"- That makes sense. I still feel somewhat off from it, but they did not think there was permanent damage." Logistics are hard, he knows that, this was a really impressive operation and in hindsight the reason he didn't see it coming, enough to have immediately prioritized getting someone to put air-quality sensors on the new base (the old one had them but the new ones weren't set up at all yet when the evacuation happened), was because - who would even try that? 

His young self, apparently, when sufficiently backed into a corner. 

"Anyway. I woke up again with Mhalir - Visser 3 - in my head - I am trying to correlate the timing, there, with what was occurring on your end, but I think it was some time before you sent the second team to the Pool ship, after the demons. - Sorry, this is foggier in my mind then I realized." Also it's jarring, in a way that leaves him almost dizzy, trying to recall those events while forcing down the associated terror and pain and near-despair he had been feeling at the time. 

"The Yeerks opened communications seven minutes after we sent the second team, if that's helpful."

Nod. "Then - I think he entered my head a few but not many minutes before your second team arrived. I - vaguely remember hearing the message of it. Before that..." It's very blurred. "He was reading my memories, obviously. He asked me about Urtho - a man I fought a very long time ago, in my own world, though I do not think I spoke of it to you before. I did not understand at the time why it was relevant, only later." 

Urtho - Seerow - mistakes they can't take back, deaths that nothing won in the future can ever undo - and suddenly his throat is tight and he can't speak. 

"Why was it relevant."

Breathe. He needs to be calm and be able to think now, he can be sad later. Leareth breathes in and out and pulls even further away from the tangle of emotions, and then he can formulate words and speak them again, with the downside that it feels kind of like he's floating and the speaking part is happening a long way off.

"Urtho was my teacher when I was a child. In my first life. Afterward I went back to my home kingdom and - rose in power, was an advisor to the King - he disapproved of my ambition - and then we were at war. I know I did not want to go to war, but. I tried to win, I was winning, and then - he did a Final Strike to destroy his own stronghold so my army could not take it, and he - deployed a powerful magic weapon, of some kind, that I had not known existed, and sent a strike team with it, and they killed my first body. And nearly destroyed the world."

He takes a slow unsteady breath. "I was - thinking of that. When Mhalir asked me what I would do, in the Yeerks' position. And I thought that I would surrender. It is not even a hard choice. Winning the war with Urtho, keeping my kingdom and all its progress, was not worth the cost of escalating, when he had such a weapon. And that the same held for the Yeerks. That - not losing to the Andalites - is not worth the deaths of five billion people." 

"It - surprises me a lot - that the Yeerks would believe that. That not losing to the Andalites was not worth the deaths of five billion people. And - if they did believe that I am confused about why they started a war that was predictably going to be that bad."

"I was not expecting them to listen. At the time. I was very surprised when he kept asking me for my advice, when they received the message about the second Gate signature on the blade ship - when it began firing..." He takes a breath. "I think I should skip ahead, to that explanation, I did not know at the time but he did. - Did Vanyel tell you of his dream last night?"

He's confused, actually, it sounds sort of like Matirin doesn't know, but surely Vanyel would have gone straight to him - who else? 

"I got a summary later, uh, fourthhand - the Visser concluded you are the same person? I sort of assumed something had gotten lost in translation, you don't seem like the sort of person who'd enslave five billion people."

"I hope I am not. But - I think it is important to note that he was not exactly doing that, or at least did not see it that way, from his end. He was pushing very hard to set up circumstances conducive to voluntary Controllers and cooperative Yeerk-human relationships, but - he did not feel he had the luxury of waiting and doing it that way from the start. Because of the Andalites."

Leareth takes another deep breath. "Because Seerow betrayed them, that was what led to their aggressions, it was only in retaliation once they feared losing everything they had worked so hard to build. Emril read his mind about it, and he was there, so - I believed it." 

"Seerow betrayed - Seerow worked very hard for them. A lot of people were deeply concerned about the project to develop a Kandrona generator that'd let them leave their planet, and he worked extraordinarily hard to make it happen anyway. I can - imagine it being possible that he changed his mind but he would've done so in response to information - if he learned they were planning to conquer and enslave people -"

"I think something did change his mind, and - I am not exactly sure what it was. I do know that Mhalir was not the foremost leader among the Yeerks, and thus was not in charge of their strategic decisions then. He did not want them to enslave people, but perhaps another faction did. It was not a complete surprise to Mhalir that he was unhappy, but the escalation to full-on hostilities caught him entirely off guard."

He looks down again. "Which is what happened with Urtho and I. He - was afraid - and I understand now what I could have done to better communicate my intentions and reassure him, but I was very young - Mhalir is so young, and - he was so afraid..." 

Damn it. Leareth is brittle glass and he can feel the first cracks, spreading like spiderwebs under the strain, and he has a choice between fighting his own mind to an extent that he'll probably regret later, or at some point in the next minute or two ending up in tears. 

He stops speaking and doesn't move. 

He thinks the "voluntary Controllers" plan concocted by a Yeerk who is also doing a secret takeover of the planet with tons of involuntary hosts and accordingly can't ever let anyone go is probably horrifying and definitely not voluntary. He also bets it's really really easy to emotionally abuse someone whose head you have full access to to convince them to keep you no matter how bad this is for you. He does not regard 'figuring out how to convince your slaves that slavery is great' to be a priority that makes slavers morally better. He does not think Visser Three's planned enslavement of the planet is the slightest fraction less bad than he thought it was yesterday, and there is absolutely no way he's letting the Yeerks have their "voluntary hosts" until the hosts have spent six months not having a Yeerk.

This is probably not the time to argue any of this with Leareth, though, it seems like Leareth has run into the madness problem. He sits patiently and in his head scrolls through more human correspondence flagged by his staff as relevant to the decision to go public.

After a couple of minutes Leareth is calm enough to formulate sentences again, although speaking out loud feels fraught. :I apologize, I think I need to take a little while to calm down before I explain more: The tone of his mindvoice is mostly matter-of-fact, with a flicker of irritation about it. 

<I noticed. Melody has been helpful about that for people, though the thing she does is distracting in the short term.>

:I am aware of that fact about Mindhealing, yes. I - might do that later, after I finish explaining everything: 

He closes his eyes and goes still again. 

Melody is sitting down with coffee now, and she's glancing over at them again, eyes narrowed. 

Matirin reads peoples' mail and politely acts like nothing at all unusual is happening and contemplates his next moves. Various desiderata: all the slaves are released immediately, including the ones who've been emotionally abused into being fine with it after it was first done to them involuntarily. (It's common for prisoners in desperate situations to bond with their jailors, their only source of contact with another person...). No one is in the position of having been freed and wanting to talk about what happened while knowledge of the aliens still is not public. These together push for telling people about the aliens right away. But another desiderata is that the U.S. government not be destabilized by the revelation that many people in it are still controlled or were just released from control by Yeerks. So maybe he should demand the government be released today or the next day, and then he can talk with them about the rest of the realization, and the President will presumably have some ideas about how his captivity can be productively presented to his people...

Eventually it feels less like everything in his head is about to shatter. Leareth still finds himself with a strong urge to curl up small in a ball, even though it's unclear why this would help with anything. He doesn't. 

He does keep going in Mindspeech, though, it's easier to navigate when his body is throwing unpredictable physiological emotion-reactions at him constantly. 

:Sorry. I - think I got somewhat out of order, there, where should I pick up again...?:

<Seerow attacked. Mhalir was taken by surprise. He was scared.> Matirin is scared all the time and has never once enslaved five billion people about it, he is not feeling especially sympathetic.

Leareth nods. :That was a long time ago, of course. ...Anyway. I was saying, when Mhalir was infesting me - he was actually in Alloran's head in Yeerk morph at the time, so Alloran also had access to all of my mind, you could ask him about it if you wanted - he was asking what I would do, and - he was listening, I did not understand why at all. But I kept thinking, over and over, of how badly I wanted Earth not to be destroyed: 

His breath catches. 

:I - my memory is confused, here, on what order things happened in, but I think I told him to send a message warning your people the ship was rigged to explode, and he did, and when there was no reply I thought he was not trying very hard, so he tried harder, did the radio broadcast over Alaska and Canada and the flashing lights signal to the ship itself. And then I somehow convinced him, just by thinking about it at him, to send the message that the Pool ship was surrendering. They looked at sensor logs after it exploded, thought it had maybe stop firing a second before - did you decide to start pulling people off...?: 

<Yes. Mostly not in time. I thought maybe there was an internal Yeerk power struggle and we wanted to help the side that was trying to surrender, if so. I wasn't very sure what was going on, it also seemed very plausible that the broadcasts were meant to pinpoint our location, Nayoki's base wasn't getting them.>

:That makes sense. I think, after that, he was asking me what to do next - I still had no idea why! - I thought of and discarded some options. I was thinking about - trust, building and maintaining those roads even at great cost, because of the option value in the future. It was not something I understood yet when I was young, and I understand it better now: Another slow breath. :The decisions I made when your people arrived in Velgarth, even. I could have stolen your tech and kidnapped your people to take the morphing power, and I did not, because even if it took fifty years to truly earn your people's trust, that would still waste less than - what is lost forever when the doors are closed to cooperation...:

He doesn't feel particularly coherent right now and hopes Matirin is making any sense of this. 

:Anyway, I thought that he needed to give a costly sign of good faith, to - reopen any chance at negotiations going well, when everything had already escalated so badly and so much was lost. Eventually I convinced him to order his staff to send a message saying he would return me, verifiably Yeerk-free, so that I could explain what had happened: 

Nod. <By then we had retreated to Velgarth. We were planning to return today and accept the surrender if it was real, or destroy the Pool ship and all Earthside pools if it was not.>

:That is about what I thought. Anyway, this is the point at which the Visser's staff became very panicked that I was somehow using mind control on him despite him being the Yeerk controlling me: 

<You know, I might've also come to that conclusion with that evidence.>