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<Well,> Ax said as he swooped down to perch on the deck railing of the governor’s mansion in osprey morph. <This exercise concluded in what I would deem a limited success.>
“Oh yeah?” I asked, looking up from the paper and setting down my coffee. “Did Tobias talk to you this time?”
<Indeed,> Ax said. He started to demorph, doubling, tripling in size as his gray-and-white feathers melted into an intricate blue-and-tan coat.
“Something other than ‘go away’?” I asked. Ever since the funeral, Ax, Loren, Jake, and Cassie had been going on Tobias-chasing missions on a nearly-daily basis. Jake and Cassie had backed off after Tobias told Cassie to tell Jake to stick to what he was good at (and then had said, and I quote: “ie, leaving other people to die”), but neither Ax nor Loren were about to be scared off. Ax didn’t have to heavy lifting to do in the political front until the Andalites got done with some special session of congress or whatever that was supposed to take them another four days, so he’d taken on Birdboy duty. I was the only one who seemed to be leaning into the whole ‘the war is over’ thing with luxuries like sleeping in, chilling, and eating full meals.
<Tobias spoke to Loren separately and she did not tell me what was said. He told me that if I still wished to speak to him in one of your years, he would hear me out. >
I really wanted to say “there everybody’s years”, if only for old times’ sake, but I restrained myself out of respect for the gravity of the conversation. “So what are you going to do now?”
Now fully Andalite, Ax’s eyestalks did a quizzical little bob. <Loren and I will respect Tobias’ wishes, naturally,> he said. He trotted up beside my chair and folded his hind legs so that he was seated more or less at my level. I turned to lean against his torso. This maneuver really worked better with a couch but there aren’t a whole lot of ways for an Andalite and a human to snuggle so you’ve got to stick with the old standbys.
“So you’re telling me you’ll throw down a challenge to broker a three-way ceasefire between the Yeerks, Andalites and humans but you’re not going to try to get a better deal from your own best friend when he’s being an idiot?” I asked. Tobias and I had never been close, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t recognize the strategic value of all the major players of the Earth resistance presenting a united front to the rest of the world. Plus, I could tell that Ax missed him. “If he went from not talking to you to telling you he’ll talk to you in a year, go back tomorrow and see if you can talk him down to a week.”
<It is common for warriors to seek solitude after losing a comrade-in-arms among my people,> Ax said. <He has suffered a great loss. I believe his request to be reasonable, and it would be dishonorable to deny him his seclusion.>
I rolled my eyes. “You’re a pushover, dude,” I said, trying to keep my mind from jumping straight into the calculations of what it meant that Tobias was out of the game for at least a year. It was an awkward loose end in our public image – he wasn’t a martyr like Rachel or a hero like Jake, but a walking casualty, at large in the wilderness… well, it was his life. But it didn’t make mine any easier.
<Have you finished your preparations for the press conference tomorrow?> Ax asked.
I leaned my head against his shoulder and sighed. “Not really. There’s a lot of Ellimist stuff we probably can’t really talk about in public without sounding nuts and big parts of the story that don’t make sense otherwise. But there are some things we can just eliminate from the narrative completely, like the Time Matrix and the Sario Rips and Gafinilan and Mertil.”
<I understand redacting confidential information to protect Mertil’s seclusion, or even to avoid creating a social shock by revealing the existence of the Ellimist and the Time Matrix, but why do you wish to conceal our experiences within Sario Rips? They are an established phenomena of Z-space physics.>
I scoffed. “Yeah, you can tell the apocalypse cults about the established phenomena of Z-space physics after I go on the air next to the president and say ‘by the way, we killed the dinosaurs’. No way, Ax-man. We gotta keep the story simple and digestible at first. Maybe some of the crazier stories we can reveal a few years from now, but for the time being, we need to keep it straightforward enough that we can control the narrative. And there are real political ramifications to messing it up. I’m still trying to get in touch with Erek to figure out how much he needs us to downplay the Chees’ involvement… there’s a lot of moving pieces and not a lot of time to get our stories straight.”
<Prince Jake has entrusted you with a complex and difficult duty and I am, as they say, “here for you,” if you should require my assistance,> Ax said, wrapping his arms around my waist. Ax was a born snuggler. The boy lived to snuggle. I leaned into his shoulder.
“Well, I’m gonna need all the help I can get,” I said. “Journalists and government officials are going to be fact-checking the living daylight out of us for the rest of our lives, so we’ve gotta get this right.”
<Your human media is nothing if not insistent,> Ax said. <I anticipate that the rest of you will have as many difficulties controlling your public image as I will in justifying my previous actions to my commanders back home and adjusting to my duties at the rank of prince. I do not envy the challenges you will encounter.>
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t want the Andalite military breathing down my neck either,” I said. Absentmindedly, I traced whorls and loops on Ax’s forearms with my fingertips, watching the way the feathery blue down would prickle up and flatten down. “You might win this round.”
<I fear that the Andalites will not prove as resilient in victory as the humans have,> Ax said. <In less than one of your weeks since the ceasefire was declared, most humans have incorporated the idea of an existential threat to humankind via invasion of alien life forms into their reality and continued on with their normal lives. I am worried that upon my return to the homeworld in a month’s time, I will discover that my people are less adaptable after fighting such a long war.>
Only one part of what Ax had just said registered with me. My fingers froze. “You’re going back to the homeworld for a month?” I asked.
<No,> Ax said. <I am returning home in one month.>
“But not one of our months, right?” I asked. “Like, an Andalite month. Which is probably longer.”
I could feel Ax tense up. <Commander Asculan has scheduled my return to the Andalite homeworld to take place in three and a half of your weeks.>
“So they call the shots now, huh?” I asked, trying and miserably failing to make my voice sound wry and unconcerned.
<I am assured I will return to Earth often for diplomatic purposes,> Ax said. A tremor went down his torso. It seemed like he was shivering or something. <I have heard some talk of a war crimes tribunal. I imagine that I will be called on to testify.> The shivers intensifies and it occurred to me that I had no idea how Andalites cried. I twisted around so I could look Ax in the eyes. His tail was stretched flat and his eyestalks were drooped down. He looked miserable. It was times like these that I wished that spontaneous gestures like kissing could be more straightforward, but I made do with wrapping him in a bear hug and holding him close.
“Look, nene, it’s gonna be okay,” I said. “You all have long distance calling on the Andalite homeworld, right?”
<Only for Class B3 or higher classified military and consular transactions,> Ax said with a particularly wracking shudder that I translated as a sob.
“We’re very important people, Ax,” I said. “I’m sure we can commander some phone time.”
<You don’t know how things work in the Andalite military structure,> Ax said, with a brave but unconvincing attempt at Andalite superiority.
“I know that if my boy Jake tells your officers to jump, they ask ‘how high?’” I said. “I think he could swing telling them that the Animorphs need a secure, untapped line to you 24/7, as our primary contact on the homeworld and unofficial ambassador to Earth.” Ax’s shivers subsided a little and I put a hand to the side of his face. “Look, nobody can make you join back up with the military if you don't want to,” I said. “If you decide you want to retire right now, to Earth or to the homeworld, I doubt anyone could stop you. It’s your life, Ax-man. You get to decide how to live it.”
<What do you think I should do, Marco?> Ax asked. His bright green eyes bored into mine.
Okay, hold the phone. Ax never asked me for advice (okay, beyond things like “is this greenish liquid you call chimichurri good to drink?”). This was all but unprecedented. This really seemed more like a Tobias-level question. “I don’t know, dude,” I said. “I mean, where do you think you can do the most good?”
Ax didn’t reply right away. But his main eyes slid out of focus and some of the tension went out of his shoulders. <I am uniquely positioned to serve as an envoy between my people and the people of Earth, especially at this moment in time.>
“Alright, cool.”
<But to do so effectively will require me to reintegrate myself with Andalite society to a large extent to better understand the diplomatic world into which I am entering. That must become my first priority.> It dawned on me then that I had managed to say the exact wrong thing to keep Ax here. If he thought it was his duty to politick it up with the Andalite shmuckity-shmucks back on the homeworld, it would take another freakin’ invasion to get him back here on Earth. <And it seems that you are greatly needed here.>
I thought for a second about what it would be like to make an extended visit to the Andalite homeworld. I thought about Jake trying to go on late night talk shows and grimaced. I thought about Cassie trying to go on daytime and winced. Maybe she had a promising career in human rights (or, as the news anchors were saying these days, “beings’ rights”), but that girl once gave a Zone 91 base sergeant a fake phone number with eight digits. The Animorphs wouldn’t last a week without me in peacetime.
<Marco? How do you want to proceed?> Ax asked.
“Look, we don’t have to make any decisions right now,” I said. “We’ve got a month.” Even as I said it, I realized that there was really only one decision to make. There was a knot in my stomach that I used to get before missions – the anticipation that something was about to hurt like hell, fine-tuned by three years of guerrilla warfare. Ax and I didn’t have a real future together now that the war was over, at least not until we put ourselves back together a little. Ax cared about things like order and self-discipline and recreational physics. I liked video games and Bob Marley and living the good life. Ax was career military and I was a born-and-bred Santa Barbara suburbanite. We were never that compatible to begin with. We were mostly together out of a powerful but unspoken shared desire to not just die without wringing some happiness out of our totally FUBAR lives.
<I suppose you are correct,> Ax said. <There is no immediate imperative to come to a decision.> I caught a weird tone in his thoughtspeak, hesitant, almost wistful, like he didn’t really believe what he was saying, either.
I guess I lost the prerequisite idealism to be a hopeless romantic somewhere in year two of the invasion, before Ax and me became an item, so I never thought we were soulmates or that it was true love or anything. I was pretty pragmatic from the start: romance and kissing and sweet nothings and all that crap releases endorphins in your brains, endorphins keep you from wanting to kill yourself, and that was good enough of a reason to do anything at that point. Dating Ax seemed like a pretty viable survival strategy at the time. He was cute, I was smitten, both of us were pretty short on adequate coping mechanisms - I figured there was nothing else to it.
Looking back on it, I guess I was pretty naïve. If there was one thing all six of us were good at doing, it was catching feelings. But even though our relationship turned out to mean a lot more than I had intended it to mean to me, I had never thought Ax and me were going to spend the rest of our lives together. Not really, anyway. Call it heartlessness, call it seeing the bright, clear line, call it being a jerk, but I had always assumed there was some kind of expiration date for this thing. I just hadn’t realized it was coming up so fast.
I was going to miss his dependability. His resolve. His ability to keep it together no matter how bad things got. Even his dumb sense of non-humor. But trying to have a healthy relationship when I knew how much work it was going to require just to take care of myself was going to be much, much worse.
“Did you know that Jake asked Cassie to marry him?” I said. No forethought, I just blurted it out. Really smooth, Marco. What a normal, cool thing to say right now. “A couple of days before the battle with the Pool ship. He told me about it a few days ago when I asked what was going on with them.”
<I was not aware of that,> Ax said. I couldn’t read the tone of his voice at all, but at an outside guess, he thought it was reckless and dumb but didn’t want to badmouth the fearless leader. <I take it she did not accept his proposal?>
“Apparently she told him to ask again in a year if he still thought it was a good idea,” I said. “That’s what made me think of it. What Tobias told you.” Phew. Thank God I managed to make that sound less desperate and crazy than it was.
<Do you think he intends to ask again in a year?> Ax asked, probably trying to figure out just how much he ought to judge Jake for trying to get hitched to the girl who’d let Tom’s Yeerk take the morphing cube.
“Well, I think the deferment had a chilling effect,” I said. “I kind of doubt it. Cassie was best friends with…” the end of my thought hung in the air. Rachel’s death still didn’t feel real. I’d watched her die, I’d been to the funeral, they even asked me to ID the body, but it still felt sometimes like if we just didn’t mention it, she would pop out from behind a corner and drag us all to the outlets or the battlefield again.
Just like old times.
<I see,> Ax said. <I must state that I think Prince Jake is very young to be considering choosing a life mate. In my society, all parties entering into a union must have completed one-third of their life cycle before they are eligible for marriage. And no form of fraternization is ever condoned.> His tail was twitching at an irregular tempo that made me think he was irritated, like a cat watching a mouse from behind a window.
“I guess it’s a good thing that Cassie turned him down, then,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s exactly fraternization. You might have officially declared Jake as your prince, but we're volunteers. He doesn’t have any formal military authority over the rest of us.” Ax didn’t say anything to that. I think he thought a little more formal military authority would have gone a long way in the last couple of years. Meanwhile, I had been raised by a Silicon Valley engineer and a political exile from a Latin American dictator regime, so respect for authority was never a big part of my worldview. But this was an argument I was already tired of having and just as content not to start.
“Ax, are you okay?” I asked. “With what Tobias said, I mean?”
Ax took a second to formulate a reply. <I am willing to accept his wishes,> he said. <But I feel that I am losing you all at an alarming pace.>
“I didn’t think winning was going to be this hard,” I said. “I guess I should have. My mom saw this coming. She tried to tell me. But we were just so outgunned I never planned for us to make it.”
<Marco, you might react disfavorably to this suggestion,> Ax said. <But regardless of what we decide about our romantic relationship a month from now, I believe that we must maintain something of a political alliance. I am afraid that much of the practical work of negotiating the peace will fall to us.>
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “You might be right about that.” I turned around enough so that I could bury my face in Ax's shoulder. For everything that Ax and I didn't see eye-to-eye on, there were a lot of things he just got. When I had to talk something out even if I didn't really want to, when it was time to do something distracting and fun, when I needed to just be still and reflect on the fact that we were both miraculously still alive. I was going to miss how warm he was and the weird sweetgrass and orchard scent that clung to his coat. I could already start to feel the knife-twist ache in my stomach, the fine-tuned anticipation of pain. How much harder was it going to do what we needed to do to build a durable peace with this beautiful, dorky, brilliant, uptight alien half a galaxy away?
But then I realized that the mass of Ax's body was shifting and changing, shrinking slightly, becoming human. This was a pretty standard prelude to smooching, because blue German-shepherd-puppy fur is actually not that nice to have in your mouth. I guess Ax didn't really feel like talking, either.
It suddenly occurred to me that we were on the deck of a government home that had been lent to us because we were big damn heroes, and it also occurred to me that the rest of the Animorphs and all our families were also staying here, even if they weren't in this actual house at this actual moment. "Look, just for your information, I am not about to get caught fooling around at the governor's mansion," I said. "I was raised better than that."
Ax blinked those ridiculously long lashes at me. "I understood that this was an extraordinary circumstance precipitated by the destruction of your homes and the extreme need for security against lone wolf assailants," he said. "Is that a common social situation against which your parents cautioned you as a child? Cautioned. Shunned."
"Well, no, but I don't want to be the one to bring shame down on my family," I said. Ax looked crestfallen. I wrapped an arm around his waist. "So I'm saying we had better not get caught."
"We are highly skilled at evading capture."
I pulled him closer.
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