You are thirteen and you want out. It isn't any one thing in particular. It isn't the bullying, or the neglect, or the loneliness in a crowd. You just wake up one morning, blinking at the blue numbers of the clock on your nightstand, and decide today will be the day something finally happens in your anonymous, unremarkable life, or the day will never come.

You follow Jake through the construction site. Everything changes forever. You follow Jake through this weird motley group's first mission. You change, also forever.

Or so you thought.

The thing about being an Animorph is that your body is no longer your own, and not just literally either. You are six kids with the power to transform yourselves utterly, be whatever creature can get the job done. When you use that power, you are pulled limb from limb by enemy ant colonies, you are ripped open in battle even as you slash and bite, tongue stinging with the taste of alien blood. You are so many soldiers crammed together, dashing yourselves like waves against jagged rocks. Pulling yourselves together as you withdraw till the next fight.

In the months of life as a nothlit, before the Ellimist makes you morph-capable once more, sometimes you would watch the others return to their human bodies and wonder. As Marco pats himself down, comically checking for all the right appendages in the all the right places, your hawk eyes catch the shaking of his fingers that everyone else misses, and your human mind speculates on how hard it is for your friends to remember their own bodies anymore.

Jake used to have a scar on his knee from a bicycle accident but when he reconstructs himself from his own genetic code it disappears. It takes him weeks to notice, and by that time he says he can no longer remember its shape. He tells you about it with the kind of abruptness that means he's been mulling it over a while. Probably longer even than the whole time you've both been waiting in the barn for the others to arrive. It sits in the back of your mind, like a secret slipped onto a high shelf.

You carry it up with you as you ride a thermal into the sky. You imagine it falling from among your feathers, dissolving them as it goes as if you were Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

How neatly poetic. How easy to forget the other warning. Icarus, Icarus, don't fly too low, near the ocean. Your wings will dampen and you will drown.

You love a girl who will go the way of warriors. You are afraid for her, and sometimes you are afraid of her. And other times? Other times, you want to protect her; you thought-speak to her in private to remind her she will always have you as her eyes in the sky. You have weird dates together, takeaway McDonalds that you consume partly with a sharp beak and partly with soft lips. Lips that could kiss hers, only you're a coward, still. You've been part of a guerilla resistance force defending the planet from an insidious alien invasion and enslavement, but you can't work up the guts to lean over, touch her neck, cup her cheek.

You are proud of her, watching her pull on that bravado like it's the latest fashion so that the others can stomach wading back into another fight. Between Rachel and Jake, you wonder if lionheartedness and the loftiness of command runs in the Berenson blood. You wonder if they were born for this life.

(Later, you will stop wondering.)

Ax thinks for the longest time that the Andalites are coming. He holds onto the fairytale long after you begin to doubt it. Perhaps he needs it. Perhaps the sheer distance from home echoes too much between the twin beats of his hearts.

You try not to think about how everyone else is doing. How are you doing, since the chamber and the pain and the crazy laughter? Everyone wants to know. Nobody wants to ask you, not even Ax.

One night you catch yourself thinking that if you were still at school, if you were still in possession of a human form for most of the day, a teacher would have pulled you out of class by now and asked if you needed to see the counsellor. Maybe perfunctorily. Maybe sinisterly, if they went on to suggest The Sharing. There's a cruel twist of irony in there that makes you laugh.

Red-tailed hawks don't laugh, or smile. So you laugh in your head, and it echoes out over the dusky treetops. Later you wonder if Ax heard you. You dismiss the thought.

But if you do watch anyone, it's Cassie, because it's Cassie who will let you know if you're flying too high or too low. It's Cassie whom you trust to show you when you're too far gone and in too deep. Because you know it'll happen. Somewhere down the line, loving Rachel and needing somewhere to belong and saving your species all blends together: you know this like you know dinosaurs, and random nerdy trivia, and the twitch of a blade of grass that means breakfast. It settles in the pit of your stomach.

You only wonder: when it happens, what will you feel? Dread, or relief?

Or horror. Mounting horror, the kind that fills your eyes with tears before you can realise you are suddenly, impossibly broken. Grief, the kind that punches a hole through your chest as Cassie's wolf muzzle brushes against your human skin.

You are screaming in your head. All is loud, the rush of blood in your ears.

Once upon a time you hid behind your morph to escape pain, but not this time. Part of you watches in consternation, because there's just so much blood, and carnage, and you're close to being sick but you're looking at the dying light in her eyes. They're not her own, and you curse at yourself, because when you got trapped in hawk morph you shoved a deal out at the world. You said, Okay. Okay, but just me. Not them, never them, just please let them live and die themselves.

You are the son of a warrior, as it turns out, and the sentiment is rather aptly noble.

Part of you watches because it is distantly aware that this is the last time you will see her. No Ellimist non-interventions, no way to bridge the gap of space and time. Your World History teacher once spieled about the families of soldiers who died in war, who had the unprecedented experience of bereavement denial because there weren't any bodies. And here, too, there is no body: there is no blonde hair and irreverent smile, no manicured nails or savage grace. You are in one ship, and Rachel is in another as she dies, blind and glorious, falling ever further away from you.

You were her eyes till the end. She couldn't see to complete her mission, so she finally, finally called on you. Not to get her out, like you thought for a heart-shattering moment. Just to finish it. Finish it, and the maybe find some peace in that.

After that you don't know what happens. You want to tear at Jake. You want to rage and storm, because you have finally won the war, but now you just want to be fighting still. You want to be bleeding, you want to inhabit a body that did not insist on being so undeniably yours, so irrevocably sundered. You would take the nightmares, and the dysphoria, and the eternal quandary of whether you could leave the fight and still be with her. Of whether she could leave the fight and be with you.

And that's what haunts you. Maybe it's been one too many encounters with the Ellimist, and mind-bending time warps and things you faintly remember but think that you shouldn't, because they never happened, or once did or will but as though to another person. No matter how you swing it, there is something broken in you, and the person who could remember who you used to be and help you find him again, is no longer here.

You start to think how long you've known she would never survive the war. You start to wonder whether you ever really believed you could have a life together afterwards.

You're under no delusions. You loved a warrior, you love her still, but she was always just a little in love with the battlefield.

You fly out over the forest sometimes. You go to all the places you used to meet her: the cove, the school, your old meadow. Her window, till someone stops leaving it open.

She isn't there. She isn't here anymore, and sometimes you feel like you aren't either.

Cassie doesn't stop you from disappearing, retreating utterly from the others. Once again it's that tenuous, tacit agreement. Nobody thinks about how anyone else is doing, and nobody has to acknowledge what everybody has lost.

Ax is gone. Marco is famous. Jake grieves, and there are days you wish he would grieve more. Days you dream about him making deals with Crayak, jumping back in to get her back. Anything to stop the emptiness.

You don't morph anymore. You don't know how much time goes by. There are stretches of what are probably several days, up to weeks at a time, when all you know is the hunt, the instincts of the hawk. You give yourself up to them, and then suddenly you find yourself at her memorial all over again, knowing there was no body to bury, knowing that even here, no trace of her is to be found.

Everyone learned to morph decent clothes near the end, despite shoes still being impossible, but you don't morph human even to cry for her. You would see the clothes she picked out for you and sniff for her smell on them. You would expect to look up and see her walking towards you, your name on her lips. She would chide you and you would duck your head. Bully bait meets homecoming queen, oh, you two were a children's story gone so terribly wrong.

If the Ellimist would only appear to you now, you'd be ready to make a deal. You'd be ready to beg for another dream, another little time-bend. You'd wake up bird, flutter in through the open window of her room. Perch on her desk and morph to boy, stay until the sun came up and she yawned and stretched and then stared, knowing by your expression what you'd done.

You'd choose her. You'd ask her to choose you.

But the Ellimist doesn't care about you anymore. Your battle has wrecked all your lives, but in the scheme of the universe it has signified less than nothing.

You have the audacity to dream, anyway. It's something the battlefield taught you.

You are… who knows how old? And you don't want out. In or out of one fight or another, it barely matters to you anymore.

But it's Ax. Ax whose four eyes watched the sky with as much mirth and longing as yours do, even though he looked further, past light-years and whole systems in space. Ax, possibly the last person in the known universe that you can say with certainty you still consider family.

You follow Jake again. You see the new Blade ship, and it doesn't scream danger and power and beauty, so much as whispers it, the way she used to whisper to you, afraid her mother or sisters might overhear her. You christen it Rachel, and there she is still, in your heart, all around you, forging out through the blackness of open space. Onto the next fight. How could you forget her? How could you forget who she was? You were too busy grieving her loss.

You don't worry about surviving. You always have before, and you never did.

I've been a fan of the Animorphs books since I was 10 years old. I read what secondhand copies I could get my hands on or could trade with classmates for, voraciously. And (like many of you I'm sure) I always identified with Tobias — the loner, the daydreamer.

In June this year, for the first time, I did a full read-through of all 62 canonical books in chronological order within 12 days. When I finished #54 it was so late it was early again, and I lay in bed crying so hard I couldn't breathe.

This is my first time writing in this fandom — talk about late to the party, eh? Also my first time writing in second person. It's basically how I came to terms with the whole narrative. Just a humble offering.

m.e.