A/N: Set about one month after "Day the Earth Stood Still," but these stories can be read in any order or alone. Written to the sounds of "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve. Warnings for gore, victim blaming, and occasional profanity throughout; if there are any other warnings you'd like me to add please let me know.

"Take your time, hurry up, the choice is yours—so don't be late."

—Nirvana, 1991

The first guy who spoke was a couple years older than me; he wore a green t-shirt that said Kill the Whales across the front. "My name's Clark. And I was infested for eighteen months."

The whole circle cracked up. The laughter was more nervous than amused, but it seemed to give him courage.

"Anyway, I think it's good we're all here. And, yeah, that's all I really have to say." He glanced at Eva for confirmation.

Eva smiled. "Thanks, Clark. Who'd like to go next?"

A girl about my age raised her hand. Realizing what she'd done, she dropped it, blushing.

Eva motioned for her to go ahead.

"Mary," she said. "Mary Lennox." She raised a hand halfway to her mouth as if to cover it. "Um, everybody forget I said my last name."

"Will do," the green-haired girl next to her said solemnly.

I smiled faintly. Oh yeah, everyone here was shy, unsure, hesitant. At least all of us here had excellent poker faces.

"Anyway," Mary said. "I was only infested for about a month and a half there."

"It's not a contest," Kill the Whales guy (I'd already forgotten his name) said. I was guessing the shirt was a nod to the deal Cassie and Jake wrangled for the yeerks—the subtle distinction that they'd ended up morphed as all kinds of aquatic animals was lost on most people.

"And if it is, I already won by a landslide," Eva muttered. No one laughed, but at least it made people stop glancing over at her nervously in case Visser Mom disapproved of anything they said.

"Yeah, it still wasn't fun," Mary definitely-not-Lennox agreed. "It was my dad, actually. He saw what was happening with the battle over Santa Barbara and, I don't know, decided we couldn't beat them so we might as well join them."

Green-haired girl made a noise of disgust. I agreed with the sentiment.

"Not that all voluntary hosts aren't whacked in the head," another woman muttered, "but dragging your whole family along? That's, like, eight steps beyond..." She broke off, shaking her head.

"Yeah," Mary said. "Last I talked to him he hadn't changed his mind—kept insisting that it was only a matter of time before they came back and took over, and then we'd all see."

There was an ominous silence.

"Someone's been hitting the maple-and-ginger oatmeal," an older woman to my left muttered. The moment broke as Mary cracked a smile and Eva rolled her eyes.

"So, your dad—is he a Symbiote these days?" Kill the Whales guy asked.

Mary shook her head. "Nothing that extreme. Just, I guess, supports their cause."

Symbiotes were, in my humble and entirely unbiased opinion, the scum of the earth. They comprised a brand-new extremist movement which insisted that yeerks and humans were supposed to live in harmony, that the superior aliens were only trying to stop the humans from pursuing their barbaric ways, and that yeerks had the right to take over the bodies of those humans who weren't using them properly. None of that was particularly bad in and of itself (if nonetheless fairly stupid), but Symbiotes also tended to insist that the humans who weren't using their humanity properly included anyone with brain damage, anyone who'd ever been addicted to drugs or alcohol, anyone who had ever committed a crime, anyone who disagreed with the Symbiote movement... Oh, and they mostly expressed this opinion through blowing up cars and sending Jake vaguely-worded death threats.

Isn't humanity lovely.

"Grant," the next guy said. "Four years, two months, eighteen days." He left it at that, expression sliding back into blankness the second he was done talking.

"Thank you," Eva said. I suspected she was a little nervous herself, but so far she wasn't showing it.

"Rose Rita." The green-haired girl sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "And I haven't been a controller in over a month," she added with a challenging grin. "So how I actually ended up that way is the weirdest story..."

Okay, let me start at the beginning. First thing you should know: it was all Eva's idea. Seriously. She just showed up at my house one day out of the blue, and next thing I knew I was getting talked into gatecrashing veterans' protests and taking on serial killers.

Anyway, like I said, she showed up one day out of the blue. And there I was. Eavesdropping.

Because, as it turned out, listening to Eva's and my mom's attempts at small talk was somewhere between hilarious and excruciating:

"Eva, I love what you've done with your hair!"

"Thanks, Jean. I see you're looking very well with the shorter cut too."

"Well, actually some yeerk cut it all off, but I guess you make do with what you can, right?"

"I know the feeling. So, how're the kids?"

"Um, they're... Well, I'm sure they're fine. How's your family been?"

"Dead, mostly, but we seem to have an excellent recovery rate so far. Although you wouldn't believe the paperwork involved in getting one's own death reversed."

"I can only imagine."

Here, a very long pause. Followed by both of them attempting to speak at once.

Finally, my mom said, "Well, you look great for a dead woman!"

"That's the most honest compliment I've gotten in a good year. Yeerks cut your hair, yeerks redecorated my face, but what're you gonna do?"

"Really, I think you look fine, all things considered."

"Well, thank you, Jean. And I was telling the truth about the haircut, by the way."

"You really think it looks okay?"

"Swear it on my grave. Speaking of which, Peter told me you helped out with my headstone, and I've been meaning to thank you for that. Very nice, very tasteful, exactly the sort of thing I would have picked out. I love that man, but if it had been up to him to decide... I shudder to think."

"Oh, of course, don't mention it. I'm sure you'd do the same for me."

Me? I was hovering at the top of the stairs, wondering if I had the necessary spine to go down there and attempt to contribute. I tended to find interacting with other humans confusing at best and unbearably obnoxious at worst, but I also figured I had a filial duty to rescue my mom from the slow disastrophe of social niceties playing out in our kitchen.

Wonderful loyal dutiful son that I am, I clomped down the stairs as obviously as I could and shuffled my way into the kitchen with a loud "Hi, Mom!"

It took me completely off guard when Eva turned around, caught my eye, and said, "There you are!"

For a second I seriously wondered if she'd mistaken me for Jake, despite the fact that she knew our family way better than that.

"I had a favor I wanted to ask you," she said. "Might take a little while, so if you're not free right now I can come back."

I shrugged. "I'm free as a bird."

Eva flashed a smile, not missing my implied joke. "Perfect."

My mom, utterly betraying my gesture of loyalty, took that opportunity to say "I'm just going to..." and sneak out of the room.

I dropped into a kitchen chair and Eva sat down across from me like a queen settling onto her throne.

Eva folded her hands on the tabletop, looking closely at me. "So," she said. "How are you doing?"

I hesitated. The way she said it made it sound less like a casual polite inquiry than like the beginning to a psychological assessment. "Um?" I said intelligently.

She pressed her lips together into something that wasn't quite a smile this time. "That well, huh?"

I admit it: Eva scared the hell out of me. She'd been intimidating even back when I'd been stuck babysitting Marco and Jake all the time and she'd had dozens of very specific and dire threats about what would happen to me if I let them eat candy and watch TV all afternoon. And now... Well, now I kept flashing back to the incredibly vivid memory of watching Visser One shoot a human-controller in the leg and leave him in a room full of taxxons after he accidentally brewed her coffee wrong. It was, admittedly, a little distracting.

"I'm good!" I said at last. "I mean, I'm... not being controlled by aliens anymore. So... You know."

Eva raised her eyebrows. "Exhausting, isn't it?"

I blinked. That had been... more honest than I was expecting.

"I'm sorry." She glanced down, smoothing her thumb over a line in the wood of our tabletop. "I'm supposed to preface that with a polite statement about how I'm grateful, and I of course would never want to go back to that life, but I'm still learning to adjust." She didn't sound particularly apologetic.

"Okay, yeah, it's a little bit..." I gave up; she'd already dumped it all on the table and I might as well do the same. "It kind of feels like I got to be lazy about everything for three years and now everyone expects me to... Make conversation. Show up. Meet commitments. Clean my room."

"Oh, and heaven forbid you're not doing something sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours a day, am I right?" Eva said.

I laughed—I'd never thought of it quite that way before. "Yeah, a little bit. I mean, they're just concerned, but..."

She leaned forward conspiratorially. "But sometimes you want to sit around and do nothing, and if you're not fidgeting or, I don't know, blinking enough, then people act like you went and died or something."

"Ugh. I know exactly what you mean," I said.

"Yes, I know you do." Her tone shifted, becoming more serious. "Which brings me to my point: Do you have access to the Sharing's phone tree?"

I opened my mouth and shut it again without saying anything. Evidently we had made a leap of logic at some point and I had failed to follow.

"I'm trying to hunt down as many ex-hosts as I can," Eva said. "I think we need to form up. Connect, if nothing else. The government has done shit so far outside of letting a couple clearly innocent people out of prison, and I figure we need to organize. Stop letting everyone classify us as inconvenient and ignore us whenever possible."

"Huh." It sounded a little crazy to me—from what little I'd seen of fellow ex-hosts, we weren't the most reputable-looking population in the world—but I wasn't about to stand in her way. "In that case, yeah, sure."

"You have the Sharing contact list?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's only got names and numbers for the Santa Barbara and L.A. chapters, maybe five thousand people in all. But it's a start, right?"

"It's more than I have," Eva said. "If you want to know the name of every yeerk that was ever on the planet I'm all set, but the names of the hosts?"

"Course not." I sighed. "Why on earth would you want to record personal information about your livestock?"

"Damn yeerks." She sounded almost fond.

"I can also do a search of our computer, see if I can get email addresses while I'm at it," I said. "That might not get us anyone's real name, or even any answers at all, but if I send out a mass notice and drop a flag on the Sharing website as well, it might get us a few replies."

"Yes, that would be..." Eva stopped, shaking her head. "Okay, I'm sorry, I died before email was invented. Can you explain to me, using smaller words than my husband, how exactly it works?"

I found myself grinning. She was still terrifying, but she was starting to grow on me.

As it turned out, I had access to more information than I thought I did. There were a couple dozen names and addresses I could pull from various Sharing promotional materials, files with backlogs of recruitment options, and a few dozen old messages in the inbox for e412 that I could pull.

While I waited for the massive file with the phone tree to load, I found a scrap of paper and started jotting down names of hosts whose yeerks hadn't been in the Sharing. Not that many were coming to mind—the yeerks had primarily used younger hosts like me for recruitment, not upper management—but I was six or seven names deep when I heard Jake make a strangled sound behind me.

I swiveled the chair around to look at him. He appeared to have frozen in the midst of walking through the living room into the kitchen, and he was staring over my shoulder at the screen.

"Hi?" I said.

"Is that what I think it is?" His voice was hushed, reverent.

I spun back around. The list was steadily populating across the screen, loading faster now that the bulk of the file had already been processed. "Eva's pulling together a list of ex-hosts for some kind of..."

I trailed off as it finally occurred to me why he was staring at the computer screen like it was a ghost. A few short months ago, this would have been a list of almost every controller in the entire county. A nearly-complete who's who of the people that could be trusted and the ones that could not. If the Animorphs had ever figured out how to access the list of names still populating across the screen three years, one year, even six months ago... The possibilities were staggering. There might not have been a war, or at least not for long.

And the entire time it had been sitting right here on the desktop of our home computer, deliberately mislabeled as one of my old English essays.

I had the absurd and too-late urge to hastily switch the computer off and pretend that Jake hadn't actually seen what he'd just seen. Instead I moved out of the way as he walked slowly over to touch the screen, expression pained.

Knowing Jake, it was going through his head as well: if he'd known... If he'd only thought to look...

"It doesn't actually load faster if you watch it, you know," I said out loud.

Jake jerked his head around like he was startled to find I was still there.

I raised my eyebrows at him. "Now go steal Mom's laptop and start doing news searches for anyone who's popped up as an ex-host since the war, would you?"

Jake walked out of the room—either to do as he was told or to disappear into his room again—and I let out a long breath. Kid thought too much for his own damn good.

And then, figuring that Eva would never get through all these people on her own, I picked up the phone and started dialing.

They were definitely among the stranger conversations I'd ever had in my life ("Uh, hello, is this still the number for Anthea Psammead?... No, I'm not selling anything, I'm... Well, actually, this is Visser Seventeen's former host, she probably doesn't know my name, but if I could just talk to her...") but I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who showed interest in what Eva was proposing. Maybe that was just because I was rather hopefully defining "interest" as anything that wasn't just grunting and hanging up on me, but by that somewhat pathetic metric I had a nearly 50% success rate.

Jake did in fact wander back in, mostly just contributing unhelpful commentary ("Aw, man, Mr. Broxholm was a controller? Think I can use that to contest all those chemistry tests he failed me on?") until eventually he remembered he was supposed to be searching news sites for names I'd missed. He actually managed to surprise me a few times ("Dude! Barbra Streisand! This is not a drill, I repeat: Barbra freakin' Streisand!") but was not all that useful when it came to finding contact information. Because, as it turned out, most famous actresses did not have public numbers listed anywhere on the internet.

At one point Jake called Marco under the assumption that Marco knew all the famous people in the world, got distracted by the discovery that despite not having met Barbra Streisand Marco had in fact attended one of Mike Tyson's house parties, and wandered off.

I kept going down the list. So far I had six "yes"es, forty-three "maybe"s, and fifty-five variations on the theme of "fuck off, please."

I kept going, figuring that at least most of the rejections were polite.

Matter Over Mind, we called it. The name was the only easy-to-remember thing either Eva or I could come up with after ten minutes of brainstorming, and (after my alternate suggestion of Alien Abductees Anonymous turned out to be copyrighted already by the Skrit Na's victims) it stuck.

The first meeting had more turnout than I was expecting, in that it had any turnout at all. There were maybe fifteen people who showed up that first time, perching awkwardly on the edges of folding chairs to listen to Eva talk. She held it in a church basement, for lack of another venue that would take an uncertain number of people for free on such short notice.

Although I could practically hear my mother making disapproving noises in the back of my head, the church people proved to be pretty nice. They loaned us a basement and 20-odd folding chairs, and even made coffee for the occasion (no free wine, even though I was hopeful since they were Catholics).

Now, we were winding down as we listened to a guy named Justin (one year, ten months) wander through a sentence. "It's like... like someone else borrowed your car," he was saying. "And not only did they trash the interior, and never change the oil, and scratch up the paint... they also racked up, like, thirty speeding tickets."

There was a general murmur of agreement.

I dropped my eyes. The body I'd gotten back was more or less in mint condition, crappy knee fixed and old scars gone. The morphing ability I'd inherited hadn't hurt either. Funny thing to feel guilty about, and yet I did.

"And it doesn't quite feel like yours anymore," Justin said softly.

"Like it's only a matter of time before you lose it again. Like this is all temporary," one of the teenagers said.

"They're not coming back." The girl with the green hair spoke quietly but firmly. "They're not. Never again."

"Another invasion?" Eva said with confidence I suspected she didn't feel. "Never gonna happen. The yeerks have nowhere near the technological capability to come close, and humans have some pretty powerful friends right about now."

"Too bad our own technology's nowhere near up to scratch," another woman muttered.

"We did okay despite that," Mary said.

"With Andalite technology," the woman said coldly.

"Humans using andalite technology," I couldn't help but point out.

"Naive preteens who got lucky." The woman shrugged.

I turned to Debbie Downer, trying not to get too annoyed with her. "Sorry, who are you?"

"Margaret." She left it at that.

"Humans are getting there, though," the green-haired girl said. "I mean, they've got that manned mission to Saturn they're trying to get off the ground right now."

"They do know Saturn is already inhabited by giant people-eating clouds, right?" the guy in the Kill the Whales shirt said dryly. "Because if not someone should probably tell them."

An older woman shuddered, making a face. "I was part of the crew that had to bring that stupid Veleek-thing in. My hand to god, we lost more personnel just trying to get it under control than in the entire rest of the war. Gertrude," she added belatedly. "Three and a half years."

"What did it eat, then?" Mary no-last-name asked.

"You mean besides human-controllers?" Gertrude asked with a wry smile. "Z-space energy output. Eventually. What a mess. But, well..." She shrugged. "KTVH."

That got another laugh out of the circle.

"KTVH?" Eva asked.

Everyone abruptly fell silent.

"Awkwaaaard," Kill the Whales guy whispered under his breath.

No one else said anything.

"No, really." Eva was starting to look annoyed now. "What does KTVH stand for?"

The girl with the green hair turned and looked at me. The guy on her other side looked at me as well. Pretty soon the whole damn circle was giving me a fifteen-times-concentrated version of Jake's patented how about you explain to Mom why there's a giant hole in the ceiling and the carpet is on fire? look. (In my defense, I don't know how we could have been expected to realize that setting off bottle rockets inside the house would be a bad idea. We were, like, six and nine at the time. A fact that didn't stop Mom from grounding us for over two months.)

Crumpling under the weight of peer pressure, I turned to Eva. "It's human-controller slang, probably from text-speak. Number-one priority of the invasion. And, well, any given mission, for that matter."

She didn't let me leave it there. "And that number-one priority would be...?"

"KTVH," I said, shrugging. "Keep the visser happy."

"'Keep the...'" Eva snorted, pressing a hand to her mouth to hide her smile. "Are you kidding me?"

"No ma'am," I said solemnly.

"Oh my god," she said, delighted. "What a bunch of... No wonder they lost the war."

Emboldened, an older man across the circle spoke up. "It's not that none of the yeerks cared about conquering the planet. It's just that... Well, they cared a hell of a lot less about conquering the planet than they did about avoiding being fed to taxxons, if you catch my meaning."

Eva slowly looked around the circle. "And every yeerk on the planet knew about this except Edriss five-six-two?"

"And the rest of the single-digit vissers," I added. "Presumably if Visser Three had ever found out the response would have been... dramatic."

Eva was still frantically scanning the room as if seeing everyone in it for the first time. "And that's it? 'Keep the visser happy,' no matter how wrong the visser in question happens to be?"

"Well, sure." Gertrude the Veleek wrangler spoke up again. "Even knowing that a project is probably going to fail... KTVH."

"Everybody knows that hamburgers with GHB don't actually cause mind control?" Kill the Whales guy shrugged. "KTVH."

"Visser Three wants every bird in a five-mile radius shot? KTVH," someone else offered.

One guy who I vaguely recognized as the host for one of the yeerk technicians laughed. "Gleet BioFilters cost five hundred thousand bucks a pop? KTVH. Make sure all twenty-eight yeerk pool entrances have 'em and throw a couple on the Blade ship for good measure."

Gertrude gasped. "Each Gleet BioFilter cost half a million dollars? Each one?"

"Yep," the technician guy said.

She whistled. "And how many were there on Earth by the end of the war?"

"A hundred sixteen," I volunteered. I knew this one; Essa 412 had been in charge of the invasion force's security at the end of the war. "Counting the ones the Animorphs either destroyed or disabled, they actually built about a hundred sixty-three in total."

There was a moment of silence while we all did that mental math.

"Animorphs," Gertrude said fondly, shaking her head. "Saving the world by bankrupting the yeerk empire since nineteen ninety-six."

Mary straightened up, cocking her head to the side. "It's actually not a bad strategy, if you think about it. As long as they focused on destroying things the yeerks had to import materials from other planets to rebuild—Well, look how much damage that did. Look at the billions of dollars Visser Three threw away on hundreds of projects to keep six kids out of his hair."

"Yeah," the technician guy said. "The destruction of the ground-based kandrona alone..."

Eva suddenly sat forward. "Hang on. That was the Animorphs who destroyed the kandrona source? Are you sure?"

"Um, yeah." The guy looked a little uncertain now. "I mean, unless a wild elephant just happened to break into the EGS Tower and throw it out a window."

Eva sat back in her chair. "Visser Three told Visser One that it just stopped working on its own."

"You mean..."

She grinned. "KTVH, apparently."

The meeting broke up not long after that. The church people handed us all pamphlets on the way out the door. I only glanced at the cover of mine—"How to Cope with Demonic Possession Through the Love of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ"—before tossing it. I guess it was nice that they were trying to save our souls or something, but I wasn't about to convert. God hadn't been much help in the past, and I wasn't expecting him to start now.