Spoilers for #54. Post-war AU, much angst. Rated PG-13/T just to be on the safe side.


He was never quite right again after the war.

He saw Marco, sometimes. Talked a bit, tried to forget, tried to go back to what they'd had before, but it was never quite right.

Cassie had moved on in a way he could never bring himself to. Sometimes he would sit by the phone for hours on end, picking up the receiver, putting it down. Picking it up, dialing her number, hanging up again before it could ring.

Then it had shown up in his mail. Not the fan mail, or the junk mail, or the mail from the press begging for an interview with the One Who Saved Us All. It had come in the real mail, the mail that was only from people he knew, people he treasured, even if he couldn't bear to see them anymore. He never got anything in the real mail, though. Even if Marco planned ahead enough to arrange something ahead of time, he would email, or get a secretary to email. He wouldn't bother writing letters. Tobias and Rachel and Tom, gone. His parents called, not wrote, but he never picked up anyway. Ax was back on his own planet, with his own Andalite ship and Andalite crew. And Cassie, well.

But not quite four years after the end of the war – one thousand, three hundred, and fifty-nine days, but who was counting? – a letter came. Heavy, with thick, fancy paper and his name stenciled in neat calligraphy on the front. He stared at it for a long time, because even though he didn't know what it was, he could guess.

Then he'd ripped it open, just gotten it over with. Pulled out the card and read the front and felt like his heart was dying all over again.

He didn't go. The media had a field day at that, but he didn't go. Couldn't. Couldn't bear to see Cassie so beautiful, dressed in white, walking down the aisle with a bouquet of flowers to say her vows to a man who wasn't him. It was on every station, every channel, that whole week, and he spent that whole week holed up inside his horribly large, empty house, pacing and moping and trying not to hurl.

A week after that he was somewhere else.

He didn't tell anyone where he was going. Didn't tell Marco, or his parents, and definitely didn't tell Cassie.

The day before the wedding he had looked up local offices. Gone down, filled out a form, handed it to the clerk.

The guy's eyes had widened as he saw the name. He made some calls, his superiors made some calls, all the way up to the head honchos over in Washington.

They had offered him a head start, said he didn't have to go through boot camp, given him a position as Major. He said no.

He didn't want to be the leader anymore. Didn't want to be making the decisions and the hard calls, didn't want to be in charge.

He wanted to know what it was like to be a real soldier, he told them. The underlings, the ones who wallowed in the mud and put themselves in the line of enemy fire. One of many. Not one of six. Never again.

But he wanted to do it under a different name. He didn't want to stand out. So they agreed to enlist him as Private Fitzhenry. It was his own, quiet little tribute to his distant relative from the Civil War.

They also agreed to speed him through bootcamp. Just the basics: guns, survival, first aid. Not many people recognized him, somehow. He kept his face down, his cap low, but it was still an accomplishment. By the time he was through training the media had burned through all the material they had on his "disappearance" and then had returned to other things. He hadn't heard anything from anyone – not Marco, not Cassie, not his parents – but he did make sure to leave his parents' address along with his faked identity when he received his deployment assignment, just in case.

And then two weeks later he was crouched in a ditch, a rifle clenched in his hand and enemy fire streaking over him and he felt his heart pounding and that amazing rush of adrenaline flooding through him and he wanted to laugh and cry and throw up all at the same time.

Because he was human, not tiger, and the people crouched around him were soldiers, not his friends, and he was fighting with a gun in his hands instead of teeth and claws. And the opposition was human, not Hork-Bajir or Taxxon or Yeerk, and they used bullets, not Dracon beams.

But it was all the same because war was all the same. And he was so, so happy, happier than he had been in years, because he realized now that he had missed this. Rachel may have been the wild one, the warrior, but Jake – Jake was different. Jake was a soldier.

All that time as an Animorph, he thought he had been fighting because he had no other choice. But he loved it, and he had missed it, and it was good to be home.


A/N - And yes, I am very into the idea that Jake should have joined the army. Why do you ask? ^_^