Disclaimer: The Animorphs series and the characters therein belong to K.A. Applegate. I'm just playing in her world for a bit.
This isn't my first fic, but it is my first time posting in the Animorphs section. Comments, criticism and questions much appreciated: just drop a review and lemme know what you think!
Postcard Perfect
"You're a true patriot," Issek tells her gently. "You see justifications in everything."
It's just as well that the lab is empty for this, all the equipment cleared away and Issek's fellow scientists gone off to feed host and self. Just two Controllers in this chamber, human and Taxxon and two Yeerks with an old, shared passion.
Telrim salutes him mockingly and waves at the painting in front of them, unfazed. "Look at it, though."
Issek studies it to humour his friend. It's a painting of the Yeerk homeworld, lightening-split green skies over the barren shores of silver Sulp Niar. A few stunted trees on either shore, detailed in excellent brushwork down to the acid-pitted texture of the black and swollen bark.
"It's beautiful," he hisses with a lash of his tongue, pointed enough to be a reminder. He obviously expected her to be more appreciative. Their once-student has done a superior job with alien tools and hands, rendered an image of their beloved capital clear and vivid enough to do them proud. It's better than anything they could do. It's surely everything they've sought since they first fell in love with their senses those generations ago.
Telrim sighs and complains to her bemused host, That's just the point.
"Notice anything strange about that scene?" she asks aloud. "Out of place- odd, unusual? No?"
"It looks just as normal."
"Exactly. Just like every image in the holovids. All three of them. The same scene, same vantage point, same pool, same season and photographer. An Andalite's-eye-view. We've been there, we know there's more to it than that. Mardra shining through a gap in the clouds, packs of Gedd, runoff trenches, tracks, something different to show the place is inhabited."
Telrim sighs and spells it out for her friend. "None of us have actually seen our own world – not with eyes like these, not at all for most of the Yeerks we know. All we have to tell us what it's like are a few images – Andalite images – like pictures taken by tourists. What do they show of our world?"
"It isn't original enough for you? Or insufficiently realistic?"
"That's not quite my problem, Issek." She shakes her head. "It's hard to be original when you're stuck in other people's viewpoints. That's what worries me. The fact that when you ask a young Yeerk to depict his planet of origin, this is what he regurgitates. This one damned image is all they have to repeat to themselves. Is that right? Is that good? That this one propaganda-pandering image is all our students have of the world we spring from and fight for?"
"Be calm, Telrim. I understand your message." Issek settles back down on his rear hundred legs, eyeing the painting with fresh intensity. It's a painful thing, to think that your home may have been taken from you in ways you didn't realise.
Telrim gives a low, frustrated growl and folds her arms, leans her lower back against a workbench while she studies the picture mournfully.
"This is why we have to win this war," she repeats quietly, like the renewal of a vow. "This is why we will."