Eulogy

Disclaimer: I do not own Animorphs.

Note: So I've never had to write a eulogy before…

The memorial was to be held outside. Fortunately, it was a nice day. You could see the Pacific Ocean from the spot in the cemetary where Rachel's monument would be placed. There was an honor guard of free Hork-Bajir. Two dozen Andalite warriors stood at attention. Our friend and ally General Doubleday was there and quite a few men and women in uniform.

Jake and Marco and me and Ax. We all gave little speeches. The President of the United States was there. He gave a speech, too. I guess Rachel would have liked it, in her own way. She would have laughed. She would have thought it was all way over the top, but at the same time, she would have liked the attention. Would have, but she was just a few ounces of ash in a jar resting inside an open wooden box.

-Animorphs #54.

When my Aunt Naomi saw me arrive at Rachel's memorial service, I thought for a minute that she would attack me. It's actually the first time that I've seen her since I got her daughter killed and I wouldn't blame her. Everyone's making me out to be some sort of hero and frankly it's a little sickening. I made Rachel go on a suicide mission to kill my brother (no, not made. That's not right. No one could ever really make Rachel do anything) and all of that might have been avoided if only I'd made different choices.

It's only been two days since I watched them die and already I'm driving myself crazy thinking of all the ways that it could have been different. Of course, as much as I hate to admit it we did need Tom's Yeerk (even just thinking his name is causing my heart to seize up. I know Rachel's death was a betrayal but so was his and it feels like murder on top of that) and had I done the right thing and killed that thing then who knows where we'd be now? Caught between two callous superpowers most likely. I'm not sure if that makes it worse or not.

Tobias was likely observing the memorial service. He loves Rachel too much to miss this and I'm sure he won't have killed himself in two days, even though I'm not sure what he's going to do in the long-term. The rest of us are here, though, and have given eulogies. Tobias wouldn't have given one even had he openly attended, I don't think. His love for Rachel isn't something he'd want to share with the rest of the world.

Cassie's eulogy was sweet and touching, of course, and she started crying half-way through it. I wanted to be up there with her, my hand on her shoulder, helping her get through it but I couldn't. I should have but I can't and I don't even know why. Cassie gave the Yeerks the morphing cube that let that Controller turn into a polar bear and kill her but I thought I had forgiven her for that. The Taxxons wouldn't have allied with us if it weren't for that and my brother would have been killed weeks ago once we reclaimed the morphing cube…if I hadn't killed him myself to get it back. I had asked her to marry me and she said yes if I asked her in a year. A year. I can't even imagine. I do wonder if I will. I killed her best friend. She hasn't shown any sign of blaming me.

Marco's eulogy was surprisingly somber but then, Rachel was dead and she was one of us. He spoke of the lighter side of Rachel's personality, of how he called her Xena and her love for shopping and of their seemingly endless banter. Ax spoke of her skill as a warrior and how honored he was to serve beside her, of how much her sacrifice had meant. The President was supposed to speak soon but what can he possibly say? What does he really know of Rachel? Only the basic facts, to be sure, and that she is dead. It's a nice gesture, I suppose.

In the meantime, it's my turn. I was up all last night trying to think of what to say. What could I say? Aunt Naomi was probably right; I shouldn't even be here. And yet…how could I not? How dare I not even attend Rachel's memorial after being the one to put events into motion that led to her death? My parents, seated on either side of me, give me supportive looks as I stand and slowly make my way to the podium. At least I had them back. I wasn't sure if I had properly let them know just how much I had missed them but with any luck I would have years to let them know. I shouldn't put it off, though. You never knew what might happen.

I looked out at all the faces in the crowd. Not all of them were human and I didn't know everybody. Rachel wouldn't have known everybody but they were here to honor her and that was enough. I saw Melissa Chapman sitting near the back. It looked like she made it through more-or-less in one piece. Rachel would have been pleased. I was vaguely glad that Ax hadn't had to kill her father. I took a deep breath. "I've known Rachel my entire life. My first clear memory of her was when we were three or so and I had just gotten a brand new wagon and the two of us played with it. Of course, Rachel's idea of playing with it was her sitting in the wagon while I pulled her all around our block. Being Rachel, of course that's what ended up happening because that's just the sort of person Rachel was: the kind who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it.

"It's hard to believe looking back now, but there was once a time when Rachel did play with Barbie dolls and those girl toys that they have in Happy Meals at McDonalds. Her mom always got her the career Barbies like Doctor Barbie or Astronaut Barbie to try to set a positive example for her while her dad was always determined to avoid turning her into a girly-girly by insisting on buying her cars and trucks to play with. Well, it half-worked. Rachel never looked like she'd be out of place on a runway but you also secretly knew that she could beat you up if she wanted to." Even before the Yeerks, really, though I'd never admit it. "Rachel played with both and even managed to combine them, believe it or not. She used to line up all of her dolls and all of her cars and trucks and plot world domination. Watching her going at it, I really thought she could do it. Fortunately for the world at large, she eventually grew out of that stage.

"We played together a lot as children, though we sadly grew apart when we got older. I thought girls had cooties and she thought boys were filthy. It wasn't like Rachel minded doing any of the things that got us so muddy in the first place, she just would rather have fun and still look like she had just gotten dressed.

"All of that changed when we found out about the Yeerks. It was an accident, really," I admitted. Already I could tell that that wasn't what people wanted to hear. They wanted us to have noticed that something was wrong and investigate and get involved entirely on purpose and start kicking ass from day one. That would be unlikely in the best of cases and certainly not at thirteen. Maybe if the Yeerks caught us at thirty.

"Strange, I know, that the resistance that ended up saving the planet wasn't something that any of us really planned but there you have it. We were all normal kids, back then, and just thirteen. When I was younger, I used to worry about turning eighteen and getting drafted and now here I am, not even old enough to enlist but already the veteran of a war. I look at thirteen-year-olds now and think 'My God, they're only children. They're far too young to fight.' And yet, we were called upon and so we did." I did, in fact, have a bit of that reaction upon first seeing James' people. James' people who as far as I knew were all dead and who I really had forced into that last battle. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway and people are calling me a hero.

"It all started at the mall on a Friday night. It was just your ordinary Friday night, to be honest. I was upset that I hadn't made the basketball team at school so Marco and I were playing video games to try to take my mind off of it. Tobias ran into us when we were about to leave and didn't want to walk home alone. Then I saw Rachel and Cassie shopping and so it was the five of us going through that construction site. It was actually because of Rachel that we took that path instead of the long way around," I said thoughtfully.

"By all accounts, we really should have taken the long way. We'd have more time to talk, my parents had threatened to ground me until I was twenty if I went through the construction site, it just wasn't safe, and we were all secretly terrified of going through it at night. But Rachel had issued a challenge when she asked if we thought that she and Cassie needed 'big strong men' to protect them so what else could we do?

"None of us wanted to be caught up in the war, you know. I guess that maybe that sounds selfish but we were thirteen and terrified and convinced that we would just end up getting ourselves killed…if we were lucky," I added, almost as an afterthought. None of us had ever wanted to die but the worst part was knowing that death wasn't even the worst thing that awaited us. Torture wasn't even the worst thing that awaited us. Our worst-case scenario was something that some people had lived with for years, for decades, their entire lives. Something I had just allowed to happen to him for years on end before I had him killed. "Rachel was just as scared as we were but she wanted to do the right thing. She couldn't have just watched Elfangor be murdered and then heard about the ongoing enslavement and destruction of our species and do nothing.

"A lot of people called Rachel fearless. I know that I've done so in the past but I really don't think that was true. She had just as much fear as the rest of us, she just knew how to hide it better. Some people would say that admitting that she was afraid is admitting weakness on her part but I don't think that's true either. It's easy to face death and torture and infestation when you're not afraid. It's easy to do anything if you're fearless. It doesn't mean as much. But if you are perfectly, justifiably afraid and you do it anyway…that is courage and that's what's truly remarkable. Rachel was afraid but you'd never know it and that's what made her so strong." Rachel's apparent fearlessness wasn't always a good thing, of course, but I wasn't about to sully Rachel's memory by needlessly complicating the issue with things like Rachel's growing bloodthirstiness and the fact that we honestly had no idea how she'd cope with post-war life.

"Rachel had an opportunity to leave the war behind, you know. None of us really felt that we could ignore the war while it was going on in our hometown because, if nothing else, the invasion would keep progressing and we were all at risk." I don't want people to think that we fought the war for selfish reasons because we didn't. We didn't think we could win and we just wanted to protect people and there's nothing selfish about that. But at the same time Rachel's decision is so much more meaningful if you know about what it was like back then. "Everyone we know, everyone we loved. Once, a few short weeks into our fight, Rachel's dad decided to move out of state and he offered to take Rachel with him. It was an incredible opportunity for her. Rachel had always loved gymnastics, even if she didn't have as much time for it towards the end. Carla Belnikoff taught gymnasts who went to the Olympics and who won medals in that new town and Rachel stood a good chance of being accepted into her program. There was so much to do there and she could have flown back every weekend if she wanted to.

"She couldn't have been expected to fight a war from so far away and the Yeerks wouldn't have been her problem anymore. It was even more tempting because this had been before we had scored any major victories against the Yeerks and so it wasn't even as if her leaving seemed like it would hurt the fight against them. At that point in time we had gone to the Yeerk Pool to let the Yeerks know that we existed, which ended up leaving Tobias trapped and with only one free woman to show for it. We had learned a little more about the Yeerks but also nearly gotten an innocent girl infested. We had found Ax at the bottom of the ocean and destroyed two minor Yeerk vessels." Sometimes I don't know how we had made it through those early days when we were still learning how to fight. The situation seemed more hopeless then than it even had when we knew that the Andalites were coming to destroy us and had no plan for defeating the Yeerks. We hadn't managed anything and it was really only the thought of him that kept me going. For all the good that did.

"We had gotten the Yeerks to shut down their plan to use a hospital to infest then-governor Pete Wilson and to gain two hundred new Controllers a month by infesting all of their patients. That last one does sound impressive, I'll admit, but the Yeerks shut down that hospital more for the fear of what we'd do since we knew about it than because of anything we had actually done. We did deal major blows to the Yeerks, of course, but that came later. At the time, it seemed like her staying wouldn't hurt the Yeerks and her leaving would only give her more time before the end.

"Still, Rachel chose to stay." I still marvel at that. If I had been in Rachel's shoes and it hadn't have been for…would I have been able to do that? I'd like to think I would but, in truth, I just don't know. "She had the best opportunity any of us had ever had to walk away and she turned it down. She refused to be safe and have a normal life if it meant abandoning the people the Yeerks had stolen to their fate. She stayed and she fought all the battles and endured all the nightmares when she didn't have to because it was the right thing to do and she couldn't have done any less.

"Our first major blow to the Yeerks came with the destruction of their Kandrona, their food supply. Rachel was the one to actually figure out where that was and deal us our first real victory. If she had chosen to leave, we might never have found it and we might never have grown to be the people who ultimately brought the invasion force to its knees. The fact of the matter is that we needed Rachel and we couldn't have done it without her.

"We couldn't have saved the world without Rachel, even at the end. The end," I echoed. "The war's end, Rachel's end. We didn't know what kind of forces the Andalites were sending and if they'd win the inevitable battle between them and the Yeerks for Earth. We hoped they would but we couldn't risk it." Technically, that was true. If given a Sophie's Choice between everyone dying and everyone being infested, we would all prefer to die. Maybe it wasn't our right to decide that but it's not like we just waited around and let others decide our fate. " We needed to get things settled before the Andalites showed up. We worked everything out so we could win…everything, except one small, very vital, detail. The Yeerk who promised to work with us and who took command of the Blade Ship was lying. He wanted us dead." He was always a Yeerk but now he's the Yeerk. The one I'll never be able to forgive or forget.

"We couldn't die. It wasn't just a matter of not wanting to, the entire fate of humanity depended on us." I know that I had said that Rachel died in vain because the Blade Ship got away and to some extent I still felt that way but I couldn't bear having sent my cousin to die for nothing and so I was trying to be as objective as I could about it. "With the Pool Ship destroyed and the Blade Ship long gone, how could the Andalites possibly be expected to know that it was over?" Here's where it gets tricky. Very few people know that the Andalites were plotting genocide and we'd all like to keep it that way. Less than forty-eight hours after the Andalites stood down and already we're white-washing it. It would serve no one for the truth to come out and I don't want to needlessly antagonize them. But people deserve to know why what Rachel did mattered so much so I'll stick as close to the truth as I can.

"The Kandrona hadn't been destroyed even if the Pool had been and the Yeerks still on the planet could find a way. And even if they couldn't, were the Andalites just supposed to take our word for that? They didn't have the resources to quarantine every human they came across and the Controllers would just pretend that they weren't infested. Who knows what might have happened?" It was true that up to that point the Yeerks' reaction to seeing an Andalite was to immediately out themselves as a Controller by yelling 'Andalite' and, often, trying to attack but there must be some sensible Yeerks among the invasion.

"We had to survive. Rachel knew this. She knew that the only way one to ensure that was to take out the Yeerk who wanted us dead. It was a risk, certainly. What if one of the surviving crew members decided to kill us no matter how many Rachel could take down? We had to risk it, though, because it was our only shot and it paid off. By taking down the Yeerk who wanted us dead, Rachel saved all of us on the Pool Ship. By saving us on the Pool Ship, Rachel saved the planet. I won't lie and say that that makes it okay that she's dead. I won't even say that her sacrifice was worth it, regardless of if that's true, because that's just the sort of thing that people always say but that no one who knew the person who sacrificed themselves can ever really believe. Rachel is dead and no amount of logic or facts is ever going to make that better. But. But I do know that, without a doubt, Rachel's sacrifice saved the planet and there are worse deaths." Maybe that's the same thing as saying that it was worth it. I don't know. It doesn't feel like it's the same thing and I can't say the former but I'll freely admit the latter.

"Rachel knew she was going to die," I said bluntly. "She knew that it didn't matter how well she fought or how many Yeerks she took with her, she could not possibly hope to take out an entire crew, particularly not a morph-capable one. She knew that there was no escape for her and that she'd rather die than be captured by the Yeerks. She went anyway. She knew what it would cost her, so impossibly close to the end, and she went anyway." I wish it had been me. If I hadn't been needed as the universally recognized figurehead and if my death hadn't been such a devastating blow to morale then I would have. It would have killed my parents more than what already happened but I wouldn't have to live with this. I'm not the suicidal type and frankly I don't feel that I have a right to just throw my life away after so many, many people had theirs ripped away without their consent. Still, to have died then…that would have been okay. It would have been necessary and useful and maybe even noble.

"I suppose it might sound better to say that Rachel was perfectly willing to go and that she had no doubts. I don't think that's true but that just gets back to how much more remarkable it is that she did what she did. The truth is that Rachel didn't want to die and she fought tooth and claw to avoid it. People always talk about accepting your fate with dignity but I don't really see the appeal." If we had just accepted what everyone thought our fate was we never would have risen up against the Yeerks. Cassie told me about when she and Rachel had encountered David and he begged her to kill him. Rachel sent Cassie away before she made her decision so I don't know what she did but I think I hate David a little more for that. Yeah, maybe we made the wrong choice by not just killing him but if he wanted to die so badly then why did he have to try to put that on Rachel's conscience? Nothing was stopping him from dying from the moment we let him go. I know that ending your own life isn't easy to do but neither was what he asked of Rachel and she had to live with her choice while he obviously wouldn't have to. He never changed, did he? Never grew up.

" Rachel's sacrifice would have been horrible and wonderful all at once either way but would it have really been a sacrifice if she had been ready to die? I don't think so. I think that had she been ready for death then it still be important and we would all still owe her everything but it's so much more meaningful in that she wanted to live but chose to give that up for the sake of everything she'd been fighting for." Cassie said that David had accepted his fate with dignity but I disagree. If dying was his endgame then he was hardly 'accepting' anything, now was he?

"When I told Rachel what I needed her to do, she didn't blame me." That might be the worst part and why I almost need Tobias and Rachel's family to blame me. I can't have done something so terrible to them and be forgiven. I just can't. I wondered, vaguely, if Rachel knew what her forgiveness would do to me and it was calculated to torture me from beyond the grave. I dismissed that thought. Rachel wasn't that kind of a person. Now Marco, Marco was exactly that kind of a person but Rachel wasn't exactly the subtle type.

"She knew that by doing what I'd asked, she would get herself killed and even her initial reaction was not to blame me. You know what she told me? She told me not to blame myself. Here I was ordering her to die and she was worried about me. She didn't tell anyone else that she was leaving either because she didn't want them to blame themselves for not being able to stop her. That is just so unbelievably selfless of her that I'm humbled by it."

"It's hard to believe that she's gone because Rachel was just so full of life. She was always on the move, always doing something. She was so very passionate and never held back, never hesitated." That wasn't always a good thing but it was Rachel and in the end it was what we needed. "She was more alive than anybody I've ever known and she's gone. She's gone. But, and I do hate to end on a cliché, I can't help but feel like she'll never be truly gone as long as she still has all of us who loved her and as long as the legacy of her sacrifice carries on."

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