Coming back from the dead is pretty cool, Rachel thought giddily.
The others were questioning the guys who had somehow gotten on Cassie and Tobias's bad sides, but Rachel was barely listening. Instead she kept looking over at Tobias, standing next to her.
He was in his human morph right now, which was a strange mix of old and new: the same untidy dirty-blonde hair that used to hang down in his eyes back when he'd been that shy, artistic boy whom all the bullies in school had always been so drawn to; the flatly expressionless mask of a boy who'd forgotten how to make facial expressions because he was too used to having a beak. He was shorter than her, softer, except for his face and his eyes; eyes which had long ago lost the dreamy look she still sometimes dreamed about. Now his dreamy blue gaze was hard and sharp and it was fixed on the dude whose head had been in Cassie's mouth a few minutes ago with as little pity as he'd look at a mouse with—less, even.
One part of Rachel wondered distantly what these two guys had done to get not just Tobias but also Cassie so angry that neither of them had flinched over Cassie threatening to bite one of their heads off. And not just, like, fake-tough-talk threatening but actually lowering her polar bear teeth around his face…
But mostly, Rachel was watching Tobias. They were standing close together, the two of them, standing where he'd let go of her at last and turned to face the others; standing close enough to touch, still, but not quite doing it; standing close enough that they could have been holding hands, although she'd probably have to remind Tobias that he had hands first. For once that thought didn't make her sad, because it turned out that when it mattered—when it really mattered—he'd remembered his human hands and his humans lips and everything human that went along with them. When he'd thought she was dead, he'd remembered he was a boy, not a bird.
Normal people might have found all that pretty sad, but it made Rachel feel giddy with delight. The Animorphs lived their lives on the edge of death every day, it seemed sometimes, and when she'd crossed that edge Tobias had been there to catch her on the other side. No flinching away from a too-human touch, no fluttering feathers that weren't there, no straining to reach the sky or shying from an embrace that made his hawk's senses feel trapped; no, he had grabbed her. He had been the one to run to her.
Rachel could feel herself grinning. She hoped it looked unnerving, to the two guys they were interrogating. A grin would be out of place while her friends were trying to scare them into giving up some information, unless they thought she was grinning at the thought of causing them pain of terror. People did seem to find her grins intimidating these days so maybe it would work out that way, although she had a feeling that the expression on her face right now wasn't her usual sort of grin. This felt…what would Marco call it? Sappy. This grin felt sappy.
Too bad. Rachel decided she'd earned some sappiness, after everything. She had just died, after all. If a person can't be a little sappy after they come back from the dead, when could they?
She couldn't believe Tobias had done that. Not the sheer fact of him kissing her; unlike the ineptitude and tragedy that was Jake and Cassie's quasi-relationship, she and Tobias hadn't needed a near-death experience (nearer-than-death experience? Post-death experience? What was the appropriate phrase, here?) to force them to share a kiss.
They'd kissed a few time before, tentative and awkward things mostly but still sweet, still good; awkward because neither of them were experienced at kissing, because one of them wasn't even used to having a mouth, but sweet because they'd meant those kisses, even if one of them had been fighting a hawk's instincts to fly away at the time. Rachel had told herself to appreciate the fact that Tobias had fought those instincts, had considered kissing her worth fighting them, rather than dwelling on the existence of those terrible instincts in the first place.
But this kiss hadn't been anything like that. The whole embrace had been—well, hawkless for lack of a better word.
Hawks didn't charge people out of affection. Hawk's didn't throw their wings around people to make sure they were really there. Hawk's didn't lift people in the air and spin them around. Hawks didn't dive in for a kiss like the other person's lips (beak?) were the sole source of air in the room. Hawks didn't…
But Tobias had. He'd grabbed her so fast that she hadn't even been able to react; had startled her so much that she hadn't even been able to think about wrapping her arms around him in return before he'd been stepping back—not letting go, though, just moving back enough that he could look at her—and accused her of being dead.
It was honestly impressive just to think of him being able to lift and spin her. That must have taken some serious adrenaline. Rachel was quite a bit taller than Tobias, and she weighed more than his human morph—his human body—did to boot; she had at least twice his muscle tone, and as her gymnastics instructors had reminded all their students over and over again (hoping to stave-off eating disorders; hoping to instill in those fragile adolescent minds that being fit didn't have to mean being thin and even being thin didn't have to mean being frail; hoping to save them from the war that was being a girl, where their bodies became battlegrounds to a despairing insecurity and calorie counting that slowly took their minds down with them into the dark), muscle weighed more than fat.
Rachel had been a gymnast for years and that wasn't the sort of sport that resulted in bulk, but even an amateur like her had to have strong muscles to vault and twist and dangle and spin around off of bars and rings and beams. Tobias in his human body was skinny, and it wasn't the sort of skinny that had any muscle tone to it. There was no way he should have been able to pick her up like that—but he had. He'd lifted her straight into the air and spun her around, actually spun her, before he'd put her down again. He hadn't seemed to even notice the effort it had taken!
It was a moment worth treasuring. Not just the way his warm human hands had felt on her arms, or his soft human mouth against her lips, but the way he hadn't hesitated.
Rachel tuned back into the conversation—forced herself to tune back into the conversation—when that distant, absent part of her brain noted that the talk had turned around toward killing. She struggled to keep up, to contribute, but her thoughts were still scattered—no, not scattered. They were focused, just not on the mission. Not on the Visser they were chasing through time.
Not even on Jake, dead.
She felt guilty about that—guilty about all of that—but it was a distant feeling, too. Even when Cassie looked at her and said, "Why are you back? Why are you alive? And why isn't…why isn't Jake?"
"I don't know," she had to admit. That was a sobering through, bringing her back down to earth—mostly. Back to the mission. Back to the battle.
Instead of taking Tobias's hand, she curled hers into a fist and slammed it against her palm. "We have to get Visser Four," she said, as much to herself as to the others. "That's the bottom line here."
And it was. She knew it was. But nonetheless—that moment when Tobias had run to her, the hawk abandoned, that was a moment worth treasuring.
And she would, she knew, if she lived through this. (Or even if she didn't, maybe; apparently that might be a thing.) She would take that moment out in the dark nights when she woke up sweating and trying not to scream, the memory of blood in her teeth and bones shattering inside her own body; she would take that moment out when she lay awake pressed into a pillow wet with tears over the life she couldn't have, the dates she would never go on, the boy who would rather fly than hold her hand. She would counter those nights with this bright, shining, perfect moment of being spun through the air and kissed like some kind of movie starlet with a big, bright, perfect happy ending waiting for her on the other side of the sunset.
Rachel knew there wasn't a happy ending waiting for her, knew it deep in her bones—but maybe, maybe sometimes, she could let herself pretend. Could balance the darkness around her and inside her with the memory of this day, this beautiful sunlit day on an unfamiliar campus in an unfamiliar year and an unfamiliar world where she had come back from the dead and found Tobias waiting for her.
It was a good moment. It was a moment that meant something, that mattered. It would sit heavy on the scales of her life, tilting them away from the dark—not forever.
But maybe just for long enough.
Yeah, Rachel thought with a grin, coming back from the dead is definitely worth it.
{Set during the events of Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret.}