The world comes back in layers, and once he can feel his body at all, Leareth isn't at all surprised to find that he can't move. 

He wonders if this is it - if Matirin is (maybe correctly) going to determine it's too late, and destroy Earth. He feels - grief, regret. Wondering what he missed, replaying bits of the past weeks, though he's still too groggy to really hold onto it. Maybe he just got complacent. Didn't expect someone on the other side to be as good as him, to be able to piece together a picture from what must have been very few hints, and stay a step ahead - how - they must have gotten the Healer, the one in Washington, what was her name, he can't recall... 

There is, in fact, so much here. Mhalir should be prioritizing, hard, they're running short on time, but - there's so much, and - well, all minds are beautiful, in their own way, to Yeerks. Hopes and dreams and childhood memories, love and hate, plans and regrets. But this one is - more - it's like drinking from a cold spring and only realizing then just how thirsty he is. 

He dives deeper - 

- a tower silhouetted against the stars - a man whose face he no longer remembers - recognition, relief, hope - to build something better - never to give up never to die never to leave - to win to fix it no matter what as long as it takes - 

What. 

Alloran hates the Yeerk morph, even more than he hates every minute of their shared existence, he's been mostly shifting quietly in the back of Mhalir's thoughts, gleeful at the thought of the Yeerk's prize being snatched away, even if in ashes - and he doesn't want to help Mhalir notice anything important, so he's not really looking -

- but this human has less of the tragic smallness of the humans they've seized before, and he's curious, paying attention despite himself -

Thousands of years old. It's so - organized - it reminds Mhalir obscurely of his own note-keeping, he started doing it as soon as he had hands and the ability to write - it's somewhat redundant now with Alloran, his quick Andalite mind and brain chip, but he doesn't know that he'll have Alloran's body forever. 

...He's done so many things. So many of them awful. Lives burned for fuel - a ledger of numbers, from a very long time ago, his careful calculations of how this many deaths worth of power could increase crop yields this amount, with this likelihood - and always the same question, matter-of-fact, unemotional save for the inevitable background current of determination, is it worth it. 

Less crisp but more recent memories - reading about Hitler, about Hiroshima, pacing in the dark and hurting, a painful update, absorbing something that was already true before he knew it, this is reality - vague recall of nightmares, not real but echoes of a reality, a tower going up in flames, a man - 

<Who was Urtho> 

This feels like an almost offensively personal question from his enemy! Of course, he can't help but drift to it anyway, not that the Yeerk even needs that. 

His first teacher. The person who showed him, with fifty years of work, that something better could be had. Who wrote letters to him. 

- who betrayed him, and killed himself in a fiery conflagration to deny Ma'ar his resources, and then...something, he still doesn't know what, a weapon, an assassination team, probably, but all records were lost - and he awoke in a world in shambles. 

<You miss him> 

Of course. 

<He betrayed you. He killed you, destroyed everything you had worked for> 

He was spooked. Ma'ar's mistakes were at fault, there, Leareth knows that now, he was so young and confused and trying so, so, hard, but trying isn't enough, and he make missteps, and what happened might have been disproportionate but that's how the world is, right, it's not fair. And Urtho wanted a better world. They had - goals in common, even if they weren't aligned, not really... And if he'd understood more, maybe, if he hadn't been so young and so rushed, if he'd had patience, maybe it wouldn't have ended up such a stupid pointless waste...

Alloran is confused, but - catching up, sort of, to why Mhalir cares about this, to what connections he's drawing -

You're nothing like him, he thinks, bitterly. Even to people who think they're monsters, you're a monster. The only way for you to make the world a better place is to let it be one that doesn't have you in it.

Mhalir lets that slide. Not productive to argue, right now. 

<Leareth, I - do not expect you to believe me, but please hear me out. I...want the same things that you do> 

- Well, that is the kind of argument best suited to convincing a Leareth, he feels a flicker of respect for that, for how fast this Yeerk figured it out. Implausible, though. Actions speak louder than words, right, and he can guess it's not as perfectly clear-cut as the Andalites would like to claim, but he knows enough. 

Search, riffling through memories–

<The Andalites told you that we betrayed Seerow> 

Yes, they did. He read their minds about it, too. He can guess that, too, is probably messier than presented, reality generally is, but. Still. That wasn't really a loadbearing part of his choosing his side; it was a piece, but he knows more than enough about what the Yeerks have done since then, and their activities on Earth so far - his people read a lot of Yeerk thoughts about it - and that's enough. 

<Seerow betrayed us> 

Oh really. 

<He could have spoken with me! He - did not - caught us entirely by surprise...> 

Alloran is pretty sure that is bullshit, in the transmissions he has read from the last few years before the betrayal, Seerow was nervous about the Yeerks and their sudden ambitions for galactic conquest, I've warned them, he said, that they must not pursue this...stupid of him, to have warned them, it just taught them to be more secretive about their plans...

<...He thought we were greedy. That we - ought to stay small - not wish for better things, not - try to use our strength to help the rest of the universe grow, as he helped us... Did you know anything about what state the Taxxons lived in before we came? The Hork-Bajir? And the Andalites did not care. Seerow - cared, enough to work with us - but he was the only one> 

Mhalir is not normally this emotional when he's trying to interrogate a host in Yeerk morph. It's odd. 

Leareth doesn't know much about the Taxxons or Hork-Bajir, actually. Mostly just that they're very handy for war. The Taxxons...eat people? 

<Very rarely, now! We have vat meat to feed them, now, on their home world, and are working on other engineered-medicine solutions to their constant hunger> 

Maybe the Andalites would care about more species if the one time they tried they hadn't unleashed an army of fast-spawning nightmare slug-conquerers destroying lives throughout the galaxy. That may have perhaps influenced the Andalite attitude towards trying to technologically uplift people in need. The best thing the Yeerks could've done for all those other peoples is to have never existed been a success story.

That - genuinely hurts. They were trying. Well, at least he was trying, and he had a substantial faction very loyal to him. Mhalir was never the leader of the Yeerks, and, well, he had quite a lot of influence but not infinite influence. There were some who from the start didn't care about consensual hosts. Mhalir fought back hard, and - damn it, he would have won that round if not for the surprise attack. Which was a surprise, even if there had been some warning mutters, before, it escalated so quickly and it was the first war in his species' history and how...was he supposed to know... 

But it doesn't matter in the end whose fault it was, or how unfair. Or how much he misses Seerow and wanted him to be proud. This is the reality they have now. One where the Andalites tried to pre-emptively take out everything the Yeerks had built so that they could grow, and Mhalir wouldn't have made the choice to start that war, he never wanted a war, but he wasn't going to just give up. And once you're in a war anyway, the thing to be done is win it, and figure out terms from there. 

Except that the Andalites have a weapon to destroy Earth, and might be scared enough to do that...

<You are being very reasonable in doubting me> he says to Leareth. <I cannot ask you to do otherwise; I am the one who must prove things to you, here. But - start with the premise that I am telling the truth, and I - we are so alike, I never thought to...> Focus. <If you were in my position, and wanted this to go well and not disastrously, what would you do>