The makeshift headquarters was quiet at midnight, but Jack wasn't finding any sleep.

He lay on his bunk in the converted storage room with his boots still on, staring at a water stain on the ceiling. Somewhere down the corridor, a generator coughed and settled. Somewhere further, a radio operator was fighting sleep with his headset on. And three doors down, Catherine was asleep in a room that smelled like her, and she had spent the evening before the briefing looking straight through Jack's chest while he talked.

"You're sweet, Jack. You're just… you're very intense."

She'd said that four months ago. She'd said it again, differently, three weeks ago. And again this evening. The words changed; the shape of them never did. It was always the same sentence: "Not you, not now, not like this."

He had killed things for her. To protect or impress he was never totally sure. He'd turned into a wolf for her and torn an alien's throat out in the rain and staggered back to the rendezvous with his muzzle red to the eyes, and she'd put a hand on his shoulder and told his he needed to turn back now. Like a worried mother. Like something beneath her.

Twenty years old. Hormones like a furnace. A war that made every week feel like a decade. He was so tired of wanting.

The window latch clicked.

Jack's hand found the pistol under his pillow and his grip tightened as a human silhouette slid through the window. She landed in a crouch and straightened and smiled at him.

"Don't shoot. It'd wake everyone up and I don't think you want them to hear what I have to say."

He knew her face. Not well. He'd seen her in the corridors of the enemy garrison downtown, in the gray coveralls the lower ranks wore, carrying crates and clipboards. Dark hair pulled back hard, freckles scattered across a nose that had been broken once, a mouth that always looked faintly amused.

"You're a Controller."

"I'm a Controller." She said with a casual nod. She down on the edge of his desk like she'd been invited. "People called her Lillian before I moved in. I know our names and designations can be somewhat foreign to you, so instead of Trass-353, you can still just call me Lillian. And you're the leader of the ones who turns into animals. The Andalite's chosen shitheads. Don't bother denying it. I've been watching you for eleven weeks."

Jack didn't lower the gun. "Then why isn't there a strike team on the roof right now."

Her eyes glanced up. "How do you know there isn't?"

A cold panic ran through him before she smiled again.

"I haven't told anyone." She held up a hand, palm out. "That's the point of the visit."

"Why not?"

"Because you little animal fuckers have killed quite a lot of us," she said before waving her hands slightly. "Oh don't get it twisted. You haven't made enough of a dent for the invasion to be in danger. You're strong but we're an empire spanning galaxies. That being said, I am personally growing weary of the struggle and I thought that there might be a way to end these hostilities without more blood."

She reached back and undid her ponytail, and the hair came down around her shoulders, and Jack noticed, because he was twenty and stupid, that she was pretty in a way the gray coveralls had hidden. "Can I sit on the bed? The desk is a terrible place to have a treasonous conversation."

"Sure."

"You've got a problem," she said. "Two problems. One is us. The other one is called Catherine, I think."

Jack's jaw tightened.

"I've watched you look at her," Lillian said. "Eleven weeks. You look at her the way a man looks at water when he's been walking in the sun all day. Like we look at our pools after spending too long in your little brains. And she looks at you like a competent colleague. Do you know how many times you've made her laugh? In eleven weeks? Twice, and one of those was a pity laugh."

"Three times," Jack said before he could stop himself, blushing.

"Twice," she reaffirmed.

He didn't argue. She was probably right. He stood and put the pistol back on the desk, leaning against the wall, and looking at this pretty little monster on his bed.

"Here's the offer," she said. "And it's real, so listen before you get noble. You bring me into your unit. Officially. I'm a deserter, a defector, a random girl off the street. Whatever story you like. The details don't matter."

"And in exchange?"

"In exchange, you get Catherine." Lillian's mouth curved. "Not the Catherine you've got now. The one who says that you're sweet as she pats your shoulder. You get the Catherine with something else driving her. And when a Yeerk's in your head, Jack, it learns what you want before you know you want it. Mine's been in me since I was nineteen. It knows every filthy thing I've imagined for the last nine years, and it knows how to make them real. It'd know exactly what Catherine needs to be, and it would be that, every hour of every day, because that's what a Yeerk does. It makes your fantasies come true so you stop fighting it."

Jack stared at her. "That's the pitch? Surrender and get laid?"

"Surrender and get the two things you want most: love and peace." She shrugged.

She was good. She'd had eleven weeks to get good.

"The others," Jack said. "They won't go for it. Catherine especially. She's got a cousin who got taken. She's been fighting this thing since day one. She's not going to hand the squad over to a Controller because she's got a crush on one."

"No one's doing any handing over but you, my dear. I'm not going to them with the offer, I'm going to them with Yeerks. You just have to get me in the door. It's not a trick." She leaned in, and the movement was slow enough that he could have pulled back. "Jack. Look at me."

He looked. She was close now, close enough that he could see the individual freckles, the way her pupils had gone wide in the dark, the chapped spot on her lower lip where she'd been biting it.

"This ends with your team as Controllers. I'm not trying to lie and scheme. I'm trying to win, and I'm trying to get you a little something to thank you for helping."

She kissed him.

It was slow, and her hand came up to the back of his neck and held him there, and her tongue touched his and his whole body went hot and stupid again. She made a soft sound into his mouth - a small, pleased noise - and pressed her body against him.

When she broke off, she was breathing a little harder. So was he.

"Christ," Jack said.

"Say yes to me, Jack."

He thought about four months of being looked through. He thought about the wolf and the rain and the hand on his shoulder. He thought about the war going on and on and on, and about the fact that he was twenty years old and could count the times he'd been touched by someone who wanted to touch him, and every one of them had been a Controller trying to manipulate him. At least this one was honest.

"Okay," he said.

She smiled and pulled him across the room back to his bed, kissing him all the way. Pulling at their clothes. The freckles on her face continued down to her shoulders and chest. And as he slid inside her, she let out a sigh like it was the most fulfilled she'd ever been. And she smiled that smile the whole time she rode him.

In the morning he told them she was a new recruit.

He'd rehearsed it with her between fucks. Her mother had been taken as a controller, and she'd discovered it. She'd found the resistance and wanted to help. It wasn't a perfect story, but it tugged enough heartstrings to stop people asking too many questions. They put her to work stocking and cataloging rations.

Six days. She'd move the boxes she was told to move. She's fill out her checklists and report to her supervisors. In the nights, she'd come to Jack and ride him until he slept, keeping him pliable and eager to go along with her plans. She was very good at it. And on the sixth night, Lillian finally found herself alone in a room with Catherine.

The woman was sleeping on a small cot in a common area. It was late. Later than Catherine had intended to sleep, but there had been combat during the day and so she was more worn out than normal. So here she lay, exposed and vulnerable in the dark of the empty warehouse.

It was a trivial thing. Almost laughable, considering the damage these assholes had done to her people. But slowly, a worm slid from Lillian's ear and down her arm. 

"This is how it ends," she said to the empty room as she held her kin up to the woman's ear and watched it disappear inside.

Catherine's eyes shot open and she started to thrash, but before her vocal chords could produce a sound, the Yeerk had wrapped around her mind. The panicked look melted back to a serene blank, then a smile that matched Lillian's. 

"You know the plan?" Lillian asked.

"I know the plan," Controller-Catherine confirmed. 

Jack opened his door when he heard the knock, and he gasped. Catherine stood in the hallway outside, completely naked.

"Jack."

Just that. His name, the way Lillian had promised. Like it was the only word she knew.

His throat closed as she stepped inside and closed the door.

"You—" he got out. "You're—"

"I'm naked in your room at midnight and you're still dressed." She wandered around him in circled like a predator. "Why aren't you taking your clothes off, Jack? Why aren't you touching me?" She ran a finger across his lips. "Why aren't you on top of me? Why aren't you inside me?"

His short-circuiting brain flared back to life.

He got his palms on her waist and pulled her in and she made a sound, a long shuddering breath, and then her mouth was on his and her tongue was in his mouth and her hands were dragging at his shirt. She got it up over his head and threw it and then her bare chest pressed against his and her hips rolled against his thigh and she was already wet. He could feel it, a slick warm smear along his leg.

"I want to be so good for you," she said into his neck. "Your good little soldier girl. Tell me what you want, Jack. I'll do anything."

"Get on the bed," Jack said.

She got on the bed. She got on her back and pulled him down on top of her and hooked a leg over his hip, and her hand went down between them and got him out of his shorts and stroked him once, twice, and then guided him in.

She was hot and wet and tight and she took him all the way in one long slide, and her head went back and her mouth opened and she said, "Oh…" and then, "Yes, yes, yes, Jack, FUCK yes."

Jack lost all control.

He was not careful or clever. He was twenty and he had wanted this for four months and it was being handed to him by a woman who wanted it as badly as he did, and he drove into her and she took it and asked for more. Pleaded. Begged for more. She got her heels up on his back and her hands in his hair and she talked the whole time, a steady stream of it.

"Harder, right there, don't stop, don't you dare stop, oh god you feel so good inside me, Jack, Jack"

It was the exact opposite of every conversation they'd ever had. Fucking finally.

"Turn over," he said, and she turned, and pushed her hips up, and he got a hand on each and pulled her onto him from behind and she sobbed into the mattress and shoved back to meet him. Her back was freckled too. He wanted to bite it and he did, and she yelped and laughed and pushed back harder.

She came the first time with her face buried in the pillow and her whole body clenching around him, a series of short wracking shudders, and she was still coming when she reached back and grabbed his hip and said, ragged, "In me. Don't pull out. Come in me, Jack, please!"

The door opened quietly.

Lillian came in, closed it behind her, and stood watching with her back against it. She'd changed into a t-shirt and nothing else. She looked at the two of them, at the way they were joined, at the sweat on Jack's chest, and her mouth curved into that faintly amused shape.

"Don't mind me," she said.

Catherine lifted her head. Her face was flushed and her hair was in her eyes and she was still pushing back onto him in small rocking movements, and she looked at Lillian and said, hoarsely, "Get over here."

Lillian got on the bed. She kissed Catherine, deep and slow, and Catherine's hand came up to hold her there, and Jack watched the two of them over Catherine's shoulder and felt the pressure build in his gut.

Lillian swung her leg over and sank down onto Catherine's mouth. The soldier stopped babbling praise at Jack and went to work on Lillian's cunt. Jack watched Lillian's tits rock underneath her t-shirt. He felt the warmth of Catherine's pussy as it throbbed around his cock. His hands found Catherine's tits as he continued to thrust into her.

It was a moment of euphoria for him with his two mind-fucked women. So euphoric, that he began to forget that he wasn't the one who had mind-fucked them.

"In me," Catherine gasped when Lillian got up off her face. "In my cunt, come in my cunt, I want to feel it."

He didn't pay her any mind as she walked behind him. He was too focused on all his desires coming true. He drove deep and came, and it went on and on, wracking, hot, and Catherine pushed back onto him and held and said, "yes," long and low, and he emptied into her until his knees shook.

He was still coming. Still buried to the root, still twitching, the world narrowed to a point.

And something touched his ear.

Cold. Wet. A thin, sinuous weight at the rim of it, questing. Jack's whole body locked.

"Don't move, Jack" Lillian said softly. "It's easier if you stay still."

The thing pushed. It was smaller than he'd expected, and it worked its way in with a strange, patient, muscular insistence, and there was a pressure and a wet squelch and a sound like a straw in the bottom of a cup, and then a sensation he had no word for. 

A slow, deep sliding, like being filled somewhere behind his eyes.

He heard himself make a noise. His vision swam. The room went strange at the edges and then sharpened, and there was something at the back of his skull, a warm moving presence, curious and calm and horribly, horribly gentle.

"Hello, Jack," said a voice that was not his voice. 

"Oh," Jack said.

Catherine turned under him and looked up at his face, and she was smiling, flushed and wrecked and pleased. "There you are," she said.

And he understood, suddenly, entirely: that the thing in his head was already sifting through him, all of it, the water stain and the rain and the wolf and the hand on his shoulder. It was learning. It was calculating. And it was ready to provide for him like any good Master should.

He kissed her. Behind him Lillian laughed, soft and warm, and settled against his back with her cheek between his shoulder blades.

The war ended nineteen days later.

It went the way a house goes when you take out the load-bearing wall. Jack's core unit went first, then the two support ones, quietly, one ear at a time. Then the supply chain, the comms net, the safe houses. Everywhere the Animorphs had ever been trusted, there was suddenly someone with a warm thing in their head and a very good memory for where the rest of them slept.

The last free commander in the city surrendered to a twenty-two year old waitress who came to the meeting in a sundress and a high-ranking worm in her skull.

And then there was nothing to do but live.

Catherine found out that Jack liked being told what to do, and started telling him. Jack found out that Lillian liked to be watched, and watched her. Jack's lieutenants began to live out the fantasies that they'd always repressed now that there was no one left to shame them.

The resistance didn't fall. It just stopped fighting long enough to figure out that fucking was far more fun. Nobody said the word occupied anymore. No one used the word invasion. It was just normal life now.

Jack lay in the dark one night with Catherine and Lillian under each arm and a Yeerk coiled content and drowsing behind his eyes, and it occurred to him that he'd been right to be scared of the offer Lillian had brought him. He'd betrayed his friends, his family, and his race so that he could fulfill some limerence that may have just gone away on it's own.

But as he felt Catherine's lips make contact with the head of his cock, he decided that he'd been right to accept the offer, too. This life was pretty fucking good.