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“Watch out!”
Instincts honed from mission after mission, countless moments of near-instantaneous reactions to shouted thought-speak in my head, rapid demorphing before the time limit ran out, had given me a pretty good reaction time. Better than most (though never better than Rachel’s). But I didn’t react fast enough to my dad’s hurried shout. I hadn’t been expecting trouble here, in the barn, even though I knew, better than most, that trouble could come from anywhere.
Of course, I realized, a split second after looking up, this was the usual kind of trouble we had in the barn. A tool left in the wrong place, a scared and frustrated and hurt animal: nothing the two of us hadn’t dealt with before. We’d had plenty of accidents, in this barn. Nothing serious, but nicks and bumps and bruises – and bruised egos – a plenty.
I tried to dodge the goat, heart already racing, mind already running through the best morph to deal with the circumstances, but I didn’t quite manage it. I managed well enough, enough that his horn only just grazed my thigh, instead of ramming me head on, but I could already feel the bruise welling up as I pinwheeled backward, tripped over the broom that had been leaning against the stall behind him, and gashed my bicep open on the corner of the stall door.
My mind was still running through the best morph, even as I landed: something with wings, to get out of the way of the goat; a larger predator was a bad option – it’d scare too many of the other animals.
“Cassie!”
My dad’s tone was worried even while it was focused. I swallowed down the pain, worried for the briefest of moments that he’d think that was unusual, and then pushed that aside too.
“I’m fine!” I called back. “Grab the goat!” My tailbone was smarting, and my thigh ached something fierce, and my bicep was singing out its agonies, but I knew battle wounds. I was fine. A few stitches, maybe not even that, and I’d be right as rain.
Morph, my brain tried to tell me. Morph, and the pain will be gone. It was a tried-and-true tactic, one we used often in battle, but it wasn’t an option right now. My dad was right there, and even I wasn’t that fast of a morpher. Besides, it wasn’t like there hadn’t been times when morphing wasn’t an option, when we had to battle through the pain and wait for healing later. I could handle a little gash and a few bruises. This was nothing.
As my dad came back into view though, goat calm again as he herded it into a stall, I second guessed my own thoughts. Was this nothing? How was my dad going to react? How would a normal teenager react?
I’d never been afraid of blood, or needles, or hospitals, or anything like that, so I didn’t have to worry on that front, but pain… Was I powering through it because I was used to it, or was it really that minimal? Did I have to put on an act for my father, lie to him about even this?
I swallowed, the guilt threatening to drown me more than the pain did, and I hadn’t even done anything yet.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Dad said, closing the stall door behind him as he spotted me. There was guilt in his tone, a little, but mostly just compassion. We’d had enough small accidents over the years to not make too much fuss over whose fault it was, but he was always going to worry about me. (If it was really him.)
Not that he knew anything close to the worst situations I’d been in.
“I’m fine,” I said, then backtracked in my mind, remembered my previous thought, and winced on purpose. “It’s not too bad, is it?” I asked, adding a little waver in my tone. I was sure my dad would see through it – I still wasn’t that great an actor, no matter how many excuses I’d given my parents since that night in the construction zone.
He didn’t though, just wince sympathetically in turn and knelt down at my side.
I shifted my arm to face him, and he grabbed gently below the wound, twisting just a little to get a good look.
“It’s not too bad,” he agreed, soft and full of love.
Neither of us touched it just then, both of our hands dirty from a day’s hard work.
“Can we take care of it inside?” I asked. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, not for an injury as small as this, not for something I’d morph away tonight, when I was alone in my room. Not with the Yeerks out there looking for new hosts.
“We’ll give it a try, but you might need stitches.”
I almost, almost asked if he’d be willing to stitch me up. What was a bit of field medicine, right? He was a vet anyway. But that, I figured, would be going too far. No normal kid would have suggested that.
“C’mon,” he said, helping me up. “Let’s clean up, try and stop the bleeding.”
We had a little clean area in the corner of the barn, where we kept the sterilized equipment and the gauze and the needles. The equipment was meant for animals, but gauze was gauze. We washed our hands, the both of us, nevermind the blood dripping down my arm, and then Dad began to dab gently at the wound. I bit back the urge to tell him to hurry it up and get it over with, not to worry about the pain he was adding – no normal kid would have said that either. (Morph, my brain still urged me, but it was a distant thought, even with my thigh still throbbing.)
“What’s the prognosis, Doc?” I asked after a bit, once the wound had been clean, and he’d held the gauze to it long enough to stop the bleeding.
“Still want to avoid the hospital?”
I shrugged with my uninjured arm. No need to seem to desperate.
“Well, that’s gonna scar, probably, but you could probably do without stitches.”
My throat dried up in an instant. I hadn’t even thought, hadn’t even considered…
Scars. I hadn’t had any of those in some time. Morphing healed all injuries. All of them. It’d been weird, at first, missing the little nick in my thumb, the pinprick on my right calf, but I hadn’t had that many scars to begin with. I’d never have another again. Not so long as I was morph capable, and my future lately was measured in days and hours, not years – I couldn’t begin to even picture what it would be like, if our guerilla warfare against the Yeerks ended.
No, it wouldn’t scar. It couldn’t scar. Even if I held off on morphing just to heal it, even if I slept tonight with bloody bandages on my shoulder, I’d be needed for a mission eventually. Suddenly, the throbbing in my thigh seemed to beat in time with my heart. My tailbone sent a sharp stab of pain up my spine to my brain. The arm stung, Dad still pressing against it a little with the gauze.
I’d have to fake it. I’d have to fake every injury my parents saw me get, from now on. I wouldn’t get any scars, no matter how badly I was injured.
That’d always seemed like a blessing, in battle. No evidence, no old wounds to explain, no aches and pains when the weather changed. My body was as healthy as it could be, physically. And I was stuck that way.
The Andalites probably hadn’t thought of something like that as a curse, when they’d created the technology. Most people probably didn’t, when they gained the ability to morph – it was a blessing, a cure-all (or, almost all).
It was just another thing I’d have to hide from my parents. How long would I have to wear the bandage, to pretend it was still healing? How long would I have to wear sleeves long enough to cover the spot, until they stopped looking for the scar?
“Sweetheart?”
I blinked. The world righted itself, a little at least. I was back in the barn. My leg hurt and my arm stung, but I was just Cassie, without the weight of the world on my shoulders (at least for a little while, at least until the next mission). All I had to do was lie to two people, pretend a little bit, right? I could do that. That wasn’t so bad. (I hated it.)
My dad was waiting on an answer. “No stitches sounds good to me,” I said, a little hoarse, a little detached. Maybe that was good. Maybe he’d think it was in response to the injury, and not the looming guilt I was trying to process of a life of lying to my parents.
He cared so much about me, loved me so much. They both did. And I couldn’t even be confident that they were themselves, couldn’t even tell them the truth about this one little scratch.
Dad offered me up a sympathetic smile. “I’ll get you some Tylenol for the pain,” he said.
That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all, but I couldn’t tell him that. “Thanks,” I offered, in response.
“Here,” he said, moving around. “Just hold this in place while I get the supplies out.”
I shifted to press the gauze to my shoulder myself. The first aid kid – the human one – was already out and open, but Dad took a moment to wash his hands off again first, scrubbing off the small bits of my blood before he started looking for the right size bandage and the painkillers. We were both silent as he got to work, me because I didn’t know what to say, him as he concentrated on his work the same way he did when he had an animal patient.
He loved me so much, and I couldn’t tell him that all that care was pointless.
Should I morph immediately, take away the pain, start learning how to fake it? Should I wait until the bandage need to be changed? Should I wait until the next mission? There was no guarantee when that would be; I was already lucky we’d had the weekend go by without anything major happening besides Tobias swinging by to spend some time practicing to be human again before a date (or whatever – I didn’t pry into that too much) at the mall with Rachel. We didn’t like to skip school too much – it drew too much attention to us, especially if a mission was big enough for us all to skip the same day – but I knew it wouldn’t be too long before we were morphing again, even if it was just reconnaissance or surveillance.
Eventually, I knew, I’d have to fake this wound. Why not start early?
But how was I going to convince my dad – or my mom, for that matter – not to check on it, not to help change the bandages? Maybe I’d have to spend some time at Rachel’s house, or Jake’s, or at least tell them I was. I didn’t know. My mind was whirring with possibilities, worst case scenarios, battle plans. I wondered if this was how Jake felt, or Marco, when he had to plan a mission.
This was nothing like that. It was everything like that. The guilt in my gut, in my throat… It was different, but it didn’t matter. It was still guilt. Still another piece of my soul I was chipping away in this war.
“There we go,” my dad said, ever ignorant to my spiraling thoughts (because he had to be, because I couldn’t let him know more). “That should do you. Here.”
He held out a glass of water, and two painkillers.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, still a little stilted as I took them. It was pointless. All of this was pointless. I wished I hadn’t been here today, that none of this had ever happened.
No, I was spiraling. None of this was pointless. This mattered. This had to matter, these small moments.
My dad loved me. He cared for me. My arm ached and my thigh throbbed and my dad hovered in front of me caring for these hurts because it all mattered. This was what we were fighting for, wasn’t it, moments like these?
I took back my wish. Days like this, in the barn with my dad, soothing the hurts of the frightened animals that were brought to us, working side by side, I wouldn’t give them up for anything. I couldn’t. It was all that was left of who I used to be.