The usual copyright BS. I don't own Animorphs and I ain't makin any money off this.

~The Last Ronin~

I drift over the house and barn; a quick look just to make sure Rachel's okay and then I head away. We haven't spoken in the week since she remembered we'd been engaged before the war ended. She needs time to think. Perhaps I do too.

She's kept herself occupied in several ways. A few times she's gone off into the forest alone; hiking I suppose. It's hard not to follow when she does that. The forest has plenty of things that wouldn't hesitate to attack a full grown human, let alone a teenage one. But I have to leave her be, at least until she's ready to talk. Besides, she can take care of herself. We Animorphs are difficult to kill.

Somehow though, that thought doesn't comfort me.

For a while I fly aimlessly, but eventually my wings carry me to the place I've been unconsciously heading all morning: Rachel's memorial. I land across from the monument and morph to human. As out of place as I feel when I'm my old self I need to think, and my hawk self would just be a bundle of nerves sitting in the open like this.

Maybe I need a hobby, something to take my mind off of things for a while, but what can a hawk really do? Rachel began channeling her inner Martha Stuart and set about cleaning and repairing what parts of the house she could. Although she was probably just looking for something, anything, to take her mind off things I'd never thought of her as a homemaker before.

Sitting there, looking at the memorial it really hits me, what she'd said after I took her here. The girl I'd fallen in love with had been a warrior: forged in the bloody flames of a war she hadn't asked to be dropped in the middle of. But before that she had simply been a girl who loved shopping and gymnastics. That was a side of her I'd never really known. Rachel the warrior I knew, respected, loved. Rachel the teenager though...

"Son, you look like you've got the weight of the world on your shoulders," a gruff voice says from my left.

I look over and squint - I don't know if I'll ever get used to these weak human eyes. Next to me is a man in his fifties...maybe. One of his legs is noticeably shorter than the other and he's missing an eye along with several of his fingers.

"Mind if I sit?" he gestures to the ground beside me.

"Free country," I grumble, irritated at his intrusion.

"That it is," he chuckles and carefully lowers himself down.

He just sits for a time, looking at the monument or the ocean or the sky. Or maybe he's looking at all three.

"This place makes me both proud and sad," he says at last and then continues before I can say anything, "proud that my country can still produce a person as courageous as this young woman must have been; sad because I'd hoped I'd never have to see another person so young killed by war."

He shakes his head, muttering to himself for a moment.

"Such a shame. I was in 'Nam...saw to many young people die. We'd hoped that we'd never have to see another war like that again," he sighs, "course, I suppose we say that about every war. How about you? Which war were you in?"

He's joking, probably thinks he's just trying to cheer up a kid down in the dumps over something that happened at school. So he looks slightly surprised when I answer seriously.

"Yeerks."

For a minute he examines me closer, sizing me up.

"A bit young to have been in that one aren't you?" he asks, not mocking, just trying to understand.

"I'm older than I look," I shrug. He looks at me closer still, his eyes shifting from me to the memorial and back again.

"You knew her, didn'tcha," he gestures to the stone.

I could lie. Probably should, it's all that has kept me going for so long. A lie. But I'm tired of lying, tired of not being able to talk to anyone. Maybe this old soldier...

"She was my best friend, my partner," a few tears slide down my face, "we were going to get married after the war."

"But she died," he finishes after it becomes obvious that I can't, "I am sorry."

"For a long time I kept hoping it was all just a bad dream, that I'd wake up and she'd be alive again," I shake my head, suddenly angry, "but it's not a dream. She's gone."

We sit for a while in silence save the wind in the trees and the chatter of passing families.

"Do you miss her?" he asks eventually.

"Of course I do! What kind of..."

"Then she mattered." he cuts me off, "never mind what happened. If you still miss her then she mattered, to you if no one else. And so long as that's true, a part of her will never really die.

"Look son, It's hard, always will be, but you can do one of two things: roll over and let the grief take you or try to live your life the best you can."

"How?" I sob quietly, "I had nothing before her."

"I don't know exactly how you feel, but this is what I tell myself to help deal with the friends I lost: put on the happiest smile you can," he says, "tell yourself that you can make it through the next minute. Then through the next two, five, ten. Start small and keep going up. Don't do it alone either, don't cut yourself off from the world, drown yourself in it."

"And that helps?" I look up and notice tears in his own eyes.

"I don't know," he admits, getting up, "I'll tell you when I get that far."

"Thank you," I say to him as he brushes the seat of his pants off. He places a hand on my shoulder, smiles and limps away.

Maybe I couldn't tell him everything, but it feels good to have been able to talk about what I could. My circumstance is a bit more complex than he knows, but maybe his advice still applies.

I stand, demorph and take to the sky. Air-born, I circle for a minute till I spot the old soldier ambling slowly along the path and then drop to land in front of him. He looks at me, startled.

[Thank you,] I repeat and take off again, heading for the house this time. I need to talk to Rachel. Even if she isn't ready to speak to me just yet. She doesn't have to say anything if she doesn't want to. But I do.

What a fool I've been. For all my bravado about not caring if her memory returns or not all I've been doing is trying to make her remember. But it's for me that I really want her to remember, not her. I want the girl I love back, the girl I was going to marry and spend the rest of my life with.

But her memory returning may not be what's best for her. Sure we had some good times and I would love for her to remember those. But mixed in with those are a lot of very bad memories too. Do I really want her to suffer all of that again just so I can be with her like we used to be? And what does that say about my feelings for her? Nothing good I'm sure.

The old Rachel would have said she'd walk barefoot through hell for me. And she would have too, no matter how much it hurt her.

The new Rachel...or the older Rachel as it may be...she never had to make such a choice. And in the world as it is now she shouldn't have to. There is no more secret war. The warrior Rachel isn't needed here. This is teenage Rachel's world.

The war made me who, what, I am now: there's no going back for me. The person the war had turned Rachel into, however, died more than five years ago aboard the Blade Ship. Perhaps it's time I stop carrying her ghost around and let her rest.

Maybe Rachel was right when she said this was a second chance; a second chance for her to live a normal life. The life she should have lived had there never been a war. A life I have no place in.

Maybe it's time for me to let her go.

I just don't know if I can.