-One year after the reunion, Animorphs are 23-24-
-Rachel-
Marco and I had a place where we always met to discuss missions. It was a room in a fancy restaurant, highly guarded, so no one could overhear any classified information. I was sitting at a table, waiting for Marco, again! He was 15 minutes late. He'd been later, but still.
He finally walked in, breathing hard and grinning at me. I didn't return the smile. I glared at him. "You're late, midget." I knew that would get him. He was almost an inch taller than me now, but he was still shorter than most guys and he had always been shorter than me until just recently.
"Haven't you ever heard of being fashionably late?" He asked grinning at me. "I was detained by an entourage of beautiful women, all who pale in comparison to you, Princess."
Why did he call me Princess? I don't know. He started that a year or so ago. And all the crazy compliments – yeah, those were complete BS, as far as I was concerned. He tried to sweet-talk everyone, so it didn't faze me a bit.
"I ordered your usual." I said still glaring. "But I told them not to bring either of ours until you got here. So what's this new mission?"
"Well," he began. . . I tried to listen, but I got to daydreaming again. I started thinking about how bizarre our relationship really was. He'd been my ... friend? Kinda, I guess. You can't go through what we did and not be at least friends with everyone involved, but I was definitely not close to him.
After the war, I didn't see him for a long time, but it wasn't exactly a relationship I had really cared about keeping. Now he was really my only friend. Cassie – I hadn't seen her since her wedding. Jake? My cousin? I hadn't seen him since then either and as a secret agent, I wasn't exactly a social butterfly. I hadn't really made any new friends.
At least I wasn't so lonely now. I mean, before Marco was my partner, I really was alone. I should appreciate him more, I guess, but he was so full of himself, it wouldn't have been good to improve his ego. Better to take it down a notch. He was cute, I guess. He'd managed to get that out of me while I was cut in half – mean Rachel never would have said that and I wouldn't have either, but nice Rachel told him. And he never let me forget it.
"Hello? Are you listening in there?" Marco said waving a hand in front of my face.
I shook my head to clear it. "What?" I asked looking at him.
"Did you hear a word I said? What could you have possibly been daydreaming about? And you asked me to get down to business! Gosh!" He said in mock-anger. Then he winked at me. "This is not a good beginning to a marriage!"
I nearly choked on my coke when he said that "Marriage? Who said anything about marriage?"
"Wow, you really weren't listening, were you?" he said grinning at me. "Its our next case. We're supposed to investigate this Andalite, Ganlor-Sirbabial-Raynier." He read the name off the briefing document in front of him, stumbling over the words. "No wonder he goes by Ganlor, what is it with these hard-to-pronounce Andalite names?"
"He's the one who runs Andalite Honeymoons, right?" I asked.
(A/N: If anyone has a better name for this space cruise line, please tell me. I was at a loss as to what to call it!)
"Yeah." Marco continued. "The government thinks he's up to something, and they need us to find out what it is. The mission is to go on our honeymoon on his ship to the Andalite homeworld and check it out. We're supposed to search the ship while we're on it, then search the hotel and follow him around while we're on the Andalite homeworld. First, we have to get married. For real."
"Why?" I asked. "We've faked the documents in the past, can't we just fake them now?" I was confused. I didn't want to marry Marco. I didn't want to get married at all.
"Nope, they checked into it." Marco said shaking his head. "Has to be the real thing for a couple reasons. They have this new authenticity strip in all legal documents now – including money, ID and a bunch of other stuff, including marriage licenses. You can't book a honeymoon trip with Andalite Honeymoons without the real thing and since we're so famous, our honeymoon has to be big – a big wedding publicized and everything or it won't be believable. We can always get an annulment when we get back."
I groaned. "Sounds like a lot of work. Are they sure this Andalite guy is acting suspicious? Isn't there another way?" I was whining and Marco picked up on it.
"Well, if you're afraid, we can always see if someone else will do it..." He grinned at me, knowing that would get me.
"I'm not afraid, Marco." I glared at him. "Just let me think for a minute."
He went to the bathroom, while I leaned back and thought about it. Why would it be so bad to marry Marco? It's not like it would be real, we could just get an annulment when we got back, just like he said. It would be a snap. Plus, a trip to the Andalite homeworld would be fun... I hadn't been in space in forever and I'd seen the commercials for Andalite Honeymoons – those honeymoon ships were like mini cruise ships and they were designed for humans – it would be relaxing! Far better than usual when we had to just deal with quarters designed for Andalites.
Marco came back. "So?"
I grinned at him. "Let's do it."
He groaned.
I called Cassie that night and told her about the wedding plans. She was shocked, but agreed to being the maid of honor. I had her ask Jake to be the best man. I did all the planning and stuff – Marco didn't really care about most of it. It wasn't real, after all. To make it look real, the bride was supposed to do the planning anyway. Plus the government was paying for all of it! I managed to pull it off in a month.