Disclaimer: Animorphs and all things related belong to K.A. Applegate and Scholastic. I just like to hang out in their world.
Their Special One
The will never admit it, but they are both disappointed. They had silently hoped against hope that genetics would do them a favor and give them a gifted child, that he would somehow, against all logic, have an Andalite mind, or a seer mind, or something other than what he was guaranteed to have.
They knew they should be happy. Seerow was progressing at a perfectly normal rate for a Hork-Bajir his age, even one being raised in a war zone. He learned how to scrape bark and leap through the trees and chatter away in his Hork-Bajir language. He followed the things that his mother and father taught him, memorizing with all of his might. But it was just that: memorization. He knew that the lights in the sky were stars, but if asked to explain what stars were, he might as well just call them sky flowers. He could not comprehend or imagine great balls of burning gas in space. It was a miracle that he had been taught multiplication.
It was hard. She had never exactly fantasized about being a mother like other females had, but she had thought about a family. She had thought about teaching her children to tail fight, about running through fields, and about telling them the proud histories of the Andalite people. Now she used a mouth to hum lullabies to a lizard. He had dreamed about having another like him. Now, he looked on his son, and could not help appraising him as a future soldier, a simple-minded force to move and use as needed. This was just one more Hork-Bajir, and what right did he have to value his own progeny over anyone else's?
But despite their disappointment, their sadness, their quietly crushed or re-evaluated dreams, they loved their son. They loved the little family that they had been able to cobble together in the middle of this hell. They loved the hope that they had when they looked at him. Not an Andalite. Not a seer. Not anything more than average. But he was theirs. And that was enough.