Wondering why I haven't updated TBS in ages? Well, I will soon, but for a very, VERY short explanation just take a look at my profile. It's there somewhere, by the TBS related information, next to 'Progress'.

Feel free to point out any mistakes. I don't trust my editor to get everything. (Hint: I'm my own editor.)

There was no way that I was going to make it to the end of this war. There's no way. If my body makes it out alive, I don't think my mind will. I can already feel myself going insane. Slowly but surely, my mind was giving up on me. The only thing that was holding me together at this point was the fact that I had a physical body to take care of.

I couldn't stay in bed all day because I eventually had to take a piss, or I'd get too hungry to lie there any longer. My dad was concerned that every morning he had to fight me to get me to go to school; literally drag me out of bed while I screamed at him to just let me sleep. One more hour, then I'd definitely go to school, I'd go and he wouldn't have to drag me out.

But if he let me stay in bed for an extra hour it would be more difficult. I'm already late, Dad, just let me stay home from school today, I promise I'll go tomorrow.

I hated school. I never liked it, sure, but now it's like going to my own personal hell. The bullies, the teachers, the other students. I couldn't trust them. They might not even be human anymore. Human on the outside, Yeerk on the inside. Any one of them could be an enemy, and any one of them could be him.

That nice looking guy that always smiles at me and says hello to me in the halls? That could be him. That one girl that sat next to me in math? I saw him.

The others all thought he was dealt with, but I knew differently. He had to have found a way out of being trapped as a rat, of all things, for the rest of his life. I knew he could still morph, that he morphed into people around me.

At night, he would talk to me and relay what I had done that day. Sometimes I swore I could see eyes peeking out from a shirt on the floor, under the door, outside the window.

I never could bring myself to tell the others that he wasn't really gone, and that he was haunting me, because there was a part of me that was worried that I was just going inside, and that he wasn't really there. A part of me that said, No, Marco. It's just your imagination.

So I'm not going to survive this war, and I could accept that because maybe I can go to a place where he can't follow me. Maybe I'll die in battle, maybe I'll go completely insane and my mind will just go away. That would be nice, I think.

Though, if we won this war I'll be thought of as the Animorph that went insane. I don't know if I would appreciate that, if I was even sane enough to realize they thought I was crazy. It was better than being haunted by a rat, I guess.

He never did leave me alone. He blamed me for what I did to him, told me I deserved what he would do as revenge. I believed him, still did, because I did screw up his entire life, so why wouldn't I deserve it?

I deserved to be haunted by him for the rest of my life.