What if the animorphs kept the telepathy ability that was in the first book
[Since there are a couple abilities that kinda come up in the first book but not again—continuity is a tricky beast—I went with the ability that Elfangor demonstrates to send everything from emotions to images to huge downloads of information using thought-speak. Hopefully this is what you were asking about, dear anon.]
• All five of them are still staring up at the sky, watching the yeerk ship come in to land, when the andalite suddenly whips his tail around. Tobias flinches back, but Elfangor just gently presses the flat of his tail blade against Tobias’s forehead. Visser Three’s Blade ship is descending, Jake is calling for them all to get out of there, Elfangor is bleeding out on the cracked concrete, but the two of them stay frozen there for a long several seconds anyway. Finally Tobias rocks back, taking a huge gasp of air as if just waking up. Rachel yanks him away from Elfangor, out of sight behind a broken wall, before he has time to ask any of the billion questions on the tip of his tongue.
This time, when Elfangor sends them all a warm burst of courage and hope, Tobias closes his eyes—and sends it back.
• Jake practically has to drag Tobias to safety even as Rachel distracts the hork-bajir-controllers. Tobias is silent, strangely blank-faced despite the tears that continue to run down his cheeks, eyes flickering to follow events that have no relation at all to the present world.
When he finally does come to, Tobias finds himself in Jake’s bed in the middle of the night. Jake is camped out on the floor, sitting up in his sleeping bag in a way that suggests he hasn’t even tried to lie down and sleep yet.
Unable to stand the fear and concern in Jake’s eyes, Tobias leans down and presses a hand against his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he whispers, and lets the threads of his own excitement and wonder and fascination flow through that touch, keeping his grief and terror locked away. “I’ll explain in the morning, but I promise we’re going to be okay.”
Sleepy as a child, Jake looks up at him and nods trustingly. Together they slip into strange, cosmic dreams.
• It takes Tobias several days to sort through the enormous set of memories that Elfangor forced into his mind. When Cassie asks, he says it’s almost like a huge computer file that’s been compressed into a tiny amount of disk space, all there but time-consuming for his brain to read through. Still, the more Tobias figures out the more he can teach the others: he makes Rachel laugh just by concentrating hard enough at the place where Marco’s hair is stuck to a hay bale behind him with static electricity, he shows Jake how to pull out of a dive during flight without ever saying a word, he coaches Cassie through spreading empathy to the rest of the team.
Marco remains the most reluctant to get involved, not even morphing after each of them have all tried it at least once. No matter how many times the others reassure him that it’s cool, that being an animal is the wildest thing and sharing it with everyone else is even crazier, he keeps saying that they all need to stay the fuck out of his head if they know what’s good for them. Because, he insists, he is not fighting this war.
“It’s okay,” Tobias says gently. “In your situation I’d be that concerned about my dad as well. In fact—”
Marco punches Tobias so hard that he actually knocks him over. Tobias, dizzy and with a newly blackened eye, misses the next several seconds where Jake has to tackle Rachel to keep her from strangling Marco and Cassie ends up forcing everyone to calm down.
• After all that, it’s Marco who galvanizes them into the first battle. Just one, he insists, one and done, but… He glances at Jake while Jake’s back is turned, and doesn’t finish that sentence. But this battle can’t go unfought, Tobias supplies mentally.
• It’s Jake’s idea to gather them all into a huddle before that first battle. Tobias is reluctant to demorph, but he does it anyway when he understands what Jake is doing. The five of them link arms, forming a circle with their bodies as they all face each other across the dense space. Marco mutters a comment about Satanic rituals that sets them all off giggling, but even he quiets down when Tobias becomes the first one to send them all emotion.
All of them take deep breaths, filled to the brim with Rachel’s fierce courage and thirst for vengeance. With Jake’s casual, collected self-confidence. Cassie’s sweet compassion and indomitable will. Marco’s racing brilliance and bleak amusement. Tobias’s determined, hopeful, iron-hard idealism.
Thus, armed to the teeth with one another’s strength and skill, they go into battle together.
• After, of course, everything changes. And yet in some ways nothing does.
Jake knows what happened—or at least some part of it—the moment he sits up in bed before Tobias has even had time to land on his windowsill. With a shaking hand he presses resilience and hope into Tobias’s feathers.
Rachel comes by often, and together the two of them construct elaborate daydreams which range from the inane (What if unicorns were real?) to the exquisitely sad (What would they do together, if they could go on a normal date?) as they sit side by side in Tobias’s meadow.
Cassie and Jake and even Marco come by to visit on a rotating schedule, Marco transmitting ridiculous little mental cartoons of their Algebra teacher and speculating about what that yeerk in Chapman’s brain does all day, while Jake and Cassie mostly just send love and support.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel says, and Tobias sends her the sensation of hot wet meat and bone sliding down her throat even as the dying scream of a field mouse echoes in her ears. She swallows hard, looking faintly sick, but all she says out loud is, “At least it’s more nutritious than hamburgers, right?”
• When the dreams come, it takes Cassie and Tobias all of thirty seconds—and a fair amount of intense concentration—to convince the others that this is a real problem and that there’s an andalite who definitely needs their help. Tobias only hears secondhand about when the others all discovered that whales can also use this strange form of nonverbal communication they all thought was unique to andalites. However, he gets to meet Ax in person before long, so it’s largely a moot point.
«You have paid a high price for the gift of my brother Elfangor,» Ax says, in his strangely formal andalite way.
«Prince Elfangor was your brother?» Tobias demands. «Wow. Then I guess that’d make you my uncle.»
“Wait, WHAT?” three or four people say at the same time.
• It’s the sort of thing that Tobias found too raw, too personal, to share with anyone else. Almost every other detail from the huge set of memories he received has been parceled out to his friends, picked over and analyzed to death… Except this one, which Tobias has kept close.
That is, until he met someone who had known Elfangor far better than he ever would. He and Ax spend most of the next several days talking—and doing that strange andalite thing which goes beyond mere speech—about everything Ax remembers of his brother. About Elfangor’s legacy, and their struggle to live up to the gifts he left.
Tobias gives Ax the secondhand memories he received, and the story they tell: of a disgraced prince and two eager young arisths, of a pair of human children stranded far from their own world, of how yeerks came to take their only andalite host and thousands of humans after. Neither of them quite knows what to make of it, but together they start to put together the disparate pieces of a life that ended too soon.
• Before every battle they follow the same ritual, sharing—amplifying—their courage and determination while crushing their fear and exhaustion to death beneath the weight of their common affirmation that they’re all still here to fight another day. Ax teaches them all on a level without words what it means to give oneself so fully to one’s team and one’s cause that one ascends a mere petty life to become part of a legend. Jake thinks of the humbling realization of his friends’ love as Cassie and Marco charged to rescue his family on the shores of a night-dark lake. Marco pulls up the fierce pride of causing his mother to laugh until she snorted unflatteringly, and marries it with the gorilla’s slow-burning anger at the yeerks who took her away. Rachel gives them all the heady feeling of a perfectly executed cartwheel and the even headier rush of invincibility that comes every time they survive another battle. Cassie thinks of the awe and beauty and near-terror she felt the first time a humpback whale gave her a tiny glimpse of the sheer scale of the ocean, and the awareness that this is what they are fighting for. Tobias gives them the soaring freedom of coasting on silky wings through a perfect sky and the hork-bajir’s own fierce cry of defiant independence from yeerk tyranny.
After, they are quieter, more subdued. The exhaustion that bleeds from every cell of their broken-repaired-mutilated-remade bodies cannot help but slide through their connection, but other things get through as well. The knowledge that they’re all still here, if only for now. The hope that maybe this time they made a difference. Even just the warmth of the worry that Jake is going home to a controller-infested house and Marco is going home to an empty one, while Ax and Tobias aren’t quite going home at all, can be enough to keep them feeling safe for a time.
They don’t know it, but they are healthier than they would otherwise be. More secure. Better prepared for the horrors to come.
• Tobias becomes a sieve rather than a vessel, letting every modicum of pain and fear flow through his body—and straight into Taylor. She crumples to the ground, screaming, and he feels a vicious joy. Two hours later when the Animorphs manage a rescue, Taylor is screaming “How are you doing that?” as Tobias watches her with calm defiance, barely a feather out of place.
• Rachel jolts her reduced team with heady insouciance like a million shots of caffeine when she leads the team while Jake’s out of town. High on her courage and elation, trapped in a feedback loop of their own cockiness, no one realizes that eight civilians have already died until it’s too late.
• “There’s something I have to tell you,” Tobias says to Loren. He presses a soft hand to her arm, concentrating carefully—and watches her entire expression transform in surprise.
• It’s Ax who finds Jake in the hork-bajir valley after they fail to evacuate his family. Ax who presses the flat of his tail blade against Jake’s forehead. Ax who sends a message with associations and images and emotions and everything that there are not words to describe. Ax who gives Jake his entire life in some ways, and in others gives only one concept: I understand. Ax who clumsily catches Jake when he collapses afterward, nearly sending them both to the ground, and holds him for the next hour as he cries.
• «Where’s Rachel?» Marco says during their final battle for the Pool ship, and Jake cannot contain the emotion that comes spilling out of him in response.
Tobias shouts at him. Cassie sends a wave of silent recrimination that nearly knocks him off his feet. Ax stares at him with an expression, nearly pitying, that is worse than Cassie’s anger. It’s Marco who finally takes a shaky breath and says, «In that case, we’d better get to the bridge and help her out, don’t you think?»
What happens in the interim—the cold calculation between Marco and Ax as Jake watches the yeerk pool flushed into space, the disgust as Cassie tells Erek he’s a robot who doesn’t even feel and wouldn’t understand, the desperation bleeding out of Tobias like a toxic cloud—doesn’t matter. What matters is this: when they get to the bridge, Rachel’s fight hasn’t begun yet. What matters as well: the Blade ship and the Pool ship are parked end-to-end, so close that it is possible to shout thought-speak, to send emotions, across the divide.
«Surrender. Now,» Jake tells Visser One. Espin senses the cold confidence in that voice to the depths of his being, and doesn’t bother to argue.
• The ensuing fight on the bridge of the Blade ship is the stuff of legends. One grizzly bear goes up against an entire menagerie, over twenty different predators and killers from this planet and half a dozen others. One grizzly bear, and yet not fighting alone. Every single one of the Animorphs is right there with her in spirit and in sense, looking through her eyes and feeling through her claws as the six of them together battle for her life.
Rachel has only weak near-sighted bear vision, and yet she swings around to monitor her flanks with an andalite warrior’s grace and ease, incorporating both her own view and that from the screen as if she has four eyes instead of two. With discernment keener than her own she registers the second that the cape buffalo in front of her drops its shoulder to charge, ignoring the lioness to her left even as it turns from battle to run. Two of the hyenas converge on her, and—picturing the ship’s layout as if from above—she ducks behind a control module just in time to send one crashing into the other with bone-breaking force.
Exhaustion has her swaying on her feet, but she digs deep inside herself finds the willpower to shove pain and fatigue aside even as her body fights on, more under her friends’ control than her own. With cold calculation she slams a rhinoceros into the far windscreen hard enough to shatter a hole clear through the window of the Blade ship, watching as if from a distance as the entire craft tilts out of orbit and half a dozen controllers are sucked into the unforgiving vacuum of space. It is with far more compassion that she steps over injured bodies without finishing them off, goes for disabling blows rather than killing ones—including with the king cobra she leaves coiled unconscious on the floor.
At the end of it she stands over the carnage, the only one left reasonably intact despite the bleeding cuts that coat her fur and the gory absence of her right eye. Staggering, she presses her unbroken front paw against the computer’s control-system panel, blindly obeying the mental commands that Ax sends to her in order to bring the ship down.
It is only when Rachel is confirmed as safe that the other five Animorphs realize that this entire time their bodies have been lying almost unattended on the deck of the Pool ship, and that Alloran has been fighting with the strength and skill of twenty warriors to keep them all safe from the remaining controllers in their mental absence.
• «We are not so different from you,» Jake tells the andalite high command. Through their long-distance comm he sends his weariness of war and his hope for the future. The sick sadness of his grief and the flickering flame of his defiance. The love he holds for his planet in general and his friends—his family—in particular. He sends all this, and he can see immediately that the andalite prince understands.
• Meanwhile, a Blade ship is landing on the Washington Mall. When the ramp descends Rachel staggers off it into the jarringly manicured lawn, dragging the unconscious body of her cousin, and only pauses long enough to flip off the shouting circle of reporters that surrounds her before she goes to find her friends.
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