Chapter Text
Rachel didn’t say anything. She just kept staring at me, her blue eyes wide, pupils dilated. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out a hand and touched her face. She jumped, blinked, and suddenly her eyes were swimming with tears.
I pulled her inside, locked the door behind us, and practically pushed her into the living room. She sat down on the couch so hard, it was obvious her knees had given out. She was trembling uncontrollably, and when she finally spoke, her voice shook just as much.
“J-Jake?”
I sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders.
“Jake, w-what’s going on?” she asked. “What’s happening? Why am I…”
She trailed off, apparently unable to bring herself to say it. I had no answers.
“I remember everything,” Rachel said. “The last stand. The plan. The auxiliaries. The double-cross. Tom…” her voice broke. “Jake, I’m sorry. I know it was your order, but I’m so so sorry.” She drew a ragged breath and continued, almost babbling, “I never got to say it to you really and I mean it because you were the only one who could really understand what it was like for me and you never pitied me even for a minute and even when I thought I hated you I knew you were right and I’m sorry, Jake, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
I put my other arm around Rachel and hugged her, rocking her gently back and forth until her sobs subsided. She shivered once more, dragged the back of her hand across her eyes, and was still.
“What’s going on, Jake?” she asked. Her voice was steadier now, more like the confident Rachel I knew and missed so much.
I shrugged. “Time travel? Alternate reality?” It was a mark of how strange our young lives had been that those weren’t comedic, or even unlikely suggestions. “It’s like somebody hit a giant reset switch.”
“Jake…” Rachel sounded nervous again. “I can’t…I can’t morph.”
I blinked. I hadn’t even thought of that. I concentrated quickly on Homer, on how the dog morph felt.
Nothing happened.
“So do you think we’ve just gotten de-powered somehow?”
“I don’t think it’s just 'somehow', Jake,” Rachel said, shaking her blonde head. “I think…I think we’ve gone back to before the Andalite came.”
“But how long before?”
“Well, what day is it?” She took a moment to gather herself, then heaved herself up and walked into the kitchen.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat as I thought of the way my life had been before the Andalite. Before I became a soldier. Before I spent years and countless missions trying to save us all from the Yeerks, and on a more personal level, trying to make sure I wasn’t caught by…
Tom. If Rachel was back, did that mean Tom was, too?
I followed Rachel into the kitchen and found her spreading a newspaper over the counter. I supposed my father must have been reading it. Before I could say anything, Rachel looked up and said, bleakly, “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. The Andalite would be landing tomorrow. Which meant that we had a scant thirty hours to figure out what was going on and why we were here.
“Jake? Jake!” Rachel snapped her fingers under my nose. Lost in my own thoughts, I hadn’t realized she was still talking. “Stop freaking out about the time frame,” she ordered, as if reading my mind. “We need to round up the others and see if they—” she froze. It was a second before I realized she was staring over my shoulder. I turned around.
Tobias was framed in the doorway. Human. Average-height, weedy, dirty-blond and tousle-haired, his expression blurring between uncomprehending and enraged.
I sidestepped quickly, taking myself out of their way. Rachel and Tobias had not had an easy time of the last war. The sight of Tobias becoming human so that he could cry for Rachel as she sacrificed herself for everyone on Earth, then returning to hawk form to hide his emotions from the rest of us, was something I would never forget.
Rachel walked toward Tobias like a zombie, and only stopped when they were toe-to-toe. Rachel reached up, just as I had done to her, and touched Tobias’ cheek. Tobias ran his fingers gently through Rachel’s hair. Neither spoke, and both seemed afraid to so much as breathe.
The sound of the phone ringing should have shattered the atmosphere, but it didn’t look like they even heard it. I turned away, suddenly self-conscious, scooped up the handset and walked around the corner into the laundry room, as far away as the cord would let me go. I heard fast breathing on the line.
“Hello?” I said.
The breaths stopped. Then, “Jake?”
“Yeah, Marco, it’s Jake.”
There was a pause.
“Jake…please…please tell me what the–”
“You know as much as we do, Marco,” I said over him. “Marco…do you know what day it is?”
More silence.
“Yeah, Jake, I do know what day it is. And guess what? I know exactly where I’m not going to be tomorrow.”
“Marco, we can’t–”
“Can’t? CAN’T?” Marco shouted, so loud I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. “Jake, you listen to me right now! I’ll tell you what CAN’T happen. What happened to us before CAN’T happen again! We CAN’T let it happen to us again! The same set of people CAN’T put up with the same thing twice in one lifetime! You ought to know that better than anybody, considering the amount of time you spent with your head up your butt after–”
“Marco,” I cut across his ranting. “Rachel’s here.”
Yet another pause.
“Tobias just walked in,” I added. “They’re talking now.”
I could practically hear Marco’s brain whirring. Finally, he said in a broken whisper, “I can’t stand to do it all again, Jake. I just can’t do it. I got past it by putting it behind me; I can’t go back and…” He trailed off, then started talking again in a low voice, “That’s just it, isn’t it, Jake? I can’t go back. We can’t do it all again, because it’s already different. We never had this conversation before.”
“And Rachel and Tobias never came over today, last time around,” I finished his thought. “So, even if everything else is the same…”
“We’re not.”
The silence that stretched between us was the longest yet. Finally, Marco mumbled, “We have work to do, don’t we?”
“Barn in thirty,” I replied, snapping the order like the old days. “We don’t have a lot of time and I want to make a calendar. Bring pens and paper.”
Marco didn’t reply, but I knew he had heard me. The phone clicked, and the line went dead. I listened carefully before returning to the kitchen, but heard nothing. I went back in and set the phone down, then turned to see Rachel and Tobias sitting at the kitchen table. They were both clasping each other’s hands with both of their own, as though terrified to let go again.
“That was Marco,” I said quietly. “We’re going to meet him in half an hour.” There was no need to say where. “I’m going to call Cassie.”
I picked up the phone again, and squinted at the notepad next to it, trying to find Cassie’s number. I had long since forgotten little details like that. I punched the number in slowly, and stepped back into the laundry room. This time it wasn’t to give Rachel and Tobias privacy, but myself.
The phone rang a few times, then connected, and a deep voice said, “Hello?”
My breath caught. Not Cassie, but her father.
“Hello?” he said more loudly.
I forced my throat to unstick. “Hi, Wa–” I cut myself off. Cassie’s father only told us to use his first name toward the end of the war. “Hello, sir,” I tried again. “It’s Jake. Is Cassie home?”
“I think she’s in her room. Hold on.” There was a clatter as he set the phone down. I waited, hearing him say faintly in the distance, “Cassie, phone for you.”
The receiver made a smaller sound as it was lifted up again, and a soft voice said, “Hello?”
For the second time in as few minutes, I found myself frozen, barely able to breathe.
“Who is it?” she asked into the phone. Her voice was gentle, worried, and pained. Everything I remembered, and so much more.
I drew a deep breath.
“It’s Jake.”