Idea: What if, partway through the war, all the yeerks (on Earth) died? Not killed by the Animorphs– maybe the Andalites got their act together, maybe they were wiped out by an unexpected plague, whatever. But suddenly, the teen soldiers find their enemies just… gone.

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

Embarrassingly enough, it takes them almost two weeks to notice. Well, that’s not quite true. They notice the suspicious lack of yeerk activity in less than a week, but mostly in the form of Marco declaring it to be “quiet… too quiet” and Jake wondering what the heck has the yeerk inside Tom acting so morose all of a sudden. It takes almost two weeks of Tobias lurking over known Yeerk Pool entrances wondering where the heck the controllers are, two weeks of Ax mentioning that the internet chatter is more full of yeerk talk than usual, two weeks of Erek reporting no Sharing meetings anywhere in the country, and two weeks of Cassie telling them to appreciate the break for a change… and then Rachel snaps.

Specifically, she gets fed up with the tension, marches up to Tom in the middle of a school hallway, and (poking him in the chest every so often for emphasis) demands to know whether the entire Yeerk Empire has suddenly gone into hibernation or— or what.

Tom’s response is to grab her by the arm and drag her into Chapman’s office.

Rachel fights him with literal teeth and literal nails, of course — right up until the moment Tom turns to Chapman and goes “See? She remembers that there were brain-stealing aliens too. That proves I’m not crazy.”

Rachel stares at Tom in shock. Chapman heaves a put-upon sigh and says, “I never said you were crazy. I said that we should all probably forget it ever happened and move on, because if we told anyone then we’d appear to be crazy.”

“But…” Tom frowns, petulant. “But if we, like, got a reporter to talk about the yeerks, and enough of us agreed about what happened…”

“Then no doubt the school district would send gas inspectors out to determine why so many people in this town are hallucinating,” Chapman drawls. “The yeerks are all dead, their bodies entirely decomposed in the Earth atmosphere by now. The nonhuman hosts were last seen wandering off in search of that mystical colony of free hork-bajir somewhere in the mountains. I don’t have a way to contact the andalites. All of which means that the only proof you have is a rapidly-evaporating puddle of kandrona under the school.” He sighs. “Any reporter with an ounce of sense will blame the fumes from that for the gas leak, and we’re back to square one.”

“The yeerks… are dead?” Rachel asks.

“How did you not already know this, if you were a controller?” Tom says.

She should probably wait and confirm this with Jake and the others. Probably. But then, she’s never been very good at waiting. “Because I’m one of the morphers who’s been fighting them.”

After all that, Rachel doesn’t even get to tell the others the news. Because she bursts into their meeting only to find that Toby is already standing there looking grave, and Cassie’s mouth is hanging open. By the time Toby is done telling her story — and answering all 500 of Marco’s suspicious questions — most of the details come out.

A few days ago, close to a thousand hork-bajir and taxxons had simply wandered into the free hork-bajir valley. Toby had assumed an attack, until one of the taxxons, who gave the unusual-for-a-taxxon name of Arbron, had explained that none of them were controllers. Because, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, all the yeerks simply dropped dead a few days back.

Toby, not being born yesterday, had forced the entire cavalcade to wait three days under constant guard before letting them into the valley. They passed. All signs point to the conclusion that they’re telling the truth: the yeerks inside them all have died without warning.

Marco, being Marco, maintains that this is all some elaborate yeerk conspiracy. Until Rachel shamefacedly mentions that she blurted the whole thing out to Tom. Until Tom, muttering about their questionable taste in tourism destinations, takes them through a Yeerk Pool entrance under the car wash and shows them the cavern: empty, echoing, deserted. Filled with detritus and congealing kandrona and abandoned junk.

Cassie becomes the one to voice the question that’s been on all their minds, later that afternoon as they sit around her barn. “So…” she says slowly. “Now what?”

“We’ve gotta tell someone, right?” Rachel looks around at them. “Just pick any adult, show them that we can morph, and then…”

<And then come the conspiracy theorists,> Tobias points out. <Then come the social workers. Then come the paparazzi. Is that really what we want?>

<Prince Jake? What do you recommend?>

Jake runs his hands through his hair. “Honestly? I want to go home. I want to finish my stupid English essay, since I guess I’ve got time for it now. I want to go to the UCSB game on Saturday. I want to…” He takes a breath. “To catch up with my brother. Maybe even get some sleep for once, while I’m at it.”

They vote on it, for lack of a better solution. Rachel and Marco are all for telling the world. Cassie thinks they should wait on a decision until they talk to Toby and some of the ex-hosts about what everyone else wants. Tobias and Jake seem exhausted even by the thought of the media circus that would ensue. Ax, as always, abstains.

“Okay,” Jake says. “I guess that’s two votes in favor of sharing our story, three against. We’ll go with Cassie’s suggestion: hold off for now, revisit the idea after talking to the others.”

Things get back to normal. Kind of. Sure.

Rachel punches a girl she doesn’t even know in the face after said girl rudely ignores Marco. And then, when Marco makes a breathy comment about Rachel defending his honor, she punches him too. Detention is a relief; it’s high time someone punished her.

Cassie breaks down crying in the middle of dinner for, really, no reason at all, and finds herself crying harder when her parents hover and worry and offer explanations: it’s about a boy, it’s about the goose last week they couldn’t save, it’s about hormones.

Tobias wavers. He practices, a little bit at a time. Pretends to be human long enough to walk downtown. Grows fingers and dull eyes to see what happens when he rings Rachel’s doorbell like any other boy on the planet. Each time he goes back. Each time giving up human shape feels more like disappointment, more like relief.

Jake wanders the house in restless circles for six or more hours a night, trying to wear himself out so that the nightmares won’t wake him yet again. Sometimes he hears the crisp pock-pock-pock of a basketball on concrete outside, and feels less alone.

Marco’s dad comments on how many evenings they’ve spent together with a reheated pizza and the latest Madden. Marco brushes it off with a comment about earning enough brownie points to get a car.

Ax, with a little help from some commandeered yeerk tech, calls home again. He tries to tell his parents everything that happened, and finds he doesn’t have the words. They assure him they’re coming for him the moment they get permission from the Electorate, and he tries to believe that that time is coming soon.

Ten days later, when it seems that every single trace of yeerk activity really has disappeared for good, a kid with messy blond hair and soft grey eyes walks into their high school to enroll. There are some inconsistencies in his paperwork, of course — he lists his uncle as his legal guardian in spite of said uncle being less than a year older than him, he gives his home address as a P.O. box downtown, he has no transcripts from previous schools — but the vice principal proves willing to overlook all of those issues in light of everything that this kid has done to keep the planet safe. Chapman even signs off on the form claiming that Tobias requires access to a private bathroom once every two hours all day long for unspecified medical needs. It feels, in some ways, like the first true commitment to the idea that this peace might just last.

Which is why Marco corners Tom the next day in school. “So,” Marco says, “I had a question. And you probably don’t know the answer, but you’re like, my second-to-last resort before Chapman, so let’s go with you’re kinda my last hope. Anyway, I was just wondering, in case you happened to know—”

“Supervising the invasion of the Anati system,” Tom says over him, “as of the day all the yeerks on Earth kicked it. No one’s heard from Visser One or her forces since.”

“Anati. That’s far away, isn’t it.” Marco doesn’t wait for confirmation. “And if I wanted to, say, send a message to Anati…?”

Tom considers for a minute. “Find Alloran. He’ll know how.”

So Marco goes to Ax. Just to Ax. He’s getting closer and closer to the others all finding out about this, but… it’s his mom. His problem. He doesn’t want to trouble the others, who all deserve their rest.

Ax, however, seems to be bored out of his mind. He seizes on Marco’s “mission” with enthusiasm, hacking every open-circuit camera he can get his hands on in about two hours flat.

Between Tobias being at school for several hours a day and Jake having essentially ordered them all to take a break, Ax has a lot of time on his hands. It takes him less than three days to catch sight of a very familiar human morph — tall, balding, with a commanding smile — and figure out where Alloran has been hiding. The paper trail takes a little more tracing from there, but eventually he gets a hit on a four-star hotel whose penthouse is currently being paid for by a Yeerk Empire shell corporation… and whose penthouse guest has already been reprimanded twice for stealing too many tiny Danishes from the breakfast bar.

Alloran listens to Marco, and even seems sympathetic, but insists that, as long as they don’t know what killed the yeerks on Earth, he’s not going to contact the yeerks elsewhere to let them know so that they can start invading Earth all over again. Which is when Marco reluctantly gets the others involved, on the assumption that one of them will know how so many yeerks ended up kicking the bucket all at once.

Chapman, when asked, immediately blames the oatmeal crisis that was underway at the time when the yeerks died. However, he has no proof to back up this theory, so he’s not much use.

Tom blames the whole thing on inbreeding. He does not listen to Ax when Ax points out there’s no way a lack of genetic diversity could kill a whole species that quickly.

Jake comes up with an elaborate explanation about them having all died of the common cold. Rachel pokes fun at him for plagiarizing War of the Worlds, until Cassie points out that technically a lack of genetic diversity could in theory leave them open to all being affected by the same disease.

Marco and Tobias, it might be said, get a little too far into tinfoil-hat territory around the time they connect an experimental weapons test out of Zone 91 with a fractional shift in the pH of the surrounding atmosphere, which might have something to do with the acid rain out of Nevada… which probably has nothing to do with the yeerks dying.

Alloran makes a single, muttered comment about quantum viruses. He refuses to explain himself, or even to tell anyone what a quantum virus is.

Marco writes the whole thing off as a colossal waste of time. He goes home that night frustrated, defeated, and wondering if Ax is quite bored enough to steal an unused Bug fighter so that they can go on a kamikaze run for Anati.

He wakes up tied to a chair in the middle of an abandoned warehouse.

“Listen to me, parasite,” a very familiar voice says. “We can do this the easy way, where you worm yourself out of him right now and no one has to get hurt… or we can do it the very, very hard way.”

Which is right around the time that Marco remembers that he definitely pretended to be a controller the last time he saw his mom. “Oh crap,” he says out loud, and then, “I’m guessing you’re not a controller anymore.”

“Edriss dropped dead out of the blue, don’t know why. I stole a Bug fighter and came straight here.”

“Huh,” Marco mumbles, “must be genetic.”

Eva raises the dracon beam in her hands until it’s pointed at his head. “Surrender or don’t. Either way, I’ve got no plans for the next three days.”

Marco blinks several times. Judging by the fuzziness of his vision and the cloying taste in the back of his throat, his mom friggin’ drugged him. There’s no telling how long he’s been gone. “I should probably warn you. Jake and a couple of my other very dangerous friends are gonna be looking for me, and I can pretty much guarantee that when they find us—”

“Your threats don’t mean anything to me.” Eva smiles bitterly. “After all, I’m already dead. So I suggest you be quiet, or I might be forced to gag you.”

Marco does as he’s told. Staying quiet and staying put until his mom figures out he’s not a controller either seems preferable to fighting her.

By his extremely crappy system of internal timekeeping, it is either two hours or two days later that there’s a scraping sound on the roof of the warehouse… almost like a bird of prey landing on the corrugated iron. Eva stands up, tilting her head to listen. In the process, she lets the dracon beam drop to her side — which is when the grizzly bear hits her like a freight train. Her body goes skidding across the floor, a small mountain of brown fur and claws following.

“Stop!” Marco bellows. “Rachel, STOP!”

<I’m not gonna kill her, jeez.> Rachel pins Eva to the ground, leaning just enough weight on the arm that holds the dracon beam that the weapon clatters out of her hand.

“She’s not a controller!” Marco says. “Visser One is dead.”

<She has you tied to a chair—>

“Yeah, exactly!” Marco really wishes he could hold up his hands in a placating gesture right now. “Which we both know I could get out of in about two seconds. So if she knew I could morph, why bother trying to capture me alone? If she didn’t know I could morph, why capture me at all?”

Rachel pauses for a second, looking between him and Eva. <I don’t get it. Why did she kidnap you, then?>

“Because she thinks I’m a controller.” Marco raises his eyebrows. “Which means she isn’t.”

<Marco’s logic does appear to be sound.> Ax steps delicately forward. <In that case, we apologize for inconveniencing you, Mrs. Marco’s Mom.>

Rachel sits back on her rump with a whuff of indignation.

Eva climbs slowly to her feet. She looks over at where Marco is awkwardly shifting out of the way so that Ax can cut him loose. “Mijo,” she whispers, “who the hell told you that you were allowed to fight in a war?”

Marco stands up, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Does this mean I’m grounded?”

“Oh yes,” Eva says, pulling him into the tightest hug he’s had in his life. “For the rest of existence.”

It finally happens less with a bang than with a whimper. The mall downtown is expanding to a new wing, and the construction equipment encounters a sinkhole larger than any California has yet seen. After a trackhoe breaks through to an underground cavern the size of a football stadium, the county immediately halts all activity and sends a team of archaeologists down to excavate what everyone is clearly expecting to be ancient ruins… and instead proves to be stranger than anyone imagined.

It is with no small sense of surreality that Cassie finds herself sitting on her couch with her parents to her left and Rachel to her right, watching on TV as scientists dissect a dracon beam while a Discovery Channel personality narrates the debate about lost civilizations and secret underground cities.

“I think it’s high time we gave them some answers,” Rachel says. “Don’t you?” Her tone is casual in a way that Cassie recognizes as an act, covering for some of the same nerves she’s feeling herself.

Cassie thinks of Toby, struggling to keep her colony alive and hidden. Thinks of Tom, too-casual just like Rachel when saying “I’m not crazy, right?” five or six times. Thinks of Ax swinging by twice a day, just to see if there’s anything she needs. Thinks of Aftran, who — she hopes — would’ve wanted this.

And then she picks up the remote and turns off the TV. “Mom. Dad.” She smiles in a way she hopes is reassuring. “There’s something we have to tell you.”