Chapter Text
My name is Fjord. Just Fjord, that's all you need to know. Even if I had a last name I liked using, I wouldn’t use it here. If I or any of my friends ever put out too much information about ourselves, they might be able to find us. And we can’t let them find us.
Who’s us? Well that depends on who you ask. Jester might call us superheroes. Beau would just say we’re just a bunch of pre-teen assholes. The Yeerks call us Andalite bandits. Yasha and Caduceus might call us a family. Caleb would say we are soldiers. But if you ask Veth for the name she came up with, you’d get what we really call ourselves: the Mighty Nien. I think the name is a little silly; it’s not like anybody uses it but us. But it keeps the team happy, and boy do we need any morale boost we can get.
Yes, it’s important for my team to stay happy, because we are fighting a deadly enemy. Yeerks. Parasitic alien slugs that enter your brain through your ears and take over your life, puppeting you so carefully that not even your closest family will realize that you’ve become nothing but a screaming prisoner of your own mind. The Yeerks have been here on Exandria for more than a year now, with nothing but the seven of us kids to stem the tide of their invasion force. Those odds may seem impossible, but we have a secret weapon: the ability to morph, to change our bodies into any animal we can touch for two hours at a time. My friends and I have been birds and fish and reptiles and bugs; anything we can think of that may allow us to keep fighting.
Caduceus says he still prays to the Wildmother every night, asking for the strength to go on, for the andalite fleet to arrive sooner and take this burden off our shoulders. Lately, I’ve been doing the same. The way I see it, we need all the help we can get. We can’t afford to have any weak links. That's why I agreed to Beau’s crazy idea, when this whole thing started. That's why I let her teach me how to swim.
“I just never had a way to learn before, y’know?” The two of us were sat on a jetty in the harbor, feet dangling into the foamy water. “It’s not really something worth spending the money on.”
“You don’t need to make excuses, man. I get it. But you practically drowned out there last time.”
I swallowed, trying to stop the memories from rising up in my throat again. Not long ago we had a mission that took us way out to sea, following a voice in Caleb and Caduceus’s head that turned out to be Yasha. We had to re-morph in the middle of some seriously stormy water, and it hadn’t exactly gone well for me.
Beau must’ve seen something of my thoughts in my expression. She made a noise in her throat, placed a hand on my shoulder… and pushed me face-first in the water.
My panicking mind instantly flashed back to the moment when I’d first felt the waves closing over my head forever. I flailed, desperate, holding my lungs tightly closed, heart pounding in my ears, until I heard Beau’s voice breaking through my tangled thoughts.
“Hey, stand up dummy! You’re in four feet of water.”
Oh. Oops. I stood up. “What exactly did you do that for?”
“I know you, man. Would’ve taken forever to coax you in nicely. This was eas–Bleurgh!” Her voice was cut off when I grabbed her ankle and yanked her down with me. So there.
“Yeah, I probably earned that.” Beau stood and shook off her head like a dog, spraying water all over. “Now let’s do this. You know how to float?”
“I do not.”
“Cool. Then we’ll start there. Can you just kinda lay down? I should probably be able to support your weight with the water helping.”
“Very reassuring,” I muttered, leaning back, “I feel completely safe.”
“Well don’t do that! You gotta stay aware and ready in the water, man. The ocean will totally mess you up if you let it.”
I bolted up immediately at that pleasant thought. “You know what. This was a mistake, I don’t need to be able to swim. I got some homework to finish anyway, lets just–”
“No no no, I’m sorry.” Beau interrupted, grabbing my shoulders with both hands. I flinched a little bit, but if she noticed she didn’t say a thing. “I know you can do this. Let’s try again. I’ll keep my dumb mouth shut this time, and I’ll support your back. That should help.”
“...Ok. Let's try again.” I took a deep breath, and let myself sink back into the water. I kept breathing as my center of gravity shifted up and out of my control, as my hearing was muted by the quiet burbling noise of the sea. I’d trusted Beau with my life on the battlefield countless times. I could trust her here, too.
We spent about an hour just working on getting me to float on my back without support. It wasn’t exactly easy going, but near the end I was pretty reliably doing it on my own. It was actually pretty peaceful once I got over my initial fear. When your heads underwater everything is muffled and still. The world and its problems almost seem to go away, if only for a moment. I liked that.
Beau had just started to bring up the idea of face-down floating when something interrupted that peace I’d found, as things tend to do. Suddenly, from way down below our feet, there was a rumbling. The sound was deep, whirring, and almost mechanical. Waves started to kick up higher and higher around us as the ground beneath our feet shook. I bolted up, trying to get a better look at what was happening, but Beau grabbed my shoulder and forced me lower in the water instead.
“Wait,” she said, “let's see what’s happening.”
After a moment, I could see that her instincts were right. Out in the middle of the harbor, beyond the docks, something big was rising up from the waves. It was metallic and broad, bigger than any of the boats on the docks. As we watched, the top of the thing opened, releasing a metal hatch with what looked like some kind of sensor on the end. The sensor turned around, slowly. I realized with a start that it was headed our way. It would see us in a second, and there was no place to hide!
Beau’s hand on my shoulder cut through my panic. She fixed me with a hard look, then dragged us both down underwater.
Clinging tightly to Beau’s arm, I couldn’t resist opening my eyes, just for a second. The sting of the saltwater was almost unbearable, but through tight blurry vision I could see the horrible diffused red light of the thing, slowly rotating its way above our heads and across the rest of the harbor. My lungs started to burn from lack of oxygen. Once I felt confident it was away, I gave Beau’s arm a tug. We rose through the water like a bullet from a gun. At the surface, I pulled in gasp after gasp of air like I’d never breathed before in my life. Next to me, Beau was doing the same. In my periphery, I was vaguely aware of the metal thing finishing its rotation and sinking back down into the water, as fast as it had come.
After another few moments of hacking Beau and I made eye contact. “What the heck was that thing??” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, “but if there’s one thing to be sure of, it wasn’t any human technology. And that can only mean one thing…”
Beau nodded, and I knew we’d come to the same conclusion. Yeerks. It looked like we were going to have to postpone the rest of my swimming lesson.
How tragic.