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I couldn’t remember the last time I ate cake. I guess I was a little out of practice. I had morphed human (chocolate doesn’t really appeal to hawk taste buds), and dispatched Rachel’s cake as cleanly as I could--with her help, of course. I don’t know when she had time to make it, considering how crazy our lives had become lately. Jordan had helped with the decorating, she told me.
Rachel had two forks and two paper plates, little white ones with confetti printed on them. She served me a piece, and after watching me struggle to keep cake on the fork, started picking morsels off her piece with her fingers and popping them in her mouth. I did that too, but God, it was messy. I might have been eating too fast, though; it tasted amazing. I had forgotten how sweet food could be, and it was overwhelming.
Rachel took one look at the chocolate frosting and rainbow sprinkles on my bike shorts and my hands and said, “Hold on, I’ll get you a towel.”
I could feel my face go warm. Was I blushing? This isn’t even that bad! She saw me eat ROADKILL just a couple days ago. Definitely more embarrassing! Get it together!
I looked down and saw a glob of chocolate frosting on the bedspread. Yep, I was definitely red in the face. Spend a little time as a hawk, and table manners go straight out the window.
She came back with a beach towel, and gently closed the door behind her. “Rachel,” I started. “Thanks, but you couldn’t have gotten me something easier to eat? A rabbit, perhaps? Or a field mouse or two?”
She snorted, and her hands flew up to her mouth. She looked at me with wide eyes. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking or trying to tell me in that look. Some sympathy, some surprise? Surprise at my sense of humor, or surprise that she could laugh in the dark, too?
She nestled up next to me on the bed, and gave me a quick jab in the side with her elbow. “Don’t make me laugh, my mom will wake up!”
I took the towel and gave her what I really, really hoped was a smile. “Got it, no more jokes.”
She smiled, and her hand drifted up toward my face. She paused, her fingers hovering there like a butterfly or some other beautiful thing, before gently guiding a strand of hair back from my eyes. I looked down at my cake-smudged hands. My face felt warm again. Actually, downright hot this time.
Rachel stood up real fast. “Are you cold? Morph clothes are about as warm as they are stylish.”
The window was still open behind us, and there was a bit of the cool night breeze coming in. “Maybe I’m a little chilly, but don’t worry about it--”
“No, I’ve got one of my dad’s old sweatshirts around here somewhere.” She rooted through a few drawers before pulling out one long, blue sweatshirt and tossing it to me. I put it on. It had the Tasmanian Devil, from Looney Tunes, on the front in football gear.
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Ugh, I forgot about that one. Thank God I don’t get my fashion sense from my dad.”
Dad. I really tried to smile. I couldn’t remember how. Rachel knew her father; she talked about his visits, his habits, and the times he had gotten her and her sisters tickets to basketball games. His shitty, shitty golf game, and how much did it suck balls that she had to be his caddy? It was just because she was the oldest, she said, and she didn’t have any brothers. She wouldn’t miss a minute of it, not for anything. And whether she liked it or not, or a mixture of both, he was just distant enough to be out of the day-to-day of guerilla war. Not like my father. I couldn’t even imagine having a dad like Rachel did.
She sat back down next to me, legs crossed, hands folded in her lap.
“So, how did it go today?” she asked.
Now, the cake felt like rocks sitting in my stomach. Which part, narrowly escaping Visser Three, or finding out that my dad is the alien war prince we saw him murder?
“Well, not great.” Now I could feel a lump in my throat. Not now, not yet. I had to focus. “Aria--wasn’t--isn’t my cousin. Turns out, she was Visser Three--”
“What?” Rachel’s hand flew up to her mouth again, and she repeated, in a whisper this time: “What?”
“Yeah, luckily for me I guess, she--he?--never wanted to actually adopt me.”
Rachel started picking dirt out from under one of her nails, thinking. She stared down a Buffy poster on the other side of her room.
“But, then, why--”
“It was a trap. They wanted to lure me in,” I said.
“Do they know? That you’re an animorph?”
“No, I don’t think so. That’s not why they were trying to track me down. This DeGroot guy, the lawyer? He’s definitely a controller. But my dad had left a letter with his dad, who had run the office before. And I guess, when this Yeerk was digging through all the paperwork in his newly acquired law office, he saw the letter and told Visser Three about it.”
Rachel didn’t ask why. She was watching me very closely now, trying to see where this was going. My eyes were burning now, stinging. They were still sore from crying that afternoon.
“Because, uh, he saw a name he recognized. Any Yeerk would recognize. Elfangor. He’s--he’s my dad.”
“Elfangor? The Andalite that gave us our morphing powers?”
“Yeah,” I said, a little softer. It sounded crazy--crazier than normal, even.
“Is your dad?”
“Yeah.”
She was quiet. She must have been thinking back to the abandoned construction site, the same as me. I was reliving it over and over again, cowering behind a giant concrete tube in the dark, watching as Visser Three’s rows and rows of teeth, dripping with saliva, closing around the dying alien. My father--
“Tobias, how? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. He lived as a human for a while, with my mother, on Earth. This was during the war, I guess he just left.”
Rachel frowned. Elfangor, the war prince, deserted? She said what I was thinking.
“That doesn’t sound like Elfangor, from what Ax has said. Why would he abandon the war?”
Why wouldn’t he? War was hell. I pulled my knees to my chest, and then had to drop them again. It felt awkward, unnatural, but that was everything that I did in this body now. Rachel--strong, beautiful, terrifying Rachel--didn’t understand. She was made for this, even in the worst of it she could still see how to win, and close her mind around that goal like steel jaws. I could still see her, at the Yeerk pool entrance, beating back controllers with her own severed grizzly arm. Even in the most cartoonish, outrageous moments, when I wanted to throw up, Rachel took it all in stride. She found herself in the fighting.
Me, well, I had lost something. To be sitting here, now, eating cake and wearing a sweatshirt, with human hands and a human voice, was unthinkable just a few weeks ago.
I shrugged. “Maybe he got trapped in morph.”
My heart dropped into my gut as what I just said hit me. Elfangor, at one point, had been a nothlit too, and it might have been by choice. And he, too, had gone back to war, chose to keep fighting. The Ellimist had trapped him, too.
But even now that I could morph again, I could feel pity radiating from Jake and Cassie, and--worst--Rachel. Like now. Elfangor, at least, had been able to live a life, with a wife, even a son, at least for a little while.
Rachel and I only had moments. Two hours, max, like TV episodes. Elfangor abandoned the war and got to live the everyday kind of love I would never be able to have. I would never be able to abandon this war like he did. Even if I wanted to run away, Rachel never would. It would mean abandoning my friends as much as my responsibilities. They would never say it, in their pity, but it would be a betrayal. Unlike Elfangor, running away would mean returning to life alone, with only some bullshit relatives who couldn’t care less whether I was still breathing. The life he had left for me. At least, until he dragged me into a war.
“Tobias, are you okay?” she started to say, watching me closely, rubbing my back.
I did not want to tell her.
“I’m going to be fine. I got to meet him. I know why he left.”
I meant that, and that surprised me. As crazy as the whole situation was, I was glad that I knew he had a reason to leave me and my mom, one stronger than human mistakes. But that feeling--almost peaceful?--came and passed like a breeze.
“I wonder if he knew who you were,” Rachel said, so quiet I might not have heard her.
Fuck, I hadn’t thought about that. I couldn’t think about that. Visser Three had said he would be ashamed of me. Would he? Was he? Did he know he was dragging his son into the same war that killed him? He must have known war, and all it involved. I felt sick.
He hadn’t seen me since I was a baby. But maybe I looked like my mother, and maybe he recognized me. My stomach clenched. Maybe I had looked like his human morph.
But if that were the case, why would he have given me the cube? If he knew, would he have swatted it out of my hand? Maybe he wanted to. My eyes burned again. I wanted to ask him why he picked us. I wanted to ask if he was sorry. I wanted to ask if he was proud.
One thing was certain. “We’ll never know,” I said.
But I would think about it, when I was trying to sleep in my tree. When I was alone, when I was hunting, when I was watching the Hork-Bajir kids play, I would think about it. I would play the moment over and over again in my head, what I could remember. Elfangor would haunt me.
Rachel leaned on me and rested her head on my shoulder. A strand of her long, blond hair tickled my chin.
I didn’t want to be a hawk again.
For the second time that day, I started to cry. Rachel held my hands for a moment. She sat up and guided my head to rest in her lap, and said that it was okay to cry, what a fucked up day, right? She stroked my hair. She filled the silence with whispers, telling me it was ok, she was there for me, she wasn’t going anywhere. How could I tell her that everything she did made it more painful for me to do what I had to do?
“Rachel,” I choked. “I need to go.”
She nodded, and I started to morph. I’ll spare you some of the details, but you know the sound and the feeling when you pop your knuckles? Now imagine that all over your body.
I was a hawk again, perched on her bedpost. <Thanks for the cake. And for listening. Sorry about the mess.>
I half-hopped, half-flew over to the open window, but Rachel’s voice stopped me from going any further. “Tobias?”
<Yeah?>
“What are you going to tell Ax?”