Not To Be, But Rather To Seem To Be
Warnings: Spoilers for the whole series, especially 54. Brief mention of suicide. A lot of deception in the context of a romantic relationship. Character death (canon abd otherwise).
Author's note: Yeah, this is admittedly strange. I don't know how exactly I got this idea, but it intrigued me enough to write it, although I'm not sure how it turned out. Also, to be clear, I don't condone all of the narrator's behavior in this as "right." Anyway, I hope you enjoy this, and I'd really appreciate any feedback on it, even if you don't like it. Finally, I don't own the Animorphs and don't pretend to.
…
The crowd parts, and I see her standing there and think she is beautiful. At first, it caught me off-guard, the thought—she is many things: Cassie, an Animorph, world famous, a survivor, an advocate… but beautiful? We can see beauty, of course, and understand it—it's part of what makes life joyous, after all, and I had seen plenty of beauty in my time. There had been palaces in Russia, temples in Rome, cathedrals in Spain, gardens in Japan… all of it, breath-taking. It was part of why we had loved them, actually—the beauty of their world, natural and otherwise, could not be overstated.
But beauty in a person? And in this person? I do not yet understand it, but there it is.
I walk up to her and introduce myself. "Ronald Chambers, California Department of Alien Citizenry," I say. "Call me Ronnie." My voice is a baritone now, and I hardly recognize it.
She smiles and extends her hand. I take it and smile back. She introduces herself, completely unnecessarily, for there is not a sentient being in this galaxy who does not know her name.
"It's nice to meet you," she says, and I smile back, a fake yet sincere grin.
It is indeed nice to see her-but this is hardly the first time we've met.
….
For a long time after the war, I stayed away from humanity and lived as a Chee. My people rebuilt our home, and we lived there as inconspicuously as we had done for years. Most of us took human forms and started new lives while I stayed stagnant and alone. The other Chee… well, they didn't understand, exactly… but they tried. I couldn't blame them for not understanding, of course—they had done what they were meant to and kept their hands free of blood. Me? Not only had I changed my programming and slaughtered a room full of living creatures—Controllers, yes, but living creatures nonetheless—but my actions, blackmailed or not, had lead to death of tens of thousands of sentient beings. I had so, so much blood on my hands, when even a drop would have been too much.
And it haunted me, each and every day.
But one day, I had seen her on the TV, speaking about the war. I was about to turn it off, about to walk away, when I heard her say something that stopped me dead. "Every life is sacred, even the life of an enemy. The Yeerks… they did horrible things. But they were not without life, not without knowledge, or feeling, or being. They, their lives, still mattered. Their lives were still lost. "
I listened. I listened to her struggle and mourn. I listened to her be haunted and listened to her know why she was, why she always would be. I listened to her and I heard me.
And that was the moment I began to fall in love with a human girl.
…
The others might have objected, but they didn't say anything. Yes, it was a breach of tradition, of the unspoken rule that has forever dictated that we Chee stay firmly in the bottom rungs of society—the servants, slaves, bellhops, and chamber maids of human history. So, to become a person filled with ambition, with the goal to rise to a position of fair prominence and power, was not the Chee way. But then again, neither was altering our programming to become a killing machine. Or assisting in acts that murdered thousands of sentient beings. Sin, I guess, is all relative.
It was surprisingly easy for Ronald Chambers to rise up the ranks in the California department of Alien Affairs. Partly, it was thanks to a few of my people who worked there as secretaries, janitors, and glorified gophers and subtly lifted me up the ladder. Partly, I was qualified for the job—after all, it's not like I had never seen a Hork Bajir before, and I certainly cared about preservation. I was certainly passionate about peace.
All and all, it took about a year and half before I had a chance to "meet" Cassie. Of course, I could have gone to see her at any time I wanted—a tree or a truck or an empty field, they all would have gone without so much as a blink of the eye. But even then, I knew that simply seeing wasn't what I wanted. Even then, I knew that woul never be enough.
….
I take things slowly—after all, when you've lived for millennia, a few weeks, a few months—well, that isn't even a grain of sand.
We are in Yellowstone, watching Hork Bajir swing from trees. Cassie is away, in wolf morph, trying to find Toby, to introduce us. It is an honor, I know that—few humans outside of Congress can say they have actually spoken to the leader of the free Hork Bajir. And so I wait here and practice making my hologram look surprised.
Long before a human would notice, I hear the sounds of Toby and Cassie making their way back to me. I move back intentionally, positioning myself between our food and a particularly strong smelling bunch of flowers. I have mixed feelings about Cassie being in wolf morph—on one hand, there is nothing quite so beautiful as watching her take the form of a canine, ancestors of the creatures who now carried on my creators' souls. On the other hand, I am all too cognizant of the wolf's incredible sense of smell, all too aware that that very sense of smell is what had lead the Animorphs to us to begin with.
While Cassie may have been warming up to Ronnie Chambers, I wasn't so sure she would feel the same way about Erek King.
And so when her lips touch my hologram later that night, I let her believe she was kissing a 20-something environmentalist and hiking enthusiast and not a 10,000 year old android who had cut the hair of czarinas. I lie to her, yes, as I have done to humans for millennia, but when I tell her she was incredible, when I tell her thank you, when I kiss her back—I could not have been more sincere.
…
Beside me, Cassie sleeps fitfully. I had heard, of course, their conversation, their good-bye, and I know, just as well as Cassie does, that she had spoken her last words to Jake Berenson, first love of her life, leader of the Animorphs, Yeerk killer, great hero, blackmailer of me.
To her credit, she had done a good job of hiding her sorrow today, of saying nothing more than that Jake had stopped by on some official business. That shouldn't have surprised me, with all the lies Cassie had to tell during the war. But, as with all of their horrors, I can tell the unrest is haunting her sleep, as she twists and turns under the sheets. There was rarely a night where Cassie did not wake up screaming, but because I never sleep anyways, I "wake" with her and listen without fail to the blood and gore that haunted her dreams. I tell her she is safe, tell her I love her, tell her the war was over, although I don't think any of it helped much. I do not, of course, tell her that my nights are as haunted by violence as hers, nor that she is lucky—so, so lucky—to have memories that can one day fade.
I love her, but there are so many things I've never said. I am a liar, but I fool myself into thinking that doesn't matter. I make myself believe she would understand.
In one of the many lies I've told, Cassie has met my "family," the Chee who was once Erek King's father again playing my dad, and Lordes, the Chee she and her fellow Animorphs had saved so many years ago posing as my elderly mother. I told them—told myself—that it was a favor to her, but really, I think they did it as a gift to me.
I've "met" Michelle and Walter, too, both of whom still work as veterinarians and still live on the now-legendary farm, although the barn itself has been removed and shipped across the country so that tourists can flock to it and gape in awe at the barrels of hay where the Animorphs once sat, the stall where I once played rock paper scissors with a young Andalite wrapped in fever dream.
Michelle and Walter both like Ronnie Chambers and are kind to him, as they are to most every living creature they meet. In this, I see in them a bit of my creators, the same compassion that draws me to their daughter. When we come over for dinner, they quiz me about the Hork Bajir. Cassie sighs and rolls her eyes, and I can't help but think of the girl who three years ago—a million lifetimes ago—told her mom not to pet an Andalite's butt, and I smile. Then I think inevitably of that day, of showing her parents a few of the thousands time their daughter had all but died, and I find her hand under the table and hold it tight.
We have talked about Jake, too, of course. We have talked about Jake until there was nothing more to talk about and then a few days, a few weeks, later we have talked about him again. I let Cassie think that the contortion on my face is that of jealous lover, weary of Jake Berenson's myth and legend, not of an old ally who knew Jake's faults all too well.
I know that Jake comes with Cassie, that his specter will always be part of the relationship I have with her. He was her first love, and I, as much as I may love her, will never be that. He was there, too, for all the battles I did not—could not—fight in, for all the horrors of war I could not bring myself to see. They had gone through hell together and that had forged a bond among the Animorphs that even Erek King could not share. I had to understand that, and I told myself I did.
This is what I tell myself when Cassie wakes up screaming his name.
"It's okay," I tell her, even though I know it's not. It hasn't been okay for Cassie since the day that she walked across that abandoned construction site, and it never again, will be, not all the way. But, as always, I love her, and so I lie.
She is shaking in my holographic hands. I hold her and mummur to her until she stops shaking so violently and then an idea comes to me.
"Get up," I say gently and lead her outside. I call over one of my dogs—as any good Chee would, I keep some with me and treated them well—and gesture to it. After a moment Cassie understands, and reaches out to pet King on the head.
A few minutes later and standing a safe distance away, I watch a chocolate lab run happily through the yard, and it warms both the part of me that is pure Chee and the part of me that pretends to be human. If just for those two precious hours, I know without a doubt she is happy, and, even if she does not realize it, she has me and my creators to thank. I smile in secret pride.
…
In the end, we have many children, and we have none. I cannot, of course, father children, and although Cassie takes it well, I sense that it saddens her more than she lets me see.
We take in foster children instead, the youngest of the war orphans first. These are the children who were Controllers and left when their host parents died in the war, sometimes at their own helpless hand, and the free children who nevertheless lost their families in the bombing and the destruction that signaled the outbreak of open warfare. Most of these children are far from angelic—some of them steal; others run away, leaving a wolf-Cassie to hunt them down and a human Cassie to convince them to come home; yet others yell and scream; some cry; some don't speak for weeks. We talk to them for hours, listen to their horror and their grief. We get them therapy, although the therapists do not yet know how to help the freed Controllers. We spend seemingly endless amounts of money on them, but of course, money is no object for Cassie, and even if she was not the exemplar she is, the government would struggle to balk at anything that keeps these children from becoming either human shells or hardened criminals. They could not ignore an entire mass of children who had learned intimately how to conduct a global war.
Some of them stay with us mere weeks, others for months, and still others for years. We see some of them of to college, and every now and then we get a snapshot of a cap and gown, a wedding, a newborn baby. When the war children are all grown, we foster kids with disabilities who have been abandoned by their parents, those who have not been cured by the now seldom-used morphing technology.
We love them—really, we do—but it would be lying to say this was ever selfless. Self-sought atonement never is.
…..
When all is said and done, she dies young; although at the age of 50, she is an ancient compared to her fallen friends. Bone cancer with multiple, distant metastases, they say, and I wonder if it has anything to do with the morphing, years of regeneration providing a million chances for something to go wrong. Morphing had saved Cassie's life hundreds of times, but in those final months, as I watch my wife grow weaker and weaker, I have to wonder if it just might have killed her as well.
Centuries as an attendant, a servant, and even a slave have prepared me well for the role of caregiver to my dying wife, and I am no stranger to death. I have seen plagues and fires and natural disasters and coups and old age and illness and death on the battlefield. Death is a part of life, but that doesn't mean it ever stops hurting—especially for a species of pacifists. Of course, know—I always knew—what would come of this. And yet it still hurts.
The day she dies I lie one last time.
Ronnie Chambers is with her through it all, but on the last day, and I sit by my wife as she lays, drugged and dying. In her passing moments of lucidity, she tells Ronnie she loves him, and my metaphorical heart swells as I tell her the same. Still, on the last day, I force myself to confront what I have always known: that this has never been how Cassie was meant to die.
And so I leave the room, and when I come back, I am different, younger, and not at all who I want to be. Cassie opens her eyes and smiles and when she dies, it is as she had always thought it would be. And so, when she dies, it is in Jake Berenson's arms.
The things we do for love.
…..
A week after she is buried—it was just as inconceivable that Cassie wouldn't be buried in the earth as it had been that Rachel would—Ronnie Chamber disappears while on a work assignment in a California forest, and they find his body lying dead in a stream two days later. Officially, the death is an accident, although some whisper suicide.
His funeral and burial are, by request, small, private, and unadorned, and the night after, some of the "mourners" come back to keep watch as a silver form climbs out of the grave and runs home, a swift form against the black sky.
A few days after Ronnie's death, a new boy enrolls at the local middle school, which had been rebuilt in the wake of the war. Of course, everyone who had worked at the school during the war has long since died and retired, and so no one so much bats an eye when Erek King shows up to sign up for classes once again.