A/N: Set about three months after "Day the Earth Stood Still." Written to the sounds of "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind. ( watch?v=QdgCajndgNw)
"You have to help my brother!" I gasped, thrusting the green anole lizard in my hands at the nurse behind the desk. "I think he's allergic to cats!"
The poor woman looked at the lizard, and then slowly up at my face. "All right, son," she said gently in the voice she probably normally used to appease crazy people. "I'm sure it'll be all right. If you just want to calm down we can fill out one of these forms-"
I slammed my palm against the countertop. "You don't understand! He could be dying!"
I'm not dying, Jake said petulantly. I just- He sneezed violently, tumbling off my hand in the process. Which was fortunate, because then he threw up on the check-in desk.
At least now the nurse was no longer looking at me like I was losing my mind. Instead she was staring in alarm at the lizard on her desk like any second now it was going to turn into a Bievilerd and eat her.
"Are you okay?" I asked Jake.
I'm fine. It really didn't help his case that he used exactly the same whiny tone as he'd always had when six years old and trying to convince our mom he wasn't ready to go to bed yet.
"Um." The nurse was staring between me, Jake, and the mostly-digested spider he'd just barfed up on her desk.
I swear I'm okay.
"Look, we'll get a doctor to help you as soon as possible," the nurse said, finally pulling a Kleenex out of the box on her desk and dropping it over the spider. "But we really do need you to fill out the intake form first."
"Yeah, okay." I gave up, mostly because Jake seemed to have stopped morphing for the moment and really did sound more or less okay.
"Thank you."
It'll be fine, Jake said, like he was trying to reassure me.
"Great," I said. "Think you'll be able to demorph before the staff calls someone from the psychiatric ward to do something about the guy claiming his brother is a lizard?"
Jake sent me a mental sigh but scurried down off the desk and onto the floor, turning back into a human while I wrote down his name, age, and insurance card info. (I wasn't sure what to do with the "occupation" box so I left it blank, and the "height" and "weight" ones kept changing by the hour-that was part of our problem-so I didn't bother with those either.) There was a long list of boxes I was supposed to check off for previous conditions; I left those blank except for the one asking about allergies, where I wrote "possibly cats? (does not include tigers)."
"Oh my god." The nurse was watching Jake in wide-eyed horror. "Is it supposed to look like that?"
"Probably." I didn't look up from where I was signing the line marked "parent and/or guardian" (if anyone tried to dispute it then I'd burn that bridge when I came to it), not quite as jaded to the sheer grossness of morphing as I really wanted to be. "What's today's date?"
"The twenty-third." She was leaning around me to continue looking at Jake.
"Thanks." I pushed the form back through to her.
"If you're sure that the condition is not life-threatening...?" she asked Jake.
Jake, who was fully human and miserable-looking but not visibly dying, nodded. "I think I'm okay," he said. He sniffled and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
"That's disgusting," I said. "There are, like, forty boxes of tissues all over the room, and you still..."
He shrugged, and now he just looked even more miserable.
Sighing, I stole a box of tissues off the desk and handed it to him, followed by several of the sanitary wipes also from the desk. "You're not supposed to infect other people," I told him as I ushered him over to a plastic seat and guided him into it.
"I don't think what I've got's contagious," he mumbled. "Anyway, it definitely can't affect anyone who's not morph-capable."
"So it's just me you'd be spreading your germs to. Thanks for your concern, midget, I'm touched."
He pulled his legs up onto the seat with him and hunched forward to rest his chin on his knees. It looked kind of ridiculous to have a kid as tall as him (don't tell him I said that) smushing himself into a tiny plastic seat. He shivered, pulling his arms into himself, and I understood why he was curled so tight.
I shrugged out of my jacket and dropped it on top of him.
"'m just gonna rip it next time I morph something big," Jake said, but he was burrowing into the denim and pulling it tighter around himself.
"Too bad. Your fashion statement is offending everyone in the room," I informed him, "and it's already too late to pretend I don't know you."
While he sniffled some more and tried to doze off, I found myself glancing around the room. Sure enough, every single person there was shamelessly gawking at us. Mostly Jake-which I guess was fair, considering he'd been a lizard five minutes ago-but me as well. One little girl was whispering to her mother, pointing openly at both of us. I waved to her and she blushed, ducking behind her mother's leg.
Jake had slept late this morning, and he hadn't had much of an appetite all day, but unfortunately neither one of those things was that unusual for him. I hadn't assumed that anything was wrong until he'd started turning into a dragonfly in the middle of some ongoing argument about Latrell Sprewell.
"Eew, God, cut that out," I'd said automatically.
Jake had looked up at me with rapidly-compounding eyes from where he'd shrunk down onto the floor and whispered, I can't.
Cue me grabbing the utterly disgusting half-human half-dragonfly off the floor, sprinting to the car, and possibly breaking landspeed records on the way to the hospital.
I'd frantically demanded an explanation on our way there, and all Jake could come up with was that one time Rachel'd morphed uncontrollably for a while because she was allergic to alligators. And he had acquired the neighbor's cat's DNA yesterday...
"How can you be allergic to house cat DNA but not tiger DNA? And why the hell did you want cat DNA in the first place?" I'd demanded in the middle of running a red light.
I don't know, he said sullenly. I was just petting Mrs. Guren's cat, and then she was getting all pissy and I didn't want to get scratched, so it was the only thing that came to mind. Sorry?
"Fine." I'd sighed, torn between wanting to check on him again and not wanting to look away from the road. "I should call Cassie, then."
NO!
"Jake..."
No, I'm fine!
We'd both been distracted from the conversation when he morphed again. Straight from dragonfly to lizard. No demorphing. No passing Go. No collecting two hundred dollars.
I may have started driving even faster then.
The sneezing had started not long after that. The chills and distinctive flush to his cheeks I could see now were both new.
Great. Just great.
"Is he okay?" The elderly woman next to me was leaning around to try and get a better look at Jake.
I had the irrational urge to throw a tarp over Jake so that people would stop paying attention to him. I knew how much it sucked being sick with other people around, and how much infinitely worse it was when those other people were concerned strangers.
"Sure," I said casually. "Cat allergies. Lots of people have 'em." Okay, most people were allergic to cat dander and not cat DNA, but I wasn't getting into that distinction with some old bat in an ER.
"Oh." She was still peering at Jake's sad huddle of limbs. "How does that work with him turning into a tiger?"
Just in case there was the slightest chance in hell anyone in the room didn't know who he was. Shit.
"That's what we're here to figure out." I think I managed to sound polite-ish, but firm enough to try and head off any more questions.
"Did yeerks do it to him?"
Never mind. "No, yeerks did not give him cat allergies!" I announced, loudly enough that Jake woke up and glanced over.
"Wha' yeerks?" he asked.
"Nothing. Go back to sleep."
"'kay."
Amazingly, he did as he was told almost instantly.
"Are you sure?" The old woman leaned toward me, whispering conspiratorially. "Because I heard that they're making a comeback."
"The yeerks?" I said, like I couldn't be totally sure she wasn't talking about some boy band.
She leaned in a little closer, voice dropping even more. "They could be anywhere. And you'd never even know. Because they hide inside people's brains, so no one knows how many of them stuck around, how many are in the government right now, setting up for the second wave of the invasion-"
"Please stop talking right now before I have a paranoid freak-out in the middle of this emergency room," I said.
Mercifully, she did.
The room was silent for a few minutes except for Jake's occasional sniffles and the teenage boy three seats down from us, whose nose was bleeding and who kept coughing up even more blood into the paper cup he held. Neither he nor the girl who was there with him seemed all that concerned by this turn of events-she was playing a game on her cell phone, and he was reading a (by now thoroughly bloodied) paperback novel.
I was just pulling out my own phone to call my parents, debating whether I felt more like dealing with my mom's I'm-only-yelling-because-I'm-worried panic or my dad's hypochondria-by-proxy forty-diagnosis-long-list panic, when the young woman sitting across from us pulled out a small camera and surreptitiously snapped a picture of Jake.
"Seriously?" I said loudly. "He's a sick kid, not a museum exhibit."
She lowered the camera, looking so mortified I almost felt bad. "Sorry," she whispered. "It's just... My little sister's crazy-obsessed with the Animorphs. Wants to be one when she grows up."
I glanced over automatically, but Jake hadn't seemed to notice the flash, or my snapping at the young woman. He was drooling on my coat, and a slight scale pattern was starting to form under his skin.
"Lucky for your sister," I told the woman, "being grown up isn't actually one of the necessary qualifications for becoming an Animorph."
Her eyes widened sympathetically. She didn't say anything else.
And now I really felt bad for snapping at her. "What're you in for?" I asked.
Her smile was self-conscious. "Fell off a ladder. Think I broke my collarbone."
I was about to say something politely understanding when a nurse walked into the room-and started screaming at the top of his lungs. I whipped around to follow his gaze, hand reaching for a weapon that wasn't there as my brain frantically catalogued morphs I could use to kill whatever it was in case Jake couldn't. And then, when half the rest of the room started shrieking or pulling their legs up onto their chairs, I figured out Jake was the problem.
Apparently, the little brat had an anaconda morph.
Jake flailed awake when he fell off the chair-not surprising, considering he was now over twenty-five feet long-and I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting knocked over by his enormous tail.
What happened? he blurted.
"What do you think happened?" I said. "Think you can change back?"
Um... He sneezed, the motion sending a violent ripple all along his coils.
The other half of the room pulled their legs up onto their chairs. The older woman who had been sitting next to me was standing on the seat of hers, clutching her purse to her chest.
"He's not rabid," I told her, trying my best to sound patient. "He's not even venomous, for that matter."
Jake nodded in agreement. Judging by the expression on her face, this didn't reassure her much.
"Jake... Berenson?" the nurse asked. His voice was barely present.
Hi, Jake said. Are they ready for us? He started to slither toward the door.
The nurse nodded, looking like it was taking every ounce of willpower he possessed not to jump up on a chair along with all the patients. He held the door open and Jake slithered through.
I sighed. "Next time I don't care what he says, I'm just calling Cassie," I muttered, grabbing my coat off the chair and following him.
They led us through a huge long room filled with curtain-obscured cells, down another hallway that had doors to actual hospital rooms lining either wall, and into an exam room kind of like my dad's. People kept glancing down at Jake and hastily jumping out of the way, some with expressions of ego-protective annoyance and a few with undignified shrieks of surprise.
Sorry, Jake kept telling people. Like it was his fault he accidentally turned into a snake.
The doctor who met us in the exam room, mercifully, did not scream or even seem that put out by the fact that her patient was currently a giant snake. She just directed Jake to sit on the bed, put a warming blanket over him because apparently tropical animals weren't that well-adapted to air-conditioned hospitals, and asked about his symptoms and medical history.
After several more minutes of interrogation Jake succeeded in demorphing, at which point she took his temperature and blood pressure and asked him to spell world backwards and hop on one foot.
And then she gave up.
"I'm sorry," she said, glancing between Jake and I. "I really have no experience with this kind of alien illness. Honestly I'm not sure if I should be calling a veterinarian or an andalite technology expert or what."
"Gosh," I said slowly. "If only there was someone we knew who was trained as a vet and also an expert at morphing. Someone we could call."
Jake's head jerked up as he glared at me. "No," he said flatly. "I'm fine."
I raised an eyebrow. "You don't know that for sure, do you?"
Jake wheezed out a stuffy-sounding sigh. "It's really okay. You don't have to worry-"
"Too fucking late-"
"-and you don't have to do anything drastic."
"I'm not being drastic, you're just being stupid," I snapped before I could stop myself.
The doctor was looking back and forth between the two of us like we were a high-speed and potentially dangerous tennis match.
She might have been right about the dangerous part, because I was about two seconds away from crossing the room, grabbing Jake, and shaking him until his head fell off. I had no idea what it was between him and Cassie—Okay, well, I had more of an idea than most of the news crews who tried to interview either of them about it—but being stubborn right now was just idiotic.
Jake looked away, staring across the long row of curtained-off cubicles toward the door at the far end. "Tom…"
I exhaled slowly, trying to let go of my annoyance with the air. "Look, squirt," I said. "I'll be the one to talk to her, okay? And I promise it'll be just talk. See if she has any other advice, anyone else she thinks we should call. I won't ask her to come here unless she thinks it's really important. I promise."
"This isn't a big enough deal to..." Jake glanced over at the doctor, who was fortunately examining her clipboard in a polite show of not knowing that there was any other conversation going on in the room. "You really don't know what you're talking about," he said at last, tone almost gentle.
I shrugged. "Probably not. But there's the slight matter of you being at any moment two seconds away from involuntarily turning into a fish and then not being able to turn back before—" I pressed my lips together, not wanting to contemplate the possibility too hard. I hadn't wanted to put the idea in his head at all, but I was also running out of patience.
"Yeah, but Cassie isn't going to be able to do anything. And it's…" He hunched in on himself. His skin was starting to change colors and his hair was disappearing again, but he hadn't seemed to have noticed yet.
"Complicated?" I suggested.
He didn't laugh or respond at all other than to hunch forward a little more. Which, yeah, it wasn't that funny. A little too close to being true to be funny.
"Sorry, midget, but I'm overriding you on this one," I said.
"I—" Whatever he was going to say next got cut off when the bed under him collapsed in on itself with a scream of twisted metal.