Mhalir waits. Wiggles Leareth's fingers, just to reassure himself that he can, even though he can see all of Leareth's thoughts laid out and feel the rock-solid certainty that he's safe, in this head, that Leareth isn't going to betray him. Or let anyone kill him. Leareth is incensed at the idea - Leareth approved doing this 'test' at all mostly because Matirin thought it would help with the politics of not executing Mhalir and having to rely on his immortality contingencies... 

It's not really helping him to calm down, yet. 

Matirin trots over. <Should we get a conference room?>

:Yes, I think so: 

:Matirin: Mhalir adds, in Leareth's mindvoice. :This was your idea?: 

<This was Alloran's idea but I authorized it and it is more reasonable to be angry with me than with him about it.> He finds a conference room and closes the door.

:Did you - actually have doubts? Did you really think I would betray Leareth even if I could?: 

<No.>

:Then why?: The overtones of distress are clear in Leareth's mindvoice. :Leareth thought it might help with trust, but - how, why - what contingency does this cover against...: 

<May I have him?> he says to Leareth.

He wants to know but also aaaaaaaaaaaaaa. 

:I want you to either let him use your thoughtspeak, or take off your amulet so I can read both of you: Leareth says, levelly. :If he has to be in your head with no way to communicate, he is going to spend the entire time having a panic attack about it, and will not gain anything useful: 

He takes the amulet off and sets it on the table. 

He is thinking that Cayaldwin is doing something, and it must be something that people other than Cayaldwin can do, it's not as if Cayaldwin is partilcularly well-adjusted. He asked Cayaldwin what it was and Cayaldwin didn't even have much insight, frustratingly, but he did say one thing, which was that if Yeerks had been born the way Leareth's magic makes them - able to watch, not to control - Andalites wouldn't have minded them, once they got over the distasteful look - <And you can wear gloves>, Cayaldwin had said, with the impatience of someone who'd thought of the intrinsic disgustingness of Yeerks as something that wearing gloves would solve, and then done that, and then it had worked - in Matirin's head the intrinsic disgustingness of Yeerks doesn't feel like the kind of thing you can wear gloves about, but apparently that's an error, because you can -

- anyway if Yeerks had been powerless from the beginning then it'd just be the knowing you. Matirin knows people. Knowing people isn't a privacy violation, necessarily - it can be, but it doesn't need to be - if Yeerks had been powerless from the beginning he would have wanted one to know him, if it might help them trust each other. 

Leareth got mindhealing about his Andalite instincts, so they wouldn't get in his way. As if there was no - truth, there, a signal with no content. 

This was only worth it if Mhalir is not afraid, now, not inclined to give up the weight he has placed on this alliance. And - and maybe he could get there by talking, eventually. He probably could. But it's been almost two months, and they haven't talked, somehow, and he doesn't actually know what he'd say.

:I am not angry: Mhalir sends, slowly. :I - am afraid. I am not sure it makes sense to be, but I am feeling what I am feeling, I suppose: He folds Leareth's arms, sort of half-hugging himself. Them. Whatever.

He wants to be in Cayaldwin's head, doing math, but at least half of that is - he wants none of the last few minutes to have happened, he wants it rolled back and undone, and he can't have that. Avoiding thinking about it won't accomplish anything. 

:...I want to understand you: he adds, eventually. :Leareth knows you, Leareth trusts you; I see it through him, but - at a remove. I do not quite understand it. I - would prefer not to be afraid, if in fact it still makes sense to put weight on this alliance, which I think it does. And Leareth thinks that - knowing more true things about you, will help: 

He hesitates. :...I am not sure it would help to go in your head if you are thinking about how disgusting Yeerks are the whole time: 

- right, the thoughtsensing. He hadn't actually considered that it meant they'd be reading him now, even though it's a very obvious feature of the situation, because he'd been absorbed in - well, in finding the thing Cayaldwin is doing. He suspects he's found it, he suspects there are no insights not contained in thoughts he has already had. His model of Melody is - disapproving, but if he unpacks that, it's - she disapproves of the Andalite instincts too, she's proud he made progress towards an insight about that, she's worried he's trying to push it too far, he thinks he isn't, what would he tell her in response - (this is all in an odd sort of blur, in his thoughts, the imagined-conversation-imagined-response, talking to his own head in a way people don't normally do) - he'd tell her that he thinks that when his intuitions are out ahead of his having checked all his reasoning in this specific way, when it's about people, he's never wrong, and he's a person, and he can tell when he'll hurt himself if he thinks of it like that -

<The thing I am thinking is much more complicated than that> he says dryly. <There is a reason I did not know how to make myself understood to you just with Thoughtsensing.>

:Then I will go in your head, if you agree to it: Decisiveness, and fear under it. :- Can Leareth leave the compulsions as they are now. I will not even do anything, I swear, just...: Scaredscaredscared. 

:I can redo them in about half a second if he does try anything: Leareth points out. 

<Yes, of course.>

Then Mhalir will slip out of Leareth’s head and wait to be brought to Matirin’s ear.

Leareth catches him, very gently, and holds him out.

Matirin takes him. He wishes he had gloves but - the fact it would be fine if he had gloves is doing something. He holds Mhalir up to his head.

Mhalir slips in. It doesn’t take long. As promised, he doesn’t even try to take control of Matirin’s body, he’s just...there. 

Matirin means to let Mhalir use his body. The point of doing this is for Mhalir and it is not a gift to Mhalir, right now, to make him once again a prisoner. There is certainly a thread of thought that observes quite calmly that Mhalir put hundreds of thousands of people through that, deliberately, for years, screaming helplessly in their own heads, thrashing desperately for control of one limb or one breath they could use to warn someone. But - but that thread of thought has a core, and the core is that it is an awful thing to do, an awful thing not given less weight by all the times it has been done which were much worse than this. And the thread of thought is not very central. It did not motivate this. 

What motivated this was politics. If Leareth is not satisfied with the immortality method that Cayaldwin and Mhalir come up with then he will demand Matirin tell the Andalites they cannot have Mhalir. They will be furious. They are in the process of sense-making, of the war, in the process of carefully distinguishing Yeerks as individual moral actors in the first place, it's important and Matirin has thrown himself at encouraging it, and it is a process the natural output of which is a hatred of Mhalir, personally, individually, in more depth than they hated him before. Before he was the symbol of an alien and universal thing, a monster king of monsters, evil because the thing that he was is evil. Now, there are good Yeerks, there are Yeerks they are supposed to embrace as innocent victims, as bystanders. They are supposed, perhaps, to believe that that is most Yeerks, weak young innocents who do not wish to enslave worlds, and who were nonetheless set to it by people like Mhalir, who told them that their promised day would come as long as they enslaved five billion people first. 

Matirin has done that. Matched his pace to that of a troubled young soldier, let his flank brush against theirs, let his voice contain an anguish that is useful more than it is deeply felt. Told them, none of us wish to do this. You are not alone, in wishing that you did not need to do this. It is not weakness, to have in you the Andalite spirit that yearns for beauty and invention and discovery and generosity, and not for endless war. But we can buy that for our children, by winning, and we can lose it for everything in the universe, by failing. Matirin did not, in the end, order any of them to kill five billion people. But if he had, he does not think that it would have made it forgivable, that he spoke to them of a distant better world. He thinks that it would have been unforgivable and he would have died for it and it would have been right - not right - less wrong than anything else, at this point. 

He resents it, maybe, slightly, that of all the places to throw himself at repairing the damage wrought by this war he has been told to throw it at saving Mhalir. It is not really that he thinks Mhalir deserves to die. It is that it will cost so much, and he has so little, and he is so tired, and he does not believe it, not at all, that it would have been right, or worth it, to enslave five billion people, no matter what the Andalites were. The Andalites were prepared to do terrible things in this war but - for the whole galaxy, which they believed to be at stake. It would be monstrous, if they'd done all that only to save themselves. He would never even have considered it, if the peoples and stories and legends and memories and ambitions of his own world were the only ones at stake. He would have grieved. He would have been terrified. He would have been furious. He would not have destroyed Earth. Not for everyone he knew and everything they would ever have the potential to do, not for all the things they would ever have had the chance to build - if those alone had been the stakes he would not have done it.

It looks to him, based on the choices made in the war, like Mhalir would have. That is to say - of course on some level Matirin is guilty of looking at a fight with a terrible symmetry to it and declaring his side's escalations intrinsically reasonable and the other side's intrinsically despicable, Matirin has definitely noticed his mind inclined to do some of that, but also the Andalites believed they were fighting not just for their own survival but for the fate of the entire galaxy, and they had the genuine strength as a people - he does think it's a strength - to be a thousand times more willing to cross lines with the galaxy at stake because the war was a thousand times as important - 

They were wrong, apparently, about that, and he's been trying to hold that in his mind, that maybe he meant to destroy Earth and was wrong, meant to do it for a war where less than that was at stake. And of course, even in the best case scenario of total Yeerk victory, Mhalir meant for all the Andalites to die. Didn't prefer it, maybe, but had pointed his course right there and was executing on it with all due diligence, and he was perhaps only a few more decades away, and - 

- five billion people experiencing decades of what they just did to Mhalir for five minutes -

- it's not even that Matirin cannot see a way to force his people to forgive that. He can. He can see a way through a thousand impossible things, as long as they're all merely politics. But - it does not entirely feel like he ought to, it does not entirely feel like it's fair to, it is in an important sense a betrayal. He does not think that his people are wrong, to want to kill Mhalir, and if it were up to him he would let them, and it is not up to him and Leareth never will allow it and so as many things as needed will die on this pyre - because Leareth is lonely, because Leareth recognizes something in Mhalir that Matirin does not, really, himself fully believe in, because they can't win without Leareth and so he can make whatever demands he pleases and it would not really be in his power, to not demand this, knowing that he could, not for the sake of something as intangible as the thing Matirin is acutely aware he is sacrificing. 

Justice, someone might say, but Leareth does not assign that word or its associated concepts much meaning and Matirin is not wholly sure that he does either. Just that - just that knowing that the world will be better in the future with Mhalir in it - and he does believe that - isn't the whole thing, that it isn't settled, that it is a wrong in the world that will keep being one, a thing not reckoned with.

Alloran will never really feel safe, not a thousand years from now, in an Andalite country that decided to let Mhalir go free. 

There are tangible things being sacrificed too. He could convince his people to give humans morph, end aging once Cayaldwin has the new morph setup worked out. He could convince them to give humans better vat meat. Or cheaper, cleaner energy. He can do lots of things, just not all the things, not all at once, and if he must throw all of himself instead at the cause of persuading them that Visser Three, in particular, should live - then if he can make that one cent cheaper by having given Visser Three a worse time in some way that helps him get it done, of course he will do it. He doesn't feel apologetic about it. 

(And there are intermediate options, he has run through a hundred of them - force Mhalir into some other form, leave him in a pool for a hundred years, leave him helpless the way that his victims were, for as long as the collective time they spent enslaved - maybe there's something that doesn't feel like pretending away an important fact about the history of the world for the sake of its future. He's not sure. He is not sure Leareth can help him here, Leareth - and presumably Mhalir himself - are very psychologically odd, his model of Leareth is pausing again and again with an objection on his lips, unsure in what precise form it applies but suspecting it does, somehow - an ethos built in a world where everyone but Leareth himself is temporary -)

He is not actively thinking about any of this right now. It's there for Mhalir to look at, signposted in case that's helpful, but his conscious thoughts are mostly occupied by trying not to go mad about this, it's fine to need lots of consulting of imaginary Melody but he's going to be so embarrassed if he has to get real Melody in here. He wants the thing Cayaldwin has, except Cayaldwin's desired relationship with Mhalir is very simple and Matirin's is, well, very complicated. To put it mildly.

The thing Mhalir said a moment ago - Leareth knows you, Leareth trusts you; I see it through him, but - at a remove. I do not quite understand it. - is applicable to the other way around, really. He can predict Mhalir, but there's something else that's missing. Some sense in which he does not understand him. He wants that. He's not sure if he will get it or not, from this. Yeerking doesn't go two ways. But it seems notable that the thing Mhalir said is also so true the other way around. Maybe they do not understand each other for symmetrical reasons. Maybe when Mhalir looks deep inside him he will also see why Matirin does not understand him back. 

And maybe not; this will still leave them better off, if not, because Mhalir will understand him, and that will help. He's suddenly anxious about that, when he wasn't anxious a minute ago - like maybe Leareth is wrongly imagining that understanding Matirin will help Mhalir work with him, because Leareth doesn't fully understand Matirin himself, and sees what Matirin lets him see - everybody sees only the bits Matirin lets them see, he's very good at it - 

Mhalir makes Matirin's arm move, a little, just to reassure himself that he can, but he barely needs to. He's been fine as a prisoner in Cayaldwin's head, because Cayaldwin likes him and doesn't want to hurt him - because it would be stupid for Cayaldwin to hurt him, the whole point is that Cayaldwin can achieve his goals faster and with higher probability with Mhalir. 

His own thoughts are fast-moving and unformed, as he sifts through Matirin's mind, and rather than attempt to form them into words, he - just tries pushing the raw thought directly across to Matirin, he's never tried that before but Mindspeakers can do it and he has more bandwidth than that, here. 

Mhalir agrees, abstractly, that many people would say he deserved a taste of imprisonment, because he put so many people through it for so long, and neither he nor Leareth assign that word much meaning, but he recognizes the symmetry in it. And that there's value, maybe, in making sure he fully understands the cost. ...He thinks he does. It doesn't feel like there's any new information, new grief or regret, from what he just experienced. He knows what he put Alloran through; he saw it up close, every day. He agrees with Matirin on it being worthwhile if it makes any of the tangible sacrifices cheaper; that doesn't feel controversial to him at all, and it's why he isn't angry. Because Leareth thought this was worth it, and if he couldn't quite fit his head around why, well, that's because Leareth is wiser than him.

...That feels important. They're the same, but - he's seen in Leareth's mind how he thinks of his younger self. Still brilliant, and trying, the way almost no one does (but Cayaldwin does, but Firayar did, and Mhalir will never, ever meet him, that's a cost of the war and it's one he does think he understood before he knew that specific price...)

But, in fact, Leareth sees in his younger self, and in Mhalir, a lack of the wisdom needed to weigh up those intangibles alongside the more measurable costs and benefits, when making his tradeoffs, when deciding which lines to cross. Leareth, he thinks, understands the cost he's asking Matirin to pay, even if Mhalir himself struggles to. Leareth...wouldn't have let the Andalites genocide his entire species because they were afraid and disgusted and wrong about what Yeerks wanted, Mhalir thinks, Leareth is a pattern that doesn't see any noble sacrifice in just, giving up and lying down and letting the people willing to do the worse atrocities have the galaxy - that's not quite right, Mhalir thinks, it isn't fully the frame Leareth would use, but he's not sure he has the concepts yet even though he's seen them in Leareth's thoughts. Leareth would have seen the upside, all the future people that the Yeerks would be able to help, someday. But Leareth would have executed everything else better. He would have better understood the Andalites' state of information; he would have better questioned his own state of information, and if he had guessed that the Andalites would settle on leaving the Yeerk home planet intact, he would probably have taken that over enslaving five billion people.

...He can sort of see the intangible about Alloran feeling safe, that's specific enough and Leareth's thought about it in his presence. 'Deserve' is a fake concept, not ontologically fundamental to reality, but...it's better, right, a world where Alloran can feel safe. Where he can at some point...be okay...and stop paying the cost that Mhalir demanded of him. It doesn't make it forgivable what Mhalir did but it's still better and he wants that, if it's possible at all. 

Leareth isn't asking to spare Mhalir because he's lonely, or even because he thinks a future with Mhalir in it is better. Mhalir is - a little angry, actually, that Matirin thinks that of him. Leareth is asking it because he is a pattern that keeps his word, because Mhalir trusts him and that trust carried so, so much weight in the pivotal moments of the war, when Leareth was persuading Mhalir to surrender. Persuading him to go to the Andalite ship and meet with Matirin face to face. Leareth promised that he would keep Mhalir safe, and Mhalir could believe it because he saw exactly what kind of pattern Leareth is, the full stack of his thoughts that generated that promise. And so - the counterfactual world where Leareth doesn't make this demand, isn't the one they're in now, it's the one where Mhalir never surrendered.

(And maybe he should have anyway, once he saw in Leareth's mind that Leareth believed Matirin wanted to spare as many Yeerks as possible, and give them sensory access to the universe. Maybe that should have been enough, to countenance a future without him, specifically, in it. Maybe it should have made a difference that Leareth would be in it. Maybe it would have, if he'd had longer, but Leareth had been asking him to decide so fast, to change his mind against decades of momentum, and Mhalir thinks that nothing short of what actually happened could have persuaded him to give the surrender order inside of ten minutes.)

...On another level, Mhalir is fascinated and joyful and affectionate about the contents of Matirin's mind. All minds are beautiful, according to Yeerk instincts - even Alloran's was, on some level - but he's never met anyone who was such a glorious bountiful conglomerate of other people, where he could suddenly feel like he understood Melody better even though he'll never be in her head, just because Matirin is using his understanding of her to think certain thoughts. It's very impressive. 

He's happy that Matirin does understand Leareth. Whether or not it's relevant to his demands here, Leareth is lonely, and it's good, it feels important, that he has Matirin as a friend and someone he can trust. (Mhalir suspects that Leareth loves Matirin, at least, the closest analog to that emotion that a Leareth contains. He wouldn't normally say this to Matirin but he's communicating his entire stream-of-consciousness right now and it comes along for the ride.) 

No, see, something seems off in that analysis of Leareth, or - incomplete - if someone, as a prisoner and under duress, makes a promise which, on reflection later when it is safer, you no longer wish to hold them to, no longer believe should be an unshakeable commitment on a landscape of strategic considerations, you can just - release them. You should do that, really. It doesn't work to say that promises made under duress are acceptable to break, that's just saying that prisoners may not make promises, but it's - relevant, among allies, especially if you conclude later that the promise shouldn't have been needed. And yet Matirin thinks that if Mhalir released Leareth from the promise it wouldn't matter at all, because Leareth wants to save him.

Matirin is - himself in the position of meaning to keep his word even though it mostly binds him to prioritize things he does not care about above things that he does care about, Matirin knows that feeling intimately, Matirin spends every day working on getting Yeerks human hosts and he works with Yeerks who (as he sees it, and he's aware it's maybe not entirely fair, but) enslaved people and tortured them and then used their knowledge of their heads to beat them down into surrender over the course of years, until the humans, sufficiently carefully manipulated, bonded to the one exception to their otherwise total torturous isolation even though that exception was their unfathomably evil jailor -- and he has to enable that, put a pretty PR spin on it and sign up more humans under the best better system he could hack together, because it is his duty, because he has given his word, because he'd be in a worse world, if he were not the kind of person who could do that. He does spend a lot of time reminding himself that the world could be even worse, while he works with human governments on Yeerk access in their countries. 

Leareth's desire for Mhalir to live is not like that at all. 'lonely' is maybe slightly too simple a gloss on it, but - he doesn't really believe that Leareth is willing to proceed in a world without Mhalir in it when he could have saved him, even if Mhalir had possessed in that moment the strength to surrender with no reassurances, even if he were willing to do without them now. 

And Matirin can do it. It's just so much, and he's so tired, and it keeps being things he doesn't care about won at the expense of everything he does, and he's not running out of steam, exactly, he knows what it's like when it's too much (Mhalir can see the memory, presumably, those ten minutes Mhalir apparently spent trying to decide whether to surrender, getting transmissions that the other camp wasn't getting, assuming that it was an attempt to narrow down their location so they could gas them more, Cayaldwin on the Blade ship working through its computer system, numb and lost and in so much pain he was trying not to feel) and this isn't too much, it is a perfectly manageable and sustainable diet of giving up everything over and over again and not even getting any of the - He wants to give humans morph. He wants to give humans organ and tissue reproduction. He wants to cure cancer and pretty much everything else that goes wrong in humans, he gets all these stupid letters from people who want him to save their babies, and objectively it makes sense to resent the electorate for the fact he cannot do this at least as much as he resents Mhalir - and he kind of does - but resenting everybody all the time is terribly lonely and Matirin is not a person who copes with loneliness well. 

- there's an interesting parallel that's sort of coming to him, actually, which is that - to Matirin the Andalites have some dumb values that interfere with fixing the entire galaxy, but it's a minority opinion among many held by basically decent people who just don't have the skill to think about questions like these, who have heuristics they have spent a century trusting and will take a century to rethink, and he can hold their hand through it, and it's frustrating that he needs to but obviously the Andalites will be a force for good, when they've had some time not at war to grow into it, when Seerow is not the one person exemplifying the stance that everyone else in the galaxy no matter their shape urgently needs help - and to Matirin the Yeerk leadership is mostly terrible, and maybe there are some good Yeerks who could've won some influence over the others if the circumstances were exactly right, and - he really doesn't think that everything has the tragic-symmetry of people who are pretty much the same and persuaded they are very different from their enemies. But this in particular might have that tragic-symmetry. 

...Mhalir thinks that last part is symmetrical, yes. (And if it had been Leareth in his place, Leareth might have seen that so much sooner, might have guessed it with no specifics at all, just because he's seen that pattern play out so many times across so many centuries.) Mhalir was often frustrated with the Yeerk Council, but - it wasn't that they were bad, mostly, in his eyes. He's definitely met Yeerks who were bad people, who enjoyed their hosts' terror and screams, but, fuck, there are people like that in every species. Humanity has plenty of them. And the Council isn't made up of people like that. It's made up of people who are pretty much exactly like what Matirin thinks the Andalite leadership are, and Mhalir was very sure that eventually, given enough time, he could persuade them otherwise, but not when they were scared. Scared people have a hard time being curious and changing their minds. 

Matirin wants to fix the entire galaxy. That might be the critical piece Mhalir was not-quite-seeing, right there. It was so hard to believe, laid alongside twenty years of Alloran's thoughts, and Seerow's choice to betray them without even the dignity of a conversation first... (Mhalir misses Seerow so much. Grieves for him. Mhalir wasn't even an important Yeerk at the time, but he spent the most hours talking to Seerow, thirsty to know everything about the world - trusting Seerow, believing that Seerow shared his values, wanted to save everyone, and on some level he still wants to believe that, wants to believe that Seerow did care and was just scared. He misses him and wants him back in the world and he can't ever, ever have that, no matter how many other victories they win.) But Seerow betrayed that, and the rest of the Andalites as a species seemed so - not like that - that it was hard to wrap his mind around Leareth's claim that Matirin was. Maybe Mhalir was afraid it was wishful thinking, Leareth pattern-matching something that wasn't quite there.

He feels deep appreciation for Matirin's endless thankless efforts, here, trying to build a world worth living in out of all the wreckage, even though it feels like sacrificing everything he cares about for everything he doesn't. And...there's a feeling of symmetry there, too, Mhalir has felt that way a thousand times. He suddenly, urgently, wants to fix everything for Matirin personally. The way he does for Cayaldwin. Maybe it's impossible to see all of someone's courage and determination laid out like that and not want to build a paradise for them in particular. That's not the point, though, it's probably not in Mhalir's power to fix what Matirin cares about. Only to make his work a little cheaper and more convenient around the edges, which he obviously should do. 

- he feels like maybe he should convey why he was so terrified, a few minutes ago, because it's important that it wasn't mostly about his own death. It was a little about that, nonexistence is a yawning pit of NO and Mhalir has always wanted to shout defiance in the face of death, but - mostly it was about the larger picture. The seconds where he started to make the update that Matirin and Leareth's efforts weren't enough, that the Andalite leadership had decided to betray all of that, and his fear that Leareth would turn on the Andalites, who had proven themselves unable to keep to agreements, and then all their slow, painful peacemaking efforts would be for nothing, and it would be so much harder to rebuild that a second time, when trust had already been exploited and burned for fuel. He had been so angry and scared that the Andalite government apparently didn't see what this would do, or appreciate what it would mean, sacrificing Leareth's goodwill.

Leareth is going to fight to save Mhalir - because he does that for everyone, and additionally because Mhalir is someone who can fight alongside him, even though Leareth is, well, actually kind of furious with Mhalir for his choices in the war. Furious and tired and sad. He doesn't lecture Mhalir about it or anything but he doesn't need to. Anyway, Leareth is going to do that but he doesn't actually need Matirin's cooperation. If Matirin unilaterally executes Mhalir, Leareth knows the location of Mhalir's backup (encrypted, and behind a Mindhealing block, so no one can extract it involuntarily from his mind), and he will find it, and spend however many years or decades he needs to build computers that can run it. Leareth would prefer having Mhalir back sooner than that, but it's not as though everything is lost if Matirin needs, for political reasons, to execute Mhalir before they've solved immortality. It'll just be very sad and wasteful if that happens, because Mhalir thinks Cayaldwin will need a lot longer to finish figuring it out on his own.