Disclaimer: Aladdin, and not to mention the other characters, are Disney's.
A/N: Oh, wow, my first upload to ff-dot-net in... Let's just say, a very long time. Oh well, I wrote this a few months ago when I was in the middle of watching the TV series, and needed a way to channel my inexplicable love for Iago. There are way too many commas, but to be honest, I think that's a terribly hammered in part of my writing style. Just look at the author's note!
A/N revisited: Re-uploaded to fix some typos and weird missing spaces. I hope this didn't bump it to the front of the Aladdin archive, and if it did, I apologize.
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Parrots needed a lot of attention. You could find the information in any pet-care book.
As much as Iago was loathe to admit anything that might tie him to the "Polly wanna cracker" sect, he was no exception. You could look it up—parrots without enough attention can develop "extremely aggressive behavioral problems," which was a fancy way of saying that he was like a little kid acting out to get noticed. Well, that would certainly explain things, wouldn't it? He was a jerk because he didn't get enough love as a chick. How cliché. A Freudian excuse if he ever heard one.
He didn't want an excuse, that was the problem. Maybe it was a good thing no one ever bothered to look for one. He was loud, greedy, and conniving—it was who he was, for Pete's sake. He shouldn't need a reason for it. Giving him a reason like that just gave him a reason to change, and he didn't want to have to do that.
You see, change was hard. Iago knew that better than anyone. Oh, sure, the rest had all gone through their fair share of changes: Aladdin, from street rat to renowned hero, Genie from slavery to freedom, Abu from... from common monkey thief to the future sultan's monkey thief. But those changes were welcome, and they came on their own—a direct result of being the good guys. Iago had made changes that would have been much easier to do without. No, not breaking off from Jafar. While he was still in the lamp, that wasn't even slightly difficult. He had reached the breaking point with that guy, and enough was enough. Switching over to Aladdin's side didn't take much either—that was all for the perks, not the morals. The hard changes had been when Jafar came back. To follow the course he knew, he should've gone back to Jafar without any hesitation, but... he did hesitate. He didn't want to help him, not any more. And it wasn't because Team Hero had all the prizes now. If that had been the problem, he would've been cozying up to the Sultan long before Jafar had even heard of the genie of the lamp. The thing was, he'd finally realized that Team Hero was Team Hero because, well... they were the good guys. Not just "the" good guys, but they were genuinely good guys. For one thing, Aladdin had stuck up for Iago. He didn't have to—Jafar certainly wouldn't have. No one except Iago would've blamed him, and what should he care about the opinion of a foul little parrot? Iago had saved his life, yeah, and he claimed he owed him, but he didn't really expect him to actually take the responsibility.
And then Jafar returned, and he'd done the self-beneficial thing, the expected thing, at first. He didn't want to help Jafar, but he did, because he was scared. And for good reason. But that stupid conscience that he didn't even know he had-- it wouldn't let him forget he was leading his so-called new friends into destruction, and it hurt. A lot. He had wanted so desperately just for Jafar to leave him alone... he would've even left the palace at that point, gladly, just to get away from all these moral conflictions. But of course Jafar wouldn't have let him do that—he was enjoying all this far too much. He could've just used some other means of splitting up them up, but it was so much more fun to have the bird betray them, wasn't it?
He had to have known that Iago's loyalty wasn't with him anymore. It was all out of fear. Then again, that probably added to the fun—Jafar knew Iago was cowardly and would never cross him in a million years, not when it meant putting his own feathers in danger. Maybe it was his payback for dumping the lamp into a well. Maybe Jafar just liked having someone so very scared of him, when the heroes were definitely too, well, heroic to show anything but bravery. Jafar was a bully, after all, and especially to Iago.
Iago had understood that Abis Mal sort of filled the role he had before. Not as well, of course—Abis Mal just wanted A) revenge on Aladdin, and B) treasure. And Jafar bullied him, too, but he didn't care because he—somehow—thought he was at least sort of in control, because he held the lamp. Which was ridiculous. Even Iago wasn't that stupid. Back when he'd been the willing ally, he'd known perfectly well that Jafar was the one in charge. Iago had an ego, but he knew when he was the sidekick. That was different, too: Abis Mal wasn't a sidekick to Jafar so much as annoyance that had to be tolerated. As a sidekick, Iago had actually been genuinely loyal to Jafar—if he hadn't been, he would never had stuck with him so long back in their days pretending to be good—and he was pretty sure that Jafar, while certainly not any kind of loyal, had at least been fond of him. Well, not him personally, so much as his darker qualities that mirrored Jafar's own. Just louder, brasher, and much more sarcastically—it was more of a fun-house mirror, but it was there. And it helped that he occasionally came up with a good idea or two.... What had Jafar said, once, after one of these? "I love the way your foul little mind works!"That was it in a nutshell, there.
But that wasn't the point. That change should have been hard, since he had been with him so long, but it came at a point where any loyalty Iago had possessed had waned down into nonexistence. The really hard change was choosing to nearly get killed... for the heroes.
"Self-sacrificing" was not a word that could ever describe Iago. He was not heroic, not brave, not good. Putting himself into danger for others went against every part of his nature. He was a coward, and he was well aware of this fact. "A villain through-and-through." If it didn't have personal gain, he wasn't likely to go through with it.
Somehow, he still came back to save them. Even he couldn't understand it. He knew it would have gotten him killed, at the very least almost killed. For a bird so very fond of keeping himself breathing, it was just an idiotic move. But he still did it. And his going back on Jafar was the only thing that had defeated him, and the heroes knew it, too. If Iago hadn't have listened to that stupid little conscience of his, they would all be dead either way. All of them except him, of course. None of them really mentioned it, but all that was why they let him stay on the team, even after those times he let his worser nature come out.
He was glad of that. He didn't want to change his nature. It was easier the way he was.
Things were expected of him, you see. Who was he to deny them their truths? He was expected to be that loud, greedy, conniving parrot—why should he just needlessly confuse people by doing anything but? Usually he followed that rule to a T, but it was strange that he was the one who thought that. He broke expectations more often than anyone else. When danger called, Aladdin was expected to be a hero, and he was. But Iago was expected to run away, and he did, don't get him wrong—but when things were really important, he always, always came back. It happened so unfailingly that it should have become what was expected of him in the first place, but somehow it never ceased to surprise everyone, and especially Iago himself.
He never brought these times up. It certainly wasn't modesty, and he was by no means above trying to work the "sympathy act," as he put it once. Any minor good thing he did he would try to use to his advantage—unless it had actually mattered. If it was it had actually been accidental, if he was taking someone else's credit, anything like that, he'd try to milk the most out of it, but if it had been something that genuinely showed how good he could be, he would never use it. Never even talk about it, really. Maybe the person whose expectations he most wanted to fulfill were his own.
Maybe that was why he always seemed to be delegated to the sidekick role. That might just be part of being a parrot, though. He'd learned a long time ago that if you weren't LOUD, you were forgotten. As much as he hated to give the guy any acclaim, Jafar was better at that then the heroes. Sure, they trumped him in a billion other ways, but he tended to give Iago a lot more credit. It's not like Jafar never forgot about him, of course. But he did remember him a good deal more than anyone else did, and that was probably where the loyalty had come from. Iago had been remembered barely at all before then, and with someone who treated him like he was actually alive, if only as a sidekick, well... that was more than he had ever had before.
And he had it now, too, if not quite as often. When they did remember him, they were a thousand times better than the Grand Vizier had been. Still, it was frustrating sometimes. Like the time he and the monkey had gotten trapped in the Netherworld—the details aren't important, the point was Aladdin and his wonderful "gang" were all worried about only one missing member, and it's pretty obvious which one it was. Hint: It wasn't the parrot.
And as for the monkey, yeah, a lot of the time he remembered him, as they were always paired off together, but that was a sidekick thing more than anything else. There were certain levels in the groups, you know: Aladdin and Jasmine were the straight-out heroes, in a class of their own. Genie and the carpet were the magical types, and that left Iago and Abu, the shoulder-perching animals. It helped that they were both the fondest of treasure, the less morally-sound ones, but that was mainly Iago all the way. The factions crossed over all the time, but when it came down to it, those were the basic dynamics and they all knew it. Or at least, Iago did.
When the Sultan came along, he always stuck with his daughter and Aladdin. Either that or Genie and Carpet showed off for him, which left Iago and Abu on their own again. Sometimes Rajah came into the picture, but Iago really didn't like it when that happened. He had seen the inside of that cat's muzzle more times than any self-respecting bird ought to. Sure, the high number meant he had never actually been swallowed, but ever been inside a tiger's mouth? It's not pleasant.
To tell the truth, he knew he should probably be really happy with what he had already. He was lucky they never excommunicated him, what with all the stuff he pulled, and even aside from that, his personality alone might've been enough to make a lesser leader kick him to the curb. He knew perfectly well he didn't mesh with the rest of the group. They were all heroes, and he was... well, more or less a zero. Yeah, the team zero, what a wonderful role to fill. He was there for the others to play off of, to take the selfish road, to make everyone else seem like better people. It wasn't exactly a fulfilling position, but it worked.
It wasn't that he wasn't intelligent. He gave the realistic perspective most of the time, without any tint of rose-colored glasses, though admittedly there may have been cynicism-colored ones. It was the way he dressed it that might make it seem otherwise, but he couldn't help the sarcasm. It was how he got things across. And he had his fair share of ideas, too—half of Jafar's good ideas were actually his, and he did a lot of the dirty work on top of it. He didn't tell them that, though. Mentioning his association with Jafar was fine—it was mentioning any active part in it that he shied away from. And yeah, so maybe a lot of those ideas were a bit tricky, to say the least, even on the heroic side—but how come when Aladdin does it it's clever, but when Iago does it it's deceitful? Oh, well. They worked either way.
It was probably the shakiness of his moral compass. Everyone else's was straight on, pointing to directly to "good," but Iago's flew all over the place. Self-preservation and treasure tended to get the better of it. But wasn't going to betray his friends again, and that's one thing his compass could get straight, even if it did sometimes take it awhile to get there.
He wasn't much of a hero, and that was probably why he was forgotten so often, as loud and obnoxious as he might be to try and keep that from happening. And he was loud and obnoxious, there was no doubt about that. If that was the reason for it, though, it wasn't really conscious, but on occasion he had to catch himself and try to add a quick fix. Compliments and anything that might make him seen "soft" were quickly and rather self-consciously followed by insults and dismissals. It wasn't just for the sake of being loud. He desperately wanted to look emotionally tough compared to the others, without any of that mushy, wimpy stuff, which was for the birds. Or maybe monkeys.
But strangely, despite his insistence on maintaining this image, the times he was remembered the most seemed to be when he ended up showing any vulnerability. They weren't all that common, and he tried to paper over them afterward, but they did happen, as much as he hated them. And when they came... those times were when the heroes could remember that he wasn't just an obnoxious little bird with a big mouth, he was also an obnoxious little bird with some, well, humanity. He just didn't like letting them know.