Three weeks and one day had passed since my nightmare. Things had been going well-with my job/internship, with the growing Yeerk presence in the midwest city we'd be spending the summer in, and with my roommate, Sarah.
I'd been a little worried after I had woken her up screaming bloody murder after my nightmare about Tarash's death. Up until then, we'd gotten along fine, but I'd never woken anyone up screaming before. It must have been unnerving, to say the least.
Thankfully, she'd handled even better than I could have hoped.
Now, on a Saturday evening after our usual dinner of salad (Sarah hated to cook, and didn't eat meat), we were assembling the ingredients for dessert.
See, even though Sarah hated to cook, she loved to bake. She hadn't grown up with parents who baked very much ("There were five of us. Mom had her hands full. More than full with my older brother!"), but she'd discovered baking back when she was in college, and found she both had a talent for it and a love for it.
"I'll never be on one of those baking competitions," she'd told me, after I'd sampled one of her donuts and found it was the best I'd ever had in my life. "It's more of a hobby."
Our first experience baking together had been after my nightmare, and it had become a weekly tradition. The second week, donuts. Then, cookies. Now, we were being ambitious (well, I was being ambitious) and trying cake.
Vanilla cake, of course. Because chocolate cake was just an inferior brownie.
As it was Saturday, Tarash was in my head, and Sarah's Yeerk was always in her head, save for when she fed. Sarah always let me know when her Yeerk, Tamlin Three-Two-Five, was going to feed, in case Tarash wanted to join. But the two had started off with very different feeding schedules, so Tarash always politely said no.
After we'd assembled all the ingredients, Sarah silently read off from one of her recipe cards the first step. She knew the instructions by heart, but she always liked to double check.
"Once, I forgot the baking soda when I was making oatmeal raisin cookies," she'd explained, looking sheepish. "They looked awful and tasted off. Good thing I didn't bring them into the station. But I've always double-checked since."
We spent the next ten minutes silently mixing and adding and-in Sarah's case-double-checking. The silence wasn't an awkward one, but filled with purpose. Despite having just eaten, I was very much looking forward to sampling the end result.
Once the cake was in the oven and we were sitting down with large mugs of hot chocolate-another Saturday tradition-Sarah cleared her throat, the way she did when she was going to speak.
"Can I ask you a question?" she asked, looking up at me, watching me with her bright blue eyes.
My own dark brown ones watched her. "Sure."
"It's Tamlin's question...kind of. I mean, I want to know, too, but she's the one who heard the word around the Yeerk Pool. She thought they were talking to her, because it sounds so much like her name. But she didn't want to interrupt their conversation and ask, you know? Anyway, what does 'tamli' mean?"
I smiled. "Tamlin was born after the war ended, right?"
Sarah nodded. "She's two human years old. She says that it's not the same in Yeerk years, that you reach adulthood well before six months."
She said the last part with a smile, and I wondered if the two of them had had this conversation on several occasions.
Tarash had been of the Hett Simplatt Pool, making her about twenty-five human years of age. Older than me no matter how you looked at it.
(No wonder she didn't grow up knowing it,) I told Tarash, a hint of wonder in my voice.
(Yes. Yeerks who spawned after the war ended have no concept of the Empire, except that it was vile and existed before them,) Tarash told me, almost wistfully.
"Well," I began, "there are two answers. One's the kind of mythological story that's almost definitely false, and one's the factual one. Do you want both?"
Sarah shrugged. "Sure. Can't hurt to know them both."
(I'll give the mythological story, if you like,) Tarash offered.
(Thanks. You're way better at that than I am,) I answered, gratefully.
"Tarash can give you the mythological story," I said, and felt her gentle control. "The story goes that the first Yeerk to ever infest a Gedd host was named Lee, without any numbers, and the Gedd host was called Tam by her fellow Gedds. Up until this point, no other Yeerk had attempted infestation, and the Yeerk was baffled by encountering another mind. The Gedd was also confused, and frightened, by the appearance of another mind inside of her head. But the two worked together for almost three days, and they slowly developed a friendship as Lee helped Tam with procuring more food and quicker access to drinking water. Tam was grateful and offered Lee the use of her senses so that she could better experience the world. Lee was able to move Tam's body after a few attempts, and was awed by how much more mobility her host had. The two became so close during this time period that Lee invited Tam back into her body after she fed on Kandrona rays, and Lee told the other Gedds to let Yeerks inside their heads so that they could experience this symbiotic relationship."
Here, Tarash sighed and shrugged my shoulders. "I don't doubt that the early relationship between Gedds and Yeerks was symbiotic. They lived on the same planet for centuries, and there were no cages to hold the Gedds when Prince Seerow arrived. Gedds are barely sentient, but even they would know to cover their ears when they dipped their heads into the water to drink-or not put their heads in the water at all-if they truly hated infestation. Also, Gedd names are far longer than 'Lee," although it wouldn't surprise me if Yeerk names once only had one syllable. I rather suspect that the myth was told to give an idea of what could have been, rather than anything that was. Of course," Tarash added, after some consideration, "I imagine that some Yeerks had friendships with their Gedd hosts."
Sarah nodded, slowly. "Yeah, it feels a little too...nicely woven together, you know? Like the story fits too well."
"Exactly," Tarash agreed. "Almost no Yeerk believes it happened that way. Well, here's Emily..."
I felt full control return to me. "As for the accepted explanation...you know about Galard, right?"
"Yeah, it's the language of the galaxy," Sarah answered, with a smile. "Barely know much of it. I guess you and Tarash are fluent?"
I laughed. "It's almost impossible to be truly fluent. I mean, there are words for relationships and ideas and people that only exist in far corners of the galaxy. Guess what 'tumin' means?"
Sarah shrugged. "Wife's brother?"
"Second to last brother of the third generation hatched during the full moon of the third rainfall season," I recited.
Sarah stared at me. "You're joking."
"Nope. That's not even the weirdest on there is. Most people who use the language just learn the words that apply to their species. I figure every race uses about eighty-percent of the language and considers themselves fluent. To be fair," I added, "most could probably converse easily enough with that understanding. But there are words that are so specialized that only those species who need to know them use them."
"And 'tamli' one of those words?" Sarah guessed.
I had just taken a sip of my hot chocolate, and nodded. Sarah smiled at me, waiting for me to swallow, not rushing me.
"Yeerks aren't the only species in the galaxy to be able to form a symbiotic relationship with their host," I began, "and at some time, between some species, the relationship must have been so strong that they coined a word to describe it. Or, rather, an expression. In Galard, 'li' refers to belonging to someone, in the relationship sense. It means 'my,' but more like 'my brother' or 'my sister' than 'my car' or my house," I explained. At Sarah's nod of understanding, I continued. "The word 'tam' is directly translated as the heart."
"Heart as in the body part?" Sarah asked.
I smiled. "There are several Galard words for 'heart,' but this one can refer to the organ as well as love that we humans attribute to the heart."
"Guess we're not so different after all," Sarah murmured, with a laugh. "Then tamli means 'my heart'?"
"If translated directly, yes. The more colloquial expression is 'my precious one.' A symbiote refers to their host by this term if they have a strong symbiotic partnership. It's like saying, you're the only host I could ever want, because we get along so well, and we completely understand each other. If something were to happen to either of us, neither of us would ever be whole, even if I got a new host or you got a new symbiote."
Sarah nodded, thinking this over. Her face took on a slightly clouded look, and I knew that she was conversing with her own Yeerk.
"Does it happen often? Now, I mean?"
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "I imagine that you don't hear it very often by Yeerks who survived the war, even if they felt that way. Unless they were Peace Movement, and then they figured they were dead either way."
Sarah's eyebrows shot up. "You're kidding."
I shook my head. "Host sympathy was on par with providing information to Andalites. It's one thing to prefer a voluntary host. Virtually every Yeerk wanted that." Why else would they have kept the Taxxons as hosts? Their eternal hunger outweighed whatever benefit their bodies provided. If they hadn't been nearly universally voluntary as a species, I couldn't imagine the Yeerks would have bothered with them. "But to declare yourself an equal to your host? To profess that you cared about them more than anyone else on the planet? Sarah, even the rumor that you had called your host your tamli would be grounds for a memory dump, if not outright execution."
The buzzer went off, then, and Sarah rose to check the cake. I followed her.
She opened the oven and carefully removed it, then placed it on top of the stove. "Needs to cool for about fifteen minutes. Then, we can ice and devour," she told me, with a grin.
"Sure," I agreed.
She sat down at the kitchen table, and I followed her once more.
Sarah held the mug in her hands, but didn't bring it to her mouth.
"I hadn't realized just how awful things were in the war," she murmured. "You know, having not lived through it directly."
Tarash nudged me, and I gave her a mental nod.
"It's Tarash," she spoke up. "It wasn't so bad for us, really. Emily suffered more, having a borderline empire Yeerk before I assigned myself to become her host. Living in Pennsylvania, though, we were part of the invasion but on the outskirts. The Animorphs and Visser Three all inhabited California. In the rest of the country, as long as you fulfilled your annual quota, the empire mostly left you alone." She smiled a bit. "They didn't have the power to do much else."
"You were still the leader of the Peace Movement," Sarah reminded us. "If you'd been caught..."
"Being the leader and a high-ranking visser enabled me to eliminate anyone who might have suspected me," Tarash explained, in a matter of fact manner. "I had no reservations about executing cruel Yeerks, as long as I could save their hosts and reassign them to my trusted Yeerks."
"Peace Movement Yeerks?" Sarah guessed.
"Of course." She smiled. "And besides, I strongly enforced treating humans well. How else would I have managed a ninety-five percent voluntary rate with nearly fifteen-thousand humans by the end of the war?"
Sarah snickered. "You mean...if you actually treat your human host like they're sentient, they won't mind sharing a body with you?"
"Yes, bizarre, isn't it? But I found that of the humans we asked to become full members, most preferred the company of a Yeerk who was decent to being alone." Tarash smiled again. "And now that the war is over, rather ironically, we have nearly twice as many symbiotic partnerships in this country alone than we ever had hosts during the war."
"That, and the injection," Sarah reminded us.
She was, of course, referring to the bi-annual injection that all Yeerks with hosts received. It prevented the Yeerk from taking control without their host's permission, reacting against the panicked emotions such a brain would trigger. A Yeerk seeking to take control would not be ejected from their host's brain, but the host would remain in control without much of a fight, and if the Yeerk tried to misuse their power, the host could report them at their next feeding cycle.
The injection was meant to be permanent, a sort of vaccine against the Yeerk's ability to take control, but it faded over time, and after six months, it was essentially gone from the Yeerk body.
Our biologists thought it had to do with Kandrona rays. Since they repaired the body of the Yeerk upon feeding, they might be working against the chemical.
Or, maybe, it wasn't meant to last.
It wasn't the worst thing in the world. It meant that we could better keep track of the Yeerks with hosts, regardless of what state or country they resided in. They'd have to return to the headquarters twice a year to remain in good standing.
"Of course," Tarash agreed, simply, then restored control to me.
We began to ice the cake, then added sprinkles on top.
"Can I ask you something else? Something personal?" Sarah said, a few moments later.
"Me, or Tarash?" I asked.
"Either."
I nodded.
"Has she-has Tarash-ever called you 'tamli'?"
I grinned. "Yeah. Tons of times."
Sarah reached out and put an arm around my shoulder. "I'm glad, Em."
"Me too," I said, still grinning.
Sarah cut two slices of cake, placed them on separate plates, and handed me mine. It looked amazing, and I knew it would taste even better.
We retreated to the living room-another tradition-and sat on Sarah's big, squashy couch.
After each taking a bite out of our pieces, Sarah spoke again.
"So. Tell me more about your boyfriend."
There was a grin on her face. A teasing grin that I knew all too well.
"My...boyfriend?" I stalled.
Inside my mind, Tarash snickered.
"Yes, Em. Your boyfriend. Tom, the brother of Jake the Animorph." She leaned in. "I need details!"
The End
Author's note:
When I wrote "Nightmares and Friendship" last year, I wasn't sure if it would remain a oneshot or part of a larger story. As I mentioned, I wrote it in part to honor my friend "Sarah," whose death anniversary intentionally coincided with the date I published my work.
Well, it's been a year, and five years since "Sarah" died. And while I doubt that she ever read the Animorphs books, I'd like to think that she'd up there, knowing that she's Sarah, knowing that I still think about her, and understanding the meaning of some of the details I include in this work.
There's more than one way to mourn and heal.
Thank you for reading.
