Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

My name is Tom. I can’t tell you my last name, or the last names of anyone I know, either. It’s too dangerous. If they knew who we are…if they knew who I was…Earth would lose the fight before it even started.

I should start at the beginning. Or rather, when I found out about the invasion. That’s right, the invasion. Of aliens, of course. I was at the mall not too far from our house, looking for a new pair of basketball shoes. I’m a member of the basketball team at the high school, so I go through them fast. I didn’t find anything I liked that night- luckily, because if they’d found a receipt with my name on it, we’d be dead meat by now. I decided to duck into the arcade for old time’s sake. My little brother, Jake, and I used to go there together all the time, before he got too ‘cool’ to be seen hanging out with his older brother.

I spotted Jake’s best friend, Marco, playing a single-player game, and immediately and headed over to say hello, and maybe challenge him to a game.
"Hey, squirt . Jake around?" I asked.

Marco grimaced, “Not really. Off at some club meeting. I tried to get him to skip it, I mean, Killer Instinct 2! How do you turn Killer Instinct down for some lame save-the-world club, I don’t know."

I laughed. “That’s Jake for you, always wanting to save the world. I’ll play you, though, if you don’t think I’m too old for the arcade…?"

"You’re on," he said, “But prepare to have your butt kicked." Yeah, right. Brat.

While I kicked Marco’s butt, my cousin Rachel and a shy dark-skinned girl in overalls approached us. I let myself die, and while Marco was whooping, I leaned over and asked, “Is that The Cassie?" This requires a little bit of backstory. See, for years Jake has had a crush on Cassie. For years, and he still can barely even talk to her. From what gossip I’d heard from Marco, it was a sad, sad, situation. I’d only ever seen her in passing at Rachel’s birthday parties and bat mitzvah.
Marco grinned at me and opened his mouth to say something, doubtlessly a bad joke, but Rachel interrupted.

"Tom beating you as horribly as you deserve?" she said cockily. The thing about Rachel is that everything she says is cocky and self-assured. It’s not vanity, she just knows she’s that good. Sometimes I wonder whether mom is even related to her, with how messy mom is and how perfectly-put-together Rachel is. That sounds mean, but it’s true. Maybe it’s just that Rachel seems so wonderful that it makes everyone else look bad.

"I’m offended that you think that I could ever be beaten," said Marco, hand pressed to his heart dramatically.

"I’m offended that you think you’d ever win," she shot back. I’ll never understand these two. They’re friends, I think, but then they start the insults and it seems like they hate each other.

Cassie watched Rachel and Marco go at it, flicking her eyes over to me with a slight frown.

"Hey, I’m Tom," I said, “Jake’s brother?"

Cassie blushed and nodded. “Pleased to meet you. Rachel, I thought you said we were going now."

"We haven’t even gotten you anything! The whole point of coming here was so that you could get something that wasn’t covered in horse poop!" Rachel retorted.

"I like my clothing."

"Yeah, and you also like skunks, so what does that say about you?"

I intervened, “You should be getting home anyways, right, Rachel?" I knew for a fact that Rachel had been testing her boundaries on her curfew recently, and getting home early would only help. She scowled, but agreed. “Marco, you want to walk home with us?"

"Yeah, sure. Uh…let me just use my last quarter up," he said.

I grinned at him. “Well if it’s only you playing, you’re bound to win." He rolled his eyes as Rachel and Cassie laughed. Then Rachel grinned and said the words that would change our lives, and the whole planet, forever.

"Let’s go through the abandoned construction site!"

Chapter Text

[Excerpt from In the Shadows of the Martyrs (draft) by Tom Berenson, found on his computer 16 days after he disappeared]

“Here’s something most people don’t like to think about for too long: the Animorphs were children. 12-year-olds, mostly, barely old enough to be in middle school. They were kids. So was I, of course, but to them it didn’t matter. I was an adult, one they knew and one they could trust because they had rescued me themselves. Of course they looked to me for leadership and guidance. Of course they did. Was that a good thing? I don’t know.

It also helped that I was the only reminder they had left of Jake, who gained a sort of golden boy gleam in their eyes after his death. Being compared to my dead baby brother and told that he would have done better was always a fun conversation.

Maybe if I’d had morphing capabilities, it’d have been better. But I was rescued after the rest of the Animorphs had already gotten their powers and lost the cube that gave it to them. So I was stuck as a useless human, living deep in the woods, avoiding human contact in order to hide from the Yeerks. At least I had Tobias, and later Aximili, to talk to. I had some very good friends in the Hork-Bajir by the end of the war as well.

I could’ve just run. The Yeerks weren’t everywhere yet, after all. The key word in that sentence, however, was ‘yet’. They’d find me, and when they did, everything my brother had fought and died for would be worthless. I couldn’t just leave my newly-infested parents to suffer alone, either. If I could do anything, I would. Not that I did a lot, other than planning. Most of the Animorphs’ best- and, to be honest, worst as well- ideas happened during the heat of battle, which I of course I wasn’t part of until much later in the war.

Well, that’s not completely true. I was a part of it, I just wasn’t fighting. When we could spare Tobias, one of the others would relay what was going on back to him, who’d talk to me, and then I’d give my thoughts on what was happening to Tobias, and it’d go back. It only worked sometimes, and some was better than none, but… I was the leader. How could I lead when I didn’t know what was going on? That cost us battles, I know it did. We were lucky that we didn’t all crash and burn. I don’t know how we survived. By rights, we should’ve all been dead that first night in the Pool, instead of just Jake.

Since Andalite Princes are usually in the heat of battle, Aximili was often confused by the arrangement, but he accepted it as another weird human thing. You know, Ax is the only one who never met Jake. I think about that sometimes, about how they might react to each other. They’re almost exact opposites, in their own ways. Jake was hopeful, determined, and down-to-earth. Ax was stiff, uncertain- though not so much any longer- and a little pompous. Mostly I think they wouldn’t know what to do with each other. Not that I knew what to do with Ax either. The others just sort of accepted him and his alien-ness. But my worldview wasn’t as flexible as theirs anymore, and it was hard. Cultural exchange is always difficult, but in the middle of the war, while we were all terrified that we could be found at any moment? It was hard.

Sometimes I imagine how Jake would have done it. He’d have been in the middle of the chaos of the battles, of course, so it’d be more real to him. Excluded from the battle as I was, it got easier and easier to just see the numbers rather than the names. The only thing that seemed real anymore were the memories of the Yeerk in my brain and the reality of having my home and my family taken away from me. That led to some pretty horrible decisions on my part, even after I’d gained morphing capability. I wonder if Jake would have been a better, a more compassionate, leader. I guess we’ll never know.

I know this for sure: there are some things I did in this long, bloody war that I know for a fact my brother would not approve of. But you know what? We won. That makes it all worth it. As Toby Hamee once told me: Free or Dead. I still believe that whole-heartedly. People will ask about the number of Yeerks killed, of Controllers killed or mutilated, and that will always be my answer. Better dead than Controlled. Always. Some things you can’t compromise on.

They killed my childhood, my future, and my little brother. I will never let them win.”