A/N - An extension of my oneshot "I'm Not". Just consider the original the prologue. Spoilers up to the end of #54 for Animorphs and none for Doctor Who. Little to no knowledge of the Whoverse is required. The only AU in this 'verse is that Rachel's body was never found, because, well, she's not dead. x)
Six years.
It's been six years and she still misses them.
Cassie stands on the porch and watches the stars, twisting the ring on her finger. She knows she has to move on sometime, and she does love Ronnie – she really does, and she knows he loves her back – but she still can't let things go.
Still can't let him go.
She's a grown woman now. A fully trained veterinarian, one of the people in charge of working with the Hork-Bajir, and still waiting for the return of friends who are probably long dead in some distant reach of space. Dead without her.
"Cass?"
She turns, sees Ronnie silhouetted in the light streaming out through the doorframe.
"Come inside. It's cold out."
"Yeah," she agrees, though she doesn't really feel cold at all. "I'll be in in a minute." She turns back towards the trees and hears him go back inside. One thing she loves him for is his understanding that sometimes, she just needs some time to herself.
She tilts her head slightly to one side as a metallic grating noise, like nothing she's ever heard, fades into existence somewhere in the woods. Frowning, she squints, trying to make out the source of the noise, but she doesn't see anything.
Feeling a sudden urge to do something she had promised herself she would never do again, she shrugs off her fleece and kicks her unlaced boots towards the door, then shuts her eyes and lets the changes begin.
They're slow at first, because she's rusty and out of practice and she can't stop thinking that the others should be there with her. But they aren't, and when she opens her eyes the night has transformed into a bright, visible landscape teeming with life.
She wrestles with the owl's instincts for a moment, resisting the urge to go after a mouse she can see scampering through the trees not far away, but it doesn't take her long to figure it out again. She guesses morphing is a little like riding a bike – once you learn, you never really forget how to do it.
She spreads her wings and takes flight, letting the keen joy of cutting through the air on her own power take over so completely that she very nearly forgets why she morphed in the first place.
The noise is gone now, but the owl can hear other noises – a door shutting, quiet voices too far away to understand – and the absence of the usual nighttime sounds in a particular area. She tracks the disturbance, and it isn't long before she finds it.
A large box – she thinks it's blue, but owl eyes aren't quite the same as human eyes and she isn't sure – with frosted windows and the words "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX" printed boldly at the top. The voices come from the other side of the box, so she can't see the speakers, and though she's close enough to understand them, her mind freezes, because one of them is so very, very familiar and so very, very wrong.
Her muscles seize up, even as an owl, and she lets herself fall to the soft leaf carpeting as she realizes that she's started to demorph on her own.
Shit, she thinks fuzzily as human features emerge from the owl's. I'm naked. It's not quite true, as her underclothes miraculously managed to make it through the morph along with her, but she hasn't worn her morphing outfit in years and it's very cold and very disconcerting to stand alone in the dark in the middle of the woods in her underclothes with her dead best friend's voice coming from just a few short yards away.
Without noticing she starts to move towards the box, her heart beating so strong and so fast that she's surprised it hasn't leapt through her chest yet. She's shivering, and she isn't sure whether it's from the cold or something else. Her bare toes overturn a large pile of leaves and the noise is amplified tenfold in the sudden silence.
Rachel's voice is gone now, and in the long seconds that follow Cassie begins to think that she's been imagining it all along, a delayed hallucination brought on by war and death and far, far too much time to think.
But then she's there, stepping boldly around the corner of the box, and both are so very out of place. Still dressed in her black leotard and still seventeen years old, looking as though any moment someone would tell Cassie that the last nine years have all been a very long, very hard dream and the war isn't over yet and oh God Rachel is still alive.
There's a choking, strangled, sob-like noise and it takes Cassie several seconds to realize that it's coming from her own throat. Rachel squints, her blue eyes glinting in what little light filters through the foliage.
"-the hell? Cassie?" She moves forward, covering the impossible distance between them in two long, quick strides, to grip Cassie's bare arms and hold them out from her sides. "What on Earth are you wearing?"
And Cassie laughs, because it's such a beautiful line, so very Rachel, that she nearly believes that the apparition is real. But she can't allow herself to think that, because any second the golden goddess before her will vanish again and leave her alone in the cold and the dark and she knows she can't go through this again.
But she can't help but whisper the words she's been wishing she could utter since she saw the Blade ship vanish into Z-space with her best friend on board.
"You're alive."