The other day, I came across a post by @thejakeformerlyknownasprince talking about, among other things, rarepairs in Animorphs shipping. And one that was mentioned was Melissa/Tobias, which somehow grabbed onto my brain and won't let go. So here's the concept I've come up with, because I have to do something with it and no way am I confident enough to try writing Melissa.
This would be a fic from Melissa's POV. Ideally in first person like the canon Animorphs books, but I'm not picky about it.
It's Rachel who introduces them, naturally. The boy looks vaguely familiar; Melissa never really paid attention to him, but was he always so... confident and alert? When she talks, he looks at her like she's got his whole attention. (For the purposes of this fic, Rachel and Tobias wouldn't be in a relationship. There may be a story there, but it's not this one.)
So the two start to hang out more and more, and gradually those hangouts become dates. Tobias' home life remains a complete mystery - any time she offers to walk him home, or have her dad pick him up for something, he seems so uncomfortable with the idea that she backs off, and sometimes he vanishes the next time she looks away. Sometimes he talks like he's got a brother or two, but one of them seems to be Jake's friend Marco, who's definitely an only child, so she must be misunderstanding something.
And Tobias does vanish, a lot, actually. They'll say goodbye and go their separate ways, and Melissa looks back and he's nowhere to be seen. Between that and the fact that he doesn't seem to have a phone number, she sometimes wonders if he's even real. (I'm picturing a phone conversation with Rachel where Melissa goes "be straight with me, is my boyfriend a ghost?")
And then they kiss, he completely disappears, and Melissa doesn't see him at all for over a week. When he does show up, he's blatantly worried, showing more emotion than he's ever displayed before. After frankly excessive checks to make sure they're totally alone, he tells her that he has to confess something, and she can't tell anybody, like no, anybody at all. (I want some kind of "what, are you a vampire?" here, but I don't think that was a significant thing in mainstream consciousness before Twilight in 2005.) And then, before her eyes, Tobias' body starts to change, compressing into itself, sprouting feathers...
(It is essential to my concept that, up to this point, the story be strictly slice-of-life, with no clear indication that any of the events of canon are happening. Tobias' disappearances could be parkour or camouflage or something, and the hawk that's often mentioned when he's not around might just be a coincidence. Melissa's parents are distant and stressed, but it could just as easily be because of their jobs or something. The canon Animorphs - including "Phillip" - recently started hanging out together, and sometimes they all go absent at the same time, but who knows what's going on in other people's heads? Any indication that they're suffering from escalating stress and dissociation should be within levels reasonably attributed to the middle-school experience. The Sharing probably shouldn't be mentioned more than passingly.)
And so Melissa hears his voice in her head, explaining that he met an alien who gave him morphing powers, and that some things went wrong and now the hawk is his base form, so he can't live a normal life. If pressed, he admits that it would be possible to make his human form his base again, but then he wouldn't be able to morph any more at all, and he "can't" do that but won't explain why not.
I think that's where the story should end, although I do have thoughts about a couple of story threads that would need at least an epilogue.
