-Marco! What the heck are you doing?! Get out of there!-
-I can't!- I cried back in thought-speak. I'd been backed into a corner by a couple of cocky-looking human-Controllers. One had a handgun. The other had an equally deadly and much more painful Dracon beam. Both of them looked a little too sadistic, even for Yeerks.
-I'm hurt, bad,- came Rachel's "voice" in my head, distant and weaker than was expected. Rachel weak made me even more scared. -I'm gonna bail before I lose too much blood and can't fly.-
-Pull out,- Jake agreed, though I could tell he was still concerned about poor, cornered old me. -We'll meet back at Cassie's barn.-
-We only have thirteen of your minutes left in these bodies, Prince Jake,- Ax reported from equally far away. He and Rachel were presumably out on the roof, along with Tobias.
-They're not "our" minutes,- I groaned, still joking at a time like this.
-Don't call me "prince,"- Jake said at the same time. If I'd have been human, I'd have grinned.
The mission had been relatively harmless in theory. Some Yeerk bigwig from the opposite side of the country needed to get some valuable info to our man Visser Three about...well, we didn't exactly know, but Erek the Chee had said it seemed very important, according to his reconnaissance. Naturally, we wanted to intercept it. See, apparently, this guy from the opposite coast wasn't high up enough to get fancy spaceships or super teleportation rays, or whatever. He needed this info disk sent, and he needed it sent fast. So what did he choose? Good old FedEx. The package gets loaded aboard a big white van and off it goes. I mean, we ourselves caught a commercial airline flight once (as flies, of course, but still). It seemed a simple route to go.
What we, like the amateur kids we were, hadn't taken into consideration was that the Yeerks would be following the package every step of the way from coast to coast. Our clever interception at the local post office - scouts posted on the ground and on the roof while one of us flew through the window as a seagull and snatched up the envelope - quickly turned hostile when one of the postal workers shouted out "Andalite!" Just our luck the other doofuses on shift were Controllers too. One of them had run outside and started harassing the scouts, and probably some innocent birds, too, looking for the rest of the "Andalite bandits." The other two had stayed inside and terrorized me.
Yep, I was the lucky sap that drew the short straw and got to fly in and snatch the thing, and boy was I regretting not just agreeing with Jake that Tobias, the best flyer out of us all, should have just done it from the start.
-Don't move,- said Jake in his forced-calm fearless-leader voice. He was a seagull, too, one they had miraculously not hit before they realized that shooting lazer beams at random birds at six a.m. was probably pretty conspicuous. He was sitting on the sill of the window I had flown through. -I am about to do something very stupid, and I would prefer it if those two idiots were not looking in my direction.-
And with that he swooped into the room, as quiet as you can be when you're a small, fluttery bird, and darted behind one of the plastic chairs in the post office waiting room. From where I was, cowering in the corner with the Controllers looming over me, I could still see his small, white form just a little through the thick particle board legs of the chair.
And suddenly he began to change.
-What the heck are you doing?!- I yelled in private thought-speak that the Controller goons couldn't hear. -They'll see you!-
-Don't. Move,- he insisted. -As long as they're focused on you, they won't see me. This shouldn't take long.-
-Jake - -
-Keep them distract - !- But by then he had to stop speaking, because the demorph was far enough underway that he couldn't communicate in thought-speak any more. He merely raised one still-feathered finger to his thin, mostly-human lips.
Right. Keep them distracted and not looking at my best friend, because I did not want him dead. I didn't want me dead either, but if they caught Jake morphing straight from seagull to human, they'd know we weren't Andalites, and we'd all be much worse than dead. Much, much worse. For that, I could handle a little distraction.
I clawed at the padded envelope with my small seagull feet, shredding the manila on the outside and hacking through to the bubble wrap.
The gun-wielding Controller stiffened. "Why don't we just kill it! The bird is going to damage the data disk!"
"You idiot!" said the one with the handheld Dracon. "If we shoot the bird, we risk shooting the disk, too! That would surely damage it more than some foolish Earth bird morph! Besides, the Visser will want as many of the bandits alive as possible. Why shoot it when we have it trapped so effectively?"
In the midst of my shredding rampage, I cocked my head to the side a little to look at Jake out of one eye.
-Oh, yeah!- Behind the chair, fully human Jake had started morphing again - and this time, it was to something I would definitely not want to be on the receiving end of.
Twenty seconds later, there was a bullet hole dangerously close to my head as the Controller with the gun flailed about blindly. A putrid blast of skunk musk had hit him square in the back of the neck. The other Controller turned around and got it right in the face.
-Marco!- Jake yelled, but he didn't even need to tell me. Making sure I had the right half of the envelope clamped in my beak, I was out! of! there!
-Yahooooo!- I screamed as I fluttered out the window and into the gray, early-morning sky. -Okay, okay, I've got like six of my own freakin' minutes left in morph, I gotta go get back into my lovable human self! Where do I head, oh fearless leader?-
-I stashed our street clothes in the men's room at the Arby's across the street,- said Jake. -I'll meet you there, just gimme a little bit of time. These skunk legs don't exactly motor.-
The service entrance to the Arby's was wide open and I darted through it, going as fast as I could while hauling a shredded envelope and a tiny computer disk in my beak. Fortunately, it was early enough in the morning that not a lot of people were in restaurant. No one saw me as I flapped through the back hallway to the bathroom and checked the stalls, one by one, until I found the one that was hiding our paper bag full of jeans, T-shirts and sneakers.
I dropped the envelope, careful not to land it in the toilet, and began to demorph. It was so, so good to get out of the small, relatively defenseless bird body and back into my own skin where I could at least punch a guy in the face if I needed to defend myself.
Sproot! went my hair as it sprouted out of my seagull head. Morphing never makes sense, and it never happens the same way twice, so not was I now a ridiculous-looking seagull with hair that would be almost shoulder length on a guy my size, but was nearly down to the floor on the seagull body, but it was a visual I'd never been presented with before, either. Still on the adrenaline high from the almost-getting-shot, almost-getting-stuck-as-a-seagull morning I had had, it made me start to laugh. And I couldn't stop.
Slowly but surely, my human arms crawled out of my short, agile wings, feathers slipped back into my skin, skinny bird feet became my normal stubby toes, and through it all I was giggling like a madman. Life as an Animorph was pretty insane, you know? I hadn't even had breakfast this morning. Heck, I'd probably just grab something at the Arby's when we were through.
And I don't know, maybe it was because I was kinda loopy that morning that my thoughts started to take the course they did. But I kept seeing Jake - the real, human Jake, not the skunk or the seagull that he'd been today - just crouching behind that tacky chair, one finger to his lips to shush me as I distracted the bad guys. Now that we were Animorphs, Jake and I didn't get to hang out as much. Sometimes we even made it a point not to hang out - we don't wanna come across as a "group" to outsiders, because that might look suspicious. The Yeerks can be anyone, they're always watching you, yadda yadda yadda. But Jake and I had been friends a long time before Elfangor had given us the morphing power. Why should it be any different now?
By the time cute, stinky little skunk-Jake trotted into the stall, I was completely human and yanking on my jeans over my skin-tight morphing outfit. He began to change back while I sat on the toilet and tied my sneakers, no socks. By the time I was reaching back into the bag for my T-shirt, he was fully human, making the tiny bathroom stall really crowded. It was seriously cramped, actually, to the point that when he reached down for his shirt, we were pretty much face to face.
"Scary out there, isn't it?" he said, in a tone of voice I didn't really recognize. And that's when it really started to hit me. I've known Jake for how long? I know every tone of voice the guy has. How could I have missed this one? Had we really lost touch that much?
"Aliens, man," I mumbled back with a morbid chuckle. "Never know which ones wanna kill you next."
He looked me straight in the eye, something that was kind of unnerving at such a close distance, but also kinda nice. Jake's a very straightforward person, so you feel sort of important when he's looking straight at you like that.
"One of these days we're gonna get killed, Marco," he said.
"Nah, don't talk like that," I told him, pulling out the T-shirt. For the jeans, he'd made sure to get my own, because I'm a good bit shorter than he is, but the T-shirt was one of Jake's. It smelled like him, sorta.
Wait, I don't recognize that tone in his voice, but I can remember the way the guy smells?
This morning was getting really weird all of the sudden.
"Marco, I...I don't want you to die," he said.
"Well duh, Jake, I don't really want to - "
"No," he insisted, almost fiercely. He stood back up and leaned against the locked door of the stall, putting a little space between us again with me sitting on the downturned toilet seat. "Marco, I...I don't really know what I'd do if you died."
I faked a laugh, something I'm actually pretty good at. "None of us want any of us to die, Jake. It'll be hard for all of us if it happens. We're best friends, so that just makes sense, yeah? You'd say the same for Rachel – for Cassie."
He didn't say anything immediately, and suddenly the bathroom stall seemed even smaller than it really was.
I tugged Jake's T-shirt over my head in the two seconds of silence before he said, "Marco..."
And it was probably the insanity of that morning already - I'd lost some sleep getting up early to do the mission, of course, and I was still reeling just a little from the close brush with death - but with Jake's new voice, and the straight-on influence of his squinty eyes, and the strange, familiar smell of his T-shirt masking the grody smell of the tiny, cramped fast-food bathroom stall...
Well, when he leaned in to do something crazy like kiss me, I just kind of...went with it. His hands seemed to want to be in my hair all of the sudden, and I went with that, too. I hadn't had a whole lot of experience kissing, despite my obvious good looks and winning personality, so my hands didn't know quite where to go, hovering somewhere around his waist. He kissed me a little, and then we just kind of…breathed on each other for a couple seconds, and then he kissed me again.
For the record, it was pretty freaking good. For once, I felt like we'd had a mission go totally and completely right.
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((Thank you to my reviewer anne for telling me that this website is retarded. -grumbles about canonical inconsistency- It was hard as hell to format on my LiveJournal without the thing thinking thought-speak was HTML, but even that wasn't THIS annoying.))