Fic: Caretaker (Animorphs, gen)
Title: Caretaker
Author: kleenexcow
Rating/Warnings: PG, spoilers up to and including #54, The Beginning
Pairing: General, mentions of Cassie/Jake
Summary: The others may be gone, but they still touch Cassie’s life, and on no day is that more apparent than the day she says goodbye to an old friend.
Word count: 1,851
Marco never had a funeral, a memorial service. Neither did Jake, nor Tobias. No one had ever found bodies or any trace that they were really gone. The closest they ever got to a ceremony was the execution of Marco’s will, a sterile undertaking that had more to do with the division of Marco’s television money than a farewell to an amazing life.
But Big Jim got a funeral. Televised, even. Most animals can’t say that, not even the rest of our morphs. My wolf and Tobias’ hawk both died in the wild, presumably. Rachel’s bear died in obscurity, and Jake’s tiger was gone even before the end of the war. Our dolphins, our bats, our rhinos were all owned by the Gardens but none ever obtained the same level of association. And what about our seagulls, our flies, our roaches, our squid? They had no one to notice their passage from this world to the next.
The only morph who came even close to Big Jim was poor old Homer, who’d been buried with a song and more than a few tears beneath an old oak tree. He’d spent the last of his years, by Jean’s request, in the fields behind my parents’ house, and though I think he enjoyed chasing the squirrels and horses, he never stopped looking for his boy.
I could understand that.
Homer had meant something to me, to Steve and Jean, but Big Jim meant something to the human race. And when he died, he unleashed a sorrow that Earth had been holding in. The age of the Animorphs was over. There was only one of the young, daring heroes who had saved the world while simultaneously ushering humanity into the intergalactic community. Only one. Me.
At the memorial service, my mom talked about Big Jim’s life at the Gardens. The president of the World Wildlife Fund announced new measures designed to protect silverback gorillas and get them off of the endangered species list. Marco’s dad read an excerpt from The Gorilla Speaks and his mom talked about how seeing animals fighting for Earth’s freedom always gave hope to her as a host, even before she knew her son was one of them.
I didn’t cry. No one would have blamed me if I had, but I knew that once I started, I wasn’t going to stop. The Gardens had asked me to speak for Big Jim, and to get the words out I needed to stay composed, graceful. The Cassie that the world knew and needed.
“Big Jim’s hands weren’t ordinary gorilla hands,” I said. I had a set of notecards in front of me, but I was speaking from the heart and didn’t need them. “Instead of foraging, his hands were used to open doors and drive getaway cars and carry his friends to safety. Without knowing it, Big Jim saved my life. In fact, Big Jim lent Marco the use of his DNA so that we could save all of the species on Earth, not just humans, and so I-we will always be grateful for his strength and dexterity and resilience. Thank you, Big Jim. Thank you for helping to keep me free.”
After the service, after most of the cameras left, there was a small reception with the speakers and the Gardens staff and a few other VIPs. I signed autographs until I saw Steve and Jean at the edge of the room. I excused myself from the groundskeepers and concessions workers and crossed the crowd towards them.
“Hi, honey,” Jean said as we embraced. If there had ever been any awkwardness between me and the Berensons, it all dissipated after I became the last Animorph for the mothers to, well, mother. They’d even been at my wedding, which was rather kind of Steve and Jean considering that I’d once been proposed to by their son.
“That was a very nice speech,” Steve said.
“They all saved my life, you know,” I said. “All of them, not just Marco.”
“We know. And you saved theirs,” Jean replied, but there was sadness there. I might have saved Jake’s life in the heat of battle, or Marco’s, or any of the others’, but that didn’t make a difference to me anymore. It takes only one failure to make none of it count-they were long gone, and wherever they had been when they died, I hadn’t been there to be a part of the team. Jean had never asked me if I knew where Jake was, and for that I was grateful. I don’t know if I would have been able to lie in the face of her mother’s sorrow, threat of intergalactic war or not.
I left Steve and Jean before I started to cry in front of them. My dad offered to drive me home, but I wasn’t going far, and I felt like I needed a good fly. He settled for taking my expensive public appearance clothes for me, while I stripped down to a leotard in the parking lot. It had been over fifteen years since I’d first morphed osprey, and everything about the change was familiar: the decrease in size, the itch of new feathers, the freedom of leaping into the sky and knowing that I wouldn’t fall back down.
I flew down to the coast, and I drifted over the waves breaking on the shore. As I neared Rachel’s memorial I could see two figures lying beside it. I swooped a little lower, and I recognized the blonde heads. An arm raised, finger pointing straight at me. Loren and Naomi went there sometimes, to talk and watch the birds, and I had guessed correctly that a funeral day would be one of those times. I didn’t give them any indication that the osprey was me, and I flew on.
I lived mostly in Washington, D. C., but I kept a home in Southern California, too. I needed it for when I spent time amongst the Hork-Bajir and for Official Animorph Functions like these, and it was nice to be able to visit my parents without actually staying in their house. Still, it embarrassed me slightly to be so wealthy as to have a second home, and so this one was modest in every way except for its location a few steps from the ocean.
I demorphed on the beach and walked up to the back door. It was locked, but a DNA scan confirmed it was me and the door clicked open. I could hear the television on in the back room, but the solitude of flying was still with me, and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone just yet.
There was Chunky Monkey in the fridge, so I went into the kitchen. Getting older didn’t necessarily mean that I had developed more mature coping mechanisms than the occasional stress eating. But as I put my hand on the handle of the freezer, something stopped me, and it wasn’t the guilt of calories. It was a magnet on the refrigerator, with a postcard and a magazine article under it. Of course, I saw the magnet every time I opened the fridge, but today it meant so much more. I abandoned the ice cream and took the postcard and article out from under the magnet.
Marco and I had, in the years after the war and especially after the Hague, taken to sending each other regular postcards. Most of his were brightly-colored scenes from playgrounds of the rich and famous-Tahiti, San Tropez, Cabo, Tuscany. Mine were always from places where I worked, mostly Yellowstone, but a few from the Tetons and Appalachia and the Amazon. We always wrote just a few lines, but getting one of his postcards in my mailbox had brightened my day in ways he never knew. Or maybe he had. Maybe he had felt the same way about mine. Who knew with Marco?
But this one, the last one he had ever sent me, wasn’t from somewhere exotic. It was from the Gardens, which still made me smile. He’d sent it in an envelope with the magazine article, postmarked the day before I said goodbye to Jake. I turned the postcard over.
Cassie--
I wish Rachel were around for this.
The only thing missing from my life
is being able to see the look on her
face. Now are you sorry that you
rejected me while we were tiny?
--Marco
The article was he’d sent with it was from Cosmopolitan, where he’d been named one of their 25 Sexiest Bachelors of the Year. “Sexiest Intergalactic Hero,” had been his official title. In the picture, he was wearing nothing but a pair of tight, animal-print pants, so ridiculous that I would have lost of all respect for him if he had been anyone other than Marco. I did have to admit that in this picture his abs were significantly more impressive than in our spandex days.
“We all love Jake Berenson as much as the next girl, but it’s Marco McCain who really makes our hearts flutter. He may be only nineteen, but with his thousand-watt smile and easygoing charm, it’s easy to be smitten by Marco. He put us at ease during his photoshoot, making everyone laugh even as we were drooling over his rock-hard muscles and unfairly long eyelashes. Now we’re extra mad at the Yeerk Empire for endangering this gorgeous piece of-” By this point, I was giggling so hard that I had to stop reading so that I could catch my breath and wipe the tears out of my eyes.
And then, a switch. Even though the tears were still flowing, I wasn’t giggling anymore. I was crying, all of the tears I hadn’t shed during the day bubbling out of my body like a waterfall.
I had moved on with my life. I had become a grown woman, with a job, and a family, and a reputation that these days had more do with my position in the government than my past as an Animorph. I had grown up.
But I still missed them. Thirteen years since the last time I’d seen Rachel, ten years for the boys, and every day I longed for Rachel to tease me about my clothes, for a kiss from Jake, for Marco’s smile or Tobias’ introspection or Ax’s observations about humans. I had moved on, but I hadn’t forgotten.
I heard footsteps approaching the kitchen. They weren’t my husband’s-they were smaller, quieter. Postcard and article still clutched in my hand, tears on my cheeks, I looked up. She was standing in the doorway. She was small, and precious, and the most beautiful person I had ever seen.
“Mommy?” she asked.
“Come here, sweetie,” I said. She was the one person that I could love more than my missing friends, and I knew they would never fault me for it.
As she came to me, I hugged her tight and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you so much, Rachel,” I whispered.
They would have loved her, too.
Author: kleenexcow
Rating/Warnings: PG, spoilers up to and including #54, The Beginning
Pairing: General, mentions of Cassie/Jake
Summary: The others may be gone, but they still touch Cassie’s life, and on no day is that more apparent than the day she says goodbye to an old friend.
Word count: 1,851
Marco never had a funeral, a memorial service. Neither did Jake, nor Tobias. No one had ever found bodies or any trace that they were really gone. The closest they ever got to a ceremony was the execution of Marco’s will, a sterile undertaking that had more to do with the division of Marco’s television money than a farewell to an amazing life.
But Big Jim got a funeral. Televised, even. Most animals can’t say that, not even the rest of our morphs. My wolf and Tobias’ hawk both died in the wild, presumably. Rachel’s bear died in obscurity, and Jake’s tiger was gone even before the end of the war. Our dolphins, our bats, our rhinos were all owned by the Gardens but none ever obtained the same level of association. And what about our seagulls, our flies, our roaches, our squid? They had no one to notice their passage from this world to the next.
The only morph who came even close to Big Jim was poor old Homer, who’d been buried with a song and more than a few tears beneath an old oak tree. He’d spent the last of his years, by Jean’s request, in the fields behind my parents’ house, and though I think he enjoyed chasing the squirrels and horses, he never stopped looking for his boy.
I could understand that.
Homer had meant something to me, to Steve and Jean, but Big Jim meant something to the human race. And when he died, he unleashed a sorrow that Earth had been holding in. The age of the Animorphs was over. There was only one of the young, daring heroes who had saved the world while simultaneously ushering humanity into the intergalactic community. Only one. Me.
At the memorial service, my mom talked about Big Jim’s life at the Gardens. The president of the World Wildlife Fund announced new measures designed to protect silverback gorillas and get them off of the endangered species list. Marco’s dad read an excerpt from The Gorilla Speaks and his mom talked about how seeing animals fighting for Earth’s freedom always gave hope to her as a host, even before she knew her son was one of them.
I didn’t cry. No one would have blamed me if I had, but I knew that once I started, I wasn’t going to stop. The Gardens had asked me to speak for Big Jim, and to get the words out I needed to stay composed, graceful. The Cassie that the world knew and needed.
“Big Jim’s hands weren’t ordinary gorilla hands,” I said. I had a set of notecards in front of me, but I was speaking from the heart and didn’t need them. “Instead of foraging, his hands were used to open doors and drive getaway cars and carry his friends to safety. Without knowing it, Big Jim saved my life. In fact, Big Jim lent Marco the use of his DNA so that we could save all of the species on Earth, not just humans, and so I-we will always be grateful for his strength and dexterity and resilience. Thank you, Big Jim. Thank you for helping to keep me free.”
After the service, after most of the cameras left, there was a small reception with the speakers and the Gardens staff and a few other VIPs. I signed autographs until I saw Steve and Jean at the edge of the room. I excused myself from the groundskeepers and concessions workers and crossed the crowd towards them.
“Hi, honey,” Jean said as we embraced. If there had ever been any awkwardness between me and the Berensons, it all dissipated after I became the last Animorph for the mothers to, well, mother. They’d even been at my wedding, which was rather kind of Steve and Jean considering that I’d once been proposed to by their son.
“That was a very nice speech,” Steve said.
“They all saved my life, you know,” I said. “All of them, not just Marco.”
“We know. And you saved theirs,” Jean replied, but there was sadness there. I might have saved Jake’s life in the heat of battle, or Marco’s, or any of the others’, but that didn’t make a difference to me anymore. It takes only one failure to make none of it count-they were long gone, and wherever they had been when they died, I hadn’t been there to be a part of the team. Jean had never asked me if I knew where Jake was, and for that I was grateful. I don’t know if I would have been able to lie in the face of her mother’s sorrow, threat of intergalactic war or not.
I left Steve and Jean before I started to cry in front of them. My dad offered to drive me home, but I wasn’t going far, and I felt like I needed a good fly. He settled for taking my expensive public appearance clothes for me, while I stripped down to a leotard in the parking lot. It had been over fifteen years since I’d first morphed osprey, and everything about the change was familiar: the decrease in size, the itch of new feathers, the freedom of leaping into the sky and knowing that I wouldn’t fall back down.
I flew down to the coast, and I drifted over the waves breaking on the shore. As I neared Rachel’s memorial I could see two figures lying beside it. I swooped a little lower, and I recognized the blonde heads. An arm raised, finger pointing straight at me. Loren and Naomi went there sometimes, to talk and watch the birds, and I had guessed correctly that a funeral day would be one of those times. I didn’t give them any indication that the osprey was me, and I flew on.
I lived mostly in Washington, D. C., but I kept a home in Southern California, too. I needed it for when I spent time amongst the Hork-Bajir and for Official Animorph Functions like these, and it was nice to be able to visit my parents without actually staying in their house. Still, it embarrassed me slightly to be so wealthy as to have a second home, and so this one was modest in every way except for its location a few steps from the ocean.
I demorphed on the beach and walked up to the back door. It was locked, but a DNA scan confirmed it was me and the door clicked open. I could hear the television on in the back room, but the solitude of flying was still with me, and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone just yet.
There was Chunky Monkey in the fridge, so I went into the kitchen. Getting older didn’t necessarily mean that I had developed more mature coping mechanisms than the occasional stress eating. But as I put my hand on the handle of the freezer, something stopped me, and it wasn’t the guilt of calories. It was a magnet on the refrigerator, with a postcard and a magazine article under it. Of course, I saw the magnet every time I opened the fridge, but today it meant so much more. I abandoned the ice cream and took the postcard and article out from under the magnet.
Marco and I had, in the years after the war and especially after the Hague, taken to sending each other regular postcards. Most of his were brightly-colored scenes from playgrounds of the rich and famous-Tahiti, San Tropez, Cabo, Tuscany. Mine were always from places where I worked, mostly Yellowstone, but a few from the Tetons and Appalachia and the Amazon. We always wrote just a few lines, but getting one of his postcards in my mailbox had brightened my day in ways he never knew. Or maybe he had. Maybe he had felt the same way about mine. Who knew with Marco?
But this one, the last one he had ever sent me, wasn’t from somewhere exotic. It was from the Gardens, which still made me smile. He’d sent it in an envelope with the magazine article, postmarked the day before I said goodbye to Jake. I turned the postcard over.
Cassie--
I wish Rachel were around for this.
The only thing missing from my life
is being able to see the look on her
face. Now are you sorry that you
rejected me while we were tiny?
--Marco
The article was he’d sent with it was from Cosmopolitan, where he’d been named one of their 25 Sexiest Bachelors of the Year. “Sexiest Intergalactic Hero,” had been his official title. In the picture, he was wearing nothing but a pair of tight, animal-print pants, so ridiculous that I would have lost of all respect for him if he had been anyone other than Marco. I did have to admit that in this picture his abs were significantly more impressive than in our spandex days.
“We all love Jake Berenson as much as the next girl, but it’s Marco McCain who really makes our hearts flutter. He may be only nineteen, but with his thousand-watt smile and easygoing charm, it’s easy to be smitten by Marco. He put us at ease during his photoshoot, making everyone laugh even as we were drooling over his rock-hard muscles and unfairly long eyelashes. Now we’re extra mad at the Yeerk Empire for endangering this gorgeous piece of-” By this point, I was giggling so hard that I had to stop reading so that I could catch my breath and wipe the tears out of my eyes.
And then, a switch. Even though the tears were still flowing, I wasn’t giggling anymore. I was crying, all of the tears I hadn’t shed during the day bubbling out of my body like a waterfall.
I had moved on with my life. I had become a grown woman, with a job, and a family, and a reputation that these days had more do with my position in the government than my past as an Animorph. I had grown up.
But I still missed them. Thirteen years since the last time I’d seen Rachel, ten years for the boys, and every day I longed for Rachel to tease me about my clothes, for a kiss from Jake, for Marco’s smile or Tobias’ introspection or Ax’s observations about humans. I had moved on, but I hadn’t forgotten.
I heard footsteps approaching the kitchen. They weren’t my husband’s-they were smaller, quieter. Postcard and article still clutched in my hand, tears on my cheeks, I looked up. She was standing in the doorway. She was small, and precious, and the most beautiful person I had ever seen.
“Mommy?” she asked.
“Come here, sweetie,” I said. She was the one person that I could love more than my missing friends, and I knew they would never fault me for it.
As she came to me, I hugged her tight and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you so much, Rachel,” I whispered.
They would have loved her, too.