pick on someone your own size, chapter 1
@yellowocaballero wrote Jake Lockley as a teenage alter, the discord went feral, and now 9k words of this thing exists?? 1.3k words
Read on AO3
Chapter Two
When Marc was eleven years-old, Jake beat up a bigger kid for him.
He stood over the bully, blood on his knuckles, and said: “Pick on someone your own size.”
Because Jake was big. He might be small on the outside, but inside, he was nearly as tall as Mom.
“Hey,” he said gently to the bathroom mirror. “You can come out now.”
“You’re not Steven,” Marc said uncertainly.
“Nah. I’m Jake. And I’m gonna look out for you from now on, comprende?”
When Marc was eleven years-old, Jake beat up a bigger kid for him.
He stood over the bully, blood on his knuckles, and said: “Pick on someone your own size.”
Because Jake was big. He might be small on the outside, but inside, he was nearly as tall as Mom.
“Hey,” he said gently to the bathroom mirror. “You can come out now.”
“You’re not Steven,” Marc said uncertainly.
“Nah. I’m Jake. And I’m gonna look out for you from now on, comprende?”
And Jake did, thumping any kid who dared lay a hand on Marc Spector until word went around that he was out of bounds. He helped him with his homework, explaining the difficult problems. When Marc played video games, sometimes he’d drop the console in a huff. “I can’t do it,” he’d say, and stare beseechingly at his reflection in the television screen until Jake sighed and did it for him.
Pretty soon Marc got bigger, and forgot about Jake, but he still dropped the console in a huff whenever it got difficult, and saw later that someone had sorted out the tricky bits. He woke up to scraped knuckles and found that groups of kids who’d previously kicked his ass were suddenly terrified of him, or to a Mom somehow placated when he was sure she’d been livid earlier.
He’d still wake up bruised.
Because that was one thing Jake could never protect him from. He’d stare up at her, heart in his mouth, suddenly real small.
“Pick on someone your own size.”
He didn’t say, because the words wouldn’t come out. And because although Jake was worryingly good at getting them into trouble, he was just as good at getting them out of it.
“Sorry Mom,” he’d whisper instead.
Then Marc was big, and Jake didn’t come out so much. Marc would sit at his computer and Jake would quietly play his games until Marc remembered he had something else to do. Jake stayed small and skinny, halfway through a growth spurt he’d never reach the end of, spending most of his time in the little fortress in his head that was made of Minecraft blocks, building and rebuilding to his heart’s content.
And then he was holding a gun and running, and someone was shouting at him, and someone else was shooting at him, and all Jake could do was what he’d always done, which was keep Marc safe.
He stood and stared at the bodies.
“Good job, soldier,” Marc’s CO Bushman said, slapping him on the back with a hand that should have felt much heavier, and Jake nodded, heart singing at the praise. He cried in his bunk later, without really knowing why.
He took over in combat more often after that, but it got easier. He pretended he was in a video game, and he had to shoot all the bad guys if he wanted to beat the level. Marc had always needed Jake to beat the difficult levels. No matter. This was fun.
He got to eat food out of packets, and camp out, and light fires. He learned to take apart a gun to clean it, and sometimes did it even when he didn’t have to so he could look at all the parts. He learned to shoot so that it didn’t kill, which got you extra points. He learned to drive stick shift from Frenchie, which was a major upgrade, and got in trouble for doing donuts in the troop transport.
Frenchie was awesome. He was French (obviously), broad-shouldered and dark-haired, with a sense of humor so dry it could make jerky. He was pretty old (thirty) but he had a face like a baby chicken and Jake delighted in telling him so. He spoke four languages, including Spanish, which in their unit felt like they had their own secret language. He also kept dirty magazines under his mattress which he didn’t think anyone knew about, but Jake stole them once and laughed so hard he was almost sick.
Frenchie drove like a demon, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in teaching Jake all his tricks. Early on, he’d have a hand out ready to grab the wheel at any moment, but he never had to, and soon enough he just goaded Jake to drive faster.
And he flew helicopters, which were so loud that they drowned out everything else and made Jake’s entire body vibrate. He gazed lovingly at all the buttons. “Can I fly it?” He begged Frenchie. “Please let me fly it.”
“No. You are not trained,” Frenchie said, rolling his eyes. “Go through the training, and you can fly my ‘coptère.”
One time, Jake made a grab for the controls and Frenchie yelled at him. It was awful. Frenchie never yelled, and it was so jarring that Jake fled.
He went to Frenchie’s bunk in the middle of the night and shook him awake. “Mon ami, it’s three in the morning,” he groaned, batting Jake away.
“I had to tell you I’m sorry,” Jake said anxiously. “It was stupid, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Sorry for what?” Frenchie said, rubbing his eyes with one hand and using the other to push himself upright.
“For the helicopter.”
“What helicopter? Marc, what did you do?” Frenchie looked wide awake, now, and concerned. Jake shrank away. He didn’t want to get yelled at again.
“When I grabbed the controls,” he said uncertainly. “I’m sorry.”
Frenchie stopped. There was something strange in his expression. Jake didn’t like it. “Marc, that was months ago,” he said eventually, brow furrowed. “You apologized. We moved on. Didn’t I say we’ve moved on?”
Jake stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
They sat outside with beers. Jake tried his tentatively, and screwed up his face in disgust. He sipped at it anyway, feeling like he ought to.
“What don’t you understand?” Frenchie asked him.
Jake considered telling him the truth. That there was so much he didn’t understand. The things the other soldiers talked about late at night; their jokes, sly glances, and the probing questions Frenchie never let him answer. Why his life was so disconnected; how he could know with such certainty that his name was Jake Lockley but know also that it was Marc Spector; how he could close his eyes one day and wake up months later with no memory of what happened in between. What they were fighting for.
He didn’t, of course. There was a lot that Jake didn’t understand, but some things he did, and he knew instinctively that he was meant to be hidden. Even from Marc.
He looked at his hands, which were too big, and touched his face, which felt scratchy. He rubbed at it, not sure if he liked the sensation or not. He remembered playing with his Dad’s razor as a kid, pretending to shave an imaginary beard. He hadn’t used one since.
“Look, maybe we should go to see the doctor. Explain you’ve been having some memory problems-”
“No!” Jake said. “You can’t. They can’t know.” His heart started to race, and every part of him wanted to go, to fade away, let Marc take over, but he clung on, knowing he couldn’t just drop Marc into this conversation. It would ruin everything. “They’ll make us go back to Mom and Dad.”
“Marc, you are twenty-two years’ old. Nobody can make you go back to your parents,” Frenchie said gently.
“No, I’m-” He stopped. Fourteen, he was going to say. But he wasn’t, was he? Not even America let fourteen-year-olds enter live combat. “They can’t send me back?” he said distantly.
“No,” Frenchie said.
“Oh.”
They sat in silence for a little while. Jake had dropped his beer at some point and it had spilled into the dust. Some ants had already found it and he watched them. They were so busy, so constant. Each had their role, and they knew what it was.
He suddenly felt very weary.
“I’m going to go away now,” he said quietly.
“Yes, it’s late-”
But Jake was already gone.
