primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2013-01-19 04:43 pm
primeideal) wrote2013-01-19 04:43 pm
Entry tags:
"Nonviolence" ficlet
Freebie "nonviolence" ficlet for the Crowdfunding Creative Jam. chordatesrock prompted "Someone travels one or more universes full of conflict, healing people indiscriminately," and I've been on an Animorphs kick, so...this happened.
When he runs across the Time Matrix, Erek knows better than to use it right away. His people had hidden it away, millennia before, for a reason. And in the years since, humans had grown no more peaceful, and ever more powerful.
He knows his fellows would have cast it away, found another quiet planet to hide it on and stand guard there for another myriad of years. He is even more sure they would never have considered using it, not even to go all the way back and save their creators. There was too much potential for annihilation, too many timelines that could be wiped out.
But after the recent war, after the things he has done--to the Yeerks--and undone--to his own encoding, Erek is not like the others anymore.
The Chee have long memories, every one of them. They dwarf even the Andalites, whose civilization is ancient and to whom human generations rise and fall in the blink of an eye. The great tragedy of the war was not, ultimately, one of battle plans or Z-Space expansions, but a question of timing. To the Andalite point of view, it had been the blink of a screen between Seerow's Kindness and the Escafil Device, the technology that gave the Yeerks enough power to truly escape their limited bodies as well as their isolated homeworld. As powerful as the Time Matrix was already, it wouldn't take long--relatively speaking, for a Chee--to improve it.
So he works alone until he has contained its power. No longer can he send it back or forward in time, rippling through and causing paradoxes, killing people without touching them. Instead, he sends it sideways, finding universe after universe where the wars rage on. His strength is enough to rescue dozens from the fray of battle. Sometimes humans, sometimes Yeerks. Sometimes Andalites. Sometimes Taxxons. They don't ask questions. He doesn't stick around long enough to answer, anyway.
He journeys onwards, and by the time he has looped around to the universe where he begun, the last of his allies has grown old on her own.
"I'm not going to ask," says Cassie. "I trust you."
"You don't have to," he says flatly.
It is nothing she did in the war that will survive, throughout the universes, not even what she managed after, trying to defend the Hork-Bajir, control diplomacy as the Earth takes its place in the galaxy. But the person she was before--a child, unconcerned about looking flashy, ready to take her place and gently care for the injured animals no matter how crudely they peck at her--that, perhaps, has outlasted time.
chordatesrock prompted "Someone travels one or more universes full of conflict, healing people indiscriminately," and I've been on an Animorphs kick, so...this happened.When he runs across the Time Matrix, Erek knows better than to use it right away. His people had hidden it away, millennia before, for a reason. And in the years since, humans had grown no more peaceful, and ever more powerful.
He knows his fellows would have cast it away, found another quiet planet to hide it on and stand guard there for another myriad of years. He is even more sure they would never have considered using it, not even to go all the way back and save their creators. There was too much potential for annihilation, too many timelines that could be wiped out.
But after the recent war, after the things he has done--to the Yeerks--and undone--to his own encoding, Erek is not like the others anymore.
The Chee have long memories, every one of them. They dwarf even the Andalites, whose civilization is ancient and to whom human generations rise and fall in the blink of an eye. The great tragedy of the war was not, ultimately, one of battle plans or Z-Space expansions, but a question of timing. To the Andalite point of view, it had been the blink of a screen between Seerow's Kindness and the Escafil Device, the technology that gave the Yeerks enough power to truly escape their limited bodies as well as their isolated homeworld. As powerful as the Time Matrix was already, it wouldn't take long--relatively speaking, for a Chee--to improve it.
So he works alone until he has contained its power. No longer can he send it back or forward in time, rippling through and causing paradoxes, killing people without touching them. Instead, he sends it sideways, finding universe after universe where the wars rage on. His strength is enough to rescue dozens from the fray of battle. Sometimes humans, sometimes Yeerks. Sometimes Andalites. Sometimes Taxxons. They don't ask questions. He doesn't stick around long enough to answer, anyway.
He journeys onwards, and by the time he has looped around to the universe where he begun, the last of his allies has grown old on her own.
"I'm not going to ask," says Cassie. "I trust you."
"You don't have to," he says flatly.
It is nothing she did in the war that will survive, throughout the universes, not even what she managed after, trying to defend the Hork-Bajir, control diplomacy as the Earth takes its place in the galaxy. But the person she was before--a child, unconcerned about looking flashy, ready to take her place and gently care for the injured animals no matter how crudely they peck at her--that, perhaps, has outlasted time.