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“In order to act like Jake,” Marco was saying, as he paced back and forth with one hand raised dramatically in the air, “you must become one with Jake. Feel his power coursing through your veins!”
Cassie chuckled, but it was one of those strained ones; polite at best. She probably knew he was just playing it up to hide how scared he was for Jake. Despite his confidence that the plan would work, he couldn’t help but worry about how Jake was doing in there.
If he was still in there.
Ax, who was currently morphed as Jake, didn’t quite get the joke.
Rachel and Tobias were currently keeping watch over Jake and the Yeerk in his head back at the shack. Marco, Cassie, and Ax had moved to a more secluded spot in the woods — far enough from the others, close enough for thought-speak. If there were any coming dangers, they would have to rely on Tobias’s eyes.
“Give it a go,” Cassie urged Ax.
“I have been studying the way Prince Jake acts,” Ax said, looking down at himself. “Acts-uh. His posture contradicts itself. Nobody should be able to balance this way. Sway. Waaaay-uh.”
Ax attempted to pull off the way Jake typically stands, the way most human beings stand: without a perfectly straight spine. Marco supposed that for someone already relying on balance this much, standing like that would be hard.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said, reaching out to steady Ax. “No one’s going to send you to Yeerk-town for standing up straight. We need to focus on the other things.”
“His personality,” Cassie offered, “his smile, his laugh…”
“His sense of humour.” Marco looked at Ax and had the brief thought that maybe he would have been the better one to act as Jake for three days, having known him for so long. But that would mean Ax would have to masquerade as him, as Marco, and he didn’t want to think about how badly that would end.
“Humour,” Ax repeated. “Hyooo-mur. This is the one where you talk strangely in order to make others laugh. Laff-uh. Fuh.”
“Don’t add on the extra syllables, Ax.” That was Cassie, sounding just a bit exasperated. She was probably worried about this. Marco himself had a bad feeling, but they would be able to pull it off, right? After all, this was just Ax.
And it was for the fate of the world. No pressure!
“Syllables?” Ax asked. “Bulls?”
“Moving on!” Marco snapped his fingers in Ax’s face. “Let’s shift. Sense of humour — that’s your biggest gap.”
“I was told that before,” Ax noted.
“By who?” Cassie asked.
“Me,” Marco said without missing a beat. “And I’m not wrong. Alright, Ax, Jake likes dry wit. You don’t tell people the joke; you let them find it.”
“Like a hunt?” Ax asked.
“...Sure,” Cassie replied. “We’ll go with that.”
Marco pursed his lips. “Here’s an example. If someone says, ‘Nice weather today,’ you don’t say, ‘Yes, the meteorological report confirms this.’ You say…?”
A pause of anticipating silence; Cassie and Marco watched as Ax furrowed his brow. The expression was so uncannily Jake.
“It is okay,” Ax said. “I have had warmer hugs from my freezer. Freezer. Zzzzzer.”
“Hey, that’s … actually almost there?” Cassie said.
“He just said that so he could make the ‘z’ sound,” Marco responded flatly. Then he shrugged. “It wasn’t bad, though. Still zero charm.”
“Prince Jake has charm?”
“Buckets of it,” Marco said before he could stop himself. Then he recovered, his cheeks heating up. “I mean, objectively. Cassie agrees, don’t you?”
“He sure is something,” she said, glancing away with a shy smile.
“You two seem to have a special affection for Prince Jake,” Ax observed. “Jay-kuh.”
“Well, yeah,” Marco replied, turning back towards him. “We’ve known him for years.”
“He’s got that personality that just sticks,” Cassie added.
“So I need to stick?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’ll be the hard part: the heart of him.”
“Harder than humour?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Marco said, leaning back; Cassie could take the lead on this one — she and Jake had shared more emotionally vulnerable moments than he ever would. “Being kind on purpose? Way harder than cracking a joke. Compassion’s a muscle.”
“Okay.” Cassie was suddenly more serious. “Let’s say I told you my dog died. I’m crying. What do you do?”
“....Why did you allow the dog to die?”
Marco burst out laughing.
Cassie continued, patient as ever.
“That’s not how Jake would respond,” she told him. “He wouldn’t ask why. He’d just … sit with it. He wouldn’t try to fix it, he’d just be there.”
She was right.
Marco remembered the Pool Ship; he’d never forget it. He remembered Jake’s words.
“But if I do not fix the distress,” Ax said, “then it continues. Yoos.”
“Yes. Sometimes it does. But Jake knows when it’s not about fixing. It’s about being with someone.”
“Pulls you in, holds you still,” Marco added on, making sure he didn’t sound as fond as he felt. He gave Ax a half-smile.
“How does one hold stillness?”
“You listen,” Cassie said gently. “And don’t fill the silence too fast. Try it.”
They acted out a few more scenes after that; Cassie pretending to have lost a dog; Marco pretending to be Tom and asking Jake where he’d been. They worked on emotion, lying, humour, human culture. Ax was getting better and better, but he would still occasionally toy with a word or two. Per sentence.
After around fifteen minutes of it, Ax was starting to get the hang of it, kind of. He certainly wasn’t Jake, and could definitely be too blunt sometimes, but he was Ax. That counted for something.
“One of us should probably be near him at all times,” Cassie said. “Just in case. Maybe a bird morph outside the window, telling him what to say in thought-speak.”
“That’s a good idea,” Marco agreed.
<I disagree,> Ax said. He’d morphed back to Andalite now that they were basically done. <You must help the others when the Yeerk tries to escape. We need as many people helping as possible.>
“Oh, yeah,” Cassie said.
“Guess we’ll just have to trust you on your own,” Marco said with a shrug. “Aw, they grow up so fast, don’t they?”
<Who are they?> asked Ax, and Marco had a witty comeback at the ready but before he could say it they were interrupted by Tobias.
<Guys,> he said, <It’s probably nothing, but there’s some couple headed your way. On Marco’s left. They’ll reach you guys in about ten minutes. Ax should morph to human.>
“It’s getting late, anyway,” Cassie noted. “We need to get back home. I can come back here later and get Rachel some food, and tell her parents she’s sleeping over at my place. Marco, you take Ax to Jake’s. And try to stay with him as long as you can? At least until sundown, because that’s when we’ll all meet up to plan for what to do when the Yeerk escapes.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Marco said. “Alright. Guess this is where we part ways. You know, I’m kind of confident in us.”
“Yeah, this’ll work, won’t it?”
“Totally.”
But three days later, when Jake was freed and he went back home, his parents were so convinced he’d gone insane or hit his head or something that they drove him right back to the hospital where it all began. Jake was free, so the mission was successful, but Ax had not done a very good job. Which meant Marco and Cassie hadn’t done a very good job, either.
Marco and Cassie had forgotten to factor in taste.