Better than nothing
Author's note: Extremely angst-y post-war/post-54 parent!fic about Jean and Jake. I don't claim to endorse Jean's conclusions, and claim no ownership of the Animorphs.
When it came down to it, Jean Berenson learned more about the last few years of her son's life through movies and books than she did through the actual boy (man? she wonders) who lived beside her. She never touched them in the years before he left; never read Marco's book or Cassie's, never went to the movies that premiered, never opened the magazines that told of the five children who had miraculously saved the world. She did not need to see her personal tragedy played out on pages, talk shows, or the silver screen; she knew it all too well. As she stared at her hollowed out husk of a surviving son, she knew that in war, there are no miracles.
Once, when she was flipping channels, she came across a clip from one of the many, many movies that had been made. It was a money shot, the blow that had saved Earth—a grizzly bear biting down on a snake. To everyone else, it was D Day and V Day and the Fourth of July all wrapped in one. It was glorious—her niece killing her firstborn son. She got up and hugged Jake tight as he stared at her, silently mirroring her pain. Jean knew she would rather have a husk of a son than none at all. She never complained, and she hugged him tighter everyday.
Jake never spoke about the war, and Jean never asked. In fact, she never asked Jake to do much of anything in those three precarious years between before and after. Jake, being Jake, did his part anyway. He took out the garbage, mowed the lawn, and did the dishes—under different circumstances, it would have been hilarious, a war hero doing a seventeen year old's chores—except this war hero was seventeen. In the end, that just made her sad.
Jean knew she was being a bad parent, and she didn't care. Before, Jean had been a good parenting junkie, reading Dr. Spock when her sons were young and then reading his replacement when he went out of style. She had cared about the buzz words, about raising "self-motivated," "intelligent," "socially motivated" sons who were "respected by peers." She had cared about school, about community involvement, about family dinners; she had believed if she tried hard enough, if she followed the experts, if she read the right books and said the right things, she could raise sons who grew the change the world. Unfortunately, she had been more right than she ever could have imagined.
The house was beautiful, of course, because no one said no to Jake. He probably could have called up the president and the demanded the White House, but Jake never demanded much of anything, much less attention. Jean and Steve had had his medals framed—hundreds of glittering, glorious commendations of the thing her son, her family, most wants to forget. She knows that had Jake had his way, the medals would have been in an old footlocker, like Grandpa G's. They had insisted and so Jake had relented and let the medals hang prominently, looking out of place in the modest piece of real estate that had been their home. Jean knew why Jake did not want to see them but she also knew why she did—they reminded her that for some people in this world, the war to which her family had lost everything had not been a loss at all.
Had it not been for the war, Jean would have dragged Jake to a therapist long ago. She would have lobbied for him to be put on Prozac, to attend weekly sessions, to modify his thoughts, to fix his feelings. She would have thought whatever he was going through—stress at home, problems with Tom, problems with her, love-ridded angst, a chemical imbalance, a drug problem—could be fixed and ameliorated and made okay again. She would have moved heaven and earth to help him, but now, he had already done that for her. How do you make a son who is buying you your own mansion at 19 do anything? How can you tell someone who killed hundreds of thousands of sentient beings, who lost their own brother, that life can ever really be okay? Moreover, how do you even begin to save someone who has already sacrificed everything to save you?
Jake handed over the keys, and they both hugged him tightly. Jake would live only a few miles away, she knew, and had already promised to stop in for weekly dinners. This isn't good-bye, she told herself. This is healthy. We are moving on. This is what children do; they leave.Still, in that moment, as she held her youngest tight in her arms, all she wanted to do was to never let go.
In the years that follow Jake's mysterious disappearance and his presumed death, that becomes her biggest regret: letting go. You can say that it was for the better; you can say that he saved the world, that he might be saving it again; you can say that wherever he is, however he has died, maybe he was happy. You could even say, if you are the type to believe such things, that maybe he is with Rachel and Tom and Grandpa G. You might even be right. She's heard it all, but in the end, it comes down to this for Jean: that, when it comes to her children, something is always better than nothing, no matter how broken, how piecemeal, how Controlled, how hollow, that something is.
Never, ever let go.
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