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Books 1-22, Megamorphs 1, The Andalite Chronicles, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
Book 1: The Invasion (Jake)
Tobias was... I mean, I guess he still kind of is a strange guy. He was new at school, and he wasn't the toughest kid around, so he got picked on a lot.
...
Tobias was actually grinning, but that's Tobias for you. He's never scared of weird stuff. It's the normal stuff he can't stand.
...
[after Tobias morphs for the first time]
He was glowing. I swear, he was glowing. Not like he was radioactive or anything, I don't mean that. It's just that his eyes were shining bright, and his face was one big grin, and he seemed to be tingling with energy, bouncing like he couldn't stand still.
...
"You wouldn't have that attitude if you'd been up there with me," Tobias said angrily. "It was cool being a cat and all. But a hawk! It's just total, absolute freedom." I hadn't ever seen Tobias so happy. I mean, Tobias has a pretty lousy home life. Thinking about it, I suddenly had this feeling...
...
Still Tobias hesitated. <I hate changing back. It's like going back into a prison or something. I hate it when I don't have wings.>
...
Tobias had terrible notes with all kinds of little drawings in the margins. It took a while before I could figure out what they were. They were buildings and people and cars, the way they looked from high up in the sky. "I don't really need to go in," Tobias said as we pooled our limited cash to buy tickets. "I'm happy with just my hawk morph. I don't want to be anything else."
...
<The Yeerks convince them that taking on a Yeerk will solve all their problems. I think that's what The Sharing is all about. People believe that by becoming something different, they can leave behind all their pain.>
"Like spending all their time as a hawk," Marco pointed out. Tobias had nothing to say to that. He spread his wings and flew up and away.
Book 3: The Encounter (Tobias)
But it was the hawk that frightened me. Or maybe not the hawk herself. Maybe it was the feeling I had, rising up to meet her in the sky. The feeling of recognition. The feeling of going home. The feeling that I belonged with her.
It hit me in a wave of disgust and horror. No. NO! I was Tobias. A human. A human being, not a bird! I banked sharply away from her. I was human. I was a boy named Tobias. A boy with blond hair that was always a mess. A boy with human friends. Human interests. But part of me kept saying, "It's a lie. It's a lie. You are the hawk. The hawk is you. And Tobias is dead."
...
But it sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.
...
"Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart," [Rachel] said with sudden passion. "A person isn't his body. A person isn't what's on the outside."
...
The freed hawk was watching me. I could almost feel her drawing me toward her. It was like a magnet. She was my kind. She was like me.
...
Hawks are defensive about their territory. They don't want strangers coming and grabbing all the best prey. But I had the feeling that there was something more going on. She wanted me to join her. I don't know how I knew that, but I did. She wanted me to fly down to her.
Some people think hawks mate for just a season. Some people think they mate for life, and I don't really know which is true. One thing I knew for sure: I wasn't ready to settle down with anyone. Especially not a hawk. And yet there was this feeling in me. Like... like I belonged with her.
I looked away. I would be glad when this mission was over and I no longer had to come here to her territory. She confused me.
...
I am a human, yes. But I am also a hawk. I'm a predator who kills for food. And I'm also a human being who... who grieves, over death.
...
I am Tobias. A boy. A hawk. Some strange mix of the two.
...
Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.
Book 7: The Stranger (Rachel)
He was a sweet, poetic kind of guy. The kind bullies love to pick on. He used to have messy, out-of control hair and dreamy eyes that always seemed to be looking at something no one else could see.
Book 13: The Change (Tobias)
I would have been one of the kids paying attention, but too shy to volunteer. I was never very bold or aggressive. I was a bully-magnet, to tell you the truth. The kid most likely to get pounded. The kid from the home so screwed up that I ended up being shuttled back and forth between aunts and uncles who didn't even remember my name half the time. But that wasn't me anymore.
...
If you asked me what I think of being a red tailed hawk, I'd give you two different answers, depending on the time of day. When the sun is up, and the thermals are piling up the tall clouds, and I'm riding the high breezes a million miles above the humans who crawl along below me... well, then I'd say it's great. But at night, when I cower on my branch and peer half-blind through the leaves at a cold moon and can only listen to the sounds of the night predators doing their work, well, that's different.
...
[in the Ellimist's allegorical space]
I was no longer a red-tailed hawk. But I was not human, either. At least not the way I had once been human. I had arms that were wings. I had legs that ended in talons. I had a beak, but it was a mouth, too. I know this all sounds crazy. I know it's impossible to really imagine it very well. But somehow I was both a human and a bird and some third thing that was in between the two.
...
The [Ellimist in] bird shape smiled. Don't ask me how it smiled with a beak. It just did. I CHOSE A SHAPE YOU WOULD IDENTIFY WITH.
"Baloney. You know better than that. You know I'm human."
ARE YOU? YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE A HUMAN TO ME. I felt a queasiness in my stomach. I looked at the body I had. A body that was equal parts boy and bird.
...
"And what do you want, Tobias?"
"You know what I want," I said, almost choking on the words. "You know."
"Yes. But do you know what you want, Tobias?" the Ellimist asked. "And if you get it, will you still know?"
...
<The Ellimist says he'll... he'll... you know. Make me human again.> Somehow putting it in actual words didn't sound right. And yet that was what I wanted. To be human again. To live like the others.
...
Jara Hamee looked at me. "You human folk?"
<l used to be,> I said. <l, um, well... well, I'm not exactly the same as I used to be. I've changed.>
"Jara Hamee change, too. Not free. Now free."
...
I focused. I closed my weak raccoon eyes and focused on a different body. A body with feathers and wings. And slowly I became myself again.
...
At the last second, [Jake's] wings opened, he took the shock of the air and he swept his talons forward, all in one fluid movement. Even in pain, lying there a second away from death, I thought I had never seen anything so perfect in my life.
...
That was the life I would never have again. Human life. But you know, even as I was wallowing in self-pity, I knew I was being dishonest. Maybe that warm, fuzzy, golden life was how some people lived. But it wasn't how I had lived. Not really.
Okay, I thought. Okay, so maybe my life as a human sucked, too. That doesn't mean I want to spend the rest of my life as a bird.
And yet I had another memory, more recent. I saw myself the way I had appeared when the Ellimist had taken me into the turquoise mist. I saw myself half-bird, half-human.
...
I knew the truth now. I could see it clearly. I was looking at myself. Back when I was human. And looking at myself, I couldn't escape the truth - that wasn't me anymore. I wasn't Tobias the human. I had become something else. Something new.
...
I had acquired my own human DNA. But it was just a morph. If I stayed in my old human body I would be trapped there forever. Never again to morph. Never again to be a hawk. Never again to fly.
HAVE I KEPT MY PROMISE?
<Yes,> I said.
AND ARE YOU HAPPY, TOBIAS?
Megamorphs 2: In the Time of Dinosaurs
<Tobias! Listen to me. You are a human being! It's me, Rachel. Your friend. You are human, you...> No, I realized. No, that was wrong, wasn't it? <Tobias. You are a hawk. You are a red-tailed hawk. Remember your wings? Remember flying? Flying high on the thermals?>
Book 19: The Departure (Cassie)
I don't know why Tobias has chosen to remain a hawk. I guess he wants to stay in the war. Or maybe the truth is, he's happier as a hawk than he was as a human.
Book 21: The Threat (Jake)
<Murder? I don't think so, Jake,> [David] said with a laugh. <He's a bird. You may kill a bird, but it isn't murder. I'd never do that. I wouldn't hurt a human. But hey, an animal? That's a different story.>
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
"Tobias," Jara said. "This daughter named Toby. Name for Tobias."
In the old days, back when I was truly human, "Tobias" was a word that meant wimp. That's what I was. I guess I was a nice person, back then. I guess teachers liked me and girls felt sorry for me. But the bullies were drawn to me like a mosquito to a sweaty neck.
...
"My name is Tobias." I told her my last name. Weird. I could barely remember it. It felt like I was using an alias.
...
Rachel went into her bald eagle morph. I've seen her do it many times before, of course, but for some reason this time it fascinated me. Is that the right word? No, it mesmerized me.
Rachel is a beautiful girl. She's beautiful in that way you know will last her whole life. She'll be a beautiful woman. But beauty alone isn't that big a thing. What makes Rachel "Rachel" is what's inside. And watching her morph to eagle was like seeing her soul emerge through her flesh.
...
But sometimes it seemed to me that this [bald eagle] body suited [Rachel] better than her own. Her own body misled people with superficial resemblances to the glossy images of magazine models. This body was Rachel: fast, strong, smart, intense, and dangerous.
...
I was off in my own mind, watching the strange woman who said she wanted to take care of me. Why? Why would someone want to take care of me? She didn't know me. So why?
...
Sometimes I wondered if it was all an illusion. That I'd never had a mother and father. That I'd never really been human. I was a freak of nature. No, that wasn't right, either. Nature at its most perverse could not create me. I was a freak of technology. Of alien technology.
I was a bird with the mind of a human boy. Or I was a boy with the body of a bird. Either way, that woman I saw through the glass, the woman now channel-surfing with her remote control and stopping at CNN, that woman did not know me. Not the old me or the real me.
Surprise, Cousin Aria, your adopted son is a red-tailed hawk.
...
A quick morph, two hours, and I'd be back. Back where I'd started. Human. Tobias the boy.
Ever since the Ellimist had given me back my power to morph and allowed me to reacquire my own original DNA, the question had hung in the air. Rachel wondered, I know. Once she'd suggested it to me: Why not just become fully human again? I hadn't given her an answer.
...
Before, I'd had no choice. Now I did. I was choosing to live as a hawk. Choosing to build a life around a scruffy meadow and the pitiful rodents in it.
Maybe I was crazy.
...
I forced a laugh. <Yeah, that'll work out real well. "Hi, Cousin Aria. It's me, Tobias. No, over here: the bird. Yes, your cousin is a red-tailed hawk. Surprise!">
"You don't have to be."
I pretended not to know what she was talking about. <What?>
"Tobias, you have the power to become human again. Fully human."
<Uh-huh.>
"You can go to this woman as a human. You can be Tobias again. You can have a family. Someone around to take care of you."
<l don't need anyone to take care of me.> I bristled.
...
<I'm a hawk,> I snapped. <A bird of prey. When we're weak, we die. That's the law for us. I'm not a human being. Not anymore. No one helps a hawk. A hawk lives by his eyes and wings and talons.>
"You're a hawk?" Rachel sneered. "You talk, Tobias. You read. You have emotions. Those are human things, not hawk things."
<l know! I know! Don't you think I know? That's why I'm going hungry. Because I'm not hawk enough. That's why I let Bek get away, because I was human enough to care more about my pain and fear than I cared about doing what I had to do.>
"That's just stupid," Rachel said angrily. "It doesn't even make sense. You know what? You have to make a choice, Tobias. You can be a hawk. But you will never, ever, not in a million years, be a pure, true hawk. If you want to stay a hawk you'll be like you are now: confused, conflicted, torn up inside, never knowing what you really are. Or... or you can be human again. All human. You can live with the Aria woman and eat at the table and sleep in a bed."
<And never fly,> I said. <Never fly again. Never see with hawk's eyes. Never morph again. I know you guys would all be nice to me, but I'd lose all of you. I'd lose being an Animorph.>
"You wouldn't lose me," Rachel said. For a long while neither of us spoke. Then Rachel, in a whisper, said, "What am I supposed to do, Tobias? I'm a girl. You're a bird. This is way past Romeo and Juliet, Montagues and Capulets. This isn't Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio coming from different social groups or whatever. It's not like you're black and I'm white like Cassie and Jake. No one but a moron cares about that. We are... we can't hold hands, Tobias. We can't dance. We can't go to a movie together."
<l... God, Rachel, don't you think I know all that? Don't you think I want to have all that? But I can't keep changing. I can't keep becoming something different.>
"One more change, Tobias. Back to human. You'd be free of this stupid war and free of all the danger of living as a hawk. I wouldn't have to worry about you anymore."
I couldn't take anymore. I just couldn't. It was too much. I felt like I'd explode if I didn't get away from her. I couldn't be that near to her... couldn't.
...
I could morph to human. Stay human. Eat as a human. No fighting over territory, no fighting Yeerks.
And I would still have Rachel.
Such a simple decision. So easy. Any fool knew the answer. Be human! Be human!
...
I hadn't realized till that moment how much this hope had meant to me. A home. A family.
<Not for you, Tobias, you idiot! You fool! I hate you! I hate you! I want you to die!>
I couldn't fly. I landed hard and lay there in the dirt. I just kept saying it, over and over in my head. <l hate you, Tobias. I hate you. I want you to die.> In my life as a human, in my life as a bird, I have never been lower than that. I knew my friends were fighting. I knew they needed me. But I couldn't...
...
Now I heard the message my own mind was telling me: You are both, Tobias. Hawk and human. You always will be.
...
It's a rotten situation, I guess. But my duty is to be what I am. A hawk. A boy. Instinct. And emotion. I'll have to go on walking that tightrope.
I ate the mother rabbit. All I could hold. Then I morphed into the mother rabbit. And I shepherded the babies safely back to their den, as over our heads the other hawk flew, looking down at us for a chance to hunt and eat as I had done.
Book 25: The Extreme (Marco)
"Say, Rachel, I got a joke for you," I said.
"No you don't," she said.
I ignored the warning. "Two blonds are standing across the river from one another..."
"Hey," Tobias interrupted. "Remember, I'm a blond, too. It may be dirty-blond, but it's still blond."
Book 31: The Conspiracy (Jake)
<What?> [Tobias] asked, sounding defensive. <l used to do that whenever one of my aunts or uncles wanted me to go somewhere I didn't want to. They never made me go.> He was quiet a moment. Then, abashed, he said, <Oh. Duh. They didn't care what I did.>
Book 32: The Separation (Rachel)
<We're used to crazy,> Tobias said. <l mean, who else would, you know, care about someone like me? It takes a fairly crazy girl to like a Bird-boy.>
Book 33: The Illusion (Tobias)
"It's just all these other people. The noise. This body..." I looked around, worried that someone might overhear. But no, not with human ears, not with this much noise.
"You mean your body. The body you're in now is your body, Tobias. It's who you truly are. Normally, naturally."
...
I could choose to trap myself in my human form now, but I would lose my morphing power for good. Do you see? I would be useless. Unable to honor my responsibility to Earth, powerless to resist Yeerk evil.
"Just dance with me, Tobias. Please." A slow song started. I was surprised. I actually knew this one. Goo Goo Dolls. [almost certainly Iris]
...
Rachel was running right behind me. Had she seen the clock before I had? Had she known time was short and chosen not to tell me, hoping I'd forget? Hoping I'd be "accidentally" trapped in human morph? No. Of course not. She wouldn't want that. And yet... I wasn't completely sure.
...
"Tobias, I want to explain..." She broke off as her eyes followed mine to the picture of the red-tailed hawk and the caption beneath it. "Longevity in the wild," it read. "Almost never reaches the figures attained by captive birds guarded against disease and predation. A generous estimate: eighteen years."
...
She paused to consider her next words. She was embarrassed by what she was about to say. Fighting to get past her embarrassment. "But you've got to realize that there's more. I'm not just a warrior," she said, her blue eyes glittering so close to mine. "I'm a girl. I'm trying not to let myself be dragged off the cliff, away from all normalcy, into this insane life we live. I don't like what it does to me, Tobias, and I need to be a girl again. I need a little bit of normalcy, okay? Not a lot, but some."
She pushed back, away from me. I'd never seen Rachel so emotional. Unless, of course, the emotion was an act. Unless she was stalling me just to eat up the minutes, to trap me, to -
"All the things we're supposed to live while we're in school, Tobias, you know, dances like this, nights out at the movies, walks on the beach. That stuff is passing us by. I want those things. We deserve them. And if you were human..."
I cut her off, repeating her words out loud. "Yeah. If I were human. If."
So she'd finally said what I'd known she felt all along. It made sense. She was right. She did need normalcy. Rachel had gone pretty far out on the edge in this war.
But it still hurt. Hurt worse because I didn't have an answer.
"I need to go," I said flatly.
...
The clock was ticking down and I wasn't even sure Rachel was on my side. In minutes I'd be trapped. Trapped as a person who was no longer me.
...
[after demorphing to hawk, barely avoiding getting trapped in human morph]
I looked toward the night sky, so relieved.
So happy.
...
[a flashback to Tobias's life before]
I spoke cautiously. "Well, it's like an honor," I said. "I mean, the committee picked my drawing out from hundreds of entries. Just something I sketched during art class. I had no idea it would make the state show."
I was hoping [my uncle] would take me to the prizewinners' reception that weekend. Stupid. It wasn't like it was a big deal. But it would have been okay.
"Do you get prize money?" he grumbled casually, not even turning to look at me.
"No," I said, confused.
"No? So then what's it worth? If it won't help pay the bills, what good is it?" He glanced at me patronizingly, then back to the TV. "When I was about your age I already had a job. At this car lot. Washing the cars. All the money went to my mother. All my earnings. Because Dad wasn't around. It was tight..." He broke off and leaned back into the couch.
I stood there at the foot of the stairs, unable to move. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Couldn't show him that.
I told myself, No big deal, Tobias. Just some dumb drawing. No big deal.
To him I said, "Yeah, well, it was just an idea."
No answer.
I dragged myself upstairs to my room. Walked across to the window. I could cry up here where no one would see.
Stupid to cry.
Then, through blurry eyes I watched a car pull up to a house across the street. A mom and daughter got out. Walked together to the front door. The little girl was carrying a page smeared with finger paint, crumpling it a little as she walked. The mother stopped, took the picture from her daughter, and carried it into the house like it was the Mona Lisa.
It was like someone had set out to shove my life in my face. Here, Tobias, take a look. Take a look at your life, and at the lives of normal kids. Take a good long look.
I was alone. I was alone.
Where would my strength come from?
I raised a hand to brush away the tears.
A hand that was... fingers that were...
Tan.
Feathers. A wing.
...
She's crazy, I realized. She's insane. The Yeerk. The girl. The line between them all confused.
Hawk. Boy.
Yeerk. Girl.
I had a terrifying moment of understanding. Pity. To be the human girl desperate, terrified, alone, all alone, needing someone to look at her without cringing. To be the Yeerk, hungry for sensations that were so intense, so powerful compared to the dull, blind life of a slug.
...
The memory of the mission was far behind. The close call with death forgotten. For a while.
Who am I? What am I? A bird. A boy. Something not quite human. Something more than human.
The person Rachel loves.
I discovered something amid the pain and terror and confusion. I discovered that the answer to what I am, to who I am, isn't something to be answered in a single word or a single moment.
It could take a lifetime to figure out who I am.
For now, I'm willing to hang in there, floating on a thermal. Biding my time.
Book 38: The Arrival (Ax)
Tobias is interesting. A nothlit, but now an almost voluntary one. He has lost his human life, but not his human friends. He belongs. But at the same time, he does not belong.
Book 40: The Other (Marco)
The other Animorphs. Jake. Cassie. Rachel. Tobias, the guy who lives as a hawk. Ax, Elfangor's younger brother.
...
Tobias [in human morph] with Rachel. She, carrying a bag from Express and one from Bebe. He, looking slightly awkward and out of place.
...
<What is "normal," anyway?> Cassie asked, rhetorically.
<The norm. The standard. The average,> I said.
Tobias glared. <Okay, I'm getting a complex over here. I'm a nothlit. A freak. Whatever. My best friend is an alien with blue fur. My girlfriend is human — when she isn't in morph. How about we don't talk about "normal" anymore. Or "average" or "natural." Please.>
Books 41-54, Megamorphs 4, The Ellimist Chronicles
Megamorphs 4: Back to Before (all)
Cassie: There was a third guy with them. This kid named Tobias. He's kind of an unknown to me.
He seems like he's kind of latched onto Jake. Jake is too nice to ever tell him to go away, and I could see he was trying to include Tobias in the conversation and all. But Tobias was still standing a little apart. Looking a little uncomfortable, trailing a little behind.
...
Tobias: I put on the least pathetic clothes I could find and headed for the bus stop. That part was okay. No major hassles at the bus stop, usually. It's not till I'm on the bus that it started. This kid named Andy and his creep sidekick who for some reason was called Tap-Tap, enjoyed kidney punching me. They'd wait till we were getting off the bus, find some way to get up behind me, and when I was all crammed in, they'd nail me once or twice in the back.
I am what they call a bully magnet. I don't know why. I just am.
...
Tobias: I hung around with [Jake] for a while. Totally lame on my part. Jake has a best friend who doesn't like me, I don't think.
After a while it was kind of obvious that I wasn't going to be part of that circle of friends. That was okay. I was still grateful.
I guess Jake is who I'd like to be if I could be someone else. But there was a long list of people I'd rather be than me.
I managed to avoid Andy and Tap-Tap on the bus. Which just meant they'd lie in wait for me some other time. Probably it would have just been better to take my beating and move on, without all the suspense of wondering when they were going to get me.
Yeah, right, Tobias. That's a good way to live.
I had to wait all day [for them to strike]. Sixth period. I headed for the boys' room. The boys' room is always dangerous for me, but I couldn't hold out all day.
...
Tobias: "Why don't you guys find someone else to pick on," I said. Yeah, that'll work. Whining. Whining will work.
Andy laughed. "But you're so nice and easy," he said. "No one else is as big a wuss as you."
Tap-Tap joined in the laughter. "You're the man, Toby."
...
Tobias: They walked away. After a while I managed to stand up.
I threw up in the toilet.
I rinsed my face in the sink. I was late for class. Great. That meant a trip to Vice Principal Chapman.
I cried. I was there alone, what did it matter?
I cried.
...
Tobias: I kept watching Jake. I don't know why. I don't think he knew I was there.
I guess it was pathetic but I thought that if he was a member and I was a member, somehow, someway, stupid thought, lame idea, but somehow I could become him. And not me. Have his life, and not mine.
...
Tobias: I was used to the place now. I felt comfortable there. Weird feeling. Weird to be comfortable.
I'd been to several meetings of The Sharing. Once some new kids started teasing me, but the real members shut them down fast.
No one gave me any grief at The Sharing. They acted like I was an equal. Like I belonged.
Or at least like I could belong.
...
Tobias: [Andy and Tap-Tap] started to stuff me into one of the taller lockers the football team uses. I was yelling, kids were laughing. Not just Andy and Tap-Tap. It was like every kid in there wanted to see me get humiliated.
...
Tobias: [Jake] looked sharply at me. "I wasn't trying to offend you, man."
"You didn't offend me," I said, sounding offended. "Not at all. I'm just curious. Why don't you want to join? Tom's a member, so it's not like it's just for losers like me."
That came out much harsher and more pathetic than I'd intended.
"Tobias, you're not a loser," he said.
Which just made it worse. It's bad enough being a loser. You don't want the winners like Jake feeling sorry for you.
...
Tobias: Why me? The question was impossible to avoid. How did I fit into this group? Was it really true that The Sharing didn't care if you were young or old, male, female, black, white, Asian, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, straight, gay, rich, or poor?
I mean, that's what they said. But lots of people say that. They don't always mean it.
Mostly people look for ways to treat other people like dirt.
...
Tobias: Mr. Chapman. Our vice principal at school. So far my meetings with Mr. Chapman had been in his office. Him asking me to tell him who had beat me up. Or who had pantsed me and shoved me into the girls' bathroom. And me refusing to tell.
...
Tobias: Chapman forced his features back into a pleasant smile. "Are you ready, Tobias? Is this what you truly want?"
What I wanted? I wanted to fly. To spread my wings, catch the breeze, feel my talons leave the branch, soar as the thermal raised me up to the clouds.
What?
[...] The vision, what was it? Some desperate fantasy?
...
Tobias: Most painful of all was the image of myself swallowing everything The Sharing told me. I had walked, willingly, to my own destruction. At the time I'd seen no alternative. Now I saw nothing but alternatives.
Was my home a dreary, awful place? Yes. Was I somehow marked as a bully magnet? Yes. Was I different, strange, not-quite-normal? Yes.
And to fight all of that I had destroyed myself.
Brilliant, Tobias. Brilliant. All of life's pains combined could not have equaled what I now endured.
Even now no easy answers leaped to mind. I could not easily have stood the bullying. I could not easily have survived the loneliness. In my fantasies I could construct fantastic escapes, but in reality there was no easy way. My life was nonfiction, not some story where the endings are always happy. I couldn't simply become a different person. I couldn't just have some great insight that would save me from myself.
All I could have done, really, was wait. I could have endured. I saw that now. It wasn't a dramatic answer. Wasn't exactly inspiring.
Endure. Outlast. Outwait.
I might have been able to do that. I'm not a fool, I know that school was just a part of my life.
You spend eighteen years as a kid, then maybe seventy years as an adult. And what you are as a kid isn't what you'll be as an adult, not always, anyway.
Book 43: The Test (Tobias)
[thinking back on when he got trapped in hawk morph] I'd be trapped forever. A bird. Independent, free, alone.
Forever.
Images of the human life I'd led till then flooded my mind. The images were dark. My apathetic aunt. My alcoholic uncle.
Then, something brighter, something powerful surged through my mind. Something else.
Shoring me up. Drawing me in. A wave of...
What? What had I felt then, at that moment, with the seconds ticking down? With the deadline chasing me...
Weakness or strength?
...
I stretched out my talon. I gripped the fleshy fingers of [my torturer Taylor's] real hand. Then I closed my eyes, shut my ears, shut it all out. The animal screams, the grunts, the human shouts. The horror of reliving a nightmare.
Acquire her. Acquire her. Become her.
A nauseating idea. Necessary.
...
"Guys," I said, half-scared, half-thrilled by the meaning of my words, "I just happen to have the perfect morph."
Six hours later, when its doors opened, I strolled into Borders bookshop. Strode past piles of self-help books and tiers of best-sellers. Despite Rachel's objections and Marco's security concerns, Jake had let me go. I needed to be the one to deal with Taylor. Jake knew that.
But even Jake had some reservations about this morph. About the victim becoming the victimizer.
...
Rachel chose the outfit, so I was dressed to kill. And I would have looked great in rags. See, morphing uses DNA, and I'd morphed [Taylor's] body as it would have been before the fire, before the accident. No artificial arm. No reconstructed beauty.
I was a cover girl who could give even Angelina Jolie a run for her money. I was...
"Taylor," I said easily, coming up behind the tall blond wandering the wildlife section. She spun around, surprised and off guard. Her mouth dropped open. She was face-to-face with herself.
...
The high school kid behind the counter stared wide-eyed. One, make that two very attractive girls were closing in on him.
"Uh, what can I get you?" he asked shakily.
"Decaf latte with skim," Taylor purred.
The kid turned to take my order. I smiled and he almost fell over. It was crazy to have such power. I'd been on the receiving end before. I'd just never been the source. Is this what Rachel experienced? Was this part of what made her so brave?
...
Taylor glared at the boy. I laughed. We were mirror images, literal carbon copies. But I was alive. Taylor wasn't. Not really. I had a sense of humor. Taylor had a coldness that enclosed her like a shield. The kid could see this. Anybody could.
...
Had it been like this at the Yeerk pool? Deep beneath the murderous hunger, my mind wondered.
Had I overstayed the two-hour time limit so I wouldn't have to face simple facts of life?
Being a boy, living with foster parents, school, Rachel, Taylor...
...
But there is always a choice. In any and every situation. It's usually the choice between bad and worse. But it's still a choice.
"Come on," she said again. "Be my host. Offer me your body and you can have anything you want."
Choice. Traitor or...
<Can I have freedom?> I asked.
"It is a kind of freedom," she answered.
<Can I be happy?> I asked.
"It is a kind of happiness," she replied.
Book 48: The Return (Rachel)
It’s a long story. But because of an inscrutably powerful being known as the Ellimist, Tobias can morph his human self. Even choose to be that human forever, give up the morphing. The fight. Life as a bird of prey.
But he doesn’t choose that option.
Because, just like me, Tobias doesn’t want to go back to where he started.
...
There was a time when Tobias had hidden his feeding habits from me. A time when he had been ashamed of killing and eating. Unbearably humiliated at having, in hard times, to scavenge garbage and roadkill.
But Tobias had shed his inhibitions. Had learned to follow his animal instincts. And to do what he had to do.
Maybe Tobias wasn’t the only one who’d faced up to himself.
Book 49: The Diversion (Tobias)
In my old life, my life as a boy, I was the mouse. The prey. Stalked by predators bent on flushing my head down the men's room toilet. Scurrying to find a hiding place. Rarely succeeding.
...
My mother was blind.
If she was my mother. Okay, so she had the same hair I had. And she was thin, like me. And pale. Like me. And her long, straight nose looked just like mine.
...
I'd never really been comfortable in my human body, even back when I was a regular non-nothlit kid. But now, with [my mother] Loren here, I wanted to at least try it out. For two hours at a time, anyway.
Book 50: The Ultimate (Cassie)
Sometimes we think Tobias is happier as a hawk. That he let himself be trapped, on purpose.
But none of us has come right out and asked him. At least, I haven’t.
And none of us has asked if given the same situation he’d do it again. Assuming Tobias chose his fate and wasn’t just a victim of a really bad circumstance.
Book 51: The Absolute (Marco)
The mike was attached to a thick wire that curved down from the side of the helmet, like a telephone headset. Tobias adjusted it in front of his mouth.
"I feel like Britney Spears," he said.
Book 54: The Beginning (all)
Marco: At last Tobias swooped down and landed on my patio table. "So where's the other Horsewoman of the Apocalypse?" I asked.
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Books 1-22, Megamorphs 1, The Andalite Chronicles, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
Book 1: The Invasion (Jake)
Tobias was... I mean, I guess he still kind of is a strange guy. He was new at school, and he wasn't the toughest kid around, so he got picked on a lot.
...
Tobias was actually grinning, but that's Tobias for you. He's never scared of weird stuff. It's the normal stuff he can't stand.
...
[after Tobias morphs for the first time]
He was glowing. I swear, he was glowing. Not like he was radioactive or anything, I don't mean that. It's just that his eyes were shining bright, and his face was one big grin, and he seemed to be tingling with energy, bouncing like he couldn't stand still.
...
"You wouldn't have that attitude if you'd been up there with me," Tobias said angrily. "It was cool being a cat and all. But a hawk! It's just total, absolute freedom." I hadn't ever seen Tobias so happy. I mean, Tobias has a pretty lousy home life. Thinking about it, I suddenly had this feeling...
...
Still Tobias hesitated. <I hate changing back. It's like going back into a prison or something. I hate it when I don't have wings.>
...
Tobias had terrible notes with all kinds of little drawings in the margins. It took a while before I could figure out what they were. They were buildings and people and cars, the way they looked from high up in the sky. "I don't really need to go in," Tobias said as we pooled our limited cash to buy tickets. "I'm happy with just my hawk morph. I don't want to be anything else."
...
<The Yeerks convince them that taking on a Yeerk will solve all their problems. I think that's what The Sharing is all about. People believe that by becoming something different, they can leave behind all their pain.>
"Like spending all their time as a hawk," Marco pointed out. Tobias had nothing to say to that. He spread his wings and flew up and away.
Book 3: The Encounter (Tobias)
But it was the hawk that frightened me. Or maybe not the hawk herself. Maybe it was the feeling I had, rising up to meet her in the sky. The feeling of recognition. The feeling of going home. The feeling that I belonged with her.
It hit me in a wave of disgust and horror. No. NO! I was Tobias. A human. A human being, not a bird! I banked sharply away from her. I was human. I was a boy named Tobias. A boy with blond hair that was always a mess. A boy with human friends. Human interests. But part of me kept saying, "It's a lie. It's a lie. You are the hawk. The hawk is you. And Tobias is dead."
...
But it sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.
...
"Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart," [Rachel] said with sudden passion. "A person isn't his body. A person isn't what's on the outside."
...
The freed hawk was watching me. I could almost feel her drawing me toward her. It was like a magnet. She was my kind. She was like me.
...
Hawks are defensive about their territory. They don't want strangers coming and grabbing all the best prey. But I had the feeling that there was something more going on. She wanted me to join her. I don't know how I knew that, but I did. She wanted me to fly down to her.
Some people think hawks mate for just a season. Some people think they mate for life, and I don't really know which is true. One thing I knew for sure: I wasn't ready to settle down with anyone. Especially not a hawk. And yet there was this feeling in me. Like... like I belonged with her.
I looked away. I would be glad when this mission was over and I no longer had to come here to her territory. She confused me.
...
I am a human, yes. But I am also a hawk. I'm a predator who kills for food. And I'm also a human being who... who grieves, over death.
...
I am Tobias. A boy. A hawk. Some strange mix of the two.
...
Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.
Book 7: The Stranger (Rachel)
He was a sweet, poetic kind of guy. The kind bullies love to pick on. He used to have messy, out-of control hair and dreamy eyes that always seemed to be looking at something no one else could see.
Book 13: The Change (Tobias)
I would have been one of the kids paying attention, but too shy to volunteer. I was never very bold or aggressive. I was a bully-magnet, to tell you the truth. The kid most likely to get pounded. The kid from the home so screwed up that I ended up being shuttled back and forth between aunts and uncles who didn't even remember my name half the time. But that wasn't me anymore.
...
If you asked me what I think of being a red tailed hawk, I'd give you two different answers, depending on the time of day. When the sun is up, and the thermals are piling up the tall clouds, and I'm riding the high breezes a million miles above the humans who crawl along below me... well, then I'd say it's great. But at night, when I cower on my branch and peer half-blind through the leaves at a cold moon and can only listen to the sounds of the night predators doing their work, well, that's different.
...
[in the Ellimist's allegorical space]
I was no longer a red-tailed hawk. But I was not human, either. At least not the way I had once been human. I had arms that were wings. I had legs that ended in talons. I had a beak, but it was a mouth, too. I know this all sounds crazy. I know it's impossible to really imagine it very well. But somehow I was both a human and a bird and some third thing that was in between the two.
...
The [Ellimist in] bird shape smiled. Don't ask me how it smiled with a beak. It just did. I CHOSE A SHAPE YOU WOULD IDENTIFY WITH.
"Baloney. You know better than that. You know I'm human."
ARE YOU? YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE A HUMAN TO ME. I felt a queasiness in my stomach. I looked at the body I had. A body that was equal parts boy and bird.
...
"And what do you want, Tobias?"
"You know what I want," I said, almost choking on the words. "You know."
"Yes. But do you know what you want, Tobias?" the Ellimist asked. "And if you get it, will you still know?"
...
<The Ellimist says he'll... he'll... you know. Make me human again.> Somehow putting it in actual words didn't sound right. And yet that was what I wanted. To be human again. To live like the others.
...
Jara Hamee looked at me. "You human folk?"
<l used to be,> I said. <l, um, well... well, I'm not exactly the same as I used to be. I've changed.>
"Jara Hamee change, too. Not free. Now free."
...
I focused. I closed my weak raccoon eyes and focused on a different body. A body with feathers and wings. And slowly I became myself again.
...
At the last second, [Jake's] wings opened, he took the shock of the air and he swept his talons forward, all in one fluid movement. Even in pain, lying there a second away from death, I thought I had never seen anything so perfect in my life.
...
That was the life I would never have again. Human life. But you know, even as I was wallowing in self-pity, I knew I was being dishonest. Maybe that warm, fuzzy, golden life was how some people lived. But it wasn't how I had lived. Not really.
Okay, I thought. Okay, so maybe my life as a human sucked, too. That doesn't mean I want to spend the rest of my life as a bird.
And yet I had another memory, more recent. I saw myself the way I had appeared when the Ellimist had taken me into the turquoise mist. I saw myself half-bird, half-human.
...
I knew the truth now. I could see it clearly. I was looking at myself. Back when I was human. And looking at myself, I couldn't escape the truth - that wasn't me anymore. I wasn't Tobias the human. I had become something else. Something new.
...
I had acquired my own human DNA. But it was just a morph. If I stayed in my old human body I would be trapped there forever. Never again to morph. Never again to be a hawk. Never again to fly.
HAVE I KEPT MY PROMISE?
<Yes,> I said.
AND ARE YOU HAPPY, TOBIAS?
Megamorphs 2: In the Time of Dinosaurs
<Tobias! Listen to me. You are a human being! It's me, Rachel. Your friend. You are human, you...> No, I realized. No, that was wrong, wasn't it? <Tobias. You are a hawk. You are a red-tailed hawk. Remember your wings? Remember flying? Flying high on the thermals?>
Book 19: The Departure (Cassie)
I don't know why Tobias has chosen to remain a hawk. I guess he wants to stay in the war. Or maybe the truth is, he's happier as a hawk than he was as a human.
Book 21: The Threat (Jake)
<Murder? I don't think so, Jake,> [David] said with a laugh. <He's a bird. You may kill a bird, but it isn't murder. I'd never do that. I wouldn't hurt a human. But hey, an animal? That's a different story.>
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
"Tobias," Jara said. "This daughter named Toby. Name for Tobias."
In the old days, back when I was truly human, "Tobias" was a word that meant wimp. That's what I was. I guess I was a nice person, back then. I guess teachers liked me and girls felt sorry for me. But the bullies were drawn to me like a mosquito to a sweaty neck.
...
"My name is Tobias." I told her my last name. Weird. I could barely remember it. It felt like I was using an alias.
...
Rachel went into her bald eagle morph. I've seen her do it many times before, of course, but for some reason this time it fascinated me. Is that the right word? No, it mesmerized me.
Rachel is a beautiful girl. She's beautiful in that way you know will last her whole life. She'll be a beautiful woman. But beauty alone isn't that big a thing. What makes Rachel "Rachel" is what's inside. And watching her morph to eagle was like seeing her soul emerge through her flesh.
...
But sometimes it seemed to me that this [bald eagle] body suited [Rachel] better than her own. Her own body misled people with superficial resemblances to the glossy images of magazine models. This body was Rachel: fast, strong, smart, intense, and dangerous.
...
I was off in my own mind, watching the strange woman who said she wanted to take care of me. Why? Why would someone want to take care of me? She didn't know me. So why?
...
Sometimes I wondered if it was all an illusion. That I'd never had a mother and father. That I'd never really been human. I was a freak of nature. No, that wasn't right, either. Nature at its most perverse could not create me. I was a freak of technology. Of alien technology.
I was a bird with the mind of a human boy. Or I was a boy with the body of a bird. Either way, that woman I saw through the glass, the woman now channel-surfing with her remote control and stopping at CNN, that woman did not know me. Not the old me or the real me.
Surprise, Cousin Aria, your adopted son is a red-tailed hawk.
...
A quick morph, two hours, and I'd be back. Back where I'd started. Human. Tobias the boy.
Ever since the Ellimist had given me back my power to morph and allowed me to reacquire my own original DNA, the question had hung in the air. Rachel wondered, I know. Once she'd suggested it to me: Why not just become fully human again? I hadn't given her an answer.
...
Before, I'd had no choice. Now I did. I was choosing to live as a hawk. Choosing to build a life around a scruffy meadow and the pitiful rodents in it.
Maybe I was crazy.
...
I forced a laugh. <Yeah, that'll work out real well. "Hi, Cousin Aria. It's me, Tobias. No, over here: the bird. Yes, your cousin is a red-tailed hawk. Surprise!">
"You don't have to be."
I pretended not to know what she was talking about. <What?>
"Tobias, you have the power to become human again. Fully human."
<Uh-huh.>
"You can go to this woman as a human. You can be Tobias again. You can have a family. Someone around to take care of you."
<l don't need anyone to take care of me.> I bristled.
...
<I'm a hawk,> I snapped. <A bird of prey. When we're weak, we die. That's the law for us. I'm not a human being. Not anymore. No one helps a hawk. A hawk lives by his eyes and wings and talons.>
"You're a hawk?" Rachel sneered. "You talk, Tobias. You read. You have emotions. Those are human things, not hawk things."
<l know! I know! Don't you think I know? That's why I'm going hungry. Because I'm not hawk enough. That's why I let Bek get away, because I was human enough to care more about my pain and fear than I cared about doing what I had to do.>
"That's just stupid," Rachel said angrily. "It doesn't even make sense. You know what? You have to make a choice, Tobias. You can be a hawk. But you will never, ever, not in a million years, be a pure, true hawk. If you want to stay a hawk you'll be like you are now: confused, conflicted, torn up inside, never knowing what you really are. Or... or you can be human again. All human. You can live with the Aria woman and eat at the table and sleep in a bed."
<And never fly,> I said. <Never fly again. Never see with hawk's eyes. Never morph again. I know you guys would all be nice to me, but I'd lose all of you. I'd lose being an Animorph.>
"You wouldn't lose me," Rachel said. For a long while neither of us spoke. Then Rachel, in a whisper, said, "What am I supposed to do, Tobias? I'm a girl. You're a bird. This is way past Romeo and Juliet, Montagues and Capulets. This isn't Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio coming from different social groups or whatever. It's not like you're black and I'm white like Cassie and Jake. No one but a moron cares about that. We are... we can't hold hands, Tobias. We can't dance. We can't go to a movie together."
<l... God, Rachel, don't you think I know all that? Don't you think I want to have all that? But I can't keep changing. I can't keep becoming something different.>
"One more change, Tobias. Back to human. You'd be free of this stupid war and free of all the danger of living as a hawk. I wouldn't have to worry about you anymore."
I couldn't take anymore. I just couldn't. It was too much. I felt like I'd explode if I didn't get away from her. I couldn't be that near to her... couldn't.
...
I could morph to human. Stay human. Eat as a human. No fighting over territory, no fighting Yeerks.
And I would still have Rachel.
Such a simple decision. So easy. Any fool knew the answer. Be human! Be human!
...
I hadn't realized till that moment how much this hope had meant to me. A home. A family.
<Not for you, Tobias, you idiot! You fool! I hate you! I hate you! I want you to die!>
I couldn't fly. I landed hard and lay there in the dirt. I just kept saying it, over and over in my head. <l hate you, Tobias. I hate you. I want you to die.> In my life as a human, in my life as a bird, I have never been lower than that. I knew my friends were fighting. I knew they needed me. But I couldn't...
...
Now I heard the message my own mind was telling me: You are both, Tobias. Hawk and human. You always will be.
...
It's a rotten situation, I guess. But my duty is to be what I am. A hawk. A boy. Instinct. And emotion. I'll have to go on walking that tightrope.
I ate the mother rabbit. All I could hold. Then I morphed into the mother rabbit. And I shepherded the babies safely back to their den, as over our heads the other hawk flew, looking down at us for a chance to hunt and eat as I had done.
Book 25: The Extreme (Marco)
"Say, Rachel, I got a joke for you," I said.
"No you don't," she said.
I ignored the warning. "Two blonds are standing across the river from one another..."
"Hey," Tobias interrupted. "Remember, I'm a blond, too. It may be dirty-blond, but it's still blond."
Book 31: The Conspiracy (Jake)
<What?> [Tobias] asked, sounding defensive. <l used to do that whenever one of my aunts or uncles wanted me to go somewhere I didn't want to. They never made me go.> He was quiet a moment. Then, abashed, he said, <Oh. Duh. They didn't care what I did.>
Book 32: The Separation (Rachel)
<We're used to crazy,> Tobias said. <l mean, who else would, you know, care about someone like me? It takes a fairly crazy girl to like a Bird-boy.>
Book 33: The Illusion (Tobias)
"It's just all these other people. The noise. This body..." I looked around, worried that someone might overhear. But no, not with human ears, not with this much noise.
"You mean your body. The body you're in now is your body, Tobias. It's who you truly are. Normally, naturally."
...
I could choose to trap myself in my human form now, but I would lose my morphing power for good. Do you see? I would be useless. Unable to honor my responsibility to Earth, powerless to resist Yeerk evil.
"Just dance with me, Tobias. Please." A slow song started. I was surprised. I actually knew this one. Goo Goo Dolls. [almost certainly Iris]
...
Rachel was running right behind me. Had she seen the clock before I had? Had she known time was short and chosen not to tell me, hoping I'd forget? Hoping I'd be "accidentally" trapped in human morph? No. Of course not. She wouldn't want that. And yet... I wasn't completely sure.
...
"Tobias, I want to explain..." She broke off as her eyes followed mine to the picture of the red-tailed hawk and the caption beneath it. "Longevity in the wild," it read. "Almost never reaches the figures attained by captive birds guarded against disease and predation. A generous estimate: eighteen years."
...
She paused to consider her next words. She was embarrassed by what she was about to say. Fighting to get past her embarrassment. "But you've got to realize that there's more. I'm not just a warrior," she said, her blue eyes glittering so close to mine. "I'm a girl. I'm trying not to let myself be dragged off the cliff, away from all normalcy, into this insane life we live. I don't like what it does to me, Tobias, and I need to be a girl again. I need a little bit of normalcy, okay? Not a lot, but some."
She pushed back, away from me. I'd never seen Rachel so emotional. Unless, of course, the emotion was an act. Unless she was stalling me just to eat up the minutes, to trap me, to -
"All the things we're supposed to live while we're in school, Tobias, you know, dances like this, nights out at the movies, walks on the beach. That stuff is passing us by. I want those things. We deserve them. And if you were human..."
I cut her off, repeating her words out loud. "Yeah. If I were human. If."
So she'd finally said what I'd known she felt all along. It made sense. She was right. She did need normalcy. Rachel had gone pretty far out on the edge in this war.
But it still hurt. Hurt worse because I didn't have an answer.
"I need to go," I said flatly.
...
The clock was ticking down and I wasn't even sure Rachel was on my side. In minutes I'd be trapped. Trapped as a person who was no longer me.
...
[after demorphing to hawk, barely avoiding getting trapped in human morph]
I looked toward the night sky, so relieved.
So happy.
...
[a flashback to Tobias's life before]
I spoke cautiously. "Well, it's like an honor," I said. "I mean, the committee picked my drawing out from hundreds of entries. Just something I sketched during art class. I had no idea it would make the state show."
I was hoping [my uncle] would take me to the prizewinners' reception that weekend. Stupid. It wasn't like it was a big deal. But it would have been okay.
"Do you get prize money?" he grumbled casually, not even turning to look at me.
"No," I said, confused.
"No? So then what's it worth? If it won't help pay the bills, what good is it?" He glanced at me patronizingly, then back to the TV. "When I was about your age I already had a job. At this car lot. Washing the cars. All the money went to my mother. All my earnings. Because Dad wasn't around. It was tight..." He broke off and leaned back into the couch.
I stood there at the foot of the stairs, unable to move. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Couldn't show him that.
I told myself, No big deal, Tobias. Just some dumb drawing. No big deal.
To him I said, "Yeah, well, it was just an idea."
No answer.
I dragged myself upstairs to my room. Walked across to the window. I could cry up here where no one would see.
Stupid to cry.
Then, through blurry eyes I watched a car pull up to a house across the street. A mom and daughter got out. Walked together to the front door. The little girl was carrying a page smeared with finger paint, crumpling it a little as she walked. The mother stopped, took the picture from her daughter, and carried it into the house like it was the Mona Lisa.
It was like someone had set out to shove my life in my face. Here, Tobias, take a look. Take a look at your life, and at the lives of normal kids. Take a good long look.
I was alone. I was alone.
Where would my strength come from?
I raised a hand to brush away the tears.
A hand that was... fingers that were...
Tan.
Feathers. A wing.
...
She's crazy, I realized. She's insane. The Yeerk. The girl. The line between them all confused.
Hawk. Boy.
Yeerk. Girl.
I had a terrifying moment of understanding. Pity. To be the human girl desperate, terrified, alone, all alone, needing someone to look at her without cringing. To be the Yeerk, hungry for sensations that were so intense, so powerful compared to the dull, blind life of a slug.
...
The memory of the mission was far behind. The close call with death forgotten. For a while.
Who am I? What am I? A bird. A boy. Something not quite human. Something more than human.
The person Rachel loves.
I discovered something amid the pain and terror and confusion. I discovered that the answer to what I am, to who I am, isn't something to be answered in a single word or a single moment.
It could take a lifetime to figure out who I am.
For now, I'm willing to hang in there, floating on a thermal. Biding my time.
Book 38: The Arrival (Ax)
Tobias is interesting. A nothlit, but now an almost voluntary one. He has lost his human life, but not his human friends. He belongs. But at the same time, he does not belong.
Book 40: The Other (Marco)
The other Animorphs. Jake. Cassie. Rachel. Tobias, the guy who lives as a hawk. Ax, Elfangor's younger brother.
...
Tobias [in human morph] with Rachel. She, carrying a bag from Express and one from Bebe. He, looking slightly awkward and out of place.
...
<What is "normal," anyway?> Cassie asked, rhetorically.
<The norm. The standard. The average,> I said.
Tobias glared. <Okay, I'm getting a complex over here. I'm a nothlit. A freak. Whatever. My best friend is an alien with blue fur. My girlfriend is human — when she isn't in morph. How about we don't talk about "normal" anymore. Or "average" or "natural." Please.>
Books 41-54, Megamorphs 4, The Ellimist Chronicles
Megamorphs 4: Back to Before (all)
Cassie: There was a third guy with them. This kid named Tobias. He's kind of an unknown to me.
He seems like he's kind of latched onto Jake. Jake is too nice to ever tell him to go away, and I could see he was trying to include Tobias in the conversation and all. But Tobias was still standing a little apart. Looking a little uncomfortable, trailing a little behind.
...
Tobias: I put on the least pathetic clothes I could find and headed for the bus stop. That part was okay. No major hassles at the bus stop, usually. It's not till I'm on the bus that it started. This kid named Andy and his creep sidekick who for some reason was called Tap-Tap, enjoyed kidney punching me. They'd wait till we were getting off the bus, find some way to get up behind me, and when I was all crammed in, they'd nail me once or twice in the back.
I am what they call a bully magnet. I don't know why. I just am.
...
Tobias: I hung around with [Jake] for a while. Totally lame on my part. Jake has a best friend who doesn't like me, I don't think.
After a while it was kind of obvious that I wasn't going to be part of that circle of friends. That was okay. I was still grateful.
I guess Jake is who I'd like to be if I could be someone else. But there was a long list of people I'd rather be than me.
I managed to avoid Andy and Tap-Tap on the bus. Which just meant they'd lie in wait for me some other time. Probably it would have just been better to take my beating and move on, without all the suspense of wondering when they were going to get me.
Yeah, right, Tobias. That's a good way to live.
I had to wait all day [for them to strike]. Sixth period. I headed for the boys' room. The boys' room is always dangerous for me, but I couldn't hold out all day.
...
Tobias: "Why don't you guys find someone else to pick on," I said. Yeah, that'll work. Whining. Whining will work.
Andy laughed. "But you're so nice and easy," he said. "No one else is as big a wuss as you."
Tap-Tap joined in the laughter. "You're the man, Toby."
...
Tobias: They walked away. After a while I managed to stand up.
I threw up in the toilet.
I rinsed my face in the sink. I was late for class. Great. That meant a trip to Vice Principal Chapman.
I cried. I was there alone, what did it matter?
I cried.
...
Tobias: I kept watching Jake. I don't know why. I don't think he knew I was there.
I guess it was pathetic but I thought that if he was a member and I was a member, somehow, someway, stupid thought, lame idea, but somehow I could become him. And not me. Have his life, and not mine.
...
Tobias: I was used to the place now. I felt comfortable there. Weird feeling. Weird to be comfortable.
I'd been to several meetings of The Sharing. Once some new kids started teasing me, but the real members shut them down fast.
No one gave me any grief at The Sharing. They acted like I was an equal. Like I belonged.
Or at least like I could belong.
...
Tobias: [Andy and Tap-Tap] started to stuff me into one of the taller lockers the football team uses. I was yelling, kids were laughing. Not just Andy and Tap-Tap. It was like every kid in there wanted to see me get humiliated.
...
Tobias: [Jake] looked sharply at me. "I wasn't trying to offend you, man."
"You didn't offend me," I said, sounding offended. "Not at all. I'm just curious. Why don't you want to join? Tom's a member, so it's not like it's just for losers like me."
That came out much harsher and more pathetic than I'd intended.
"Tobias, you're not a loser," he said.
Which just made it worse. It's bad enough being a loser. You don't want the winners like Jake feeling sorry for you.
...
Tobias: Why me? The question was impossible to avoid. How did I fit into this group? Was it really true that The Sharing didn't care if you were young or old, male, female, black, white, Asian, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, straight, gay, rich, or poor?
I mean, that's what they said. But lots of people say that. They don't always mean it.
Mostly people look for ways to treat other people like dirt.
...
Tobias: Mr. Chapman. Our vice principal at school. So far my meetings with Mr. Chapman had been in his office. Him asking me to tell him who had beat me up. Or who had pantsed me and shoved me into the girls' bathroom. And me refusing to tell.
...
Tobias: Chapman forced his features back into a pleasant smile. "Are you ready, Tobias? Is this what you truly want?"
What I wanted? I wanted to fly. To spread my wings, catch the breeze, feel my talons leave the branch, soar as the thermal raised me up to the clouds.
What?
[...] The vision, what was it? Some desperate fantasy?
...
Tobias: Most painful of all was the image of myself swallowing everything The Sharing told me. I had walked, willingly, to my own destruction. At the time I'd seen no alternative. Now I saw nothing but alternatives.
Was my home a dreary, awful place? Yes. Was I somehow marked as a bully magnet? Yes. Was I different, strange, not-quite-normal? Yes.
And to fight all of that I had destroyed myself.
Brilliant, Tobias. Brilliant. All of life's pains combined could not have equaled what I now endured.
Even now no easy answers leaped to mind. I could not easily have stood the bullying. I could not easily have survived the loneliness. In my fantasies I could construct fantastic escapes, but in reality there was no easy way. My life was nonfiction, not some story where the endings are always happy. I couldn't simply become a different person. I couldn't just have some great insight that would save me from myself.
All I could have done, really, was wait. I could have endured. I saw that now. It wasn't a dramatic answer. Wasn't exactly inspiring.
Endure. Outlast. Outwait.
I might have been able to do that. I'm not a fool, I know that school was just a part of my life.
You spend eighteen years as a kid, then maybe seventy years as an adult. And what you are as a kid isn't what you'll be as an adult, not always, anyway.
Book 43: The Test (Tobias)
[thinking back on when he got trapped in hawk morph] I'd be trapped forever. A bird. Independent, free, alone.
Forever.
Images of the human life I'd led till then flooded my mind. The images were dark. My apathetic aunt. My alcoholic uncle.
Then, something brighter, something powerful surged through my mind. Something else.
Shoring me up. Drawing me in. A wave of...
What? What had I felt then, at that moment, with the seconds ticking down? With the deadline chasing me...
Weakness or strength?
...
I stretched out my talon. I gripped the fleshy fingers of [my torturer Taylor's] real hand. Then I closed my eyes, shut my ears, shut it all out. The animal screams, the grunts, the human shouts. The horror of reliving a nightmare.
Acquire her. Acquire her. Become her.
A nauseating idea. Necessary.
...
"Guys," I said, half-scared, half-thrilled by the meaning of my words, "I just happen to have the perfect morph."
Six hours later, when its doors opened, I strolled into Borders bookshop. Strode past piles of self-help books and tiers of best-sellers. Despite Rachel's objections and Marco's security concerns, Jake had let me go. I needed to be the one to deal with Taylor. Jake knew that.
But even Jake had some reservations about this morph. About the victim becoming the victimizer.
...
Rachel chose the outfit, so I was dressed to kill. And I would have looked great in rags. See, morphing uses DNA, and I'd morphed [Taylor's] body as it would have been before the fire, before the accident. No artificial arm. No reconstructed beauty.
I was a cover girl who could give even Angelina Jolie a run for her money. I was...
"Taylor," I said easily, coming up behind the tall blond wandering the wildlife section. She spun around, surprised and off guard. Her mouth dropped open. She was face-to-face with herself.
...
The high school kid behind the counter stared wide-eyed. One, make that two very attractive girls were closing in on him.
"Uh, what can I get you?" he asked shakily.
"Decaf latte with skim," Taylor purred.
The kid turned to take my order. I smiled and he almost fell over. It was crazy to have such power. I'd been on the receiving end before. I'd just never been the source. Is this what Rachel experienced? Was this part of what made her so brave?
...
Taylor glared at the boy. I laughed. We were mirror images, literal carbon copies. But I was alive. Taylor wasn't. Not really. I had a sense of humor. Taylor had a coldness that enclosed her like a shield. The kid could see this. Anybody could.
...
Had it been like this at the Yeerk pool? Deep beneath the murderous hunger, my mind wondered.
Had I overstayed the two-hour time limit so I wouldn't have to face simple facts of life?
Being a boy, living with foster parents, school, Rachel, Taylor...
...
But there is always a choice. In any and every situation. It's usually the choice between bad and worse. But it's still a choice.
"Come on," she said again. "Be my host. Offer me your body and you can have anything you want."
Choice. Traitor or...
<Can I have freedom?> I asked.
"It is a kind of freedom," she answered.
<Can I be happy?> I asked.
"It is a kind of happiness," she replied.
Book 48: The Return (Rachel)
It’s a long story. But because of an inscrutably powerful being known as the Ellimist, Tobias can morph his human self. Even choose to be that human forever, give up the morphing. The fight. Life as a bird of prey.
But he doesn’t choose that option.
Because, just like me, Tobias doesn’t want to go back to where he started.
...
There was a time when Tobias had hidden his feeding habits from me. A time when he had been ashamed of killing and eating. Unbearably humiliated at having, in hard times, to scavenge garbage and roadkill.
But Tobias had shed his inhibitions. Had learned to follow his animal instincts. And to do what he had to do.
Maybe Tobias wasn’t the only one who’d faced up to himself.
Book 49: The Diversion (Tobias)
In my old life, my life as a boy, I was the mouse. The prey. Stalked by predators bent on flushing my head down the men's room toilet. Scurrying to find a hiding place. Rarely succeeding.
...
My mother was blind.
If she was my mother. Okay, so she had the same hair I had. And she was thin, like me. And pale. Like me. And her long, straight nose looked just like mine.
...
I'd never really been comfortable in my human body, even back when I was a regular non-nothlit kid. But now, with [my mother] Loren here, I wanted to at least try it out. For two hours at a time, anyway.
Book 50: The Ultimate (Cassie)
Sometimes we think Tobias is happier as a hawk. That he let himself be trapped, on purpose.
But none of us has come right out and asked him. At least, I haven’t.
And none of us has asked if given the same situation he’d do it again. Assuming Tobias chose his fate and wasn’t just a victim of a really bad circumstance.
Book 51: The Absolute (Marco)
The mike was attached to a thick wire that curved down from the side of the helmet, like a telephone headset. Tobias adjusted it in front of his mouth.
"I feel like Britney Spears," he said.
Book 54: The Beginning (all)
Marco: At last Tobias swooped down and landed on my patio table. "So where's the other Horsewoman of the Apocalypse?" I asked.
Books 1-22, Megamorphs 1, The Andalite Chronicles, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
Book 1: The Invasion (Jake)
Tobias was... I mean, I guess he still kind of is a strange guy. He was new at school, and he wasn't the toughest kid around, so he got picked on a lot.
...
Tobias was actually grinning, but that's Tobias for you. He's never scared of weird stuff. It's the normal stuff he can't stand.
...
[after Tobias morphs for the first time]
He was glowing. I swear, he was glowing. Not like he was radioactive or anything, I don't mean that. It's just that his eyes were shining bright, and his face was one big grin, and he seemed to be tingling with energy, bouncing like he couldn't stand still.
...
"You wouldn't have that attitude if you'd been up there with me," Tobias said angrily. "It was cool being a cat and all. But a hawk! It's just total, absolute freedom." I hadn't ever seen Tobias so happy. I mean, Tobias has a pretty lousy home life. Thinking about it, I suddenly had this feeling...
...
Still Tobias hesitated. <I hate changing back. It's like going back into a prison or something. I hate it when I don't have wings.>
...
Tobias had terrible notes with all kinds of little drawings in the margins. It took a while before I could figure out what they were. They were buildings and people and cars, the way they looked from high up in the sky. "I don't really need to go in," Tobias said as we pooled our limited cash to buy tickets. "I'm happy with just my hawk morph. I don't want to be anything else."
...
<The Yeerks convince them that taking on a Yeerk will solve all their problems. I think that's what The Sharing is all about. People believe that by becoming something different, they can leave behind all their pain.>
"Like spending all their time as a hawk," Marco pointed out. Tobias had nothing to say to that. He spread his wings and flew up and away.
Book 3: The Encounter (Tobias)
But it was the hawk that frightened me. Or maybe not the hawk herself. Maybe it was the feeling I had, rising up to meet her in the sky. The feeling of recognition. The feeling of going home. The feeling that I belonged with her.
It hit me in a wave of disgust and horror. No. NO! I was Tobias. A human. A human being, not a bird! I banked sharply away from her. I was human. I was a boy named Tobias. A boy with blond hair that was always a mess. A boy with human friends. Human interests. But part of me kept saying, "It's a lie. It's a lie. You are the hawk. The hawk is you. And Tobias is dead."
...
But it sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.
...
"Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart," [Rachel] said with sudden passion. "A person isn't his body. A person isn't what's on the outside."
...
The freed hawk was watching me. I could almost feel her drawing me toward her. It was like a magnet. She was my kind. She was like me.
...
Hawks are defensive about their territory. They don't want strangers coming and grabbing all the best prey. But I had the feeling that there was something more going on. She wanted me to join her. I don't know how I knew that, but I did. She wanted me to fly down to her.
Some people think hawks mate for just a season. Some people think they mate for life, and I don't really know which is true. One thing I knew for sure: I wasn't ready to settle down with anyone. Especially not a hawk. And yet there was this feeling in me. Like... like I belonged with her.
I looked away. I would be glad when this mission was over and I no longer had to come here to her territory. She confused me.
...
I am a human, yes. But I am also a hawk. I'm a predator who kills for food. And I'm also a human being who... who grieves, over death.
...
I am Tobias. A boy. A hawk. Some strange mix of the two.
...
Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.
Book 7: The Stranger (Rachel)
He was a sweet, poetic kind of guy. The kind bullies love to pick on. He used to have messy, out-of control hair and dreamy eyes that always seemed to be looking at something no one else could see.
Book 13: The Change (Tobias)
I would have been one of the kids paying attention, but too shy to volunteer. I was never very bold or aggressive. I was a bully-magnet, to tell you the truth. The kid most likely to get pounded. The kid from the home so screwed up that I ended up being shuttled back and forth between aunts and uncles who didn't even remember my name half the time. But that wasn't me anymore.
...
If you asked me what I think of being a red tailed hawk, I'd give you two different answers, depending on the time of day. When the sun is up, and the thermals are piling up the tall clouds, and I'm riding the high breezes a million miles above the humans who crawl along below me... well, then I'd say it's great. But at night, when I cower on my branch and peer half-blind through the leaves at a cold moon and can only listen to the sounds of the night predators doing their work, well, that's different.
...
[in the Ellimist's allegorical space]
I was no longer a red-tailed hawk. But I was not human, either. At least not the way I had once been human. I had arms that were wings. I had legs that ended in talons. I had a beak, but it was a mouth, too. I know this all sounds crazy. I know it's impossible to really imagine it very well. But somehow I was both a human and a bird and some third thing that was in between the two.
...
The [Ellimist in] bird shape smiled. Don't ask me how it smiled with a beak. It just did. I CHOSE A SHAPE YOU WOULD IDENTIFY WITH.
"Baloney. You know better than that. You know I'm human."
ARE YOU? YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE A HUMAN TO ME. I felt a queasiness in my stomach. I looked at the body I had. A body that was equal parts boy and bird.
...
"And what do you want, Tobias?"
"You know what I want," I said, almost choking on the words. "You know."
"Yes. But do you know what you want, Tobias?" the Ellimist asked. "And if you get it, will you still know?"
...
<The Ellimist says he'll... he'll... you know. Make me human again.> Somehow putting it in actual words didn't sound right. And yet that was what I wanted. To be human again. To live like the others.
...
Jara Hamee looked at me. "You human folk?"
<l used to be,> I said. <l, um, well... well, I'm not exactly the same as I used to be. I've changed.>
"Jara Hamee change, too. Not free. Now free."
...
I focused. I closed my weak raccoon eyes and focused on a different body. A body with feathers and wings. And slowly I became myself again.
...
At the last second, [Jake's] wings opened, he took the shock of the air and he swept his talons forward, all in one fluid movement. Even in pain, lying there a second away from death, I thought I had never seen anything so perfect in my life.
...
That was the life I would never have again. Human life. But you know, even as I was wallowing in self-pity, I knew I was being dishonest. Maybe that warm, fuzzy, golden life was how some people lived. But it wasn't how I had lived. Not really.
Okay, I thought. Okay, so maybe my life as a human sucked, too. That doesn't mean I want to spend the rest of my life as a bird.
And yet I had another memory, more recent. I saw myself the way I had appeared when the Ellimist had taken me into the turquoise mist. I saw myself half-bird, half-human.
...
I knew the truth now. I could see it clearly. I was looking at myself. Back when I was human. And looking at myself, I couldn't escape the truth - that wasn't me anymore. I wasn't Tobias the human. I had become something else. Something new.
...
I had acquired my own human DNA. But it was just a morph. If I stayed in my old human body I would be trapped there forever. Never again to morph. Never again to be a hawk. Never again to fly.
HAVE I KEPT MY PROMISE?
<Yes,> I said.
AND ARE YOU HAPPY, TOBIAS?
Megamorphs 2: In the Time of Dinosaurs
<Tobias! Listen to me. You are a human being! It's me, Rachel. Your friend. You are human, you...> No, I realized. No, that was wrong, wasn't it? <Tobias. You are a hawk. You are a red-tailed hawk. Remember your wings? Remember flying? Flying high on the thermals?>
Book 19: The Departure (Cassie)
I don't know why Tobias has chosen to remain a hawk. I guess he wants to stay in the war. Or maybe the truth is, he's happier as a hawk than he was as a human.
Book 21: The Threat (Jake)
<Murder? I don't think so, Jake,> [David] said with a laugh. <He's a bird. You may kill a bird, but it isn't murder. I'd never do that. I wouldn't hurt a human. But hey, an animal? That's a different story.>
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
"Tobias," Jara said. "This daughter named Toby. Name for Tobias."
In the old days, back when I was truly human, "Tobias" was a word that meant wimp. That's what I was. I guess I was a nice person, back then. I guess teachers liked me and girls felt sorry for me. But the bullies were drawn to me like a mosquito to a sweaty neck.
...
"My name is Tobias." I told her my last name. Weird. I could barely remember it. It felt like I was using an alias.
...
Rachel went into her bald eagle morph. I've seen her do it many times before, of course, but for some reason this time it fascinated me. Is that the right word? No, it mesmerized me.
Rachel is a beautiful girl. She's beautiful in that way you know will last her whole life. She'll be a beautiful woman. But beauty alone isn't that big a thing. What makes Rachel "Rachel" is what's inside. And watching her morph to eagle was like seeing her soul emerge through her flesh.
...
But sometimes it seemed to me that this [bald eagle] body suited [Rachel] better than her own. Her own body misled people with superficial resemblances to the glossy images of magazine models. This body was Rachel: fast, strong, smart, intense, and dangerous.
...
I was off in my own mind, watching the strange woman who said she wanted to take care of me. Why? Why would someone want to take care of me? She didn't know me. So why?
...
Sometimes I wondered if it was all an illusion. That I'd never had a mother and father. That I'd never really been human. I was a freak of nature. No, that wasn't right, either. Nature at its most perverse could not create me. I was a freak of technology. Of alien technology.
I was a bird with the mind of a human boy. Or I was a boy with the body of a bird. Either way, that woman I saw through the glass, the woman now channel-surfing with her remote control and stopping at CNN, that woman did not know me. Not the old me or the real me.
Surprise, Cousin Aria, your adopted son is a red-tailed hawk.
...
A quick morph, two hours, and I'd be back. Back where I'd started. Human. Tobias the boy.
Ever since the Ellimist had given me back my power to morph and allowed me to reacquire my own original DNA, the question had hung in the air. Rachel wondered, I know. Once she'd suggested it to me: Why not just become fully human again? I hadn't given her an answer.
...
Before, I'd had no choice. Now I did. I was choosing to live as a hawk. Choosing to build a life around a scruffy meadow and the pitiful rodents in it.
Maybe I was crazy.
...
I forced a laugh. <Yeah, that'll work out real well. "Hi, Cousin Aria. It's me, Tobias. No, over here: the bird. Yes, your cousin is a red-tailed hawk. Surprise!">
"You don't have to be."
I pretended not to know what she was talking about. <What?>
"Tobias, you have the power to become human again. Fully human."
<Uh-huh.>
"You can go to this woman as a human. You can be Tobias again. You can have a family. Someone around to take care of you."
<l don't need anyone to take care of me.> I bristled.
...
<I'm a hawk,> I snapped. <A bird of prey. When we're weak, we die. That's the law for us. I'm not a human being. Not anymore. No one helps a hawk. A hawk lives by his eyes and wings and talons.>
"You're a hawk?" Rachel sneered. "You talk, Tobias. You read. You have emotions. Those are human things, not hawk things."
<l know! I know! Don't you think I know? That's why I'm going hungry. Because I'm not hawk enough. That's why I let Bek get away, because I was human enough to care more about my pain and fear than I cared about doing what I had to do.>
"That's just stupid," Rachel said angrily. "It doesn't even make sense. You know what? You have to make a choice, Tobias. You can be a hawk. But you will never, ever, not in a million years, be a pure, true hawk. If you want to stay a hawk you'll be like you are now: confused, conflicted, torn up inside, never knowing what you really are. Or... or you can be human again. All human. You can live with the Aria woman and eat at the table and sleep in a bed."
<And never fly,> I said. <Never fly again. Never see with hawk's eyes. Never morph again. I know you guys would all be nice to me, but I'd lose all of you. I'd lose being an Animorph.>
"You wouldn't lose me," Rachel said. For a long while neither of us spoke. Then Rachel, in a whisper, said, "What am I supposed to do, Tobias? I'm a girl. You're a bird. This is way past Romeo and Juliet, Montagues and Capulets. This isn't Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio coming from different social groups or whatever. It's not like you're black and I'm white like Cassie and Jake. No one but a moron cares about that. We are... we can't hold hands, Tobias. We can't dance. We can't go to a movie together."
<l... God, Rachel, don't you think I know all that? Don't you think I want to have all that? But I can't keep changing. I can't keep becoming something different.>
"One more change, Tobias. Back to human. You'd be free of this stupid war and free of all the danger of living as a hawk. I wouldn't have to worry about you anymore."
I couldn't take anymore. I just couldn't. It was too much. I felt like I'd explode if I didn't get away from her. I couldn't be that near to her... couldn't.
...
I could morph to human. Stay human. Eat as a human. No fighting over territory, no fighting Yeerks.
And I would still have Rachel.
Such a simple decision. So easy. Any fool knew the answer. Be human! Be human!
...
I hadn't realized till that moment how much this hope had meant to me. A home. A family.
<Not for you, Tobias, you idiot! You fool! I hate you! I hate you! I want you to die!>
I couldn't fly. I landed hard and lay there in the dirt. I just kept saying it, over and over in my head. <l hate you, Tobias. I hate you. I want you to die.> In my life as a human, in my life as a bird, I have never been lower than that. I knew my friends were fighting. I knew they needed me. But I couldn't...
...
Now I heard the message my own mind was telling me: You are both, Tobias. Hawk and human. You always will be.
...
It's a rotten situation, I guess. But my duty is to be what I am. A hawk. A boy. Instinct. And emotion. I'll have to go on walking that tightrope.
I ate the mother rabbit. All I could hold. Then I morphed into the mother rabbit. And I shepherded the babies safely back to their den, as over our heads the other hawk flew, looking down at us for a chance to hunt and eat as I had done.
Book 25: The Extreme (Marco)
"Say, Rachel, I got a joke for you," I said.
"No you don't," she said.
I ignored the warning. "Two blonds are standing across the river from one another..."
"Hey," Tobias interrupted. "Remember, I'm a blond, too. It may be dirty-blond, but it's still blond."
Book 31: The Conspiracy (Jake)
<What?> [Tobias] asked, sounding defensive. <l used to do that whenever one of my aunts or uncles wanted me to go somewhere I didn't want to. They never made me go.> He was quiet a moment. Then, abashed, he said, <Oh. Duh. They didn't care what I did.>
Book 32: The Separation (Rachel)
<We're used to crazy,> Tobias said. <l mean, who else would, you know, care about someone like me? It takes a fairly crazy girl to like a Bird-boy.>
Book 33: The Illusion (Tobias)
"It's just all these other people. The noise. This body..." I looked around, worried that someone might overhear. But no, not with human ears, not with this much noise.
"You mean your body. The body you're in now is your body, Tobias. It's who you truly are. Normally, naturally."
...
I could choose to trap myself in my human form now, but I would lose my morphing power for good. Do you see? I would be useless. Unable to honor my responsibility to Earth, powerless to resist Yeerk evil.
"Just dance with me, Tobias. Please." A slow song started. I was surprised. I actually knew this one. Goo Goo Dolls. [almost certainly Iris]
...
Rachel was running right behind me. Had she seen the clock before I had? Had she known time was short and chosen not to tell me, hoping I'd forget? Hoping I'd be "accidentally" trapped in human morph? No. Of course not. She wouldn't want that. And yet... I wasn't completely sure.
...
"Tobias, I want to explain..." She broke off as her eyes followed mine to the picture of the red-tailed hawk and the caption beneath it. "Longevity in the wild," it read. "Almost never reaches the figures attained by captive birds guarded against disease and predation. A generous estimate: eighteen years."
...
She paused to consider her next words. She was embarrassed by what she was about to say. Fighting to get past her embarrassment. "But you've got to realize that there's more. I'm not just a warrior," she said, her blue eyes glittering so close to mine. "I'm a girl. I'm trying not to let myself be dragged off the cliff, away from all normalcy, into this insane life we live. I don't like what it does to me, Tobias, and I need to be a girl again. I need a little bit of normalcy, okay? Not a lot, but some."
She pushed back, away from me. I'd never seen Rachel so emotional. Unless, of course, the emotion was an act. Unless she was stalling me just to eat up the minutes, to trap me, to -
"All the things we're supposed to live while we're in school, Tobias, you know, dances like this, nights out at the movies, walks on the beach. That stuff is passing us by. I want those things. We deserve them. And if you were human..."
I cut her off, repeating her words out loud. "Yeah. If I were human. If."
So she'd finally said what I'd known she felt all along. It made sense. She was right. She did need normalcy. Rachel had gone pretty far out on the edge in this war.
But it still hurt. Hurt worse because I didn't have an answer.
"I need to go," I said flatly.
...
The clock was ticking down and I wasn't even sure Rachel was on my side. In minutes I'd be trapped. Trapped as a person who was no longer me.
...
[after demorphing to hawk, barely avoiding getting trapped in human morph]
I looked toward the night sky, so relieved.
So happy.
...
[a flashback to Tobias's life before]
I spoke cautiously. "Well, it's like an honor," I said. "I mean, the committee picked my drawing out from hundreds of entries. Just something I sketched during art class. I had no idea it would make the state show."
I was hoping [my uncle] would take me to the prizewinners' reception that weekend. Stupid. It wasn't like it was a big deal. But it would have been okay.
"Do you get prize money?" he grumbled casually, not even turning to look at me.
"No," I said, confused.
"No? So then what's it worth? If it won't help pay the bills, what good is it?" He glanced at me patronizingly, then back to the TV. "When I was about your age I already had a job. At this car lot. Washing the cars. All the money went to my mother. All my earnings. Because Dad wasn't around. It was tight..." He broke off and leaned back into the couch.
I stood there at the foot of the stairs, unable to move. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Couldn't show him that.
I told myself, No big deal, Tobias. Just some dumb drawing. No big deal.
To him I said, "Yeah, well, it was just an idea."
No answer.
I dragged myself upstairs to my room. Walked across to the window. I could cry up here where no one would see.
Stupid to cry.
Then, through blurry eyes I watched a car pull up to a house across the street. A mom and daughter got out. Walked together to the front door. The little girl was carrying a page smeared with finger paint, crumpling it a little as she walked. The mother stopped, took the picture from her daughter, and carried it into the house like it was the Mona Lisa.
It was like someone had set out to shove my life in my face. Here, Tobias, take a look. Take a look at your life, and at the lives of normal kids. Take a good long look.
I was alone. I was alone.
Where would my strength come from?
I raised a hand to brush away the tears.
A hand that was... fingers that were...
Tan.
Feathers. A wing.
...
She's crazy, I realized. She's insane. The Yeerk. The girl. The line between them all confused.
Hawk. Boy.
Yeerk. Girl.
I had a terrifying moment of understanding. Pity. To be the human girl desperate, terrified, alone, all alone, needing someone to look at her without cringing. To be the Yeerk, hungry for sensations that were so intense, so powerful compared to the dull, blind life of a slug.
...
The memory of the mission was far behind. The close call with death forgotten. For a while.
Who am I? What am I? A bird. A boy. Something not quite human. Something more than human.
The person Rachel loves.
I discovered something amid the pain and terror and confusion. I discovered that the answer to what I am, to who I am, isn't something to be answered in a single word or a single moment.
It could take a lifetime to figure out who I am.
For now, I'm willing to hang in there, floating on a thermal. Biding my time.
Book 38: The Arrival (Ax)
Tobias is interesting. A nothlit, but now an almost voluntary one. He has lost his human life, but not his human friends. He belongs. But at the same time, he does not belong.
Book 40: The Other (Marco)
The other Animorphs. Jake. Cassie. Rachel. Tobias, the guy who lives as a hawk. Ax, Elfangor's younger brother.
...
Tobias [in human morph] with Rachel. She, carrying a bag from Express and one from Bebe. He, looking slightly awkward and out of place.
...
<What is "normal," anyway?> Cassie asked, rhetorically.
<The norm. The standard. The average,> I said.
Tobias glared. <Okay, I'm getting a complex over here. I'm a nothlit. A freak. Whatever. My best friend is an alien with blue fur. My girlfriend is human — when she isn't in morph. How about we don't talk about "normal" anymore. Or "average" or "natural." Please.>
Books 1-22, Megamorphs 1, The Andalite Chronicles, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
Book 1: The Invasion (Jake)
Tobias was... I mean, I guess he still kind of is a strange guy. He was new at school, and he wasn't the toughest kid around, so he got picked on a lot.
...
Tobias was actually grinning, but that's Tobias for you. He's never scared of weird stuff. It's the normal stuff he can't stand.
...
[after Tobias morphs for the first time]
He was glowing. I swear, he was glowing. Not like he was radioactive or anything, I don't mean that. It's just that his eyes were shining bright, and his face was one big grin, and he seemed to be tingling with energy, bouncing like he couldn't stand still.
...
"You wouldn't have that attitude if you'd been up there with me," Tobias said angrily. "It was cool being a cat and all. But a hawk! It's just total, absolute freedom." I hadn't ever seen Tobias so happy. I mean, Tobias has a pretty lousy home life. Thinking about it, I suddenly had this feeling...
...
Still Tobias hesitated. <I hate changing back. It's like going back into a prison or something. I hate it when I don't have wings.>
...
Tobias had terrible notes with all kinds of little drawings in the margins. It took a while before I could figure out what they were. They were buildings and people and cars, the way they looked from high up in the sky. "I don't really need to go in," Tobias said as we pooled our limited cash to buy tickets. "I'm happy with just my hawk morph. I don't want to be anything else."
...
<The Yeerks convince them that taking on a Yeerk will solve all their problems. I think that's what The Sharing is all about. People believe that by becoming something different, they can leave behind all their pain.>
"Like spending all their time as a hawk," Marco pointed out. Tobias had nothing to say to that. He spread his wings and flew up and away.
Book 3: The Encounter (Tobias)
But it was the hawk that frightened me. Or maybe not the hawk herself. Maybe it was the feeling I had, rising up to meet her in the sky. The feeling of recognition. The feeling of going home. The feeling that I belonged with her.
It hit me in a wave of disgust and horror. No. NO! I was Tobias. A human. A human being, not a bird! I banked sharply away from her. I was human. I was a boy named Tobias. A boy with blond hair that was always a mess. A boy with human friends. Human interests. But part of me kept saying, "It's a lie. It's a lie. You are the hawk. The hawk is you. And Tobias is dead."
...
But it sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.
...
"Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart," [Rachel] said with sudden passion. "A person isn't his body. A person isn't what's on the outside."
...
The freed hawk was watching me. I could almost feel her drawing me toward her. It was like a magnet. She was my kind. She was like me.
...
Hawks are defensive about their territory. They don't want strangers coming and grabbing all the best prey. But I had the feeling that there was something more going on. She wanted me to join her. I don't know how I knew that, but I did. She wanted me to fly down to her.
Some people think hawks mate for just a season. Some people think they mate for life, and I don't really know which is true. One thing I knew for sure: I wasn't ready to settle down with anyone. Especially not a hawk. And yet there was this feeling in me. Like... like I belonged with her.
I looked away. I would be glad when this mission was over and I no longer had to come here to her territory. She confused me.
...
I am a human, yes. But I am also a hawk. I'm a predator who kills for food. And I'm also a human being who... who grieves, over death.
...
I am Tobias. A boy. A hawk. Some strange mix of the two.
...
Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.
Book 7: The Stranger (Rachel)
He was a sweet, poetic kind of guy. The kind bullies love to pick on. He used to have messy, out-of control hair and dreamy eyes that always seemed to be looking at something no one else could see.
Book 13: The Change (Tobias)
I would have been one of the kids paying attention, but too shy to volunteer. I was never very bold or aggressive. I was a bully-magnet, to tell you the truth. The kid most likely to get pounded. The kid from the home so screwed up that I ended up being shuttled back and forth between aunts and uncles who didn't even remember my name half the time. But that wasn't me anymore.
...
If you asked me what I think of being a red tailed hawk, I'd give you two different answers, depending on the time of day. When the sun is up, and the thermals are piling up the tall clouds, and I'm riding the high breezes a million miles above the humans who crawl along below me... well, then I'd say it's great. But at night, when I cower on my branch and peer half-blind through the leaves at a cold moon and can only listen to the sounds of the night predators doing their work, well, that's different.
...
[in the Ellimist's allegorical space]
I was no longer a red-tailed hawk. But I was not human, either. At least not the way I had once been human. I had arms that were wings. I had legs that ended in talons. I had a beak, but it was a mouth, too. I know this all sounds crazy. I know it's impossible to really imagine it very well. But somehow I was both a human and a bird and some third thing that was in between the two.
...
The [Ellimist in] bird shape smiled. Don't ask me how it smiled with a beak. It just did. I CHOSE A SHAPE YOU WOULD IDENTIFY WITH.
"Baloney. You know better than that. You know I'm human."
ARE YOU? YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE A HUMAN TO ME. I felt a queasiness in my stomach. I looked at the body I had. A body that was equal parts boy and bird.
...
"And what do you want, Tobias?"
"You know what I want," I said, almost choking on the words. "You know."
"Yes. But do you know what you want, Tobias?" the Ellimist asked. "And if you get it, will you still know?"
...
<The Ellimist says he'll... he'll... you know. Make me human again.> Somehow putting it in actual words didn't sound right. And yet that was what I wanted. To be human again. To live like the others.
...
Jara Hamee looked at me. "You human folk?"
<l used to be,> I said. <l, um, well... well, I'm not exactly the same as I used to be. I've changed.>
"Jara Hamee change, too. Not free. Now free."
...
I focused. I closed my weak raccoon eyes and focused on a different body. A body with feathers and wings. And slowly I became myself again.
...
At the last second, [Jake's] wings opened, he took the shock of the air and he swept his talons forward, all in one fluid movement. Even in pain, lying there a second away from death, I thought I had never seen anything so perfect in my life.
...
That was the life I would never have again. Human life. But you know, even as I was wallowing in self-pity, I knew I was being dishonest. Maybe that warm, fuzzy, golden life was how some people lived. But it wasn't how I had lived. Not really.
Okay, I thought. Okay, so maybe my life as a human sucked, too. That doesn't mean I want to spend the rest of my life as a bird.
And yet I had another memory, more recent. I saw myself the way I had appeared when the Ellimist had taken me into the turquoise mist. I saw myself half-bird, half-human.
...
I knew the truth now. I could see it clearly. I was looking at myself. Back when I was human. And looking at myself, I couldn't escape the truth - that wasn't me anymore. I wasn't Tobias the human. I had become something else. Something new.
...
I had acquired my own human DNA. But it was just a morph. If I stayed in my old human body I would be trapped there forever. Never again to morph. Never again to be a hawk. Never again to fly.
HAVE I KEPT MY PROMISE?
<Yes,> I said.
AND ARE YOU HAPPY, TOBIAS?
Megamorphs 2: In the Time of Dinosaurs
<Tobias! Listen to me. You are a human being! It's me, Rachel. Your friend. You are human, you...> No, I realized. No, that was wrong, wasn't it? <Tobias. You are a hawk. You are a red-tailed hawk. Remember your wings? Remember flying? Flying high on the thermals?>
Book 19: The Departure (Cassie)
I don't know why Tobias has chosen to remain a hawk. I guess he wants to stay in the war. Or maybe the truth is, he's happier as a hawk than he was as a human.
Book 21: The Threat (Jake)
<Murder? I don't think so, Jake,> [David] said with a laugh. <He's a bird. You may kill a bird, but it isn't murder. I'd never do that. I wouldn't hurt a human. But hey, an animal? That's a different story.>
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
"Tobias," Jara said. "This daughter named Toby. Name for Tobias."
i used to understand summer preferrers i used to see where they were coming from but frankly in 2026 its just an inexcusable position to hold. you think any of this is okay? you sicko?
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(SOUND IS CRUCIAL) this video is has murdered me dead the music the editing the way information is slowly revealed about the two of them the plot twist the breaking bad images. WILLIAM WILLIAM WILLIAM. all over minecraft parkour someone help im seizing
i was parked at the beach yesterday and a Real Biker Dude pulled up beside me. Like on a big handlebar motorcycle with his whole life packed onto it. a real rambling man. a son of the highways and byways. and he looked down at my mini-series purple e-bike and he was like "what a sweet little thing! how's it ride?" and we talked my e-bike specs. i said i liked his motorcycle and he was barely interested in talking about it except to tell me where he got it in case i ever want one. but he loved my little bike.
this is a problem for me because now i feel respected and powerful so from now on i'm gonna roll up with my e-bike to other guys on their motorcycle and be like "sick bike. reminds me of mine if it were less space efficient..."
the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you
This is called a "superloo" and terfs are actively trying to steal this from you, in the UK they changed bathroom regulations to mean new buildings have to prioritise gendered toilets rather than build superloos.
This also upset a lot of architects and designers who like the superloos. They're also typically more like small rooms rather than having doors you can look under.
I have a friend who was strongly against inclusive bathrooms because he felt that “bathroom stalls are already really exposed due to how they’re constructed, so no wonder women don’t want men in the same bathrooms as them” and when I pointed out that we could just… build better bathrooms… with less exposed stalls, he got really quiet and then said “honestly that sounds so much better, but there must be some problem with building them like that, because otherwise wouldn’t we already be doing it?” BESTIE we are. WE ARE. Old-style bathrooms are cheaply made, poorly designed, and all around bad. Haven’t you noticed that men’s restrooms rooms get weirdly sticky? Haven’t you noticed that women’s restrooms end up with giant lines? This is because these rooms are architecturally awful. And we can do better now, because we know more! And we are!!! People are actively designing better bathrooms that address known problems, and guess what: those bathrooms are “inclusive” in the same way that curb-cuts are inclusive. It doesn’t matter if the ramp was built for a wheelchair or a stroller; it doesn’t matter if the bathrooms were designed specifically for gender inclusivity or just because fall-apart-if-you-sneeze-on-them metal stall dividers with giant ass peek gaps suck. We can in fact improve our built environment to better meet our needs. Stop cutting off your nose to spite your face; stop settling for less just because someone else might also enjoy it.
Seattle's SEA-TAC airport has an all gender restroom that's a row of about a dozen fully enclosed separated little rooms that lock, with a shared bank of sinks and it's great. Love it. Lot of very strange encounters at the sinks, feels odd the first few times! But people laugh it off almost instantly. Because it's not actually a big deal to share a sink.
Idk if this is too personal, but have you got any philosophical tips on breakups?
Im not sure whether I will have to go through one (its a weird situation) but the prospect is giving me immense dread and it would be my first. No clue how to prepare myself :(
Some breakups you'll shrug off, some will always ache, less and less with time but never zero. The worst ones are breakups with friends. Pride is a worse teacher than humility. Sometimes deep love and affection can wind up becoming really bitter enmity and it'll be confusing how the same person could mean opposite things to you at different times in your life. Falling in love and wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone changes you forever. It changes you even more if they leave you, and even more if it happens to you more than once. But change can't be avoided and you can't control other people. Some of your mistakes will be forgiven, but some never will be and you'll have to live with being the villain in someone else's story. Sometimes you won't make any mistakes but things still won't work out, and you'll have to live with the unfairness of that too. Making the same mistakes again and again and learning slowly to be better is part of being a person. Everyone else is trying their best, just like you. But the absolute best breakup advice I ever got was this:
Watch the entire box set of The World At War (1973) and by the time the Red Army take Berlin you feel better!
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I had noticed these strange little occurrences all my life. A bird would fly past my window and it'd sorta look like it was half there, half not. I'd glance up at a clock and for a moment, the second hand would be in two places at once. Never really thought much about it. I thought it was just normal. Someone told me once about the clock hand illusion where you flick your eyes and it looks like time stops for a half second or so, I figured it was something weird like that.
But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.
And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.
It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."
And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.
That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.
I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.
One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.
I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.
It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.
Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.
I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)
She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.
I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.
In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.
I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.
It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.
It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.
When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.
But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.
Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.
I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.
But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.
I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.
My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.
I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.
After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?
And I was just like :| yep.
Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!
And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.
The kinda scary thing is, every once in a while I'll see some of those artifacts that I used to see, like, little tiny desynchs within each timeline. I only recently got used to being in two timelines at the same time, I don't think I can handle being in three or four. My brain's already better at handling the desynch, like, one time I managed to move my finger in two directions at once all in the pizza timeline. But I'm really scared of the desynch multiplying over time. Maybe it's inevitable, but my main strategy is just to not flip any coins for the rest of my life.
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