The Problem with Victory
Disclaimer: I do not own Animorphs.
Note: Takes place in the alternate future of #41.
Esplin's life was perfect and that was surprisingly frustrating.
It had been a very long, mostly enjoyable, climb to the top. Going from lowly and anonymous Yeerk in the pool to that odd Andalite expert to a hosted Yeerk who'd successfully styled himself a sub-Visser at the very beginning. Fortunately, he'd gotten a Hork-Bajir instead of a Taxxon which almost wasn't worth leaving the pool for. From that it was clawing his way through the sub-Visser ranks (controlling the Taxxon Homeworld was nothing special but at least it was his very own planet) and landing on what the humans had called lucky number seven when the Andalites arrived.
Oh, he did love to replay these memories over and over again. His host did not love it when he did that which honestly just made it better.
If it hadn't been for one young Andalite's instinctive revulsion to the characteristic feeding frenzy of the Taxxons then he might have never known that the Andalites were there and they just might have managed to stop by, grab the Time Matrix, and flee the planet undetected. The Andalites always had been arrogant enough to try that. The young Andalite had been extremely arrogant to think that no one would notice his refusal to feed but it was like they couldn't help themselves.
It was Elfangor's first big mistake but it hadn't been his last. For such a dangerous and hated enemy, he had been remarkably helpful in aiding Esplin's rise. The Chapman host had been invaluable as well and that, more than anything else, was why he gave the man's daughter a few extra years on her own. He had what he wanted and he could afford to be generous.
If Chapman hadn't subdued the other human, the one that Elfangor was inexplicably obsessed with, and revealed himself to them then how could he possibly take the Andalites? Oh, he could have defeated them (they never would have left the landing pad if he hadn't allowed it) but the Andalites were never gracious losers and tiresomely predictable in their tendency to kill themselves or everyone around them in their quest to screw the Empire over. They could be appallingly selfish, sometimes.
Alloran was a particularly potent example of this. He had not decided to release the Quantum virus when it had happened. Without the interference of Aldrea and her Hork-Bajir pet, he would have simply tried to blackmail them to take what they had and leave. He honestly didn't know how they would have responded to that threat.
And Alloran didn't know if he would have really done it. He believed that he would have, he believed that he had most days but while you can lie to yourself all you like you can never lie to the Yeerk in your head and so Esplin knew better. The Andalite high command hadn't believed the story about Aldrea and said it wouldn't have mattered if that was true because the virus never should have been created in the first place and certainly should have had better security.
For Esplin's part, he felt that it was a shame to lose so many of the Hork-Bajir but they had ultimately prevailed anyway.
It was strange but Alloran had only ever been his third choice as a host. At first he had wanted that strange and beautiful creature called Aldrea, the cold-hearted daughter of that fool Seerow. He had been so close, too…sometimes he still thought back to those glimpses he had seen of her mind before his own traitorous host had yanked him loose. He had heard that she died a disappointment, choosing to be Hork-Bajir when she was the one who introduced him to morphing power in the first place and changed his desire for an Andalite into a need that he could not ignore.
And then he wanted Elfangor. Not for who Elfangor was or what he had done but because of his delicious defiance that he just knew he could spend countless hours breaking apart little by little. He said he'd rather die than be infested and Esplin hadn't intended to give him that choice. He hadn't in the end, either, but things had gone down differently than he had planned all those years ago.
But then he had learned that the Alloran-Semitur-Corraass, the one responsible for their incomplete victory on the Hork-Bajir world, was there. The Andalite that, five years after the fact, everyone still cursed. It would be more difficult to take him, yes, but easier to deal with the smaller Elfangor afterwards than infesting Elfangor and trying to escape from Alloran. And Elfangor, he knew just from watching the argument about destroying those ten thousand Yeerks, would balk at outright 'murdering' him if he didn't attack first.
Alloran would have cut his damn head off, no hesitation.
And crushing that kind of arrogance would be even more fun than crushing Elfangor's.
When he had realized about the Yeerks in the pool, he hadn't known what to do. If he made a move to stop them then they would know what he was. And he wouldn't be able to stop them, either, just got this human body killed. But still, watching 10,000 Yeerks die like that…back then, that would have been a struggle for him.
And even if he had pulled it off, if the Yeerk in the girl hadn't been able to stay quiet then his cover would be blown anyway. She had been terrified of him, yes, but it was one thing to order your subordinates to jump out of a moving aircraft and probably be eaten by Taxxons (if the fall itself didn't kill them) and quite another to ask them to go along with such a slaughter of their own people. He'd gained much more authority since then but back then she might have refused.
But it didn't come to that. Bless Elfangor and his ridiculous little moral qualms (like he'd have hesitated if it was a shipful of Andalites of Andalites for any longer than it would have taken to try and figure out if he could have infested one of them) had seen to that. He really did owe him a great deal, didn't he?
And it had been so engaging when Elfangor had somehow impossibly returned from wherever he had taken off to. He had thought he'd seen the last of Elfangor when he and the girl had taken the Time Matrix and disappeared. He'd been so certain he'd run away.
But apparently he hadn't. It had been nice going from sub-Visser Seven to Visser Thirty-Two and even nice making the leap to Visser Three. But it had been getting a little repetitive and then Elfangor showed up. He had been meaning to make Elfangor suffer for getting the best of him and for making him walk away from a fight and then he got the chance to.
And it had been wonderful. Elfangor was so delightfully difficult to kill but then, so was he. He hadn't gotten tired of trying and doing battle with Elfangor time and time again over those long years that they'd been fighting even as the rest of his people had.
And then one day he had finally won. That day was not, as he had initially thought, the day that he had managed to kill Elfangor although that had been a good day. He pretended that they barely knew each other even though everyone knew of his…not quite obsession but it still irritated Elfangor, he could tell, just as he could tell it upset him when he hadn't acknowledged how many ships his foe had really shot down. Andalites and their arrogance.
There was a huge crowd of people all gathered to see his great triumph that had been years in the making. Elfangor could barely stand which was a little unfortunate but then if he could then he'd have been long gone by the time that Esplin had arrived. And it was hardly his fault that Elfangor had gotten careless.
He had gotten to say everything that he had always wanted to say to Elfangor. Sure, he'd said a lot of it at various points over the years but he'd found that threats tended to work best when the person you're threatening can't just brush you off and leave. He'd been planning and replanning his speech, determined to get it just right and he was pretty proud of how it had come out.
And since Elfangor hadn't been able to walk away from that encounter, he'd had to feel every single word. Of course Elfangor would completely ignore the obvious interest they would have in Earth in favor of over-identifying with the humans and acting like targeting this planet was some kind of outrage.
But his favorite part was when he promised to hunt down Elfangor's family and put his most trusted lieutenants in their heads and how he hoped that they would resist so he could hear their minds scream. He knew how much that one had to hurt when Elfangor actually struck back. On the surface, it seemed as brave and defiant as anything that Elfangor did but by now Esplin knew better. And then he'd gotten to morph into a powerful creature and he didn't just execute Elfangor. He utterly destroyed him. He ate him. And despite Elfangor's best efforts, there was no dignity in that.
That was another memory that he couldn't help but come back to and this one nauseated Alloran more than the memory of his own infestation though that one simultaneously made him angrier and depressed him. He could replay these memories just for himself, of course, but where was the fun in that? Other favorites of his were being promoted to Visser One, being elected the Emperor and publicly revealing himself, every major victory in the war for the Andalites, and finally fulfilling is promise to Elfangor from so long to take an interest in his family.
And how their minds did scream. Without Elfangor's younger brother the invasion of their Homeworld would have gone much less smoothly and Esplin was close at hand to hear it all. It was months before Esplin stopped being on hand when Aximili was in the Yeerk pool so he could remind him of his failure. It was fitting, he thought, that this is what Elfangor's family should come to.
He was there when Aximili's hands had shoved his parents' heads in the Yeerk pool and they had slowly lost control of themselves as well. Despite knowing full well who was really getting them infested and that their son was just the body used for the job, they really seemed to take that hard.
The only thing that would have made the invasion of the Andalite Homeworld any more satisfying would be if Alloran's family hadn't been so stubborn. When he had arrived at the scoop (it hadn't changed all that much since the last time that Alloran was there and so Esplin felt a great deal of familiarity for all that he had never been there before), it had been to find the bodies of Alloran's children lying prone on the floor. Jahar had been standing at the back of the room, waiting for him. Perhaps she was being sentimental and wanted to see her husband, even Yeerk-controller as he was, one last time because the minute he walked through the door she slit her own throat, no hesitation.
This, of course, had sent Alloran into a strange state of grateful mourning that Esplin had had a great deal of fun with. He only wished he could have seen the children die, as well. At least there was the fact that they didn't know who had killed the children to play with. Did they kill themselves to escape infestation or did their mother bring them out of that world just as she had once brought them into it? Alloran didn't find the topic nearly as fascinating as Esplin did but then he never did, did he?
Esplin had always wanted to go to the Andalite Homeworld, ever since he'd 'seen' that first image of an Andalite running across a field of grass back before he'd ever even seen grass himself, after only fifteen minutes with a host and less with sight. He couldn't admit it back then, though. Back then it was absurdly easy to be condemned as 'host happy' and executed in the most painful way imaginable. Not today, though. Today they had won so completely that people could feel free to revel in their victory.
It was just too bad that the Andalite world had to be so destroyed in the course of the invasion. He would have liked to stay there for awhile and marvel in everything that had once been the Andalites' but was now his. He was a little sad to no longer be the only Yeerk with an Andalite host (if he'd really been trying to get another one for some unworthy Yeerk who couldn't be bothered to go out and take it himself like he had then he would have with all the Andalites he had tortured over the years) but being the Yeerk to deliver the Andalites after being the Yeerk to deliver the humans had largely made up for that. And he was still the first and the best.
Many Andalites had followed Jahar and the children's examples, of course, but enough hadn't. Enough were theirs. If only all of the scientists who knew how to create a morphing cube hadn't ended their own lives and all the morphing cubes themselves hadn't been destroyed. Still, that did increase the value of his own morph-capable Andalite and what did he really care if anyone else had the power to morph? Destroying the one on Earth was what the blonde girl had been doing when she'd been killed.
But that had come after Elfangor's last treacherous surprise had been dealt with. It had been almost a disappointment to finally kill Elfangor and in a way it felt too easy. Elfangor had already been wounded and so he didn't need any great cunning or skill to win that confrontation. But Elfangor had left behind a legacy to crush, even if he hadn't understood that until the deed was done.
Five human children and one Andalite child. It was humiliating to learn that he'd spent more than two years foiled by some untrained and outclassed children but by the time he had learned that they were beaten. One human child was dead in his bed before the boy's Controller brother had felt secure enough to tell him of his suspicions. It was a waste but it was probably all that saved his life. And they had gone after the best friend, the cousin, the girlfriend of that dead boy. The first and third had been taken and the second killed. The former was a loyal Yeerk Visser now even if the latter was unfortunately a terrorist now.
Elfangor's brother was one of them and his son had been as well. Elfangor's brother had delivered the Andalite world to them but Elfangor's son had gotten away and was rumored to lead the resistance on Earth. It was a pitiful thing, really, but more than they had on any of their other worlds that they'd conquered and they'd conquered every world that they had come across.
In a way, the fact that it was mere human children that had been making a fool out of him for more than two years was made acceptable by the knowledge that one of them was Elfangor's son. It would have been better had this Tobias been the leader but at least he was making up for that now. Esplin had actually met the boy on a few occasions and been decidedly unimpressed. He had thought that Elfangor would be ashamed and that he wasn't even worth a Yeerk.
He'd been wrong. He was happy for Elfangor, he supposed. He really did deserve better.
By then Elfangor's failure had been complete so he could afford to be happy that Elfangor's son wasn't the waste of space he had initially thought. He must have known about Esplin posing as 'Aria' or at least that Yeerks were involved or how could he have sat there so calmly? He didn't know how the boy could have known about his father earlier but he did not react at all. Even a Yeerk might have difficulty not reacting to something that groundbreaking and yet Tobias didn't. Maybe he was worthy of being called Elfangor's son.
Elfangor's wife was killed, of course, a long time ago. Esplin had made that personal, too. She was blind and therefore useless for anything else.
The ascent…the ascent had been the most wonderful thing he could ever imagine.
But. But you can't keep rising forever and one day you'll hit your glass ceiling. As it happened, Esplin's ceiling went all the way to the top when he was finally powerful enough to let everyone know that he was the Yeerk Emperor. But then what? Then…nothing.
There were no more planets or species to subjugate and even if there were they wouldn't be a match for his Empire. There was nothing left to prove anymore and he never had an excuse to morph into a terrifying monster from some obscure star system anymore. He sometimes did anyway but it just wasn't the same. How could you feel alive when there was no risk of death? His Vissers were all reasonably competent (executions were the one excuse he had left to morph and he took even greater pleasure in those than he had earlier in his career, before he'd had everything) and so there was little that he needed to do.
Even Earth was under control now that that terrorist had inexplicably chosen to save his fellow terrorist instead of preventing them from turning the Earth moon into a Kandrona . His advisors had suggested that love was involved but how 'romantic' could it be to save one person and doom your planet? Even if there was no victory in sight currently, he had effectively destroyed all hope that they could ever have ever. It was very convenient for the Empire, of course, and reports of difficult hosts had sharply fallen but Esplin did not for the life of him understand what the benefit of that kind of 'love' was.
Esplin could now do what he wanted whenever he wanted with no one to control or influence his actions in the slightest. The problem was that he didn't know what he wanted. Or maybe he wanted nothing. Maybe he wanted to go back to the beginning and get to force his way to the top of the heap again.
He never thought that he'd miss Elfangor but perhaps he should have. You cannot have someone be a part of your life for so long – and a real person, too, not a host – and then not feel the void where they once were once they're gone. And Elfangor was always a challenge. He was loath to admit it but part of the reason they had succeeded, especially in the beginning, had less to do with their own ingenuity and strength and more to do with the fact that the Andalites seemed to be doing everything short of not fighting at all in order to lose. At least Alloran and Aldrea's Quantum virus was designed to actually achieve something.
Elfangor, though…it was like he got all of his blunders out of the way at the beginning of his career and made things so much worse for his own side that he had nothing but competence left over for the rest of it. Encounters with Elfangor always enraged him but he had always rather enjoyed a good proper bout of fury. Those around him hadn't so much but they either adapted or they died. Survival of the fittest, one of the more intriguing human concepts.
Except for the end when Elfangor's decision to break the law of Seerow's Kindness (even his people referred to it as the pithy little epithet that his host had come up with) led to two years of continued resistance and then more help to the Yeerk cause than they had ever managed to hurt it. Esplin still didn't know what Elfangor had been thinking. He couldn't help that there were only children in the construction site with him (and extremely lucky that they weren't already Controllers but then again if they were they would probably have made it quite clear. Somehow subtlety always seemed to go out the window when an Andalite was near) but giving it to human adults was stupid enough and children was just plain idiotic. Perhaps the fact that his son was there, if he even recognized him, altered his judgment.
He almost wished that he'd simply infested Elfangor that night. If he were the Yeerk to infest not one but two Andalites and one was their hero then he would have been even more hated by every Andalite in existence. The complications, of course, were that then he'd need to go around collecting new all-powerful morphs and that everyone would be all bent out of shape if he just had Alloran killed but it was standard practice for Vissers and sometimes even sub-Vissers to have their hosts killed when they moved on since the hosts knew too much.
Ultimately, though, it had been sheer hatred and the culmination of twenty-one years of energy that had spared Elfangor from having to know just what he had sentenced his commanding officer to.
Esplin almost missed Edriss, as well. She was far too dangerous to be allowed to live no matter how high he rose or long he had all this power because as a Yeerk she couldn't just be infested and be done with it. But she would have kept things interesting once he was at the top, even if she probably would've tried to take his power from him by now. That was why she had been removed from Earth, after all. The Council hadn't trusted her to play nice once she had control of the only Class Five species (the only one then, at least. When the day had come that the Andalites were reclassified he'd been beside himself with joy) they'd discovered, after all, and Esplin didn't blame them. Oh, but she was brilliant and beating her had been one of his finer moments.
There were many, many advantages to hurtling through the ranks but there had been a few costs, too, and somehow he'd never really felt any of that until the day he realized that he could climb no higher.
Esplin had used to have friends. He used to have a twin. He used to have people that he could just joke around with and complain about the people in charge with. Then he was in charge. The more ranks he ascended the more strained things got between him and others. Power disparities always made things complicated. Still, he was making it work and things were fine until the day that he'd gotten an Andalite.
Suddenly everyone knew who he was, Yeerk and Andalite and any other species they had taken. It was incredibly gratifying but it was also like having a target on his back. Esplin had always been good at surviving. He had been removed from Aldrea's head and thrown, helpless and blind, out into the forest and somehow, miraculously, he had been found before he starved to death. Maybe there was a higher power that smiled down on him, who knew?
But Esplin needed every ounce of that self-preservation he'd developed over the years to keep alive now. Every Andalite in existence was trying to end their shame and take him down. And he couldn't always be sure that it was the Andalites. They had been expected but sometimes…sometimes he couldn't be sure.
And those around him were always so jealous and expecting special favors. His brother had been the worst. The fact that they were twins meant something, of course it did, but why should Esplin the lesser benefit from what he had achieved? Everyone had spent years telling him that it was impossible and refusing to have anything to do with it and then suddenly once he succeeded they all crowded around him. Was it any wonder he had gotten tired of it all?
And there was never anything to talk about anymore. He was one of those superiors that he was sure that they still complained about now and if he wanted to kill them then he would kill them and no one would so much as blink. They became increasingly terrified of what he could do to them and they really couldn't hope to understand the new world of power and politics that he'd been thrust into. One by one, all of his old relationships crumbled. Usually it wasn't as bad as how things had degenerated with his twin who had gone to his grave still not giving up the secret of surviving with no oatmeal and no Kandrona rays. That selfish bastard.
And now that he was the Emperor and his enemies were dead (he could always find quite a lot to say to them) there really was no one left to talk to. No one but Alloran and that situation was just as bothersome as everything else was these days.
At first Alloran had been unwilling to accept his new reality and had raged about it all day, every day. He had woken up in the morning and not remembered his new reality. Watching the truth crush him every morning was the best part of waking up. Alloran plotted out his death (their deaths, usually, he was too pragmatic to hope for a rescue) and plotted his family's infestation and his planet's subjugation and they'd been happy. Well…he'd been happy but that was all that had ever really concerned him anyway. He'd replayed all the special memories that he had amassed that he was sure would have the most effect.
Alloran was, by and large, an experiment for him. Before him, he'd half-had Aldrea for less than five minutes and had the worthless Chapman host for a few – too many – hours. That had been why he never truly was able to share Edriss' fascination with humans. He rarely admitted having ever taken a human host (it was best to keep anything related to his early association with Elfangor to a minimum. If they ever found out how he had had to work with Elfangor, even to save his own life, and that he had left the Time Matrix to an Andalite then he'd be dead so fast and so painfully that he didn't even want to consider it) but he still remembered.
Chapman was truly a worthless creature. He knew full well what the Yeerks were and what they would do to his planet. And yet he was scared. So very scared of a fledgling Empire that hadn't even known that his people existed that he'd revealed their existence and told them how to find it. According to Edriss, his directions left a lot to be desired but find it they did. He betrayed the Andalites who, while he granted that they were insufferable, genuinely were planning on returning him home unharmed. He sold out his planet for the chance to maybe have a nicer Yeerk when the time came and then one day, years in the future, he dared oppose the very invasion he had caused and beg to spare his daughter from the fate that he brought on her. Pathetic.
Chapman didn't count and neither did Aldrea. Aside from them he'd had a Gedd for fifteen minutes and a few Hork-Bajir. No one really very interesting and so he hadn't gotten a chance to try his hand at experimenting with hosts.
He had plenty of time to do that with Alloran. He showed him painful scenes to hurt him and violent scenes to sicken him and victorious scenes to dishearten him and tender scenes to make him so wistful and longing that he almost couldn't stand it. He'd play the same scene (it didn't matter what, really) over and over again to see how long he could keep it up before sending his host to the brink of a breakdown and then experimented with whether different types of memories had different tolerances. He juxtaposed the good with the bad so quickly that Alloran didn't have time to properly process them.
He'd distracted Alloran with a memory when something interesting was happening and then refuse to explain what he had missed. It never bothered Esplin when Andalites called him the Abomination but it did hurt Alloran and so that soon became another favorite of his. He'd ask about his host's wife and children and speculate on whether or not Arbat – who had been seeing Jahar when Alloran met her – had ever succeeded in winning Jahar over and how soon it was before she abandoned his memory for another. Every time they faced a group of Andalites he'd wonder if Alloran's son was there, too. He'd sometimes look at things that Alloran wanted to look at or allow impulses that he had (as long as they weren't self-destructive, of course) just to keep him guessing.
It was a game that he could not lose but he didn't want it to be over too quickly.
But now…now it seemed like even that was at an end. Since he had conquered everything there was to conquer his host had been depressingly unresponsive. It was like the thought of his family was what had kept him going all these years, even though he knew that he could never see them again because if it did it meant their doom. And it had meant their doom. Now that they were gone and the Andalite world was rebuilt in the Empire's image, it was so very difficult to get a rise out of him.
It didn't mean he'd stop trying. This new, impossible challenge was all he had left, after all.
{Alloran,} he said experimentally.
He knew that a lot of Yeerks referred to their host by their species and he usually did that when speaking aloud but he'd never gotten into the habit of doing it in his head. Perhaps it was the fact he'd known of Alloran before even meeting him and always taunted Elfangor with his failure on that matter. Choosing a host specifically because of who he was did make it a bit difficult to stay anonymous, after all. And unlike some of his previous hosts who had just called him 'Yeerk', Alloran had always referred to him by his rank.
That got Alloran's attention but aside from that there was no response.
{Alloran,} Esplin said again, annoyed.
There was still nothing, not the slightest bit of curiosity.
{Why do you never answer me anymore?} Esplin demanded.
Alloran didn't verbally reply but the memory of his wife slitting her own throat bubbled to the surface.
Esplin sighed. Was he never going to get over that? It was seven years ago.
In the past they could argue for hours (though Esplin was perfectly aware that sometimes Alloran only did it so that he could avoid Esplin's other ways of amusing himself) and now look what it had turned into.
{You can't ignore me forever,} Esplin said flatly.
Not even a spark of interest.
Esplin sighed again and gave it up, once again, as a lost cause.
Things were perfect. He had no problems. None. He was the most powerful creature in the Empire and he could do as he liked, when he liked.
So why was he growing more annoyed and impatient by the day?
This was his. This was victory.
He just knew that this was somehow Elfangor's fault.
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