Title: War
Author: Malenkaya
Rating: T
Summary: Years after the Yeerks invaded, the Animorphs find themselves fighting a losing war. Salvation waits in the form of something once thought destroyed: The Time Matrix.
Disclaimer: The basic premise of the characters and some basic plot points belongs to K.A. Applegate. All else is mine!
Feedback: Please do. Why else would I be posting this!? Take a moment, please, and review.
Author's Notes: I have a lot more planned for this story. If you want to read more, please, review—right now I am on the fence about finishing all of this. This chapter is more of a life preview than anything else—title especially is subject to change.
This is an AU fic in which I pretend the last few books never took place and fill in a time span of a few years.
Where there are no quotation marks, it's where I had those fabulous little arrows to represent thoughtspeak and this stupid machine helpfully "edited" out. Does anyone know how I can keep those in there? I would appreciate it if you'd let me know, thanks.
Enjoy!
Chapter One:
My name is Tom.
Or at least, it was.
Now? I'm still known as Tom in some circles. Mostly within my own family.
But to most of the human race—all the innocent people the Yeerks have managed to capture and control—it's Inniss 1612 that they respond to.
Jake sleeps fitfully, tossing and turning under the deep blue cover our mother had bought him three years ago. His brow is furrowed, hair plastered to his sweaty forehead, and beneath the blankets his hands emerge, clenched into fists that leave the white fingernail prints I see every morning at the breakfast table.
We stood at the doorway and watched.
Inniss 1612 allowed it, because he understood what we both knew: that it was torture for me to stand and watch my little brother, clearly in pain and clearly afraid, and to be totally helpless to offer any sort of help.
Jake had been slipping, these last few months. Something had changed five years ago when he'd failed to make the basketball team—he'd looked at me, clearly seeking some sort of reassurance, and the Yeerk had been too busy to make the extra effort.
Things had gotten worse since then. He didn't talk as much—came home late at night, was rude to our parents, withdrawn in school—the list went on and on, but one thing remained the same: he'd changed.
Nightmares had become commonplace, and I would listen next door, tuned half into Jake's cries of fear and half into the Yeerk's discordant, arrogant speech that never seemed to stop, no matter how used to it I got, and think about how I'd failed Jake.
He was my little brother. He had looked to me, so long ago, and I hadn't been able to do anything.
Once I'd been able to fight back, and try to escape the Yeerk. The guilt hadn't been as strong then.
But I've given up since then. The amount of human population that the Yeerks have managed to infiltrate is… staggering.
The Andalites fight, still. They're constantly there, throwing a wrench into the Visser's plans.
But it's not enough. The Yeerks know it, and celebrate—even the Andalites, in the rare times we still see them, seem to understand they are fighting a losing battle. They seem more brutal, more human, stooping to levels I never expected from the haughty race that has been a bane to the Visser's life for all these years.
I think it was when I realized that even Earth's last hope had given up on this never-ending battle that I, too, stopped fighting and finally gave into the Yeerk that had controlled me for so many years.
Not that I'm voluntary. I'm not.
I just don't fight anymore.
I sit in the prison of that Yeerk pool, my own personal Hell, and stare out at everyone there, blank and unseeing.
You can tell who the new hosts are because they still fight. They scream, and shout for help, and fight like their lives depend on it.
The rest of us understand the truth—there's no point. Not anymore.
And so all I can do now is stand and watch Jake suffer alone, and try to comfort myself with the knowledge that at least I'm here, standing over him, watching over him.
Even if I can't do anything to change things.
"Cassie," Jake mumbled, and my ears perked up, not literally, but mentally—curious despite myself.
Then he rolled over, his face twisted into a grimace of hate, the bedsheets clenched into his fists.
Moonlight was shining in through his open window, casting a pale light over his face, and then he whispered the word, horribly audible in the quiet night:
"Yeerk."
With horror, I noticed the oppressive silence that had seeped into my mind, recognized it's meaning.
Inniss 1612 was listening.
My—our—eyes widened.
xxxxx
My name is Cassie.
It was a beautiful night. Calm, and clear.
The moonlight was strong and high in the sky, casting a glow over the ground beneath me, lighting up every tree and blade of grass like a spot lit stage.
I should have been fast asleep at home. Safe and sound, like any normal sixteen year old.
But I can't sleep anymore.
Which is why I was here instead, flying high over the world. Not metaphorically—but at least literally.
My owl eyes picked up every moving creature within that same stage—every mouse, every insect that scurried between the blades of grass and jutting tree roots, and I allowed the owl's mind to focus on them briefly, to see them as the moving targets they were.
I tried to distance myself from it.
Things had gotten worse lately.
The Yeerks were winning. To say anything else would be an outright lie—we tried to stop them, tried to be everywhere at once, but it was impossible.
We all reacted in our own ways. Marco's jokes had grown caustic, cruel—his analytical nature left no room for emotional reasoning, and beyond his own father and the rest of our group, everyone had become expendable.
Rachel had grown even more reckless, if such a thing were possible. Especially after her father was taken, she'd become more violent, more furious—the lines between right and wrong had always been fuzzy for my best friend, but I had a feeling that, given her latest shows of violence in battle, the lines had begun to disappear completely for her.
Tobias and Ax had both withdrawn, struggling with their own private battles. Ax tried to find a balance between the Andalites he'd grown up with, and the rest of us—the family he'd come to know.
It didn't help that we all had begun to resent the Andalites to an almost malicious degree—they had abandoned us, after all. Left us, five children, on our own to fight an evil we should have known we had no hope of conquering.
Ax would have to be absolutely blind not to see that resentment.
And Tobias—had Rachel, at one point, and she had kept him anchored to the rest of us.
But she'd been becoming more and more withdrawn, reacting with fury to the simplest of concerns, and he had withdrawn himself, rubbing out the lines between his human self and hawk self that had taken years to cement.
Jake didn't show the signs as outwardly as the rest of us. He couldn't—he was the leader, after all.
But he had the world on his shoulders. He was fighting a losing battle—we all were, and Jake was unwilling to make the choice of giving up. None of us were willing to give up—but Jake was the leader, and so he took the burden of a hopeless fight on his own shoulders and blamed himself for every advance the Yeerks made, never seeming to realize there was nothing he could have done to prevent it.
As for myself? Well, I was Cassie. The moral compass, as both Rachel and Marco so caustically reminded me. We did worse and worse things every day, committed unspeakable acts bred from a helpless sort of desperation, and I dealt with it because I had to. Because unless we took every risk possible, and left no room for emotion or, God forbid, respect for human life, there was always that open possibility that we could have won if only we'd taken it just one step further.
I know that Jake worried about me. He worried about all of us, but we'd grown closer of the years. Where this war had begun to tear Rachel and Tobias apart, it had pulled us together, created a bond of empathy and understanding that everyone else still in our group seemed to lack.
Which was why now, at four o'clock in the morning, it wasn't Rachel's house I was flying to for a girly gossip session, or to Marco's for a good laugh. I was going to Jake's—because I could tell him all these things, stuff I'd discussed with him time and time again, and he would listen.
The white roof of his home appeared in the pale moonlight, and I flared my wings and swooped forward, aiming for the tree branch directly beside his window.
I landed, in a rustle of feathers, took a peek inside the window and almost fell off the branch.
Tom was there—or his Yeerk was, anyway, staring at Jake with an expression of commingled horror and satisfaction.
He heard the gentle rustle of leaves against the glass of Jake's open window and turned to stare at me.
I had a bad feeling instantly. There was something wrong here—it was oppressive, hanging in the air, the creepy feeling of a menace unseen that Tom's suspicious expression only intensified.
When he turned and strode out of the room, his back set and rigid, I was in there before the door even closed completely.
Jake! I shouted, thought-speak actually handy under the circumstances. Jake, wake up!
Jake was a restless sleeper—his eyes snapped open, and he blinked blearily at me. "Cassie?"
In his pale blue pajamas, with his hair mussed all over his head, he looked like a little boy, and I was reminded again with a painful pang how fast we'd all been forced to grow up in this war.
I coasted to a stop on the foot of his bed, clinging to the bedpost, and fixed my intense stare on him. Jake, it's Tom.
It struck me, at the time, how little the words surprised him.
By now I've realized that some part of him expected the words—that some part of him had always realized and steeled himself for the possibility that Tom would find out one day.
"What?" he asked sharply, awake in seconds, crawling out of his bed and heading for the door.
Jake, no! I shouted, and he turned to look at me, fury in his face.
"I won't leave my parents—" he hissed angrily.
His mother's voice at that moment was audible through the thin wood of his door. "Tom, what are you doing—"
And the sickening sizzle of a dracon beam—the heavy thump of a body against the floor, and Jake's hand was on the doorknob, and I flew at him without any conscious thought.
My talons raked his face—he tried to bat me away with a shout of pain, his face a mask of shock, and some part of my mind registered the footsteps on the stairs, a male voice that had to be his father audible.
"Tom!" A shocked, horrified sort of fury, and I couldn't even imagine what it must have been like, seeing your oldest son with some form of a gun in his hand and his own mother's body crumpled onto the floor. "Tom, what have you done—"
Another blast of dracon fire, and I looked at Jake, who'd stopped struggling.
He was already morphing, tears sliding rapidly down his face that magnified and echoed all the colors in the room to my eyes. All the blues of his curtains and bedspread, all the bright colors of the basketball posters in his room that especially now seemed far too innocent for the person Jake had become.
I could smell smoke—could see it, unfurling underneath the door.
Tom's footsteps became audible, heading for Jake's door.
Jake stumbled, trying to run for the window, a half morphed monstrosity, and I realized that he was acting purely on instinct.
Jake! I commanded, trying to keep my voice calm, and he looked at me, his face a mask of fear, and I said, Jake, just focus, keep morphing. You have time.
He stared at me—and then, slowly, his head bobbed.
We flew out the window, twin streaks of color, just as the door slammed open and Jake's bed erupted into flames.
The few minutes it took to gain distance from the shell that had once been Jake's home were spent flying in silence. All the adrenaline that had flooded my system the moment I realized the danger Jake was in was starting to ebb, leaving me feeling weak and tired.
Jake? I asked, finally.
He didn't answer, and I wished desperately that just for a moment, we could both be human—so I could look at him, could see and know what he was feeling. Could touch him, make some sort of effort to comfort him.
But I knew logically that this wasn't the time for it, and tried to push the need away. Tried to be strong. Jake?
There was another moment of silence. Then:
We need to get to Marco , Jake answered wearily. We have no way of knowing what Tom knows, so we need to get everyone else out of harm's way.
You're right, I whispered, and for the first time, the magnitude of what this meant for us finally began to sink in.
It wasn't just Jake in danger now—it was all of us.
This could mean the end of the Animorphs.