Blind
Title: Blind
Fandom: Animorphs
Characters: James, Elena (possible James/Elena if you look)
Spoilers: To #54
Words: ~1380
Rating: PG
Summary: James survives the battle and leaves the rehab center as soon as he turns eighteen. Alone, he finds himself at Rachel's memorial when another reminder of the war comes back to find him.
He remembers morphing to lion and giving the order to attack. He remembers watching his friends burn. Then he doesn’t remember anything at all, and he comes to his senses human in a crowd of humans. Some of them are screaming, some are crying, and most seem to be in varying states of shock. But all of them, including James, have one thing in common: they want to know what’s going on.
When the initial chaos is over he returns to the rehab center. In the mayhem no one has noticed he’s missing, but it’s a different story when sixteen children from various wards throughout the center are found to have vanished without a trace during the fight. But so many people have disappeared or been killed - Controllers finished off in battle or just regular humans caught in the crossfire - that no one really cares about a handful of disabled kids from the hospital. James sits in his wheelchair and says nothing.
He waits for his eighteenth birthday. It isn’t long, less than a year, but spending it alone in a ward crowded by strangers when he should be dead, seeing his friends who are dead down every hallway and in every bed where they should be but aren’t - well, by the time it’s over James feels like an old man.
And when he becomes a legal adult and they transfer him to a different ward of the hospital, he simply stands up and leaves.
He finds himself walking down the sidewalk, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a handful of crumpled bills he took off unsuspecting nurses in his pocket, and the guilt that he drags with him wherever he goes following him like a ball and chain. He briefly considers tracking down his mother, but discards the idea almost immediately. She’s probably long dead, and he doesn’t want to meet or accept help from a woman who would abandon her four-year-old son anyway.
He isn’t sure where he’s going until he arrives. He pays the fee and steps through the gates, stopping at a far enough distance away from the statue so that he doesn’t have to really look up to see the bear’s head. The flowers, multilingual notes, and other gifts strewn around its paws tell him that people still flock from all over the world to visit it, but it’s a weekday morning and the park is relatively empty at the moment. He feels a sick sort of guilty pleasure that his friends weren’t the only Animorphs to die, that Jake lost someone as well, but it ends as is always does when his conscience reminds him that he’s alive too, and the others aren’t.
“It’s very her, isn’t it?” a voice says from just behind him, making him jump. He turns around and the blonde girl continues, “A big, angry, immovable statue, protecting the shores of California, showered with love and attention. Always revered. She always needed the audience.”
He opens and shuts his mouth several times in utter shock before he can force out the word, “Rachel?”
“No.” She draws herself up to her full height, nearly as tall as him, and a glint of amusement sparkles in her eyes. “Not quite.” She begins to change, but subtly: her features shift and rearrange themselves, a splash of freckles blooming on her nose and cheeks. Her hair lengthens several inches and a reddish color begins at her scalp and runs down the waves as her tall, willowy frame compacts and leaves her clothes slightly too big, hanging off narrow shoulders. Her eyes remain an icy blue but begin to flit around blindly and it takes James several seconds to make the connection.
“Elena,” he realizes, and she smiles.
“Right in two, James.”
He hasn’t thought about her in over a year. After leaving the school for the blind she came to the Hork-Bajir valley, guided by one of the original Animorphs, but they couldn’t risk taking her to the Gardens to get morphs and there wasn’t really time anyway, so she was left behind with the originals’ parents and the infirm Hork-Bajir during the battle. If he’d thought about it, he supposes, he would have assumed she was alive, but it just never occurred to him. Technically she was an auxiliary Animorph, and therefore his responsibility, but without a battle morph he never even spared her a second glance.
“So how have you been doing?”
He simply stares at her. He can’t believe that she can act so normal, even if she never did fight. “How did you know I was here?” is all he can say.
She shrugs. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you since - and during, really - the war. The others too,” she adds hastily. “Not just you. The originals, I mean. Jake and Cassie and them. Funny, even after all they’ve been through none of them thinks anything of a red-tailed hawk hanging around in their backyards.”
James frowns and recalls, just once or twice, seeing a glimpse of a hawk flying by outside the rehab center.
“Anyway,” she continues, “if you want to keep the fact that you’re alive a secret for long, I’d recommend you be careful when you’re out here. The originals show up from time to time. I’m thirsty, you want to go get a coffee or something?” Her train of thought shifts along a path that James can’t quite follow and she turns away, striding towards the gates without any hesitation despite her blindness. James is strangely compelled to follow her and hell, it’s not like he has anything else to do anyway so he does, wondering to himself if maybe they should have made her the leader of the auxiliaries instead.
She leads him to a little mom-and-pop café on a street corner with such precision that it’s obvious she’s been there often, and he wonders just how much time she spends at and around the memorial. James orders a cheap American roast with the little money he has left on him and Elena gets a mocha, and he’s once again amazed at her ability to know exactly where she’s going without seeing a thing. She leads him over to a little table in the back corner, where he can hear the dishwasher going through the wall between them and the kitchen.
“All that stuff you were saying earlier,” James says, watching with vague curiosity as Elena stirs the veritable mountain of whipped cream into her drink, “about Rachel. Even I didn’t know her that well.”
“You’d be surprised at how perceptive of other things blindness can make you,” she says with a small smile as James takes a sip of his own coffee and feels the hot liquid slide down the back of his throat, leaving a bitter edge behind it.
“Like our mental strength to make up for a lack of physical strength,” he suggests, absently reaching for one of the sugar packets lined up between the salt- and peppershakers.
“Yes,” she agrees, leaning back in her wooden chair. “For example, I know that you and Jake have more in common than you’d like to admit. And I know that you know it too.”
He stops mid-stir. “Like what?”
She takes a painfully long, leisurely draft of her mocha before replying. “You’re both born leaders, for one. You both know that sometimes in war things have to be done that we’re not happy about.” She pauses. “But I think he’s learned that better than you have. You both carry around the guilt of leading people who trusted you to their deaths while you survived. And you’ve both been fighting for so long, him with the Yeerks, and you with your own body, that you don’t know what to do with yourselves now that it’s over.” Setting down her cup, she extends an open hand towards him over the table. “I can help you with that, if you want.”
He takes a sudden gulp of his coffee, ignoring the burn on his tongue, just as an excuse not to speak right away. “I . . . Yeah. Okay.” He takes her hand and it feels good, just having contact with another human being again. “Okay.”
Fandom: Animorphs
Characters: James, Elena (possible James/Elena if you look)
Spoilers: To #54
Words: ~1380
Rating: PG
Summary: James survives the battle and leaves the rehab center as soon as he turns eighteen. Alone, he finds himself at Rachel's memorial when another reminder of the war comes back to find him.
He remembers morphing to lion and giving the order to attack. He remembers watching his friends burn. Then he doesn’t remember anything at all, and he comes to his senses human in a crowd of humans. Some of them are screaming, some are crying, and most seem to be in varying states of shock. But all of them, including James, have one thing in common: they want to know what’s going on.
When the initial chaos is over he returns to the rehab center. In the mayhem no one has noticed he’s missing, but it’s a different story when sixteen children from various wards throughout the center are found to have vanished without a trace during the fight. But so many people have disappeared or been killed - Controllers finished off in battle or just regular humans caught in the crossfire - that no one really cares about a handful of disabled kids from the hospital. James sits in his wheelchair and says nothing.
He waits for his eighteenth birthday. It isn’t long, less than a year, but spending it alone in a ward crowded by strangers when he should be dead, seeing his friends who are dead down every hallway and in every bed where they should be but aren’t - well, by the time it’s over James feels like an old man.
And when he becomes a legal adult and they transfer him to a different ward of the hospital, he simply stands up and leaves.
He finds himself walking down the sidewalk, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a handful of crumpled bills he took off unsuspecting nurses in his pocket, and the guilt that he drags with him wherever he goes following him like a ball and chain. He briefly considers tracking down his mother, but discards the idea almost immediately. She’s probably long dead, and he doesn’t want to meet or accept help from a woman who would abandon her four-year-old son anyway.
He isn’t sure where he’s going until he arrives. He pays the fee and steps through the gates, stopping at a far enough distance away from the statue so that he doesn’t have to really look up to see the bear’s head. The flowers, multilingual notes, and other gifts strewn around its paws tell him that people still flock from all over the world to visit it, but it’s a weekday morning and the park is relatively empty at the moment. He feels a sick sort of guilty pleasure that his friends weren’t the only Animorphs to die, that Jake lost someone as well, but it ends as is always does when his conscience reminds him that he’s alive too, and the others aren’t.
“It’s very her, isn’t it?” a voice says from just behind him, making him jump. He turns around and the blonde girl continues, “A big, angry, immovable statue, protecting the shores of California, showered with love and attention. Always revered. She always needed the audience.”
He opens and shuts his mouth several times in utter shock before he can force out the word, “Rachel?”
“No.” She draws herself up to her full height, nearly as tall as him, and a glint of amusement sparkles in her eyes. “Not quite.” She begins to change, but subtly: her features shift and rearrange themselves, a splash of freckles blooming on her nose and cheeks. Her hair lengthens several inches and a reddish color begins at her scalp and runs down the waves as her tall, willowy frame compacts and leaves her clothes slightly too big, hanging off narrow shoulders. Her eyes remain an icy blue but begin to flit around blindly and it takes James several seconds to make the connection.
“Elena,” he realizes, and she smiles.
“Right in two, James.”
He hasn’t thought about her in over a year. After leaving the school for the blind she came to the Hork-Bajir valley, guided by one of the original Animorphs, but they couldn’t risk taking her to the Gardens to get morphs and there wasn’t really time anyway, so she was left behind with the originals’ parents and the infirm Hork-Bajir during the battle. If he’d thought about it, he supposes, he would have assumed she was alive, but it just never occurred to him. Technically she was an auxiliary Animorph, and therefore his responsibility, but without a battle morph he never even spared her a second glance.
“So how have you been doing?”
He simply stares at her. He can’t believe that she can act so normal, even if she never did fight. “How did you know I was here?” is all he can say.
She shrugs. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you since - and during, really - the war. The others too,” she adds hastily. “Not just you. The originals, I mean. Jake and Cassie and them. Funny, even after all they’ve been through none of them thinks anything of a red-tailed hawk hanging around in their backyards.”
James frowns and recalls, just once or twice, seeing a glimpse of a hawk flying by outside the rehab center.
“Anyway,” she continues, “if you want to keep the fact that you’re alive a secret for long, I’d recommend you be careful when you’re out here. The originals show up from time to time. I’m thirsty, you want to go get a coffee or something?” Her train of thought shifts along a path that James can’t quite follow and she turns away, striding towards the gates without any hesitation despite her blindness. James is strangely compelled to follow her and hell, it’s not like he has anything else to do anyway so he does, wondering to himself if maybe they should have made her the leader of the auxiliaries instead.
She leads him to a little mom-and-pop café on a street corner with such precision that it’s obvious she’s been there often, and he wonders just how much time she spends at and around the memorial. James orders a cheap American roast with the little money he has left on him and Elena gets a mocha, and he’s once again amazed at her ability to know exactly where she’s going without seeing a thing. She leads him over to a little table in the back corner, where he can hear the dishwasher going through the wall between them and the kitchen.
“All that stuff you were saying earlier,” James says, watching with vague curiosity as Elena stirs the veritable mountain of whipped cream into her drink, “about Rachel. Even I didn’t know her that well.”
“You’d be surprised at how perceptive of other things blindness can make you,” she says with a small smile as James takes a sip of his own coffee and feels the hot liquid slide down the back of his throat, leaving a bitter edge behind it.
“Like our mental strength to make up for a lack of physical strength,” he suggests, absently reaching for one of the sugar packets lined up between the salt- and peppershakers.
“Yes,” she agrees, leaning back in her wooden chair. “For example, I know that you and Jake have more in common than you’d like to admit. And I know that you know it too.”
He stops mid-stir. “Like what?”
She takes a painfully long, leisurely draft of her mocha before replying. “You’re both born leaders, for one. You both know that sometimes in war things have to be done that we’re not happy about.” She pauses. “But I think he’s learned that better than you have. You both carry around the guilt of leading people who trusted you to their deaths while you survived. And you’ve both been fighting for so long, him with the Yeerks, and you with your own body, that you don’t know what to do with yourselves now that it’s over.” Setting down her cup, she extends an open hand towards him over the table. “I can help you with that, if you want.”
He takes a sudden gulp of his coffee, ignoring the burn on his tongue, just as an excuse not to speak right away. “I . . . Yeah. Okay.” He takes her hand and it feels good, just having contact with another human being again. “Okay.”