It's All Over, I Know
"Hey, Jake, coming to the Sharing meeting tonight? We're going to the skating rink, Star Wars, then we're having a huge water balloon fight."
I looked up into his eyes. Smiling face, teeth slightly showing through his parted lips, gray eyes twinkling, brown hair a little topsy-turvey. No sign. Just like always, he looked completely normal. Just like he always used to.
God, I felt like I was going to bawl. I, Jake, the leader of the Animorphs, witness of a hundred of the cruelest acts ever done, was going to break down into sobs just looking into my brother's eyes.
But then, my brother wasn't really my brother.
I'm sure you know about the Yeerks, the alien parasites that crawl into your brain and control you. Completely. Totally. There is no escape. A person with a Yeerk in their head is called a Controller. My brother, Tom, is a Controller. You see, the high-school student standing in front of me wasn't an older brother asking to spend time with his sibling, it was an alien parasite attempting to make a victim out of it's host's sibling.
We'd known for a while now. The Andalites were gone. It had been so simple. Ax, with his 'honorable death' had passed away first, having successfully decapitated himself. Tobias had gotten shot down. It was an accident, but still, he was gone. Rachel had become a nothlit cockroach and herself stepped on. Cassie ... Cassie, my beautiful, sweet Cassie, had been caught.
She died rather than speak of things secret. Marco had hung on to the last . . . but there was never any hope for him. I wish my best friend, the funny boy, had died laughing.
He died with tears streaming down his cheeks.
All these horrid events I had witnessed, and more. Everything was gone. Everything.
Everything...
"Hey Jake? Ja-ake? You still in there? Hello-oo?"
"Sorry Tom, spaced out," I replied.
"Really? Coming or not?"
"Sure. But first, could you come with me to the kitchen for a second?"
"Sure."
I stood up from my chair in front of Doom, a computer, and a lifeless consciouslessness that had been mine for the past week, and walked into the kitchen. I pulled out Mom's largest knife-a bread knife, sharp, new, with a foot long blade, before he came in.
"Whaddaya want? We're going to be late, ya know."
He was nearly on top of me. I grabbed his arm and whirled to face him, all the pain of a thousand battles pure agony within my heart showing through my eyes.
"What's this about?" he asked, panic creeping into his voice.
"I know, Tom, I've always known. Remember the tiger? The one who nearly died trying to save you?"
A flicker of recognition. Tom. The Tom.
"So you weren't Andalites at all."
"Never were. I wish it could be different, Tom, but, as you know, just as well as I, there's no hope left."
With that, I slammed the bread knife through his heart, with all the strength I had left.
Blood covered me, the knife, the kitchen floor. Blood. Red, stinking, foul blood...
I'd seen so much of it. Funny, how emotionless this was; how I didn't give a damn. Odd, strange, vaguely pleasant.
Using the last of my strength, I took the knife out of him, dead as he was, and plunged it into myself.
"Let it all end. Let it all end. Oh, God."
And then there was the mercy of Black Oblivion.