar anxieties - though not involving children - work through them. One client said she was afraid she was going to murder the therapist, not that she wanted to but that she'd somehow lose control of herself or an accident would happen. The solution? The therapist brought a kitchen knife to an appointment (with the patients consent), handed it to her and basically said "okay, what now?" Turns out nothing now, nothing happened, and it helped the client deal with the phobia

Enlightened normal-brainer: “that is ridiculous and irrational, clearly you’re worried because it’s secretly true”