The Ghost Of You, an animorphs fanfic

Author's Note: This is my first ever Animorphs fan fiction. It is sometime after the suicide mission in 'The Beginning' but before Jake and company go off into space to look for Kelbrids. I think it makes most sense after Rachel's funeral, when Tobias takes her ashes, that's what made me start thinking this up. Please read and review but be kind, I have never written anything Animorph related before!

Disclaimer: the Animorphs belong to K.A.Applegate. The song is 'The Ghost Of You' by My Chemical Romance. I don't own either.

I never said I'd lie in wait forever
If I died we'd be together
I can't always just forget her
But she could try

She's gone.

It's almost impossible to believe. Rachel. Dead. Not possible. Not our Rachel, not my Rachel. Not Rachel who laughed at death. Not Rachel with the 'old standbys – force and surprise'. Not Rachel of the immortal line 'let's do it'. Not Rachel who soared as an eagle, who played hell as a grizzly bear, who trumpeted as an elephant. Not Rachel who shone as herself.

Not Rachel who loved me. Not Rachel whom I loved.

But she is dead. She's gone, cut down by that bastard polar bear-morphed Yeerk. She went out fighting, a warrior princess. No, more than that. I won't insult her calling her a princess. She was a goddess – Rachel, my beautiful goddess of war.

She was everything and more to me. She was a flash of sapphire eyes, a gleam of gold hair, a spark of cunning, an inferno of passion. Rachel could never do anything by halves. She was a fighter all the way. She was brave all the way, committed all the way. She felt everything with everything she had. She hated Visser One, formerly Three, our long-time enemy – my father's murderer – with all her soul. I guess she loved me with all her soul, too.

I did. She made my world my world. She made my sun shine and my thermals soar. And I can't understand how everything is still here, still as bright as it ever was, without her in it. Why doesn't everything have a huge cold void at it's heart, like I do?

I never thought about how my world would be without her. I never thought about how I'd be able to cope with my insane life without her to ground me, to keep me connected, to help me remember all that's best and deepest about life. Maybe that's because for three years, our lives have been so wild, so dangerous that it became impossible to plan or think ahead. We went into this war as children and came out of it painfully adult. And unlike most children involved in a war, we didn't just live through it: we lived it. We lived it and we fought it and it became our war. We fought as guerrillas, secretly, secretly, and we carried all that tension and that fear and that danger for three years. And still through it all, I still loved her.

Would we have fallen in love without the war? I don't know. But while I always wanted the war to end as soon as possible, now I find myself wishing desperately that Jake never found the way to end it.

Six of us left the valley we called home that day. Five of us came back.

There is so much I need to tell her. So much I never told her. I'm sitting in my meadow, a place that seemed like home to me for a while, and it's almost like it was in those days, when I'd wait for her to leave school and come running to me, face alight with love. And we'd soar as hawk and eagle, flying companions. Then we'd dive to earth and become human. And then, with giddy delight, she'd kiss me and for a while, we could forget our war, like soldiers on leave.

God knows I wanted something more than that. This feels kind of embarrassing to admit, but what I really wanted was for the war to be over, and then I could turn nothlit in human form. I'd rejoin the race I was born in, and Rachel and I … well, we'd get married and have kids. Never feeling the freedom of the bird kingdom again would be hard, but then I'd have the freedom of loving Rachel.

All I ever wanted was to be with her.

Now all my purpose is gone. The war is over, so I can't be a warrior. Ax, my father's brother, will return to his home world. I could go with him, but I'm not an Andalite, not really. I don't crave the spotlight of fame like Marco. I'm not Earth's universal hero like Jake. I couldn't use this fame to help the world like Cassie. I don't want anything except for Rachel.

If she was with me, I could enjoy this. We all could. We'd laugh and breeze our way through and she would be the world's greatest heroine. But she's gone forever, now. I feel like a huge part of my soul's been ripped out of my body and cremated with her.

She's never coming home to me. She'll never smile at me. She'll never kiss me or hold me or tell me how she feels or love me as me. All I want is to be with her.

I want to die and meet her in heaven where she will be honoured as the angel she is. I don't want to live in a world without my angel. If dying is what it takes to be with her forever then I want to die.

I can't live without her. That sounds so corny and clichéd but it's true. She saved me from myself, the Yeerks, Taylor, Visser One/Three, and on one memorable occasion from dinosaurs. She was my fierce, joyful, passionate, warrior guardian angel. Her ghost is all I have left now and it's going to haunt my dreams forever. Now when I sleep, it'll be her face, her voice, her laugh, her smile tormenting me, not Taylor's.

Get the feeling that you're never
All alone and I remember now
At the top of my lungs
In my arms she dies, she dies

That day, that terrible, terrible day keeps replaying in my mind. Over and over. I can remember it all in perfect detail, every moment of my slow but headlong descent into hell. Coming home and her not being there. Beginning our last-ditch attack without her. Finally realising what had happened. Why she wasn't there. Why she didn't come back – would never come back.

The terrible, crushing reality of what Jake sent her to do.

He sent his cousin to kill his brother and die trying. He may not have meant to, but when he spoke that one word – "Go," – he locked my mind and threw away the key. Jake signed Rachel's death warrant without ever putting pen to paper. He made a request that she would never in a million years have refused. Rachel could never have refused to help her friends, to hurt the Yeerks, or to die for a cause or a person.

Why is she dead? How could fate take away someone like her? The world needs Rachel. I need Rachel. Why couldn't I have died instead? If I could have, if she'd told me, I would have without hesitation laid down my life in exchange for hers.

But knowing her as I do, that is exactly why she never told me. For three years of sheer bloody insanity, Rachel has tried her damnedest to protect me. At the final showdown, the denouement of our epic battle, there was no way she could undo all that. Instead she died for me and for all of us, and in doing so, severed the last link in the chain of my sanity.

I just can't deal with it. My one and my only, my love, my soul mate, my flying partner, my Rachel is gone and nothing can ever be all right again. I can never deal with it. I can never get over it. I can never move on. She is my past, my present and my future. The anchor holding me to humanity. Without her, I may just float off into the distance and retreat into my red-tail mind. Without her, I have no reason not to.

I can't picture any life for myself without her. From here on out my life can only be defined by her absence.

There is a cave where my heart should be and a black hole in my mind. A black hole of hatred and sorrow and anger that threatens to consume my soul.

At the end of the world or the last thing I see
You are never coming home
Never coming home
Could I? Should I?
And all the things that you never ever told me
And all the smiles that are ever gonna haunt me
Never coming home, never coming home
Could I? Should I?
And all the wounds that are ever gonna scar me
For all the ghosts that are never gonna catch me
If I fall … If I fall … down

Do I hate Jake? I don't know. I could. I could well hate him. I used to. I used to hate him with a terrifying passion. But that faded into pure love and grief for his cousin. All I want is for my feelings for Rachel to remain untainted by hatred. I can't love her while I hate Jake. But in a funny way, I want to hate him. Hate is a very powerful emotion, like love. Love kept me sane and human while I lived in 3-D, Technicolor hell. Maybe hate could do the same for me in the new, colourless hell I live in. But really, it doesn't. Hate kills you slowly. It makes you rot slowly from the inside out.

So I cannot hate. My love is out of reach forever. I have nothing left to live for, but death. If I die we'll be together. Those words keep repeating in my mind and I wonder: would it be so hard? To morph Andalite, for example, and use my tail-blade on myself, knowing that I would see her after it was done? I could do that, surely.

But I can't. I have tried, but I lack the nerve. I can't go through with it. I have the courage to fight to the death against any but my own grief and pain. So I must live on, bearing always Rachel's legacy of bittersweet adoration. But love and grief and despair and the rest of them are human emotions. Red-tailed hawks don't know love or loss. So I will lose myself, lose Tobias, in the mind of this red-tail. I am just looking for simplicity. I want life to be about kill or be killed again. The simplicity of danger and the brutality of animal life will be my release.

But inside, my heart still sobs and bleeds and screams for her.

At the end of the world or the last thing I see
You are never coming home, never coming home
Never coming home, never coming home
And all the things that you never ever told me
And all the smiles that are ever gonna haunt me
Never coming home, never coming home
Could I? Should I?
And all the wounds that are ever gonna scar me
For all the ghosts that are never gonna…

Dedicated to Helena and Damon. All the things you never ever told me...