A/N: I've been trying to write about Priton for a very long time. He has to be my most enduring original character of all time. He's been around since I was in fifth grade, writing fan fiction, though I didn't know that's what it was called. Seven years later, this is my attempt at writing a story for him.

Technically speaking, it's only a fic about a Yeerk. Not really about the Animorphs themselves, though they're mentioned.

So, yeah. Hopefully it's all right. Read and review. Tell me what you think. I'll try not to be too hurt if you don't like it, promise. ;-)

Disclaimer: I don't own the Animorphs, Yeerks, etc. PLEASE DON'T SUE ME!

Prologue

My name is Priton Six-Two-Four.

"Traitor! Hypocrite!"

It's been a full year since I last saw her, but her words still run through my mind late at night when Nick, my host, isn't awake to distract me, when the silence is as deafening as her shouts were that day.

"You're no better than the rest of your kind."

I used to be a traitor. I was almost the Yeerk equivalent of a terrorist. Or at least, that's where it led. I opposed the war. I had a host body, a girl named Jenny, who I came to look at in a way no sane Yeerk should ever look at his host. Not if he wants retain his sanity, anyway.

"After everything you go back to… to… this!"

She was my host for three long years. At the end of those three years I let her go. I freed her, and abandoned myself to the little world of my Yeerk pool, and tried to forget. I would have done anything to forget.

That was about two years ago. We were being attacked all the time by what we thought was a group of Andalites who had survived the last space battle above Earth. We knew now that they were really humans—teenagers, even. The same age now as Jenny was when I infested her.

It was six months after I freed Jenny that I took a new host.

In my attempts to forget, I abandoned my old ideas and embraced—or tried to embrace, I never did quite get rid of a few pangs of guilt—the ideas that the empire had been feeding us for our entire lives.

His name was Nick. He was twenty, the same age as Jenny would be then. He wasn't exactly voluntary, but we got used to each other. I had never been quite comfortable with myself and what I was, and sometimes being on better terms with my host made it easier.

A lot of times, though, it made it so much harder.

"I loved you. But that doesn't mean anything to you, does it?"

It meant the world. But I couldn't tell her that.

I rose up in the ranks. I pushed my past out of my mind, tried to forget it had ever happened. There were Yeerks who knew. But they couldn't say anything without implicating themselves. And they were afraid of what I knew about them, too.

I went looking for her. I wanted to see her. I wanted to see her without having to be inside her, looking into a mirror. I wanted to see her like any normal man saw a woman.

But I wasn't a man. It didn't matter how many hosts I took or what I made myself out to be, I would never be a man.

And she hated me now for what I had turned into. So what else did I have left?

But things could change.

We had the morphing cube.

The first time I saw it, I could only stare. Freedom lay in that little box. Touch it, and I could be anything I wanted. Anything.

I didn't have to be Priton the Traitor. Priton the Hypocrite. I didn't even have to be Priton the High-Ranking Yeerk.

I could be anything. And who would know?