Chapter Text
Let’s get straight into it. We’re well past the point of needing much preamble now.
My name is Melissa. Melissa Chapman. Unlike the others, there was never much point in me concealing my last name, or what city I lived in (Santa Monica, if you were wondering). It was always pretty obvious. I was the daughter of Hedrick Chapman, the current head of The Sharing, the Yeerks front organization. It wouldn’t be hard to figure out my identity from that.
Of course now everything has changed. The Yeerks no longer need to mask their alien invasion behind a social club like The Sharing. They no longer need to draw in the vulnerable, the depressed, those looking for purpose. They no longer need to slowly convince people to give up their humanity and betray their friends and family into becoming Controllers. For a long time, they had operated patiently through infiltration. It was a natural move for a parasitic species that slips in through the ear canal, taking complete control of the host’s body leaving them powerless to do anything more than cry inside their own head.
The Controllers would look normal. They’d generally act normal (although sometimes, like in my case, their family members would feel like their loved one had become a kind of impersonation of themself, and they’d have a lingering feeling of things being off). The Yeerks would maintain the facade of their hosts’ human lives all while working on their secret mission. They’d target influential people for infestation. They’d leverage the power they had to get even more power, to get more hosts.
And the Animorphs were the only ones who could stop it. Seven teenagers - myself, my boyfriend, David, my former best friend, Rachel, Cassie, Jake, Marco, and Tobias; and one Andalite cadet, Ax - were the only defense Earth had. One fateful night when after leaving the mall, Jake, Marco, Tobias, the other girls, and I walked home through an abandoned construction site just as a dying Andalite crashed there. That Andalite was Elfangor, Ax’s older brother. Shortly before Visser Three (now the newly promoted Visser One) arrived and murdered him, Elfangor told us about the Yeerk invasion, and gave us our one weapon to fight back. Morphing power. We pressed our hands against the Escavil Device, a blue box that gave us the ability to transform into any animals we touched, but only for two hours at a time.
Later we rescued Ax from a sunken ship off the coast, giving us one more soldier to fight against the entire Yeerk empire. We needed all the help we could get. The morphing power didn’t turn the tide in the war; it just gave us a fighting chance. Some hope instead of none. The Yeerks were still claiming hosts like Jake’s brother, Marco’s mom, and both of my parents. We’d win the occasional victory, disrupt their plans, make things harder for them, but the invasion continued nonetheless. We could only hope that we could hang in long enough for the Andalites to come and rescue us.
We weren’t expecting to have another Animorph join our ranks. But a little more than a year after that night in the construction site, a new kid named David came to our school, and as fate would have it, he ended up exploring the town and walking through that same construction site. We had thought the blue box was destroyed when the Yeerks vaporized Elfangor’s ship, but it wasn’t. David found the morphing cube. He didn’t realize what he had, and made the terrible mistake of trying to sell it. This led to a battle at David’s house between us and the Yeerks. We rescued David and retrieved the morphing cube, but the Yeerks captured David’s parents. He could never go home again.
David and I were the only Animorphs who had lost both our parents to the Yeerks. We bonded over that. David would fly to my window late at night, and we’d hang out in hotel rooms, or sometimes in the abandoned buildings that he’d made his hideouts. We’d stay up all night talking. He was so easy to talk to, I’d lose track of the time, and suddenly glance at the clock and see that it was 4:30 in the morning. I’d have to choose between trying to get a few hours of sleep, or continuing to hang out with David while we watch the sun rise and listen to the birds start chirping. Inevitably, I’d choose to stay with him even though the lack of rest made me a zombie in school.
And of course, soon our connection turned into something more. I remembered sitting next to him on the beach one night and being acutely aware of the short distance between his hand and mine. I noticed that as we talked his hand would creep closer at a glacial pace, moving millimeters over the span of half an hour. I noticed the way he’d stare into my eyes, and then realize that I was staring back into his, and then he’d seem self-conscious and would look out into the ocean instead, and I realized that he liked me just as much as I liked him but he was nervous about it. Which was so strange because normally David seems so sure of himself, bordering on arrogant. And it also felt strange that I’d be the one to make him nervous. I certainly wasn’t as pretty as Rachel. I always felt kind of invisible to the boys at school. And yet I made David nervous. I decided at that moment that I didn't want to wait any longer for his hand to slowly find its way to mine. I reached over and took David’s hand. He seemed a little surprised, and turned to look at me once again, and as he did, I leaned in. And then he kissed me. He held my cheek with one hand and the top of his index finger grazed my ear lobe.
After that, our relationship took off, and I admit, it progressed faster than I expected it to. In fairness, I think it went faster than David expected as well. We saw each other every night, even if we had already fought a mission and were exhausted and trembling from having barely survived. We’d hold each other so close we could hear each other’s heart beat, and we’d whisper to one another, “I care about you.” The precursor to “I love you”, which I ended up saying first, but he immediately reciprocated. At that moment, I had been so worried he’d just awkwardly say “thanks”, or worse, “I know”, and it was such a relief to know he felt the same way I did; that I wasn’t being foolish and just throwing myself at him. Not long after that, we undressed together for the first time, and although a dingy warehouse for a failing mattress company wasn’t exactly the romantic place I pictured it happening, it still felt special. Beautiful.
But none of the other Animorphs liked David, and the feeling was mutual. They never trusted him with the awesome power of the blue box, even though he was the one who found it. Jake gave the box to Cassie, and she hid it somewhere only she knew. David resented that. He felt that it was his box, and he dreamed of using it to create his own team. He bristled under Jake’s leadership, and I saw the simmering resentment in his brown eyes whenever Jake gave him an order. Sometimes he’d follow them reluctantly. Sometimes he wouldn’t.
But we were, more-or-less, a team, and continued to fight the Yeerks for another year, before everything changed.
Like I said, the Yeerks had been doing a quiet invasion. But eventually they figured out that despite having Andalite technology, the majority of us were actually human. They collected samples of our blood after a battle, and compared them to human samples they’d collected from blood banks. It wasn’t long before they found our family members through this search. Our secret identities were over. Most of the other Animorphs got their parents out just in time, and they evacuated to the free Hork-Bajir colony in the mountains.
Only Jake and I failed. Jake’s brother Tom infested Jake’s parents, making them controllers too. My parents had long been Controllers, and chose to take their own lives rather than suffering through the torture Visser One would make them endure for failing to infest me when they had countless chances to. My father had even made a deal with his Yeerk, Iniss 226, that he wouldn’t fight his own enslavement as long as I was never infested. Iniss had kept his end of the bargain, never realizing that I was one of the bandits who had caused such trouble for the Yeerk empire. My father’s deal had kept me safe for a long time, but ultimately it doomed him.
David and I had gone to my house with the intention of rescuing my parents, knocking them out and holding them for three days until the Yeerks in their heads died of Kandrona starvation. But we were too late. My parents put a note on the outside of the garage for me to find, and then went in and sat in the car with the engine running until they succumbed to the fumes. Jake had always promised me that we’d rescue my parents someday, but now that would never happen.
He waited too long to make a move. Jake had made a lot of tough decisions over the years, and had usually been correct. But he screwed up badly that time. It only takes one terrible mistake to ruin a streak of success.
Or, maybe, my parents just never mattered enough to Jake for him to try harder. That was certainly David’s theory.
But now that we’re forced into hiding, the Yeerks are being a lot less subtle. This is an account of that new stage of the war. This is me telling you about how the Animorphs decided to once again expand their numbers in response. This is an explanation on how the Yeerks got the morphing cube. But I know you already heard a lot of that story from Cassie’s account.
So here are some things you haven’t heard. This is also how David and I ended up quitting the Animorphs. This is how we ended up in a state of half-banishment / half-self-imposed-exile, hiding out in my grandma’s cabin in Northern Idaho. This is a tale of bad decisions and regret. This is the story of two people falling in love, and both making each other worse as a result.
This is a story about my cowardice. About me no longer knowing if what I did was right or not, or if I was good or bad. If you were looking for a story about courage and bravery, you should have read one of Rachel's accounts. If you wanted moral certainty from someone who always knows what’s right and what’s wrong, you’d probably prefer one of Cassie’s journals.
But this has neither of those. Sorry, but you’ve got a Melissa story. Bummer. Better luck next time, I guess.
Anyway, here it is.