Title: Meanwhile, I keep dancing
Disclaimer: not my characters; title from Hillel
Warnings: future!fic; AUish, according to the wiki
Pairings: none
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 280
Point of view: third
Prompt: Animorphs, Rachel, sometimes it's okay not to be brave.
"Do you think she'd be disappointed with me?" Sarah asks Jordan on the tenth anniversary of Rachel's death. There are commemorative services happening all over the world, and Cassie is supposed to be speaking at the one back home, but Sarah had fled to the coast, leaving school without calling anybody, and Jordan had used her phone's GPS to track her.
"Why would she be disappointed?" Jordan says, settling beside her on the sand.
Sarah barely remembers their sister. By the time she was old enough to formulate memories, Rachel was always busy, away. Saving the world. She's always bombarded with questions whenever people realize who she is, and that's usually only because people see her with Jordan. Jordan looks so much like Rachel. Her school years were horrible, after. But she's almost finished with law school, now. She's going into environmental law.
"I want to be a dancer," Sarah confesses, looking out over the water. "That's not important, or courageous. I just want to dance." She'll be graduating next spring with a degree in social work, and she wants to help people, she truly does, but having responsibility over others— "I'm just so scared all the time," she admits now, leaning into Jordan. "I know Mom wants me to do something important, and Dad thinks I should do something with all my notebooks."
She has thousands of pages of adventures written down, and has been meaning to type them up for years. But those are for her, no one else.
"Rachel could never be disappointed in other of us," Jordan says, wrapping an arm around Sarah's shoulders. She kisses Sarah's temple and rests their heads together, as they watch the ocean.