:Yes. It - would mean a great deal to me, to give him that chance. And - I am not completely sure of him, but I think if I told him that access to Velgarth depended on his not betraying us, that would provide a strong incentive: 

He nods. <Melody thought that Alloran will be ready to speak to people again in a few days. It might be awkward to speak to you in particular but I predict he will want to do it, if it might be valuable.>

:I think it might be valuable. And - I am not sure, maybe this is unreasonable, but I feel a little as though I owe him that, to listen fully to his side of things and what cost he paid, if I am going to go on standing up for Mhalir: 

Nod. <I have a hard time imagining how Yeerks can live with themselves if they're not - all just indifferent to all other life ->

:Mmm. I suppose I know little about Yeerk psychology for any Yeerk except Mhalir, and I suspect he would choose to be another species if he could: 

<Maybe someday.

Before - things got dire - my father was working on ending the morph limit, so people could just live in whatever body they liked. Sometimes Andalites get sick with something we can't treat, and they can nothlit themselves about it, but - only once ->

:That would be quite incredible: Leareth lifts his eyes, looks at him. :Your father must have been such an impressive person. I wish I could have met him: 

<I wish you could have. I wish - 

- a lot of things.>

'A lot of things' sounds about right. :There's an old Valdemaran saying. 'If wishes were fishes we'd never go hungry'. Find myself thinking it a lot, lately:  

<I'm - sorry, for killing so many of your people in the last hour of the war. We could have - more, here, if I'd known ->

:I know. I am not sure there is any way you could have known, though: Leareth winces slightly. He still doesn't like dwelling on the last hour of the war. 

<I don't think there is. But it bothers me that we were - so close to things being so much less awful.>

:I think it makes sense for that to hurt. But - not in the way where you blame yourself. I am not sure there is anything I could have done differently, had our positions been swapped: 

<I expect you could've taken the ships more cleanly, since the space of plans you could think of that'd work and weren't ones a Yeerk in my head would expect is larger than the reverse. And I probably could not have talked Mhalir into surrendering, so>. Unhappy tail-lash. <But I wish very much that - almost everything had gone differently, from the very beginning.>

:I know. I suspect I will never stop wishing for that. I spent the last thousand years planning how to create a god - maybe I will have to spend the next thousand years finding every possible world that exists until one has the magic to go back in time and fix it at the start: 

<I think - probably the best path from here forward doesn't involve fixing everything, not at that kind of price.> Shrug. <Good luck, though.>

Leareth laughs a short, dry laugh. :I am not actually going to do that. Though I will try to find other worlds, eventually, now that I know the way between them. Since some of them will have resources I can trade for, and others will have problems that I can fix: 

<Some of them have really interesting problems! I know of a world where people can bud off copies of themselves and when they developed genetic engineering they figured out how to bud off  tweaked copies of themselves and they have all kinds of problems associated with that now.>

:Fascinating!: Sigh. :Anyway, I had better get back to my work: 

He wants to keep talking to Matirin - he always finds that he feels a little less drained and resigned about the situation when he's talking to Matirin - it vaguely feels like there's some loose end trailing, something he's restless for, but he doesn't know what it is, which makes it kind of pointless to keep chasing it. 

Matirin goes back to scanning the headlines to learn how humans are reacting to all of this news.

Melody goes to Velgarth once a day and does her rounds at the House of Healing and checks in with Alloran. She doesn't try to bring up Leareth for the first couple of days, though, it seems like he'll benefit from minimal stressors for a while. She watches closely to see if the tiny bits of extra raw-material and malleability in his tapestry left from Jisa's naughtiness will lead into any improvements. 

On the third day after said incident, she stops by the House of Healing and attempts a frustrating fifteen-minute lesson with Jisa, and then heads out to find him. 

He seems to be making progress at rethreading himself, very slowly. He attempts whatever she recommends; he tells the foals stories; he practices with his tail, in particular, skimming the grass with it. Once he is reasonably competent he goes somewhere far enough the foals won't see him and practices bringing it to his throat.

Melody really likes Alloran. She doesn't even think his progress is that slow. At this rate, in a year's time he'll have improved hugely. 

:Hey: she says, walking out in his direction. It's a nice day, albeit cold and with a rime of snow on the grass. :I think you're moving a lot better than last week: 

<I am worse at this than a newborn child.>

:Wow, your newborns must pop out shockingly competent. Have you seen human babies?: She flashes him a memory of her granddaughter at eleven months, trying to walk and falling over on her face and crying. :That's at nearly a year old: