More Commitments

WARNING WARNING WARNING:  This should be rated R.  I put it as PG-13 because I found out that R stories don't show up unless you ask it to.  I don't write these stories to just sit and get dusty on people's hard drives.  I spent all yesterday wondering why my story wouldn't show up on the site.  Now, I just feel stupid.

A/N: I think there are two curse words in the whole thing. At first, it is very depressing. (Okay, maybe the first few chapters.J) I have a feeling this is going to be really, really long. I still have three more Animorphs to go through. This will tie in with Forgotten Commitments but it is NOT another chapter. I am going to use this story to finish the other. Is that against the rules? I hope not…

Disclaimer of a different sort: As some of you may know, I refuse to read the last four books. Homicide is not one of my hobbies... (That means you, K.A.)

Cassie

I was twenty-five. I was living in what looked like a tenement building from the first of the twentieth century. I guess things were going downhill in the early twenty-first. I had a bedroom and a microwave. The world was in chaos. The Animorphs helped create it. After Rachel's death, we went public. It didn't last long. We soon found our home town destroyed and nearly everyone killed or infested. It didn't take long for the media to get over us. Every once and a while, we would hear of military action on the invaders.

This is what had happened to me. One day, out of some telepathic whimsical message, we slowly morphed into our bird forms and snuck away. Even Tobias left, leaving his mom with her amnesia. We left our parents, Rachel's family, and the newly recruited Animorphs. We left the Hork-Bajir and our families to their own devices. Our survival couldn't depend on them. We decided we couldn't look after them and ourselves. If you think about it, I was the only one with a family. Jake's family never made it to the valley. Rachel left her family behind. Marco's Dad fell into a deep depression from the fact that his first love had been tortured for three years but was alive and he didn't do anything about it. Loren couldn't see herself as a mother. She couldn't remember giving birth to a son or the father that conceived him. Tobias never got through to her and finally gave up.

We relocated to New York City. Soon, we were doing missions again. We found a chapter of the Sharing in some old, run-down neighborhood. We tried not to kill people but it was inevitable. We gave up trying to be innocent. We burned down buildings with people inside. We put a small bomb in a yeerk pool. I also remember destroying a subway station that was leading people to infestation. Our meetings took place in an abandoned building. We kind of lived there too. We stole blankets and clothes from various places. Marco told me he once took a blanket off a baby's car seat as the mother was putting it in the car. One horrifying day, Jake came in with the most evil grin. He was only eighteen at the time, but there were gray hairs appearing. Anyway, he proceeded to tell me how, in falcon form, he broke through the window of a convenience store and blinded the clerk. He stole maybe a hundred dollars.

Our state of mind was at the breaking point. Even more so was Tobias, who was slowly going insane. In his bird form, he was aging pretty fast. He couldn't fly for more than five minutes. He was always asking one of us to get mice for him. When he morphed to human, he was still fourteen/fifteenish. However, we were quickly nearing our twenties. His face didn't age. It retained a youthful look, like he had never experienced war. The only thing you could see was his eyes. They had turned aquamarine and they were elliptical like a cat's eye. As a human, he was telepathic, more so than anyone. I think he could look into our minds and see what we were thinking. Several times, I was alone with him and talking with him and within minutes I would get a headache. I once saw Jake and him talking. Jake suddenly collapsed and was scratching all over his body. He was screaming about the yeerk that had once infested him. He was shouting, "Get me out of the pool! It's crawling in my ear!" I screamed at Tobias and Jake stopped convulsing. Jake didn't remember a thing.

I guess being part Andalite (with their telepathic abilities) and part human (with our frail psyches) and part hawk (with its pure instinctual predator mind), Tobias couldn't identify with any one species. Some days, he would be more Andalite, and couldn't do simple things like speaking without stuttering. Sometimes, he was more human. He would talk with you for hours. He once told me he had kissed Rachel. Then, the most frightening thing was when he was in the hawk mindset. That was when he unleashed his mental powers. Like a hawk goes after mice, he would go after one of us. That's what happened to Jake that one time. Tobias started walking over to him. Jake said, "Hi," and that was it. He also told me on his good days that Rachel always begged him to become human and he couldn't do it. Losing her was obviously the biggest blow to his psyche.

It was our first and only yeerk pool mission where our lives really went downhill. There were four entrances to the yeerk pool. There were two from Madison Square Garden, one from the Empire State Building, and one from the World Trade Center. Jake and I went to the WTC. Tobias and Marco went to the Madison Square Garden. Ax was assigned to the Empire State Building. We each had a bomb. We were going to set a bomb off at the base of each entrance. The bombs were like the ones in the movies with a timer. We would stick to our bird morphs. We had an hour and a half. The first half hour was Ax's job. He would go to the power station and shut off power to that part of the city, thereby turning off the bio-filters. We had approximately a ten-minute window before back-up generators came on-line. I didn't know how Ax was going to get in before the bio-filters came on-line, but Jake Okayed the idea.

Jake was also deteriorating. He stilled loved me, but in a very formal way. He felt he had to love me. It was like it was set in stone and he was a slave to its words. I didn't know how to tell him this. I didn't know how to tell him that we could get along without each other. Any real love between us was shattered back in the valley. We kissed occasionally. Sometimes we even had sex. Sometimes I thought that if I allowed him access to my body he would love me again.

Even though I had the presence of my friends, I was utterly alone. I didn't think about my parents. They were dead as far as I was concerned. I had no family. I was nameless and faceless in the big city. If I were to go away or die, nobody would care. During missions, I stopped responding to the moral crises that flooded my mind. I sat awake at night wondering where the rules of ethics and morality came from. I had learned in school that we were descended from apes. Apes aren't like us mentally. They are just like any other animal. They kill for food. They kill each other. They kill for stupid things too, like territory or females. How did the human race go from killing to sharing? Even today, people kill each other over territory and lovers.

So, who cares if I kill a few people? The cops don't care who it is I kill. What about stealing? Thousands of years ago, all these resources were all out in the open ready to take as one pleases. Why is it wrong to take them now? Oh, here's a good one: victimless crimes. Why can't I get an assisted suicide, ruin my mind and body with drugs, or prostitute myself for some extra cash. I knew these things were wrong, but why were these things wrong?

Enough about me, maybe I should move on to Marco. He had exchanged his endless wisecracks for endless strings of curse words. They used to sting my ears. However, as time moved on, I would be using the same endless strings. I remember that in the beginning he used to sing silly songs. Jake told me about an e-mail Marco sent him. He was pretending to be me and he said something to the effect of, "I want you! Baby, oh, baby!" I remember the long hair he had a long time ago that added to his humorous look. He also had a big grin on his face all the time. He was always hitting on girls to no avail. Now, he stole cash from various places and hired hookers. I once tried to tell him about the dangers of sex with strangers but he screamed at me saying, "If you can sleep with a bastard like Jake, then I think I am entitled to a few whores!" We never spoke again.

Now for the mission that really sent us spinning. We would stay in our bird forms, and wait for the power outage. We waited for forty minutes. Angrily, we flew toward our spot. We found the hole and entered. Nobody was in our way. Jake was spitting out curse words, wishing it was a machine gun. I was flying along and noticed that Jake wasn't there. I turned around and noticed the bomb teetering down the steps to the pool. Jake had diverted from the plan.

I couldn't see him anywhere. I figured he had run so I turned around and exited. I was halfway down when I had to turn around. I finally got to the exit and got through to the outside world. I still didn't see any sign of Jake. However, I saw something even more horrifying. I looked and saw an airplane. It was extremely close to the ground. It didn't take long to hear a crash or to see the shards of glass snowing down on me. I struggled through the mess and found a place to demorph. When I got my human eyes back I looked up. I was maybe five blocks away and all I could see was a cloud of dust. The WTC was falling down. . .

A/N I said it that this is the mission that sent them spinning. What did I mean? You will have to wait until the next chapter…….