NOTE: This is the last of the info-dumps, I PROMISE. Like I said, I just wanted to set the stage. Also, I've tried to keep it vague as not to spoil anyone who hasn't read the Animorphs books. WARNING: Gets a little dark with mentions of all the things Rachel went through.
But I also want to thank everyone who's read and reviewed so far, for both this story and the plot bunny before it. Between FFN and AO3, and listed in no particular order, I want to thank: Anifan1/Animorphgirl, Gryphinwyrm7, Nomolosk, LotusWolf, SoloMoon, yellow 14, KatoGS123, ThrawnCA, The Keeper of Worlds, flairina, Alyce Reide, rosetrang628, Angelwings2002, and Pesterfield for reviewing! And thanks to everyone else for following, favoriting and leaving kudos!
CHAPTER 4: That Which Came Before, Part 3
On the top floor of the prestigious hotel known as Le Grande Paris, Chloé Bourgeois smiled as she exited the chat program and powered down her computer for the night. She had already called Marinette and texted Adrien, and there wasn't much else to do before it was time to get to bed before she got up early the following morning for the first day of school. Her eyes wandered around the room, taking in the various objects from the beautiful calligraphy kit on her desk to the punching bag hanging from the ceiling in one corner of her room, the latter accompanied by a stack of books and DVDs on self-defense. In the past few years since her little "epiphany," she realized that she wanted to make the most out of life and try lots of new things.
Chloé Bourgeois herself was many things. She was the heiress to the Bourgeois family fortune. She was the daughter of the mayor of Paris, Andre Bourgeois. She was also the daughter of the head of Style Queen magazine, Audrey Bourgeois (although the girl secretly wished she didn't have someone like that witch for a mother). She was a strong-spirited teenage girl, one who loved action and excitement, and even practiced fencing and martial arts, because she insisted that the mayor's daughter should know how to defend herself (although it was also really because she was a not-so-secret adrenaline junkie).
But there was another side to her no one ever saw, a side that she could never let anyone else see.
The side of her which was the soul or spirit or whatever-it-was of a fallen hero from another world.
It was only a few years ago when the girl known as Chloé Bourgeois remembered what could only be described as her past life — from what had to be another universe.
Her life as a girl named Rachel Berenson.
Even now, she still remembered that night in another life so vividly. Just another Friday night at the mall in their town in southern California. Rachel had dragged her best friend Cassie into shopping, and on the way out, they'd met up with Rachel's cousin Jake, his best friend Marco, and the relative new kid in town Tobias.
Their decision to take a shortcut home through that abandoned construction site would change everything. None of them could have counted on that alien spaceship landing right in front of them, or the injured and dying alien stumbling out of it right in front of them.
That alien's name was Elfangor, and he identified himself as part of a race known as Andalites… and then he warned them about the Yeerks, who had already begun to invade Earth for the past few years through a stealth invasion. Slowly but surely, the slug-like Yeerks would capture unsuspecting humans and use them as hosts, controlling their bodies from the brain and leaving the hosts as virtual prisoners in their own heads. And because they were so well-hidden, anyone could be a Controller.
The Yeerks had already enslaved various other species, and now they had set their sights on the human race, what with its population back then still approaching the six billion mark.
But before his time was up, Elfangor gave them all the power to morph — the power to transform into any animal they touched.
They ran and hid before any Yeerk attack craft could land, and they stayed long enough to witness Elfangor's gruesome demise at the hands of the Yeerk commander designated Visser Three. They were lucky to escape without being caught.
This group of resistors who were given the power to "morph" into any animal they touched, and thus called themselves Animorphs — a clever portmanteau of "animal morphers."
And not long after that, they found another Andalite, one trapped at the bottom of the ocean following the same disastrous battle in Earth's orbit which Elfangor and the other Andalites lost. His name was Aximili — the Animorphs called him "Ax" for short — and he turned out to be Elfangor's younger brother. It was now six of them against an alien empire.
And they fought for three years. Only towards the end, after so many setbacks and the change in leadership, the Yeerks became desperate enough to dispense with the stealth invasion and opt for open warfare.
And it was Rachel who fell in the final battle. Doing one last mission, something which only she could do. A grim and terrible task on the orders of her cousin Jake.
That was her previous life. And as for this life…
A week or so after her twelfth birthday, Chloé had woken up screaming in the middle of the night, her head filled with images and memories of that war against the Yeerks. It had taken several minutes, but she finally remembered everything. Not only that, but she felt different too, now taking in her surroundings with what felt like different eyes and a different mind behind those eyes. No, now she felt like Rachel again.
This had led to confusion and anger, wondering what the hell she was doing there, before she also remembered her current life. Just to drive that point home, she'd even looked in the mirror and saw a different face staring back at her. She was still a blue-eyed blonde, but even that wasn't really the same anymore. Now she had slightly brighter blonde hair, eyes just a slightly deeper shade of blue, and a rounder face as well as a somewhat different body structure… and now she was in the body of a girl who had just turned twelve years old instead of the body of a girl just shy of seventeen.
And then she realized that she'd had "flashes" of past memories along the way all this time, but she'd simply dismissed them as thoughts or daydreams spawned by an overactive imagination. But now she reckoned that it must have been her old self shining through.
That first day of remembering everything as Rachel the Animorph was rough for her. She was so off her game, and everyone noticed. Oh, she still certainly remembered how to be Chloé, with everything from speaking perfect French to knowing and remembering everyone in her life, but for the first time she felt like Rachel again. But she felt like "Rachel" was buried underneath and "Chloé" was built on top of that.
She was still friends with other kids like Adrien and Marinette, but she still missed her friends and teammates from her other life.
The other five Animorphs… she wondered how they would have made out after winning the war against the Yeerks and surviving. To say nothing of her own family, her mother Naomi and her father Daniel and her two little sisters Jordan and Sara. They would have all been devastated. Rachel just wished she could have said goodbye to all of them, at the very least. Her heart broke at the thought of all of them and what they must have gone through after the war was over.
Speaking of the Yeerk invasion… there was no indication that it had ever happened here.
After discreetly doing some online searches from a public computer in a library after school (no way was she leaving such clues to her search history on her own personal computer!), she found no trace of that war or any of the other alien species she'd interacted with. No Andalites, no Yeerks, no Hork-Bajir or Taxxons or Gedds or any of those other alien races… nothing. She'd punched in every species name and individual name she could think of… and got nothing. She'd looked up The Sharing (the Yeerks' sham of a community outreach organization to convince unsuspecting humans to join them) and all the dummy corporations whose names she could still remember… and still got nothing. Aside from what she'd fought and witnessed as an Animorph, it seemed like human history was pretty much identical up to the year 2000.
Unless this was all some kind of elaborate hoax, she could only conclude that she'd somehow ended up in a completely different universe.
She'd even tried morphing again, once she was alone in her bedroom with the doors shut and windows concealed. Of course it didn't work; her powers didn't carry over from that life into this life. This body, the one belonging to the girl known to the world as Chloé Bourgeois, had never come into contact with the Andalite morphing technology and had never acquired the DNA of other living beings. Still, she figured it had been worth a shot…
Later that night, after that first day of wandering around and feeling like a stranger lost in a strange land, she'd wandered out onto her balcony in the middle of a thunderstorm and screamed at the sky. She raged and howled at this bizarre and unexplainable turn of events, demanding that the Ellimist show himself and give some kind of explanation. She'd finally broken down crying, begging any higher power that would listen to her to send her back. With no explanation or intervention forthcoming, she'd trudged back inside, dried herself off, and tried to get some sleep.
She paid the price for her recklessness by getting sick from the rainstorm. She spent the rest of the school week sick in bed, suffering from fevered dreams.
For those first few weeks, she'd had such horrible nightmares, but those few days sick and bedridden were the absolute worst. At first it was just memories from the horrors she'd endured in that past life, but then it mutated into nightmares which somehow combined aspects of both lives. Oh, the nightmares…
She dreamed of the other five Animorphs judging her guilty like grim-faced judges at a tribunal, for crimes ranging from monstrous brutality to simply abandoning them in favor of her friends in this world, and then "punishing" her by stranding her on a remote island like they did to David the traitor.
She dreamed of her cousin Tom, her cousin Jake's older brother and a Controller for almost the entirety of the invasion, coming back to haunt her as a revenant and demanding vengeance for Rachel's role in his fate after they were unable to save him.
She dreamed of Yeerk warships in the skies over Paris, burning entire city blocks while Controllers of various alien species ran wild across the world-famous city. (Sometimes she also dreamed of the Andalites finally arriving at Earth, only to "save" the planet by decimating it so that the Yeerks couldn't get anything out of it.)
She dreamed of the Yeerks attempting another stealth invasion, just like last time; sometimes she dreamed that the Yeerks got to her friends like Adrien and Marinette first and then used them to pursue her, and other times she even dreamed that the Yeerks got to her first and then used her as a puppet to infest or kill them instead…
Marinette and Adrien were two of the sweetest, nicest people she'd ever met — in either life — and the thought of them being subjected to such inhumanity was enough to make her want to weep. She had literally woken up crying when she first dreamed of things like that.
She felt torn between two worlds, even if she was firmly planted in this one with no apparent way of returning to the other one. It hurt beyond words, to know how she was separated from her family, her friends, her teammates and allies… to know that she most likely would never see them again. And all she had were all these memories and experience which didn't seem to do her any good now.
But in time the bad dreams began to fade, and sometimes she even got to dream about the few good times she'd had as an Animorph, like when she went flying with Tobias. For her, it was the occasional light in the darkness.
Rachel often wondered if this was some kind of dream or maybe an elaborate hoax, but as time went on, it was just too real. Neither the Ellimist nor his cosmic rival Crayak had ever turned up, and so life as Chloé simply… continued.
So what was she doing here, in this life and in this universe? Was it some kind of test, or simply an accident? Maybe even some kind of consolation prize from a higher power? She had no idea, so the best she could do was live her life the best she could.
What would you do if you were reborn as another person in a completely different universe, one where the things you fought seemingly never existed? That was the bizarre and unexpected question which Rachel had yet to find an answer for on her own.
It wasn't easy, but in time, she managed to come to terms with it. After all, she'd (mostly) lived through an alien war by adapting to survive; she would do the same here.
But she also had to hide just who or what she really was. And what with all that anger and rage, that love for action and addiction to violence which she had developed as an Animorph, she needed to find a healthy outlet for it. So she took up fencing like Adrien did, as well as martial arts. She claimed that the mayor's daughter should know how to defend herself (which was true), but honestly, Rachel just felt the need to hit something every so often.
She also tried things which she hadn't tried in her previous life, things ranging from computer programming to playing musical instruments. Even if she didn't succeed at many of these things, it still felt good to try something new which she hadn't done before. If nothing else, it kept her busy and her mind occupied… and kept darker thoughts and bad memories away.
But even though she shoved away her memories as Rachel Berenson deep within the recesses of her mind, she still let some parts of her personality show through. She also still thought of herself as Rachel more than as Chloé. The way she saw it, "Chloé Bourgeois" was just another disguise, albeit one which she could never remove. It was her life now.
And it wasn't a bad life either — far from it. She knew she was incredibly lucky, to be born into a family with so much wealth and prestige, even if it was dysfunctional because of the situation with her mother and her father in this life.
But sometimes, she felt so undeserving of this opulent lifestyle, especially after the things she'd done. After all the people and other sentient beings which she'd killed in her previous life…
She still cringed a little at the thought of her grim final task, wondering if she could ever be forgiven for that if she wasn't already forgiven somehow.
Still, things could have been worse. Much, much worse.
If this truly was a second chance at life, then she was determined not to waste it.
No, she would definitely live to see adulthood this time. She would make sure of it. She might not have lived to see her seventeenth birthday last time, but this time she would reach that milestone and many, many more after that.
Just then she heard a knock at the door, bringing her out of her ruminations. "Does Miss Chloé require anything else tonight?" she heard her butler's voice through the door.
"No, thanks Jean, I'm fine," she hollered back through her bedroom door. "Have a nice night."
"Good night, Miss Chloé."
Even after the past few years, she was still getting used to some things.
After checking her things for the first day of school one last time, Rachel set everything aside, tossed her bathrobe onto the chair at her desk, crawled into bed in her pajamas, shut off the lights and tried to get some sleep.
Her mind wandered back to her conversation with Marinette, and Rachel told her friend about her summer vacation adventures with all the thrilling activities.
Rachel smiled to herself as she remembered the hang-gliding. She couldn't tell Marinette or anyone else about it because of her rule regarding her big secret, but the sensation reminded her of all the times she'd flown in morph as a bird. She had even closed her eyes for a moment while in flight, and she could just imagine herself flying as a bald eagle again, back in another life.
Rachel comforted herself with happy thoughts like those as she finally drifted off to sleep.
Maybe tonight, she would get lucky and dream again of flying…
A/N: I hope I've nailed it with the symptoms of PTSD in youths.
NEXT is Hawk Moth...
By the way, I'm trying to make it as an original writer; if anyone wants, I can point them to some original stories I've published here and there across the Net.
