#animorphsecretsanta

 Ax glances up from his work long enough to roll his eyes at me. He didn’t roll his eyes before we started dating. I’m clearly a bad influence, which is awesome. “I am not a warrior yet. I am still an aristh. And I have not been defeated. Merely—set back. These human hands are—”

 “Vastly inferior to Andalite hands, because everything humans have is vastly inferior to Andalites, up to and including our Porta-Johns, yeah, yeah, I think I get it by now.”

 He blinks, startled, then gives me a tiny smile, like he’s testing out his face. “I was going to say unexpectedly strong. It is difficult to properly calibrate the amount of pressure I am applying to the ribbon.”

 “Give it to me.” I hold out a hand. “I have a lot more experience calibrating my fingers or whatever.”

 Ax hands over the chocolate box. “You are making an innuendo.” He sounds delighted with himself for figuring it out.

 “Yeah. I have no idea what it was supposed to be implying, though.” Ax’s efforts to untie the ribbon have fucked up the bow to the degree that it actually does take me several minutes and one broken fingernail to untie it. I pass it back to him, and when he opens the box, his face actually lights up. I mean, with a big, goofy grin and round cheeks and sparkling eyes, like a box of chocolates is the best thing to ever happen to him and like nothing bad has ever happened to him, and he’s so bright and blinding that I have to look away for a second and count the pine needles under my bare feet.

 Ax either doesn’t notice or is polite enough not to say anything, and when I look up again, he’s already eaten three chocolates and is cramming a fourth into his mouth, scrutinizing the little chart that tells you which flavors are where intently. The wrappers are neatly folded in a stack next to him. “The hazelnut is better than the caramel,” he tells me. “But both are vastly inferior to the dark-and-white-chocolate swirl. Suh-wirl. Hazelnut. Zel. Zel. Caramel, zel, mel.”

 “And the store clerk thought I was insane for buying my boyfriend a sampler box of chocolates for Christmas.” Actually, Jake thought I was insane, too. Not that he could talk. He got Cassie a flashlight for Christmas. Mind you, this is a guy who breaks into the Yeerk Pool on a regular basis. A guy who’s been running circles around Visser Three since the eighth grade. He’s not an idiot, except for when he totally is. Who buys the girl they made out with on an alien planet—the girl who would totally be their girlfriend, if only they had the guts to ask—a flashlight for Christmas?

 Jake, that’s who. I can’t tell you his last name. Partially because of the whole guerilla warfare thing, and partially because I don’t want everyone to know how totally clueless he is when it comes to girls.

 I’m Marco, by the way. The handsomest, most intelligent guerilla warrior of the bunch. This is Ax, my boyfriend, an alien who can turn into a human, and into a lot of other animals. We can all turn into other animals. Can’t tell you who we are, the Yeerks are everywhere, etc. You know this already, try and keep up.

 “This is an excellent gift,” Ax says reassuringly. There’s chocolate smeared across the lower half of his face. Not a cute little smudge on the corner of his mouth, either. We’re talking a full-on Hershey beard. I want to kiss him anyway, because being in love is stupid. “The variety of flavors and textures serve to enhance the already highly favorable experience of consuming chocolate, and not knowing the nature of the filling before biting into it adds a welcome rush of adrenaline to an otherwise danger-less dessert experience.”

 “Wow, you should write ads for Nestle.” Ax’s brow furrows, and I move on, hurriedly, before he can force me to explain the concept of advertising again. Don’t get me wrong, Ax isn’t an idiot either, and he’s been on Earth long enough to have seen ads. It’s just that Andalites don’t really do ‘money’ or ‘companies’ or ‘capitalism’ the way humans do, so he kind of doesn’t get what they’re for. “I’m glad you like it. Merry Christmas.”

 “This day bears no significant meaning to me,” Ax says, like he has every day this month. “I am from another world. Andalites do not have the same calendar as humans.”

 “Ax-man, some humans don’t have the same calendar as other humans.”

 “I am aware,” Ax says haughtily. The effect is somewhat spoiled because—again, chocolate face. “Rachel has made this point clear. Several times.”

 Rachel hates Christmas carols, so obviously, I’ve spent every boring reconnaissance mission since Thanksgiving doing my best Mariah Carey impression. I told her it was my duty as Ax’s boyfriend to educate him about Earth culture, which as it turned out was a terrible excuse, because Ax told us last week that all human music sounds the same to him. Which is to say, terrible. Even Nine Inch Nails. Even Offspring. Which, aside from being a total affront to the glory that is The Downward Spiral, meant that I had to throw away the mix CD I’d been making him and beg Nora to drive me to the mall so that I could spend two hours searching for the perfect gift. Jake showed up to help me, which mostly consisted of him following me around and saying things like “I dunno, he likes food, right? Maybe get him a crockpot? My dad got my mom a crockpot.”

 “Your dad has been married to your mom for twenty years,” I said. “I’ve been dating Ax for three months. Also, even if we had been dating for twenty years, a crockpot would still be a shitty gift, I like to think that I have a little more game than getting my boyfriend a cooking implement for Christmas. Also, he’s an alien who eats by absorbing nutrients from grass, and he lives in the woods and doesn’t have a kitchen and he probably couldn’t cook without starting a forest fire, and then where would the Ramones live, huh?”

 Jake had been nodding along, but now he stopped and furrowed his brow. “The Ramones?”

 “The baby skunks. The ones that Cassie saved. We named them after the Ramones.”

 “I think you might be freaking out a little, dude,” Jake said, in the same carefully neutral voice that he used to talk about things like Visser One and murder. It should have felt out of place in the mall, but there was a Yeerk pool entrance in the Gap changing rooms. Jake had almost bled to death on the linoleum outside GameStop once. Jake-the-general fit right in with the fluorescent lights and the tinny Christmas carols, the same way that he did in school, or my bedroom, or every other part of my fucking life.

 And he was right. I was freaking out. Which was stupid—I’d been in way more stressful situations than this. “I’m not freaking out. I’m just not getting Ax a crockpot,” I said, in my best semblance of a normal teenage boy with a normal amount of stress over my boyfriend’s Christmas present. My secret boyfriend, who was an alien, fighting a guerilla war with me and my best friend and my boyfriend’s best friend and my best friend’s girlfriend and my best friend’s cousin, who one of these days was going to snap and murder me for telepathically singing Mariah Carey songs in the body of an osprey.

 You know. The normal amount of stress to have over that.

 And in the end I’d panicked, and gotten Ax a freaking Whitman’s sampler, and it turns out that a Whitman’s sampler was the perfect present for your alien boyfriend of three months, who was now singing the praises of rum coconut with his bony shoulders under my arm as we sat together under the biggest tree in the forest where he lives. Even human morph is taller than I am, so he has to slouch pretty dramatically to make it possible for me to even put my arm around his shoulders. Which he does, every time we sit anywhere together, even when it means half-lying down on a bunch of tangled tree roots like he is right now. It can’t be comfortable. I’ve never asked him why he does it. The answer would probably freak me out way more than any Christmas present.

 “I did not get you anything,” Ax says. He frowns. “This is not like a birth-day. Birthhh day. When you are given a gift on this day, it is customary to reciprocate, is it not?”

 “It’s cool,” I say, jumping on the distraction. “I mean, like you said, you’re not even from this planet. You didn’t know what Christmas was until like a year ago, and you don’t have any Earth money anyway.”

 He rifles through the chocolate box, squinting at the little flavor chart. “I have means of acquiring Earth money.”

 I hold up a hand. “Please do not tell me about any more of the felonies that you and Tobias commit together. I’d like to maintain plausible deniability when you two are inevitably sent to Andalite Juvie for your crimes.”

 “Tobias and I have never committed a felony,” Ax says huffily. “Property damage not involving a motor vehicle and not in excess of two hundred fifty of your human dollars—“

 “Not my dollars, and are you saying you and Tobias have never fucked up a car?”

 “—is not a felony.” He pops another chocolate into his mouth. “Ah. Peppermint. You are the one who has stolen and summarily destroyed a motor vehicle. Neither Tobias nor I can drive.”

 “Like I have my license yet?”

 Ax rolls his eyes and looks up at me through brown frizz of curls falling into his eyes. “Would you like me to steal you a car for Christmas, Marco,” he deadpans, and I laugh and give into temptation and kiss him. He tastes like chocolate and pine needles.

 When I pull away, several minutes later, he says, “Why are you not with your father?”

 “Please don’t talk about my dad while we’re making out.” I sit up and shake tree bark out of my hair.

 Ax doesn’t follow me. He stays lying on the forest floor, hair a halo around his head, staring up at me with wide, unblinking eyes. “Christmas is traditionally spent with one’s family. These Messages and the Very Special Episodes were clear on that subject. I care for you, very much.” The way he says things like that, like they’re observable facts of the universe. The sky is blue. You have thirty-two seconds left in morph. I care for you, very much. “But we have only been ‘dating’ for three months. I do not think I can count myself part of your family yet.”

 “Half of my family is probably on the Blade Ship, being used as a meat puppet to torture some poor Hork-Bajir and plot the destruction of our entire planet.” My voice comes out sharper than I want it to, but Ax doesn’t blink. Ax doesn’t blink enough, even as a human. We need to talk about that at some point. “The other half is sitting at home with his new wife, watching Charlie Brown Christmas and eating tamales, totally oblivious. Excuse me if I thought that spending the day with my boyfriend sounded more fun than watching my dad make mushy faces at my math teacher.”

 “You could have gone to Prince Jake’s house. Your families have known each other since you were children. Surely they would be a viable substitute for your own family unit.”

 “Oh, sure. Chinese food and movies with a known Controller, and the slim-but-terrifying possibility that Rachel will try and remove Tom’s Yeerk with a chopstick.” And Jake’s parents giving me pitying looks out of the corner of their eyes when they thought I wasn’t looking, in between scolding Jake about his failing grades. And Jake’s silent thousand-yard stare through Tom’s forehead, like all the failures of the world were on his shoulders. And Rachel’s skinny fingers with their blue glitter nail polish twitching on the edge of the table, just waiting for one of us to give the signal. “You have to admit, that family isn’t exactly relaxing.”

 “So I am your last resort.” Ax looks—it’s hard to read his facial expressions, but I think he looks disappointed, and like he’s trying not to be, or at least, not to let me know. He squares his jaw and looks off to the side. Yup, that’s definitely a my boyfriend just said that he’s only hanging out with me because his dad and his best friend are both totally fucked up face.

 I lean forward and take Ax’s face in my hands, so that I know that he’s listening to me. “You’re my boyfriend. Usually, people want to spend time with their boyfriends. I bought you a box of shitty chocolate specifically so that I could spend time with you, without worrying about alien space battles or alien office politics or being stuck as a flea for the rest of our lives because of alien morphing technology, or—alien things in general?”

 “You realize,” Ax says calmly, like it’s totally normal for me to be leaning over him and squishing his cheeks between my hands while I talk, “That you are an alien.”

 “Bzzt. Wrong. We’re on my planet, therefore, you’re the alien. Take me to the Andalite home world, then we’ll talk about me being an alien.”

 “I would take you to Andal, you know.”

 The thing is that I do know, I really really do. Ax wants to take me to his planet and introduce me to his parents and tell me about their trees and their grass and all the other things that Andalites think are important. And it’s too much, the way that his face over a box of chocolates is too much, the way that I care for you, very much is too fucking much. I steamroll over it, I have to, because if we start talking about family and homes I will actually have a full on panic attack, right here, in front of my alien boyfriend and this big old tree. “You are, as weird as it sounds, the most normal thing in my life. And I care about you. And I want to be here, with you, right now.”