Jordan walked down the hill from the library, balancing on a narrow strip of concrete beside the highway. Weehawken was impossible to get out of. Anyway, it wasn't like he was looking for Tobias…Gah. He wished he had, if he had he wouldn't have made such a huge fool of himself! That hadn't been the way he wanted it to go at all, he had just been thinking of what he would say if he ever met Tobias if he met him, and there was so much that it had all poured out of him. He cursed inwardly, kicking a stone hard into the street. He had been fifteen when the world had found about the Yeerks. Before that, he was just a pretty normal kid. He went to Stuyvesant, one of the best high schools in the country, something he was very proud of at the time. He was smart, but he didn't do anything in most of his classes preferring instead to hang out with his numerous friends. He detested sports. But then the Yeerks had come, and his world had been flipped upside-down. Of course, so was everyone's. He supposed there were a great many children who had returned home, happy, to find their parents aiming what he now knew were dracon beams at them. But he didn't think many had, when confronted with the large slug, floating in his fish tank near the remains of his goldfish, had kicked his mother's legs out from under her, grabbed her dracon beam, vaporized his father's head, and run, stopping only to grab his ferret Elliot from his cage.
He reached the water, paid two dollars for a ticket, and got on the ferry, slumping down in his seat, his head in his hands. He had thought that he was a murderer until he read about the Animorphs. Who knew how many lives they had taken, but they were still… Heroes. It had made him think, maybe, it was alright what he had done. And Tobias… he was alone, too, just like Jordan was after that.
Tobias flapped his wings hard, as grateful for them now as he had ever been. You would never have known it looking at him, he knew, but back when he had been human, he had loved running. When his aunt had refused to let him go to school, sending him out for groceries, or when his uncle had hit him, he would run as far and as fast as he could, dreaming in his head of never going back. He would run as long as he could, until he was near collapsing. Then he would make his way back, ready to be humble and deal with them again. But there was something about flying, hard and fast, wings straining against the wind, that was far better than those runs. If he were to collapse, there would be a much farther way to fall. And now, he really could leave. There was nothing to left to leave behind; he'd already lost all that mattered. His wings aching, he landed on a power cable pillar, talons digging into the familiar grooves. He scanned his scrawny meadow, noticing with distaste the yellowed grass, abandoned cigarette butts. He over looked the Lincoln tunnel too, a steady stream of cars lining up to drive to the city. Silly. He could just fly.
He was angry. Who was that guy to talk about what he'd… what had happened to… but he was too tired to think about it, and besides, hawks don't cry. Hawks can't.
And Tobias had been a hawk for a long time.