Oh, Geez, is this Emo Post-War Fanfiction?
...Yes, it is. And gosh, darn it, all of my fanfiction for this series is so weird. Weird and angry.
Fun Fact: This is a sad, angry, emo fic about sad, angry people. About halfway through writing this fic, I decided I needed to write something fun and silly, so I started to write a new drabble set about ½ through the series about Marco helping Rachel cut class… aaaand it turned into some weird, poorly constructed diatribe about how Andalites don’t believe in God, which I hastily aborted out of fear of depressing myself further.
I’m not even kidding.
Before I started writing Anific, I used to be able to write happy things. x_____x
Title: Just Below the Surface
Rating: PG13 for bloody battle scenes and potty-mouthed superheroes. There is also some suggestion that somewhere, somehow, someone had sex with someone else.
Description: Rachel is called to testify at Visser Three’s trial after the end of the war- all the while suffering for the loss of her friend and teammate, and the loss of the war that formed such a huge part of her self-identity. A quick exploration of what would have happened if Rachel had lived, and another Animorph had been the one to die.
Characters: Some focus on Rachel, but also looking at the others, and Eva.
Pairings: Discusses Jake/Cassie and has a heavy dose of Rachel/Tobias. Primarily gen, though.
Notes: I’m such a bitch to post-war Rachel. I mean, KAA killed her and I’m more of a bitch to her. I keep writing her and I don’t know why, because I never seem to have anything nice to say. (And I love Rachel! I have an icon reserved for Rachel! *points* And I only have fifteen icons, so that makes her special.)
So, yeah. For, like, the thirtieth time- sorry, Rach. D=
--
Jake
The day of Esplin’s funeral, Marco calls Rachel from Geneva. It would have to be Marco.
If it were Cassie, Rachel would have stared blankly at the shrieking phone, letting its reverberating sounds travel through her body like gamma rays through space, destroying what rare matter exists to be destroyed, but leaving the emptiness alone. Because she and Cassie don’t click anymore. It’s not that she doesn’t still love Cassie- fiercely, protectively, even jealously. It’s just, they’re a shadow and a breeze- existing in the same place at the same time and never touching each other. They’ve gone beyond not understanding each other; now they no longer speak the same language, they can’t follow each other’s words.
There was a time where they were best friends, laughing about their differences and bouncing from school to parks to shopping malls on their own whims, carefree in the way only children can be. Rachel is aware of that time as though she had read about it in a book somewhere. The images are flat, static and dull: line drawings in coloring books. The Time Before. The memories of that 13-year-span don’t stir her; they are nothing compared to the conflagration of emotion, of excitement, of fire that embodied the much shorter period afterward, during the war. Cassie’s name passes through her without touching the edges of her, leaving her unchanged.
But Marco’s name lights a spark.
Cassie would ask her, gently, where she was, and if she were on her way, because she is about to be late. Her words would be delicately framed, her voice perfectly pitched, avoiding friction. Cassie is so careful, these days. She won’t argue. She won’t start conflict, she hardly ever denies a request, she has a light touch with everyone she cares about, so light it’s almost as though she shies away from contact. She forces herself to accommodate, to please, to placate everyone she loves, as though terrified that if a rift opens between her and someone to whom she is close, she could lose them in a heartbeat and have only the bitter aftertaste of that conflict on her tongue.
Any non-Animorph human on the planet, including Rachel’s family, would talk to her with voices still trembling with hero-worship and slightly fear-tinged respect. Rachel hates it. She hates feeling nothing, soft interactions that produce no lingering emotions. She hates how slow her pulse has been, how dim her vision has gotten, how she meets the eyes of people on the streets without shivers or goosebumps, trusting them to be human, to be safe, in a safe and lifeless world.
But Marco, as soon as her phone clicks on and before she could ask him what he wanted, snaps out, “Where the fuck are you?”
The anger that surges through Rachel’s body is completely disproportionate, uncontrolled, delicious. “I’m at home,” she answers in the same impatient tone. “What do you want, Marco?”
“What do I want?” She hears him grinding his teeth on the other end of the line. It is a new habit he has picked up since the end of the war, since the final battle that cost him his best friend. The old habits, bad jokes and stupid comments and chewing on his fingernails- haven’t completely left him, not exactly. He still grins that famous grin on late-night talk shows, and if you catch him in a good mood, he sometimes laughs in a pitch that sounds nearly the same. “I want to know why you’re not here, Rachel, where the federal court summoned you to be, for the biggest trial in the history of this planet. And then, when you’re about half-way through explaining, I want you to shut up and get over here. Is Tobias with you?”
He doesn’t joke with Rachel, much. That bond between them, that seemingly eternal banter, died out somewhere between her surrender to the fierce, dark part inside of her and watching Jake kill his brother and be killed in turn from the viewscreen of the Blade Ship.
Jake’s death, his final sacrifice, the last part of himself he had not yet given or lost to the war, had saved earth and destroyed the Animorphs.
It had killed Marco’s humor, that eternally optimistic part of him that a thousand terrible battles and a thousand brushes with death couldn’t dent. It had killed something youthful and hopeful and beautiful inside Cassie, leaving her brittle and frail. She couldn’t talk to other men, couldn’t fathom even befriending anyone outside of the Animorphs. She couldn’t betray the ghost of her first love.
As for Rachel… in Rachel, Jake’s death had destroyed something much smaller, and much more subtle, with much more disastrous consequences.
Jake had been Rachel’s last link to her own duties, her responsibilities. He had been a constant reminder that the part of her that was dark and powerful and frightening had a specific purpose, and its strength was good, and necessary. He made her stand for something beyond the fire of her own excitement and the pursuit of her own victories.
And then, one day, all of a sudden, he was gone and the war was over. And Rachel didn’t need to be strong, or brave, or powerful- she is all of those things, but they are empty and useless in a world that wants pretty girls and smart women. Rachel is these things, as well, but she doesn’t care- she could fail every class and gain eighty pounds, it wouldn’t matter, if she could only feel important and worthy in her courage and strength.
These days, she feels nothing more than anything else. She is annoyed with day-to-day living, violently aggressive towards folding laundry and daytime television, antsy when it rains for too many days in a row. She spends a lot of time as an eagle, especially, trying to force adrenaline through her body by flying higher and faster and more recklessly each time. There is the temptation to surrender, just for a time, to the predator’s instincts, to hunt as the eagle, to feel the harsh and brutal joy of making a kill, sinking her talons into helpless prey, holding it down as she ends its life with her cruelly curved beak. Or morphing into the wolf and stalking prey, chasing it down with the animal’s endless energy, tearing it to the earth and ripping its throat out and getting that savage surge of predator victory.
But where does that end? She resists the temptation out of fear that animal ferocity and human intellect would render helpless animal prey too easy, that the thrill would sustain her for a month or two, and then start to fade. How desperate would she become? Could she hunt down criminals, humans who would deserve to be turned to prey? Could she trust herself to stop there?
It is a terrifying series of questions. She hates the part of herself that needs to ask them as much as she hates the part of herself that forces that need.
“I haven’t seen Tobias for a few days,” Rachel answers, her voice sharpened into a falsely blithe tone. She cares, she cares so much, that Tobias comes and goes to and from her life like a raincloud. It is hard to see in his expressionless human face- or his hard golden hawk eyes- how Jake’s death has hit him, has chewed him up from the inside. But on cold mornings, when their human bodies are pressed together under the covers, he tells her in a hushed voice that he is scared for her, because she is strong and fierce and seems immortal, and everyone who should be indestructible dies too soon.
That weekend, she had been woken by a breeze to an open window and an empty bed. She had felt angry at him, angry and sad and useless and insufficient. He is flying again, searching for something, something that could define him, give him purpose the way Jake used to give him purpose. Not something that could define him as human or hawk- he has given up on that, resigned himself to a life as something in-between. Now, he is just looking for where he fits into a world that has changed, but not changed enough to accommodate what they have become. A version of earth altered by a war that changed some people so intimately that they have lost their own identity, and the people who could remind them of who they are; and passed by others completely under their perception, leaving them entirely untouched.
But that is what they are all doing, all four of them. With the skeleton of the Animorphs suddenly gone, its eyes and brain and heart and muscle all collapse, and it’s impossible to find structure again.
“Whatever,” Marco says, and she hears the roll of his eyes, the way he runs his fingers impatiently through his curly hair. He tries to embrace the fame this has brought them- the money and attention and women and opportunities- but it is hollow for all of them, without the center of their group. He appears on all the television shows. He tells their story, again and again and again- embellished sometimes, and with the dirty bits cut out or glossed over. He doesn’t talk much about Esplin’s cannibal twin, or his own brilliant plan to kill his own mother. Nor does he say anything about Tom, aside from the bare-bones schematics of the situation. Some things are Jake’s story to tell. Some stories will go untold. “We aren’t really expecting Tobias, to be honest. We’re expecting you. As a matter of fact, some very important Andalite dudes who travelled some ridiculous number of light-years to get here are going to sit on their thumbs- metaphorically, of course- and wait for you to get off your ass…”
“The Hell does it matter?” Rachel snaps, her voice cracking with the force of her anger. “What does it matter, Marco? No one’s going to say he’s fucking innocent! My testimony is just going to be more of the same. It’s all the same. Three years. Three years of our fighting a losing, slipping battle against him. Three years of him doing whatever it takes to hunt us down and kill us. Three years of him murdering humans and Hork-Bajir and whatever else stood in his way. Three years of him destroying droves of people to get to what he wanted. Three years of him torturing Yeerks like Aftran. I’m done parroting it out for people. I’m done with all of them.”
Marco listens to her silently. It is a skill he has picked up in the past few months, or perhaps it is simply another change in him- a new stoic silence exchanged for boisterous humor, a part of Jake taking away a part of Marco. And then, when they both know she has rooted herself, standing strong against any argument, simply for the sake of her own stubbornness; when they both realize that nothing he can say will change her mind, he pulls out a secret weapon that is both powerful and entirely unfair.
He hands the phone to Cassie.
Rachel does not realize this until it is suddenly her soft voice on the other end of the phone. “Rachel? Please.”
Cassie’s voice is so soft. So very, very delicate.
Rachel’s anger numbs. If she argued, Cassie would submit. Nothing- no trials in Geneva, no prison time for Esplin 9466, no public appearance or even threat against the Hork Bajir colony, whose peril had forced Cassie to make the few public statements she’s made since the end of the war- nothing is more important to her than keeping these frail little connections alive. Clinging to the people important to her, careful not to hold them too tightly, terrified to let them go, even for a second. Because she turned away once, said no, fought, changed, tore away- and then when she looked back, he had already thrown himself to the wolves.
It wasn’t Cassie’s fault. But although she could easily have convinced Rachel, or Marco, or Tobias that they couldn’t change anything if any of them were blaming themselves, Cassie doesn’t have the same comforting magic to offer herself. She just quietly, calmly, privately suffers.
Rachel’s anger fades, and her frustration subsides to a gnawing, nagging feeling just on the peripheral of her conscious. All of her fiery emotions numb down.
Feeling less with every passing second, Rachel makes arrangements to be flown to Geneva from the air force base, and, with a heavy sigh, throws open a window and starts to morph.
--
Marco
It’s Eva who meets Rachel at the airport, wearing a dull brown dress and oversized sunglasses. She doesn’t smile as she recognizes one of the famous Animorphs, surrounded by state guards to keep away the gaggle of excited Germans waving notepads for an autograph; she stands still, straight, her hands dangling at her sides. In that moment, from across the walkway, in the bleary grayness of the overcast day, Rachel does not see one of the most pivotal figures speaking for ex-Controllers and the victims of the Invasion. Nor does she see a woman who fought alongside her at the end of the war, or even Marco’s mother. There is nothing of the boy’s humor or optimism in the fixed severity of her expression or in the ramrod straightness of her spine. The person Rachel sees standing before the state car that was sent to take her to the trials is Visser One, and, for just one moment, her pulse quickens.
But, of course, the war is over.
Eva has not dealt with the death of her son with as much grace or humor or flexibility that Marco showed when she disappeared. That’s how it is, they say, when parents lose their children- and how many times has Eva lost Marco? She lost him when she was first infested, and the hand that touched his cheek wasn’t her’s to move, the voice that told him her own philosophies and her own ideas was speaking at the bidding of another will. She lost him when she was pulled from her boat in a storm and taken to space; the disposable body of a high-ranking alien, to be used until she was no longer of use, and then discarded. Never to see her family again.
And then she lost him again.
It was no surprise that Jake would send Marco into the Blade Ship. It only made sense. Marco was ruthless enough to throw his own mother off a cliff. Marco was conniving enough to twist high-powered Controllers around his fingers. Marco was patient, and cautious, and capable. If anyone had the chance to destroy the threat Tom and the other rebel Yeerks posed and get out of there alive, it was Marco.
And he almost had.
He’d managed to get a Dracon beam and take out three of them quietly, off-scenes, in secluded wings before Tom even knew he was there. He’d managed to hack into the ship’s mainframe computer and shut down the weapons systems before Tom could blast apart the Pool Ship. And then, only then, had he been discovered.
They might have been able to save him. If Erek hadn’t been draining the power from the Pool Ship’s weapons, and they could have shot out the Blade Ship’s engines and overtaken the ship. If Jake hadn’t hesitated, just for a second, as Marco’s powerful gorilla hands folded around Tom’s jaguar skull and pushed inward, muscles bulging from his shoulders, long teeth bared in a feral grin, coarse hair bristling, two polar bears closing in on either side. If. If. If.
Marco had never wanted a hero’s death. Maybe, just maybe, if he were watching from some other dimension, he would find it funny. The one who didn’t want the responsibility of battle, but saw a crashed alien spaceship in an abandoned construction site as a chance for fame and television stardom, had died a martyr while his comrades-in-arms awkwardly pantomimed their way through interviews before the cameras. Conan. Letterman. Marco could have made the joke. But Marco was gone, and the rest of them couldn’t find the humor in it.
Maybe, Marco could have made a joke from that, as well. It wasn’t like he’d ever known when to stop.
He always said that it was his mother who had taught him that everything- every situation, every circumstance, no matter how grim or gloomy- has some element of humor, or goodness, in it. But it’s obvious when Rachel gets close to her that Eva hasn’t been practicing that philosophy. There are lines in her forehead and around her mouth that hadn’t been there when Rachel had last saw her, at Marco’s memorial service- the last place where Rachel had truly been able to feel something that was a strong and clear and powerful emotion. Beneath the lower edge of those sunglasses Rachel can see large purple bags ringing Eva’s eyes and loose wisps of hair sticking out from the messy bun the older woman has pulled her long, dark hair into, in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the fact that she hasn’t brushed it for days.
The state car smells new, with soft fabric seats. Rachel is still dressed in her morphing suit; they hadn’t been thinking at the Air Force base she had flown to, and hadn’t gotten new clothing for her. And so she’s wearing a black leotard through a foreign city where everyone knows exactly who she is. She doesn’t care. There’s so much, too much, that she doesn’t care about anymore.
She misses Marco, in a dull and distant way. More than she would have expected. Marco was so… so real. So much more real than Jake and Cassie and even Tobias, in a way.
Jake was a puppet, most of the time. He was the leader of the Animorphs more than he was her cousin or Marco’s best friend or even Cassie’s boyfriend; he was their leader much, much, much more than he was Jake. He had given himself to the war until he was little but a shell that contained it; a calm veneer over chaos and bloodshed and the narrow path of strategy through disaster. He didn’t tell you what he thought; she wondered if he even allowed himself to think freely, or if he controlled his thoughts as strictly as his dialogue. He said what needed to be said, to keep his compatriots fighting, to keep them moving, to keep the war going. He did what needed to be done.
And Cassie was more of the same. She was so gentle, so indecisive. She said what she thought you wanted or needed to hear. She was honest in a calculated and forced sort of way; careful not to lie, but careful not to hurt. Careful not to say the wrong thing.
Tobias? Rachel lets her head fall back against the plush headrest of the car as she tries to pick apart that faint trickle of disquiet that she feels whenever she thinks about Tobias. He can make her happy, when he’s human and they’re together. He’s pretty much the only thing that can do that for her, anymore. Even her family is nearly intolerable, most of the time; she is less patient after the war than she’s ever been. But they lie to each other, looking each other in the eyes and using words like forever and never and always and holding hands and kissing and letting these illusions build themselves around them until they’re using words like marriage (is that legal, for a girl and a hawk? Well, she is Rachel Berenson. They’d let her marry a donkey if she wanted to.) and children (her, a mother? It’s funny in hindsight, although such a beautiful illusion they build together, holding hands and whispering in the night like, maybe, Elfangor and Loren used to before they, too, were jaded and destroyed by circumstance and war) and future (which is a word without a meaning, these days. They’re so used to future being some ridiculous hypothetical that they were almost certain not to live to see that these days they throw it around without thought for what it’s actually referring. Tomorrow? A year? A minute?) until they have their story written, a free verse love poem.
It only lasts two hours.
Tobias is as real as Cassie. He loves her, she is sure of it, but they both look into each other’s eyes and lie and lie and lie. Because it’s what they need from each other, as much as they need the touch and kiss and sex and passion and understanding that only the one can give the other. And then the hours pass and she is left with feathers in her bed and twisting in her gut and confused thoughts sweeping through her mind as her heart tries to settle on one emotion.
Marco was real. Everything he did, everything he said, was from Marco’s mind, from Marco’s heart. It was all Marco to the core.
It wasn’t that he was more honest than the rest of them- he lied and pretended and schemed as much as anyone. But he didn’t just say what was needed, or wanted, by the others- the things he said, the things he did, were because they were what he wanted to say, or what he thought needed to be done. And if you were losing yourself, it was Marco who would tell you. If you were toeing the line, it was Marco who would tell you. Marco said what he thought and felt what he felt, no filters or restraints.
And now he’s gone, and they’re so wrapped up in their own private deceptions and masks and projections that it’s hard to see who they are anymore.
The clouds haven’t cleared when they get to the courthouse. Everything is gray and dull and dim. Rachel hates it. It makes her skin crawl with the need for total darkness or blinding brightness. She hates this soft-edged, middle-ground world. She hates these empty streets and innocent people. She hates the post-war world.
Jake and Cassie are waiting for her out front. Eva has testified already and does not leave the car. The Animorphs are waiting to reunite.
They stand awkwardly, together but not touching. Every now and then, Cassie looks at Jake, and even Rachel knows that she loves him, she’s worried for him, she aches for him and for Marco and for Rachel and Tobias, and the ex-Controllers, the Yeerks, the victims and the casualties, the Auxiliaries, and the Hork-Bajir and for everything, and everyone, who has been touched by this war. Jake doesn’t look at anything.
He had hesitated, when Marco met his eyes through the video links between the two ships, his leathery palms slick with Tom’s blood and gore. It was not a beautiful or dignified death for either of them, but none of the Animorphs really believed in graceful battles with dramatic final stands anymore. They were all like that- bloody and disgusting, with lines of intestine tangled together on the ground and fecal matter caked in your fur; the stench of burning flesh filling your nostrils and the iron taste of blood filling your mouth.
Rachel misses it. Marco hated it. He always hated it. He had met Jake’s eyes in those final moments, his eyes dark and animal in his intelligent gorilla face, as Controllers closed in on him, beaten and bloody and nearly defeated. Had he said anything, in those final moments, to the man who had been his best friend since they were old enough to talk to each other? Had he told Jake to gun the engines, to come pick him up, get him out of here? There still might have been time- if the engines had enough power, if they had made the move as quickly as possible. Had he told Jake to get them out of there, assured him that he could take care of this mess? Or had he simply asked Jake if this had been what he wanted, when he sent Marco to his death, on a mission to kill his best friend’s brother?
No way of knowing. Jake hardly talks to anyone anymore.
--
Cassie
Seventeen thousand Yeerks. Seventeen thousand helpless, vile little gray slugs in a little pool, looking like colonies of Ebola in a Petri dish. Rachel knows exactly why Jake did it. She hates the lawyer who hounds him about it with the exact same dim, dull hatred she focuses on most of this quiet and lackluster world.
And Jake?
He lets everyone else speak for him. His lawyer. The irate Andalites, defending the warrior-Prince that stood so valiantly in defense of his world, so like an Andalite and so very, very different. He sits still and silent and stares into space with that vacant look that they are so used to seeing on him, these days, and for so long.
He had never wanted it to be Cassie. Rachel doesn’t know when he figured out that it was going to be her. They had all been little cockroaches when they’d snuck onto the Pool Ship, thinking their own private, rushed, thoughts. Not really paying attention to whose thought-speak voice they heard. Assuming Jake was keeping track of them. But eventually, she thought, he had to have heard her voice, Rachel’s voice, and realized that a mistake had been made. Had it been after they had gotten into the Pool Ship, after the doors had closed behind them, after they had launched into space? Or had he led them in there without Cassie, knowing that he was leaving her to throw herself into almost certain death, in a desire to spare her best friend and serve the man she loved?
When had he figured it out?
When Rachel had shown up with the group, had he assumed she had shied away from the grim duty he had thought he’d assigned her? Had he maybe assumed that Cassie had left the fight altogether, again, unwilling to let the Auxiliaries die not knowing what they were in for, unwilling to kill innocents, unwilling to do the things he asked of her?
No. He had to have figured it out.
Realized that, when he told Rachel he needed to speak with her alone, Cassie had overheard. Realized that kind, sensitive Cassie had convinced Tobias to go flying with the girl he loved. One last time, before the end, before it might be too late, she told him. Try and pull her out of this rut she’s gotten into. She’s still in there. The girl we love is still there.
And then she had touched the DNA of her best friend, acquired with Rachel’s permission almost three years before. That version of Rachel was a little shorter than she was at sixteen, and a little thinner, without the curves of her older self, but they looked just about the same. Cassie carried herself with Rachel’s aggressive confidence and no one could tell the difference.
Ever the perceptive one, Cassie had answered Jake exactly as Rachel would have- but her words would have meant something completely different, if only Jake had known who he was really talking to. “If you send me there,” she had said, and Rachel couldn’t imagine her voice carrying all the nuances of pain and empathy and fear and love and, yes, moralistic disgust that she knew Cassie would have spoken with, “I will do what you tell me to do. You know I will.”
“I know,” Jake had said.
“And you really want me to do that?”
When they were getting ready to leave, to put their plan into motion, Rachel had seen Cassie standing beside Jake. They were all getting ready to die, all of them. Jake touched Cassie’s arm and leaned in to kiss her, but she had pulled away, and her eyes were wide and rimmed with red from crying and her mouth was twisted in betrayal. The man who touched her was not the boy she loved.
“I’m sorry,” she’d whispered, but Rachel could hear her. And that was the last thing any of them heard her say, out loud, in her human voice, before she was gone.
And now, as then, Jake says nothing and shows no emotion on his face, because the human face is not designed to show the amount of pain they all have to convey.
Marco is sitting next to Rachel, their elbows touching, and she feels through that contact that he is shaking with anger. Cassie’s death didn’t honestly mean very much, to Marco. They had never been close. But he is trying to keep Jake in the realm of functioning human adults, and that is nearly a full-time job. When they’d first touched down, he’d put Rachel and Tobias on suicide watch, keeping tabs on their fallen leader- Tobias especially, who was in limbo- no longer part of the war or the world, without a function or a goal or really even an identity. He had needed the task as much as Jake has needed the supervision.
As for Rachel- she hated the sight of her cousin giving up. He, who had at once been so strong, strong enough to control her- it stirred a deep and primal anger in her to see him decompose.
But, at the same time, when he spoke, he gave her insight into him. Insight that, sometimes, she didn’t want to have.
He told her what he had originally planned. That it was supposed to be her, Rachel, that died. (That seemed logical, to Rachel. It should have been her fight. It was supposed to be her fight. She is restless and angry and aching for battle in dry, sedate Santa Barbara.) He told her that, when he first realized what had happened, that it was Cassie, not Rachel, in the Blade Ship- he had felt a surge of horrible, agonizing fear. Not that the girl he loved was about to die- he didn’t feel anything about that, not right away. The part of his brain that was Jake, that loved Cassie and already grieved for Tom and was terrified for his parents and scared of death had been turned off- he was scared that Cassie wouldn’t, couldn’t go through with the mission. He knew, knew with the certainty of a good leader who knows his troops, that Cassie could not look a man in the eyes and kill him.
They didn’t see Cassie die, but as Tom’s face broke into a victorious smile and the Blade ship closed the distance between them for the last killing blow, she told them where she was. She had spoken to Mertil and Gafinilan about the mechanics of the engine of the Blade Ship. Yeerk technology was just bastardized Andalite technology, after all. And then, she had morphed into an ant and squeezed into a space just barely big enough for a small human to demorph inside it, and cool enough for her to survive for a few hours. And then she had begun her second morph, into a humpback whale. She was deep enough into the morph to speak, mostly whale but only a little larger than a human- ready for the exponential growth that would end this battle.
The human body, swelling with the mass of a whale, is a fragile thing- but Andalite technology is graceful and delicate, and, as Cassie put it, the whole thing was ready to crumple with just a little more pressure. The combustion of the engine wouldn’t be enough to destroy the entire ship- but it would crumple both the exterior and the interior walls, and that would be enough to implode the ship.
They couldn’t see her or hear her when she died. All they had of Cassie was her thought-speak voice inside their heads.
She asked Jake if he was sure he wanted her to do this.
And he had sat on his haunches, a huge and regal animal, and stared at his panicking brother and his terrified associates with cold, green predator eyes. If he had said no, maybe- maybe, maybe, such a slim chance- they could have intercepted the Blade Ship, captured Tom and the other Yeerks, saved Cassie and Jake’s brother and all lived as happily as possible for the rest of their lives. Rachel didn’t think so, but the doubt will always be there. Was there ever a chance?
If he had said no… then Tom might have destroyed them. The Yeerks might have taken Earth, or maybe the Andalites would have destroyed the Invasion and saved Earth, or maybe the Andalites would have bombed Earth from hundreds of miles away and gone off to fight the Yeerks over another planet, without a second thought for those backwards two-legged creatures that had once ruled a planet for a few measly thousand years.
For a few moments, he said nothing. But he was their leader, and a leader must make choices. He was their leader before he was Jake. And not making a choice is also a choice.
He said, [Do it, Cassie.]
It was the last thing he ever said to her. What do you say after that? Can you follow it with “I love you” ?
Part of him must have hated her as the air rushed out from around his brother and then the steel of his own ship collapsed in on top of him.
They recovered her body- a mangled heap of human hair and whale blubber, a disgusting corpse. They cremated it without letting her parents see the twisted thing that their daughter had died as.
She never knew they saved the earth. She never knew what Jake went through. She never knew that seventeen thousand Yeerks had been flushed into space alongside her at the coldhearted command of the boy she had once loved.
Rachel doesn’t miss Cassie in those everyday moments, the way she might have, if her best friend had been taken from her before the war. She doesn’t cry when Wal-mart has a sale on overalls, for instance, nor does she brake for squirrels stupid enough to dart out in the street in front of her car or donate money to the ASPCA or think twice before eating a hamburger. But sometimes, in the gray hours of very, very early morning, when Rachel has been trying for a long, long time to sleep, she feels the pain of the girl’s passing, sharp and physical, in her core. Cassie’s death is not an every day pain, nor is it a heartache or nausea- she feels it as very real and tangible, the feeling of losing something from the center of your body. The pain of a grizzly bear tearing its way out of an ancient sea monster’s abdomen. A half-cockroach, half-Andalite hacking a path from the belly of a Taxxon. This is the pain she feels, curled up around herself, under the covers. She doesn’t cry for her best friend, but oh God, she hurts for her.
Tobias tried, for a time, to stand for the Hork-Bajir, to be a voice for them. But he can’t do it. He’s not a public face, and he hates talking to the press. And so Toby is the voice of the Hork-Bajir, and fights for them, as well as she can.
They are leaving Earth at the end of the month, at the request- the demand- of the United Nations. The Andalites have provided a sort of weapons-free Dome Ship for them to occupy while a suitable world is located for them to inhabit. It’s much, much too small for the entire colony, and they will not be able to climb the trees or live the lifestyle they’ve had in the forests on Earth. Tobias has made his disapproval of this decision clear, but has no alternatives. Marco shakes his head when asked and says the seven-foot freaks should be allowed to stay in the forests here- they aren’t hurting anyone. Rachel doesn’t do interviews, anymore- she’s not very personable, the media has found, and she finds herself not really caring much about these issues. Jake tends not to say anything.
His testimony is over. He rises when told, walks down from the witness stand.
And then it’s Rachel’s turn.
--
Tobias
As Rachel stands, she feels the eyes of everyone in the courthouse falling on her. She doesn’t care. Does a tree care about the ants that crawl over it? Does the ocean care about the dreamers staring into its waves? Does the universe spare a thought for the stargazers? They were ants to her.
All of them.
Such apathy was a new development, but it was a good one, she thought. It kept her stable, and functioning. She had given her first press release last week- two months after Marco’s best-selling book was published- and had spoken brusquely, simply, but without emotion. No anger. Nothing. She had told the world her side of the story, and then had gone down the street, and bought three barbecue tacos with extra-hot salsa, and then taken them back into her apartment and eaten, slowly, without tasting anything, without seeing anything, without feeling anything.
It was better.
For a long time- what felt like an eternity- Rachel had felt nothing between or aside from the two extremes of absolute anger and being completely, utterly broken.
There had been a time where there was something else inside of her. She had watched Tobias rise from his hiding place on the Blade Ship, half hawk and half Hork-Bajir, blades shooting out between feathers, eyes shrinking, spine lengthening. And she had felt fear, then- the crushing, overwhelming fear that freezes a deer in headlights and sends lemmings hurtling off the edges of cliffs. Primal fear she would never have felt for herself.
Tobias was a predator, sent on a predator’s mission. Even as his body and the veneer of instincts in his mind changed from a calculating carnivore to a peace-loving herbivore, there was still something ruthlessly hawk about him. Even Rachel, who never saw him as less than human, knew and accepted that. His eyes, dimmed by the morph though they were, focused on his prey, and he hunted Tom down in three swift strides, and killed him with his massive taloned feet before the other Controllers could get halfway through their morphs.
After that, he fought well. No one could ever say Tobias was less than a good warrior. But he was cut down quickly, outnumbered and outmatched.
And then, in the silent aftermath, as the Blade Ship powered away, Rachel felt the anger bubbling up inside her. She had been watching the fight as a human, met Tobias’ alien eyes with her own blue ones, stood inches from the screen. “I love you!” she told him, in the final moments.
Had he heard her? In her memories, sometimes the words leave her mouth just before Tobias is killed, and sometimes, she says them a millisecond too late. She doesn’t know which version is the truth, anymore.
She knew the second he was gone, though. Watched as the life bled from the hole in his neck torn by the jaws of a massive polar bear, watched as his eyes dimmed and unfocused, watched as his muscles became meat and he sagged forward and fell to the ground.
Just before her entire being sacrificed itself to anger, she felt the all-consuming grief take her like a torrential river, sweep her away to parts of her mind and her being she had never guessed existed. The anger was a respite. The anger was a tree root she could cling to, trying to keep from being lost to the ocean of endless, relentless emotional pain. It was a placebo of strength and power for someone who suddenly found herself without either.
She started to morph and started to move towards Visser Three simultaneously, without thinking, shrieking out in raw and primal rage. Luckily for Esplin, and probably for Jake, they were ready for her- Marco’s massive gorilla hand closed around her arm, pinned her on the ground. And, when she didn’t stop in her morph or her struggling, his knuckles rapped gently across her forehead. Gentle being relative, and more than enough to knock her out.
They never told her how they kept her unconscious. She never asked. She woke up as a fully human girl, soft and pink and clothed in unfamiliar clothes, in the green hills of Erek King’s basement.
They tried to walk her through her grief, but in thousands of years of existence, the Chee had never encountered anyone quite like Rachel. In the end, they just kept her away from their precious dogs as she ranted and raved and destroyed what inanimate things they allowed her to destroy. They had little patience for her, these infinitely patient beings. She didn’t care. They didn’t matter to her.
It took her months to reappear. Of course, the public didn’t know that. Cassie made a few appearances as Rachel, quiet and recalcitrant, talking mostly about how she wasn’t ready to talk, yet. But the public didn’t matter to Rachel. She made up fantasies, for a little while, in which he never died, in which he was waiting for her, loving her, looking for her. But she has never been the kind of girl to hide from the truth. She knew what the truth was.
And that was when Rachel discovered how deeply depression can run.
Feeling nothing is better.
She went back and forth, for longer than she cares to think about. Uncontrollably angry: at Esplin and his vile, life-stealing, world-destroying Yeerk friends or Jake and his manipulative, self-righteous ways, or Tom for luring Tobias into the ship where he died, or Tobias for going, without telling her, without saying goodbye. She was even furious at Marco, for stopping her from killing Esplin, and at Cassie, for being in love with Jake, and at her aunt and uncle, for producing the two boys that ruined her life. At Alloran. At Elfangor. And then, all of a sudden, she felt broken down, defeated, lost to a grief so deep she couldn’t see the bottom, and couldn’t see her way out. And then the anger started to boil again.
Feeling nothing is better. Rachel sits up straight in the witness seat. Her hair is brushed smooth and clean and it shines even in the dim courtroom lighting. She isn’t wearing make-up, because she never needed it. Her blue eyes are bright and intense. She stares straight ahead without seeing.
Feeling nothing.
They hold out a book for her to place her right hand on. It is soft beneath her hand; not real leather, but a decent imitation. She looks up at the man who is holding the book. He has a wide forehead, small eyes, huge eyebrows.
“Do you swear to tell the truth-”
The truth is, she isn’t okay. Under the hot incandescent lights of the courtroom, a bead of sweat is trickling down the bailiff’s expansive forehead, tracing a slow path towards his brow, and Rachel watches it as her thoughts move of their own accord. The truth is, she can’t keep feeling nothing. The truth is, she’s trying to run on autopilot, but as she looks around, she finds herself meeting the eyes of person after person who had some hand in the disaster that has become her life. A group of Andalite warriors, maybe the same ones who had planned to destroy the planet they had been called to save, stand near the back, their haughty features just barely human enough to be readable. Human politician after human politician who had been blind or distracted or weak enough to be taken by the enemy.
And Jake.
“-the whole truth-”
Jake, who had ordered Tobias on a death mission.
Jake, their leader, who had let her down, let her spiral out of control until she was a complete mess, living a life that wasn’t worth living, writhing in her own agony like a snail in salt. He doesn’t meet her eyes, but he doesn’t look away, either. He just sits there, like a flour sack- lifeless and heavy and slumped in his seat, sucking the oxygen out of the air.
“-and nothing but the truth-”
And then, on her right, there is a small, purple box.
Why should Esplin 9466, the Yeerk in charge of the human invasion, who had ordered so many sentient creatures to their deaths, who had killed Elfangor, who had ruined their lives and been responsible for so much, be still alive, when Tobias- sweet, sad, thoughtful Tobias- is dead?
Why should Visser Three be looking at life in prison while Tobias is a clump of ashes on a stone memorial?
“-so help you God?”
Rachel isn’t a victim. She doesn’t talk about her problems, doesn’t throw the power to make the hard choices to an impartial jury- how on Earth is anyone on this planet supposed to be impartial about this trial, anyway?- doesn’t lie in agony on a lawn strewn with dog poop and want, and wish, and hope and hate and scream until her throat is sore.
She is a fighter, and she fought, until the end.
Claws spring from her hand and scrape across the book, tearing through that nice, soft cover.
She is moving for the Yeerk in his little purple box before the morph is more than half complete, her teeth shooting from her mouth like little white sabers as a growl like thunder escapes from her throat and she surrenders her mind to the anger that always, always, always bubbles just below the surface.
Fun Fact: This is a sad, angry, emo fic about sad, angry people. About halfway through writing this fic, I decided I needed to write something fun and silly, so I started to write a new drabble set about ½ through the series about Marco helping Rachel cut class… aaaand it turned into some weird, poorly constructed diatribe about how Andalites don’t believe in God, which I hastily aborted out of fear of depressing myself further.
I’m not even kidding.
Before I started writing Anific, I used to be able to write happy things. x_____x
Title: Just Below the Surface
Rating: PG13 for bloody battle scenes and potty-mouthed superheroes. There is also some suggestion that somewhere, somehow, someone had sex with someone else.
Description: Rachel is called to testify at Visser Three’s trial after the end of the war- all the while suffering for the loss of her friend and teammate, and the loss of the war that formed such a huge part of her self-identity. A quick exploration of what would have happened if Rachel had lived, and another Animorph had been the one to die.
Characters: Some focus on Rachel, but also looking at the others, and Eva.
Pairings: Discusses Jake/Cassie and has a heavy dose of Rachel/Tobias. Primarily gen, though.
Notes: I’m such a bitch to post-war Rachel. I mean, KAA killed her and I’m more of a bitch to her. I keep writing her and I don’t know why, because I never seem to have anything nice to say. (And I love Rachel! I have an icon reserved for Rachel! *points* And I only have fifteen icons, so that makes her special.)
So, yeah. For, like, the thirtieth time- sorry, Rach. D=
--
Jake
The day of Esplin’s funeral, Marco calls Rachel from Geneva. It would have to be Marco.
If it were Cassie, Rachel would have stared blankly at the shrieking phone, letting its reverberating sounds travel through her body like gamma rays through space, destroying what rare matter exists to be destroyed, but leaving the emptiness alone. Because she and Cassie don’t click anymore. It’s not that she doesn’t still love Cassie- fiercely, protectively, even jealously. It’s just, they’re a shadow and a breeze- existing in the same place at the same time and never touching each other. They’ve gone beyond not understanding each other; now they no longer speak the same language, they can’t follow each other’s words.
There was a time where they were best friends, laughing about their differences and bouncing from school to parks to shopping malls on their own whims, carefree in the way only children can be. Rachel is aware of that time as though she had read about it in a book somewhere. The images are flat, static and dull: line drawings in coloring books. The Time Before. The memories of that 13-year-span don’t stir her; they are nothing compared to the conflagration of emotion, of excitement, of fire that embodied the much shorter period afterward, during the war. Cassie’s name passes through her without touching the edges of her, leaving her unchanged.
But Marco’s name lights a spark.
Cassie would ask her, gently, where she was, and if she were on her way, because she is about to be late. Her words would be delicately framed, her voice perfectly pitched, avoiding friction. Cassie is so careful, these days. She won’t argue. She won’t start conflict, she hardly ever denies a request, she has a light touch with everyone she cares about, so light it’s almost as though she shies away from contact. She forces herself to accommodate, to please, to placate everyone she loves, as though terrified that if a rift opens between her and someone to whom she is close, she could lose them in a heartbeat and have only the bitter aftertaste of that conflict on her tongue.
Any non-Animorph human on the planet, including Rachel’s family, would talk to her with voices still trembling with hero-worship and slightly fear-tinged respect. Rachel hates it. She hates feeling nothing, soft interactions that produce no lingering emotions. She hates how slow her pulse has been, how dim her vision has gotten, how she meets the eyes of people on the streets without shivers or goosebumps, trusting them to be human, to be safe, in a safe and lifeless world.
But Marco, as soon as her phone clicks on and before she could ask him what he wanted, snaps out, “Where the fuck are you?”
The anger that surges through Rachel’s body is completely disproportionate, uncontrolled, delicious. “I’m at home,” she answers in the same impatient tone. “What do you want, Marco?”
“What do I want?” She hears him grinding his teeth on the other end of the line. It is a new habit he has picked up since the end of the war, since the final battle that cost him his best friend. The old habits, bad jokes and stupid comments and chewing on his fingernails- haven’t completely left him, not exactly. He still grins that famous grin on late-night talk shows, and if you catch him in a good mood, he sometimes laughs in a pitch that sounds nearly the same. “I want to know why you’re not here, Rachel, where the federal court summoned you to be, for the biggest trial in the history of this planet. And then, when you’re about half-way through explaining, I want you to shut up and get over here. Is Tobias with you?”
He doesn’t joke with Rachel, much. That bond between them, that seemingly eternal banter, died out somewhere between her surrender to the fierce, dark part inside of her and watching Jake kill his brother and be killed in turn from the viewscreen of the Blade Ship.
Jake’s death, his final sacrifice, the last part of himself he had not yet given or lost to the war, had saved earth and destroyed the Animorphs.
It had killed Marco’s humor, that eternally optimistic part of him that a thousand terrible battles and a thousand brushes with death couldn’t dent. It had killed something youthful and hopeful and beautiful inside Cassie, leaving her brittle and frail. She couldn’t talk to other men, couldn’t fathom even befriending anyone outside of the Animorphs. She couldn’t betray the ghost of her first love.
As for Rachel… in Rachel, Jake’s death had destroyed something much smaller, and much more subtle, with much more disastrous consequences.
Jake had been Rachel’s last link to her own duties, her responsibilities. He had been a constant reminder that the part of her that was dark and powerful and frightening had a specific purpose, and its strength was good, and necessary. He made her stand for something beyond the fire of her own excitement and the pursuit of her own victories.
And then, one day, all of a sudden, he was gone and the war was over. And Rachel didn’t need to be strong, or brave, or powerful- she is all of those things, but they are empty and useless in a world that wants pretty girls and smart women. Rachel is these things, as well, but she doesn’t care- she could fail every class and gain eighty pounds, it wouldn’t matter, if she could only feel important and worthy in her courage and strength.
These days, she feels nothing more than anything else. She is annoyed with day-to-day living, violently aggressive towards folding laundry and daytime television, antsy when it rains for too many days in a row. She spends a lot of time as an eagle, especially, trying to force adrenaline through her body by flying higher and faster and more recklessly each time. There is the temptation to surrender, just for a time, to the predator’s instincts, to hunt as the eagle, to feel the harsh and brutal joy of making a kill, sinking her talons into helpless prey, holding it down as she ends its life with her cruelly curved beak. Or morphing into the wolf and stalking prey, chasing it down with the animal’s endless energy, tearing it to the earth and ripping its throat out and getting that savage surge of predator victory.
But where does that end? She resists the temptation out of fear that animal ferocity and human intellect would render helpless animal prey too easy, that the thrill would sustain her for a month or two, and then start to fade. How desperate would she become? Could she hunt down criminals, humans who would deserve to be turned to prey? Could she trust herself to stop there?
It is a terrifying series of questions. She hates the part of herself that needs to ask them as much as she hates the part of herself that forces that need.
“I haven’t seen Tobias for a few days,” Rachel answers, her voice sharpened into a falsely blithe tone. She cares, she cares so much, that Tobias comes and goes to and from her life like a raincloud. It is hard to see in his expressionless human face- or his hard golden hawk eyes- how Jake’s death has hit him, has chewed him up from the inside. But on cold mornings, when their human bodies are pressed together under the covers, he tells her in a hushed voice that he is scared for her, because she is strong and fierce and seems immortal, and everyone who should be indestructible dies too soon.
That weekend, she had been woken by a breeze to an open window and an empty bed. She had felt angry at him, angry and sad and useless and insufficient. He is flying again, searching for something, something that could define him, give him purpose the way Jake used to give him purpose. Not something that could define him as human or hawk- he has given up on that, resigned himself to a life as something in-between. Now, he is just looking for where he fits into a world that has changed, but not changed enough to accommodate what they have become. A version of earth altered by a war that changed some people so intimately that they have lost their own identity, and the people who could remind them of who they are; and passed by others completely under their perception, leaving them entirely untouched.
But that is what they are all doing, all four of them. With the skeleton of the Animorphs suddenly gone, its eyes and brain and heart and muscle all collapse, and it’s impossible to find structure again.
“Whatever,” Marco says, and she hears the roll of his eyes, the way he runs his fingers impatiently through his curly hair. He tries to embrace the fame this has brought them- the money and attention and women and opportunities- but it is hollow for all of them, without the center of their group. He appears on all the television shows. He tells their story, again and again and again- embellished sometimes, and with the dirty bits cut out or glossed over. He doesn’t talk much about Esplin’s cannibal twin, or his own brilliant plan to kill his own mother. Nor does he say anything about Tom, aside from the bare-bones schematics of the situation. Some things are Jake’s story to tell. Some stories will go untold. “We aren’t really expecting Tobias, to be honest. We’re expecting you. As a matter of fact, some very important Andalite dudes who travelled some ridiculous number of light-years to get here are going to sit on their thumbs- metaphorically, of course- and wait for you to get off your ass…”
“The Hell does it matter?” Rachel snaps, her voice cracking with the force of her anger. “What does it matter, Marco? No one’s going to say he’s fucking innocent! My testimony is just going to be more of the same. It’s all the same. Three years. Three years of our fighting a losing, slipping battle against him. Three years of him doing whatever it takes to hunt us down and kill us. Three years of him murdering humans and Hork-Bajir and whatever else stood in his way. Three years of him destroying droves of people to get to what he wanted. Three years of him torturing Yeerks like Aftran. I’m done parroting it out for people. I’m done with all of them.”
Marco listens to her silently. It is a skill he has picked up in the past few months, or perhaps it is simply another change in him- a new stoic silence exchanged for boisterous humor, a part of Jake taking away a part of Marco. And then, when they both know she has rooted herself, standing strong against any argument, simply for the sake of her own stubbornness; when they both realize that nothing he can say will change her mind, he pulls out a secret weapon that is both powerful and entirely unfair.
He hands the phone to Cassie.
Rachel does not realize this until it is suddenly her soft voice on the other end of the phone. “Rachel? Please.”
Cassie’s voice is so soft. So very, very delicate.
Rachel’s anger numbs. If she argued, Cassie would submit. Nothing- no trials in Geneva, no prison time for Esplin 9466, no public appearance or even threat against the Hork Bajir colony, whose peril had forced Cassie to make the few public statements she’s made since the end of the war- nothing is more important to her than keeping these frail little connections alive. Clinging to the people important to her, careful not to hold them too tightly, terrified to let them go, even for a second. Because she turned away once, said no, fought, changed, tore away- and then when she looked back, he had already thrown himself to the wolves.
It wasn’t Cassie’s fault. But although she could easily have convinced Rachel, or Marco, or Tobias that they couldn’t change anything if any of them were blaming themselves, Cassie doesn’t have the same comforting magic to offer herself. She just quietly, calmly, privately suffers.
Rachel’s anger fades, and her frustration subsides to a gnawing, nagging feeling just on the peripheral of her conscious. All of her fiery emotions numb down.
Feeling less with every passing second, Rachel makes arrangements to be flown to Geneva from the air force base, and, with a heavy sigh, throws open a window and starts to morph.
--
Marco
It’s Eva who meets Rachel at the airport, wearing a dull brown dress and oversized sunglasses. She doesn’t smile as she recognizes one of the famous Animorphs, surrounded by state guards to keep away the gaggle of excited Germans waving notepads for an autograph; she stands still, straight, her hands dangling at her sides. In that moment, from across the walkway, in the bleary grayness of the overcast day, Rachel does not see one of the most pivotal figures speaking for ex-Controllers and the victims of the Invasion. Nor does she see a woman who fought alongside her at the end of the war, or even Marco’s mother. There is nothing of the boy’s humor or optimism in the fixed severity of her expression or in the ramrod straightness of her spine. The person Rachel sees standing before the state car that was sent to take her to the trials is Visser One, and, for just one moment, her pulse quickens.
But, of course, the war is over.
Eva has not dealt with the death of her son with as much grace or humor or flexibility that Marco showed when she disappeared. That’s how it is, they say, when parents lose their children- and how many times has Eva lost Marco? She lost him when she was first infested, and the hand that touched his cheek wasn’t her’s to move, the voice that told him her own philosophies and her own ideas was speaking at the bidding of another will. She lost him when she was pulled from her boat in a storm and taken to space; the disposable body of a high-ranking alien, to be used until she was no longer of use, and then discarded. Never to see her family again.
And then she lost him again.
It was no surprise that Jake would send Marco into the Blade Ship. It only made sense. Marco was ruthless enough to throw his own mother off a cliff. Marco was conniving enough to twist high-powered Controllers around his fingers. Marco was patient, and cautious, and capable. If anyone had the chance to destroy the threat Tom and the other rebel Yeerks posed and get out of there alive, it was Marco.
And he almost had.
He’d managed to get a Dracon beam and take out three of them quietly, off-scenes, in secluded wings before Tom even knew he was there. He’d managed to hack into the ship’s mainframe computer and shut down the weapons systems before Tom could blast apart the Pool Ship. And then, only then, had he been discovered.
They might have been able to save him. If Erek hadn’t been draining the power from the Pool Ship’s weapons, and they could have shot out the Blade Ship’s engines and overtaken the ship. If Jake hadn’t hesitated, just for a second, as Marco’s powerful gorilla hands folded around Tom’s jaguar skull and pushed inward, muscles bulging from his shoulders, long teeth bared in a feral grin, coarse hair bristling, two polar bears closing in on either side. If. If. If.
Marco had never wanted a hero’s death. Maybe, just maybe, if he were watching from some other dimension, he would find it funny. The one who didn’t want the responsibility of battle, but saw a crashed alien spaceship in an abandoned construction site as a chance for fame and television stardom, had died a martyr while his comrades-in-arms awkwardly pantomimed their way through interviews before the cameras. Conan. Letterman. Marco could have made the joke. But Marco was gone, and the rest of them couldn’t find the humor in it.
Maybe, Marco could have made a joke from that, as well. It wasn’t like he’d ever known when to stop.
He always said that it was his mother who had taught him that everything- every situation, every circumstance, no matter how grim or gloomy- has some element of humor, or goodness, in it. But it’s obvious when Rachel gets close to her that Eva hasn’t been practicing that philosophy. There are lines in her forehead and around her mouth that hadn’t been there when Rachel had last saw her, at Marco’s memorial service- the last place where Rachel had truly been able to feel something that was a strong and clear and powerful emotion. Beneath the lower edge of those sunglasses Rachel can see large purple bags ringing Eva’s eyes and loose wisps of hair sticking out from the messy bun the older woman has pulled her long, dark hair into, in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the fact that she hasn’t brushed it for days.
The state car smells new, with soft fabric seats. Rachel is still dressed in her morphing suit; they hadn’t been thinking at the Air Force base she had flown to, and hadn’t gotten new clothing for her. And so she’s wearing a black leotard through a foreign city where everyone knows exactly who she is. She doesn’t care. There’s so much, too much, that she doesn’t care about anymore.
She misses Marco, in a dull and distant way. More than she would have expected. Marco was so… so real. So much more real than Jake and Cassie and even Tobias, in a way.
Jake was a puppet, most of the time. He was the leader of the Animorphs more than he was her cousin or Marco’s best friend or even Cassie’s boyfriend; he was their leader much, much, much more than he was Jake. He had given himself to the war until he was little but a shell that contained it; a calm veneer over chaos and bloodshed and the narrow path of strategy through disaster. He didn’t tell you what he thought; she wondered if he even allowed himself to think freely, or if he controlled his thoughts as strictly as his dialogue. He said what needed to be said, to keep his compatriots fighting, to keep them moving, to keep the war going. He did what needed to be done.
And Cassie was more of the same. She was so gentle, so indecisive. She said what she thought you wanted or needed to hear. She was honest in a calculated and forced sort of way; careful not to lie, but careful not to hurt. Careful not to say the wrong thing.
Tobias? Rachel lets her head fall back against the plush headrest of the car as she tries to pick apart that faint trickle of disquiet that she feels whenever she thinks about Tobias. He can make her happy, when he’s human and they’re together. He’s pretty much the only thing that can do that for her, anymore. Even her family is nearly intolerable, most of the time; she is less patient after the war than she’s ever been. But they lie to each other, looking each other in the eyes and using words like forever and never and always and holding hands and kissing and letting these illusions build themselves around them until they’re using words like marriage (is that legal, for a girl and a hawk? Well, she is Rachel Berenson. They’d let her marry a donkey if she wanted to.) and children (her, a mother? It’s funny in hindsight, although such a beautiful illusion they build together, holding hands and whispering in the night like, maybe, Elfangor and Loren used to before they, too, were jaded and destroyed by circumstance and war) and future (which is a word without a meaning, these days. They’re so used to future being some ridiculous hypothetical that they were almost certain not to live to see that these days they throw it around without thought for what it’s actually referring. Tomorrow? A year? A minute?) until they have their story written, a free verse love poem.
It only lasts two hours.
Tobias is as real as Cassie. He loves her, she is sure of it, but they both look into each other’s eyes and lie and lie and lie. Because it’s what they need from each other, as much as they need the touch and kiss and sex and passion and understanding that only the one can give the other. And then the hours pass and she is left with feathers in her bed and twisting in her gut and confused thoughts sweeping through her mind as her heart tries to settle on one emotion.
Marco was real. Everything he did, everything he said, was from Marco’s mind, from Marco’s heart. It was all Marco to the core.
It wasn’t that he was more honest than the rest of them- he lied and pretended and schemed as much as anyone. But he didn’t just say what was needed, or wanted, by the others- the things he said, the things he did, were because they were what he wanted to say, or what he thought needed to be done. And if you were losing yourself, it was Marco who would tell you. If you were toeing the line, it was Marco who would tell you. Marco said what he thought and felt what he felt, no filters or restraints.
And now he’s gone, and they’re so wrapped up in their own private deceptions and masks and projections that it’s hard to see who they are anymore.
The clouds haven’t cleared when they get to the courthouse. Everything is gray and dull and dim. Rachel hates it. It makes her skin crawl with the need for total darkness or blinding brightness. She hates this soft-edged, middle-ground world. She hates these empty streets and innocent people. She hates the post-war world.
Jake and Cassie are waiting for her out front. Eva has testified already and does not leave the car. The Animorphs are waiting to reunite.
They stand awkwardly, together but not touching. Every now and then, Cassie looks at Jake, and even Rachel knows that she loves him, she’s worried for him, she aches for him and for Marco and for Rachel and Tobias, and the ex-Controllers, the Yeerks, the victims and the casualties, the Auxiliaries, and the Hork-Bajir and for everything, and everyone, who has been touched by this war. Jake doesn’t look at anything.
He had hesitated, when Marco met his eyes through the video links between the two ships, his leathery palms slick with Tom’s blood and gore. It was not a beautiful or dignified death for either of them, but none of the Animorphs really believed in graceful battles with dramatic final stands anymore. They were all like that- bloody and disgusting, with lines of intestine tangled together on the ground and fecal matter caked in your fur; the stench of burning flesh filling your nostrils and the iron taste of blood filling your mouth.
Rachel misses it. Marco hated it. He always hated it. He had met Jake’s eyes in those final moments, his eyes dark and animal in his intelligent gorilla face, as Controllers closed in on him, beaten and bloody and nearly defeated. Had he said anything, in those final moments, to the man who had been his best friend since they were old enough to talk to each other? Had he told Jake to gun the engines, to come pick him up, get him out of here? There still might have been time- if the engines had enough power, if they had made the move as quickly as possible. Had he told Jake to get them out of there, assured him that he could take care of this mess? Or had he simply asked Jake if this had been what he wanted, when he sent Marco to his death, on a mission to kill his best friend’s brother?
No way of knowing. Jake hardly talks to anyone anymore.
--
Cassie
Seventeen thousand Yeerks. Seventeen thousand helpless, vile little gray slugs in a little pool, looking like colonies of Ebola in a Petri dish. Rachel knows exactly why Jake did it. She hates the lawyer who hounds him about it with the exact same dim, dull hatred she focuses on most of this quiet and lackluster world.
And Jake?
He lets everyone else speak for him. His lawyer. The irate Andalites, defending the warrior-Prince that stood so valiantly in defense of his world, so like an Andalite and so very, very different. He sits still and silent and stares into space with that vacant look that they are so used to seeing on him, these days, and for so long.
He had never wanted it to be Cassie. Rachel doesn’t know when he figured out that it was going to be her. They had all been little cockroaches when they’d snuck onto the Pool Ship, thinking their own private, rushed, thoughts. Not really paying attention to whose thought-speak voice they heard. Assuming Jake was keeping track of them. But eventually, she thought, he had to have heard her voice, Rachel’s voice, and realized that a mistake had been made. Had it been after they had gotten into the Pool Ship, after the doors had closed behind them, after they had launched into space? Or had he led them in there without Cassie, knowing that he was leaving her to throw herself into almost certain death, in a desire to spare her best friend and serve the man she loved?
When had he figured it out?
When Rachel had shown up with the group, had he assumed she had shied away from the grim duty he had thought he’d assigned her? Had he maybe assumed that Cassie had left the fight altogether, again, unwilling to let the Auxiliaries die not knowing what they were in for, unwilling to kill innocents, unwilling to do the things he asked of her?
No. He had to have figured it out.
Realized that, when he told Rachel he needed to speak with her alone, Cassie had overheard. Realized that kind, sensitive Cassie had convinced Tobias to go flying with the girl he loved. One last time, before the end, before it might be too late, she told him. Try and pull her out of this rut she’s gotten into. She’s still in there. The girl we love is still there.
And then she had touched the DNA of her best friend, acquired with Rachel’s permission almost three years before. That version of Rachel was a little shorter than she was at sixteen, and a little thinner, without the curves of her older self, but they looked just about the same. Cassie carried herself with Rachel’s aggressive confidence and no one could tell the difference.
Ever the perceptive one, Cassie had answered Jake exactly as Rachel would have- but her words would have meant something completely different, if only Jake had known who he was really talking to. “If you send me there,” she had said, and Rachel couldn’t imagine her voice carrying all the nuances of pain and empathy and fear and love and, yes, moralistic disgust that she knew Cassie would have spoken with, “I will do what you tell me to do. You know I will.”
“I know,” Jake had said.
“And you really want me to do that?”
When they were getting ready to leave, to put their plan into motion, Rachel had seen Cassie standing beside Jake. They were all getting ready to die, all of them. Jake touched Cassie’s arm and leaned in to kiss her, but she had pulled away, and her eyes were wide and rimmed with red from crying and her mouth was twisted in betrayal. The man who touched her was not the boy she loved.
“I’m sorry,” she’d whispered, but Rachel could hear her. And that was the last thing any of them heard her say, out loud, in her human voice, before she was gone.
And now, as then, Jake says nothing and shows no emotion on his face, because the human face is not designed to show the amount of pain they all have to convey.
Marco is sitting next to Rachel, their elbows touching, and she feels through that contact that he is shaking with anger. Cassie’s death didn’t honestly mean very much, to Marco. They had never been close. But he is trying to keep Jake in the realm of functioning human adults, and that is nearly a full-time job. When they’d first touched down, he’d put Rachel and Tobias on suicide watch, keeping tabs on their fallen leader- Tobias especially, who was in limbo- no longer part of the war or the world, without a function or a goal or really even an identity. He had needed the task as much as Jake has needed the supervision.
As for Rachel- she hated the sight of her cousin giving up. He, who had at once been so strong, strong enough to control her- it stirred a deep and primal anger in her to see him decompose.
But, at the same time, when he spoke, he gave her insight into him. Insight that, sometimes, she didn’t want to have.
He told her what he had originally planned. That it was supposed to be her, Rachel, that died. (That seemed logical, to Rachel. It should have been her fight. It was supposed to be her fight. She is restless and angry and aching for battle in dry, sedate Santa Barbara.) He told her that, when he first realized what had happened, that it was Cassie, not Rachel, in the Blade Ship- he had felt a surge of horrible, agonizing fear. Not that the girl he loved was about to die- he didn’t feel anything about that, not right away. The part of his brain that was Jake, that loved Cassie and already grieved for Tom and was terrified for his parents and scared of death had been turned off- he was scared that Cassie wouldn’t, couldn’t go through with the mission. He knew, knew with the certainty of a good leader who knows his troops, that Cassie could not look a man in the eyes and kill him.
They didn’t see Cassie die, but as Tom’s face broke into a victorious smile and the Blade ship closed the distance between them for the last killing blow, she told them where she was. She had spoken to Mertil and Gafinilan about the mechanics of the engine of the Blade Ship. Yeerk technology was just bastardized Andalite technology, after all. And then, she had morphed into an ant and squeezed into a space just barely big enough for a small human to demorph inside it, and cool enough for her to survive for a few hours. And then she had begun her second morph, into a humpback whale. She was deep enough into the morph to speak, mostly whale but only a little larger than a human- ready for the exponential growth that would end this battle.
The human body, swelling with the mass of a whale, is a fragile thing- but Andalite technology is graceful and delicate, and, as Cassie put it, the whole thing was ready to crumple with just a little more pressure. The combustion of the engine wouldn’t be enough to destroy the entire ship- but it would crumple both the exterior and the interior walls, and that would be enough to implode the ship.
They couldn’t see her or hear her when she died. All they had of Cassie was her thought-speak voice inside their heads.
She asked Jake if he was sure he wanted her to do this.
And he had sat on his haunches, a huge and regal animal, and stared at his panicking brother and his terrified associates with cold, green predator eyes. If he had said no, maybe- maybe, maybe, such a slim chance- they could have intercepted the Blade Ship, captured Tom and the other Yeerks, saved Cassie and Jake’s brother and all lived as happily as possible for the rest of their lives. Rachel didn’t think so, but the doubt will always be there. Was there ever a chance?
If he had said no… then Tom might have destroyed them. The Yeerks might have taken Earth, or maybe the Andalites would have destroyed the Invasion and saved Earth, or maybe the Andalites would have bombed Earth from hundreds of miles away and gone off to fight the Yeerks over another planet, without a second thought for those backwards two-legged creatures that had once ruled a planet for a few measly thousand years.
For a few moments, he said nothing. But he was their leader, and a leader must make choices. He was their leader before he was Jake. And not making a choice is also a choice.
He said, [Do it, Cassie.]
It was the last thing he ever said to her. What do you say after that? Can you follow it with “I love you” ?
Part of him must have hated her as the air rushed out from around his brother and then the steel of his own ship collapsed in on top of him.
They recovered her body- a mangled heap of human hair and whale blubber, a disgusting corpse. They cremated it without letting her parents see the twisted thing that their daughter had died as.
She never knew they saved the earth. She never knew what Jake went through. She never knew that seventeen thousand Yeerks had been flushed into space alongside her at the coldhearted command of the boy she had once loved.
Rachel doesn’t miss Cassie in those everyday moments, the way she might have, if her best friend had been taken from her before the war. She doesn’t cry when Wal-mart has a sale on overalls, for instance, nor does she brake for squirrels stupid enough to dart out in the street in front of her car or donate money to the ASPCA or think twice before eating a hamburger. But sometimes, in the gray hours of very, very early morning, when Rachel has been trying for a long, long time to sleep, she feels the pain of the girl’s passing, sharp and physical, in her core. Cassie’s death is not an every day pain, nor is it a heartache or nausea- she feels it as very real and tangible, the feeling of losing something from the center of your body. The pain of a grizzly bear tearing its way out of an ancient sea monster’s abdomen. A half-cockroach, half-Andalite hacking a path from the belly of a Taxxon. This is the pain she feels, curled up around herself, under the covers. She doesn’t cry for her best friend, but oh God, she hurts for her.
Tobias tried, for a time, to stand for the Hork-Bajir, to be a voice for them. But he can’t do it. He’s not a public face, and he hates talking to the press. And so Toby is the voice of the Hork-Bajir, and fights for them, as well as she can.
They are leaving Earth at the end of the month, at the request- the demand- of the United Nations. The Andalites have provided a sort of weapons-free Dome Ship for them to occupy while a suitable world is located for them to inhabit. It’s much, much too small for the entire colony, and they will not be able to climb the trees or live the lifestyle they’ve had in the forests on Earth. Tobias has made his disapproval of this decision clear, but has no alternatives. Marco shakes his head when asked and says the seven-foot freaks should be allowed to stay in the forests here- they aren’t hurting anyone. Rachel doesn’t do interviews, anymore- she’s not very personable, the media has found, and she finds herself not really caring much about these issues. Jake tends not to say anything.
His testimony is over. He rises when told, walks down from the witness stand.
And then it’s Rachel’s turn.
--
Tobias
As Rachel stands, she feels the eyes of everyone in the courthouse falling on her. She doesn’t care. Does a tree care about the ants that crawl over it? Does the ocean care about the dreamers staring into its waves? Does the universe spare a thought for the stargazers? They were ants to her.
All of them.
Such apathy was a new development, but it was a good one, she thought. It kept her stable, and functioning. She had given her first press release last week- two months after Marco’s best-selling book was published- and had spoken brusquely, simply, but without emotion. No anger. Nothing. She had told the world her side of the story, and then had gone down the street, and bought three barbecue tacos with extra-hot salsa, and then taken them back into her apartment and eaten, slowly, without tasting anything, without seeing anything, without feeling anything.
It was better.
For a long time- what felt like an eternity- Rachel had felt nothing between or aside from the two extremes of absolute anger and being completely, utterly broken.
There had been a time where there was something else inside of her. She had watched Tobias rise from his hiding place on the Blade Ship, half hawk and half Hork-Bajir, blades shooting out between feathers, eyes shrinking, spine lengthening. And she had felt fear, then- the crushing, overwhelming fear that freezes a deer in headlights and sends lemmings hurtling off the edges of cliffs. Primal fear she would never have felt for herself.
Tobias was a predator, sent on a predator’s mission. Even as his body and the veneer of instincts in his mind changed from a calculating carnivore to a peace-loving herbivore, there was still something ruthlessly hawk about him. Even Rachel, who never saw him as less than human, knew and accepted that. His eyes, dimmed by the morph though they were, focused on his prey, and he hunted Tom down in three swift strides, and killed him with his massive taloned feet before the other Controllers could get halfway through their morphs.
After that, he fought well. No one could ever say Tobias was less than a good warrior. But he was cut down quickly, outnumbered and outmatched.
And then, in the silent aftermath, as the Blade Ship powered away, Rachel felt the anger bubbling up inside her. She had been watching the fight as a human, met Tobias’ alien eyes with her own blue ones, stood inches from the screen. “I love you!” she told him, in the final moments.
Had he heard her? In her memories, sometimes the words leave her mouth just before Tobias is killed, and sometimes, she says them a millisecond too late. She doesn’t know which version is the truth, anymore.
She knew the second he was gone, though. Watched as the life bled from the hole in his neck torn by the jaws of a massive polar bear, watched as his eyes dimmed and unfocused, watched as his muscles became meat and he sagged forward and fell to the ground.
Just before her entire being sacrificed itself to anger, she felt the all-consuming grief take her like a torrential river, sweep her away to parts of her mind and her being she had never guessed existed. The anger was a respite. The anger was a tree root she could cling to, trying to keep from being lost to the ocean of endless, relentless emotional pain. It was a placebo of strength and power for someone who suddenly found herself without either.
She started to morph and started to move towards Visser Three simultaneously, without thinking, shrieking out in raw and primal rage. Luckily for Esplin, and probably for Jake, they were ready for her- Marco’s massive gorilla hand closed around her arm, pinned her on the ground. And, when she didn’t stop in her morph or her struggling, his knuckles rapped gently across her forehead. Gentle being relative, and more than enough to knock her out.
They never told her how they kept her unconscious. She never asked. She woke up as a fully human girl, soft and pink and clothed in unfamiliar clothes, in the green hills of Erek King’s basement.
They tried to walk her through her grief, but in thousands of years of existence, the Chee had never encountered anyone quite like Rachel. In the end, they just kept her away from their precious dogs as she ranted and raved and destroyed what inanimate things they allowed her to destroy. They had little patience for her, these infinitely patient beings. She didn’t care. They didn’t matter to her.
It took her months to reappear. Of course, the public didn’t know that. Cassie made a few appearances as Rachel, quiet and recalcitrant, talking mostly about how she wasn’t ready to talk, yet. But the public didn’t matter to Rachel. She made up fantasies, for a little while, in which he never died, in which he was waiting for her, loving her, looking for her. But she has never been the kind of girl to hide from the truth. She knew what the truth was.
And that was when Rachel discovered how deeply depression can run.
Feeling nothing is better.
She went back and forth, for longer than she cares to think about. Uncontrollably angry: at Esplin and his vile, life-stealing, world-destroying Yeerk friends or Jake and his manipulative, self-righteous ways, or Tom for luring Tobias into the ship where he died, or Tobias for going, without telling her, without saying goodbye. She was even furious at Marco, for stopping her from killing Esplin, and at Cassie, for being in love with Jake, and at her aunt and uncle, for producing the two boys that ruined her life. At Alloran. At Elfangor. And then, all of a sudden, she felt broken down, defeated, lost to a grief so deep she couldn’t see the bottom, and couldn’t see her way out. And then the anger started to boil again.
Feeling nothing is better. Rachel sits up straight in the witness seat. Her hair is brushed smooth and clean and it shines even in the dim courtroom lighting. She isn’t wearing make-up, because she never needed it. Her blue eyes are bright and intense. She stares straight ahead without seeing.
Feeling nothing.
They hold out a book for her to place her right hand on. It is soft beneath her hand; not real leather, but a decent imitation. She looks up at the man who is holding the book. He has a wide forehead, small eyes, huge eyebrows.
“Do you swear to tell the truth-”
The truth is, she isn’t okay. Under the hot incandescent lights of the courtroom, a bead of sweat is trickling down the bailiff’s expansive forehead, tracing a slow path towards his brow, and Rachel watches it as her thoughts move of their own accord. The truth is, she can’t keep feeling nothing. The truth is, she’s trying to run on autopilot, but as she looks around, she finds herself meeting the eyes of person after person who had some hand in the disaster that has become her life. A group of Andalite warriors, maybe the same ones who had planned to destroy the planet they had been called to save, stand near the back, their haughty features just barely human enough to be readable. Human politician after human politician who had been blind or distracted or weak enough to be taken by the enemy.
And Jake.
“-the whole truth-”
Jake, who had ordered Tobias on a death mission.
Jake, their leader, who had let her down, let her spiral out of control until she was a complete mess, living a life that wasn’t worth living, writhing in her own agony like a snail in salt. He doesn’t meet her eyes, but he doesn’t look away, either. He just sits there, like a flour sack- lifeless and heavy and slumped in his seat, sucking the oxygen out of the air.
“-and nothing but the truth-”
And then, on her right, there is a small, purple box.
Why should Esplin 9466, the Yeerk in charge of the human invasion, who had ordered so many sentient creatures to their deaths, who had killed Elfangor, who had ruined their lives and been responsible for so much, be still alive, when Tobias- sweet, sad, thoughtful Tobias- is dead?
Why should Visser Three be looking at life in prison while Tobias is a clump of ashes on a stone memorial?
“-so help you God?”
Rachel isn’t a victim. She doesn’t talk about her problems, doesn’t throw the power to make the hard choices to an impartial jury- how on Earth is anyone on this planet supposed to be impartial about this trial, anyway?- doesn’t lie in agony on a lawn strewn with dog poop and want, and wish, and hope and hate and scream until her throat is sore.
She is a fighter, and she fought, until the end.
Claws spring from her hand and scrape across the book, tearing through that nice, soft cover.
She is moving for the Yeerk in his little purple box before the morph is more than half complete, her teeth shooting from her mouth like little white sabers as a growl like thunder escapes from her throat and she surrenders her mind to the anger that always, always, always bubbles just below the surface.