Chapter Text

The Terran Catastrophe-class Battlecruiser, Indomitable, cracked. For one brief, horrifying moment, Drive Engineer Third class, Katie Sahas felt all the oxygen in the room rushing away, yanking her from her workbench at perilous speeds.

In an instant she went from engrossed in her work to flailing, reaching desperately for one of the many handholds around the mighty heart of the warship: their pride and joy, the Jump Drive. She managed to grab hold of one—barely!—and clung to it for all her life was worth, holding her deep breath inside as if it were her last. Only after several moments did she realise the blast doors had sealed, and she wasn't about to die.

"What the hell just happened?" she asked, raising her voice so that it could be picked up by the ship's internal communication microphones. Her voice, deep and gravelly and painfully human as it felt to her, seemed to echo, unanswered. Comms were down? She pushed off of her handhold and sailed through the air, back towards her work area where she had a proper hardline terminal.

Let's see, let's see... every system reported catastrophic failure, like the ship had been torn in half and the two sides couldn't talk to one other. That, however, was impossible. This ship was the pride of the Martian shipyard, with a hull meters thick of some advanced composite. It was meant to be, well... Indomitable. They didn't give names like that to ships that couldn't walk the walk.

What systems could Katie get to work? From her position in the Drive room, she was meant to be able to see almost everything. It was the best protected, most hardened area in an already hardened ship. The blast doors alone were a meter thick, and even the vents got sealed in an emergency, which... this was.

Katie had frozen. She'd managed to get a visual from one of the exterior cameras. Some kind of bio-mechanical tube was moving through the ship. There was a hole. With growing panic, she figured out how to rotate the viewpoint and despaired.

No. No, this couldn't be happening. They'd done so well! They'd spent a week drifting on a pre-programmed course, no engine plume to give them away! No jumps to detect, just clean physics bending them around planets! They'd been doing fine! Since they'd lost that last away team, onboard hydroponics had been breaking even! They had enough fuel for weeks! How could they possibly have been found, and how could they possibly not have noticed the gigantic Affini cruiser approaching?

Katie took deep breaths, knuckles going white as she clung to the workstation forcefully enough that the screen started to distort under her fingertips. It didn't matter any more. People didn't come back from this. The Ochre Skies had been in contact for months, ever since the fucking weeds had taken Earth, but one little run-in with an Affini ship and you never heard from anybody ever again. Didn't matter if they were friends, if they were family, if they were loved ones. Maybe the fuckers killed everyone, maybe they used them for fertilizer, maybe they used them as batteries, for all Katie knew. All that she could be certain of was that no matter how important you were to somebody, you never heard from them again once they were captured.

She knew that no human vessel had ever escaped a direct confrontation, and that nobody would ever know what happened to her. She hardly had friends any more, but she'd still wanted her name to matter. She was just going to disappear. A slave, stripped of who she was and forced to... she didn't know, water plants all day? Work in a mine? Nobody knew. There was propaganda, but it was obviously faked.

She heard a bang, from beyond the blast doors, and screamed.

"You'll never take me alive, you fucking weeds!" she screamed, and dived back for the console. No, she wasn't going out like this. She was going to make an impact. People were going to know her name. She'd practiced this a dozen times. She'd practiced this in her sleep, or at least her nightmares, knowing that she'd fought too hard to be who she really was, and to figure out what she wanted out of life, to spend the rest of it as an identical drone in an Affini water mine.

Her hands were a blur, snapping out to grab levers and twist dials, turning everything she could directly into the red zones on all the little readouts. On her first day, back at university, learning about the most advanced spacial science humankind thought to exist, they had opened the lecture with a long list of things that they should never, under any circumstances, do.

Well, she was doing them.

The mix of exotic matter they used as fuel was usually carefully balanced to avoid runaway effects. Water was a temperature moderator, and she didn't want that just now, so coolant flow was all the way down. She knocked everything out of balance and dialed in a destination at random. It wouldn't matter, the drive would tear space apart long before it actually tried to go anywhere. Nobody would be making it to the destination. In a handful of moments, she turned the Jump Drive at the heart of what had once been a symbol of hope into the biggest bomb she'd ever dared imagine.

The last stage was on a timer. Not a digital or mechanical one, but a physical process. The core was already unbalanced; the jump already locked in. The sphere in the center of the room thrummed with energy even at idle, but she could hear the nightmarish groan of straining bolts and struggling metal, now. It was already critical, and the only way to stop it before it blew would be to release the energy some other way, which would probably also work for her purposes.

Those fucking plants might have the most advanced ships in the galaxy, but they weren't gods. They still had to obey the laws of physics. Soldiers had guns and knives, but Katie had subatomic chaos on scales hitherto unimagined.

Once the Drive got hot enough, the coolant would flow back in, but things would be far too hot for it to work. It would boil in an instant, and the expanding steam would push back down the pipes. There'd be a few moments where all the slack in the criss-crossed network of vents and plumbing across the ship could hold the extra volume... and then something would break, the steam would rush out, oxygen would rush in, and the Affini would get one hell of a surprise when their 'helpless', ensnared ship suddenly blew a hole in their hull. Even if it didn't, it would blow a hole in the drive, which would then tear local spacetime in half and scatter their atoms across the universe.

All Katie had to do was survive it, which... was easier said than done. She was sealed inside the room by blast doors that simply couldn't be opened until the emergency was resolved, which was unlikely to happen any time soon.

A moment later, the doors all opened of their own accord, as the ship computer gleefully declared the emergency over. Katie lost valuable seconds freezing in terror as what looked like vines shot into the room, latching onto handholds with a terrible grip. Some inhuman mass of unknowable, eldritch being hauled itself into the room, just a... mess of tentacles, leaves, vines, and thorns, a whirlwind of colour and shape. It was impossible to tell what it was truly looking at, but the hairs on the back of Katie's neck stood on end. It was looking at her. Sizing her up for the mines. She knew it.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Katie turned and ran, yanking herself around handholds at irresponsible speeds, not daring to look back until she'd already left the room. The nightmare of leaf and wood was taking a more bipedal shape, inspecting the readouts against the device that dominated the room, the Drive. Did they... understand human technology that well?

Well, it'd do them no good. Katie figured they could probably override the computers, or any of the safeties, but at this point the conclusion was up to physics. She never thought she'd be thanking the corners cut in that particular Drive design, that traded off safety for a few extra percentage points of peak distance. It couldn't be stopped now.

The plant seemed to understand, too, whole body seeming to unfurl in surprise. Vines stretched far and wide as it shot towards her at an alarming speed, flinging itself through microgravity like earth's best zero-g gymnasts never could.

So began a chase. Katie knew the ship better, but she felt helplessly clumsy, grabbing onto individual handholds and hauling herself along, faster and faster, while the beast behind her simply attached to everything near it and moved itself with incredible speed.

The chase was over in seconds. She'd been so close to the escape pod. How could it end like this?

A vine had snapped out and grabbed Katie by the leg, and moments later the rest of the beast was curling together, taking a human-like shape around Katie's body, cradling her in strong, powerful arms. A few pieces of wood and a pile of leaves came together with a sharp click and a rustle, forming something that looked very much like a face, with contouring done through shapes and shades of leaf or curved wood.

It looked like an surrealist's painting of a human being. The eyes were little buds with a bright blue glow, set under half a centimeter of dark wood in an inaccurate impression of eyebrows. The teeth were thorns, with a tongue that seemed to be made of tightly wrapped leaves. The foliage surrounded it, leaves arranged in a soft fade from the deep green of a healthy leaf around the face all around to a mottled mix of dying browns and growing lighter greens. The coat of leaves was joined by a dazzling array of flowers in as many colours as Katie could name, and then twice that number again in ones she could not, decorating the creature's head while its body was still pulling into position.

That was simpler. Still incomprehensibly complicated. Vines met and entwined, meshing together in a complex weave and pulling tight, leaving the limbs themselves looking almost as if they they were a single whole growth, not a collection of hundreds of independent tentacles.

The whole process took a terrifyingly short amount of time. There were hardly seconds between Katie being grabbed and the face suddenly lighting up. It looked worried. Panicked, even.

"Little one, do you know what you have done? Can you shut that machine down?" The words, even spoken with clear haste, seemed to be set to a rhythm, almost sung, rather than spoken. It was like music. The accent was... implacable, certainly unlike anything a human would, or perhaps even could, have spoken.

Katie stared up, eyes wide, drinking the creature in, brain utterly failing to process thought. They had her. It was all over. She wished her training had been more... anything, but she'd been drafted at the start of the war and nobody had had time for anything then. They'd run and they'd kept running and by the time they thought they'd put enough distance between them and Earth... this happened. She'd only been a civilian Drive engineer then, but the only real thing they had taught her was, ironically, protocol for surrender.

"D- Draft Officer Jack Sahas," she rambled at a panic. Why did her last words have to be a denial of who she was? "Technician, Third Class, Indomitable. Serial number eight-five-thr— three, I, please, no, I don't want to die, I—"

A mighty clang sounded throughout the ship. Something had just broken. The creature made some kind of short, sharp sound. Unmistakably a swear, despite the vast cultural differences, but like one in a foreign language, sung to her despite the hurried breath. It continued for a moment, speaking rapidly in some alien tongue while Katie tried and failed to slip out of its iron grip. It didn't take long for the noises to grow, rapidly reaching a crescendo.

Katie squeezed shut her eyes as everything seemed to break into motion around her. She felt her back hitting metal, hard, and then heard an almighty roar, felt the heat of fire and flame along with a low grinding wall of noise that would have haunted her nightmares, if she was going to get any.

She didn't dare open her eyes. She heard a cry, and then the slam of a bulkhead. She felt something slam against her, soft in some places, hard in others. She felt a rapid acceleration, the kind that any spacer knew would kill them if they weren't strapped in, which she was not. Something held her in place anyway.

Silence.

Stillness.

Death.

Why had she done this? Katie's mind swam in half-conscious fits and spurts. She'd had a good life, before. An okay life. A— A life. An existence. There was always work for a civilian Drive Engineer. It was the everpresent Jump Drive that had made human civilization even possible, once the need to exploit the stars became obvious, and they were complicated. Like, really complicated. Katie had studied for years before she'd been allowed to orchestrate her first Jump. She'd never wanted anything to do with the military. She'd never wanted to be drafted. She'd never wanted to be forced to rebel. Humanity had never shown her an ounce of kindness, and yet it had made her fight for it all the same.

Why had the Affini made her do this? Why were they so cruel, so evil, that they would sweep over the galaxy and destroy everything that they found?

Katie had only just started to learn how to have hope for the future again. Getting HRT in interstellar space wasn't easy, but she'd managed it. Getting work as a pre-transition trans girl wasn't easy, but everyone needed to Jump, and she was demonstratably good at what she did. She had a name, she'd just started to understand who she really was, and then news of alien warships had hit. Everything since had been chaos, and the one thread that had kept her going was the warm, fuzzy feeling in her gut of knowing her body was finally self-repairing, finally turning her into something closer to what she was meant to be. If slowly. If imperfectly. If still in a broken human shell.

Then she'd died in an Affini raid, and it had all been for nothing. She hoped she'd taken a few of them with her, at least. They weren't people, they were just monsters. Even that one who'd talked to her in such melodious English, with the barest hint of panic in her otherwise confident voice, giving the appearance of a rich inner life. Probably as a defence mechanism. They weren't people.

They weren't people.

She hadn't just killed people.

Katie opened her eyes wide, taking a deep, ragged breath as she woke from high-G-induced unconciousness. She tried to sit up, but something was pressing her down, despite the microgravity, and she was still desperately gasping for breath. How was she alive?

She was... in an escape pod. How? She'd been captured, she was...

Katie screamed, eyes going wide, heart accelerating to a frantic pace, as she spotted the Affini weed's face lying to one side of the pod. She scrambled back, rapidly pushing vines and leaves off of herself, throwing them to the floor and then kicking them to one side, just to be sure. She couldn't fight. She couldn't do anything. She'd escaped, only to still end up trapped with one of them!

Except... it wasn't moving. The face was static, dead. Some of the vines seemed like they'd been sheared clean in half by something, and a good half of the beast was burned or speared by little pieces of metal. It had taken the brunt of the chaos, and died in the process.

Died to save her.

Why? The creature was much faster than her, it could have reached the pod in half the time. Katie crept forward, hearing the crinkle of leaves as she hooked her foot into a handhold. She moved to kneel by the pieces that once made a face, lifting them easily with one hand. They were connected to some of the vines, but... no breath, no movement, nothing.

It wasn't a person. It hadn't sacrificed itself for her, it couldn't make choices, it was just a hungry beast. A— a hungry beast that could talk to her. A hungry beast that had understood what was going on. A hungry beast that had definitely sacrificed itself for her. Fuck. It... wasn't a person. She was misunderstanding.

She was safe, at least. She let out a breath that she hadn't realised she'd been holding, and looked around.

The inside of a Terran escape pod wasn't a luxurious affair. There were some seats, with straps that would hopefully keep you alive during launch. Enough for half a dozen per pod. Katie knew from some half-remembered snippets of training that the pods usually had enough fuel to make it to the nearest station, and enough oxygen to last a few hours. Long enough that if you were going to get picked up, you would have been... but what would pick her up, with the Indomitable gone? Nobody else would come close to an Affini warship.

They also had a small window on the bulkhead door. The one that was the only thing separating Katie from a quick death in the void of space. It was small enough that she had to lean in close to peer through it.

She screamed, jumping back. Vine, vine! There was... no, it wasn't moving. It was... one of this creature's, she figured, almost sliced clean off, but not quite. She forced herself back to the window. She had to know. There was a debris field, but... not big enough to be a whole ship, not at all, and no sign of anything else. No battlecruiser. No Affini ship. Just scraps of metal and plantlife and stars.

The radio seemed dead. Whatever had taken comms down on the ship must have done the same here. Thrusters... everything reported okay, but they couldn't get a lock on anything to thrust towards. She could fly them manually, but it was best to know where she was going first. She didn't.

Air. A little dial that would tick down for a few short hours, and then she would die. It began to dawn on her that she hadn't achieved anything, not really. She was going to die out here instead of down a mine. At least she'd die as herself?

She found one of the chairs, brushed off the leaves, and pulled herself in to sit.

"Fuck," she breathed, lowering her head to her hands.

A vine lifted it back up.

Katie screamed, batting it away and scrambling back... back where? There was nowhere to go! Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. She had nothing to fight with.

"Get away from me, you— you fucking monster! You killed my friends! You made me— you made me kill... You made me!" she screamed, her voice a dull roar that made even her shy back. Why couldn't she have lived long enough to feel comfortable in her own skin, at least? Was that so much to ask?

The plantlife around her slowly groaned, pulling in towards a central point in halting, hesitant bursts. It didn't look scary like this. If anything, the weak, careful movements reminded her of a wounded animal. The pieces that formed its face slowly moved to a position vaguely atop of the pile, as other vines and flowers lazily flopped their way into position around it, curling around one another to form a single solid form. After a few moments, the face started to move, slowly and carefully, with dull blue eyes behind the sockets.

"Oh, dirt," it groaned, voice soft and slow, letting the rest of its body slump out in a tangled mess. Only the head looked like it was fitting together right. It let out a long breath, before continuing with a voice that sounded hollow, like it was coming down a tunnel. "You didn't kill anyone, child. Most of the crew had already been rescued, and I got confirmation that everyone else had escaped just before your little bomb went off. But—" the bundle said, with a gentle, grating laugh— "you are the most effective little rebel I've ever seen."

It had an accent, of sorts. It didn't seem like a huge leap to assume that English wasn't its first language, though it seemed to get the pronunciations about right. No doubt tortured out of earlier prisoners. The way it spoke, though, had an almost musical quality, like it was matching its words to a beat that Katie couldn't hear, or like they were the words to a very unusual song. It stuck in her head.

Katie joined the plant in its slumping, letting out a deep breath. She'd failed, then, but... at least nobody was dead. "I've never killed anyone, I— I've never even held a gun. I... I just wanted to live. I won't let you put me in the mines, I'm..."

The vine that had touched her before reached up once again, just to make contact with Katie's hand. She jumped, but it didn't seem scary. The creature was clearly dying.

"Jack," it said, and Katie twitched.

"No!" she snapped, throwing the vine back and rising from the chair in anger. She kicked a little too hard and ended up needing to brace herself against the ceiling, but she needed to get away from that thing. "You can't take my identity away from me, you utter fucks. Do you have any idea how hard I've worked to get— to get here? I won't let you turn me into one of your drones, I won't let you force me to be something I'm not, I won't—"

The vine gave her hand a light squeeze, slowly pulling her back towards a handhold, and Katie looked back towards the face. It was just a few pieces of wood and plantlife, but it looked... almost human, the way it moved. She could sense the pity in it.

"Oh, sapling, I'm sorry. I should have realised," it said, voice gentle. It was a bundle of scorched leaves on the floor, and it was apologising to her for not being perceptive? "Nobody wants to take anything good away from you. We want to help you be who you really are. We know that humans need a little help with that, sometimes. We're here."

She paused, gathering strength. She didn't sound out of breath, but then, did plants breathe? The voice was more... out of sync. Like it was being made by a thousand little sounds, and they weren't quite lined up right.

"Do you have a better name for me, flower?"

Katie glared, immediately suspicious. What could they do with a name? Bind her, force her to do their bidding? No, this creature couldn't even stand.

"Katie," she offered.

"Good girl. Mine's Thatch."

Katie's cheeks started to burn immediately, as she was left speechless, mouth half-parted. Gender-affirming praise was not a thing she was used to and not even slightly something she'd been expecting from a plant. It took all her willpower to stop herself from babbling incomprehensibly, and so she found herself staring blankly at the alien's pretty hair.

Thatch was, now that Katie could see her without the threat of immediate hyperspacial fire, almost a work of art. The plates of her face were just bits of bark, the vines were just... vines, dotted with leaves. The flowers were pretty on their own, but any flower looked better arranged in a garden, and that was exactly what Thatch was. A garden. What could have been trivial points of colour instead formed something reminiscent of hair, with a rainbow of shades cascading across it in a gradient that Katie had to admit was masterfully done.

Her face, despite being made of nothing but vines, leaves, and wood, was expressive and piercing. It was clearly taking effort to maintain, if the rest of her body simply lying unwound was any indication. She was obviously very, very injured, and yet they were talking about Katie, instead.

"Are you okay, Thatch?" the girl asked. She didn't want to care, but it was hard not to feel a sort of kinship with another sapient creature. It could be like her, forced to fight for those who had never lifted a finger in aid. She wasn't a person, Katie reminded herself, but... she sure acted like one. This clearly wasn't the monster she'd had nightmares about, but it was still one of them. She should want her dead. Want it dead.

Her question garnered a laugh, at first, and a few moments of struggle as the Affini tried to pull herself back together. Katie stiffened, pulling back, but she needn't have bothered. Thatch only managed to get most of an arm done before one of the vines that tried to wind around another came up short, ending in a scorched tear, and the whole assembly fell apart.

"I... have seen better days, but the Elattarium, the ship out there collecting you cuties, will be here to pick us up any moment, and Affini medical technology is the best there is. I shall be fine, and we will get you some better medication too."

Katie blinked. She felt like every sentence it spoke left her with a million more questions. "What do you mean?" she asked, shrinking into herself. Why would she accept anything from these freaks of nature? "I don't want any of your drugs in me! I bet that's how you... how you enslave people, before you send them into the mines!"

Thatch giggled, tilting her head to one side with a bemused expression. It was a musical sound, high and tinkling, and despite the rigidity of her face, it still reached her expression and especially her eyes. "Mining for what, floret?" Thatch frowned, tilting her head a few degrees to the right as she considered. "I suppose you aren't that, yet, actually. Regardless, we have machines to do the dirty things. Why would we ask you to do that, if you didn't want to?"

Katie's eyebrows came together in a frown. The monster was talking as if they weren't using their tremendous military might to force humanity to do anything, which was absurd just on the face of it. Why else do this?

"Well, what... do you want with me? Why are you chasing us through the galaxy?"

"Because we can keep you safe," Thatch declared, seemingly without a sense of irony. Katie gestured around at their rather dire location. "Our situation here is your doing, dear, but we will fix it. You... I shall be honest, because you deserve that much. You will be processed for domestication, as per the terms of the Human Domestication Treaty, as soon as we get back. You could have hurt a lot of people, and you almost got yourself killed, never mind injuring an affini. We cannot let that happen again. We just want to help, and one thing your culture gets wrong is not realising that if you give everybody choices, some of them will make very bad ones.

"On the bright side, once you get back there'll be Affini queuing up to take somebody as cute as you in, and I think you'll find our kind of HRT a lot more potent than yours."

Katie fell silent, looking away.

Cute. Thatch thought she was cute? And... they wouldn't take her off of her medication? On the other hand, human domestication was not a very attractive phrase. It brought to mind images of torture, to break her until she just did as they said. Was that what they were doing to the human race? Breaking it? Did she care, save for that it forced an identity onto her that left her skin feeling like it didn't fit?

It didn't seem worth asking that question. They'd be picked up any moment. She'd soon be finding out first hand. She fell silent, her millions of questions suddenly feeling rather academic.

A moment passed. Then another. Eventually, Katie got up and moved back to the window, peering out. Nothing looked any different to how it had before. Still just stars, scrap, and seeds.

"I... don't see anybody coming, Thatch," she whispered. "I don't see anything out there. Can you... do you know how to fix the radio?"

Thatch's beautifully rendered face slowly shifted into a frown, as weakened vines trailed out to grab handholds, so she could lift herself to the window. Her voice had been, even if weak, still chipper up until this point, but that seemed to falter.

"They... wouldn't leave us. Maybe they've just... lost sight of us, in the explosion. The radio should still work just fine, we didn't break them, we were just intercepting all the signals. Could you... I don't think I can reach the switch from here, could you turn it on for me, pet?"

Katie wrinkled. "My name is Katie," she insisted, but did reach over to flick the switch on the radio panel to a full-spectrum broadcast, all in the clear. This was an escape pod, priority one was meant to be the safety of its occupants, so the radio should be something anyone could pick up.

"Elettarium," Thatch spoke, as loud as they could manage in their current state. "Come in. This is Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, with the human Katie Sahas, independent, in a human escape pod. She is unharmed and currently compliant. I, however, require immediate medical attention. Please respond."

Moments passed, with the two of them staring at the receive light on the radio panel, willing it to blink. It refused.

"Elettarium, please respond. Immediate medical attention requested. Emergency code—" The creature rattled off some sounds that Katie was certain she could never have replicated, more like music than speech— ", say again, immediate medical attention requested."

Nothing. The radio panel sat there with an unblinking red light. No incoming signals. Nothing.

Thatch slowly slumped back down, lowering herself into one of the seats. "Emergency codes aren't even answered by people. They get picked up and acknowledged by the machines, even if everyone else is busy. Even if the ship were somehow disabled, it's a separate network. I... don't understand," she said, losing some of that confident edge.

The two of them sat, staring up at the small porthole, hoping for any kind of movement, staring out at static stars twinkling down at them, and trying not to look at the life support panel and its many dials, each slowly winding down to their death.

"They're not coming, are they?" Katie asked.

"I think that they perhaps are not." The affini shuddered, face twisting in pain, as they faced oblivion together.

Chapter Text

Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, was not having a very good day. She hadn't even really wanted to be there in the first place. Don't get her roots in a tangle, she was as enthusiastic about keeping cuties like Katie safe as the next Affini, but she preferred to be in more of a supporting role. It was one thing to actually venture into a ship and save all the needy sapients within, but a 0.1% improvement in efficiency for the Haustoric Implant would make a much bigger difference overall, and there were a hundred thousand others who liked to get more hands on.

Not that Thatch had succeeded at either. At the sproutly young age of a hundred and three, Thatch spent a lot of time feeling like she was surrounded by wise old geniuses, each and every one of them a font of stories and wonders. She'd only travelled to the front of the human expedition because there was simply no room to grow closer in to the core. When she'd heard that they'd identified a new species that needed caring for, that had seemed like her time to make a name for herself.

She really wasn't built for this. She knew that humans responded well to a firm hand and confidence, and she'd played with a fair few aboard the Elettarium, but this was her first meeting with a feral one. Further, that had just never been her. It was fun to pet-sit for an afternoon or a weekend, to play with some cutie's head until they couldn't remember their own name, but doing it full time? Training one from the start? It was... a lot of responsibility. It demanded a lot of time.

Easier to work with machines. Safer. Except, that's exactly why she was in this mess to begin with. All she'd wanted to do was get a good look at a nice, big, human-built Superlight Drive. Figure out which design they were using and see if it had any weaknesses. If she could shut them down, or better yet, figure out how to ping them at faster-than-lightspeed, then they'd be able to reach every rebel ship in hours. She'd make a real difference. They didn't know why they were fighting. All they needed was a hug and some reassurances and they'd come around, but for that they needed to be found.

It had been a calculated risk, Thatch maintained, but... clod, she wasn't great at maths.

Everything hurt. The parts that didn't hurt were the ones that weren't there any more. She'd lost most of her left arm. A heartbreaking collection of flowers she'd gathered from all across this galaxy, on her journey here. The legs didn't seem to be doing great, either. She could feel the toxic shock in her leaves already, and the tips were starting to wilt. She was dying. As irreversible as whatever poor deluded Katie had done to that beautiful drive; it was just down to biology now.

She didn't have to die, of course. Affini physiology was ninety nine percent throwaway. All her vines could be grown again. Most of the flowers had been transplants anyway. Leaves were meant to curl up and fall off sometimes, and her coat of leaves did so more often than most. It was just easier to shed her outer layer than to put on a radiation suit every time she needed to tinker with a reactor.

Thatch was no stranger to regrowth, but this wasn't that. She'd lost too much at once and her body was shutting down. She couldn't rescue any of it, the toxicity was much too high already. A good doctor could, but she didn't have a good doctor. She just had her.

That left one option. Abandon everything but her central core and start fresh. It was a scary idea. She liked her body. She'd been working on it and improving it for a century, and starting again was... intimidating. She had no idea what else she would lose, either. Would she even be the same person on the other side?

Even that wouldn't be easy. She had no water and no nutrients. She could rig the radio to broadcast continuously, and have her core go into hibernation, but Katie would die within hours, and...

Dirt. Thatch really didn't have time to sit here feeling sorry for herself, did she?

"Okay," she said, forcing her eyes to open and trailing a vine over to poor Katie's face. It touched against her chin, gentle enough to draw attention, but little enough to not scare the poor thing, before slowly pulling her head around. "Tell me about yourself, flowe—"

"Katie. My name is Katie," the girl insisted, giving the vine a good squeeze. Thatch couldn't have overpowered her if she'd tried, but she really wasn't the dominant sort to begin with.

"Katie, sorry. No pet names, even though they really are the most efficient way to avoid having to pause just to gush about how cute you are," Thatch said, with a smile. The girl's face went through a dozen emotions at once, before finally settling on staring towards the wall with a rising blush.

"No, come on, look at me. Katie, I need your help, okay? You're the big, strong, human rebel who knows how to work one of your little space warping machines, right?"

"It's called a Jump Drive," she said, still refusing to look.

Thatch frowned at that, though. "But it doesn't... jump. You use an exotic matter mix to punch a hole through into subspace, right? Push the hull through a transal funnel before it collapses and get squeezed out the other side? It's cute, I haven't seen another species figure out how to do it without an external stabliser."

That got Katie's attention. Atta girl, Thatch didn't need drugs to catch a cutie's eye.

"We call it a quantum arch," Katie admitted. "Going up instead of down, but... those terms don't really mean anything in hyperspace, I don't think, it's just how we do the diagrams. And, um, that's what the hull is for, it's laced with a... we call it a Quantum Faraday Cage, but it's a mesh of magnetic tubing that insulates us."

Thatch grinned, eyes sparkling. Oh, this was much better than getting to inspect it first hand. Not just the technology, but the cultural context, too! Their understanding was fraught with oversimplifications and errors, but there were still ships in the Affini fleet that operated on similar principles, albeit with vastly improved performance and safety. Admittedly those ships were antiques, maintained by history buffs who thought it was a reasonable idea to fly to war in something a sufficiently determined human battleship might actually be able to scratch, but still, it was something to bond over. This would be easier if she hadn't just lost most of her good drugs in a temporospatial claudication, but if she couldn't convince a hostile enemy combatant to save her life in the next three hours armed with nothing but her wits and charm then... well, she'd feel awful about failing poor Katie, for one thing.

"There's a good girl," she quipped, then abused the way Katie's brain ground to a halt to steamroll on. "So I think I can guess what happened, and the good news is that we aren't going to wait for the Elettarium to come get us, because they're probably also very confused as to how they ended up randomly halfway across the galaxy and they can't be that far away from us. They're never gonna find us, though, we're going to have to do that ourselves.

"So, Katie Sahas, capable human rebel and mistress of subatomic forces. You got us here, do you want me to teach you how to get us back?"

Chapter Text

Katie stared at the plant, barely comprehending its offer. It wanted to teach her something, in the next— she checked the life support readout— two hours and fifty minutes, that would lead to them not dying in space in an escape pod which had, to Katie's knowledge, no faster than light communications, no drive more advanced than a chemical rocket, literally zero atoms of anything more exotic than carbon, and almost no fuel?

"Uh, I guess?" she asked, raising her arms in a shrug. "It's something to do while we both die? Why are you pretending to be... real? You're meant to be a monster, you're not meant to... I never thanked you for saving my life, but I don't know why you did it. You say everyone else left, why didn't you?"

"Because then you'd be dead, Katie," Thatch said, voice soft and yet filling the interior of the pod. "I'm not about to let my mistake get somebody killed. Your 'jump drive' wasn't suppressed because I wanted to get a good look at it. It's my fault you're here, if I hadn't have asked to take a look then you'd be safely in processing right now. I have a moral duty to get you where you belong."

Fuck. Fuck. It had an internally consistent worldview. Fuck! It had reasons behind its actions. Fuck!! It could hold a conversation about subatomic physics. Fuck. It was a person.

"Fuck," she breathed.

"I'm guessing that's a curse of some kind," Thatch asked. "There are options, if you don't want that. It's... unlikely that you'll be allowed to go free, after scuttling a ship to try to hurt us, but as far as I know I'm the only casualty, and if I say you'll behave and you will, then you'll get to pick some things. We have forms for this, you fill out what you like, what you need, what you don't want, and they'll find you somebody nice who wants the same things for you. There are some pets that're basically the same as free range humans, except they always have a home to go back to and a friend who cares deeply for them. You... probably need to be on a shorter leash right now, but if you want to be free, I can guarantee you that there are Affini out there who want to help you get there. That's literally all we want."

Katie only stared, forehead only getting more creased as the barrage of confusion continued. What did 'domesticate' even mean, if it could mean anything? Did she have any other choice? Thatch might be lying, but what if she wasn't? Katie didn't want to be... property. She'd worked too hard to be her own person to give that up now, but maybe she could just... promise not to do it again? No, that was ridiculous. Maybe they'd give her a reduced sentence for good behaviour? Three years domestication and then she was free to go?

"Would I... could I ever go free? Would I be let go, if I wasn't a threat and I didn't want be there any more?"

"That's... up to your owner, little Katie, and whether you still wanted it at the time. I wouldn't hesitate to let you go, if it were me, though. Why would I want to keep something that wasn't happy there?"

Katie just bit her lip and looked away. It was lying. They'd say anything to get her down one of their mines. Wouldn't they?

"Okay, teach me," Katie begrudgingly accepted. Staying in this pod was certain death. At least passage on the Ettle... The Affini Warship left her with a chance. More, if she could get this affini to explain parts of their technology.

The creature rose up, gentle nudges from vines pushing the densest nest of leaves and petals into about the center of the pod. She didn't look like she'd be able to move if they weren't in microgravity, but as it was, it took very little force to manouver. Thatch spent a moment clearing away a cloud of browned, curled up leaves to create a clear view of the pod wall, which was mostly bare, and then she... licked one of the leaves?

It stuck to the wall pretty easily after that, and the creature seemed content to repeat the process, vines slowly stretching out to grab leaves and place them on the wall in a pattern that only slowly started to take shape. It looked like their two ships, hanging above a line. Was that meant to be spacetime?

"So, normally, when you cuties build your little arches, you point where you want to go, make a hole, and fly. What we do is... why we have our diagrams the other way around. You haven't figured out the fifth fundamental force yet, have you?"

A vine shot out to ruffle Katie's hair. She cried out in complaint, trying to dislodge it and failing. If Katie didn't know better she could have sworn the overgrown houseplant was trying to flirt with her, but that was ridiculous. They were either a ravenous monster that wouldn't understand flirting in the first place, or a hyper-advanced precursor race that would know better than to waste time while their air ran out.

Either way, Katie might have found them less annoying when she thought they were going to eat her.

"So, what you did was pop spacetime! Don't do that! It's really bad! Spacetime is a shared resource and we all have to be pretty careful with it." Thatch took a moment to tap Katie on the nose, vines coming in from all directions in a complex array of feints and teases to make it harder to dodge. "Thankfully, most of the time little holes like that close up of their own accord, but not before it sucks you in." She placed a vine on one of the bigger leaves, that seemed to represent their ship, and on the biggest leaf, which was probably the El... Ettelium? The Affini ship. The cursed monster mimed screams and "oh nos!" as the two were sucked into the hole, grinning the whole while.

Oh god. It was flirting, wasn't it?

"Then the hole closes behind us and both of us just drift for a million timeless years through subatomic foam until utterly random currents deliver us back up to the surface, with only a real-time second or two having passed. The Elettarium will have done better because its drive still works down there and it's shielded against the temporal effects, but they'll still be out here somewhere too, except they can get home."

Thatch shrugged. "A long time ago we used this stuff to build warships, but it's just so much hassle."

"But you still can't defend against it? The mighty Affini war fleet still has weaknesses?" Katie teased, though... if it were true and she could get that information to the rebellion, maybe it would make a difference.

Thatch, however, paused, and tilted her head with a wonderful facsimile of a frown. Her— No! The alien's false face was just wood and leaves and thorns, there was no beauty to be found! "The... war fleet?" the affini asked, mouth twisting into an amused smirk. "Honey, the Elettarium is a scouting vessel. It doesn't even have any guns, never mind dimensional anchors."

"You... captured the Indomitable with a scout?" Katie asked, feeling her heart sinking down to her feet. That was one of their best ships. It had some of their latest technologies. They had railguns! They had a Jump Drive that could spool up in half the time of an older ship! A hull meters thick!

"We captured you cuties with our cargo chutes. Came straight out of subspace right on top of you, as soon as we got a ping off of your drive. A warship would've been much cleaner. You'd just have been floating unhappily along and then bam—"

Thatch grinned, and gave Katie an instant to prepare before vines came at her from every direction, and even though she was was ready for it, Katie still ended up with her hair ruffled. Thatch laughed with an honest glee as Katie managed to grab hold of two of the vines and pull them away.

Katie was going to die because this plant literally couldn't stop flirting. This was worse than her nightmares. Could she go down the mines?

"Thatch!" she snapped. "We're going to die in two and a half hours, please can you keep on topic?"

The plant paused, pouted, and rolled her eyes. "We came out at a random position in spacetime, sproutling. Spacetime gets all squeezed up by planets and stars and stuff, and it's really very sparse out in the open, and so...?"

Thatch raised an eyebrow, smiling an infuriatingly patient smile. Was the creature somehow incapable of feeling the pressure of its own mortality? Or, for that matter, hers?

"Is this physics lesson going to help us? Thatch, we have nothing. We're in a fucking stranded escape pod, we don't even have oxygen. We can't... do anything. We don't have a jump drive. I know your fancy Affini ships probably all do, but this is just a tube we filled with air before we launched it. We're practically ballistic, the rockets won't get us between planets, never mind stars. We're fucked."

"I still don't know that word," Thatch admitted, "but that's the wrong answer, I'm afraid, dear. We came out at a random position in spacetime. Spacetime gets squished by everything around it. It's probably very likely that we're near a gravity well. It may well be a planet. Probably several. All we need to do is find one that looks livable, and land."

"Uhh," Katie interjected. "This is an escape pod, we can't de-orbit in this. We'd crash! Even if we didn't, we'd just be stuck!"

Thatch's face, which had managed to stay fairly somber for almost a minute, broke out into a wide grin. "You let me worry about that, flower—"

"Katie."

—"Katieflower, I just need you to be a good girl and put this 'tube' into a spin and watch for planets. Can you do that for me?"

Katie froze up in embarrassment for a moment, and then emitted a long frustrated groan, but after a moment of internal debate, she acquiesced. This was literally her only hope; she may as well die trying something. "Fine!"

The manual thruster controls were archaic. A pair of joysticks, one for rotation and one for directional thrust. A quick tap on the former sent the ship into a slow, lazy spin. Thatch winced as one of the walls came out to meet her, pinning her against it and scattering the carefully arranged leaf-art, and it became immediately obvious why she needed Katie to be the one doing the looking here. She wasn't getting any stronger.

Katie crawled to the back end of the ship along handholds, to where the porthole was. She stared, not really expecting to see anything but a rapidly rotating starscape, except...

"There! That's... no, no atmosphere. Oh, but... ugh, no, that looks like a gas giant. Oh! What about that one, it's blue! And... it's a bit far away, though. I'll... hang on, I can put the nav computer into manual, too," she claimed, then clambered over to it. The timing was a bit precise, because she had to hit the target lock button when the ship happened to be pointing towards the planet anyway, but after a few attempts it seemed to get a lock.

It claimed to need about a thousand meters per second more delta-v than they had to make a rendevous. Fuck.

"It's too far away to reach orbit," Katie said, feeling the fragile hope that Thatch had been building start to crumble. They might be two capable engineers, but they didn't even have a space suit between them, never mind spare fuel. The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation struck again.

"I told you, leave that to me," Thatch reminded her. "All we need is a little attitude adjustment."

"Fucking excuse me?"

"I still don't know that word, Katieflower. Attitude. Height above a planet." A vine came out of nowhere to tap her on the nose.

"That's altitude!" Katie complained, grabbing at the vine and holding it at arm's length.

Thatch paused, looking momentarily baffled. "Huh. Your cute little language has a lot of words that sound very similar, doesn't it? I suppose I should have expected a few mistakes, given I learned from a booklet written by one of our beloved cotyledons."

"What's a cotyledon?" Katie asked. It was pronounced like an English word, but not one familiar to her.

Thatch paused again, this time for longer, and carefully extracted her vine from Katie's grasp, while using another to sneak up behind her and ruffle her hair. "Uh, they're some of our happiest subjects. Don't worry about that, we have more important concerns right now."

This was getting infuriating. Katie batted the vine away, but the creature carried on talking regardless. "One of my legs had a biomechanical filter we could use, it should boost your fuel efficiency a few times. I think it's outside, though. I certainly can't feel it."

"That's a problem, then," Katie admitted.

"Not at all, actually. If you can vent all the oxygen in here first, so we don't get flung out into space, we'll be fine," Thatch claimed. Katie opened her mouth to make the obvious protest, only to find it had been a trap. The first two vines going for her hair had been feints. She'd felt good about fighting off the third, that had wanted to pinch her cheek. She completely missed the fourth, which came to rest around her mouth and nose, looping around the back of her head so it could squeeze tight enough to form a seal.

With a cry, Katie's eyes went wide, as she involuntarily breathed in, and... ohhh. Her mouth felt sparkly. Her brain felt sparkly. The whole world was sparkles. This was weird. This was, oh. Katie giggled, shaking her head. Nuh-uh, this was how they sent her to the mines, she didn't waaaant to go to the mines. Except, that thought wasn't scary any more, it was funny. What would she be mining, Thatch had asked.

Well, scary plant monster, Katie had you figured out now. It was the bloody flirting mines, wasn't it? Toiling day in day out to dig their insufferable attitude out of the dirt. She grinned over at the pretty flower like she'd just shared a joke and was awaiting a laugh, except she'd forgotten to actually say it.

Thatch, to her credit, slowly deflated. "Aw, dirt," she swore, "You are... not gonna be thinking very hard for a while, are you, precious? That's too bad. We have some pretty complicated engineering to do and I'd rather been counting on you having a clear head. My bad, I forgot how much of an effect our phytotoxin has on you cuties. Uh, well, okay! Think you can follow some simple instructions still?"

Man, Katie was gonna die! Her only hope had spent so much effort flirting she'd forgotten not to brainwash her. Katie found herself laughing, again. It was hilarious, even though she knew it shouldn't be, but that just made it funnier. The look on Thatch's face was one she'd remember for the rest of her life, which was just over two hours!

Chapter Text

Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, was a blooming idiot. On the one band, she'd gotten the human to help in under an hour, which was pretty good going, and then on the other band she'd forgotten that the stuff she needed to make pure, breathable oxygen had been in her other arm, and now her human assistant was so high on phytotoxins she was borderline useless.

Borderline.

"Katie," Thatch snapped. "Eyes on me."

Short, simple orders worked, at least for a little while. She'd start drifting after a few moments, but she was still a useful tool. The girl stopped giggling and looked towards Thatch's face, expression a distant sort of quizzical, even if she was wordless for a multitude of reasons.

"Air vents. The button on that panel. Can you find it for me?"

Katie stared for another few moments, and then smiled lazily. Thatch sighed. This was going to be difficult.

Not because what they were doing was hard, but because Katie was incredibly distracting. How was she meant to save all their lives in these conditions? The girl was already playing with a vine, and did Thatch Aquae, confident, in-charge Affini engineer have the heart to take it away from her? No, she did not. She was just down a vine now. One of precious few.

Katie would be very mad at her when she woke up, but... this way, she would wake up.

"Katie! Be a good girl and find the button that vents the oxygen." Thatch put on her firmest face. The response was... god, she was so cute. The poor thing was so starved for praise that what was given seemed to hit her like a trunk, if Thatch was getting the saying right. She did manage to make her way over to the right panel, but after that she slowed down.

"The one that vents the oxygen, pet."

A long moment of thought followed, before a careful, yet sloppy, tap of one of the buttons. A yellow one marked with... oh, it was meant to be a gust of wind. Thatch had been seeing it as a sideways tree, no wonder she hadn't found the button herself. The pod filled with the sound of hissing, that gradually decreased to nothing as Katie happily watched all the air in the room vanish into space.

That put them on a very different kind of timer. Keeping a whole human breathing, just by herself, was not exactly a small ask for Thatch. Doing it while actively dying and without half of her tools was... well, there wasn't much time for flirting right now.

"Oh, good girl! Such a clever Katie you are!"

There was always time for some flirting. The noise would vibrate along her little air hose, and vibrate around Katie's skull, so it'd be fuzzy, but she'd hear. It wasn't like she'd have many other thoughts in that poor head.

Oh, twigs and clods, humans couldn't survive in a vacuum, could they? Thatch hoped she still had enough plantmass to make all this work. She shot forward, wrapping Katie tight in a cocoon of leaves and vines, tight enough to be nearly airtight. That 'nearly' was going to make things a lot harder, though. Thanks to her floral origin, Thatch naturally produced oxygen, and thanks to her hailing from a society that loved emphasising its strong points, she was capable of producing a pretty decent amount of it. Not enough to keep Katie alive for long.

"Now, I need you to be very careful and make sure you keep those vines tight against your face, and I'm just going to go look outside."

Thatch carefully manouvered herself to the door, and struck the obvious "Open" button. The pod lights turned off. She turned them back on, and tried the second most obvious button, and that one did the trick. It was strangely morose, looking out at a collection of stuff that used to be her, but wasn't any more. That had been an arm. That was one of her favourite flowers, now squashed beyond survival. That had been a treasured momento of her visit to Sigma Theta station, where they specialised in biomechanical augmentation.

aannnd that was a leg, slowly drifting away. Thatch grabbed for it, missed, and grabbed again. She caught it by the tip of her vine, but it slipped free, sent out of reach. She swore, and strained forward, but it was simply too far. The ship was still slowly spinning, and it'd taken some of that momentum with it. She just needed another foot to reach it, and...

Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, utter moron, let go of the shuttle so she could reach out that extra foot, and put her life in the hands of a human being who, right now, was not capable of stringing together a coherent sentence.

"Okay, pull me back in!" she called, hoping that her voice would reach all the way down her vine, through a deeply empty head, and somehow spur an action. "Katie, precious, I need you to pull!" She could pull herself, but then it was almost certain she'd yank the mask off of the girl's face, and Thatch was not willing to risk her life here.

Root damnit. Thatch knew exactly what was happening, here. She was getting trained into giving this human exactly what she wanted, but this wasn't her! She didn't want a dependent. She didn't want to be slowed down and she certainly didn't feel ready. She was only a hundred and three years old, she couldn't be in charge of something this precious and fragile! She swore to the stars above and the roots below, if Katie ended up bonding and she was saddled with a pet, she'd... She'd... take good care of her and set her free once she was ready?
Thatch groaned. That could take years. Katie was cute, don't get her wrong, but she had things to do! She couldn't spend all her time doting on one particular human. Early domestication was the most exciting phase, where you got to learn all about how to keep some new species happy, and where there was a flurry of innovations to be made in figuring out how to better coexist. Wasting time on just one was... unthinkable. Yet, she could feel herself getting tied up in this one's affairs, and light knew what effect all this would be having when Katie finally woke up.

"Katieflower! If you pull me in, I'll give you headpats!"

That did the trick. Thatch felt herself being slowly reeled in, and soon she could grab onto the spinning pod herself and move the rest of the way. As soon as she was back inside, she hit the button that closed the outer door and hoped that her oxygen production would create enough pressure quickly enough for them to survive beyond the next ten minutes.

"Good girl!" she cooed, collapsing into Katie's lap, feeling exhausted. She knew that wasn't a good sign, but she was surprisingly comfortable, and it took all of Thatch's willpower to not simply melt into a frenzy of cuddles and not-strictly-medicinally-necessary dosing. Which didn't mean that she didn't waste a good five minutes stroking the girl's head, while carefully balancing the oxygen/toxin mix she got to breathe. There was something incredibly calming about stealing away all that nervous energy and all those worries and letting her experience a moment of tranquility.

Except that they had things to do. Pressure in the room had been steadily rising over those minutes, as Thatch's lost air gathered in the room. It didn't feel thick enough for Katie to survive in it, but maybe she could have the cocoon relaxed, so she could make herself useful. Or, at least, so Thatch could make her useful.

"Katieflower, precious? I need you to do something for me, okay? I'll... let you keep playing with my vines if you can be a good girl and do this one little thing for me. I need you to open up that maintenance panel, unhook the fuel pipe, and stick this thing in between the pipe and the tank." Thatch raised the biomechanical fuel filter, which via a complicated process that Katie certainly would not understand right now, should give them a boost. It had been used to purify some of her favourite drugs, once, but this was an emergency.

It would have been nice to explain it. The look on the girl's face as she'd started to understand their earlier discussion, even if it was simplified, had been a delight. The expression that Thatch got this time was still delightful, but she found herself missing the girl's thoughts. One reason among many she'd make a terrible caretaker, she supposed.

The girl seemed to be getting the hang of following instructions, which did not mean that she was really understanding what she was doing. Thatch didn't have the strength or dexterity to install anything herself, but she could offer a guiding vine, gently pressing one side of her wrist or the other to steer her into place, and between the two of them they managed to get everything secured.

This was exhausting. Thatch was already starting to feel light-headed from the strain, never mind the stint in hard vacuum, and they had so much left to do. This really was the perfect example of why she didn't want to get too close to a human. The efficient thing to do would be to pull the straps around Katie, then do the same for herself, and here she was tickling under the girl's chin just to watch the way she squirmed. How was she meant to get any work done like this?

Assuming that she got out of this, Thatch could expect to live about as long as she wanted to stick around. There would be time for pets later, after she'd made a name for herself. After she'd contributed.

Thatch's frustrated growl was apparently loud enough to draw the girl's attention, because she had to spend a few moments soothing her afterwards, wasting yet more time.

The Affini 'Compact' had a thousand thousand thousand worlds across a dozen galaxies. They encompassed more species and sub-species than Thatch could ever hope to count. They had saved more cuties than an individual could imagine, and at this point in their existence, there was nothing to do any more. Poor Katie was worried about working in a mine, but the truth was that Thatch would gladly spend some time digging out raw materials if it meant she got to feel like she'd earned her place here. Instead, she flitted from ship to ship, always a little too late to make any real contributions. Always being told that there wasn't really any need for her, and she should find a hobby, get a pet, and relax for a few hundred years.

Even on the Elettarium! Surely, she had thought, a small vessel on the forefront of Affini space would have need of an educated engineer. Surely they would face some new problem that she could solve. Yet half the population of that 'small' scouting ship was there recreationally. The Elettarium had ice cream bars, five separate kilometer-wide recreational parks, and every single Affini on board spent as much time fussing over their new pets as they did anything else, except for Thatch and a couple of others who claimed to simply not have found the right match yet.

There was absolutely nothing that needed doing. Thatch had finally convinced the others to let her take a look at a human drive design in-situ, but she suspected that they'd been humouring her. It wasn't like they didn't have hundreds of Terran ships just lying around in their shipbreaking yards.

Look where that had gotten her.

Thatch finished fiddling with the straps, to make sure Katie was comfortable, and took a moment to prepare herself. Her leaves curled inwards. She was a little worried that this next stage would get them killed, but she could at least be useful in one way here, and give the human some confidence.

"Katieflower, petal? I'm going to turn the engine on, now. Everything will get very heavy for a little while, but I'm here, and I'll keep you safe, okay?"

Thatch couldn't fight off a towel right now. How was she meant to keep this thing safe? She'd just have to figure it out on the way, she supposed, and hit the ignition switch.

The pod's thrusters roared into life, a tank full of chemicals being fed into a biomechanical engine, enriched, and then trickle-fed into the Terran design for optimal efficiency. Both of its passengers found themselves flattened against their seats, straining against a moderately high-G burn. Thatch kept her eyes on the nav computer's readout, silently begging it to not show any divergence from the route. Katie was squeezing—tightly, mind—the end of a vine and receiving all the comforting strokes that were available.

The whole journey took about an hour, slowly crawling towards a planet at painfully sub-light speeds. Thatch kept finding herself almost dropping off, having to force herself to stay awake, or, alarmingly, fighting the urge to give in and fall unconcious. It was only Katie's wellbeing that kept her focussed, but the oxygen mix was getting dangerously thin.

As the minutes crawled on, Thatch was terrified she'd miscalculated, and that they were simply going to slingshot around the planet and go back the other way. When she finally felt the telltale shaking of atmosphere, she laughed in joy. They weren't going to die. All she had to figure out now was which button switched this craft to atmospheric mode, and they'd be fine.

Except.

Thatch started hitting buttons at random. One of them had to be it. She was just misunderstanding the symbols. Nobody would build an escape pod that couldn't enter an atmosphere, that would be incredibly unsafe. The Terrans were kinda dumb, but...

Oh rot and ruin, Katie had tried to warn her about this, hadn't she?

Both of them yelped at the same time, as something broke off of the pod and sent it into a wild spin. They were crashing. They were crashing! This was... exciting, actually! If Thatch didn't do something, they were both going to die! The next minute and a half would, quite literally, have the most impact of anything she'd ever done.

Thatch cackled, unbuckling her straps and pulling herself over to give Katie a quick kiss on the forehead, then undid her straps too, and pulled the poor girl into the center of the ship. Thatch used her vines to stablise the two in the center of the pod as it span around them, insulating Katie from the chaos to give her a few blissful moments of silence, so that they could talk.

"Okay, love, we're going to do something very exciting in a moment, but I want you to know that you're going to be okay. I'll take care of everything, alright? You don't need to worry about any of it. Once we land, though, I'm going to need you to plant me, alright? Just... take the round bit and stick it into the dirt. Add some water, if you can? Can you do that for me?"

What was she saying? Katie was barely capable of forming memories at all, right now. For all Thatch knew, her core would end up lying hibernating in some barren corner of this nowhere planet forever, but at least Katie would survive. She had to, Thatch had promised. All she had to do now was figure out how to keep that promise, which certainly had a clarifying effect on her thinking.

The ship was breaking apart. It wouldn't even reach the ground at this rate. In fact, it seemed likely that—

A panel broke off, and the air suddenly rushing in broke Thatch's grip and flung the two of them out of the ship, sending them flailing in freefall. Thatch screamed, eyes wide, but... No, Katie seemed serene. She wasn't worried, and why wasn't she worried? Thatch Aquae, capable Affini rescuer, was here, and so no harm would come to her.

Thatch took a deep breath of thin, cold atmosphere. All she had to do was live up to that image in her human's head.

The. The human's head. She was not bonding!

Thatch let her head unwind, reclaiming all the vines she could, giving herself a little more to work with. She wrapped the girl in a thicker protective cocoon and positioned herself beneath, so she'd take the force of landing. She spread her vines out wide, trying to catch as much air as possible, and it burned. They were in freefall. They were de-orbiting without a ship. This was insane. A healthy Affini, on their own, could absolutely survive this. Her? With a human?

Thatch cackled again, which set Katie off in turn. This was absurd. She was going to die. She was... no, focus. She was going to save the life of this innocent flower, and if that was the sum total of her existence, then let that be worth it.

They plummeted, human and Affini both, through a rapidly thickening atmosphere. The pod was just rubble before long, but they persevered. In the final moments before they hit the ground, Thatch pulled in all the vines that weren't keeping Katie tightly secured and wound them into the biggest spring she could make, hoping to absorb the last of their kinetic energy and give Katie the soft landing she deserved.

They hit hard. Thatch blacked out.

Chapter Text

Felicia Hautere, Fourth Floret, leaned closer to her affini's side. She didn't usually want to draw attention while Rosaceae was working, but the floor also wasn't usually shaking beneath her feet. Her mistress curled a protective vine over her shoulders almost subconciously, holding her close, but resting the end on her shoulder to softly press Felicia down to her knees.

Rosaceae Hautere, Sixth Bloom, had one of the hardest jobs aboard the Elettarium, Felicia thought. She was the captain, at least at the moment. The last election had chosen her, and though the outside world would never know how uncertain her affini had been after hearing the news, Felicia was far too invested at this point to allow her caretaker to be anything but magnificent.

At a slight gesture from the plant, Felicia felt her thoughts start to return, the hazy curtain of mindlessness quickly retreating. It was a disorienting process, being suddenly pulled from being almost no more than an animal, acting on instinct, to suddenly being a person again. She blinked a few times, then looked up, soft and lazy smile sharpening into something more devious.

The bridge crew hung in nervous tension. They'd just landed back in real-space, it seemed, with a human battleship clear in their sights. The metallic tentacles of their cargo chutes were already reaching out, ready to strike.

Rosaceae had been around for almost a millenium and a half, but she'd been captain of a starship for only two short years. Felicia technically had seniority here, and all the sharpness her mind had ever possessed. More, even, with a delicate web of biotechnology laced through her body regulating everything from her hormonal balance to her mood. Delicate plantlife twisted around her bones, making her more than she had ever been. Stronger, faster, quicker on the draw. More accurate with a knife or a gun. Fast enough to evade Rosa's vines and smart enough to make that count.

She rose to her feet, raising a hand to gently rest against her affini's cheek. Though the creature was sitting, she still had a few inches on Felicia, but that hardly mattered, and the look in her soft blue eyes was beautiful enough that Felicia risked being seen to tilt her caretaker's head towards herself, two fingers beneath her chin.

"You've got this, Rosa," she whispered, planting a kiss on their forehead. She carefully tilted the Affini's head back towards the rest of the bridge, letting a finger linger for just a moment too long. Felicia had been a terror, once. Twenty years spent flying freighters, ten as the queen of a pirate armada. Her name had been spoken in hushed tones or not at all. When she'd eventually tried to hijack a small Affini cargo vessel, Rosaceae had been aboard, and had brought her in.

It shouldn't have surprised her that Rosaceae had wanted to keep her little Thorn sharp. Three decades of learning how human ships were run was valuable, and despite her own thorny exterior, Miss Rosa was a softie to the core. She'd let herself get shot five times rather than hurt Felicia in the disarming. Her domestication had been... unusual, to say the least. Felicia smiled happily, reliving the memory and leaning in closer.

The bridge of the Elettarium hung from the bottom of the ship, about half way along the vessel's magnificent length. It gave them a spectacular view of its current occupation. Tremendous metallic tentacles jutted out of the large, flower-like structure on the bow, spearing the human vessel six different ways. All around the bridge were dotted Affini and their pets, watching smaller panels or chattering away as the various teams made their way in to rescue everyone inside.

Humans hadn't always been allowed on the bridge, of course, but Felicia had practically been born to be on the command deck of a starship and Rosaceae's domestication hadn't softened her. The opposite. Some people kept dangerous pets, ones that demanded respect and careful treatment.

Pet and handler both looked up with a frown at the same time, as a klaxon went off and an emergency broadcast echoed through the room.

"Elettarium, emergency channel! Dirt and roots, can we still smother this engine? The human set it to overload, looks like this room didn't get hit by the gas. Looks like we've got thirty seconds before spacetime gets shredded, can you do something about that?"

Felicia could feel the tension in her owner's core as she listened, and for a moment afterwards it seemed like she was freezing up. The one Affini vessel lost to date had been caused by something very similar, and they were meant to be taking steps to avert it happening again. That was why Rosaceae had been picked, after all. She was an actress, a mistress of drama and tension, and so far had been extremely successful at storytelling. Her stage was the infinite cosmos, her actor a multi-kilometer vessel with thousands of occupants, and her audience the misguided human rebellion. All she had to do was keep them feeling like they had a chance, so there weren't any more of these self-destructive attacks.

Rosa was an artist, and like many artists, she was no stranger to trauma herself. Just as Felicia had been saved, she liked to think that she'd saved Rosa in turn. Her caretaker's comforting vines curled around Felicia's central nervous system, but Felicia had left her own permanent marks in exchange. Neither of them were as good without the other. Felicia subtly nudged her captain's side.

"Elettarium here," Rosaceae called, spurred into action, motioning for the science officer to stop playing with her human's hair and do something, while playing with her own human's hair in a flagrant display of hypocricy. "Smothering in progress. We may still have a bumpy ride, apparently, recommend evacuation!"

"Negative, the human's running, they won't survive this. I'll try to get us into a pod, please be ready to pick us up," the voice called. Who was that? They were a little hard to understand, even if Felicia's affini was generally excellent—at least the dialect they used around here, anyway. It was an unusual accent, but she recognised it. Rosaceae surely knew who it was, she was fantastic with voices. One of the perks of being an actress, Felicia supposed.

A tense fifteen seconds went by and every moment they didn't get a check-in made the tension grow yet thicker. Felicia was supposed to be here to support and comfort, but even she found herself holding her breath.

Felicia felt a tearing in the back of her mind as reality broke. They crossed the border of the known, the event horizon of logic, where sense was best left be. Half-reflected stars met unending void, objective untruth meeting wild conjecture as the world she knew cracked and they all fell through, down, down, down into fragmented dimensions, their ship merely a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and the elegant malevolence of pan-dimensional irrelevance and—

Felicia closed her eyes, and whimpered, suddenly remembering why the games she and her Mistress played were games and games alone. She had flown chemical rockets encased in steel and glass. Rosaceae and the rest of the crew broke reality over their knee and forced their will onto the world. It was impossible to tell what was happening outside, and the bridge was a whirlwind of action, every pet staying politely out of the way. It was a daunting sight, when a room full of Affini actually managed to all focus at once on something that wasn't cute.

The space outside stablised over long moments, but the human ship was gone, the great metallic tentacles were gone; familiar stars were gone. The voice from before came back to her, finally with a name. The cute newcomer who kept poking around the engineering department looking for something to do, the one who hadn't found a companion yet. Thatch something? She'd been lovely when Felicia had had occasion to talk. She hoped that the alien was okay. Felicia's head found Rosaceae's lap, arms squeezing around a leg, and the captain looked down and began to stroke, for both their comforts.

Felicia was the lucky one, here, finally freed from the burden of command. Being in charge wasn't a luxury, it was a curse, and she, for one, was very happy to only play pretend.

"Report," Rosacaea demanded, all playfulness gone from her voice. A chilling comfort. Scary, but safe. When all was chaos, the games were discarded, and Felicia got a brief reminder of why it was okay that she got to pretend at importance, still. Rosa set the stage, and Felicia was but her actress, pretending at still holding her former ferocity while it was useful and gladly abandoning it when she could.

"All but one got back in safely," spoke one of the crew, reading off of a panel, "Thatch Aquae, First Bloom still missing, as well as one human unaccounted for. Scanners aren't locating them, they aren't here. The hypermetric rupture must have knocked them elsewhere."

Rosacaea sighed, nodding. "We'll be out here a while, then. Inform the ship that we're going to be taking an extended break from the front and send a messenger back to fleet command, we can't leave until we've found them. Somebody tell me how to search for two creatures somewhere in this galaxy, please? Answers on a postbox?"

Felicia giggled. Sometimes she thought her owner got human phrases wrong just to torment her. Why else would she say them in affini? All she got for her bratting, though, was a gentle stroke and the comforting sensation of her thoughts sinking away, stealing the intelligent sparkle in her eyes and the deviousness in her grin, the speed of her limbs and the fire in her eyes, and leaving her simple and happy. She'd stay this way forever if she could, but Miss Rosa could make use of her wit and edge, sometimes, and so she was glad to keep it.

Rosa had seen right through her futile attempts at independence. It wasn't what she'd ever wanted, and the last eighteen months in her Mistress's care had been the happiest of her life.

Chapter Text

Ships breaking around her. Falling. Wind in her ears. The horrifying sensation of feeling like she was in microgravity, while the ground beneath rushed up to dissuade her of that. The nightmarish instant of collision. Silence.

Katie woke with a sudden start, scrambling to her feet before she'd even realised she was no longer dreaming, heart beating in her chest so hard she felt like the staccato thumps would knock her down. She was alive. She was alive. She was—

"Thatch!" she cried out, rushing over to a tangle of vines and plantlife. Half of it seemed to have already dried out, browned, or begun to rot. She wanted this creature dead, didn't she? It was the enemy. It was a slaver, a conqueror. It wanted to take her and hers, just to have it, when they already had so much.

It had also saved her life. It had almost convinced her that it wasn't a fucking eldritch nightmare beast from beyond the stars, and then it had guided a broken escape pod across a star system and protected her as they fell from the skies. It was terrifying. Almost dead and it had done all this? How were they meant to fight these creatures, when killing them took scuttling a ship and falling out of orbit?

Katie found Thatch's face. Flies buzzed away as she reached for it, but as she tried to lift it, it simply crumbled in her hands, plant matter broken and dead.

She was gone. The... dorky alien who had saved her life. Who seemed more interested in talking about science than she had in actually conquering anything. Who had made Katie feel safe when she had been certain she would die, and had then proven that that feeling of safety was earned. It wasn't fair. This was a creature that was awesome in the biblical sense of the word. Larger than life, and... yet still dead?

The face had been a fake, Katie had understood that much. A mask, put on to make it easier for them to communicate, but it had been alive. Even interesting. It was difficult not to relate to the first non-human sapient creature she'd ever sat down and talked to.

Katie looked around. They were in a clearing in the middle of what seemed like thick forest. All around them was a deep blanket of blacks, purples, reds, leaves and flowers in shapes Katie had simply never seen. Petals that seemed almost hexagonal, flowers that glistened with semi-transparent bulbs. Trees that towered far above them with golden trunks and purple leaves. The clearing was dirt and flattened plantlife, and it took Katie a moment to realise that it was an impact crater.

It wasn't fair. She was alive, but she was stuck here, now, on this alien rock, with no ship, no radio, no supplies. Nothing but the clothes on her back, and even those had taken damage back on the Indomitable. She had to— to what? Survive here? Impossible.

As impossible as surviving the journey here had been. The competent nightmare that had gotten her here may no longer be with her, but it seemed almost sacrilegious to waste its gift. They may have been enemies, but the loss of a creature like that seemed like something that should have the universe crying out in mourning, no matter Katie's feelings.

She spent a moment digging through the dying leaves and flowers, searching for one that had survived the trip. There weren't many, but she found something in vibrant pink that hadn't gotten too scorched, and tucked it behind her ear.

"I'll remember your name, Thatch. I'll... tell your people what you did, when I get back."

She paused a moment. The first time she'd thought Thatch dead, it had been her words that had woken them up and gotten their attention.

Wind rustled through the area. The carpet of plantlife outside of their clearing swayed gently, while the mighty trees surrounding them stood: diligent protectors in wood and leaf, golden bark almost glittering while the purple leaves far above kept the local star out of reach. Katie looked up, towards the canopy high above, the thick layer of foliage that protected the smaller plants. It had a hole in it, high above them, where a pillar of shattered branches drew out a column from the skies above.

The forces involved boggled the mind. Katie's meager hope that Thatch would have somehow survived fizzled. It didn't matter how much larger than life the creature had seemed, it couldn't fight physics any more than she could.

Katie picked a direction. She neither knew where she was, nor did she have any tools, so it seemed overwhelmingly likely she'd be dead within the day anyway if she didn't do something about it. Priority one was water, and then shortly after that, food. The planet they'd landed on was, by some miracle, teeming with life.

Either a miracle, or life in this universe was cheaper than she'd thought.

The flies implied animal life, but none of it seemed willing to come and say hello. Likely that was for the best, as if anything took issue with her presence here Katie had little with which to convince them to leave her be.

Instead, she walked. She couldn't even find the direction of the sun with the thick canopy above. She was probably just walking in a giant circle for all she knew, but without any way of correcting, it was the best she could do.

She mentally amended her todo list: Water; food; a compass or something like it. How was she meant to build that? She stumbled over a branch, laughing, and rolled her eyes at herself. She could fling a hundred thousand tonnes of stuff across the known universe, but building a compass from scratch? It was magnetics, right? Free-turning metal aligning with the planet's magnetic field. How hard could that be?

It was priority three for a reason.

Eventually, the ground seemed to get swampier. Katie found a stick, something nice and long, abandoned by some helpful tree, and jabbed it into the ground, trying to estimate whether the water table was close to the surface. When she brought it back up, the bottom of the stick was damp. Katie nodded to herself, and kept going, trying to gauge whether any of the directions available to her went down.

After an hour or so of wandering, and several more sticks used, Katie struck gold.

Metaphorically, anyway. The dirty water pooling on the ground before her was worth far more than mere gold. She dropped to her knees and began scooping it up in cupped hands, hastily drinking it down. It tasted foul, but it was water. She'd need a container to bring some with her, and...

A deep growling from behind captured Katie's attention in a heartbeat. She cursed her own stupidity. Where was she more likely to find animal life than at a watering hole? She slowly looked behind her towards the... thing. Like a hog, but a sextruped, with scales instead of fur, and jagged horns jutting from an open, salivating maw with rows of sharpened teeth. Its four eyes were piercing black dots, focussed on her.

Oh, and it was taller than she was. Looked hungry, too.

Katie broke out into a run, splashing through the water as she scrambled to her feet and darted for the trees. It was huge; maybe it wasn't nimble. She heard the thunderous drumbeat of six cloven hooves loud enough that it felt like it was mere inches behind her.

Katie was a spacer. She was lucky that she had any experience in real gravity at all, but she did not have experience with running on such uneven ground, where every step threatened to trip her with unseen roots or have her slip on dampened leaves. She did not have experience with predators. She did not have experience fleeing for her life.

She was nimble, though. She darted left, around a thick trunk, forcing the animal to slow to go around. She darted through a small gap between the trees, where it couldn't follow, and had to take the long way to chase her. She kept ahead of it for what felt like minutes... but gradually, her body began to slow, running out of even the desperate adrenaline-fueled strength that had kept her alive this long.

When she tripped, she knew it was over. Her ankle twisted and she could have sworn she heard a pop. The creature's jagged horn caught her along the arm, sending her spinning, landing in agony facing down what must have been a hundred teeth in a mouth large enough to eat her whole.

Branches cracked underneath its feet as it stalked towards her, realising its victory and no longer feeling the need to run. It lowered its head towards Katie's torso and she squeezed shut her eyes, knowing this was it. Goodbye, world.

The beast screeched, an overwhelming sound that forced Katie to cringe, but also one that was enough of a surprise that she opened her eyes. A blindingly red vine was wrapped around one of the horns, pulling it back with enough force to set the creature off balance.

What now? Katie despaired. Was she to simply be a snack for the bigger fish?

More vines speared out of the darkness, from behind the trees, wrapping around the beast until it couldn't move an inch. They were vibrant, a mix of deep reds and purples, much like the plant life around her.

The beast was dragged away, loudly protesting... until those protests fell silent, and the whole forest was deathly still. What the fuck could do that? Katie struggled to her feet, but her ankle was at very least twisted. Putting weight on it didn't seem like it would work, and her adrenaline was all burned through.

Something walked out of the shadows. Bipedal, tall. Hues of black and red and purple dominated its surface, seeming to draw Katie's eyes upwards, towards the face, with its bright blue eyes.

"Greetings," it spoke, voice a melody. "My name is Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom, and you really are coming with me this time."

Vines that could tie up megafauna snaked out, slowly wrapping themselves around Katie's form and lifting her, gently, into Thatch's awaiting arms. Katie let out a soft whimper as the movement jolted her foot, and a moment later there were new vines keeping it steady and fixed in place. The Affini's face looked down at her, and Katie could tell it was her, though the colouration was completely different now.

She lifted a hand to touch the chin, felt the edges of leaves and how the wood beneath was used to create structure and firmness, that was then wrapped in soft foliage.

"How?" was the only question that seemed to matter.

Thatch looked down with a caring smile and held Katie more tightly. "It's a process called reblooming. The old me dies and is thrown away, and the new me... lives. I didn't have long to do it, since you wandered off, so I had to incorporate a lot of the local life into me this time."

She raised a hand for her own inspection, replacing it with a set of vines without disrupting Katie's position. It was similar to a human hand, but Katie knew it was no such thing. The colours mixed together in a mottled texture of black and purple, with reds only starting to seep in closer to the core, and the face, giving the creature the appearance of almost being clothed.

Across her back lay a curtain of plantlife, almost like a cape, seeming to be the same stuff that was beneath their feet, but repurposed. Snatches of the old green could still be seen closer in to what was apparently the creature's core, but it seemed less like she'd regrown, so much as she'd harvested half her body from the local environment.

Thatch stopped paying attention to her hand and looked back towards Katie. Her vines stiffened for a moment, though whatever her thoughts, they didn't show on her face.

"Let's get you back on your feet," she said, lowering Katie to the ground. Vines wrapped tightly around her leg in the form of a cast, albeit one that trailed back to the creature creating it. Though Katie knew that that vine was strong enough to lift her into the air, it offered no impedance to her movements. She looked back towards the Affini, who glanced away.

"How did you find me?" she asked, stumbling as she tried to walk on her own.

"I knew you couldn't have been gone for more than a few hours, and that puts a pretty small cap on how far you could have gone, little human—"

"I'm serious. My name is Katie," she interjected, stumbling back over to Thatch and jabbing her finger into the middle of their chest. It sunk in for half a centimeter before meeting something solid. The creature leaned back as if pushed, though both of them surely knew that that was a choice they'd made. "You say that you don't want to take away my identity, but you keep ignoring what I want. I— Thank you for saving me, but I'm not going with you. Fuck off, Thatch."

The smattering of deep red leaves that made up Thatch's eyebrows rose in shock, the rest of her face following a moment later.

"The Human Domestication Trea—"

"I don't care about the treaty, Thatch! I didn't sign that. Nobody asked me whether I was okay with it, just like nobody asked me if I wanted to be human in the first place. All my fucking life it's been people telling me that somebody else made choices for me and now I'm stuck with them, and no, fuck off with that, and fuck off with all the implications of that. You say you care? Prove it."

Katie's finger was embedded an inch into Thatch's chest at this point, each vine in its makeup gradually giving way as Thatch had the arrogance beaten out of her. Not that it would matter, she wouldn't apologise. These creatures were so certain of their own superiority that they'd decided that they got to make decisions for the entire human race.

"I'm sorry, Katie," Thatch spoke, softly, raising a hand to gently extract the girl's finger from her chest. "You're right. I got carried away, and I don't really know what I'm doing. You're the first feral huma... the first feral around here that I've dealt with, and you aren't like the florets back on the ship. You are a lot more interesting, but I think not that much better at taking care of yourself. Please come with me, I'll keep you safe."

Katie's next breath was deep, and a little uneven. Safe. She didn't remember much about the descent, or how they'd gotten to the planet, but she remembered feeling like her head was floating on a soft ocean. She'd felt safe then, in Thatch's vines, and now Thatch was... so much more than she'd been before. Knowing what this creature could do, it was hard not to take its promise at face value.

"No," Katie answered, anyway, voice as firm as she could make it, knowing that refusal likely meant her own death somewhere on this rock. She didn't know what a floret was, but from context, she could guess it was what happened to their other captures, and she had no desire to find out more. "You'll take me somewhere I don't want to go because of a treaty I never signed between two peoples that I have nothing to say to. No. I refuse, and if you want to make me, then I know you can, but I'll know that you're a liar."

One of the thorns that made up Thatch's teeth pierced one of the leaves that made up the lips of her mouth. She seemed frozen for a moment, the hues of her face swirling slowly, more red finding its way to the surface, before she figured out how to smile.

"Okay! I understand. I don't think you'll be okay, though, and I have nothing better to do, so can I come with you? We never finished our conversation earlier, I was hoping to teach you how to get us home. I might not be able to do it on my own, and I'd rather not live here for the rest of my life."

Her smile was disarming, and as she'd spoken, her demenour had shifted, losing the sharp edge and speaking more casually, all vines but the one keeping Katie able to walk retracted safely within herself. Coming to her with an offer, not a demand, and admitting fallibility.

"No screwing with my head?" Katie insisted.

"Not unless you ask."

"No pet names?"

"Not unless you want, Katie."

"Then... okay. Equals, or not at all," Katie said, glaring up at the creature's twinkling blue eyes. Why did she get the sense that it was enjoying this exchange? She didn't sense dishonesty in the expression, but at the same time she felt as if there was more going on behind those eyes than she was privy to... but she really did need the help, and the alliance of something that had already pulled her out of the fire once wasn't a small boon.

"Equals," it said, mouth flowing into a grin that, for a snatched moment, seemed all-too-reminiscent of the hog-beast's toothy maw, before softening into something more polite.

Chapter Text

"You drank from this?" Thatch asked, looking vaguely horrified as she dipped a root into the dirty water Katie had been so proud to find. The dirt suspended within was sent swirling, while the thin layer of grime atop it all started gravitating towards her, pulled in by surface tension.

"I did!" Katie replied, both of them being fully aware that the girl's polite smile was a challenge as much as an answer. Was Thatch actually capable of treating her as an equal, or would she immediately revert to a casual dismissal of Katie's capabilities? Given the options Katie had available to her, finding water at all seemed like an achievement.

The Affini hesitated, seeming almost frozen in place with a look of disbelief for a moment, before it met Katie's smile with an equally polite one of her own. "That's very resourceful, Katie. Dirty water is an improvement over nothing, but I think we can do better than this. We'll want to find a river if we can, but for the moment, this—" She glanced down, smile wavering for a moment before she forced it back into place— "will have to do. Now, you can't drink this straight, it's filthy, but if we can filter it, and preferably boil it, it should be safe enough."

Katie's smile grew a little more genuine for a moment, as she considered showing Thatch her trick with the sticks. When she started looking for a prop, however, she was quickly distracted by the other suggestion. Finding some way to filter the liquid made a lot of sense, now that Katie considered it. At the time she'd been rather too excited about finding water at all to consider that it might not actually be safe for her. 'Bad' water wasn't really a thing aboard a starship. If it was water, it was drinkable, because otherwise it would be waste, or coolant, or lubricant. All H₂O as a base, but if it wasn't safe they put it in different places and gave it different names.

"You come from a society even more advanced than mine, how do you know any better than me?" Katie asked, starting to think about how she could actually filter or boil any of this. She'd need a container of some sort first, she supposed? Heat could come from a fireplace, but everything around here was damp and they'd need to make a clearing. Maybe filtering alone would suffice for now?

"Partially, I suppose I've just been around for longer than you," Thatch admitted. "You can't be more than a decibloom and I'm not one of your short Terran years younger than a hundred and three."

Katie had started rummaging around under the carpet of plantlife while Thatch had been talking, looking for rocks or branches or anything that might start being useful as a tool, but at the mention of an age, she looked up. "That's old," she admitted. "Were you, like... a leader or something? Is that why you came after the Jump Drive?"

Thatch's vine was inches away from ruffling the girl's hair, but a sharp glare convinced her to back off. "Hardly, Katie. I'm young among my people, and my exact role in our society is... a topic for another time, perhaps. The real reason I know this and you don't, I suspect, is likely a simple difference of cultural priorities. Taking care of cuties," she continued, noting the sudden glare from below, "and Katies is, I suppose, somewhat of a hobby of ours. Humans may have outgrown the need to forage for containers in the forest, but other wards of ours have not, and so to be Affini is to get a well rounded education in the needs of the universe."

While she spoke, she held out a hand to the side to take something a set of her finer vines had been fiddling with. A nest of supple twigs and leaves wound together tight in the shape of a bowl. She held it out towards whatever it was that Katie chose to be. "A gift, freely given, between friends. I'll use my skills to keep us safe, and you'll use yours in return."

Katie took the item, carefully flexing it between her hands. The twigs were well located and expertly weaved, all positioned such that while the outer shell of the bowl had a few gaps or spaces, the inner part seemed to have a smooth, leafy surface. The craftswork was surprisingly artistic, for something made of whatever could be found at a moment's notice. It looked like it should work.

Katie pulled off the top half of her jumpsuit. It was scuffed and charred anyway, and the planet seemed to have the kind of warm humidity that suggested that she should be just fine with only the thin tee underneath. It took a moment to find a sufficiently large area of clean material to cover over the bowl, but after that she sunk it into the water and waited a moment to pull it back.

She was rewarded with a bowl full of clean, clear liquid that she eagerly gulped down. It still wasn't a great taste, but it was far better than drinking something that had as much dirt and detritus as water. One bowl wasn't enough, though two was too much, so she was quickly left with half a bowl spare. She held it out towards Thatch, in offering, who politely dipped a root within.

"Very resourceful," Thatch praised, with a smile that made Katie wonder if she too were rooted to the ground, unable to move. "I suspect we'll be off-planet in mere weeks, at this rate."

Mere weeks. Katie's face fell. She'd been running on inertia until now, simply due to not having stopped since the fall of the Indomitable, but a guess at a timescale was all it took to bring her back down to earth, or... whatever this place was called.

"Heck," she breathed. "We're gonna be here for a while. I... I don't have any of my stuff, I don't have any medication, I don't—"

The world, as grand as it was, seemed to want to close in on her. The only thing that had kept her going the last year or so had been the knowledge that she was at least finally wrestling control of her body back from the uncomfortable human-male-normal shape she'd been created with, but without medication to maintain that, without tools to stop things from sliding back, what state would she be in in three weeks' time?

At least if she'd surrendered at the start, Thatch had said she'd still get medications. Instead, she'd fucked all of this up, and fought for her own identity only to be the thing that made it fall apart. The changes in her body weren't as significant as she'd wanted them to be, but she couldn't go back. She just couldn't. It would destroy her.

She was staring down at her hands, but she hardly noticed, breathing hard as the pressure of her situation started to bear down on her. She couldn't do this. This was insane. What kind of person would she have to become to get through this alive? It wouldn't be the person she wanted to be, but the person she wanted to be would die here.

She didn't want to die here and suddenly it seemed inevitable. Death by revocation of identity, or death by biological failure. Both were oblivion. She was panicking, she realised, as breaths grew ragged, world shrinking until it was just her and despair... and then Thatch was there, kneeling beside her in the muck with powerful arms wrapped around her torso, hand stroking down the back of her hair, speaking words that were like a lullaby.

Katie couldn't focus. She didn't know what Thatch was saying, it was hard to feel like it could possibly matter. The world wasn't getting any bigger, but Thatch was in here with her now, keeping the void at bay. She didn't know how long the two of them knelt there, but to her credit, the Affini never complained, nor did Katie suddenly find herself unable to think again, at least not because of brain-melting plant trickery.

"Shhh," Thatch was saying, when Katie finally managed to marshal her focus towards vocal processing. "It's okay, it's okay. We're gonna get through this, you and I, and we'll be okay."

Seeming to sense the slow increase in lucidity, Thatch paused, lifting Katie's chin with a finger. "Are you back with me, precious Katie?" she asked, and received a wide-eyed, hesitant nod. "Do you think you could tell me what just happened there?"

Another nod, but more hesitant still.

"Don't wanna... I want to be me, when we get out of here, and I can't be me without things I don't have. Pills, razors, stuff for my hair and the rest of me. I can't leave as... him," she said, hissing the last word. The world seemed to shrink further, and Katie could have sworn that Thatch physically struggled against the contracting void that surrounded them, but with vines sent outwards to stablise, the void couldn't muster the strength to overcome her. Katie struggled to imagine anything that could.

Thatch sighed something that sounded almost like relief, expression softening in an instant, and she stopped holding Katie's chin up and let it fall to nestle against her chest, shifting a hand to hold it carefully in place. Katie caught a whiff of a sweet, floral scent that seemed to stick slightly in her nose. The creature had a low rumbling sound within it, a hint at the ferocity within, but on the outside all was still and serene. Leaves rustled quietly in the wind, but there was a deep warmth to the creature, warmer the closer in to the center Katie got.

"You won't. Let me take care of that, hmn? I need my equal partner in this, and if I can't figure out how to synthesise a few simple hormones then I don't think I'd be allowed back aboard the Elettarium without a few booster classes in Terran biology."

Katie struggled against the hand holding her head down for a moment, until Thatch noticed and removed it, so that Katie could look up. "You can do that? It won't... mess with my head, or anything?"

"Ah, human psychology is easy enough, I think I can make sure it'll leave you clear headed and no different to how it would be if I simply had a stash of your regular drugs. How long do we have before you're meant to take your next dose?"

Thatch was really tall. Easily twice Katie's size, but in that moment, it felt like three or even four times, as her cheeks flushed. "I... forgot to take it this morning," she admitted. "I'm already late."

"Hmn," the creature emitted, more than spoke. The sound just buzzed out from somewhere deep within, a deep rumble that Katie could have sworn she could feel. She might not have noticed, but she was practically nestled against Thatch, to hide from the void. "I don't mind a deadline. I'll get you some by the end of the day, then."

Just like that, the void began to push back, world expanding again as the panic started to filter out of Katie's existence. No longer just her and Thatch, the world once more had trees, and water, and plants, and a family of the great hog-beasts that had been chasing her. Was one of these her assailant from earlier? It was hard to tell, but one of them was clearly larger, leading a charge with two smaller examples of the species.

Wait. Katie's head snapped back towards the beasts.

Katie yelped in alarm, jumping to her feet. "Thatch, look out!" she yelled, moments before noticing the deep red streaks that crossed the space between the Affini and each hog. Vines, held out to hold the beasts still, a vivid colour that stood out against the darker shades around them like a laser beam cutting through the depths of space.

Thatch hadn't been struggling to hold back the void, she'd been struggling to hold back these. Six vines stretched a dozen meters to wrap around horn and jaw, hold legs still and prevent movement. Each seemed to be sleeping, now, but they were still held tight. Three more vines stretched behind her leafy friend, wrapped around the great trunks surrounding them, presumably for stability's sake.

Heartrate slowly slowing, Katie reached out to feel one of the stretched-out vines. It was like steel, no give at all. She could put her whole weight against it and Thatch had no reaction beyond a vaguely amused smile.

Katie stopped playing with the vine, looking away sharply. "I— Okay. Thank you, I appreciate that." She paused to take a deep breath, telling herself to focus, and then knelt by the watering hole to busy herself filling another bowl. "A river next seems like a good idea, and we're going to need something to eat. What... do you need?" Katie asked, voice starting shaken but growing more confident over the sentence. Katie glanced over at the Affini, who looked very much like there was nothing at all she could ever need from anybody.

Thatch stood, vines shifting around her as she maintained control over the beasts surrounding them. Katie knew how firm those grips were, and yet Thatch still walked as if she were unburdened, trading off vines around the local trees to ensure she didn't lose her control. How many of Thatch's mannerisms were simply acting, for Katie's sake, she wondered, if the Affini appeared to walk normally even while under pressures that surely dwarfed the motive force that feet against dirt could provide.

"Water would be good, but I can likely get what I need wherever we find food for you. Life seems quite endemic here, but there's room for another set of roots."

Thatch paused, glancing between the restrained monsters surrounding them. "Do you eat meat, Katie?" she asked, gesturing to the beasts held helplessly before them. They couldn't fight an Affini any more than Katie could, and it was discomforting to realise how comparable their situations were. Katie didn't have immovable vines wrapped around her neck, but even ignoring the one tied tightly around her leg, the easy confidence with which Thatch suggested slaughter was chilling.

"I— No, but... Desperate times?" she asked, trying to swallow her disgust at the idea of surviving only by killing her surroundings. That was the Terran way, though, right? Finding new planets to strip mine and new species to exploit in an ever-expanding shell of endless consumption. Katie supposed, with disgust, that the Affini were doing the same thing, just better.

Thatch seemed relieved, however, vines going slack as she released the beasts. "Oh, good. I was not looking forward to needing to deal with that," she admitted, seeming almost to slump for a moment. It wasn't a very human expression, and Katie was fairly sure she couldn't have her body emulate it if she tried. It was more like Thatch's whole intricate weave had loosened for a moment. "We'll find you something non-sentient to eat, then. We're more likely to find that closer to a river anyway. Let's both drink up, and then set off. Ah, if you think that's a good idea, partner?"

Katie nodded absent mindedly, then paused, and nodded again more confidently. If she wasn't careful, equals or no, it seemed that Thatch's natural confidence would have her effectively in charge regardless, and that would be a dangerous precedent to have set by the time they got back to Terran space.

Well, Affini space, now.

If Katie was going to get out of 'domestication', she had a lot to learn and a lot to plan, and she suspected that turning up on an Affini cruiser as a rescued captive would be much less positive for her than if she were the rescuer, returning a lost soldier.

"Yeah. We need a river, we need to eat. You need to make me drugs, so tell me what you need for that and I'll make sure you get a chance. I'll look for... river signs..."

"Animal tracks, insects, thicker vegetation, that kind of thing. Life will collect around the needs for life, so we can follow it and do the same," Thatch filled in.

"I'll look for those, and we'll get out here," Katie said, as much a promise to herself as to the other. She looked away from the slumbering animals surrounding them, back to Thatch, only to catch the alien looking at her, too. Thatch turned away, focusing on something out of Katie's line of sight.

Katie took a deep breath. She needed this to work. "I don't think either of us could do this alone, but I'll keep you safe, too, Thatch."

Chapter Text

Thatch Aquae—Second Bloom—felt different. Like a new plant. As far as she understood everyone experienced the Reblooming process differently; she hadn't expected to have to find out how hers went quite so early into her lifespan.

Leaving her old self behind and continuing with the new felt like it should have been a more emotional experience, but as soon as Thatch had recovered enough to regain consciousness Katie had taken precedence. The... Thatch wasn't quite sure how to refer to Katie, currently, but finding her missing had been quite alarming.

Alarming, but exciting, too. The florets aboard the Elettarium were almost all completely useless at anything but being cute—though in their defence, they were very good at that. Whatever it was that Katie was, she had something that they didn't. The kind of fire and drive that would lead somebody to run off to dirt knew where on some new and dangerous planet.

Most of the humans Thatch knew couldn't be relied on to dress themselves, and yet here Katie was, charging off towards adventure.

Thatch refused to admit to herself that part of her haste in rebuilding a body was simple excitement at seeing what the girl would be getting up to. It was purely practical, as far as she was concerned, to forgo all reasonable approaches at regrowth in favour of rapidly transplanting every plant she could get her vines on into herself, and growing with whatever nutrients she could absorb, rather than being selective about it and rebuilding herself properly like any normal Affini would do in her situation.

She was going to pay for this, she knew. Transplanting individual flowers was one thing, but half her form was foreign; her vines were stained with local anthocyanins; and nothing sat quite right. That could just be the process of getting used to a new body, but it could also be her natural material rejecting the transplanted material, and in that case things could get ugly. She'd reach Third Bloom by the end of the week, in that case, and that would be embarrassing.

Thatch was roused from her thought by Katie yanking on a vine. She shook her head, dispelling the malaise that had been settling over her, and put her focus on her traveling companion.

Katie was walking a little ahead, ostensibly leading, though she kept glancing back. Thatch walked after, pace languid, leaving plenty of time and opportunity to get lost in thought.

"Yes, Katie?" she asked. The two were walking through the dense forest, in a direction Katie had picked seemingly at random. Thatch was trying to gently guide her into at least not walking in circles, but the curious creature beside her seemed deeply resistant to guidance, and Thatch desperately needed to be subtle. She'd already almost lost control of that particular situation once before, and the last thing she wanted was to drug the poor girl out of her mind until they got home. Katie was the most interesting thing she'd stumbled across in decades.

"I'm not completely sure where we're going," she admitted. Finally. "Do you have any ideas?"

Equality was exhausting, forcing Thatch to carefully lead her ward to solutions rather than simply outright telling her what to do. Surprisingly, it had also been quite fulfilling so far.

"Hmn, well, you had said that finding a river or lake would be most helpful, but we're not quite sure where we might find one. Perhaps if we were to find higher ground or get a better perspective on matters we could look for landmarks, or perhaps there are animal tracks which are being hidden by the undergrowth."

If Thatch was being entirely honest, she was not meaningfully less lost, and it was starting to worry her. As much as Katie needed to find her own way, they did need to find water before nightfall if Katie were to have a good meal before bed.

"Do you have any plant powers that could help here? Can you... talk to the trees, or whatever?" the girl asked.

"I would hardly refer to them as 'plant powers', Katieflower," Thatch deadpanned, "but I believe I can assist, certainly. Would you like to take a look at our location from high above, like a satellite? Alternatively, we could move more quickly if I scouted ahead alone, so that I could lead you to safety."

Had Thatch her usual array of chemicals to hand, she might have been tempted to simply give the poor thing a few choice options. Something to take the edge off of her fears, certainly, not just about herself, but about the danger she seemed to still perceive herself to be in. Any one of a dozen concoctions could build on their growing trust and streamline the process of teaching her that she would be happier if she gave up that independent streak and just let herself be taken care of. Failing even that, it would hardly be challenging to simply instill the chemicals that humans used to form trust bonds manually.

"I don't want you to run off on your own, Thatch, I think we should stick together. How do I see us from above? Is that some kind of technology?" Katie asked, softly shaking her head, but looking up at Thatch like she expected the affini to be able to work magic. If only Thatch felt so confident in herself.

Had Thatch her usual array of chemicals to hand, she would be missing out on the most fun she'd ever had with any of the Affini companion species. Without needing to constantly worry about directly managing the girl's emotional state, Thatch could simply enjoy it. It was almost enough to make one wonder whether they were destroying something, by domesticating so many of the humans, but Katie's actions hardly dissuaded Thatch from her cultural imperative. She would have died a dozen times over by herself already and needed help with everything from eating and drinking to dealing with pests. Not only that, her time in the ex-Terran Accord had clearly been traumatic, and she needed guidance through that, as well. A soft chemical blanket would have been for her own good and Thatch had no doubts she would be able to convince Katie of that if she tried, but selfishly, she was still grateful that that option was unavailable and glad that she didn't have to be the one to shoulder that burden.

Not that she was entirely opposed to seeing Katie given an appropriate set of chemicals—by somebody qualified and worthy. Though the florets Thatch had dealt with before had been ultimately unfulfilling—if cute!—the thought of seeing Katie act the same way, knowing what more she was underneath, and how much more still she could become under a careful hand in an accepting home? It was enough to send Thatch's vines squirming. Katie would make a wonderful pet for somebody who could handle that kind of thing, and perhaps Thatch would visit sometimes, if Katie still remembered her.

"I'm afraid I have about as much access to technology as you do right now, Katie, but we can get a good view the old fashioned way."

As they'd been talking, Thatch's vines had been spreading out around them, snaking beneath the undergrowth, blanketing the area so she was ready to strike. No sooner had her sentence ended than her vines were in motion, curling around Katie, wrapping her tight enough she'd struggle to move and lifting her a little off the ground.

At the same time, others wrapped around the trees surrounding them, and Thatch gave a testing pull, lifting the both of them off of the ground. Perfect. She broke into a storm of motion, bipedal form scattering into a twisted nest of deep purples and blood reds, lashing itself between the trees, heading up, up, up. Faster, faster, faster. Vines lashing to trunks, wrapping around, gripping, and flinging. The wind rushed through her leaves and in mere moments they were reaching the top. When was the last time Thatch had really gotten to cut loose, in the safe utopia of the Affini Compact?

They broke through the canopy in a burst of torn leaves and shattered twigs, Thatch laughing in delight as her longest few vines grabbed onto the tallest trunks and threw her upwards with as much force as they could muster. All the while, she spoke soft reassurances to Katie, regulating her grip to make sure the girl felt the security of being held without feeling too constrained, keeping protective vines curled around her to make sure she was safe from branches and growths.

They sailed through the sky for a long moment, protector and protégé glittering together in the sunlight, clothing and foliage both whipping in the wind, before gravity turned on them and started forcing them back down. Escaping the atmosphere would take a lot more work than this.

Thatch's three best vines shot out, creating for them a rough tripod, nestled against the very tops of the tallest trees she'd been able to spot on their ascent, while she reformed her bipedal body around Katie's.

The human's cheeks were stained almost as red as the vines surrounding her, and as fun as it would have been to engage in a few trust exercises, Thatch didn't want to risk their emerging partnership.

"Getting a good view?" Thatch asked, smiling as innocent a smile as she could manage. It took the girl a few seconds to find her calm, and despite the strength of Thatch's grip it wasn't until she offered another vine for Katie to cling to herself that she started to behave like she wasn't expecting to fall out of the sky at any moment.

"A—Ask before you do that, next time!" Katie complained, hands squeezing around the vine hard enough for Thatch to feel, "but... woah, this is useful, yeah. Do you see, um—" Katie spent a moment shuffling, making sure she had a solid grip with one arm before daring to let go with the other, so she could point— "over there, the trees seem taller!"

Thatch looked, peering into the distance. Surprisingly, while humans were outclassed in most respects by their Affini caretakers, visual acuity was somewhere where they were on a fairly even playing field. It took a moment to spot what she was looking at, but afterwards, Thatch hummed in assent.

"They do. It may also be the... altitude, you said, of the terrain."

Katie tried to twist around to look Thatch in the face, a task with which Thatch was entirely willing to assist. "The ground doesn't have an altitude, it's... altitude is how high above the ground you are. Also, you avoided my question before, about how you learned those words, I noticed, and I still want an answer. If I'm going to go back to your society I want to know more about it, first."

Thatch hummed again, feigning thought, before twisting Katie back outwards and pointing towards a space they could only barely see, where it looked like there might be a gap in the canopy. "That's more likely to be a river than higher ground, I think."

"Thatch."

Katie was prodding at questions Thatch would really rather not answer. There were much better places to start if you wanted an education into the Affini Compact's societal structure. Ones which Thatch was more comfortable speaking on. She gestured over to the gap with a mottled hand. "Perhaps we should head in that direction, Katie? We have much distance to cover if we're to reach there before nightfall. Of course, if you'd allow me to carry you we could make much better time."

"Thatch."

Thatch's center squirmed softly. She could have Katie effectively unconscious—or at least not able to ask difficult questions—in seconds, but then Katie probably wouldn't talk to her again. Wasn't she meant to be the one in charge here? Thatch tried to still the churning mess of plantlife within herself. "I... We could discuss the details of domestication protocol over dinner, tonight? I'll make something nice and hopefully we can create a fireplace. You humans love fireplaces, right?"

Katie was wrinkled by the last sentence, and Thatch felt a stab of guilt. There was a conversation there that needed having, but Katie's sense of self seemed built on such a soft foundation that now really didn't seem to be the time.

"We'll talk now," Katie said, grabbing onto her support vine with two hands and holding tight. "Unless you're going to drop me, you're stuck up here until we decide which direction to go. You haven't been evasive about anything else, and if this is a dirty little secret then I want to know about it before I figure out what I'm going to do once we get back."

The trees surrounding them shook slowly in a light breeze, giving the pair a subtle wavering motion as they hung several meters above the canopy. Thatch's leaves were rustling and squirming, and if she tried to lie to herself she could almost say it was only due to the wind. Almost. Of all the things to learn about the domestication program first, the cotyledons were perhaps the most complicated, ethically speaking. Certainly the last thing that Thatch wanted to discuss. Katie was giving her nowhere to hide, and the Affini cultural norm of drugging the poor thing out of her mind wasn't an option.

"Okay, you win," Thatch sighed. "We'll talk about it, I promise. Can we do so while we're travelling? It may be a long discussion, and I don't want you going to bed tonight hungry."

Katie squirmed energetically enough that Thatch was forced to relent, and let the girl turn to look towards her again. She didn't say anything, she only stared, the implication was clear, and more than a little painful.

"Katie," Thatch said, face falling. "I have not lied to you. I will not lie to you. We will talk about it as soon as you wish, and that can be now, but I would rather prefer us to be traveling again as soon as possible. I know how often you need to eat, and I need some time to gather ingredients of my own."

Her ward's expression softened, and Katie nodded a few times, seeming to relent. "Yeah, okay. That gap over there seems like our best bet. I think it's best if we walk, so take us back down to the surface—slowly!—and then let's talk."

Thatch nodded quietly, mostly to herself. Katie's active hostility seemed to be slipping away, which was surely a good thing. Surely this couldn't lead to heartbreak for the poor thing.

For all her foresight, Thatch hadn't particularly considered how to get down. She supposed it would be like a lesser species raising a foot to walk and then needing to pause before they could set it back again. Moving around simply became second nature, and though this environment wasn't quite what she was used to, it still sported plenty of places to tightly wrap a vine.

Gravity made moving down easy. She had planned to simply let go and catch them at the bottom, but that wasn't slow by any measure. Instead, she had to carefully lower herself beneath the canopy by her three points of stability, so that she could see another set of points to whip vines out towards, and then repeat that process, lowering them a few meters at a time until finally they touched down on solid ground.

Thatch gently leaned down to place Katie's feet against the surface, and the girl took a moment to regain her balance, and seemingly a moment more simply lingering. Building trust was good, but Thatch couldn't help but feel a growing guilt. Humans bonded at an alarming rate, and she had to spend weeks alone with this one. The last thing Thatch wanted was to get Katie's hopes up that she'd be kept. It wasn't that she wasn't interesting, Thatch just wasn't into that kind of thing.

Her guilt wasn't soothed at all by the nature of the conversation they were about to have.

Thatch gave Katie a gentle push in the direction of their travel, and then set off next to her. Walking at human pace felt painfully slow to Thatch, who could move at twice the speed if she were to walk at her natural pace, or ten times if she abandoned the need to be relatable and hauled herself across the forest vine by vine. She could hardly leave the poor thing behind, though.

"So," Thatch started. After a few moments, Katie glanced up at her, motioning for her to go on. "We do our very best to make all of our wards happy, and that means... everything to us, really. We learn all about you. How your bodies work, how your minds work. What you need and what you don't. We eagerly collect information on all the different ways that different ones of you work, so that we can provide individual love and care for every single one of you cuties."

"Uh-huh," Katie said, sounding unconvinced. "Last I checked, you people were ignoring our firm declarations of independence and got both of us into this mess by breaking into the ship I was crew on. That's one hell of an arrogant streak you have going on if you think that's 'caring'."

While they walked, Thatch had a few other tasks to attend to. She was watching out for plants, mostly, hoping to find raw materials that she could synthesise something useful out of. As Katie's sentence reached its end, Thatch focused very hard on these other tasks. She leaned down, plucking a small collection of flowers from the area around, before opening up her left arm to reveal the dense collection of vines and buds within.

With a twist of two fingers, she plucked a few of her 'natural' buds and carefully placed the new flowers in their stead, waiting a few moments while willing her body to try growing into the new matter. She couldn't be sure they'd produce anything of value, but without better analytical tools, grafting them onto herself and giving them the nutrients they needed to try was about her best option.

Thatch glanced back towards Katie. Yes, she was still looking. Thatch turned her head back and busied herself with another set of flowers. She'd graft one of every species she could find if she had to. The botanical gardens back on the Elettarium stored a vast collection of some of the most useful things they'd discovered across a dozen galaxies, so Thatch was unlikely to reach more than a fraction of her prior potential until they got back, but she'd always enjoyed biochemistry and turning herself into a workbench with a lot of different chemicals to combine sounded like a way to pass the time.

Thatch looked back again. Katie was still looking, and looking less than impressed at that. Any other human she'd met would already have gotten distracted by something by now. This was much harder to deal with.

"Yes, it is," she agreed, finally, having exhausted the unique species in their immediate area and thus every available distraction. "But we have a lot of experience doing this and we're right about it. You aren't the first species we've domesticated, we know what we're doing."

Katie, unsurprisingly, didn't seem convinced by that answer. Most of the humans had come quietly, especially once they'd seen how much more capable the Affini were than their previous leadership, but some small number, like Katie, continued to rebel.

It was a problem of information, as far as Thatch was concerned. The truth traveled more slowly than the lies, and on relativistic scales that mattered. No matter how efficiently they distributed correct information about their arrival, it was always preceded by a shell of rumours and mistruths, and by the time the facts arrived some of the most vulnerable had already been taken in by the falsities and twisted against those who only wanted the best for them.

Hence, Katie. She didn't even know why she was fighting, she just was.

It took the girl a few minutes before she figured out a response. Though their forward progress was slow, it did give Thatch plenty of time to really rummage around for new species. She was already starting to find them less regularly, but all across the natural universe's forests, she'd never known any without wonderful biodiversity.

"Don't we get a say, though? Maybe you do know better, but I don't want that. I just want to be left alone until I know what I want, and you won't leave me alone. I don't want you to make me happy, or anything else, I want to figure out who I am. That's all I've ever wanted."

Thatch could feel her core melting, vines squirming in sympathy. Katie wanted exactly what the Affini wanted to give her, and how long had she spent fighting simply due to lack of good information? How much of this could have been avoided? Thatch laid one of her few deep purple vines over the girl's shoulder. "C'mon, come here, you need a hug."

"I don't— Don't domesticate me!" she complained, trying to disentangle herself, unsuccessfully. She needed a hug; Thatch was giving her one. That was the only reason. Everything was fine.

"To my knowledge, there isn't a domicile for light years. I'm not going to domesticate you, Katie, I just want to give you a hug. I think you've had a hard life and I don't want to make it any harder. I'm afraid we can't leave you entirely alone, but we only force anything on anyone if they're a danger to themselves or others. Or, admittedly, if we're certain that it's what they want and they're just playing coy, but if it turns out they really didn't want it we'd stop. I don't think I've ever heard of that actually happening, though. We're the good guys, Katie," she said, with as kind a smile as she could manage, forcing Katie into a hug. Humans were almost uncomfortably easy, just the act of feeling something warm squeezing them released chemicals in their brain that made them happier.

"Mmmngh." Katie squirmed enough to make it clear she was protesting, but not enough for Thatch to feel like she actually wanted out, and that was enough for her. "You're not the good guys. You're... space imperialists."

"Wasn't the Terran Accord a space empire?" Thatch asked, noting that their forward velocity had been cut in half, like this. It was awkward enough that Katie was hardly able to find a stride, but it seemed important to comfort her.

"They weren't the good guys either. I dunno. I don't think I believe in good guys or bad guys? It's reductive, reality doesn't work like that. The Terrans forced their rules on me, and so are you. Everyone has their skeletons."

Thatch blinked, expression shifting to one of gentle concern, lifting Katie's chin with a finger and giving her full attention. "Darling, I don't know what you've heard, but we're descended from something much closer to plants on your worlds. Our limbs are a choice. No skeletons." she said, extending an arm and waggling it, letting it bend in places a bone never could.

She'd expected relief, or possibly discomfort at watching a humanoid shape behave so inhuman, but instead Katie began to convulse. Thatch's expression twisted into a concerned frown in an instant, as she brought up one of her natural flowers to the girl's face, ready to calm her down and settle her body at a moment's notice, but... no, this wasn't a panic attack. What was—

The convulsions finally spilled out into a few moments of bright, clear giggling as Katie fought for breath. "It's a saying, hon. It's not... literal skeletons! It means, uh... to have skeletons in your closet is to be hiding something bad, I guess? Some secret that they don't want you to know about."

Katie's face grew more serious, and she shot Thatch a pointed glare. "Like your cotyledons."

Ah. That.

Thatch looked away. How quickly could she get this part over with? Surely a good, succinct explanation would convince Katie to stop pushing? "We don't... broadcast it, but they're not in our... closets, Katie. The cotyledons are... the first of you." Thatch could feel the stiffness in her limbs, the hesitance in her expression and the flat affect to her voice that suggested she was struggling to maintain her form. She wasn't sure why. Everything was fine. "Our first attempts at figuring you out, figuring out how to work with your bodies. Figuring out how to help you, and we don't always get it right straight away. There are so many of you in so many different shapes and sizes, and..."

Thatch looked away. Not saving everyone wasn't a personal failing, she knew. That hadn't mattered for the last fifty years, why would it matter now?

Katie's look could be predicted, at this point. Thatch didn't need to actually see it. "So why are you so hesitant to talk about this?" the girl asked. "If you're gonna tell me that you all know what you're doing and I should be happy to surrender, then you have to back that up with some evidence, Thatch. What is a cotyledon?" Katie asked, voice seeming to hammer into Thatch's very center.

"We don't always... get it right st—straight away. I know that must hurt to hear, but there are some within the Compact who will likely never think another thought in their lives. They're happy! All of them! But... they're not the best versions of themselves, and—"

Thatch's attention was attracted by a sharp pull on one of the many vines making up her torso. Katie was looking up with a concerned frown of her own. Why wasn't she more horrified? Thatch could feel her core slowing down as a familiar blanket of aimless frustration began to bubble up. She didn't want to be having this conversation. She didn't want to be here. She had better things to do. She had more important things to do. She had... apologies she could never make.

"And..." she tried to continue. "There's just so many things that can go wrong," she breathed. "So many ways a body and mind can break. So many mistakes that can be made, before we know how it all works, that you can't take back."

Thatch tried to focus on the forest that was really around her, not the sterile walls of an Affini medical unit. Not the machine beeping in one corner. Not the figure lying on the bed in the room's center. Not the— Was Katie saying something?

Ah, they'd stopped moving altogether now, Thatch realised. She had no memory of dropping to her knees, but that was exactly where she was. No wonder Katie seemed concerned. Thatch was fine, though. Everything was okay. She just had to get up and keep on going.

"Hey," Katie said, struggling her way out of the Affini's grasp. That was absolutely something one of their wards should be able to do. Nothing was wrong. "Thatch, eyes on me." Everything was fine. Everything was fine. Everything was—

Thatch recoiled, more in surprise than any kind of actual pain, as Katie slapped her, forcing her attention back to reality as the girl cried out in pain, with a bloody gash across her palm. Oh, dirt and roots, she shouldn't leave thorns pointing outwards like that, but this body was so new she didn't know where they all were yet. All of a sudden, Thatch was dragged back into reality, where it was just her and Katie deep within a dark forest.

"Oh, clod, I'm sorry, Katie, let me get that for y—"

The girl recoiled, pulling backwards with her face twisted in pain, cradling her now-bleeding hand in the other, teeth gritted. "Nope, nope, this was my bad, I don't know why I thought that was a good idea, by the goddess you're sharp. This isn't going to drug me, is it? I think I can feel my thoughts going already."

"That's probably just shock, you wouldn't be talking otherwise. Please, let me at least clean it," Thatch said, reaching within her chest to grab the tall weave of twigs and leaves they'd filled with water before leaving the source Katie had found. She held out a hand towards Katie. If she kept her focus on the moment, it was almost like the previous conversation hadn't happened. "Please?" she asked, using a supporting vine to keep her own hand from shaking.

Katie acquiesced, allowing her Affini guardian to tend to the wound. Thatch's thorns were new, and very sharp, and so while the wound was alarmingly deep it was at very least a clean cut. It should be stitched together, but they lacked the materials for that. Wrapping it in leaves and tying them tightly on with the stems of some local plants was about the best they could do on short notice.

As they began to travel again, the silence that stretched between them was sharper than any thorn. Katie seemed to move to speak several times, but never quite managed. They had a long way to go before the end of the day and the journey was only just beginning.

Chapter Text

They'd been walking for what felt like hours. Katie's attempts to restart the conversation had been met with a few words in response at best. More often, a grunt or simple silence. It was hard to tell how long it had truly been, as she couldn't even see the sun's trail through the sky. It must have been a while, though. Katie's feet almost stung with the pain of it, and her legs had wanted to give out long ago.

All this, to crawl along the surface of a single rock. How far had they really gone? Would it even have taken the Indomitable a whole second to travel what was taking them a day?

Katie tripped over something hiding beneath the undergrowth and stumbled to her knees. She reached out to catch herself with a hand but the stabbing pain that shot through it reminded her why she was supposed to be keeping that hand safe.

Thatch was on her in a moment, the long silence between them finally broken by an exclamation of concern.

"Oh! I'm sorry, Katie, I was lost in thought. Let's get you back on your feet," Thatch said, carefully wrapping a pair of vines around Katie's body so she could be lifted and held upright. With one vine still curled tightly around her pained foot and two more holding her up, Katie felt like she was being puppeted... but that was a price worth paying for getting her conversational partner talking again.

"It's okay, Thatch. You're not responsible for every bad thing that happens to me," Katie insisted, gently poking the leaves wrapping her injured hand and wincing. Two more, smaller, vines wrapped around her wrists to hold them apart, and though Katie's struggles couldn't get her free of them, a pointed glare could.

The affini replied to that with a wry smile and something broadly approximating a shrug. It was more like a rippling motion through her upper body, but it got the point across. "Perhaps not, but I am responsible for missing the debris that tripped you," she admitted, gesturing to the forest around them as a dozen minor vines poked up from beneath the undergrowth, before returning to the shadows beneath.

Katie followed one of them, intentionally going down to one knee, so she could lift the leaves of one of the plants keeping the ground beneath out of view. From this angle it was easier to spot what was going on. Hidden beneath Thatch's thick cape of foliage were many vines, ranging from a centimeter in thickness to perhaps an inch and a half, spiking down against the ground, where they scattered in every direction. Thatch continued walking for another few steps, so Katie could see the way the vines trailed behind her, not even disturbing the plants around them, before eventually getting pulled back in and replaced when they were too far behind.

"Is this what you've been focussed on?" Katie asked, glancing up at the center of all this hidden activity. Katie had thought the affini was moping, though in all honesty she lacked the knowledge to assume that they were even capable of such a thing. Their bodies weren't truly comparable to anything even remotely human, why would their minds be?

In a second of rapid motion every vine retracted. Maybe two seconds. It was fast. Several held small clumps of what looked like flowers or leaves, others were empty. The plantlife was delivered to one of Thatch's hands, and after that the long, powerful vines seemed to just join with the rest of her body, somehow finding room.

"Are you hollow in there, Thatch?" Katie asked. "Where do those go?"

Thatch had seemed to like explaining things, at least so long as Katie stayed away from sensitive subjects. Despite everything, Katie found herself sympathising. She apparently wasn't the only one on this planet with baggage.

Why wasn't Thatch answering her questions? She was busying herself with something. Pressing flowers into her arm? She was stood at her full height, easily twice Katie's size, and whatever she was paying attention to was out of Katie's line of sight.

Katie set her jaw. "Thatch!" she snapped. "Will you pay attention to me?"

Nothing. After a moment, the creature began walking onwards. The vines around Katie began to grow taut, and she was forced to follow or be pulled along besides. Was this the same creature as had come from beyond the stars to so effortlessly destroy her ship, and then save their lives from certain death? Katie needed that helping her if she was going to survive here, not the aloof thing currently walking away from her.

Thatch was acting exactly like the propaganda said they acted. Uncaring, other than appropriating the aesthetic of loving support in order to trick people into willing surrender. Katie had believed in that propaganda a night ago, but that was before Thatch had at least convinced her that it was a real, sapient, individual. If Thatch had been human, Katie would have thought she'd seen this before. What struggling person on the outskirts of humanity wasn't familiar with getting stuck inside of their own head?

Katie grumbled as she hurried to catch up. If she pushed herself, her foot still hurt, and her hand was still pained from the fall. All in all, not a terrible set of injuries given their situation, but certainly not convenient. She caught up with Thatch in just a few moments, and then reached out to grab onto the curtain of leaves at her back.

At closer inspection, it was a mix of several things. It wasn't actually wholly undergrowth, though the hexagonal leaves of the plants around them did feature heavily. There was also a tight latticework of smaller vines, some of which bore sharp thorns facing in towards Thatch's main body, binding the whole thing into a single cohesive sheet. There quite a few leaves with jagged edges, like the ones closer in to Thatch's center, mixed in with the straighter blades of this planet's flora. Most of them were stained with the same small set of colours, matching the plantlife around them, but it was easy to tell where natural Thatch ended and harvested material began. She seemed to have an awful lot of harvested material.

The criss-cross of vines made it easy for Katie to work her fingers in and pull. Getting a foothold was a bit harder, as the vines were too close and tight to pull that far apart, but if she tried a few times she could find a place where leaves gave her some purchase. The next handhold was harder, given that she needed to use her injured hand to get it, but so long as she didn't hold on too tight with that it worked.

Over several moments, she alternated between hand and foot, climbing steadily until she could get a hand onto Thatch's shoulder and haul herself up. Her footing faltered and she almost fell, but a vine shot out from beneath the curtain to give her the purchase she needed to finish her climb.

Thatch's arm was half open. It was hollow inside right now, but mostly because the vines that looked like they would usually be nestled within were instead poking out, arrayed before them. These weren't the thick, powerful kind of Thatch's outer shell, but instead dozens, maybe even hundreds of fine strands of green and greenish-yellow, each tipped with something. A flower only just starting to bloom, with what looked like a sharp needle spiking up from the middle of the rounded leaves. Buds in reds and purples. A few that switched abruptly from green along the vine to the darker shade of the hexagonal flower attached. As Katie watched, another bud was twisted off and discarded, replaced by one of the flowers harvested.

Huh. That was kinda cool, and utterly irrelevant. Katie reached around to grab Thatch's face and forcibly twist her head around, so she could be looked in the eyes. Katie didn't imagine she could have done it if Thatch had been willing to resist, but she was hardly responsive, never mind resisting.

"Do you know what a trigger is, Thatch?" Katie asked, looking Thatch straight in the eye and refusing to let her glance away.

"Yes," the affini eventually, begrudgingly, responded. "A trigger is something several of our companion species sometimes experience. Some event, word, or stimulus that causes intense recall of trauma. If you have any, I assure you that any caretaker you choose or are assigned would become intimately aware of them and help you avoid experiencing that."

Katie rolled her eyes. She was fine. "Your companion species, huh?" she asked, struggling to climb a little further upwards. "Put a vine here, would you?" she asked, reaching out to a space that would be a very helpful handhold if it was anything other than empty air. By the time her hand was there, so was a vine. They repeated that dance a couple times, until Katie managed to get herself settled, sitting around Thatch's neck, supported by a handful of vines to the back and resting her crossed arms atop the creature's head.

She pointed forward. "C'mon, we have a long way to go today. Mush."

Katie took a deep breath, then continued. "Thatch, you basically shut down when we started talking abou— Before. You've been ignoring me for hours and the only times you've paid me any attention were if I was getting hurt. Does that sound like you're behaving normally?"

"I... have had a lot on my mind," the creature admitted. From her position up here, Katie could feel the rumbling voice through her whole body. It was a loud, low drawl that was almost, but not entirely unlike any accent she'd heard a human speak. Perfectly intelligible, even musical, but clearly not from around here.

"Tell me about it," Katie insisted. "What have you been thinking about for the last however long it's been?"

"I... I've been collecting a lot of these plants," Thatch explained, still busying herself with their installation. "I think I have about enough that I can probably start to synthesise something useful for you. I'll need a few attempts, I expect, and it won't be as good as what I'm used to, though I suspect still better than whatever primitive medications you have subsisted on so far."

"Okay, and? It's been a while and you're very clever, right? I've seen you moving around, I know that walking this slowly must be agonising for you. You orchestrate all these vines like it's nothing, it obviously doesn't take your full concentration. What else have you been thinking about?"

"I— I've been watching for things you might trip on?"

"Poorly."

From her position perched atop, Katie could quite easily feel the ripple running through Thatch's body in response. She dropped an inch or two in height, vine lattice pulling together more tightly. Katie almost felt bad for her.

"I don't know what I've been thinking about," Thatch finally admitted. "I don't want to talk about—"

Katie cut her off, hands moving to cover Thatch's mouth. "Hey, shush. We don't have to talk about anything you're not ready to. What was it you said, any potential caretaker would get to know your triggers intimately? Let me take care of you here too. Equals, remember?"

They were moving forward through the forest at a much faster pace this way than they had before. Even distracted, Thatch's legs were simply twice the size of Katie's, her stride was naturally longer. If Katie risked twisting around to look behind, she could see the vines below still spiking down into the undergrowth, presumably still sweeping the surface for raw materials, though likely no longer looking for things that would trip Katie. That job had switched, she noted, as a vine snapped out to break off a twig that would otherwise have scratched Katie's face as they walked.

"That is not usually how that works, Katie. Affini do not have caretakers," Thatch replied, voice a little closer to her prior effortless arrogance. That was probably a good sign in some ways, though not very useful right now.

"Oh, well I'm glad to hear that the human race was conquered by another species that refuses to admit that they need therapy. That'll really help."

Thatch's greenery squirmed uncomfortably. It felt like all of her vines were pulling in different directions at once, and Katie felt momentarily nauseous, sitting meters above the ground atop something that squirmed. Thankfully, it wasn't something she had to experience for long.

"Please do not judge my entire people based upon my sole example," Thatch said, voice once more quiet, almost strained.

"Then don't judge me based on my people, Thatch. Think we can both treat each other like individuals, here? I'll admit that your problems don't reflect on the Affini if you admit that humanity's needs don't reflect on me."

The predatory plant from beyond the stars let out a long, slow sigh, shoulders slipping. "I— Okay. You're probably right, I don't like talking about—"

Katie cut her off again. "We're not talking about it. It's okay. You're going to tell me about things you are comfortable with. Try to sell me on your deal. Don't say the decision's already made, don't say that I signed a treaty. Tell me what I get out of this; tell me what you get out of this. Ideally. Ignore the hard parts."

Thatch's vines suddenly curled around Katie's torso, then pulled her around up front, so Thatch could look at her with a bemused expression. Katie shrugged back. "I doubt I'm gonna take you up on it, yeah? But... I've had some friends who were struggling and getting them to talk about things they're enthusiastic about helps, sometimes. Put me back on your shoulders and look where you're going, though, if you trip I have a long fall down."

Katie was settling back in to her prior position when Thatch began to speak again. "Our 'deal', as you put it, is extremely straightforward, but I suspect that you'll need a longer retelling if you're to believe me. We are a very old species. We were exploring hypermetric theory while humanity, adorable menace that they were, were figuring out how to bang rocks together to make a spark. We figured out how to make ourselves nearly immortal long, long before there was meaningful human civilisation."

Thatch threw her hands forward, twin vines sent hurtling into the distance to spike into two distant trees. The pair was pulled forward at twice the speed they'd been going before, more vines sent searching for more handholds to maintain their new pace.

"And at that point, Katie, a spacefaring civilisation must stop and ask why they are still doing this. We were siphoning power from our galaxy's central black hole, skimming matter from a thousand stars. Our society had already moved beyond the kind of barbarism yours portrays in ages past, but with near unlimited resources and power we were forced to answer the question of what it was that we actually wanted to do, with all our limits removed.

"At the same time, those around us were not so fortunate. They suffered and hurt, while lacking the wisdom to use any gifts of technology we could have granted them. Think what would have happened had we granted the Terran Accord even a single warship? You would have had tyranny."

Katie could feel the wind in her hair. She clung tight to the two vines Thatch had set at her sides, holding on. If she pushed the left vine left, Thatch didn't seem to mind shifting her path, and so while her steed talked, Katie tried to keep them moving in the right direction.

"Katie, we are a precursor race that is far older than yours, and you cannot take care of yourselves. We have literally nothing better to do than to bring happiness to the universe."

Katie pulled back on the vines, slowing their travel. It was still fast. "Happiness at your heel?"

Thatch slipped, and they veered dangerously off to one side, almost crashing into one of the gigantic trunks they were travelling past so quickly. It didn't take long for her to recover, but Katie could hardly fail to miss that her own suggestions were utterly ignored when they were actually in any danger.

"Not at my heel, but in principle, yes. We have more experience at making you happy than you do. We have more resources to make you happy than you do. We will do a better job, and this is the best way. If maintaining independence actually made any of our companion species happier, then they would be independent. Of the quadrillions of life forms we take care of, the number who resisted at any point is a rounding error, mostly focused around the new species that don't understand what we are offering."

They were speeding back up now, and Thatch let Katie guide. She tried to steer them straight into the biggest tree she could spot, and, of course, was not allowed.

"Now, see, Katie, this is what I mean. Independence is a self-destructive, futile urge that you will be happier without. If you can manage those urges yourself then you will not be forcibly domesticated. Please behave, I don't want to have to do that any more than you want it done."

Katie recoiled, as if stung, feeling her heart start to beat faster and louder until it threatened to drown out the wind. Her grip on Thatch's vines grew tighter and tighter until her knuckles were stained white. The sensation of rapid deceleration had her crying out in alarm, suddenly back aboard the Indomitable, hearing the crack of a dying engine and the roar of fire burning up all the oxygen onboard. She felt the heat of combustion against her skin and chill metal against her back. She was going to die. Nobody survived a situation like that.

In a moment, she realised all that she had thought had happened had been nothing more than broken fragments of dreams, caught in the instant the collision had knocked her unconscious. She was going to die. She was—

She felt a pinprick on the side of her neck. A rushing warmth spread out from the point, leaving her skin tingling. Her panic didn't vanish, not really, but like the escape pod had burst free of its dying mothership, Katie burst free of the visions she'd been trapped within. She gulped down a desperate breath, feeling the now-familiar hot and wet air that, at least in that moment, was like a salve. She felt Thatch's arms around her chest, squeezing just a little tighter than was comfortable. She smelled Thatch's gentle aroma, something sweet and tangy, but too subtle to detect outside of the shortest of ranges.

"Did you... drug me again?" Katie asked, feeling a spike of fear that faded away in an instant. She should be more afraid of that. This was literally how she was going to end up down their mines, and she couldn't be afraid of it? Katie focused, stoking her fears, and her breathing sped back up, heartrate rising, eyes going wider.

Thatch raised one of those flowers she'd seen earlier. The ones with the thin and sharp needle nestled between the petals. Threatening, if that was the word for somebody poised to calm you down whether you wanted it or not. Katie shook her head. "Just— Just making sure I can still be scared," she admitted, letting her efforts lapse. The fear slipped away. "We said no messing with my head, Thatch, what the hell."

Man, she should have been angrier. She couldn't get mad. That was inconvenient. Thatch kept saying that she didn't want to domesticate Katie, but wasn't this the first step? Katie grabbed at the threatening flower and turned it away. Whatever this was, it wasn't the concoction she'd been under the first time, that was for sure. She could still think.

Thatch nodded. "Yes, we did. I apologise unreservedly. Firstly, for a mistimed... let's call it a joke, on my part, and secondly for dosing you without your permission. I'd like to promise to do better on the first, and I hope you agree that the second was necessary. You were having a panic attack, Katie. I don't think that anything I can synthesise here will be nearly as effective or as targeted as what we have available on the Elettarium, but I'm hoping you'll tell me that this is as effective as I had hoped, and that you agree that it was necessary."

Katie considered that. Her thinking was remarkably clear. Her mind was quiet in a way that made her realise how unquiet it usually was, filled with anxieties and doubts. She could still fear or panic if she tried, but... why would she try? This was technically a violation of the promise she'd had Thatch make, but something like this was hardly what Katie'd been thinking of when they'd made it. On the other hand, she could feel the terror bubbling underneath that thought, that she was okay with this having been done to her because this had been done to her.

"I... don't know that I can make that decision like this, Thatch, I'm... altered. I'm not me. That's terrifying, or it should be terrifying. I can't tell you this was okay."

One of Thatch's needles came back up to rest against Katie's neck. She stiffened, face twisting in concern.

Thatch's hand stroked through her hair, with a few moments of soothing noises, before continuing in soft tones. "I have a counteragent right here. I'll apply it now, if that's okay, and then you can decide whether I have violated your trust."

"No!" Katie exclaimed, hand moving to pull the vine away before it could penetrate her. "N—No, I— Can I keep this a little longer?"

Thatch's face wasn't visible, as Katie was being held too close to the being's chest, but she could feel Thatch's body freezing up for a moment, vines going stiff. What had been a comforting hug felt, for a brief instant, like a prison. Katie couldn't manage to be afraid of that either. After a moment, Thatch spoke. "You can," she replied, taking a moment longer to run her faux fingers through Katie's hair. "Only for a little while, though. It's a little toxic. Not in a bad way, but I'll want it out of your system within a few hours and then you'll need plenty of rest."

Thatch paused, warm hand resting atop Katie's warm head. "I... don't think it would be fair of me to continue our talk about domestication while you're like this."

Katie shook her head as best she could, between the hand in one direction and the chest in another. "I'm not scared of you. You're just like me; broken and... people. Or... I don't like that word. 'People'. You're whatever I am."

Thatch's vines wriggled, a brief callback to the uncomfortable moment before. She pulled back, lifting Katie's chin with a vine to make sure she was paying attention. "Katie, you are in an altered state of consciousness and I'm already worried you're going to be mad at me when you stop. Please don't say anything that you'll reg—"

Katie cut her off again. "Shuuuuuuuuuuuut it, plant," she droned back, reaching out to try to cover Thatch's mouth. "Get me back on your shoulders and keep going. Can I drive?"

"Absolutely not. Your self-preservation instinct is likely somewhat impaired right now, and—"

"I said shut it, plant!" Katie replied, glaring up. She didn't feel aggressive, but she wasn't scared, either. She couldn't really think of any negative consequences of being forceful here.

Thatch groaned, muttering something under her breath before uncurling from around Katie so she could stand, and then lifting the girl to her back. "Didn't we agree no pet names?"

"You agreed no pet names; I made no such promise." Katie insisted, grabbing two vines and pushing them both as far forward as she could reach. "Be more careful what you agree to next time."

Thatch sighed, and began to move, picking up speed fairly rapidly, though not quite to the degree that Katie was demanding. "I shall bear this in mind next time I attempt to compromise with you, human," she replied. Her natural drawl was already quite dry, but Katie thought she was starting to understand her mannerisms enough to read the sarcasm.

Katie fell silent. She could feel the fear and loathing bubbling underneath her mind, but it felt distant. It let her know how she should feel about things without forcing her to actually experience it. It was... convenient. She could get more introspection done in five seconds like this than she could in months without. Katie slowly pulled back on the control vines. She wasn't really sure why, Thatch seemed perfectly capable of conversing at high speeds, but the trees rushing past were distracting and her focus did seem easier to lose track of like this.

"I don't think I like that word very much," Katie pondered. "It's weird, that idea is scary, but I don't really get why? I don't want to be human. I know I have to be, but I never asked to be, and it hasn't really brought me anything good. Are humans... good, Thatch? You've met other species. What are we like, relative to them?"

The creature that she was riding wasn't just a non-human life form, the way it spoke suggested that it knew many. Surely humanity was uniquely fucked?

"You are unique in a lot of interesting ways. You are pack animals, and so I suspect that as time goes by, humanity will spread throughout the Compact less than some other species, preferring to stick near other humans. You make some very cute noises when you're confused,—"

"No, no," Katie interrupted. "The— The politics, the societal problems! The fascism! The way we, we, we just find things and strip-mine them, or how our best minds waste their time finding new ways to lock citizens into traps of debt or circumstance! How we— We destroy everything, in an ever-increasing sphere of exploitation until something breaks! Like it did when we ran into you!" Katie half-shouted, feeling her heart beat harder. Her emotions were harder to make stick, but apparently she was still capable of it if she tried.

"Oh, that's distressingly normal," Thatch replied, without breaking stride. "I'd say... sixty percent? Some are better, some are worse. Humanity is pretty average."

Katie pulled a face, pouting into the wind. That didn't make the subtle sensation of fear unfelt any calmer. She'd spent her life resenting humanity for what it had done to her, and then to hear that most of the universe was like that? It was... heartbreaking on a scale she'd never before imagined. With the fear not distracting her, it was so sad she could have cried... except that that was a strong emotion too, and she seemed incapable of it without great effort.

"Are there any that were good?" she asked, voice quiet. Was the universe really as cruel as she feared?

"Oh, yes, many. The species before yours, for example. They were wonderful negotiators who seemed to truly believe they could find common ground with any sapient life," Thatch explained, while letting Katie steer her around a tangled group of fallen trunks.

Katie noted the past tense. Did they make good miners?

"What happened to them?" she asked.

Thatch emitted a questioning "hm?", before realising what Katie was really asking. "Oh, we negotiated. Once we figured out their language, which was a bit of a tricky one, we met up, came to an agreement, and offered them a place with us. They accepted. Many of them came with us, some stayed behind with our unconditional support and access to our resources. One of the clerks aboard the Elettarium is one."

"What are they called?" Katie asked, gently pushing the vines forward again. She couldn't see the sun, but it did feel like it was getting darker, and a little colder. Maybe evening was coming for them faster than they'd hoped.

Thatch let out a short laugh. "Oh, I couldn't even begin to pronounce it. I have never been close with the one aboard, but if you wish, I'm certain you could organise a conversation with her once we get back."

Thatch's vines were a blur at this point, launching out four or five at a time to find strong places to anchor against. It was difficult to tell whether they were always suspended by enough vines to be stable, or whether they were being flung through the thick woods one tree at a time. Strangely, Katie didn't feel the fear beneath her waking mind that she might expect, even if she went looking, despite the inherent danger to her situation. They were moving so fast that she certainly wouldn't survive a crash, shouldn't she be afraid under her comforting chemical blanket? Why wouldn't she be?

"Okay," Katie replied. The idea of getting back to the Affini ship was still terrifying, as it should be, but a distant fear. It could be dealt with later. "Hey, Thatch, I don't want the last things I got to choose on my own to be something that was forced on me because I'm human. I know that your treaty probably uses human as... biological, or a political construct, or something, but... does it have to apply to me?"

Thatch was silent for long moments, or as silent as she could be while moving at speeds that should have felt reckless. The bright red streaks that blurred around her cut through the air with an audible crack, and even the ones coming back landed with a thump. Eventually, though, she did find an answer.

"If it were up to me, I would suggest that it does not, but I think that is a matter that would need to be decided by a larger group. It could have... consequences. I would be willing to advocate on your behalf to the Elettarium board of domestication, however. I would reiterate, though, that that would be primarily an academic distinction, the Human Domestication Treaty primarily exists to define the rights and protections humanity receives. No sapient creature would be turned away simply because its government had not yet signed a document."

Thatch gently slowed to a stop over the course of several seconds, before lifting Katie from her back and placing her on the ground to one side. Katie frowned, looking up at the face high above.

Thatch continued regardless. "However, the local governmental board for this system is, I suspect, me and me alone, and so I'll grant you a reprieve in this space. If you would like, I can also organise your official retreat from the human race, politically speaking, at least for the meantime."

Katie looked away, focusing on anything else. She could feel her fear broiling, and though it was a distant emotion, it threatened to break through if it got any worse. "Why... did we stop? Is something wrong?"

"Oh, no, we've arrived," Thatch announced, brushing a leaf against Katie's hand as she set into motion. Katie stood, confused, until the cast around her leg threatened to pull her along, and she was forced to follow. In moments, they came to exactly what they'd been looking for. A river, what must have been ten meters wide of fast flowing water.

Katie gasped, pointing as what looked much like a school of fish leaped from the surface. Bright blue, with an angular shape and no clear fins, they spiked out of the glimmering water to hang in the air for a long second, before crashing down.

The water sparkled with the dying embers of the day. The canopy high above broke when it reached the water, with no trees to sustain it, letting the system's star shine down upon them. Evening was here. That said, Katie had no idea how long the days on this planet were. For all she knew, they had hours yet before the dark took them. Alternatively, they could have minutes.

Katie turned to Thatch, nodding mostly to herself. She took a moment to try to remember their plan. She needed to be confident and caring, if she was to have anybody believe that she'd contributed to their rescue. "Okay, looks like we're here. We need food and shelter. How about I go gather some firewood and see if there's anything we can build with, and you see if you can find any food, and then we regroup?" Katie suggested, taking a moment to experimentally wiggle her foot, finding it usable enough on her own.

Thatch seemed to struggle for a moment. Every time it happened, Katie got a better understanding of her mannerisms. Where a human might have looked conflicted, here Thatch simply froze in place, if you were looking at anything a human might express themselves through. What Katie should be looking at, however, was the way that the floral latticework of Thatch's body softly quivered, or the way that the dense mass of plantlife at her center seemed to gently buzz. A moment of indecision, internal conflict that stole enough attention away that she stopped consciously reflecting her emotions onto her body, and fell back to the expressions she wasn't putting on for Katie's benefit.

The affini nodded, retrieving the vine that had formed Katie's cast, smiling down. "Be good, Katie. If you meet anything, call for me. I don't care if it looks harmless, you aren't a good judge of that right now. Don't go far, either. Stay where I can hear you if you call and I'll be there in a moment if you do."

Chapter Text

As the sun sank the shadows grew braver, blanketing the land inch by inch. Though the canopy high above had always seemed dark it was only through contrast that Katie could start to learn what the night would bring. The leaves high above were losing their colour, shifting from a detailed web of plums, purples, and violets—with perhaps the odd flash of mauve—to a sheet of black.

As the light above died the forest below seemed to grow more confident. Insects that had been hiding beforehand began to buzz, crawling out of nests nestled in burls of golden bark or from under the rot of fallen logs. Katie let out a short gasp of surprise as a school of softly glowing creatures took to the air, streaming out from behind a tree to swirl around one of the many flowers surrounding them.

Those too had come to life. Semi-transparent bulbs nestled between hexagonal leaves had been ever-present on their journey, but now the day had reached its end their purpose was revealing itself. Each was a tiny pinprick, either only visible now that the sun was acquiescing to night, or that the forest only truly came to life when it no longer needed to fear the light.

Katie knelt, running her hand along the undergrowth while watching the way the glowing plants shifted at her touch. It was beautiful. The forest had seemed almost static before, as if the only life around were her and Thatch, but it was proving quite the opposite.

The plants reacted to her presence, like this. Perhaps they always had, but it was simply more noticeable now. The glowing ones seemed to subtly lean in towards her from further away than she would have thought possible. As Katie moved between the trees the plants around her turned to look, though on closer inspection they had no more reaction than that. The insects too responded to her presence, albeit by scattering.

Katie made her way back towards the river, only to pause in amazement as she came upon it. The flow was fast and undulating, with regular sprays sent crashing away from rocks set throughout or against the banks to each side. It left a mist in the air and through that mist shone the lights of the forest, a thousand thousand twinkling points.

She had been walking for too long. Her foot was starting to hurt again, so she shuffled closer to the river and sat at its side, letting her legs dangle out above the water. She risked the occasional few droplets of spray, but she couldn't complain about the view. The strange cylindrical fish she'd noticed before still played, leaping from the water in large arcs, but now their purpose was made more clear as they snatched some of the glowing bugs out of the air into their large, open mouths. For a moment the glow could still be seen within, giving the fish an otherworldly look.

Appropriate, Katie supposed. She was certainly the first member of her civilisation to set foot here. Likely, her and Thatch were the first sapient life to ever get to appreciate the beauty around them. It was almost enough to make her feel lucky to be here.

Almost. The panic settled deep in Katie's stomach was trying quite hard to get her attention. It was distant and easy to ignore thanks to the soft chemical blanket that had been wrapped around her, but the knowledge of how she should be feeling still tainted the surrounding beauty.

The sound of a branch's crack from behind roused Katie's curiosity. She leaned backwards, lying on the floral carpet behind her so that she could crane her neck upwards to look behind. Something was walking up behind her, covered in little glowing points and moving with the easy grace of a predator. The way the tiny flashes of light danced in front of Katie's eyes was really pretty, but made it hard to tell what the thing was beside as her eyes adapted to the brightness and left the rest in shadow.

Wasn't she meant to do something if she saw something unusual? Thatch had... Oh! She should be calling for help, she remembered. Katie was, for a moment, fascinated by the experience of having something stalking towards her and not being afraid for her life, though if she felt around in the depths of her stomach she could still sense the fear that should have been there.

"Thatch? There's a thing," she called, and the creature of light and shadow stopped coming. It shifted, a top piece seeming to tilt to one side. Questioning? Uncertainty? Katie couldn't quite tell.

"Are you quite alright, Katie?" the creature asked, as Katie followed the pretty lights on their bouncing journey closer. It spoke with pretty words, in a soft rhythm that matched the gentle path of the glowing points, sounding every bit like Thatch herself, down to the melodic lilt of each and every word.

Katie nodded, then squeaked quietly as something squirmed beneath her to lift her back to a sitting position. By the time she'd looked back around for the creature, Thatch was sitting next to her, covered in the little glowing plants. Oh. Katie reached out to touch one, wiggling it back and forth with a finger while she leaned closer to her partner, for the warmth. With the sun down it was getting chilly.

"Use your words, please," Thatch insisted, gently taking Katie's hand in hers and guiding it back down. "Did you get the firewood?"

"Oh." The firewood, right. That was what she'd been looking for before... she'd gotten distracted. "I... No, I'm sorry. Have you seen the forest? It's beautiful. Have you seen you? You're—"

Thatch pressed a soft finger to Katie's mouth, shushing her, and then used her other hand to stop the girl from nuzzling into the first. "Oh, dear. I think now might be the right time for you to take the counteragent for your earlier dose, Katie."

Katie shook her head. "Mmmhh, no it's not. I'll panic again," she admitted, testing the broiling mess in her stomach. "Can't I stay like this?"

Thatch's vines grew stiff for a moment. Katie was starting to recognise that expression. Thatch was surprised or uncertain or something like it. The plant eventually shook her head. "Not right now, no. I need you to be able to focus, okay? I think the chemicals in you are degenerating and I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we got them out."

Katie firmly refused, shaking her head emphatically. She tried to lean back in to Thatch's side, feeling the rising heat and naturally gravitating towards it, but she was held away.

"Katie, please. I need you to trust me here, you wouldn't be making this decision without your current dosage," Thatch insisted as if it wasn't obvious, tilting Katie's head up to look at her. She did look very serious, but wouldn't it be hard to tell?

Katie giggled, nodding. "That's the point, I wouldn't! But I am, and... Oh. Hmn." The girl's giggles died out, as she took on a more pensive expression. "I don't want to start panicking again," she admitted, trying to gather up all the different ways her mind wanted to split her focus and point them all in the same direction. It was unusually difficult.

Thatch let out a soft sigh and nodded. "I know. I'm sorry. I'll be here for you."

Katie spent a moment considering that. It didn't seem like a very good trade, but the more she considered her behaviour, the more incongruent it seemed. Was this the choice she had to make? She could either not panic or have a self-preservation instinct? What a dumb choice.

Katie reluctantly nodded and Thatch slowly raised a small collection of vines, topped with flowers, to rest between them. It was a mix of species from this planet, it seemed, with a few of Thatch's natural growths mixed in.

"While most of my species prefers safe injections that can still be done in a struggle," Thatch began, raising one of her flowers with the pointed needle into Katie's line of sight for a moment. "I find that when experimenting it can be much easier to control the mix of ingredients when aerosolised. When you're ready, I want you to lift that collection of flowers up to your face and take a deep breath. Can you do that for me, Katie? One big, deep breath?" Thatch asked, speaking slowly and clearly, as if she expected Katie to not understand.

Katie did understand, though, she thought. She leaned over, bumping into Thatch's warm side and slowly sliding downwards until her face was practically nestled within Thatch's curated garden. It had a potent set of scents. Mostly it was just Thatch, but stronger. The walking flora smelled kind of sweet, with a little bit of tang around the edges. It was usually very subtle, but Katie had spent more than a few minutes with her nose pressed up right against Thatch at this point, and she was getting good at recognising it.

"That's it," Thatch whispered, one hand carefully pulling Katie's hair out of her face, the other moving to the back of her head, either to comfort or to hold her down. It wasn't clear. "Deep breaths for me now, Katie."

Katie breathed in. Once, twice, and—

"Holy shit what," she gasped, trying to pull the same expression as Thatch so often used where her whole body seemed to pull in and shrink. Katie couldn't do that, but she could try to curl up into a ball small enough that the universe might take pity on her and let her slip into hyperspace. "No, I— This is awful, I want to go back," she whimpered, breathing growing uneven and uncertain.

Thatch's hands were around her a moment later, holding her close and still, head pointing outwards so she could watch the raging river beside them. It didn't seem to help. What had been tranquil and beautiful now seemed overwhelming. "I— Why would you do this to me?" Katie hissed, trying to force her way out of Thatch's iron grip, unsuccessfully.

The arms surrounding Katie didn't budge. "I know, I'm sorry," Thatch whispered, fingers drawing lines in Katie's hair. "This is a lot and it shouldn't have to be. I didn't know what else to do, and then I made the mistake of letting you wander off without supervision, and I'm sorry. I should never have done this to you and I hope you can find a way to forgive me. I wasn't sure how else to stop you from panicki—"

"Not that!" Katie said, voice still a whisper, as she shook her head. The lights were so bright. The sky was so dark. The insects buzzing around them were endless and she felt so fragile and cold. Worse, her thousand minor anxieties were all rushing back, forcing her to meet each one by one in an uncomfortable greeting. She'd lived with them for so long that everything had melted into one dull haze in the back of her mind, and coming back to it after some time away was torture.

"You— Thank you for calming me down before," Katie managed to force between uneven breaths. "You should have stopped it straight away but that's my bad not yours, I asked you not to and I didn't know. N— Not again, okay? Don't let me do that again. Don't let me make that decision without knowing what I'm doing, okay?"

Thatch's calming motions faltered for a moment, and she was silent for several more beyond, before finally coming to speak again. "I understand. I— won't do this without asking again," she whispered, voice quiet and a little halting.

"Not what I mean," Katie insisted, reaching up to pull one of the plant's arms down over her face, so she didn't have to look at the outside world. "Calm was good. If I can't have a conversation about it and I need to be calmed down, then do it, but don't let me stop you from un-doing it unless I have a clear head. It was... really nice but this is awful, and it isn't worth it," Katie whimpered, holding Thatch's arm close. It was good that the creature hadn't bones, because she was pretty sure that a human arm couldn't have bent like she was demanding this one did.

Thatch didn't respond in words. The slow, firm soothing motions continued, making certain that Katie had no room to feel alone while she processed her every anxiety over from scratch. It took a while. By the time she was feeling calm enough to consider moving again, the sun was but a distant memory and the forest had finished coming to life. Even Thatch was a light show, covered in a dense pattern of glowing bulbs.

Eventually, things seemed still enough that Katie dared take a peek outside again. She still felt a spike of alarm at the life teeming around them, but no longer was it something that made her want to vanish into subatomic dust. Slowly, she pushed herself up. Thatch's arms, leaves, and vines parted around her as she did, only reforming once she was through.

"Sorry," Katie started, before getting cut off by a gentle shake of the head.

"Let's keep our focus, hmn?" Thatch asked, raising herself to her feet in the entirely unfair manner of somebody who didn't really have to worry about leverage or balance. Katie spent a moment figuring out how to stand up herself, from her seated position, and then awkwardly rose in a several-stage operation that left her palms dirty and her knee a little scuffed. Thatch had offered a helping hand, obviously, but hadn't Katie been supported enough?

"Focus, right. Dinner?" Katie raised a hand to her mouth to cover a yawn. "...and bed?"

"Dinner and bed. We'll worry about the fire tomorrow, hm? I think we haven't time to cook anything tonight regardless, if you're already yawning."

Katie began to protest. Thatch raised a hand to her own mouth, while opening it, and Katie's words were stifled by another yawn and then crushed beneath a raised eyebrow.

"Okay, okay, fine," Katie said, raising her hands in defeat. "Did you find anything that looked edible?" Katie asked, cautiously skeptical. To her surprise, Thatch reached inside of one of her arms and did actually retrieve a small bundle of brightly coloured, triangular items.

"I found several other species around here which I believe should be edible, but I don't think they would have a very pleasant taste uncooked. These are a kind of fruit, I believe, with high sugar content and I don't feel any meaningful toxins. I don't think they'll be very healthy, so we'll try to prevent these from being a staple of your diet, but for tonight I think you deserve some comfort food, don't you?"

Thatch twisted the fruits out of their resting places. Had she taken the fruiting plants into herself too? Katie considered thinking about the implications of that, but as soon as Thatch handed one of the fruits over her body stopped pretending it wasn't hungry and admitted that she hadn't eaten for an entire day.

This one was bright red, a little hairy, and with an odd squish to it. Like a triangle, but with rounded points, and then extruded a centimeter or so into three dimensions, and about half the size of Katie's hand otherwise. Katie made a face, carefully biting the tip, and winced as red juices began to drip.

She wrapped her lips around the damaged piece and tried to suck the juices out, and...

"Mmh!" she exclaimed, raising her eyebrows and giving Thatch a thumbs up. 'Mostly sugar' sounded about right. It was like a hairy chocolate bar, but one of the good ones, not the mass produced shit she'd usually gotten in deep space. It took thirty seconds or so before she'd drunk most of it, and unfortunately that was the good bit. The actual fruit was stringy, with a slightly bitter aftertaste and an uncomfortable partition between the outer skin and the flesh within that made it difficult to cut through with teeth alone. All the same, Katie chewed it down and held out her hand for another.

Thatch had several. A whole plant's worth, by the look of it, but when Katie finished the second and held out her hand for a third, she got a gentle refusal instead.

"Katie, we need to ration these. We'll make you something healthier tomorrow," Thatch declared. Why was it her decision? Just because she'd been the one to find them?

Katie frowned up at her partner. "Aren't we meant to be equals? You aren't in charge of me. Give me the fruit, Thatch," she insisted, holding out her hand for a long moment in a quiet standoff.

The noises of the forest continued to swirl around them. The quiet hum of a million insects, each individually so quiet as to be silent, but together forming an unavoidable presence. The twinkling lights surrounding them mostly held still but some whirled around on unseen currents, moving with unknown goals.

Thatch looked far more of this world than not, joining in on the celebration of night surrounding them. Most of the planet barely reacted to Katie's presence, but that one small part that did was very focused. After a few moments more, Thatch handed a third fruit over.

"Thank you, Thatch," Katie said, taking its weird hairy surface and giving it a gentle squeeze. She could feel the slippage within where the skin and the meat slid over each other.

"You're welcome, Katie. Are you sure you're still hungry? I imagine you don't want to ruin your sleep, either, and too much sugar will keep you awake. I think I could synthesise something to calm you down, but that seems like a very heavy-handed solution, no?"

Katie glanced down at the fruit. She didn't even want it any more. She bit into the side anyway, but after a moment of drinking she'd more than had enough. She pulled a face and held it away, watching the rest of the sweet nectar within dribble onto the undergrowth with a stomach full of regret.

Thatch reached out to take it back. "We'll save the rest for later, then," she said, slipping it back inside her body with a patient smile. "What's next on your agenda?"

Katie glanced towards the sky. With the sun stolen away, the skies too were ablaze with a million million stars. An alien sky. As a Jump engineer Katie had crossed the length and breadth of Terran space and there was a difference in the skies between one side and the other, but it was subtle.

This sky, though, was unrecognisable. How far out had they gone? Just how far away had they gotten thrown?

"It's getting late," Katie admitted. "Time for bed?"

Thatch nodded to herself. "Aren't you forgetting something, little Katie?" she asked, raising her eyebrows and staring down at the girl. Katie squirmed on her feet. Was she? What was there to forget here on an alien rock hanging below an alien sky?

Katie tilted her head to one side, uncomprehending, until Thatch continued. "Your medication, Katie, remember?" she asked, and Katie winced. She was usually pretty okay at remembering it, but it was a routine. As soon as the routine was interrupted her mind just never went there, and what was more of a routine interruption than this?

"Oh, right, that," she said, feeling the blush rising on her cheeks. Given that it was the one thing in this universe keeping her sane she really should keep better track of it. She looked back up at Thatch, suddenly realising the implication. "Wait, you've made some? It's ready?"

The affini nodded, opening an arm to retrieve another twisted collection of vines and flowers that looked surprisingly intricate for flora. "Now, I'll need to be sure you understand the consequences, as per our earlier agreement, before we do this."

Katie nodded quickly. "Yeah yeah, I got the whole informed consent thing out of the way a while back, gimme."

Thatch deftly avoided Katie's attempt to grab the bundle of leaves, shifting away with preternatural ease. Katie again cursed the creature's ability to seemingly ignore inertia and balance by simply faking the whole body to begin with. "This is likely to be a little different. I wasn't able to perfectly reproduce human-level medication, so this is likely to be a lot more impactful, and you might notice some changes—"

"That's the point, Thatch! I want changes! I promise I understand," Katie protested. Thatch continued to avoid her for a moment more, before finally wrapping a vine around Katie's torso and forcing her to calm down.

"You promised, Katie. We'd talk about anything that might 'mess with your head', and these might. If you wish to let me dose you with anything so long as I think you'd want it, then don't you think that rather leaves a gap in your defenses? If you'd rather I simply go ahead and do what I think would make you happy, however..."

Katie shook her head rapidly. "Ah, no, okay, yes, let's talk!" She remembered the last thing Thatch had given her quite clearly. When she thought about it now it terrified her, but at the time? Her head had been quiet and accepting, and she hadn't really minded at all. Was Katie one bad decision away from getting dosed with something that would stop her from ever wanting to be truly clear-headed again? She had to be careful here, if she was to get out of this with her sanity intact.

"My last hormone prescription did mess with my head a little," she admitted, "but it was all good. I stopped feeling so dead inside all the time and started actually having emotions. Is this going to be more of that?"

Thatch nodded. "I believe so. Unless I made some big mistakes somewhere, it should be just like that. I've watered it down as much as I can so it's closer to your old dosage, but we can make it stronger over time if your body gets on with it. Until then, it'll still have to be a daily thing, but that should make it easier for you to remember. You know what to do here, right?"

Katie nodded. "Deep breaths," she said, as Thatch brought the bundle of plantlife up to her face, and raised a hand to rest against the top of Katie's hair.

"That's right," Thatch replied, voice soft and quiet. "Deep breath for me, now, Katie. Breath in. Hold," Thatch guided, voice soft but firm. This was medicine, after all, you couldn't mess around with it. Katie breathed, smelling a potent floral scent. A mix of Thatch's usual aroma and a few other, more subtle smells, thick in the air.

Wherever the scent touched seemed to tingle, and as she took it into her body, Katie briefly thought she could feel the shape of her own lungs, before the soft sensation diffused throughout her entire form. Her skin felt lighter, her mind a little softer, but she was sure that was just her imagination. Just excited to be back on her medication.

Katie held her breath, only starting to worry towards the end, when it started to burn. Thankfully, Thatch continued. "And out. You did very well, Katie. One more time?"

Katie nodded. Was the lightheadedness because she'd been holding her breath or an effect of the new medication? Either way, she breathed it in again. Thatch didn't count with words this time, instead using a hand to indicate when Katie should breathe. True to her question, the second was the last, and while Katie was still holding her breath Thatch was busying herself folding the grouping back inside of herself.

Thatch's hand dropped; Katie breathed back out. It took a few moments for her breathing to steady afterwards, and several more for the scent to leave her nostrils, but Katie felt good. She wasn't going to be stranded here without her medication and that made everything seem a little bit easier. There were still going to be challenges, but... the challenge seemed more surmountable if she had a more stable foundation to begin from.

Thatch smiled down at her, one hand still resting lightly on the back of Katie's head. She pulled it away quickly, once she noticed. "Feeling okay, Katie?"

The girl nodded rapidly. "I—Yeah, thank you. This helps, a lot. I owe you one."

Thatch raised a hand, shaking her head. "Debts are not a concept my people are comfortable with. Consider it a gift. Now, time for bed, perhaps?" she asked, stretching her false face with a false yawn that brought a real one to Katie's lips.

There was hardly much to prepare for bedtime. Without any meaningful camp to speak of, it was mostly a matter of finding a chunk of undergrowth that looked well sheltered and lying down in it. Katie picked one just out of sight of the river, hoping that come morning the sunlight would still wake her up. Thatch spent a few minutes poking and prodding at an area a few meters away, before eventually unceremoniously collapsing, bipedal form slumping apart in a display that probably should have been more discomforting than it was. Katie watched the way that her travelling companion went from being a person to something closer to a small hedge with interest.

If she looked for the person, Thatch was all gone. No face, no body, nothing. If she looked for Thatch, though, she was hard to miss. The same curiously hesitant way of moving. The same subtle aura of quiet surrounding her, something that Katie had only started noticing as they'd gotten deeper into the day. The same sweet scent. Katie had never really lost the sense that she was being watched, either, though she still couldn't prove it any better than she'd been able to when they'd first met.

Katie rolled over, pointing her head away from the glowing pile of leaves that was her... what? Companion, certainly. Partner, ostensibly. Friend? Hardly, but perhaps growing in that direction.

It was time to sleep.

Katie wondered if any part of their escape pod had made it to the ground. The last she'd seen it it had been disintegrating, so probably not, right? That was kind of a metaphor, right? The works of the Terran Accord burning up, leaving only her, right?

Ugh. Sleep! Katie rolled over in the other direction, maybe hoping that her thoughts would get lost in rotation.

How were they going to get off of this planet? Katie was a talented engineer and Thatch certainly seemed to have some smarts of her own, but what use was hypermetric theory if you didn't even have a campfire? Breaking the spacetime barrier required exotic forms of matter that they just didn't have access to. What were they gonna do, build a particle accelerator out of twigs?

Mrngf. Katie tried sleeping on her stomach but that was just painful, so she lay on her back instead.

It was cold.

The twinkling lights wanted to stab through her eyelids.

Her brain didn't want to let go. She was tired, but... hell, she hoped this wasn't having had too much sugar. Dumb stupid plant being right all the time.

With a sigh, Katie sat up and shuffled over to the only clump of plant matter around that she knew the name of, and took a moment to identify the sheet of leaves and vines that usually adorned Thatch's back.

"Not a word," she whispered, as she tugged the sheet over to her chosen sleeping position. By the time she'd gotten there, there was a little bed of vines in place too, and at this point in the night Katie wasn't going to complain. It took a few more moments to figure out where she wanted everything, and then she took her place lying down and pulled the foliage over her. It was slightly warm and much more comfortable, and the only real problem was—

"Thatch, could you get the lights?" Katie whispered, and a few moments later, all the plants in the sheet began to dim, before going entirely dark. Katie tucked her head underneath, breathed deep of a familiar scent, and was asleep within moments.

Chapter Text

Some sapient creatures, the beloved plants themselves included, thought that the beating hearts of the Affini Compact were the tremendous, ostensibly motive, space stations dotted around the front, like the Sphenophyllia hanging over Mars, or the Meandrina loitering around Epsilon Eridani. Hundreds of kilometers long, they were entire microcosms of the Affini core worlds unto themselves, capable of wholly independent operation, be it organisational, industrial, scientific, or domestic.

Those creatures would be wrong, of course. The mega-ships were a vital piece, but most decisions were made elsewhere, most of the population didn't live aboard, and the Affini's true purpose hardly lay in the autonomous stellar gardens that grew their smaller ships.

The ships, then. Other, wiser, creatures would point to the fleet as the Compact's true center, the distributed, decentralised starhoppers that flew between worlds, bringing with them the freedom of domestic bliss, like the Elettarium, the Baiera, or the Pinidae, all currently busying themselves with rescuing the human race from itself.

Though closer, they would be wrong too.

The heart of the Affini Compact, according to Wing Cnidaria, assistant clerk, were the clerk's offices. The Elettarium office was located near the rear of the vessel, sandwiched between an ice cream bar and the main communications relay. Though in truth it was a large construction indeed, Wing suspected that they could dedicate the full width of the ship to it and still end up cramped between stacks of reports and piles of requests.

This was the room where the rituals were penned.

The space where the desires of five thousand, four hundred and thirty three sapient life forms went to become real. The paper—locally grown in the Elettarium's botanical gardens and destined, one day, to be broken down for recycling—was by far the least data storage format in use here, and yet it piled to the high ceilings, held in place only through the constant rotation of the habitatable decks.

Wing had long since given up on applying classical Information Theory to the Affini Compact. Here, the words ran so thick they formed their own gravitational field, sucking in every other bit of information around until everything found a home. Astrogeologists filed reports on rock composition; xenolinguists submitted updated words for their darling companion species; botanists wrote reports on their latest concoctions; and everything besides. Nowhere knew more about the day to day operations or the large scale organisation of the greater civilisation than the clerks.

If only Wing could keep her focus on it. Today was not a normal day. In her journal, placed carefully to the left of her expansive work area, the date was circled thrice and underlined twice, highlighted in the bright red of exclamation that caught her eye every time she saw it. The room besides that was shades of grey. Black ink on white page on white desk on a black floor. To one side of the room, a full-length window gave a portal to the full majesty of the cosmos.

White stars on black void.

Wing's fingers clutched a thin, hexagonal pen. The white status light on its side shone through her blurred, semi-transparent skin, lighting the bone within and refracting through the whole finger, lighting it up like it was she who was the digital instrument, recording every stroke written on the paper before her. She focused, forcing her eyes to glance across the form at her fingertips.

Requisition request. One standard hab unit bathtub's worth of a specific kind of human dessert. Wing glanced over to the computer terminal on the far side of her desk, and bioluminescent organs dotting her chest flashed a quick sequence of colours. The computer flashed back, and the clerk nodded to herself. This particular kind of dessert was something their libraries contained the recipe for.

Transparent eyes skipped over the firm lines of the form, cross-referencing every scrap. Date of submission, date of the request being made, date they'd like it fulfilled. A hab identifier. She licked one finger on her free hand and lifted the page, checking beneath. The required data on dietary requirements, culinary preferences, allergies, and a structural assessment confirming they had the facilities to handle receipt were attached. There wasn't a supplementary notice detailing the time and location the request was generated by one of their automated systems, so apparently this form had been filled in by hand.

Wing smiled. A creature after her own heart.

Affini script was a gentle, flowing alphabet. As close to art as language, but given that nobody wrote it except by choice, and the Affini never did anything by half, it was almost restrained in its choices. Their numerals were, in many senses, easier to work with than Wing's native base-7 system, but...

She paused, expression utterly impassive, but luminescence glittering under the skin in tickled delight. Whoever had made this request had checked the wrong box and requested their produce be delivered by a method that wouldn't handle that much weight. She took a moment to check the metasubmission, where the Affini responsible for such an error had clearly indicated that if an error were to be found, they wanted the form sent back, rather than quietly corrected. They had also requested a hint of "reasonable" obscurity, so Wing took a moment to consider, before penning "The Affini Compact carries all, valued protector, but your paperwork is messy and I shan't carry you.", signed with her name.

It was a game, of sorts. Of course, they could simply have sent a simple request and let a computer define the form. They could have permitted Wing to fix their mistake for them, or asked to be told the precise error at least, but half the work of a clerk was to act as the operator for a vast ship-wide puzzle of paper and byzantine requirements that only the Affini truly seemed to enjoy.

Well. The Affini, and Wing.

The doors to the office slid open, breaking the otherwise stony silence, as one of the many citizens under Wing's care entered the room, not speaking a word. In fact, she walked in without even looking. Not a wave or a sound, and yet Wing found herself smiling.

Along the chest of the great plant flashed a series of brightly coloured leaves. It was a slow imitation of Wing's native communication, with a curious accent and hesitant wording.

"Good morning, clerk," it spoke. Montsechia Vidalii, Eighth Bloom, was the head clerk at the office, and she had taught Wing just about everything she knew. White vines wrapped around black thorns and a white core. Leaves mostly in shades of grey, giving her the appearance of simply being washed out, like all the colour had been stolen from her. She fit into the room well, and it made the brightly coloured leaves she was using to 'talk' stand out almost as much as they did on the cloudy surface of Wing's body.

"Good morning, Miss Vidalii. I trust your day finds you well," Wing flashed back, handing her superior a small stack of papers she had been unable to process herself with a look of quiet pride. Despite the mountains around them, the unprocessed forms numbered only in the low double digits, and mostly focussed around the few areas that Wing had not yet been taught.

The plant took the papers, vine not lingering for a moment longer than was polite, as a ripple of soft orange slowly swam over her torso, mottled with the deep blue of (pride/accomplishment/satisfaction). Wing saw the whites in the room start to sink into a soft pink, as the light from her own photoemitters bounced around her body, giving her a gentle glow and staining her vision. She forced the emotions down, and everything returned to quiet calm.

Montsechia moved across the room to her own desk, every step a sharp click as thorn met tile. Click, click, click. Wing couldn't hear them, but one of the few pieces of Affini technology she bore was a tiny strip of bioengineered plant matter set just below the skin at the base of her neck. In response to sound, it lit up. It didn't give a clear enough picture to understand spoken word, though as Wing's lip reading was second-to-none this rarely caused problems.

In an otherwise silent room, however, the sharp clicks of Miss Vidalii's thorns stabbed through Wing's attention, scattering her focus, not that she'd been having much success keeping it together to begin with.

Today was an exciting day. The splash of red in the corner of her vision was impossible to ignore. (Importance/danger/attention) drawn in marker over the date in her journal, and that page had far fewer entries than the average day, as if she'd not managed as much work as she usually would have.

Montsechia's desk was behind hers, but she had a mirror installed above, so they could still speak. Her eyes flicked up, following the creature's journey across the room as she settled in.

"We're going to have a busy day tomorrow, Wing," Montsechia signalled, without looking up from her work. "I'm sure you heard about our little problem earlier, and the captain says we're going to stay out here in uncharted space until we find our runaways."

Wing nodded politely. "Of course, Miss Vidalii, we had the transcription here before the captain had fully finished speaking. I've filed it against the ship logs if you wish to check. Do you think that we will be... needed today?" she asked, the tiniest tinge of (nervous/concerned/worried) green mixing in. Today was a special day, and it would be unfortunate if something as minor as a hypermetric displacement were to alter her plans.

Thankfully, the affini flashed a brighter green of (soothing/agreement/acceptance) along with a brief, but strong moment of (negative/denial/rebuttal) red. Wing felt her heart beat a little harder, both at how much nuance Montsechia was managing to put into her language these days, and also because it meant that it was time to make her move.

She stood, for a moment unsteady on her feet and needing to lean against the desk for support, as she grabbed a small stack of papers and turned to her colleague. For a moment, she looked past, to the stars. White points of twinkling light against a black void, but stars weren't just white. Instants of (encouraging/excited/eager) pink and (forceful/demanding/requirement) deep orange twinkled in her eyes for a moment, spurring her on. Perhaps the universe was telling her to get on with it. Perhaps she was just imagining it.

Nerves calmed—or at least, given the appearance of calm—she moved across the room to the head clerk's desk. "Apologies, I must have forgotten to stack this small request with the others," she flashed, colourscape the picture of apology with only the barest hint of (playful/mischievous) malachite dancing behind the words.

She turned and slipped to her desk while her partner analysed her gift. After a few minutes, a soft pink moved across her surface, breaking out from the center of her chest out into an expanding concentric circle, with the tiniest flash of her own malachite leaves barely visible underneath, being dragged just behind the pink ones on tiny vines.

Wing almost broke there and then. The subtlety on display in the creature's mastery of her language was beyond exciting. She tried to keep the anxious green out of the sides of her cheeks, but how was she meant to do that? Her emotions could hardly be hidden, she was literally glowing with her nervousness.

"You've made an error here, assistant clerk," the head clerk stated, colours firm and clear and bright. Disappointment and rebuke, and only the tiniest flash of playfulness in the final instants. "The form was submitted perfectly, though the author marked that they wished the clerk's office to fix any issues found within."

A vine shot across the room, landing on Wing's shoulder and forcing her to stand and turn. Another gently pulled her across the room to face the consequences of her error.

"Now, no mistakes made on the form itself, but I can't submit this. Do you know why, assistant clerk Wing?"

Wing gulped, flashing a tiny green acceptance through shivering glands.

"I've used the wrong signature, Miss. Vidalii," she admitted, shivering finger moving to just beneath the spot for clerk's assent.

"And so," Miss Vidalii spoke, raising Wing's chin to follow her as she stood. "It falls to me to correct your mistake. The form is immutable, of course, you've marked it done. To submit this, we must correct you—"

The affini theatrically paused, leaning over to inspect the signature, letting only the slightest malachite grin shine through. "You know how that paperwork wo—"

Wing raised her hands, which were clutching a small stack of pre-filled papers in fingers now openly shaking, her whole-body pink glow staining the clean white surface. These were correct. These she had checked and re-checked every night for a week. All they required was one final signature.

Montsechia provided it.

Wing Vidalii, Third Floret, exploded into a rapid succession of shines, giving the ordinarily quiet, ordinarily restrained interior of the clerk's office the appearance of a rave as she leaped towards her new owner with a glee so bright it caused the lights in the room to automatically dim in insufficient compensation. The affini was hardly more restrained, hugging her new pet with a wide grin, both on her face and in her chromaticity.

The beating heart of the Affini Compact was in its clerk's offices, or, at very least, the parts of it that Wing adored the most.

Chapter Text

The instant of a faster-than-light Jump felt much like standing next to the instruments in a voidcrash rave, but only for a heartbeat. Katie had been told, anyway. It wasn't her scene, but she could see how it could be, if the metaphor held.

It was like getting kicked across your whole body, a deep thud that felt like it should have knocked you to your knees, but without physical force behind it. Even with the tightest quantum shielding they could build, the hypermetric shock that marked a spacecraft's emergence into real-space bled back inside as a force that wasn't really a force. It couldn't be measured, but everybody who'd flown aboard a spaceship knew it. It was like the bottom of the world had fallen through and the rules were breaking down. Just for an instant. Just for long enough to notice, but not so long you could be certain of what it was.

Katie watched the dials and readouts on the side panel of her cherished Jump Drive. The fuel mix was hovering at a cool hundred degrees kelvin, stable and ready. The last thing anybody wanted was to see that thermostat creep up. That was the stuff nightmares were made of.

All nominal. Ready to jump. All Katie had to do was dial in the destination and begin the process. This was a simple trade route between two well populated systems, carrying a cargo hold full of ice down to a desert world. They'd pay through the nose for water on their long summers, and so the entire crew of the Atlantis's Fortune were working triple shifts to haul it back and forth. Not that they'd see a credit of the profit on it.

Katie's nimble fingers carefully took the aluminium knob of the main fuel valve and turned it three notches to the right, smooth and gentle. A needle on the corresponding dial started its long crawl upwards. A blend of exotic particles rushed into the central chamber of the drive, suspended in gravitational lenses while the temperature inevitably and irrevocably rose. At fifty below freezing, the mix would undergo a phase change, from gaseous straight through to something they hadn't quite figured out yet.

...what you did was pop spacetime...

Katie's finger twitched, momentarily raising the fuel feed a little too high. She corrected it an instant later, but she was already on edge.

All she had to do was let the fuel heat up enough, keep the lenses balanced and oriented correctly, and aim the quantum arch towards their destination. She'd done this a hundred times. Easy. As soon as the fuel underwent hypersublimation, the hyperspace window would open, and they'd jump through to the other end and all feel the kick of a hypermetric shock.

What did 'hyper' even mean? Was that just a word that they attached to things that didn't quite make sense?

...You haven't figured out the fifth fundamental force yet...

She had no idea what she was doing, did she? Katie was a wreck in real-space, why would she be any better in hyper-space? She couldn't even get through the day without medical intervention, and she was expected to play with forces she literally didn't understand? This was madness. This was—

The fuel in the reactor hit two hundred twenty three point one five kelvin and spacetime got torn in half.

...Don't do that! It's really bad!...

The Atlantis's Fortune... fell? Rose?

The Atlantis's Fortune was engulfed by broken space, left hanging over eternity. Katie looked forward and locked eyes with the void. She echoed through time, a thousand thousand copies locked into the same path. Behind Katie was Katie. Ahead, was Katie. In fact, everything was Katie. Backward and forward in time, to each side the infinite possible paths that could have led her here, and above and below the infinite versions of her she could have been. A matrix of every eventuality.

...Most of the time little holes like that close up...

She seemed miserable. In all of them. Every past, every future. Every way she could have gotten here. Every her that could have gotten to every way. None of them happy, not even in the future.

A future that was getting cut short, future Katies scattering into dust one at a time. Had something gone wrong with the jump? Did she have any idea how this worked? What she was doing? What she was playing with? What was wrong with her? Why had she agreed to do this, when it so obviously could never make her happy? Katie screamed as her future selves vanished one by one until finally, it was her turn.

Katie woke up with a sharp intake of breath, scrambling to put her back against a tree, eyes wide. She sat there, breathing hard, not really taking in what she was looking at, fingers clutching at the leaves resting over her.

That... wasn't how it had happened. Katie knew that wasn't what had happened. The Atlantis's Fortune had reached its destination without incident. She'd jumped that ship a dozen times without problem. They'd only replaced her because... well, humans weren't exactly accepting out in the fringes.

Katie squeezed shut her eyes and focused on her memory of the real thing. She'd twitched, yeah, but she'd corrected it. It had been fine. Jump'd run a little hot, but that just meant extra waste at the far side, not... that.

Didn't it? Her classes had covered a lot of the practical aspects of Jump Drive operation and maintenance, but when it came to modeling the physics behind it all, there was a lot of conjecture. A lot of guesswork. Ships went missing sometimes, or... ships went missing a lot these days, but before humanity had found itself in a war, ships did sometimes still just vanish. Who was to say that they weren't falling foul of a one in a million fluke; having their atoms scattered across the universe because none of them really understood what was going on?

This was Katie's profession. The one thing that human society had always agreed actually mattered about her life; the way she could contribute to the grinding engine of capitalism. To the society that she had come from it was really the only thing that had mattered, and having her confidence in it shaken hurt.

Why? She was never going to be allowed near a Jump Drive again either way. She was...

Katie took a deep, pained breath, hands clenching. She had too much nervous energy and she needed to do something. She needed to fiddle with something. The undergrowth at her hands would do. She plucked a leaf and began to tear it into scraps. She—

"Katie?", spoke a voice that was... airy, like a whisper caught by the breeze and delivered to her ear though there was no meaningful wind to speak of. Katie glanced around, forcing herself to actually look at what she was seeing. She was alone here, there was nobody around.

"Oh, my apologies," the voice continued. A beat later, the undergrowth covering Katie pulled away, leaving her suddenly cold. A surprising amount of the plantlife surrounding her followed, contracting towards a central point, and—

It was Thatch, obviously. Of course it was. Was Katie just going to have to get used to this weird alien stuff, now? The affini gathered herself up, vines curling into approximately the right shape, but a little padded out and overly large, before pulling tight. The whole thing took a matter of seconds, and Katie was getting less overwhelmed by the storm of motion each time.

Thatch reformed kneeling, holding out a hand to touch Katie's cheek, with a face that looked some combination of bemused and annoyed. Katie surmised that that was unintentional, as it pulled into a look of concern a moment later.

"I would appreciate it if you wouldn't pluck my leaves without asking, Katie, but is something wrong?" For a few brief moments, Katie had been able to tell herself that the events of yesterday had been just a dream, but the waking world had a way of stealing those hopes away, didn't it? She was still stuck on... the rock. The planet they were on. Whatever it was called.

She was still trapped with this creature, the enemy combatant she was meant to hate, that she'd just wasted the last year of her life fighting against. The soft leaves slightly pressing into her cheek tingled slightly. Thatch was another living creature, and in this situation, Katie would take what she could get.

Katie nodded, glancing away. "I had a bad dream," she admitted. "I'm okay, just frazzled. We have lots to do today, I'll probably feel better once I make myself useful."

Katie moved to stand, but found a vine blocking her path. She glanced back up with a frown at the affini, who's expression had only shifted deeper into concern.

"You don't need to make yourself anything, Katie. We have, frankly, all the time in this world to talk. An hour or two here and there isn't going to make much difference, and we'll both be much better off if we're happy."

Katie looked away, feeling a surge of embarrassment. "It was just a bad dream, it's no big deal. I'll be fine," Katie insisted, fishing for some way of changing the subject. "I am pretty hungry, though. Got any more of those fruits?"

"Maybe for dessert." Thatch seemed to take the bait. "We're going to do some cooking this morning. We have flowing water, plenty of firewood, several species I think you'll find quite palatable, and even some things that I think should work as spices."

One of Thatch's seemingly infinite vines turned Katie's head with a gentle yet insistent touch, so that she could observe Thatch attempting to put her foot down. "We can talk about your dream while we prepare the meal," Thatch continued, voice firm. It was a little cute, given that Katie knew full well the plant would cave at a sharp glare, but she reluctantly kept her gaze soft. Talking about it might actually help.

"Yeah, okay," Katie accepted. "I kinda want to talk to you about some of it anyway." She'd had more important things to think about, but the brief conversation they'd had the day before about the physics of faster than light travel had clearly rattled Katie, if the dream was anything to go by. How could she know so little about her life's work?

Thatch nodded, with a smile. "But, ah, before that I need your help with something. I've gathered some wood and rocks, and we can make a fire, if you can light it. I believe I've located the right types of rock, with which you can make a spark."

Thatch spoke with a little more hesitation in her voice than usual. Katie didn't think she would have noticed, if she hadn't seen how Thatch behaved under stress the day before. Katie's eyes flicked over the creature's body, noting the way the precise pattern of plantlife was squeezing in a little tighter than normal. Almost quivering, if Katie tried to apply a human mannerism to it. Thatch's face betrayed little of it, but her voice and her body gave the impression of reluctance, even worry.

Katie looked the affini in the eye with a curious frown, shuffling around until she could sit up straight, and tilted her head to one side, questioning. "Why do you need me for that? You're stronger than me, faster, why don't you do it?"

Again, no response on the face. Thatch maintained her air of effortless confidence in every human respect, but it was still incredibly transparent. Katie had only known her a day, and Thatch's trick had fallen flat.

"I might simply be looking for ways for you to make yourself useful." Thatch had a wry smile on her face and a dry drawl on her lips, and her body gave away that it was all lies.

Katie reached up and ruffled the thing's hair. She had to practically stand to reach, but it was worth it to see surprise breaking through the facade. "You might, but you're not," Katie agreed. "Talk to me. Bad dreams for you too?"

Thatch finally let the frown that had been struggling to get out show. She huffed, but that wasn't really human either. The air seemed to move through her whole body, rather than just her lungs, giving Katie the impression of a much larger sound than it otherwise should have been. She still wasn't scared of this thing, though, or at least nowhere near as much as she had been before they'd met. Thatch was like her, even if she refused to admit it.

"The fire," Thatch admitted, voice quiet. Her tangled weave hugged in tighter, cutting an inch off of her height. "Back on the ship. I couldn't sleep, the scene just kept replaying in my head. Did you know—" Thatch split a hole in her torso, revealing the tangled mass of green vines that seemed to be where the rest of her emerged. It rotated in place, until Katie could see an area that had been scarred by flame— "I was so distracted yesterday that I didn't stop to properly check myself over until you had gone to sleep, at which point I found this."

The parting in Thatch's torso closed back up. Vines in two perpendicular directions pulled tight against each other in what looked like a sturdy weave. Certainly Katie didn't expect she'd be able to get it open herself, nor had she seen anything else on this planet that could.

"I nearly died on board that ship, Katie. I did lose half my mass, and had to abandon the rest. I had not... planned to bloom again for a long, long time, and everything feels wrong. I am clumsy. I am not put together right and I do not move the same way that I used to. I wanted you to wake up to a freshly cooked meal, but I held the rocks and..."

Thatch shook her head, shifting her shoulders in an approximate shrug. "I know that it could not really hurt me, but I just... remember the way half my body went dead in an instant."

"Shit," Katie breathed. "I'm sorry. I... understand, I think. I didn't get that badly hurt, but I don't think I'll ever forget the heat or the sound. It feels wrong to apologise, because I meant to hurt you, and if I was in the same situation again with what I know now, I can't say... It felt like it was you or me, right?"

Thatch shook her head, waving her hand dismissively. "You did not do this to me; I did this to me."

"Uh, I was the one who scuttled the ship, Thatch." Clearly the flora was used to taking responsibility for things that weren't her fault, but this one was something Katie had done herself, with her own hands and her own skills.

"And I was the one who let you, Katie," the plant shot back, voice infuriatingly even.

Katie bared her teeth, reaching up to yank off another small leaf from the side of Thatch's arm. The transplanted parts didn't seem any stronger than the original plantlife, at least. The affini winced, either in pain or a reasonable facsimile, as Katie tore the leaf in half in front of her face. "Will you let me apologise for that? I swear, you fucking weed, let me take responsibility, yeah? You can't be responsible for literally everything that happens around you, it isn't healthy."

Two of Thatch's stronger vines came in from each side, to wrap around Katie's wrists and hold them apart and away from anything fragile. The girl glared, and continued regardless. "It isn't healthy, Thatch. You're not a god. You're a sapient creature just like me who's scared of fire and pretends to be less of an emotional wreck than she is."

Thatch was frozen up. Even the small amount of flex that Katie's struggles usually bought her had vanished. Was Thatch normally pretending to be weaker than she was, on top of everything else? Katie growled, utterly failing to squirm out of the iron grip, and continued. "Stop beating yourself up and let yourself be helped, already, okay? You're allowed to screw up."

Thatch met Katie's growl with one of her own. Much deeper, much louder. It buzzed the air. Katie could feel it in her chest. Against her hair. This thing was not just like her in a lot of ways that didn't matter, and Katie was gambling that she was in the way that did.

"You do not know me," Thatch hissed. "I am not like you, little human. We can work together, but do not presume to—"

Katie shook her head, interrupting. Her voice was shaking and unsteady, but then, she would freely admit she wasn't as good as Thatch at acting. "Thatch, please. Eyes on me, please focus. Equals, r-remember? And... Please less 'human'?"

For a brief, tense moment, Katie worried that she'd pushed too far... and then Thatch's shoulders sagged, and she was lowered to the ground.

Thatch didn't so much turn away as her entire body flowed to the opposite side of the clearing. No footsteps, just a mess of vines shifting away in the blink of an eye. She collapsed into a tangle that buzzed for a few short moments before starting to speak.

Her voice was a little different like this. A little higher pitched. A slight echo. Still recognisably Thatch, with the same intonations and the same unsung rhythm backing every word. "Sorry," she said. "Sorry. I am sorry. I panicked and... that was not okay. I am meant to be in control," she said, holding up a flower in rough approximation of a hand to forestall the obvious response. "But I am not. My body is not moving right and I can not make myself light that fire; I could not sleep; and I thought that I could at least claim responsibility over the unknowing actions of a ward, and that would help. I can not make mistakes, Katie. The consequences are too great."

Katie was still breathing hard, adrenaline only very slowly draining away. She idly rubbed the skin on her wrists, where the vines had grabbed her. It didn't hurt, but there was still a leftover tingling, something warm and gentle. That had been what had given it all away. It had still been a gentle touch, despite everything.

Katie walked over to the crumpled pile of plant and spent a moment rearranging to make a little divot, into which she promptly sat. "Yeah," she finally replied, word short and a little harder than she'd intended. "Yeah, I've done that too," she admitted. "Not— Not exactly that. I can't do the things that you can do, but I have panicked and lashed out because somebody doesn't know when to shut up and leave me alone."

Katie lay back. Even as a formless pile of greenery, Thatch still had a comfortable warmth and a gentle scent. She could feel it through her whole body when Thatch spoke this way, and the sounds came out a little muffled. Half of it felt like it was just vibrations rattling her skull. "Mmmmh," Thatch thrummed, as magnificent as any Jump Drive. "And how did you deal with that, Katie?"

The girl laughed. "I learned how to poke holes in spacetime and ran. I'm not a good example to learn from."

Thatch rumbled again. Maybe a groan, maybe a laugh? It was hard to tell. "I can help you with that," she said, voice slightly discordant, but... was this sarcasm again? The difference was barely perceptible at the best of times, but Katie was learning.

"With the running, or the holes?"

"Yes. I am supposed to be able to make you the best version of yourself, Katie. That is the whole point of my being here, to help. Except that if I had not gotten involved you would likely be much happier."

Katie rested a hand on one of the vines. She had no idea if it was sensitive enough to feel anything, but hopefully it was the thought that counted. "And who makes you the best that you can be? You? You obviously can't take care of yourself alone, Thatch. I think I need you to help me survive here, but I don't get anything out of the green saviour routine, so how about we drop it and take care of each other? I'll set the fire going, we can talk about dreams, and then we'll sit down and figure out a plan for the day, yeah?"

Thatch's body pulled in tighter for a moment, but soon after she buzzed an affirmative, wordless sound. Katie could feel Thatch's heat rise and fall with a gentle rhythm, in time with her own breaths. Did it serve the same purpose?

"Okay," Katie breathed, voice quiet, though given the two of them were entwined it seemed unlikely she could speak quietly enough Thatch wouldn't hear even if she'd tried. "I had some friends once who struggled with anxiety attacks." Katie ignored the complaint from beneath. "Breathing exercises helped them, sometimes. I don't know if you really breathe, but you must have some rhythms, and can we try slowing those down?"

After a few moments of quiet, Thatch began to reform. A vine or three held Katie in her prior position while the creature rebuilt itself underneath, only to finally let her fall back into place once she was sitting in Thatch's lap, leaning back against their torso.

Katie closed her eyes, taking a deeper breath, letting the last of her adrenaline drain away while Thatch's arms came around to wrap around her chest. Her scent was all the stronger in the moments after such rapid movement, body warmed through the rush of exertion, soft vines leaving tingles in their wake.

Katie felt air moving against the back of her head as Thatch spoke. "Yes, let's."

Katie nodded. "Then, please close your eyes, and follow along with me. Breathe in, or whatever you're going to do, and hold it there."

The soft heat radiating out of Thatch's warm vines, and especially the area around the central core Katie had seen earlier, grew stronger. Katie let her head fall back, resting against soft foliage, while the warmth suffused her. With her eyes closed and a comfortable weight over her chest, she had to fight against a rising urge to yawn, but thankfully only for a few moments.

"And out."

Katie was very aware that she was simply repackaging Thatch's guidance from the night before, but she also understood how difficult it could be to take your own advice. If laundering it so Thatch didn't realise it was hers helped, then Katie would happily be unoriginal.

Whatever it was that Thatch was doing was as obvious as breathing, or more, this close up. The heat fell away, leaving Katie cold. Subconsciously, she pressed a little closer into Thatch's soft weave. "Let's do that a few more times, yeah?" Katie asked. "Slow 'breaths', or whatever."

She couldn't see Thatch's response, but she could feel the slight movement of a nod, before the heat rose again. Katie let her head turn, resting her cheek against a set of leaves, concentrating on the slow ripples of warmth rolling out of her companion. The heat faded, drawing Katie closer in, and then rose again, filling her. More up and down than in and out, but it was easy for Katie to match her own breathing to it. Each cycle, breathing in as the heat rose, feeling comfort and breathing a sweet scent, and then breathing out as it fell, emptying herself of warmth and air.

The next thing Katie knew, there was a vine against her chin, tilting her head up to look at what seemed to be an amused smirk. Not that Katie could trust the expressions on Thatch's face, given how much control she had over them. The real secrets lay elsewhere.

"Napping, Katie?" she asked.

Thatch's heavy arms remained protectively crossed, holding Katie down. A moment's squirming didn't find escape, and the vine kept her from looking away. Katie felt her cheeks flush. She didn't want Thatch thinking she was lazy, she was as willing to work for their survival as anyone would be!

"Didn't— Maybe didn't sleep enough?" she asked, sentence ending with a hopeful lilt. Thatch seemed to consider it for a few moments, before letting Katie look away, to hide her embarrassment. Katie managed to squirm out from underneath Thatch's arms, or more likely, she was released from them.

Humiliating. She'd only just gotten up, and was already being lulled back to sleep? They had a whole day in front of them yet, and Katie intended to prove that she could be useful.

Without looking back, Katie kneeled to inspect the firepit Thatch had already built. How hard could starting a fire be, really? She heard the creature behind her rising, with a repetitive sound that could have been a chuckle, or a cough. Perhaps holding her 'breath', whatever that process was, was more challenging for an affini than a humanoid?

Katie struggled to imagine anything being a challenge for Thatch.

Chapter Text

Katie looked down at a carefully arranged pile of sticks, leaves, and logs in the middle of their small clearing. It looked suspiciously like Thatch knew what she was doing, though Katie was hesitant to grant that honour. How much of this knowledge was stuff the affini had simply learned in the abstract, from books or... however the Affini collected their knowledge? A hundred years old or not, surely she'd never actually constructed a campfire out of wood.

Katie looked down at the two rocks Thatch had provided. One was a rough thing that seemed to want to crumble already; the other had more of a golden sheen. Thatch stood several feet away. Further away than she needed to.

"And I just hit these together?" Katie asked, miming bashing the two into one another.

Thatch shook her head, and sent a pair of vines the long way around, staying far away from the firepit. "More like this, I believe." She gently grasped Katie's wrists in a soft grip and moved them together at an angle, though stopped short of actually striking. The vines retreated, giving Katie the space to try it for real.

Tink!

The collision produced a small shower of sparks. Both jumped back in surprise, but Katie crept forward again, kneeling by the pile of wood, and struck the two rocks against each other once more. The sparks blanketed the dead material, collecting over it for a moment... but fizzled. Katie tried again, and this time one of the dry leaves caught. It took long seconds, but the leaf burned up, short and bright, and just long enough for one of the smaller twigs to catch.

The flames danced after that. They jumped from twig to stick to branch to log. Heat rose steadily, and Katie let her eyes slide closed, sitting backwards, enjoying the flickering warmth licking her skin. Apparently Thatch did know what she was doing, here.

Katie opened one eye, to find her companion staring at the flames, frozen in place. She pushed herself up onto her feet and hurried over, standing between Thatch and the firepit.

"Hey, eyes on me, right?" Katie said. She watched for a response, eyes flickering over leaves and roots, and then finally the face. The bright green glow of Thatch's eyes shifted, focusing, and Katie nodded, raising a hand to a purple cheek flecked with strikes of vivid red so that they could turn around without breaking that focus. "You're okay. It's not gonna hurt you. It isn't like the ship, where everything was falling apart, you have everything here well under control."

Thatch took a deep breath, or whatever the simulated equivalent of that was. Air rushed through her body. She nodded. "I do. I think I am okay, now. Thank you. I expect I will get more used to this soon."

Katie nodded. "Do you want to get closer? It's quite pretty, close up. Perfectly safe. You did everything right, I think, there's nothing around it to burn except what we want it to be burning. C'mon, I'll keep you safe." Katie extended a hand; Thatch took it, and the two of them moved closer to the flame.

"It might be nice to get something to sit on," Katie noted, guiding them both to a spot a couple feet away from the flames, where they could rest on the dirt. Katie was aware of how worried Thatch had seemed, and refused to let go of the creature's hand as they took their place. Given the sheer scale of the affini, keeping hold of a hand practically necessitated leaning against her side, but Thatch didn't seem to complain about that, and if it brought comfort, then so be it.

They sat in near-silence for long moments. Occasionally, one of the burning logs would crack or pop, and though Thatch didn't obviously seem to respond, the momentary rush of heat suggested she wasn't entirely unfazed. Katie waggled the hand back and forth a few inches, partially as a reminder she was there, and partially to check that the vines hadn't frozen up again. They hadn't. Whatever was going on in Thatch's head, she was still making the apparently conscious decision to let her body be moved.

Over the minutes, an invisible tension in the air seemed to go slack. When it was all-but gone, Thatch waggled her hand back. A leaf brushed against Katie's cheek, and the girl looked up, to find Thatch's attention had shifted onto her.

"Thank you. I appreciate this. I would like your permission to express my affection in a way you are comfortable with." Thatch was clearly holding herself back, fighting against her cultural imperatives. That had been part of the agreement. No pet names, and apparently by inference, a minimum of physical messing, though the Affini seemed incapable of wholly avoiding that.

"Among humans," Katie replied, with half a grin, "it is customary to express affection through hugs. Gosh, I can tell you learned English from a book, Thatch. I wonder if I can teach you any of my bad habits before we leave, like—"

Katie's words were cut off by a sudden "oof," as she found herself squeezed against the plant's side in a powerful single-arm hug. She could breathe—just about—but talking was an impossibility. How much of Thatch's understanding of human bodies was as abstract as her understanding of the firepit? Did she just know how much force they could handle, but lacked the visceral knowledge of first hand experience? Katie flailed for a moment, then gently pushed back against the arm until the force relented. After a moment to breathe, she pulled back in on it until it was comfortable.

That was, as it happened, still too tight to speak.

The snaps and crackles of their flame drew attention still, but neither seemed to find it alarming. A few insects found the commotion intriguing, and flew to investigate, perhaps wondering what a bright point of light was doing here in the middle of the day. Thankfully, the heat stopped them short of leaping between the logs.

The morning was firmly in progress, and the planet was going back to sleep. The plants were dim; the insects few; the sounds of the forest at a low ebb. A soft breeze flowed in from upriver, bringing with it cool, humid air, and for a few soft minutes the only sounds around were the rustling of leaves and the irregular rhythm of a controlled flame.

Katie's stomach rumbled, adding an unwelcome third instrument to what had been a pleasant duet.

Thatch's arm went slack. "Okay, I think that is quite enough of that. You had something you were going to talk to me about, and I have a meal to prepare. How about you sit right there and get comfortable and I shall make you a nice breakfast?"

Thatch began to rise, but Katie was too clever for her, and grabbed the arm that still draped over her shoulder tightly, forcing Thatch to lift her as well. She shook her head. "I can contribute. If we're cooking I want to do my part. What're we making?"

Thatch emitted a low rumble. One of the mannerisms Katie hadn't quite figured out yet, but apparently not a negative one. One of the ways in which the plant, rampant imperialist or not, was beautiful was the way in which she was a garden unto herself. The compressed weave of her arm parted, letting a vine slide out, bringing with it a small collection of weird looking items.

Unlike the fruits of the day before, these were darker colours. Less attractive by far. About half were deep purple oblate spheroids, with a small root system that had merged with Thatch's natural biology. The others were more of a rounded rectangle in unappealing brown, four or five to a twisted vine that terminated somewhere within Thatch's interior.

Katie couldn't help but grumble. Female-cut engineering overalls didn't even get pockets, and here Thatch was operating as a walking pantry.

"I do not expect you will enjoy the taste of these, but sufficient care and attention should soften the sharp edges. We have clean, fresh water, and—thanks to you—we now have heat. There are plenty of rocks of useful shapes around the riverbed, so I believe we should be able to construct a reasonably inflammable container, albeit one we'll need to be careful with. The ingredients will need preparation, additionally. Which would you like to handle, Katie?"

The affini paused, with a gentle smile on her face, awaiting a decision. Katie considered it, though in truth it was not a hard choice. She only had the one set of clothes, and going diving in such a fast-moving river seemed dangerous. "I can handle preparation. What needs doing?"

Thatch twisted a few of each ingredient off and handed the small pile over. "We shall need these washed and the outer layer removed. Ah, hmn, you'll need a tool for that, I suppose—" Thatch's eyes flicked up and to the right in an unusually human expression. A moment later, one of her smaller vines poked out from a wrist, tying around itself a few times. The end result looked much like a handle, though all that was at the end was a jagged looking thorn. With a pained expression, Thatch grabbed onto the handle and the vine connecting it to her and pulled them apart, then handed the tool over. "Please be careful with this, you have experience with how sharp these are. It should remain sharp by itself for a few days, though after that you'll likely need another."

Katie took the tool. Almost on instinct, she raised a finger to press against the tip, to test the edge, only to find another vine had gotten in the way. Katie glanced up to find the vine's origin raising an eyebrow down at her. "Doesn't that hurt?" Katie asked.

"Yes, but not as much as it would to see you injure yourself. Please be careful. I am trusting you, here." Thatch retracted the vine, though still watched closely to make sure Katie didn't jab herself anyway. She didn't; Katie tested the tool on one of the vegetables cradled in her arm. It sunk right in, without much by way of resistance. Good enough.

She made her way over to the river. The bank varied in height, mostly being a few feet above the water level, but perhaps a minute's walk downstream led her to an area where the water and ground almost met. Perfect for cleaning. Thatch followed, fishing out a wide rock with a flat top, which she spent a few moments fussing over before placing at the side of the river. Somewhere to put the ingredients, Katie supposed.

The girl sat cross legged on the bank. The river was fast enough here that the irregular spray often caught her, but it was closer to a cooling mist than real water, and a few minutes by the fire would dry her well, she suspected. She shot her companion a smile, but was immediately distracted as the affini took a running jump into the water.

Though Katie had perhaps gotten used to Thatch assuming her bipedal form, she was not used to the shapeshifter in general. Midway through the ten foot high leap, Thatch's body untangled, pausing at the apex as an unordered mess of red, black, purple, and green. It was a moment that seemed to stretch into ten, but couldn't truly have lasted beyond an instant.

On the way back down, her shape refined, becoming long and pointed, like a three meter long arrow falling from the sky. She crashed through the water's surface with barely a splash, and even the wave caused by so much displaced water was quickly lost within the fierce current. Katie leaned forward, breath half held, as she waited for the re-emergence.

It didn't take long. Something more serpentine than human slithered through the water, breaking through the surface in a shower of mist as it hunted. The river's flow was far beyond anything Katie expected she could survive within, but this creature looked at home here.

Katie took a deep breath. No wonder Thatch didn't try too hard to maintain human mannerisms, when being human was clearly so limiting. She forced her attention back down to her hands, lowering the vegetables into the water to rub and clean them, before taking her tool and scraping the skin away. It cut easily, and the work wasn't hard, but it was difficult not to feel inferior. While Thatch cut through the water like a mythical monster, Katie cut vegetables.

Was that discouraging, or was it a sign that the cosmos had so much more to offer than the Terran Accord ever could have? Katie watched the blurred shape beneath the waves turn a hundred degrees in the blink of an eye, spearing out towards something Katie couldn't spot. She thought of the frozen biped staring into a flame.

This wasn't a mythical beast. As capable as one, perhaps, but what happened when all that potential got wrapped up into something as fragile as a living creature? Give humanity this power and they'd wipe themselves out within the decade, and while the Affini Compact had clearly outlasted that, it evidently wasn't because they were without flaw.

Katie watched scraps of food waste float down the river, serene for just a moment until the currents pulled them towards the chaos and scattered them. Something would find them and feast, Katie hoped. A far cry from waste disposal in the Accord, where anything which could be burned for power would be, and to hell with the consequences.

It couldn't have taken more than half an hour to get the vegetables clean and skinned, even being careful with the 'knife', so Katie sat back and watched her partner's progress. The serpent darted all over the riverbed, occasionally breaking the water to deposit a stone, rock, or gemstone on the side. Thatch caught useful detritus as it moved past her, and dug through the riverbed to extract valuable pieces, though she always seemed to do it carefully, and always rearranged what she wasn't taking to avoid leaving gaps or breaking habitats.

After no more than ten minutes of that, Thatch's sleek head broke out of the water by Katie's seating position. Six gently glowing eyes fixed on her, blinking at irregular intervals. Rivulets of water ran down her surface, black skin freckled with purple dots. The jaw opened, revealing thorns that Katie knew were sharp interleaved in a jaw that she suspected could have bitten her in half. "Food prepared?" Thatch asked.

Katie's surprise was made evident. A slight lean away, eyebrows rising, eyes left a little wider. She knew this creature, but the sudden attention of a predator was something that set off alarm bells deep within her biological heritage. Useless, in this context, but loud, paired with adrenaline and cortisol to force her into a state of stress, so she was ready to fight.

Katie took in a sharp breath, and that was all it took to attract Thatch's concern. A vine streaked out of the water to gently press against her cheek. "Is all well? I hope this arrangement of myself is not distressing to you."

It was still Thatch. The voice was different, the edges of words seeming sharper. Sibilant, even. Despite that, the important matters held. The tone was caring and the cadence was calming. The way Thatch's head tilted a few degrees as she spoke was exactly the same between this and her bipedal shape. It was the same creature, clearly, and all the guff in Katie's head was nothing but leftover biological waste from a million years of evolving in a totally different context.

Katie nodded, forcing herself to pay attention to Thatch's body. "You surprised me, is all. That's... Do you practice these?"

The serpent nodded, six sharp eyes staying fixed on Katie's two. "Of course," Thatch admitted. "I know some Affini do this recreationally, to make themselves unique, but this is simply a prior species. Aquatic predators, the, ah... I don't think you'll be able to pronounce this one either, the Xa'a-ackétøth. A lovely species. They used to be very dangerous. They'd almost destroyed themselves and their many worlds by the time we came across them. Surprising even us, they shut down their war engines and surrendered immediately as soon as we offered them a place under our wing, metaphorically speaking."

Thatch paused, and... frowned? It was hard to tell, the face wasn't very expressive, or at least Katie couldn't read the expressions. "Literally speaking, also, at the time."

Katie nodded, movement slow and gentle, as if she were trying to avoid making any sudden movements. She caught herself a moment later and nodded properly. "How many of those do you have in you?" she asked. "And can you carry this rock? It's a bit heavy for me." Katie extended an arm towards the pile of prepared vegetables, and one of Thatch's vines stretched out to lift it.

Katie pushed herself up to her feet and began to walk back towards their camp, such as it was. Her knife was carefully strapped to her leg with one of the few concessions to practicality her uniform possessed. Thatch was carrying quite a lot, once she picked up her own pile of materials, but she had little trouble swimming upriver and holding a conversation even so.

"Three and... a half?" Thatch swam at the side of the river, looking as casual as if the water were still. Katie glanced over to make sure she wasn't cheating, finding handholds with underwater vines. She wasn't. "This one; my more human form shares a lot of similarities with another bipedal shape; and a kind of flightless bird. I did have that last one capable of flight for a while, but it was more technology than biology and was far too much hassle to maintain."

Katie walked on the other side of the boundary, where soft dirt caressed her boots and her single shape was incapable of even carrying the fruits of her own labour without risking ruination. "You must live such interesting lives," she admitted, glancing away, only to have her attention drawn back by a low chuckle.

"We are so bored that we change our shapes to match everyone we meet. The universe is a vast expanse of monotony, Katie. You are the only interesting things outside of the Compact. Life is unique, surprising, and joyful. Why do you think our culture prioritises you so?"

Katie looked away again. It seemed incomprehensible. How could humanity possibly be of enough use to justify so much effort? Realistically speaking, the Indomitable could have been left well enough alone, and they would eventually have run out of food and died in space. They weren't a threat. Hunting them down was pointless effort. How could they possibly be worth it?

The camp wasn't far, and so it didn't take long to reach it. Katie hurried on ahead to dry herself by the flames. With hardly more than a splash, Thatch emerged from the water, and was halfway to human form before Katie had even managed to turn, somehow without dropping the food. She strode over, busying herself with organising the spoils and gathering further from the environment at a dizzying pace.

Within the minute, sticks and branches had been pruned and cut to size, tied together with some length of entwined fiber, and arranged to create a harness that sat over the firepit. Vine and leaf and plantlife mixed with stone to create a vaguely misshapen pot. Greenery to lash it all together and give the natural materials structure enough to be useful, so that the rocks could achieve things neither side of the construction could manage alone.

Thatch dipped the construction in the river, then hung the pot over the fire. Flames licked the thin stone bottom, but nothing caught alight. They both let out a breath they hadn't realised they'd been holding.

"Should I cut these into pieces?" Katie asked, gesturing to the vegetables. "They're probably a little too large to eat straight."

Thatch's face was much easier to read while she was putting effort into making it human. A moment of hesitation, followed by the realisation that Katie's mouth was not large enough to eat a whole vegetable. She handed the stone platter over with a nod. "Do. We have some time before the water is boiling. Tell me about your dream while you are, though please do not lose your focus on the cutting edge."

Katie nodded. Having something to busy her hands tended to help while she was trying to explain something difficult. Despite the firmness of the ingredients, Thatch's thorn still sliced through it like it was hot syntharine.

"I dreamed about some old cargo ship I used to crew on," she started. "It wasn't a great experience, the operator was a jerk. Tried to abandon me on some ass-end of nowhere spaceport to avoid paying my last cheque. Asshole." Chop, chop, chop. Thatch seemed to be keeping one eye on the fire and one eye on the cutting.

"Jump engineer's the best job I've ever had. I was lucky to get into school for it. Most couldn't, but my parents still talked to me back then—assholes—and they pulled some strings. I thought I was getting some real social mobility, y'know? Skilled work, something that was hard to replace. It's not easy to maintain or run one of those things and learning about it was meant to be a ticket to a better life."

Chop. Chop. Chop. Katie's cuts came in time with her words.

"'course, as soon as I graduated, better designs started appearing that were easier to run. I got stuck on the shitty ships that couldn't afford to upgrade, and then a year or so back the Cosmic Navy started drafting anyone with skills and they still used manual operated units, so they could squeeze a little extra out of them."

Chop.

Chop.

Chop.

"I think you taught me more about how those things actually work than two and a half years of school did. I don't know anything—" Chop— "about this. I know how to use—" Chop— "a few specific models and nothing about how they work, really. It feels bad. I don't know how often I came close to dying because they chose to teach me a user manual instead of the fucking physi—"

No chop. Katie looked down at the knife, with its tip precariously close to her own finger and the blade half an inch deep in one of Thatch's vines. Katie winced, freezing in place while Thatch moved over. The creature sat beside her and gently reached out to take the tool away from her. Thatch took a moment to rearrange them, shifting Katie around to her other side with a fast, but comfortable, motion so she was kept away from the cutting area.

"They made no choice, Katie." Thatch kept her eyes on her work. "I do not believe that humanity understood the underlying principles any better than you did. You are right to worry, any design which crashes back into real-space as violently as yours is flirting with disaster." Chopchopchopchop.

Katie sagged. "Those newer designs?" she asked, holding out a little hope, at least.

"I believe they simply automated what you were doing and added a little redundancy to the components which failed most often. I remember reading a syndicated article from one of our shipbreaking outposts that was simply horrified at the risks humanity had been subjecting itself to." Thatch didn't look up. She had good knife etiquette, and presumably didn't want a second injured vine. The one Katie had cut seemed to have been safely stowed away, hopefully where it could be healed.

"Oh. I didn't know that. They replaced me for nothing?"

Thatch looked up. The knife fell silent, carefully placed against the stone surface of the cutting board. The hand that had been holding it came up to Katie's cheek in a firm hold. "They were fools. Would you like to know how the physics really works?"

Katie nodded, fast but small movements, looking up into Thatch's eyes. They didn't look predatory like this, though Katie acknowledged that they were the same eyes, if fewer.

"Then, if you're careful and good at following instructions, let's treat our extended stay here as an opportunity for education. We will need to build something using the same principles if we're to signal the Elettarium for rescue. I mean careful, however." A vine raised the knife into Katie's line of sight. "This is a dangerous tool, but it is entirely tame by comparison to even the simplest superluminal beacon. With this, you could hurt yourself. With that, you could do lasting harm to this entire ecosystem. Can I trust you to be careful, Katie?"

Katie nodded more rapidly, feeling a soft flush on her cheeks. Excitement. Like her first day of university, before she'd figured out it was all a sham. Like her first jump, before she'd realised the next hundred would be the same thing over and over and none of them would take her where she wanted to go.

Thatch smiled, taking a moment to ruffle Katie's hair before cutting the last few slices and dumping the ingredients into the now-boiling water, followed by a few twists of some smaller plants. "Then I'll teach you more about hyperspace theory than any human has ever known, and you'll build us a beacon that rescues the both of us. It will be tricky, and we will need materials that are likely to be hard to synthesise, but I expect you shall have us home and safe before long."

Katie took a deep breath, nodding one last time. Thatch wasn't a god, and neither was she, but Katie knew she'd always been more capable than the Terran Accord would have room for, and if she played her cards right, maybe she could prove to these invaders that she could be useful.

Chapter Text

Clink!

Katie took a deep breath through the mask of leaves tied around her mouth, shifted her stance, and lifted the pickaxe.

Clink!

It crashed down against the rock again, this time breaking a chunk off. Breathing hard, she forced aching muscles to respond, bringing the heavy instrument back up to shoulder level, so she could put her whole body into the swing.

Clink!

The rock she was hammering at cracked into a dozen pieces. Katie let the tool fall, and went down to one knee, sifting through the rubble until she found her prize. Another little nugget of metal fit to sit atop her little pile of similar nuggets. They wouldn't be much use like this, but with a bit of time in a kiln and some careful working, they aught to make passable makeshift wiring.

The nugget made a much quieter clink as it settled atop the ones beneath. Katie raised the pickaxe again. It was heavy, and her muscles were straining just to lift it.

She'd been trapped on an empty planet for a couple of days now, and she didn't want to be here any longer than she had to be. She had a stomach full of passable food and and comfortable place to sleep, and even a mentor teaching her how to survive, but what she didn't have was a tangible sense of physical progress.

Hence, clink.

With metal, she could make wires. With wires and one of those vegetables, she could probably extract some electricity, and failing that, they had a river to build a generator on. With that, they could... make some basic lighting? It wasn't really necessary, now that they'd discovered her companion could glow like a bulb on demand. A radio? There was very unlikely anything to pick up. A transmitter of some kind would be needed, though. The hard part of getting themselves rescued was going to be opening enough of a hole in spacetime to put a message through, but they'd still need something to actually send that message.

Hence. Clink.

"Katie, darling, are you still in there?" A voice called, as melodious as ever. Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom, not that Katie wholly understood the implications of the latter part. Why encode how many times you'd gotten hurt into your name? Was it thrill-seeking, or social shaming? Had Thatch gained or lost standing here?

"Uh—" Clink!— "huh," she called back.

"This really is not necessary, you know," the affini complained, needing to hunch down just to fit inside of the cave. "I am already in the process of growing the right kind of fine vines to serve as electrical conduits. In a day we shall have as much as we could want."

Thatch didn't understand. There was an irony to the creature attempting to stop her from mining, though admittedly she had supported the endevour enough to build Katie the pick. A wooden handle tied to a wooden head, tipped with something sharp and hard. Probably not actually diamond, but some kind of gemstone.

"I—" Clink!— "know. Wanna—" Clink!— "do something. Feeling—" Clink!— "restless. Can't just sit around and—" Clink!— "wait."

Katie moved to swing the pick again, but a gentle vine wrapped around it, another around her wrist, carefully but firmly removing the tool from her grip. "We can find you other things to do that won't risk doing as much harm to your body. Please remember that I need my student to be capable of very precise actions, and exacerbating your injury will not help."

Katie grumbled. In some ways, this was like being back at school. Power-tripping professors making her wait around with nothing to do. Admittedly, there were good reasons here, but still. "Ugh. Yes, Miss Aquae," she groaned, briefly imagining the affini in a scholar's robe, like some of her old tutors. At least Thatch actually knew what she was talking about, sometimes.

Thatch visibly winced, the edges of her body almost seeming to wilt. "Please do not call me that, Katie. 'Thatch' is fine, but if you really need an honourific then perhaps 'Guide' or 'Mentor' would be more appropriate?"

Katie busied herself picking up the handful of little nuggets she'd gathered. She'd ridden Thatch upriver until they'd found somewhere that looked promising, and thankfully it was much easier to find surface metals on a wholly pre-industrial planet.

"They hardly roll off the tongue, do they?" Katie complained. She didn't understand why she was being so snippy today. The first couple of days she'd hoped that the action and adventure of everything would convince her brain to forget that she wasn't happy, but apparently today was one of those days where everything anyone did or said was annoying.

Thatch had been accommodating, if confused, by Katie's sudden urge to get away from the camp and do something physical, at least so far. "Unfortunately, a significant amount of the time it takes my people to learn a new language is taken up by finding the good terms of address and appropriating them for ourselves. For a relationship between equals, we are cursed to be oblique."

It was entirely unclear whether this was a joke or not, and Katie wasn't in the mood to ask. Once Katie had the metals all safely wrapped up, she left the cave. The sunlight was blinding after so long in the dark, but if she squinted, Katie could mostly avoid stumbling over the rocks scattered around the area.

Ugh. Why was she like this? Thatch was just trying to help. Katie wished she could point to something specific that had her mood so sour, but in all honesty their situation seemed to be a clear improvement over cowering in a rebel cruiser. The food still wasn't great, but at least she no longer had to pay for it. She still didn't have any humans to talk to, though she had some companionship now.

Katie looked out over the river. They were miles up from their campsite here, and there were some clear differences. A new species of fish was hanging around. These didn't leap out of the water, but they were much more friendly than the predators back at camp. The water flow was slower—there were a few tributaries adding pressure a little downstream—and so things were calm enough that if Katie sat and dangled a finger into the water, she quickly got colourful triangles coming to taste the salts on her hand.

Even those chromatic beauties didn't do much to improve Katie's mood.

Thatch emerged from the cave, carrying another few nuggets for Katie's pile, with the pickaxe hanging from her waist. It looked comically small on her, but it was heavy enough that Katie appreciated not having to lift it. Quietly, the affini moved to sit at Katie's side, making her own offering to the fishes.

They were a little interested in the novelty, but soon drifted back towards Katie, who had the tastier digits. One small victory for her.

"I am somewhat at a loss, Katie," Thatch admitted. "I know what would help the humans in our care if they expressed your symptoms, but I have neither the ingredients nor your permission to see if it would help you, too."

Katie snorted. The movement was a little too aggressive, and ended up shifting her fingers, sending the fish running to safety. Katie sighed, but left her hand in place, hoping they would return. "More drugs?"

Thatch shrugged, retrieving her own fingers and replacing them with a root. The fish weren't interested in that either, but so far Thatch had only tasted any of the kind of food Katie ate while she was cooking, and claimed to get no nutrition out of it, so seemed to truly survive off of water and dirt. "Partially. Drugs alone cannot make something truly happy."

She paused.

"At least, not without them losing part of themselves. We are caretakers, Katie, and ruthless ones. We will use whatever we have to to make the universe happy."

Katie rolled her eyes, focusing on the water. One brave fish was returning. A shining blue, with an orange stripe running around its body, around the middle. It gave Katie's finger a careful inspection. "What a crock. You can't just make people be happy for no reason and pretend it's real."

Often, when confronted with the obvious contradictions of her race, Thatch fell quiet. Katie knew better than to think she was making progress convincing Thatch away from their cause, as she never seemed to grow less certain they were doing the right thing, but at very least she would learn what Katie didn't want. Maybe, when they got back, that would help her navigate their culture well enough to avoid finding herself in another trap of circumstance.

"Why are you sad, Katie?" Thatch asked, not needing much of a pause at all, this time.

Why was she sad? Rationally, life was looking up for her, though perhaps it was simply depressing that being stranded with only a houseplant for company was an upgrade. That didn't feel right, though. She was learning about things she'd always been enthusiastic about; learning how to be useful even in a hyper-advanced civilisation. If Thatch's claims were true, she'd never worry about affording a meal again, and a bed of vines and leaves here was likely to be the worst night's sleep she'd ever have from this point on—and even that was better than her bunk back on the ship had been.

Katie was silent for long moments. The river's gentle flow provided a peaceful soundtrack to her misery. "I don't know." She looked away from the fishes, away from Thatch, away from everything. Her heart felt like it was in her stomach and it hurt to breathe and there was no reason for it. "It just happens sometimes. Human bodies are kinda shit, and I'm stuck with one. Sometimes something just goes wrong and I spend the day miserable, but I'll be better tomorrow, probably. I usually am. I'm sorry you have to deal with me."

Thatch's still-damp finger drew a diagonal line down Katie's cheek, and then, hesitantly, balled into a fist and lightly tapped her on the shoulder. That got a weak laugh. The affini was trying to act human, even if she wasn't very good at it. That made two of them.

"Why is that real, then, Katie? You speak as if what is making you sad is not truly you. It is 'your body', but not truly what you see as yourself?" Katie glanced back towards her companion, but couldn't stand to maintain eye contact. Thatch seemed concerned and Katie wished she didn't have to be. Katie would be fine, she just needed time. She could be miserable for a while. She was used to it.

The bravest fish had found success, and the more cowardly ones were deep in envy. A pair of green swimmers moved towards the blue one—one from each side—and tried to nudge it away, so they could taste the oils and salts of a humanoid finger. Katie frowned, slowly moving her hand to protect her favourite.

"It doesn't feel like me," she admitted. "Nothing is different between today and yesterday, really, and I was enthusiastic yesterday. You're a good mentor, once you get the flirting out of your system."

Thatch paused, making a few experimental noises before seemingly deciding to ignore the claim entirely. "...regardless, if I could take that sadness away, would that not then make you more you?"

It was too fucking early in the morning for philosophy and these jealous fish wouldn't leave the brave one alone. Katie slipped another hand into the water to shield it, but the green ones were relentless, nipping at fins and scales.

"I don't even know what I am, Thatch; you're asking me questions I can't answer. Why don't you make yourself useful and help me keep this fish safe?"

"The green one?" asked the plant. It made sense she would have an affinity for green things, Katie supposed.

"No, the orange one. The green ones are jerks."

Thatch hummed in consideration, before reaching inside of herself and pulling out one of their containers of water. Katie hadn't thought that bringing them would be necessary, given that they were next to a clean river, but her companion had insisted. The contents were dumped out, and in one smooth motion Thatch snatched the orange fish and its environment right out of the water, barely ruffling its fins. She handed it over to Katie.

"There, a pet. Perhaps focusing on keeping this creature safe and healthy will give you a way to feel useful while your body is misbehaving." The plant shooed away the green fish, though now that their victim had vanished they'd lost interest in Katie's hand regardless. She rose, extending a vine to help Katie up too. Katie accepted, because getting up without spilling her container would have been a challenge.

"I don't think I'm stable enough to take care of a pet, Thatch. I don't want anything dependent on me, I can't even deal with myself half the time." The plant ignored her and turned to leave. "Thatch? Hey, get back here!"

Thatch paused, but only to extend a series of vines in a staircase pattern, giving Katie an easy walk up to her shoulders. "While I am not familiar with this exact species, I would expect that taking it out of flowing water for an extended period will not be good for it. Come, you can build it a more suitable home back at camp."

Katie tried to argue, or at least tried to come up with a plausible argument, for why she couldn't do this. She obviously had the time. Even once they could really get started on their project, there would be a lot of waiting and rest. She didn't want to hurt the fish, but Katie suspected that if she were doing that bad a job, Thatch would take over. That, at least, gave her a safety net. She couldn't screw up so badly something died.

Begrudging, Katie stepped up the ascending cascade of plantlife until she could take her place sitting around Thatch's neck. She had the affini fairly well trained now, but with one hand clutching her new pet, she could only use the one vine for steering. It felt a little less precise, but Thatch was very good at being responsive, and they were soon roaring through the forest again.

With the wind in Katie's hair, it was hard not to feel something. Thatch handled better than any ship Katie had had occasion to fly. Shifts in Katie's balance resulted in slight course changes, such that half the time piloting could be done almost subconsciously, leaning around trees and rocks. The one vine Katie had a good grasp on let her make more aggressive changes to their travel.

Still. Existence was frustrating. Katie wanted to feel alive. She leaned left, hard, while pulling the vine along with. Thatch, to her credit, immediately pulled to the side, even leaning herself so that the centrifugal force of the turn kept Katie, and her pet, safely in place. They shot out over the river, and once Thatch was unable to grab ahold of any trees, their speed did begin to drop. Vines still pierced the water, anchoring to the riverbed to keep them moving, but it wasn't... fast. Katie wanted fast. She wanted the wind in her hair. The mist in her face. Something physical. Adrenaline. Excitement.

"Can you do the, uh, the fish people thing?" Katie asked. Last time she'd come face to face with Thatch's alternate form, it had been intimidating, but maybe that was the kind of energy she was looking for. Thatch lifted a hand and wiggled it, expressing uncertainty, and Katie did feel a flush of pride. She'd taught Thatch that.

"I am not sure I can provide as smooth a journey for you," Thatch admitted. "It is much easier to absorb shocks with my vines than it would be in the water. If you can keep a tight grip on your pet, and keep the container firmly closed, however, I would be willing to try."

Katie peeked inside of the water container. Her orange fish seemed perfectly content so far, exploring its new environment. Katie experimentally moved it around, and the water seemed to keep it well insulated, like the interface tank of a gunship keeping its little pilot insulated from the forces around it.

Katie nodded, folding shut the little flap that sealed the container. The wooden clasping mechanism Thatch had devised was sturdy enough, but Katie kept her hand over it regardless. A pair of vines lifted her into the air while Thatch twisted beneath, shedding humanity to take on a form that was clearly a dominant force. The vines lowered her down, until she was sitting on Thatch's... back? Body? The part just short of the beast's head. With her vines drawn tight, Thatch looked every bit the sleek predator, aside from the twin additions of a seatbelt to keep Katie steady and the control vine to make this something other than a theme park ride.

"I shall defer to your guidance on our course, Katie. Please be careful."

Katie took a deep breath, grasping the vine with curious fingers, and slowly pushed forward. They took off at a steady pace, and Katie spent a few minutes steering them around in wide circles. She knew that she couldn't actually come to harm here, but it still felt like a bad idea to just take off without having some appreciation for what this body could actually do. Thatch spent half her time in bipedal form cheating, simply using vines for everything and ignoring the limits of the human body, but here? This was something real. Somewhere out in the universe, something really moved like this.

Katie pushed forward, and they started to pick up speed. Thatch cut through the water with terrifying efficiency, sending white sheets of foam off to each side. There was less to avoid than in the forest, but the river was still dotted with rocks and the occasional fallen tree, and so there was plenty to dodge and a seemingly endless amount of extra speed to gain.

By the time they reached their campsite they were moving at an incredible rate. Katie pressed on regardless, speeding up, and leaving their home in the metaphorical dust. They needed to explore anyway, and the adrenaline felt good when it was something she was in control of. Better, with the safety net of knowing that even if she screwed up nothing truly bad would happen.

The pair of them were still figuring out how to coexist, but progress was being made. Sometimes that was intangible, like Thatch learning how to deal with a mood swing, and sometimes it was very much the opposite, like Katie learning when to yank up on the vine to get a really high leap out of the water to clear a tree without Thatch needing to take over and prevent them from barreling straight into it.

After... a little while, Katie noticed something odd glinting a little way further downstream. By the time she'd taken note they were almost upon it. She hauled back on the vine and braced herself for whatever that instruction would get interpreted as.

Thatch leaped up out of the water, physically throwing Katie off of herself into the air. For a brief, terrifying instant she was airborne and ballistic, before a pair of vines hauled her back in to Thatch's waiting, humanoid arms while a dozen vines behind her braced to bring them to a hard stop. Katie squeezed shut her eyes, trying to ignore the not-so-distant memory of slamming into a bulkhead. She could see what she was slamming into and it was not metal. She gritted her teeth, forcing the sensation down, only semi-successfully. There was something that needed processing, there.

"What's wrong?" Thatch asked, looking down with alarm. Katie rapidly glanced around, suddenly very conscious that she may have reacted to nothing at all. After a few moments of looking, she spotted the glint, still a little ways downstream of them, and pointed.

"That... seems unusual," Thatch replied, sentence growing less certain with each short word. There was a square of something that looked metallic sticking out of the undergrowth. Thatch's vines made for a smooth journey over to the riverside, and they walked from there, cautiously approaching.

Katie knelt beside it, and pushed back the plantlife.

"Well, shit," she breathed. "That's not Terran."

Hiding within the bush was a broken scrap of metal, with torn up edges and lettering evident across it. Maybe half an inch thick and around a foot across in the other directions. Not English, and judging from Thatch's curiosity, not Affini either. It looked like part of a hull, or part of casing, that had been torn apart, but there was no chance it was a natural occurrence. What looked like rivets joined two pieces together. It was clearly machined. Katie carefully lifted it in her free hand.

"This feels lightweight," she guessed. "Can't be iron or steel. This is aeroframe grade. Maybe even spacefaring, a satellite or something." Katie paused, cheeks flushing, realising where she was and who she was with. "Uh, at least by Terran standards. I guess that probably doesn't generalise."

Thatch shook her head. "Early technology tends to take similar paths. Physics imposes the same constraints on us all. May I...?" she asked, holding out a hand. Katie passed it over. Thatch took it, pressing her thumb into the metal until it began to deform. "It is fairly strong for this weight, by usual early civilisation standards. It is unlikely this kind of alloy would be naturally produced, and we have yet to find any evidence of intelligent life here that could have built it. I think you may be right; this is likely to be a visitor to this place, just as we are."

They stood quietly, thinking through the implications of that. Without the constant motion and excitement of travel, though, Katie was quickly distracted by a chill in the air and an emptiness in her stomach. Her clothing was soaked through, and it didn't take long before she was shivering. That caught Thatch's attention, and the two of them silently agreed that the way home should be very much less exciting than the way here had been.

As Katie settled into place around her steed's neck, she let out a deep breath. "I think we should build that radio."

Thatch only answered with a rapid takeoff, heading upriver at a more reasonable, but still rapid, clip.

Chapter Text

Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom, carefully stirred a bubbling pot. The vegetables within swirled in dense patterns, pulling a mix of spices behind in a complicated dance that it was easy to get lost in. The first batch had not been quite to Katie's taste, but Thatch was feeling better about the second. More spice, more time boiling, vegetables thinner cut to give them more opportunity to mellow out. It would have been preferable to give Katie some more variety, but unfortunately this was what Thatch had to work with, and so she was determined to make it work.

She looked up at her student, who was busying herself with the final stages of constructing a tank, of sorts, for her new pet. Thatch had carefully guided her towards a design that would work, and now she was building something which would hang into the rushing water below, with carefully cut holes to allow some water flow without subjecting the weaker fish to the full force of this area of river.

It was hard not to wonder whether she was doing the right thing. Thatch's injectors itched, watching the poor creature struggle with her own emotional state like this. Anybody else in her position would already have Katie so wrapped up in chemicals that she wouldn't be capable of this kind of mood swing. Thatch couldn't even disagree that it would be better for her.

She stirred the soup, injectors dry. Not having the drug loadout for it was a poor excuse, she knew. She'd gathered enough basic ingredients that she could have synthesised something better than she had. If she couldn't even get this soup right, though, then how could she possibly trust herself to manage a delicate emotional state to Katie's benefit?

The girl paused, halfway through whittling one of the support structures on which the tank would descend. She set the thorn she was using down and lay the half-finished piece over her lap, attention drifting towards the setting sun. Her sigh was a brief exhalation, but it seemed to echo as a refutation of Thatch's efforts to date. There was only one other sapient on this planet and Thatch was somehow failing to make her happy.

Thatch could leave the soup to simmer. She hung the makeshift ladle onto a burr in the harness above and quietly made her way over to the riverside, then sat to Katie's side. She took up the half-finished project and extended one of her own thorns, so she could pick up where Katie had left off.

"How are you feeling, Katie?" Thatch made a conscious effort to keep her hands doing things that Katie's would be able to, in case the girl was watching for tips.

"Like shit, still. I dunno why, please don't feel like it's your fault." Katie spoke with a flat affect, sounding a mix between exhausted and actively frustrated by the question.

It was Thatch's fault, though, wasn't it? Somebody else in her place could fix it. She focused on the twig in her hand, cutting a little floral pattern into it as she went. Perhaps simply providing company could be enough.

Their local star was well on its way beneath the horizon now, but she didn't need to look to check. Thatch could feel the rhythm of this planet. Her body urged her to respond. To join in on the evening's festivities by lighting up and attracting insects and other small creatures.

It was easy to ignore, but still an uncomfortable experience. The material that was usually available for transplantation aboard a ship had its daily cadence bioengineered out. That there was an urge in the back of Thatch's head that she hadn't put there was discomforting; how much worse must it be for Katie, who had never experienced the lack of such things?

Katie seemed to be staring out over the river, though it was unclear what she was actually paying attention to. Perhaps the growing illumination of the forest had her transfixed again. Thatch saw no reason to rouse her, if that were the case.

After a few minutes, Thatch moved on to the next piece of wood. The design she'd led Katie to wasn't a complicated one, but it did have a few moving parts and the little one seemed to struggle with the detail.

When the next piece was mostly done, and halfway decorated, Katie began to speak. "I think you're probably right. This doesn't feel like me. Healthcare is way too expensive, so I never talked to anyone about it, but I do wish that I'd gotten that chance."

Thatch lowered the wood, mid-chisel. She had to help, didn't she? "I have several kinds of medication which could help, if—"

Katie shook her head, emphatically. "No. No, I... That wasn't worth it, last time."

Silence fell across them, for a moment. Human psychology was much harder without powerful tools for making precise adjustments. Thatch bridged the gap between them with a hand, taking one of Katie's and giving it a squeeze. Touch and warmth were still capable, and simply from that alone, Thatch extracted a brief flash of smile.

"Come, sit closer," she insisted. Katie would resist if pulled, Thatch had found, but any untamed beast could be tempted if offered one of its basic needs. The girl relented, shuffling close enough that Thatch could drape an arm over her. "If you will permit me a few minutes to work, I could—"

"I don't want any drugs, Thatch."

The affini's injectors twitched. She should ignore the demand. Katie was suffering and she could fix it. She aught to fix it. If she weren't so stars-damned hesitant then Katie wouldn't be so stars-damned miserable. She hoped that her internal turmoil didn't show on the outside. It really wouldn't do for Katie to be aware of the sharp needles a centimeter away from her skin, dripping with something that would be good for her.

Then what? Katie would spend the next few weeks happily learning about spacial routing. Katie would wake up every morning with a smile on her face. Katie would fall asleep each night in the comforting embrace of her clodding de-facto owner and then at some point Thatch would make a mistake and break her.

Thatch blinked a few times in rapid succession, as something tapped against the side of her face. She glanced across at the poor thing she'd accidentally trapped when she'd lost focus on her form and consciously forced herself to relax. Thankfully, Katie used her newfound freedom of movement to lean into the embrace, not to escape it.

"But this is nice," the girl admitted. "Company; closeness. I wish we could be doing more, but honestly, I'm exhausted." Her head fell to the side, nestling against a vine or two. Thatch shrugged the spare biomatter she had hanging from her back over to cover the girl and keep her warm, carefully regulating her rhythm to avoid lulling Katie to sleep.

"You okay, Thatch?"

"You needn't worry about me, little Katie." The rhythms were hardly conscious. It may have been something Thatch's species had always been with, or perhaps it was something developed in the early days of their campaign. Perhaps it was only her. Thatch would freely admit to being more interested in recent history, not ancient tales. Her body thrummed with heat and life in a slow, gentle dance. Her voice harmonised to the same tune, and unless Thatch took particular care to avoid it, gentle movements tended to match up as well. There were no metronomes in the Affini Compact, because their cadence was simply natural.

Thatch was sure that most found it convenient, but she had to put particular effort into keeping herself discordant enough to avoid sending Katie to sleep when they were this close together.

Thatch felt a sharp exhalation of breath against her side. A sigh, probably. In a feeble attempt to forestall the inevitable, she held Katie tighter against her side, but it was not enough.

"That's not a yes."

Dirt. If she couldn't come up with a convincing answer, then what little comfort Thatch had been able to provide would be undone before it had truly begun. Somehow, Katie kept managing to see through her misdirection, and Thatch couldn't bring herself to lie.

"No, it is not. I feel as though I should be able to help you more than I am."

Katie stiffened, a little. Dirt and decay, was even that too much? Thatch was not about to let her own morosity become contagious.

Vines carefully stroked across Katie's hair and down her arms. For a moment, Thatch indulged herself, letting warmth, the motion of vines, voice, scent, and light fall into the same harmony. "Quiet now, little one," she whispered. "You are in no danger here. Your wishes will be respected."

The poor thing calmed back down, lulled into comfort. Katie spent a moment breathing out a slow sigh, lowering her chin and gently tugging the sheet of plantlife further over herself.

It was not to be for long, unfortunately. Katie grumbled, raising her head and fumbling around with an arm until she managed to grab ahold of one of the strands of flower-laden vine that made up Thatch's hair. She yanked, and Thatch obliged, leaning down to look at her.

"What did you just do?" Katie asked. Her voice was soft, but her eyes were hard. Little chance of distracting her further, at least not without Thatch declaring herself a liar. Lying to a compliant ward was at best distasteful, and at worst a significant moral quandary. Not an option Thatch wished to consider.

"I was simply providing comfor—"

Katie's hand raised to press Thatch's mouth closed. That would not actually prevent her from speaking, but the intent was clear enough.

"No, none of that technically correct but misleading stuff," Katie insisted, drawing a wince out of an affini that had thought herself clever. "You did something, I... I think."

Katie paused, head lowering back to rest against Thatch's side.

"W's nice," she admitted, voice quiet, speaking more to Thatch's torso than anything else. "Don't stop?"

Thatch felt a low, throbbing heat settle in her core. The rustling of her own undergrowth was enough to cause a breeze. How was she supposed to handle this? She couldn't. If she took charge of this girl she would break her, and what was this but the first step down a slippery slope?

Carefully discordant, Thatch stroked a hand down Katie's hair. "I think that you may wish to reconsider. We have agreed not to, to use your words, 'mess with your head.', no?" Her touch earned a contented mumble, but her words earned a titter.

"If we take that literally then even talking to me is wrong. I meant... your chemicals and stuff, anything where you're putting something inside of me to change how I feel. Just talking to me isn't that, that's just conversation. Come on, I've been awful all day, don't tell me you've been holding out on me because you thought cheering me up would be wrong."

Thatch contracted. Was that what she was doing? So afraid of doing wrong that she'd let a living creature wallow in easily fixable pain simply to spare herself the responsibility? Her people would be ashamed.

A low rumble buzzed through her form. Not one of the mannerisms she put on intentionally. The low, slow bass line of her own music, and the sound Thatch drew comfort from in moments of uncertainty.

"Very well." She spoke in only that low beat. A complicated arrangement of dexterous growths deep within her body drew in air from all around, imparted vibration, and let it escape. Usually, Thatch would direct it towards her mouth for the sake of keeping up appearances, but there was no reason to be so limited here.

"Then," she spoke, forcing herself to loosen up a little so she had the flexibility to raise her pitch. She selected a relatively small, sensitive vine and directed it to Katie's hand, carefully closing her fingers around it. "I will stop if you ask, or if you lose your grip."

The girl was stubborn, holding it tight. Thatch took a few careful breaths. She didn't breathe to extract oxygen from the air, like Katie, but running it through her body was still a good technique for centering and focus. More so than that, however, Thatch had been holding her natural rhythms apart for so many years that though she felt like it should be easy to slip back into, the muscle memory was no longer there.

It would be a strain no matter whether she let herself sing or tore her harmony apart, then. She had not done the former for more than a few seconds at a time in decades. In all likelihood, she wouldn't need more than that now, either. Her delicate problem would fall asleep or ask her to stop and either way Thatch would no longer have to worry that she was holding herself back selfishly.

"Please take a deep breath, Katie, and allow your eyes to close."

Thatch spoke, all the different tones of her voice finally lining up. It was so much easier to speak this way, when she could direct her whole body as one piece, not holding different parts of herself to different standards so they could sing to an unnatural beat. She had worried that matching it to the rhythm of her own movements would be hard, but it wasn't. Her vines danced across Katie's skin in precise tempo, where the peaks of her words were joined by the apex of her heat and the strongest of her touches.

It was natural. It was normal.

"And breathe out," she instructed, hand brushing down Katie's cheek as she did so. Body cooling, touch growing lighter, voice growing quieter. It drew Katie in like a moth to a flame.

"Let's take another breath," Thatch whispered, though in truth she could have stayed silent. Her voice was an important part of the melody, but only part. With Katie so close, her every sense would be feeling it, in swells of scent and heat, the quiet music of plantlife in motion, the brush of soft leaf on skin, and, much to Thatch's own surprise, the gentle light of her new bioluminescence, reacting to her natural pattern as if it were an integrated part of her.

"And out," she whispered, voice so quiet it could barely be heard. She dipped one leg in a way a real biped never could so that Katie's natural option was to shuffle closer still, arriving on the affini's lap. Thatch doubted that Katie would complain about a little cheating. Not right now. Her grip on the safety vine remained tight, though Thatch noticed with interest that Katie's strength was dancing to her tune now too.

A series of vines made careful adjustments to Katie's position, making sure she wasn't lying uncomfortably or in any way that would harm circulation. Thatch's warm hand stroked down the back of her head, fingers tapping to the same soft song as all else in Katie's world.

They repeated the breathing exercises a good few times. At the end of each, Thatch could feel Katie's grip growing weaker, but never quite loosening entirely. The affini chuckled, a low chorus of wordless sound that fit into the melody without much by way of conscious effort. "You're not going to let go of that vine, are you, little one?" she asked, more to herself than the girl. Depending on how relaxed she was, she might not even read the soft sounds as speech. They fit into the same score as everything else, after all, what about them would draw attention?

Katie's head gave a tiny shake. "Not going to let go..." she whispered, voice tangled deep in Thatch's strings.

"Comfortable like this?" Thatch asked, a vine tilting Katie's head up as she spoke, so girl and sentence reached a pinnate apex, entwined together.

A tiny nod. Eyes remained closed. Breathing slow, matching Thatch's cycling warmth with impressive precision. "Comfortable... this," she mumbled, first word a little too long, second a little too short, so that it still matched the cadence of their song overall.

Thatch's breath ran up through her back and out through her front, ruffling Katie's hair. The girl took a deep breath, smile deepening a little. Adorable. This was safe, Thatch thought. Hoped. Just comfort and quiet words, no more than that. No lasting effects, other than hopefully a stronger bond of trust between them.

A careful hand tilted the precious flower's head back down, letting her curl up against Thatch's chest in a position perfect for a quiet embrace. Thatch didn't speak, but she didn't have to. She was her rhythm, in a very real way. It took some effort to maintain, still, but it was easier than she'd expected. Perhaps this new form lacking the accumulated harm of fifty years of denying herself this made it easier to find again. Perhaps it was simply easier to let herself be when she had a focus.

Either way, Thatch sat and watched the sunset while Katie half-slumbered in her lap, enjoying the slow descent into night, while she fussed and fiddled with her smiling ward.

Katie wasn't going to let go of that vine.

She was comfortable like this.

She breathed in, and the heat and light intensified. That Thatch could match her motions so precisely was impressive indeed, but Katie found herself not dwelling on it. She just focussed on her breathing. The dark mood that had settled over her all day could find nowhere to hide while Thatch's light filled her so, and all Katie needed to do to feel that was to breathe.

In, hold... and out. The out was important, she knew, despite the emptiness it brought. She couldn't rush it. She had to give Thatch time to complete the cycle. The out left her feeling cold, left her skin with a needy tingle, but Thatch didn't seem to mind her leaning closer in, and the creature's hand running over her scalp did a lot to soothe the sharp edges.

That part was nice. Still, it was her least favourite part. As soon as she could, Katie breathed in. A nice, deep breath. As her lungs swelled, so did all else. Heat radiated in from all around her, like a warm and heavy blanket. It could have been so warm as to be stifling, but the breeze picked up too, bringing with it a sweet, soft scent. A quiet rustling filled her ears, something to focus on with every sense.

With those, it might have been a wonder that Katie didn't simply drift off to sleep entire, but even with closed eyelids, the rising light kept her awake, conspiring with the rest to fill her with a comfortable, safe, warmth.

But Katie had been comfortable, safe, and warm, and she knew full well she could be miserable there too. The heavy weight of Thatch's soft fingers, and the occasional touch of a careful vine, ensured it was impossible to feel alone. The creature was paying so much attention to her that it even knew how she was feeling.

"Not sleepy in there?" Thatch sang, voice so subtle as to slip into the tapestry of inputs that Katie floated through.

"Not sleepy in here," Katie whispered. She wasn't. Totally awake. Maybe she could fall asleep, but there was so much going on to keep her attention that her mind could hardly quiet.

Thatch's hand left her head. Katie complained loudly enough that it returned.

"It is getting quite late."

Katie nodded. She was right. She'd just been thinking that, hadn't she? "It's... quite late," she agreed. Maybe she should be sleepy? It was hard to tell.

"We should get you ready for bed, soon."

She should be sleepy. Yeah, that made sense. Katie nodded, absent mindedly, and tugged the soft blanket of leaves over herself. "Ready," she sighed, cheek nestling into a comfortable bed of leaves.

Katie heard the familiar sound of Thatch's rumble for a few short moments, before the blanket was slowly pulled back. The evening air was cool and gentle, but a cycle or two of rolling heat was enough to get Katie used to it.

"You aren't ready for bed yet, are you?" Thatch asked. Katie wasn't, but... why wasn't she? She shook her head, mumbling something unintelligible under her breath.

"Because...?" Thatch prompted, but Katie wasn't sure what the affini wanted from her. She repeated the word, hoping it would bring a connection along with it, but she had nothing.

Even Thatch's sigh was melodious, starting at the peak of a cycle and lasting to its end, finishing with a low "Mmmmh."

"You wouldn't want to forget your medication, would you?" she asked, drawing the connection Katie should have made for her. Oh, that. Katie shook her head. "Don't want to forget my medication," she admitted, trying for a few moments to roll over, but finding her body strangely unwilling to respond. A soft hand helped her get her back against Thatch's stomach, where she would need to be to take her meds.

"All ready," Katie said. Or had Thatch said that? No, it had been her. She'd said it. She must have, because as the next cycle reached its peak, Thatch's scent intensified a dozen times over. Katie moaned softly, trying to lean towards the source, only for a hand to stop her.

"Let's have a deep breath for me, hmn?" Thatch spoke, while the intensity of her heat and light and scent rose.

"Deep breath for you..." Katie agreed, as it fell.

Deep breath. Thatch stretched out her own rhythm here, light and heat and sound swelling more slowly, and holding at the peak, matching Katie's need to pause as a lungful of soft, tingling sweetness spread out to her chest. To her arms, slowly sliding down until even the tips of her fingers tingled. Down to her stomach, and then to her legs, her calves, her feet, her toes. All tingling, but gently. After all else was covered, the sensation moved up into her head, too, and the tingle was everywhere.

The heat and light fell quickly. Katie released her breath before she'd even noticed it was time. Before she had chance to consider that, everything was rising again, and like just one more player in an orchestra, Katie breathed in again, taking the intense tingling back into her lungs, and then... waiting.

Basking in the heat, filled with Thatch's light, hands heavy against her skin while the comforting sensation of her body being slowly fixed spread through her. Long seconds passed where there was nothing beyond the warmth but firm hands doing their best to satisfy Katie's need for touch.

Eventually, finally, Katie remembered to breathe— She was reminded by the dying light— No, she remembered. The tingles sank in, becoming simply a part of her now.

Her head fell slowly to the side, until it rested comfortably against something soft. The powerful scent had retreated, leaving only Thatch's usual intensity.

"Hmnn. Tired now?" her blanket asked.

Katie nodded. "Tired now," she accepted, failing to stifle a yawn.

"That's quite alright. Time to sleep, then, hmn?" Thatch replied, on the downstroke of a cycle, and as the next began she kept her lighting stifled.

Katie got halfway through a response before drifting off into unconsciousness, hand finally letting go.

Chapter Text

Rain fell in a shower of broken glass. Sol's dying light made it almost look like water twinkling in the air... but the slums of New London hadn't seen true rain in months. Instead, all that glass simply shattered itself against the ground as Rain slammed into it, crying out as they felt the lacerations cutting into their body. They lay there for a long moment, working up the strength to want to get back up.

With a groan, they pushed themselves back to their feet. They couldn't let this stop them. A glance back up to the first floor window out of which they'd just been thrown was enough to let them know they shouldn't stick around.

As they ran, they fished their most prized possession out of a pocket. Looked like their trusty communicator had taken another crack, but if they were without it for even a moment, the anxiety seemed too much to bear. With shaking fingers, they took two or three attempts to get their long password correctly inserted. It wasn't convenient to run up against the lockout limit so often, but a weak password would make them a more attractive target for thieves, and this was the only valuable thing they owned.

After taking a moment to check themselves over in the broken reflection of shattered plastic, they forced a grin onto their face and hit the big red button. "So, uh, that went wrong!" they declared. "Wow, I hope I got all the footage for that. Looks like that police officer couldn't handle a little pra— pran— oh, fuck me."

Rain's run slowed to a stop. The slums around them towered high enough that they could barely see the sky, but that was enough to spot bright points of light flashing into existence above them. Ships. Massive ships. A moment of abject panic overcame them, as it would anybody watching a fleet jumping in overhead. Was this a declaration of war? Were they about to get bombed? Who the fuck would bomb New London? There was nothing here but trash.

They cringed as their beloved communicator emitted a high pitched squeal.

"Hello! Please do not be alarmed, humanity! The ships above are here to help. You don't have to worry about a thing. The Affini Compact has arrived and none of you will ever go wanting again."

Avium Prunus, Third½ Bloom, appeared to have lost xer floret.

Avium had looked everywhere. The standard scale hab unit that they lived in was, while incredibly luxurious by Terran standards, not that large. The unit itself was a large hexagon with walls thick enough that even the most determined creature couldn't escape, subdivided into four smaller rooms with a limited number of hiding spots.

Avium paused in the center of the main living space. Xer floret wasn't under or behind the sofa, or the desk, or inside any of the storage containers, or—

The ceiling tiles!

Avium leaped, grabbing ahold of the structural support in the ceiling and pushing xer head up through the lightweight tiles that separated the habitable part of the... hab from the utility parts, where the little vines and pipes that made everything work lived. Xe slowly rotated, looking for... There!

Avium flinched back as something flashed in xer face. Xer cursed hellion of a floret scrambled away like some kind of cryptid.

"Gotcha! Two turnings, thirteen arcseconds, a new record! It's just a pra—"

Avium wrapped xer vines tightly around the floret and pulled it out. Avium groaned, fruitlessly attempting to brush off the dust and smooth out the frayed edges of the standard Affini companion dress that covered its body.

"Xe Prunus, you are a goblin," xe sighed. "We have somewhere to be and you—"

"—are getting you back for that time you pretended to be the sofa!"

Avium paused. "Okay, fair point, but this is still very inconvenient, Xe! Was I this inconvenient? Don't make me take a gold star off of the good noodle board."

Xe looked aghast, but nodded enthusiastically. Its cheeks were streaked with something that looked like oil, though where it could possibly have found oil in the middle of an Affini hab unit currently attached to a ship lost in deep space was an utter mystery. "You were, remember? We had friends over. Montsechia and I were sitting on you. For six hours. I learned some new swear words that day," it declared.

Avium broke out into a cackle, bouncing up and down on xer feet, laughing for long seconds until xe finally managed to get back under control. "Right, I'd forgotten about that one. You're still a goblin—"

"Thank you, M Prunus," it said, shuffling proudly.

"—but I'm adding a star to the board."

"Thank you, M Prunus!" it exclaimed, immediately clambering up its affini's side to hang against xer shoulder. The two of them moved over to one of the walls of the hab unit, which had been repurposed to hold a vast collection of stickers. Stars beyond counting, five little snakes, almost two dozen small spaceship icons, and one lifesize sticker of Xe itself. Avium covered Xe's eyes and used xer vines to tap out an intensely complicated password on a small container bolted to the wall. A single sticker was retrieved, and then the rest of the pack returned to the container, which was carefully sealed.

Xe was again allowed to see, so that it could enjoy the moment of attachment.

Little ritual completed, it scrambled back down to the ground. Avium took a moment to look up the exact time they were meant to be arriving at their appointment and nodded to xemselves. "We can still make it on time, but I'm going to need to dress you, or—"

Avium had turned around. Xer floret was spotless and impeccably arranged, standing up straight with its hands behind its back. It wasn't even wearing the same clothes, but instead a formal companion suit, complete with one of Avium's flowers tucked behind the ear. It looked perfect. Avium quickly checked xyr body and did, in fact, find a flower missing, cleanly sliced off.

"I would never make you late for an appointment, M," it insisted. Avium opened xer mouth to rattle off the long list of appointments xey had definitely been made late for, but Xe continued. "At least, not one that mattered. I knew you'd get distracted if I didn't give you something to do."

It grinned the same undecipherable grin it always did when it knew it had its owner in checkmate. Xe could neither be punished nor rewarded and it knew it. It proudly lifted its chin, exposing the ring of its collar, around which Avium reluctantly wrapped a vine.

It had been a month since the occupation had begun. Rain snuck along the rusted, disused fire escape of one of the few buildings in the city old enough to have been built back before safety codes had been abolished. Far below, one of the weeds walked through the city.

Walked through Rain's city.

Not that they could recognise it any more. With most of the physical trash moved away, there were only remnants now, like Rain and a handful of others that refused to surrender to an enemy empire. In their braver moments, Rain liked to think of themselves as a rebel, but... well, that was hardly realistic, was it? The Free Terranist Rebellion fought in glorious starships, going railgun-to-railgun with an invading force. Rain bet they didn't go hungry every day.

Rain did have one thing that they didn't, though. A camera right in the middle of the occupied city of New London. They were sort of a journalist now, they thought, but there was nowhere left to report the news. After the gigacorps had gotten disbanded, life had somehow gotten even worse for Rain. Their TubeTube prank show had been popular for years, and they usually pulled in enough advertising money to buy food every other day or two.

Well, nobody was selling ads now, were they? Their only income source having dried up, Rain was left scavenging what little they could find, except with the added difficulty of having to figure out which abandoned foodstuff came drugged.

But they still had a camera, and they'd been good at what they'd done.

They carefully placed their communicator up at a good height and climbed down, scurrying the last few feet so they could catch up to the plant.

"Sir, sir! I'm a human being that's helpless on their own and needs your help! What's your name?"

The affini turned with a frown. "I am Avium Prunus, Third Bloom, little human. What assistance do you need?"

By Mickey, they were terrifying. Two or three meters tall with teeth that looked like they could bite straight through a human arm. The thing was, though, that the rebellion was out there, fighting these things so that humanity could have a future that wasn't under these things's thumb. The least Rain could do was keep them entertained.

*"I need to befriend a squirrel, but I can't figure out how, can you help?" they asked. *

The weed seemed perplexed. "I'm... sorry? What is a squirrel?"

Shit, of course it didn't know what a squirrel was. "They're, uh, like, four legs, pointy ears, sharp teeth? Usually looking around in the trash for food, which... I guess they're not really doing that right now."

The affini shrugged, reaching out with a vine to touch Rain. They quickly shied away. Hell no. They weren't brave enough for this. They turned and ran, screaming "I guess I need to act like a nut!" as they did.

Hours later, when they finally went back to retrieve the footage, they saw that the plant had looked bemused for a few moments, and then left. Hardly the reaction they'd been hoping for, but they had a name now. Could they track this thing down again? Maybe figure out some supply lines, get that information to the rebellion?

It had an office. Rain had their camera mounted to the opposite side of the street, and this time they had a script that was sure to work. They walked into the building with as brave a strut as they could.

"Hello, I want to speak to the manager."

The affini paused, frowning. "Don't I know you?"

Rain shook their head. "I have one of those faces. Your manager, please! I want to make a complaint."

A rippling of leaves almost had Rain running, but thankfully the thing stayed sitting. "We... don't really do managers, but if you'd like to speak to the local hyperspacial engineering leader then I could call them over. Can I ask what you're wanting to complain about?"

Rain grinned. "You're like, an architect or something, right? I think your designs are really rude. Do you know what your triangle said to my circle friend?"

Avium looked baffled. "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about. Could you—"

Rain grinned wider. "It said it was pointless!" They dashed over to the desk, spent a moment trying to flip it, and after that failed simply scattered the papers on it over the floor and ran away.

Two days later when they finally returned for the footage, they saw that the plant had stood there in continued confusion for another few seconds... before bursting out laughing. Fuck. The footage should still be good if they edited it.

An arcminute ahead of schedule, the two rode an Elettarium light magrail compartment into the depths of the botanical gardens. To Xe, the grandeur of Affini architecture seemed like something that could never get old.

The rail system ran straight through what could have been a rainforest, or what Xe imagined a rainforest would be like. It wasn't like the Terran Accord had anything better than history books to inform it. The 'rail' itself ran a stemlength or two underneath the dirt, magnetically guiding a comfortable pod just above the ground, safely out of the way of any minor plantlife. The pod itself was mostly transparent, presumably designed to show off the absurd complexities of Affini design.

Xe's nose was glued to the glass, watching trees a hundred feet tall and plants in endless variety move past as a blur. It looked up with a gasp. Spiralling endlessly into the air were great lattice structures, providing support for plantlife towering above it. Vines that must have been two hundred feet long crawled up the jet-black structures. If Xe looked beyond them, then it looked into the depths of space, as the entire botanical gardens section hung beneath a transparent section of hull that must have been a kilometer wide.

At this particular moment, Xe could spot the other habitable arc of the Elettarium. The ship's design was somewhat excessive. The Affini, like the Terran Accord, used rapidly rotating sections to provide centripetal force sufficient to simulate gravity. In principle, the designs weren't usually that dissimilar, simply placing the habitable decks in a position where they could constantly rotate around a central pillar, the Affini simply did it bigger. So much so that the time it took one of the habitable decks to rotate a single arcminute around its pivot was a useful measure of timekeeping.

The Stellar Gardener that had grown the Elettarium had been unwilling to do something so straightforward, not for a sleek, modern scouting ship. Between the rear end of the ship, which mixed the engines with vast, rotating multi-kilometer petals that extended outwards hundreds of meters into space, and the front compartment of the ship, where cargo storage, life support, and most microgravity facilities lived, were two habitable arcs which rotated independently.

If one were to ask the Gardener to justify these design decisions, they likely would have explained that the two arcs meant that the ship could sustain two different levels of artificial gravity, as well as reorient the entire structure to operate in natural gravity wells without causing significant inconvenience. They would have explained that the petals provided inertial counterspin, allowing the arcs to adjust their own rotation without requiring the ship's navigational thrusters to operate.

That was why Xe didn't ask the Affini to justify their actions. It knew the truth. They did it because it was grand. The Elettarium wasn't a vehicle, it was a home. It wasn't a purpose-built utility, it was a work of art that happened to soar through the void.

Of course, a ship so large needed its inhabitants to be able to get around. Hence, the light magnetic rail network. Xe's favourite part was that if you got the time of day right, moving through the right part of an arc in the right direction, the pod moved so fast that the arc's rotation was temporarily negated.

It kicked off of the floor and span in mid-air. It had rarely experienced microgravity, being more of slum trash in the old pre-domestication days, and from then living aboard these grand starships that were more luxurious than all but the most excessive human habitation had ever been.

Avium watched xyr pet slowly rotating until air resistance brought them to a halt in the middle of the pod. Xe paused, flailing in mid air, before realising it couldn't reach the sides.

"I'm flying!" it exclaimed, with a grin. "Better catch me before I fly away!"

Avium rolled xyr eyes. "Best behaviour, huh, pet?"

It stuck out its tongue. "We aren't there yet, dork. Wanna practice anything you're gonna say? I couldn't read your bit of the invite, I just figured it was important if it was straight from the captain."

The pod turned slightly. Xe started slowly moving towards one side. It looked to its caretaker for care and received nothing but a rough approximation of a tongue stuck out in riposte. It deserved that. Worse, after a few moments air resistance had it static again, still out of reach of anything useful.

"Nah, this is an ideas session about our runaways. All the major board leaders got invited. Heard any good ideas suggested on the outernet?" Avium never seemed impressed by the literal wonders they passed by, though xe usually did get more enthusiastic than this over impressing Xe with the more subtle flexes present in the design. Xe—the affini—must be stressed.

Xe—the human—shook its head. "Networking says we're way out of range of any of the relays, so we're on like a three week delay for updates. Local net is excited, though, and uh—"

It fished around in its pants, blushing. "Dirt, I forgot my pad, can I borrow yours?"

Avium grinned, fishing a thin transparent slate out between their leaves. They balanced it on the edge of a finger, and then very gently tapped it. It took a few seconds to reach Xe, and imparted almost no momentum when it grabbed hold, nor did it have any opportunity to grab onto anything else.

"And you call me a brat," it grumbled, tapping a quick code into the pad as it logged into its fan community. "I set up a little channel for folks to talk about it, but you know what our audience is like." It spent a few moments scrolling through threads, shaking its head.

"Yeah these are all awful ideas. Going planet to planet looking; waiting for them to somehow signal us; some conspiracy theory about humans not being real—" It looked particularly amused by that one— "and, oh, hmn. Somebody looked at the footage frame by frame, take a look at this!"

Xe moved to chuck the pad back, but thought better of it, grinned, and flung it straight up. Datapads were far too tough for a mere human to scratch or chip them, but Avium caught it regardless, and thanks to Newton's third law, Xe finally managed to make it to somewhere they could grab onto a handhold.

Avium glanced over the screenshots with interest, absent mindedly extending a vine so that Xe could climb back over. "Oh yeah, you're getting a gold star when we get back home," xe declared. Xe grinned.

"Thank you, M!"

The pod slowed to a halt over several long seconds. The systems could automatically detect who was on board, to make sure that the acceleration and deceleration profiles were safe for all, but they were smart enough to recognise when a human was accompanied by somebody willing to provide a harness, so the pod slid to a stop at a rapid pace, pressing Xe into Avium's body.

Avium's sense of humour was strangely sharp, for a plant. Rain groaned, checking over yet another reel of footage. Useless. Even with editing, they wouldn't be able to hide that the fucking plant had caught on halfway through, even with the disguise.

Without that footage, they had nothing to send up to the rebellion. Humanity was losing. Rain knew it wasn't their fault, but they couldn't help but feel like if the rebels were in better spirits, they'd fight harder. They were distracted from their misery by a complaining stomach.

Time to scavenge again. It was getting harder every day. More surveillance, more patrols, less food that was safe to eat. They carefully left their nest, only to trip over a little box that definitely hadn't been there the night before.

Cautious, but curious, they lifted the lid, and gasped as a rolling wave of scent hit their nose. Hot food. They had it in their mouth before they'd considered where it might have come from. They just didn't care. If it drugged them and they had to spend the day coming down from something then fine.

Every bite was more delicious than the last, but it didn't seem to make it any harder to think. At least, not until the end, where Rain noticed a little note tucked within the packaging.

Gotcha :;)
- Avium Prunus, Third Bloom
p.s., I found your channel! You have a new subscriber ;)

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

"Oh hey, Rain," Avium said, with a wave, as they entered the creature's office. "I was doing some research and I think I've found out what a squirrel is."

Rain groaned. They'd spent hours on this disguise. They looked nothing like themselves. "C'mon, man, can't you give me a few minutes of footage first?"

The plant waved its hand dismissively. "I would, but this is actually really cool. See, about two hundred years ago the etymology got swapped around, one of those times a coronal mass ejection wiped all your data storage. Turns out that squirrels used to be much smaller and fluffier. But, you might ask, what did modern squirrels used to be called? Here's the really cool bit: Ask me about updogs."

Rain fought the urge to just sit down and give up. "I don't... What's an updog?"

Avium's grin grew three sizes. It would have been scary, if Rain hadn't pranked the fucking thing two dozen times by now. "Not much, you?" The creature raised and lowered its eyebrows a few times.

Rain left.

They stepped out into the conference center right in the middle of the botanical gardens. The air was heavy with moisture and scents. Xe stumbled as it took its first breath, feeling lightning sparks over its mind. Half the plants here were curated specifically for their potent psychological effects, the other half because they were useful, and all because they were beautiful. Just smelling it was enough to knock the rational thought out of a Terran.

"C'mon, with me," Avium insisted, pulling it close in to its side. "Best behaviour, remember? No pranks. Be a good noodle for me and we'll get them later."

The conference center was, really, more of a clearing in the gardens. As with any gathering of more than two sapients in the Affini Compact, every attendee was doing their own thing. There were affini here alone, sitting on chairs; an affini/floret pinnate set lounging on a pair of beanbags; the two monochrome clerks paying no attention to anything but each other; the captain sitting with her back straight looking every part in charge, with her faithful pet nowhere to be seen.

Avium frowned, and—

"Agh!" Xe jumped, as a human stepped alongside them and called out across the table.

"The representative for the board of Hyperspacial Engineering, Avium Prunus, with xyr floret, Xe Prunus," they called, with a voice that seemed much too loud for such a small thing. The captain's pet intimidated even Avium sometimes. A few failed attempts to ruffle her hair later, xe was gently thrown towards xyr designated seating area, floret in tow.

Xyr preferred seating arrangement was waiting for them—which was to say, no seating at all. Avium planted roots where xe landed and kept Xe on xer knee. No sooner had xe and Xe gotten cozy than the captain had begun to speak.

"You all know why you're here, but just in case you didn't check local news yesterday, I'll recap. We happened across the cute little Terran ship Undefeatable, or some other adorable name, and rescued most of the poor things aboard."

Avium grinned. The captain and xem went way back; long before she'd gotten elected captain. She was really blooming in the role. It couldn't have been more than a few years since she'd been the unassuming actress who could take on any role, and maybe nothing at all had changed in that respect—but polling suggested she was certain to win the next election too, so apparently everyone agreed she was making life aboard ship better.

"You heard right—most. This ship had an undocumented lockdown system around the engine, so one of the humans stayed conscious and decided to scuttle the ship. One of ours was there with them and so while we don't have any evidence that they're alive, we're going to treat them as so until we can prove otherwise."

Avium raised a hand. The other softly petted their increasingly unaware floret's head, part of its reward for being useful. "I think they got out just fine, Rosa," xe declared, using a vine to tap their pad a few times to broadcast the display up to one of the big holoprojectors. Dirt and roots, was it a shame that humans struggled to stay awake in the gardens. Avium tried to draw Xe's attention up above them anyway, to point out the series of screenshots now projected against the vast ceiling above them. In a series of images rendered a kilometer wide, the last few frames of pre-claudication footage had been cleaned up, stablised, and annotated.

"Interesting," someone spoke from immediately beside Avium's ear. Xe swore loudly, overbalancing and nearly falling over. A quiet roll of laughter spread through the area. The captain's stars-damned pet again. The fraction of a second of amused grin suggested this was still payback for that one little prank. "Can I—" She reached over to tap the pad, zooming in on the image of an escape pod leaving the broken battlecruiser, trailing vines and fire.

She tapped again, marking a few points. "This style of escape pod has been in use in the Terran Accord for about fifty years. It wouldn't have gotten them far, but—"

She tapped again, zooming in on tattered vines and leaves, clearly halfway burned away. A murmur rose over the table.

A particularly colourful Affini specimen piped up. "If that human actually managed to kill poor—" They checked their notes. "—Thatch then I'm afraid I'm not confident they'll still be alive!" Their quadrupedal form matched their floret. Rheum Rhab, the current culinary lead.

Felicia Hautere—the captain's floret—laughed and shook her head. "Takes more than that to kill one of you fuckers, they'll be fine. Probably won't even need to Rebloom. Mistress didn't."

The captain spoke up. "Yes, thank you, pet, I'd almost forgotten that incident." The motion of a single finger had the floret skipping over to the captain's side, where she was brought down to her knees. Rosaceae had long since forgotten how to speak more quietly than a stage whisper, but nobody minded. "You know what we've said about swearing, precious," she said, drawing an apologetic blush out of her floret. Felicia knew how to whisper, but anyone could read the regret in the way she buried her head in the captain's side and clung to her leg.

This was simply how meetings in the Affini Compact were done. Fifty to eighty percent of the total runtime was taken up with cute florets, because what would be the point of life otherwise?

Eventually, the captain seemed satisfied with her soothing, and looked back up. "As my dear pet was saying, we can take this as confirmation the two are alive and well. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Avium! Now, does anybody have any ideas for finding our missing pair?"

"What would you have done, if you hadn't come here?" Rain asked. Avium had taken to stopping by their nest a few times a week to bring food and, at this point, script out their next video. They were surprisingly excellent at understanding Rain's sense of humour, despite the cultural differences.

Avium shrugged. "I'm honestly not sure. Hyperspacial engineering is pretty cool, but I'm kind of bored. That's why I haven't handed you over to the death squads yet."

"There's no such thing as death squads, Ave." Rain rolled their eyes. "You lot even saved all the squirrels. Dorks. For Donald's sake, what am I doing here? I have better viewership among you fucking weeds than I do the resistance, now."

"They don't understand good humour," the affini insisted, handing over another snack and a can of gamer fuel. They both held old-style video game controllers, some antique Avium had managed to get their leaves on, with some split-screen racing game. "Wanna go again?"

Rain grinned. "I'll get you this time."

Rain wrinkled their nose, poking at the colourful clothing of the companion dress with an outstretched finger. It was certainly a very smooth fabric, but the colours were beyond garish.

"I'm honestly unsure I can film this without the automatic colour grading going to shit. And it's... pretty gendered, isn't it?" Rain pinched the material together and lifted the bottom of the dress.

Avium glanced over, looking away from their own section of the store. It still blew Rain's mind that all of this was free, but apparently when the Affini said they'd outlawed money and trade they meant it. There wasn't even an attendant at this time of day, this whole thing just operated on... the honour system.

Neither Avium nor Rain were very honourable, as it happened. They had costumes to put together.

Avium shrugged. "Gender is a social construct, dear."

Rain rolled their eyes. "Which is why you still go by he/him even though you always look sad when you say it, huh?" Did this plant think that they didn't have dozens of hours of footage? That they hadn't spend days staring at Avium's expression as they edited? They knew every inch of that dumb plant's face by now.

"I— I'm just used to it, is all. It doesn't bother me. Though... I think this skirt would look good on me."

"Maybe with the suit top? Mad energy, babe."

Xe and Avium got back to their hab unit hours later, collapsing onto the main space's sofa in tight and practiced synchronization. With a shared whimper, they managed to pull themselves up vaguely into a sitting position.

"That was a lot," Xe declared.

"You slept through most of it, dummy." Avium's hand flopped over to gently squeeze xyr floret's.

"I mean, yeah, but you know what it's like. It's a meeting, they're always exhausting, even if you're sleeping through them."

Avium couldn't argue with that. Xe murmured xyr agreement. There was a huge difference between hanging out with a bunch of friends in a social engagement and trying to actually stay on topic in a meeting about something important, and as far as xe was concerned today was over with.

"Hey, you wanna play video games until irresponsibly late in the evening?"

"Yeah."

Rain glanced over the script one last time. Their biggest prank yet. Finally, they were going to get footage of Avium truly, utterly surprised. They were filming a historical piece today, with Avium playing the role of a human shop attendant, back when such things had existed, and Rain being the hapless customer... but little did Avium know that it wouldn't be going quite how they expected.

The scene called for the attendant to be written up by their manager, and at the end they had to sign on the dotted line and receive their punishment. It wasn't really a funny piece, but they'd been branching out lately and stretching their creative muscles. Rain felt the call of the prank louder every day, but they'd intentionally pushed for deeper pieces, with more research and fewer jokes. It was less Avium's thing, but xe was willing to go along with it if it made Rain happy.

That little scrap of kindness was going to be punished ten times over by the end of the shoot.

The time finally came and Rain could barely breathe, they were so nervous, but it all went perfectly, and Avium's signature went exactly where it should have.

All the lights in the studio came blaring on, and Rain ran out carrying an old school camcorder, pointing it at Avium's surprised face.

"Gotcha! You thought I'd never get you with a prank, didn't you? Well, look who's silly now, Ave! I win!"

Rain twirled the camera back towards themselves to give the lens a victory sign. "This goes out to my homies in the rebellion, looking for proof the Affini can lose! Get fuuuuuuuuuucked, Affini Compact!" At this point, ending the videos with a speech like that was in kind of bad taste, given that it was only the Affini who were watching, but it was tradition.

Avium looked rather concerned. "Rain, what's going on?"

The human grinned, turning the camera back. "I don't know who you're talking to, plant, but you'd better check that paper you just signed!"

Avium's head slowly turned to the contract. It wasn't their prop, but Rain had spent a long while making sure the sentence and word lengths matched up, so xey wouldn't bother to reread it. As soon as they did, however, they'd quickly find a very realistic and only slightly incorrect adoption contract that was sure to get a reaction. Thankfully, Rain had made sure the exact wording didn't quite match the real thing, so Avium would quickly realise it was a joke and not feel pressured into anything.

"Oh, dirt, you didn't?" Avium laughed, finally reading the actual words for the first time. "I... You got me, Ra..."

Avium blinked. Rain had written the contract themselves, but it was modeled off of the Affini domestication contracts. Not official or anything, and Avium wasn't interested in them like that, but good for a laugh, right? It didn't even use Rain's real name, though it had their real signature.

"Oh, oh, I see. Well, 'Xe Prunus', you got me. I'm gonna go file this."

Xe blinked, head snapping around. "Wait what."

Chapter Text

Leviathan's cage sank beneath the depths. Waves crashed over its surface, throwing up violent sprays of foam and mist. The structure vibrated under the pressure, but the support columns speared deep into the ground, forming immobile rails on which the rest of the containment unit could hang, fixed in place against all but the strongest forces.

Katie wrinkled her nose as the woven cord she was holding onto hitched. The descent of her new pet's tank had been impressively smooth given the materials she'd had to work with, but rope spun from plantlife wasn't quite as smooth as she might have liked. To aid with raising and lowering the tank, she and Thatch had built a pulley system, using a smoothed out stick as an axle around which sat a makeshift disc, on which the rope was mounted.

Katie carefully massaged it, trying to remove the lump that had caught in the assembly without damaging anything. If she let the tank drop from this height, the poor fish was bound to get one heck of a shock. Thankfully, a few moments of care and attention got things straightened out, and Katie lowered the tank the rest of the way, down to the bottom of the rails.

Finally, she knelt down to tie the rope to a loop of wood they'd sanded down with one of Thatch's more abrasive anatomical features. She pulled it tight and stood. It had taken a day or so of careful effort to bring this to life, overall.

Katie glanced down at scraps of abandoned wood. A collection of failed attempts at creating some parts of the construct, and leftover waste, lay strewn around the area. Katie was struck by a sudden sense of uncertainty. She'd never gotten this far in a project before. What happened to the leftovers?

She glanced over to the other side of the makeshift camp, to where Thatch was busying herself with a growing pile of stones and rocks. Her thorns were sharp and hard enough that, at least with the softer rocks around here, she could chisel them into whatever shape she wanted.

Thatch's existence had uncomfortable undertones. Perhaps not the plant herself, Katie supposed, but it was difficult to separate her from her context.

Human domestication.

Like humanity had done for millennia with animals on its homeworld. Psychological manipulation on industrial scales, creating whole species that put humanity's needs first, abandoning their own hopes and dreams in favour of an existence where anything short of immediate, flawless obedience was cause for the pain of a shock collar or cattle prod. Humanity had exploited humanity as much as it could bear; what trauma had the arguably much crueler human-led domestication projects inflicted on the world around them?

Katie shivered, imagining herself in their place. Imagining Thatch holding a sharp stick, zapping her until she was no longer herself with a cruel, domineering smirk on her face as she declared that this was all for Katie's own good. She would be happy, once they'd burned every other emotion out of her skull.

The girl shook her head, noticing that Thatch was staring. Her expression was far from cruel; nothing more than a gently bemused expression of concern. Her face was capable of lying, but the rest of her was much less so. Bright red vines had carefully anchored themselves to stable things, the vines in Thatch's legs were densely packed, almost quivering with energy. The affini must have been thirty meters away and yet Katie knew that if anything were to go wrong, she would be protected in an instant.

Her imaginations fell silent. The greater Affini could be as cruel as they liked; this one was clearly incapable. Katie smiled across at her, waving a hand to say that she was okay, and not in need of assistance.

"I'm okay! I think I'm done," she called, raising to her feet. She got a moment's notice as the edge of the bank crumbled under her weight before she was tipping backwards, very suddenly in freefall, heading for the cataclysmic rapids beneath. She didn't have time to cry out. The sudden drop stole the air from her lungs. The collapsing ground left her with nothing to push against, no way to adjust her fall.

Katie grabbed for the wooden construction of the tank, but it was out of reach, and—

"Gotcha," Thatch proclaimed, mottled hand tightly gripping Katie's wrist. The girl was carefully pulled up without another word, then set back down on the ground. Katie fended off a curious pair of vines that seemed to want to brush her down, She noted that her hands were shaking. So was her vision, and her breath. Her adrenaline spike had come too late to do anything to help. It would leave long after it had outstayed its welcome.

Katie fended off another vine, then a pair of vines, and then a set of four, then five. She had just long enough to realise that the last didn't match the pattern before the three she hadn't noticed came up behind her to lightly wrap around her wrists, steadying them, and her torso, so she could be pulled away from the side and into a gentle embrace.

"Are you okay, Katie? I'm sorry, I should have been paying more attention. We can reinforce the ground there, perhaps build a fence?"

No, Katie couldn't bring herself to be afraid of this dork even if she tried. It almost reminded her of the soft emotional blanket of Thatch's concoction, stealing away rational fears, except the only mind-affecting process Thatch had put her under was education.

Katie nodded, permitting herself a brief moment wrapped in the slow beat of Thatch's body. She could feel her adrenaline draining away, her panic sinking into Thatch's gentle 'heartbeat'. After a few moments, she pulled away. As always, Thatch yielded just an instant later. Long enough that it was clear that Katie couldn't have overpowered her, but short enough that it could hardly even be implied she wasn't respecting Katie's agency.

"No, no, I'm fine, thank you. I should have been more careful. I wouldn't usually even go near a bank like that, but... I dunno, I guess I got a little too complacent," Katie said, feeling the embarrassed blush crawling up her cheeks. Katie moved back towards the bank, carefully. She couldn't avoid noticing the way that a pair of bright red vines was tailing her. She paused and gave them a glare, and Thatch replaced them with a much harder to spot set of black ones. It would have to do.

Katie began gathering up the spare wood. "How's your project coming, anyway?"

Thatch gestured over to her pile of carved stone. It stood about as tall as Katie did, with a pair of openings near the bottom where slabs of stone could be removed to allow access. A furnace. A real tool. Katie lifted up an armful of wooden scraps as tribute, and they were very quickly ferried over to the lower compartment, where they joined a whole collection of other fuel.

"It is nice to finish a project for once," Thatch admitted. "There is something satisfying about the tactility of taking something rough and moulding it to your needs. I believe that we could attempt to purify the metals you so kindly acquired for us, and all I am in need of is a flame."

She looked pointedly towards Katie at the last word.

Katie started looking around for a long stick she could use to carry a little of the heat from their campfire over to the new kiln. "Still uneasy around fire?" she asked, picking up a long twig that had a small collection of leaves nestled at the tip. She dipped it beneath their cookpot and started very carefully carrying the resulting fire.

"I believe that it may be one of the few primal fears my people still struggle with. The paperwork for disengaging local fire suppression even within a single habitation unit is excessive even by our standards, and requires significant qualification."

Katie nodded, somewhat absent minded. Her attention was mostly on the brightly glowing flame in her hands, as it should be. "Mmmh. Don't want fire on a spaceship," she agreed, carefully placing the stick into the fuel compartment in Thatch's oven. It was too long to fit entirely, so she tapped a spot about halfway up with one of her knuckles and Thatch broke it clean in two from that spot. Katie prodded the half that was on fire deeper, using the half she still had a hold of, and then chucked that in too for good measure.

The flames caught, and Katie rushed to seal the compartment with its slab of heavy rock. Before long, a small plume of smoke began rising out of the top of the structure. Katie wrinkled her nose.

"I hope this doesn't upset anything." She gestured up to the emissions. This was hardly the same thing as the great Terran forges that had once spewed noxious waste in vast quantity out into the atmosphere of every world under human rule, but it was an inauspicious start to the industrialisation of... whatever this planet was called.

"You're thousands of years more advanced than us," Katie admitted, glancing over at Thatch. "Did you ever figure out how to... not do this? We're destroying a little bit of this planet so that we can get what we need. I guess if we need to do it to survive, then... Ugh. If humanity is worth anything, surely it's as a warning against the dangers of taking without giving back."

The plant had been smiling the whole way through. Her face was carefully polite, but the quiver in her delicate weave painted another story. Katie set her jaw, staring the creature down in a battle of wills.

Gosh, Thatch's sparkling blue eyes were pretty. They were distinctly inhuman, certainly nothing like an eyeball, but just as expressive, if not more. A part of Katie wanted to lever Thatch's head open to see how they worked, but wouldn't that be rude? Much better to appreciate them from the outside.

Much better to enjoy the way the glow seemed to twinkle and attenuate over time, like the gentle dance of starlight. Fascinatingly, as Katie looked closer, she realised that they were flecked with the natural shades of this planet too, everything moving in what seemed to be tight orchestration.

Katie realised she had lost the battle of wills.

"Once," she declared, firmly. The sound was barely beyond her lips before Thatch's warm hand was in her hair, giving her scalp a gentle squeeze.

The creature emitted a low tone for a moment, then nodded. "I do feel guilty about poisoning the atmosphere here," she admitted. Her hand moved in gentle patterns, drawing out a soft sigh from somewhere deep within Katie's body. "However, it is well understood among my people that it is sometimes more harmful to do no harm at all. That is not at all a refutation of your point, however, and we shall make a steward out of you yet. The materials sourced were..."

Katie only realised that she'd spaced out once Thatch finally paused in her explanation of all the ways in which she was mitigating the damage done. With the affini's fingers in her hair, distinctly stretching any reasonable definition of "once", and her voice on Katie's ears, it was difficult to entertain abstract fears of environmental damage, or, indeed, any fears at all.

"...I promise that before we leave this place, we shall set this right and leave this world better for our presence."

The hand was retrieved, leaving Katie momentarily unsteady on her feet, with a low tingle left behind that demanded attention. Katie scratched it. It didn't really help.

"I— Mmh." She nodded. "Yes, environment good." Katie coughed, trying to bury her burning cheeks by being useful. "Uh... Where did we put the ores? We should..." Katie pointed at the kiln. "They need cooking?"

A rustle of leaves up near her ear drew Katie's attention upwards, to Thatch. She spotted the plant's outstretched hand, pointing over to a small pile at the outside edge of their makeshift camp. Katie hurried over to it, only not running due to the fear she'd trip and end up in Thatch's arms again.

"They should be fine if you simply throw them in, I've decorated the upper compartment with channels to catch the liquified metal," Thatch explained. It was already getting too hot to spend much time inspecting the insides, but Katie could spot how the slightly bowl-shaped interior had been carved in a delicate floral print, where every line led down into a little hole that presumably led to the matching one on the outside, where it could collect in a small stone dish etched with another pattern that should allow the metal to solidify in long strips. Thatch seemed to put a surprising degree of artistry into everything she did, even here.

Katie chucked in the chunks and sealed the top compartment. Thatch visibly relaxed as Katie finally walked away. "Okay!" Katie exclaimed. "Today feels more like progress. What's next?"

Thatch raised a simulated eyebrow. "I believe that is your decision, Katie. What's next most important on our list?" After a moment in which Katie didn't manage to come to a decision, the affini continued. "We could improve our camp and get you a dedicated area to sleep. I am a little worried about you getting wet should it rain, so a covering could be advantageous too. If a busy morning has you all tuckered out, however, then perhaps we could progress to our discussion on faster-than-light communications?"

"Oh, that last one sounds interesting," Katie decided. "Let's do that. I've been doing woodwork all morning and I don't think my arms are up to anything hard. Besides, the weather has been good to us so far."

They didn't have a very complicated classroom to work with, but Thatch had dredged up some rocks and covered them in leaves to function as seats so they could sit and bask in the glow of the fire. Katie pushed one rock a little closer so she could actually feel the warmth and sat down, while Thatch picked a large, flat stone from a pile she'd apparently prepared earlier and extended a thorn, making an experimental engraving at one corner. A writing surface of sorts.

"What do you know about sending messages through subspace already, Katie?"

"Uh, hmn, jeez. It's meant to be really hard, I think? Jumping a ship is one thing; so long as you use enough fuel it doesn't really matter if the hole is too big, but sending just a signal is harder? I think we've done it in labs, feeding tiny amounts of exotic matter into something constantly to try to hold the hole open without losing control and then transmitting through?" Katie shrugged, carefully watching Thatch's response to see how close she was. This wasn't technology that the Terran Accord had had a chance to develop further before anything that wasn't a weapons project had gotten shut down, as the war had become more desperate.

The affini nodded her way through Katie's explanation, and then immediately shook her head afterwards. "It's a wonder that humanity lasted long enough for us to find them," she muttered. "No, that won't lead anywhere good for anybody, it would have been very impolite to do it that way. We'll do it right, mmh?"

Katie frowned, feeling a pang of embarrassment. A moment later, it was joined by a second layer of meta-embarrassment, directed towards the first. She knew that what she'd been taught, and what she'd picked up, was comparatively backwards. She was talking to a scientist from a precursor race here. Why would she be embarrassed by how little she knew?

Katie sighed. "Hang on," she interjected. "I think I need to set some ground rules here."

The affini paused, tilting her head with a questioning hum.

"This is my area; this is what I do. Did. Used to do. It's... for a long time, knowing how this stuff worked and being good at it was basically what my self-esteem was built on. It was all I had. I don't... Please don't tear that down?" It felt uncomfortable to ask. It was an acknowledgment that Thatch could. Five minutes in a room with a crueler plant, a cattle prod, and a physics textbook could probably shatter Katie's sense of self.

Thatch took her time coming to a response. She wasn't frozen up; if anything, she was very expressive. Her eyes flicked over Katie's body, as if taking her in from a fresh perspective. After a few moments, she glanced down at the tablet on her knee and began chiseling away.

"I apologise, I should have considered that your experience in the Terran Accord would be traumatic here. I can assure you that your value to me or to any citizen of the Affini Compact is not predicated on your skills."

Katie sighed. Of course it wasn't. Why did that feel bad? "Yes, yes, yes," she snapped. "Useless humans don't have to do anything but what they're told, right? You'll take care of us and all we have to do is give up our potential."

Thatch winced, her writing thorn slipping and leaving a deep line in the tablet. She looked up at Katie with a pained expression. "Flower, no. Not at all. Do you know what the requirements for an individual habitation unit and basic needs, like food, water, and education are, for any citizen of the Affini Compact, be they affini, human, or you?"

Katie shook her head. "You know I don't."

Thatch raised her arms in a big shrug. "Me neither!" she exclaimed. "When we get back to the Elettarium—once we clear up the minor matter of your prior feralist ideology—all you would need to do was ask to be assigned a living space and somebody would walk you through the requisite forms, or you could request a human-specification datapad and make the request via the machines. Every decision would be yours, if you wanted it to be. Please do not mistake my attitude towards your former people's reckless use of a common resource for a judgment upon your value."

Katie stared into the flames casually burning away beside them, keeping their food at a simmer. Why was this so hard? She squeezed shut, and released, a fist several times before she could no longer bite her tongue.

"Why not?" she asked, raising her voice. "You keep saying that we were doing stupid and harmful things. Why shouldn't we be judged for that? If you won't, then who will? Where do I have to go to get somebody to tell me that what humanity did was wrong? Not 'doing their best', not 'adorably incompetent', but wrong!"

Katie stood up, feeling the need to pace around the area.

"Fucking... judge me, Thatch! You act so high and mighty, like you know so much better, but you stop just short of the obvious implication that I'm so much worse, that I—"

Her pacing had led her straight into Thatch's outstretched arms. She felt them wrap around her and didn't fight it. Thatch was so much taller than her that even while the affini was sitting and Katie standing, her head still rested on the plant's chest.

Katie continued, voice just as energetic, though far more muffled, speaking against foliage. "That I—we—were so much worse. Stop acting like humanity wasn't awful, please? The slums weren't cute. The forge worlds weren't us doing our best. The way they... treated me wasn't okay."

Katie's voice fell quiet. "Please tell me you don't think it was okay?"

Katie could feel the tears leaving her eyes, but Thatch's body leeched them away before they got anywhere. She still ended up sniffling, with blurry vision. Thatch's grip grew stronger. Not so hard it hurt, but so hard that Katie couldn't hope to move.

"Very well." Thatch's voice was hard and low, and Katie had to unclench her jaw to avoid it rattling her teeth. "Yes. You are correct. It is one of the unspoken truths of what we do that we must learn how to forgive the individuals while condemning the whole. The Terran Accord was wrong, and we put a stop to it for a reason. The slums were unforgivable; we have torn them down. The devastation caused in the name of forging useless items nobody needed is not something the Affini Compact is letting slide. The careless misuse of spacetime is an error that we are correcting. Pitting you all against one another in pointless, wasteful contest was a travesty that we have ended."

Thatch's grip grew fractionally tighter. "The way you were treated was not acceptable and it will not be accepted. But."

Katie stiffened, raising her head the few degrees that she could in the tight embrace. "But?"

"Who would you have us punish, Katie? Can you name the humans who do not deserve a second chance, now removed from their, as you put it, 'traps of circumstance'? Should you be tried for crimes against the universe because you did not know the damage you were doing?" One of Thatch's hands raised up to gently stroke through Katie's hair. A pair of vines slowly moved down her sides, while others gently curled around Katie's body and limbs, intensifying the embrace.

"I... maybe!" she exclaimed, nodding her head. "Do you know how many corners I knowingly cut? Do you know how often I met people I could have helped and didn't?" Katie fell silent for a moment. "I may not have known all the consequences, but I knew what I was doing. Please tell me that you aren't okay with that?"

Thatch emitted a gentle rumble, tilting Katie's head up with a hand so their eyes could meet. They were such pretty eyes, now almost aglow with speckled reds. "Did you have a choice, Katie? One that wasn't simple starvation. What would have happened to you if you hadn't done those things?"

Katie wanted to look away, ashamed. She wanted to avoid her alien overlord's gaze and go quiet. It wasn't much of an option. The insistent thrum surrounding her drew her attention upwards and locked it in place. She couldn't avert her eyes any more than she could suspend her own heartbeat.

"I didn't," she breathed, tears now flowing more freely down her face. Her voice was hesitant, wavering as she processed each word in turn. "I had to eat. I'm sorry. I didn't have any help to spare. I was barely surviving myself, but I wish I could have done something. Something to make my existence not just be one more part of the human machine. I'm... sorry," she whispered.

Thatch's thumb gently rubbed up Katie's cheek, soaking up the tears and helping her see more clearly. "I forgive you." There was no cruelty in her smile. There was anger in her eyes, but it wasn't directed at Katie. For Katie, she had nothing but kindness. "It wasn't your fault. You did what you had to do, and now you don't have to live like that any more. It's okay. All that is over now, and you'll be okay."

Katie finally managed to tear her gaze free. She buried her head in Thatch's side, sobbing, feeling the beginnings of a weight she had carried her whole adult life begin to lighten. It took minutes before she was ready to speak again.

"But... what about the ones who didn't have to do it? Why do they get away with it? The quadrillionaires, the politicians, the warlords; the ones who could have changed things and didn't?"

Thatch laughed, a bassy, dark thing. It felt almost like a kick across Katie's whole body, but a gentle one. It filled her with warmth, not pain. Her voice had a cold edge to it that would have been terrifying had she not been directing it where Katie wanted. "They will never be allowed to hurt you, or anybody else, ever again. I can personally guarantee you that once we get back in range of the extranet, you could send a message to any one of those people and receive an honest, heartfelt apology for what they did. What additional punishment would you levy?"

Katie bit her lip, still breathing hard. "I want them hurt," she admitted, voice quiet. "I want to see them suffer for what they did. Why should they be allowed a long, happy life under Affini care when that's exactly what they stole from so many others? Why do they get moved from one life of luxury to another while I'm left broken?"

A pair of fingers snaked their way to Katie's jaw, gently pressing it open to prevent her from biting herself so hard it drew blood. For a fraction of a second, Katie felt like Leviathan, tasting the finger of something so much bigger than herself and wanting more, but Thatch's hand left an instant later, returning to the top of her head.

"You aren't broken," the plant whispered, voice firm, infused with a violent, punchy beat that was reflected in the rest of Thatch's body. Sharp bursts of heat, sound, and light joined the peaks of her words. It wasn't relaxing. Katie felt the affini's fire and her own rose with it.

"I am..." Katie whispered, voice failing her.

"You aren't broken."

"I'm..."

Thatch's grip was impossible to resist. The hand atop her head conspired with a vine or two to tilt her head back up, preventing Katie from struggling, and preventing her from hurting herself with her struggles either. Thatch's eyes were sharp and focused, drilling into Katie's soul.

"You aren't broken."

"I— I'm not broken," Katie breathed, voice quiet enough it could barely be heard. Another piece of that which weighed her down slipped away.

"Domestication is not a reward, Katie. Neither is it a punishment. It simply is. We do not believe in rewards or punishments on such a large scale. Every living creature has its own unique, incomparable value. Every one deserves to be given the opportunity to be happy and fulfilled. Some of the universe's beautiful creatures can be their best selves when we remove their limitations, give them everything they wish for, and let them grow on their own. Some prefer a strong guiding hand, to remove the challenges of existence. Some simply cannot be happy without our assistance. Others—many humans included—would do harm if allowed to grow unchecked. Like a cancer, or a parasite, the ways in which they would try to sate their desires would bring suffering to others. We will not allow that. It is the right of any sapient creature to choose to be unhappy, but it is not their right to prevent others from having that same choice."

Katie found herself nodding. It was much the same explanation as she'd been given before, and yet deeply different. This wasn't a rehearsed speech given to a confused creature, it was an impassioned one given by something which was angry.

"Isn't... that what you're doing here, though? Preventing people from having that choice? How is that your right?"

Thatch laughed again. A short, sharp bark. "It is not." The admission came easily enough. "We have no more intrinsic right to it than you do. But, if we do not do it then it won't be done—or worse, it will, by somebody who will get it wrong."

Katie took a deep breath. Anger brought out the tang in Thatch's scent. Something sharp, with an aftertaste that seemed to leave tingles over her skin. Not comforting, like it usually was, but Katie wasn't looking for comfort, she was looking for reparation. It was a scent that made her want to do something.

However, Thatch's fire was far deeper than Katie's own. It burned brighter and hotter. It drank up all the oxygen and left Katie's fire spluttering and dying out. She had little energy left. Katie let her muscles go slack, trusting Thatch would notice and guide her into a comfortable position. She did.

Katie let out a long sigh, not moving her head from where it had been placed. "Isn't that hard, though? To take on so much pressure? It seems unfair on you."

Katie had ended up sitting on the stone tablet resting on Thatch's knee, with several vines cradling her to keep it comfortable. She could feel the way the question caused a hitch in Thatch's biorhythm.

"I..."

Katie continued, thinking through the implications. "And you can't possibly always succeed. What happens to the affini who take on that responsibility and still fail?"

"We..."

Thatch's rhythm fell out of sorts. Katie didn't notice directly, not straight away. She just felt her own stress rising, paired with an inexplicable sense of panic. It was only once she noticed that her breathing was being matched by Thatch's own that Katie managed to pull herself out of it, to focus on somebody that clearly needed her help. It let her tap into an energy source she hadn't realised was there.

She squirmed around, moving until she could reach up to Thatch's cheek with a hand. She left it in place. "Hey, it's okay. Do I need to get angry on your behalf, now? If I'm not broken, you don't get to be either."

"I am... sorry. I cannot talk about this," Thatch whispered.

Katie's hand pressed into her cheek with more force. She took a breath, then spoke. "Then we won't. Do you know what a traffic light is?"

The plant looked down at the top of Katie's head, with a curious tilt. Katie thought it strange that she could intuit so much of Thatch's mood and intent while nestled so deep within her, but figured that she was simply getting to know the creature better.

"I believe my Humanity is Adorable! class—please do not be offended, that is simply the naming convention for introductory classes on new species—back when I first entered the local area suggested that they were an old signaling system for horses?"

Katie nodded. "It's pretty outdated, but we kept it around as a metaphor, like how the save icon on our computers is an bendy discus. A lot of humans use it to help their partners be comfortable. When the light went red, the horses would start waiting in place until it was safe to move. When the light went green, they would stop waiting and swim away. Nobody is quite sure what the yellow one did any more, but we can pretend it's something between the two."

Katie shrugged. Ancient history wasn't her area. "Anyway, if you want me to start holding off on something, just tell me red or yellow. If it's yellow I'll know this is a sensitive area and be careful. If it's red I'll change the subject, okay? No questions asked, no arguments, no stress. Just one word and I'll be able to do what you want me to."

Thatch seemed to consider it, nodding a few times to herself, before nodding once to Katie. "And green?"

"That means we get swimming with whatever changes we discussed. Back to our normal operations, yeah?"

Thatch let out a deep breath. "Okay. Yes. Let us be horses."

"Then if I ask that last question again, you...?"

"Red." Thatch's word was sharp, cutting Katie off before she'd even finished the sentence. "I... Red, yes. Pause your equines." Thankfully, Thatch didn't lock up afterwards. If anything, she seemed to get livelier.

Katie nodded, letting her hand fall, so she could nestle more comfortably against the affini's stomach. "Then we stop. I don't know that I'm in the mood to learn about physics any more, though I do want you to teach me how to do it right at some point. Do you want to go riding again? See how quickly we can get to that cave and back? Grab some fresh food for Leviathan while we're there?"

Thatch let out a soft sigh, and both she and Katie smiled. Her sixth sense for Thatch's emotional state was coming in useful more and more often. The affini nodded. "Yes, I believe that I do. You were a little hesitant with the turning last time; I can go faster than that. Green. Feel free to push a little harder and I'm sure we'll beat our time."

They did.

Chapter Text

The Atlantis's Fortune shook. A low boom rumbled through the superstructure along with the grinding sound of tearing metal. Katie ran for her vacuum suit, knowing that she wouldn't have enough time to put it on before succumbing to asphyxiation if the hull had just been compromised.

Atlantis was a cheap wreck at the best of times. No bulkheads to separate sections; no double-lined hull; just thin, stamped metal between crew and the void.

The old radio in the engineering bay crackled into life. "Looks like things are about to get rough: we're being boarded. Get your guns, everyone!"

Katie swore, sprinting to the side of the room. The Fortune didn't even have dedicated temperature control in every room, but each did have a rack of weapons. She grabbed a small laser pulse pistol and held it in shaking hands, pointed at the room's door.

It didn't take more than a few minutes before she heard a voice from behind. Shit. They'd come from the other direction. "Drop the toy, doll." Katie froze, feeling the mild heat of a space-grade targeting laser on her back. Her gun clattered to the ground. "Turn around, hands up."

The pirate stood before her, apparently alone, with what looked like a whole Point-Defense Cannon carried on a thick strap, pointed straight at Katie. Her heart skipped a beat.

"Yeah, atta girl," the pirate said. She wore a pretty high-end looking vac suit herself, something that was at least military grade. Possibly better, by the look of the thermal vents and what seemed to be the reflection of a targeting system on the visor's glass. "Up against the wall, I ain't gonna hurt'cha. I'm just here for the cargo and fuel."

Katie stiffened, glancing over at her discarded weapon. They needed that fuel or they'd be dead in the water. The cannon in the pirate's hands looked heavy, she probably couldn't bring it around all that fast. If Katie went now, she could—

Katie's attention was firmly grasped by the click of a shell loading into the barrel. "Nuh-uh, don't even think about it, girlie. This ain't your ship, you got no stake in this. Run the numbers for me, how much EM d'you need to reach a port? I'll not drain your tanks so bad you can't get somewhere."

Katie glanced back at the gun, and—Crack!

The bright flash of a pillar of lightning failed to wake Katie. The Crack! of thunder that followed, however, knocked her out of bed like a physical force. She cried out, stumbled directly into a tree and fell onto her ass, breathing hard. She dived for the gun, coming up in a roll and—

No. That wasn't how it had happened. She dropped the twig and closed her eyes, waiting the five seconds it took for her activity to wake Thatch up and catch her attention. The affini pulled her in out of the pouring rain.

"It's okay, it's just lightning," Thatch said. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the downpour that was crashing around them. Their hard-won fireplace was struggling against the onslaught, though thankfully the lid on their cookpot seemed to be doing its job, still. Katie glanced up to see that Thatch was only half-formed, with her other half holding her sheet of plantlife overhead to redirect the rain.

"It's just what?" Katie asked. "Thatch, I've lived in space most of my life! This is normal?"

Another rumble shook the trees like the world itself was coming apart. Katie squeaked and jumped closer to Thatch, who took the opportunity to finish her bipedal form, holding the blanket of leaves over Katie's head to keep the rain from reaching her. The plant wrapped an arm around Katie's shoulders and chuckled. "Natural correction for imbalanced electrical charge in the atmosphere, that's all."

The sky broke in half with a blinding light that burned a line across Katie's vision. She whimpered, shuffling deeper into the protective sheet. "It— It looks like a weapon, are you sure we aren't being attacked?"

Thatch slowly shook her head. She glanced to the side for a moment and all her various little flowers began to glow, pushing back against the darkness surrounding them. The rest of the forest seemed to have gone dim to protect itself, or perhaps it was simply harder to see when compared to such displays of power. "I am quite certain, do not worry. It will not hurt us so long as we stay near the trees."

Another strike, this one nearby, had Katie squeezing her hands over her ears. The rumble rattled her vision when it arrived a fraction of a second later and by the time it was over Katie was hiding between Thatch's body and her sheet of foliage. Katie had to be careful of the thorns, but as she gently touched the less sharp sides of each Thatch folded them away.

"Promise?" Katie asked. This was an unusual perspective to view the affini by, and Katie was in desperate need of something to focus on that wasn't her dream or the storm. She watched the way that Thatch's leaves subtly shifted their angles as she took air in with which to speak. A few quickly buzzed back and forth, almost too fast to see, imparting into the air the vibrations that made up speech, though clearly less limited than Katie's own vocal cords.

"I promise, yes. You know how this works, I expect. What would happen if you put a large area of charge high above a planet?"

Katie squeezed hands over her ears after another flash shone through the gaps in Thatch's weave. The rumble came a moment later. It still drew a flinch.

"I... um... electrical charge? It would... air is a bad conductor, so it wouldn't go anywhere!"

Thatch nodded. Katie could tell, through her sixth sense. "Quite so. Now, leave it there and keep increasing the charge. What happens?"

Was this really the time for a physics lesson? Katie whimpered, but tried to set her mind to the task regardless. "It... eventually it'd have enough charge to arc, if there was a connection to ground anywhere, but..."

"But...? Where might we find a neutrally charged ground source around here, Katie?"

Thatch asked as if it were a simple question. In her experience, 'Ground' was a kind of wire, usually attached to the aeroframe of a spaceship, that provided a big sink for electrical energy so that circuits could have a charge differential across which to do their work. Where would they find something like that around here?

Katie poked her head out from around the blanket for long enough to spot a pillar of fire briefly join the sky above and the ground beneath. She flinched back, but she had her answer. "The actual ground! That— that's probably where that term comes from, huh," she said, feeling a rising blush on her cheeks. "Oh! So it's— It's hitting the trees because they're better conductors than the air. It won't hit us?"

Thatch nodded. "It won't hit us."

Katie crawled out from behind her, finding a comfortable spot where she could lean against the affini's side. A little bit of tugging was enough to get the sheet lowered to hug against her body. It wasn't quite as effective at keeping the rain off, so Katie felt a few of the nearby splashes against her face, but it was good enough and far more cozy.

The next strike produced a much smaller flinch, and the one after barely a reaction at all. "It's quite pretty, actually..." Katie declared, after a while.

Thatch was smiling. Katie didn't have to look to know that, she could feel it. "Yes, it is. The universe is full of such wonders."

Katie glanced up, attention captured by a brief rustle, to find Thatch looking down at her. Katie returned the smile.

"I'm gonna try to get some more sleep," she said, as Thatch's lights dimmed. "I'll..." Katie yawned, shifting her position slightly, resting her head in Thatch's lap as she fell into slumber, trapping the plant in place.

The following morning, Katie was chewing on a bowl of soup. The fire thankfully hadn't quite gone out during the storm, so while the world around them still dripped and dried, they had a little oasis of dry to hide within.

"This is getting good," Katie admitted, halfway through the bowl. Thatch seemed to spend some of her downtime each day fiddling with it. It was a meal they could both enjoy, though it was down to Katie to eat enough of the solid chunks to keep Thatch's consumption of the liquid balanced.

The plant's smile widened. "Thank you! I am using a new blend of local spices this time, as well as some carefully engineered chemicals of my own design."

Katie squinted down at the bowl, suddenly suspicious. "This isn't doing anything to my mind, is it?"

Thatch shook her head. "Flavour only, no significant mental alteration beyond the obvious good feeling from a filling meal. No chemical releases you wouldn't find from any meal you enjoyed."

Katie pouted down at it for a moment. That wasn't quite a no, was it? She shrugged and took another bite. It was good. Satisfying. "How do you usually draw the line between something that makes someone feel good and chemical stimulation? Like, touch naturally feels comforting because of chemicals, right? Where do you put the distinction between that and simply injecting those chemicals directly?"

Thatch shrugged. "We don't," she answered, simply. "But I trust you will tell me if I am not abiding by your wishes."

That made sense. Katie finished the bowl and handed it back, so Thatch could take it over to the river for a good wash. As the bowl crossed between them, the plant took a long look at her.

"When did you last take care of your hygienic needs, Katie?"

Uh. Shit. Katie cringed, pulling in on herself a little. "I've been getting the important stuff done," she claimed.

Thatch raised a vine to Katie's side and drew a leaf across her shoulder, while taking off towards the riverbank. More respectful of her agency than simply picking her up and carrying her there, perhaps, but the implication was clear. Follow. Katie followed.

"What is 'the important stuff'?" Thatch asked, while lowering the bowl into the water, just downstream of Leviathan's tank. Katie busied herself checking on the fish, making sure it was okay after the night's interruptions, and tried not to think too hard about how Thatch's interrogation was making her feel.

"Y'know! Stuff! Body stuff. Shaving and- waste and, y'know, the essentials."

It didn't take long for Thatch's dexterous vines to scrub the bowl free of its contaminants, which unfortunately meant she was free to focus on Katie more directly.

She raised a hand to Katie's jaw, gently resting it on her cheek. "Open wide."

The cheek quickly burned red, the shade seeming to spread out from their point of contact. "Thatch, don't be ridiculous! I can take care of myself!"

Thatch's other hand came up to the other cheek, gently pressing against the muscle in the spot where Katie's jaw and skull met. It was uncomfortable and tingly and Katie kept her mouth firmly closed.

Thatch's thumbs came up to the sides of Katie's mouth and slowly pressed in. Katie could have tried to resist it, but they both knew it would have been a pretense if Thatch had allowed it. As Katie's jaw opened, Thatch pressed in a little harder with her fingers and Katie reluctantly opened it the rest of the way.

The plant leaned in, glancing around, while Katie tried very hard not to focus on how good her thumbs tasted resting against the sides of her tongue, or, secondarily, the embarrassment of being inspected for something she knew she was screwing up.

"Hmmn," Thatch rumbled, removing her hands and letting Katie close her mouth back up. "When was the last time you brushed your teeth?"

Katie's blush did not want to go away. This wasn't fair. "Thatch, we're stranded on the bloody deserted Planet Dirt, is this really our biggest concern?"

The affini rolled her eyes, tilting Katie's head up to face her with a pair of fingers. "I see you have a dirty mouth in more than one way today. Yes, your health is my biggest concern here. When was the last time?"

"Thatch!" Katie complained, practically begging for relief. "Equals, remember?" she asked, hoping to distract the plant with philosophical musings.

It didn't work. "I expect you to call me out when I am being unhealthy too. When?"

Katie whimpered, speaking in the smallest voice she knew how to produce. "Probably a few weeks."

Her equal partner's eyebrows rose. "Long before we got stranded here, then. When did you last wash your hair?"

Katie spluttered a formless protest. She'd given the answer, she'd given this damnable weed what it wanted! Torture ended when you gave the answer, didn't it?

"Katie," Thatch warned.

"There's— Nobody around here can see us! I don't have anything to wash it with! I have more important things to do!"

Thatch didn't bother speaking, this time, simply allowing her flat stare to do the work. Katie's indignation withered. "About a week," she mumbled.

Thatch's raised eyebrows asked a question.

"Hey, that one isn't my fault, it takes a while to wash long hair and ship water was pretty rationed." Katie could at least be somewhat firm when she didn't know deep down that she should be embarrassed by this, and Thatch thankfully seemed to accept that justification.

"Next, when did you last wash your body?"

This was unfair. Katie squirmed, trying to step away, but the gentle brush of leaves against her skin made it clear that her lack of restraints was an illusion. She was going nowhere. "Also about a week," she admitted. If she just answered the questions then this would go faster, right?

"Filed your nails? Or—" Thatch raised one of Katie's hands to check. "No, clearly just bitten. I'll not even ask about skincare."

Katie knew that Thatch was capable of growing taller with each word, and she couldn't prove that that wasn't exactly what was happening.

The plant sighed. "Okay, well, we have some time this morning before we can do anything useful anyway. Let's get you cleaned up."

Katie took a step backwards. A rustling of leaves provided a firm suggestion she return to her place, and so reluctantly she ended up putting her chin back against Thatch's fingertips, which had stayed static. "I can take care of myself, Thatch," she insisted.

"So you say. If I leave it at this, will you remember? Be honest with me."

"Ah— I—" Katie grit her teeth. Thatch never lied to her, did she? Misleading wording, sometimes, but no lies. Breaking that trust would hurt both of them, at this point. Katie did not, however, actually have to answer the question, so she stayed quiet.

A few seconds later, Thatch nodded. "Yes, as I thought. Come."

All of a sudden, Katie was released from her gentle prison. She could have refused to follow. If she refused enough, Thatch would relent. She always did. Unfortunately, Katie knew the cursed xeno was correct here, and so reluctantly followed along, down the side of the river until they reached a spot where the water level was high enough for Katie to reach.

Once they got there, Thatch seemed to hesitate, looking momentarily uncertain. "I, ah, I realise the only thing I have which will work to clean your teeth may have a few side-effects," she admitted. "If you wish, we can do this once I've figured out how to filter the sap."

Oh, goddess above. Have this hanging over her head for who knew how long? Katie shook her head, she was already humiliated enough. "No, I— Let's get this over with, I feel dirty, now."

Thatch nodded, then gestured for Katie to come closer while raising a vine that had been coated in some sort of thick semi-fluid. It was mostly transparent, and a pale green. Katie looked up at Thatch with a deep sense of betrayal. "Can I not do this myself?" she asked, wanting to find a hole to climb into and hide. Maybe if she jumped into the river, the current would steal her away quickly enough?

No, of course it wouldn't. Thatch would catch her before she'd even gotten wet. She was trapped here.

The plant shook her head. "Unfortunately, you didn't bring a toothbrush and I haven't a mirror, so this is the best I can offer." A gentle rustle against Katie's shoulder prompted her forward, into the jaws of this beast she'd somehow become bunkmates with.

Thatch knelt down, bringing her head just a little above Katie's own. Thatch's fingers came up to press into the muscles at the girl's jaw, tilting her head up so Thatch could get a better view, and Katie knew better than to refuse this time. She opened her mouth.

Thatch's vine slid between Katie's lips and began gently rubbing against her teeth. The vine itself was small and, though a little abrasive, smooth enough not to hurt the sensitive skin of Katie's mouth. The substance on it was a sweet smelling thing that reminded Katie very much of Thatch's own scent, which was hardly a surprise when she thought about it.

After a moment of ensuring the makeshift paste was properly distributed, Thatch began to brush more thoroughly. Her hands held Katie's head in place and her jaw open while she worked, making sure every tooth got individual attention. If Thatch's hands hadn't been there, Katie had no doubt that she would already have moved, no matter how hard she tried to stay still. The gentle glide of vine on skin felt divine, and some little of the sap had already made its way to Katie's tongue, prompting little whimpers and pants. It was delicious, almost setting her tastebuds alight with a tingling fire.

It really only made sense for Katie to close her eyes. That way she didn't have to watch Thatch glancing around, inspecting every inch of her mouth to make sure she was doing good work. Not looking at it at least made the humiliation a little more abstract, if barely. She focused on the sensations in her mouth, the flavour, the smell. She could feel something going fuzzy on the edge of her mind, but it didn't seem to matter. It was all fine. All good.

After a few minutes, Thatch retrieved her vine. "Spit," she said. Katie spat, letting the sweet tasting mixture of saliva and sap go free. A container was raised to her mouth and a little liquid poured in. "Don't swallow, just mix it around and spit again."

Katie mixed, though she had to fight the urge to gulp it down. As soon as the sap mixed in, the liquid was divine, leaving her whole mouth tingling, longing to feel touch again. Katie's lips slipped, letting a little dribble down her chin, spreading that soft tingle further. Thankfully, Thatch's thumb was there to catch it before it could contaminate her entirely.

"Spit, remember."

Katie spat.

She forced open her eyes. Had everything always been this colourful? She glanced up at Thatch's eyes and cooed. So bright and captivating, so many colours all slowly moving in their own secret pattern. Maybe if Katie stared for long enough she could figure it out.

After a moment, Thatch sighed. "Ah, a little stronger than I'd expected, then." She blew out air through her mouth. "I'll whip up an antidote, one moment."

She gave Katie a vine to play with instead. The girl spent a moment feeling it, then shook her head. "I'm... okay, no, this is fine," she insisted. "You did say, and this isn't much."

She raised a hand and held it out straight, as proof. It felt a little sluggish, but only a little, and the effects seemed limited to her sensations. Katie was still perfectly able to panic over almost nothing, so it couldn't be effecting her all that much, and not in any of the ways she was worried about.

"Hair or body next?" Katie asked, to try to hurry things along. The longer this lasted, the worse it would be.

Thatch rumbled. She was still kneeling, and very close by. Katie could feel the hot, humid air that expelled against her face. Her eyes slid half-closed, breathing deep of the subtle aroma. Thatch's two fingers against her chin elicited a quiet squeak. "Last time, you told me I shouldn't listen to you while you don't have a clear head. I should give you this antidote regardless, I think."

Katie's cheeks flushed. She spluttered. The damn plant was ignoring her clearly stated boundaries! She grumped. "Yellow," she said. "I'm fine, really. Head is pretty clear, I can think just fine. Just a bit of tingling."

The gentle sensation of a leaf brushing against Katie's cheek drew out a soft gasp, somehow paired with yet another intensification of her embarrassment. "See, fine. I can do some mathematics for you if you want proof."

Thatch emitted a low drone again. Katie smiled as the air rolled over her. "What exotic matter density would you want to jump a ship like your last one from Sol orbit to Jupiter?"

Thatch had a really pretty voice. Almost enough to dance to. Regardless, the question wasn't hard, and if anything Katie could focus better like this. Her attention all jumped at once to the last input, but that was a lot better than it trying to spread out to cover everything at once like it usually did. "Uhh, one and a half moles per mole of hydrogen," she answered, after a few moments.

"Huh, really?" Thatch asked. "You seem confident, so let us assume that is true, but... wow is that a lot. Perhaps you'll get to see the Elettarium's drive once we're back, you may actually be able to appreciate the engineering."

Katie grinned. "Thank you, Thatch," she chirped. "Green?"

The plant nodded. "Hair and body we can do at much the same time. Clear-headed or not, I do not think you are sober enough to be in charge of our ride. I could take you up to where the river is slower and give you some privacy?"

Katie considered it, but shook her head. "If I can't drive then I don't wanna." She grinned up at the plant for a moment. Now that she'd proven her head to be clear, she didn't have to worry about Thatch thinking her altered, but still had the perfect excuse for being a little bit of a brat. What was the plant going to do, spank her?

Katie's cheeks burned the brightest red at the thought alone. She jumped into the river.

As expected, ten different vines caught her before she'd even touched the water. "Katie, no. You are still dress— Well, I suppose I should wash your clothing as well, actually. Come on, take them off."

Katie's grin fell away. She wasn't going to get naked in front of this thing? "I, hang on!"

Thatch rolled her eyes. "Katie, there is nothing to be embarrassed about. I am a sapient plant from another galaxy; I can assure you that clothing or not makes little difference to how unique and squishy you seem to me."

Did that help? Did that make it worse? It was impossible to tell, especially with ten little points of tight contact massaging tingles into Katie's flesh with every tiny motion.

"Well, I can hardly take my clothes off here, can I?" Katie asked, though quickly realised that that wasn't quite true. She actually had an awful lot of mobility. She was being held in place, yes, but if she tried to move a limb then the vine grasping it would barely take a moment to register that and move. It was like wearing a little suit of powered armour. A little more embarrassing, but like Thatch said, it was hardly like this was something that made a difference to her. Katie used her freedom to carefully turn away from Thatch, so she at least had some privacy.

A little grumpy, Katie started pulling off items of clothing and throwing them to the side. Where a vine would have gotten in the way, it was temporarily removed, and then replaced once the item was done. Further vines snatched the items out of the air a moment after Katie had let go. It only took a few minutes before she was naked entirely, and...

Wow, she'd been wearing those clothes for a while, hadn't she? Just touching them had been kind of uncomfortable. She was filthy. Katie reached out to one of the vines Thatch had hanging about in the air around her and grabbed on, using it to adjust her position. As Katie moved, Thatch made sure there was always a vine like it within reach. The black ones held her in place, but generally let her move her limbs as she liked. The red ones didn't budge an inch, but instead let Katie position herself.

It was like moving freely under her own power, except both of them knew that it was the exact opposite.

Katie dipped a toe into the flowing river. It was fast moving, but not too cold. As she climbed in, she was grateful for the vines. She could tell from the pressure on her skin alone that without them she would be being whisked away. Katie glanced behind herself, to make sure Thatch could handle it. The creature wasn't even looking at her, but was instead busying herself sorting clothes, with a few vines tightly wrapped around nearby trees to provide support.

Katie dunked her head under the water. Just the flowing stream alone worked wonders. Her hair had gotten tangled and filthy, utterly bedraggled. Katie ran her fingers through it, wincing every time she came to a knot. Before she'd gotten more than a few inches down, she could tell that she'd be getting nowhere without a comb. Obviously they didn't have a comb.

"Thatch?" she called, attracting the creature's attention. She gestured to her hair. "I don't... really have the equipment for this?"

Thatch left Katie's clothing in a sorted little pile. She hopped into the river herself, using a couple more vines to counter the increased load but otherwise not seeming to care about the rapid flow. With a soft smile, she raised her fingers and gave them a wiggle. "May I?"

Even with the incredible cooling potential of being mostly submerged, Katie's blush felt like it was heating her face a few degrees. Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded.

"Then just hold still and let me take care of everything," Thatch spoke, voice gentle, though still audible over the rushing water. She placed her hands against Katie's hair, and Katie really hoped the soft gasp was drowned out. Gentle fingers pressed against her scalp, and before long Katie could feel the sensation of a gentle lather being worked up.

"What's that you're using?" Katie asked, voice as steady as she could manage despite the way her thoughts so desperately wanted to sink into the massage.

"The same sap," Thatch admitted. "It's a very flexible substance." As if to accentuate the point, a pair of vines joined in, slowly rubbing down Katie's arms, leaving distinctive bubbles of soap behind them. Katie moaned gently, feeling the same tingle from before sinking in to her skin.

Hands worked through her hair. It wasn't really anything more than Katie herself could have done, getting the strands good and coated in their best substitute for shampoo and then gently teasing the knots apart. Thatch was, however, very good at it. Katie supposed it made sense, she must be used to disentangling large collections of long strands. Probably that became second nature after the first century of being a weird plant monster.

Katie let out a long, soft gasp as the two vines gently scrubbing her body did their work. Everywhere they went, they left behind a desperate need to feel their touch again, and thankfully they were happy to sate that desire at the same time. It was slow going, almost luxurious. Thatch surely could have done this faster, but neither of them were pointing that out.

As they worked, Katie ended up leaning backwards into her partner, now also apparently her stylist. It forced Thatch mostly underwater, but she didn't seem to mind, and lying back was very comfortable for Katie. Once all the knots had been worked out of her hair, it was time to move on to the main event.

"You have wonderful hair," Thatch whispered, as she worked a fresh batch of sap into Katie's scalp with ten firm fingers. More of Katie's hair was drawn into the lather over time, until the top of her head was naught but a collection of slightly green bubbles, tingling away. Each bubble that popped took a little stress with it.

Katie moaned appreciatively, nodding. "I'd be worried that you were doing something to me," she admitted, voice at a whisper, relaxing into the gentle motion surrounding her. "But I did get to visit a stylist once and it was basically this good. Almost."

The plant chuckled, taking a moment to brush the back of her faux-knuckles across Katie's cheek, eliciting another soft gasp. "I see we have competition, then."

Katie shook her head, whimpering softly as even that small movement filled her with more sensations than she knew what to do with. "Noooooo," she breathed. "I don't think the stylists could beat your ships."

They both nodded, taking the point seriously for just a beat, before laughing. Thatch broke the silence that followed, while her fingers sectioned off bits of hair and held them down with individual vines, so she could focus on cleaning one small section at a time. "I am glad to hear that your life has not been constant misery, though."

Katie tried to nod. A moment of tighter grip reminded her to keep herself still. "It hasn't," she agreed. "Just pretty close. Can you believe I had to pay for haircare stuff on the Indomitable? Whole civilisation's gone and nobody else was using it and they still wouldn't give it to me unless I paid with money backed by a government that didn't exist any more."

Katie laughed suddenly, as the vinepair cleaning her body reached somewhere sensitive. Her head jerked a little, but she was held tight. No ruining this.

Thatch didn't respond to her laugh except by making sure her vines were more careful. "I would believe that, yes," she muttered, voice dry even while nothing else was. Even mostly underwater, she managed to produce a pretty nice voice, though it did audibly suffer a little for it. "A lot of species have something like that. Something they never even think to let go of, long past when it makes sense to keep. Looking at the patterns between our various ward species is almost as interesting as exploring the differences."

Katie felt like that was something she should have an insightful response to. Instead, she only managed an inquisitive moan. With hands against her head and vines scrubbing her chest, how was she meant to do any more than that?

"Mmh," Thatch replied, most of her focus going elsewhere. "For the Xa'a-ackétøth it was war. They were so happy when we took their automated weapons away from them, as though they'd never considered it an option. For humanity, yes, it was capitalism. A simple fact of life to them, once, yet once we took it away they thanked us."

Katie tilted her head back, subconsciously following Thatch's direction, so the affini could start washing the substances out of her. The pair of vines started over at her shoulder, now focusing on cleaning away all traces of sap. She managed to mumble out "Mmmh, yeah, thanks for that," between softly quivering lips before the sensations overwhelmed her, and she sank into silence. Thatch didn't seem to mind, and continued quietly explaining all the various iterations of the seemingly unavoidable pattern of sapient life simply not knowing how to handle itself without the Affini's guiding hand. Gambling, for the Furool; Genetic manipulation for the Hurkín; not being adorable little pets for the Beeple.

Katie simply mumbled an acknowledgment of each in turn. By the time she managed to put together a thought again, she was being carried in Thatch's arms back to camp. Her eyes fluttered open. "All done?" she asked, voice a little distant and very soft. She was carefully deposited on a warm stone near the fire to dry off. Her clothes were hung on a strand of rope Thatch had tied between two sticks, in a makeshift line hanging near the fire.

Thatch nodded, sitting on her own rock and letting the fire dry off the excess water. "For today, yes. I'm sure it won't take as long tomorrow."

Chapter Text

"So I can just wrap the wire around this?"

Katie held up a short, plump stick for inspection and received a nod. She coiled her hard-won metal wiring around it, keeping each loop right next to the one before it. This represented days of time and effort. She still had a couple of scuffs on her palm from the mining, and Thatch had a little burn on one of her vines from the processing. If Katie ruined it now, it would be a real setback.

She glanced up at the affini sitting to her side, looking for a moment of affirmation. Of course she wasn't going to ruin it. If she were doing anything wrong, Thatch would stop her before any real harm was done. Katie carefully curled the wire again and again around the stick, forming a little inductor coil.

The weather had turned again, though not as poorly as the previous day's storm. Thatch had thrown together a makeshift windbreak to keep the worst of it away from them, but Katie didn't mind the light sprinkling of rain that still managed to find them. The canopy high above kept the worst of it away, directing what could have been torrential down the sides of trees and directly into their root systems. It still made for a dramatic evening, with little by way of insect life daring to brave the winds, save for the gently buzzing pinpricks of light that hid behind the windbreak with them.

"Are you sure the antenna will be okay?" Katie asked, glancing up the side of one of those trees. A long, hair-thick vine that Thatch promised was a good electrical conduit wove up one of the massive trees surrounding them, poking up out into the empty air far above them with a few meters of metal cabling to act as a more reactive antenna. Would it stay standing in this kind of weather?

"Assuming it is not struck by lightning, it would take more than these winds to break it," the affini promised, brushing a few leaves up Katie's back. Now that her clothes were getting a daily wash and were no longer so filthy they functioned as impromptu armour plating even the lightest touches transmitted well. Katie shivered and nodded, smiling up at her companion.

"Gotcha, Teach!" She put the finishing touches on her inductor and shuffled closer to the tree to start wiring it in. Thatch raised a few vines to hold the other end of the conductive vine around the tree down, and point out the best place to insert the metal piece of their makeshift system. She was getting good at making use of her new array of colours. Black vines held the wire down, while the attention-grabbing red one was what pointed out what to do.

"Teach?" Thatch sounded more than a little skeptical. Katie didn't need to glance back to intuit the questioning look on her face. She jabbed one end of the metal wire into a vine on one side, and then into another vine on the other, and then rested the coil carefully on the ground.

Katie shrugged. "I feel like you should have some kind of title here. Thatch is a cute enough name, but a girl needs some variety, right?"

Katie was starting to think of Thatch as somewhat of a high-end speaker system wrapped up in an impractical number of vines. It made sense, sure, they needed to be able to speak every language from every species and having a voicebox as limited as the human design would quickly falter, but Katie couldn't help but think that it defeated the point of taking such obviously human form when Thatch didn't even bother making sure her noises were anything that Katie could begin to reproduce. She buzzed, in what sounded more like a frequency sweep than any reasonable voice.

Katie turned. "Okay, I'm getting pretty good at interpreting you, but what was that?"

Thatch glanced up, with two of the conductive wires leading into her chest. "Calibration." Even the simplest radio design needed some way to output what they were picking up, but when Thatch had told Katie not to worry about it, she hadn't expected this.

Katie glanced over to Thatch's hands, which were busying themselves swapping wires around over the simple tuning circuit Katie had put together. It would have been nice to have a dial to tune resistance, but the best they could do was manually jump wires around to approximate what they were looking for.

"You're weird, hon." Katie stood up, taking the moment to stretch. They'd been at this for a few hours by now, and she was getting stiff. She found herself looking out over the sky above the river. The planet was all lit up, so she couldn't see as much of the endless void as she was used to, but it was still beautiful.

"Do you really think we'll pick anything up, Thatch?" Katie asked, after a few moments of relative quiet. The radio had been her idea and while she'd certainly contributed her fair share, she would still feel bad if it led to nothing and all the affini's efforts had been wasted. It was deeply unfair how many materials the plant could simply grow, but it was still surely energy expenditure they could have been putting into something else.

The sky was bright and present in a way that it simply hadn't been whenever Katie had had the bad luck to spend time on a Terran world, where industrial lighting invariably drained the sky of its stars entirely. Could there really be anything but them here?

Thatch caught Katie's attention with a gentle rustling down the arm. She hurried over, taking a seat next to the plant and looked up with a smile. "I hope we do," Katie admitted, "but how weird would it be if we randomly landed somewhere inhabited?"

The plant nodded, opening her mouth to speak. Her lips moved, but nothing came out. After a moment, she paused, frowned, and moved one of the wires. She tried again. "It would be extremely unusual, I have to admit, but perhaps the universe simply wishes us to survive."

Katie paused, taking a closer look at her companion. She raised her eyebrows. "Is this spirituality I hear? Faith in a higher power?"

Thatch blew out a little air, face flowing into a small smile. She shook her head. "Hardly, the Affini ourselves are the highest power we have yet to meet and, frankly, were we to discover an intelligence behind the suffering of this universe it would be on the fast track for class-Os."

Katie glanced down at her hands. Thatch had given her a brief rundown of their classification system for chemical compounds over dinner the night before, once Katie had started coming down from her own chemically induced haze. The O ones were the scariest. Total rewiring of how a sapient brain experienced pleasure and suffering, to ensure an endless supply of the first and an impossibility of the second. It was discomforting to hear them spoken of so irreverently.

Thatch paused, noticing Katie's quiet, and laid a vine around her shoulders in comfort. The girl lifted her own chin, with a quick smile. She may not have been comfortable with Thatch's culture, but the same was very much true the other way around, and they were figuring out how to make do.

Satisfied that Katie's mood hadn't been too far thrown, the affini continued. "Even we do not know everything, Katie. Sometimes one simply has to accept that some things are up to chance, though of course we do our best to insulate our wards from such things. Now, it was likely inadvisable for me to section off my vocal system like this, so I would rather have this done quickly. Can I trust you to manage exploring the electromagnetic frequency for me, 'student'? I will not be able to touch the rest of the circuit if I am to also speak it."

Student. Katie cursed the way the Affini had taken all the good words for themselves. She wrinkled her nose. "Okay, no, that makes me feel like a kid again, maybe we don't use those titles."

Thatch's mouth twisted to the side in thought. "Katie is also a cute enough name for me."

Katie looked away, towards the source of the rain, in the hope that the gentle splashes would cool off her cheeks before Thatch noticed. "I liked Katieflower," she admitted. "It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's... cool to hear somebody riffing on my real name. I haven't gotten that much. It feels more like it's ours than some prepackaged term."

The wind swelled for a few moments, making it hard to converse. The windbreak strained, scaring off a lot of the insects that had been using it as cover, but it didn't take long for Thatch to shore it up. The campfire almost went out, but thankfully the windbreak could be adjusted to cover it, and the flames soon recovered.

"Is that not a pet name?" Thatch asked, genuine uncertainty echoing in her cadence. Katie took a moment to think about it, and then shook her head with a small shrug.

"I don't think so, or at least, not how I meant it. It's weird for somebody who doesn't even know you to call you cutesy names, but you're getting to know me now. It's not the same thing. I just wish I had something to call you back that wasn't super awkward or, y'know."

Her imperialist conqueror smirked. "Domestic?"

Katie grinned, and spoke her first words through a laugh. "Sure, let's go with that. 'Thatch' is good, and so long as it's safe for you to do so, let's see what we can pick up?"

"It is safe, flower." Thatch paused, and glanced up at the sky. "Assuming I am not struck by lightning."

The two of them spent a moment carefully considering the clouds. After a few seconds, Katie blew out air and spoke. "Let's be quick about it, then."

Thatch connected a wire and began to hiss. Katie couldn't help but waste a moment looking at the creature's leaves, all vibrating in place in an unusual pattern. What did it say about the past few days that this wasn't the weirdest thing she'd done recently? Katie started swapping wires around while the two of them paid attention to any changes in the pattern, until...

The hiss stopped, replaced by a firm staccato beat. Not music, but a pattern all the same. All four eyebrows rose to the heavens as Katie tweaked a few other wires to zero in on the frequency.

They needed to write this down! Katie hurried over to the small stack of slabs Thatch kept for writing. She grabbed a blank one and her own thorn tool. She moved back over, stepping a little carefully, as she knew Thatch likely couldn't catch her without disrupting their delicate balance of Terran and Affini technologies.

She started trying to chip in the pattern. It was somewhat like morse code, the old encoding mechanism that still saw some use on broken ships that couldn't signal any better than on or off, but only really in that it shared that common technical limitation. The pattern itself was utterly unrecognisable, but after a few iterations, Katie was fairly confident she had it written down.

She reached over to unhook a wire, and Thatch twitched and slumped, making a loud noise not unlike a whole-body cough. She opened her mouth to speak and couldn't produce more than a whisper. Katie carefully put the tablet down and moved over, putting her ear to Thatch's chest. She knew where the sounds really came from, after all.

"It appears that did more damage than I had been hoping," Thatch whispered, voice sounding strained even at her slight volume. "Perhaps this is why I was so often told not to do this kind of thing by my own tutors."

Katie placed a finger over Thatch's mouth, hoping the cultural iconography would translate well enough. "Shh. You okay?"

Thatch nodded firmly, though didn't try to speak. She pointed at their makeshift radio and shook her head, then back at herself with a second nod.

Katie pulled a face. "Sorry. Will it get better?"

The plant nodded again. A soft tap on the back of one of Katie's shoulders had her turning around, and then a leaf's brush across her upper arm sent her to retrieve the tablet, so they could inspect it. Katie brought it back and held it out for Thatch to take, then settled herself in the creature's lap before holding out a hand to take it back.

"This way we can both see it," she explained, holding it in a position that was comfortable for her and trusting that the creature watching over her would have a good view too. Katie found herself smiling, knowing Thatch would be doing the same.

Though unable to speak, Thatch was still a great help when it came to cleaning up the pattern. Stark red vines pointed to different sections, helping Katie figure out where the repetition started, so they could extract just the piece that meant something.

Katie stared down at it, carving little doodles into the side of the page with her 'pen'. "It's too short to be a very complicated message, I think."

A brief sense of approval came down from above. Katie glanced upwards, momentarily concerned that she was putting far too much faith in her inexplicable sixth sense, but Thatch was smiling down at her. "Okay, cool." She nodded, mostly to herself, and looked back down. "It isn't simple enough to just be an emergency beacon, though, probably? Back in the Terran civilian fleet, we used 'SOS', which stands for 'Ship Outside Safety', so that it was easy to broadcast and hear."

Katie felt a hand gently grasp her wrist and hold it still. Katie glanced down, and only then noticed that she'd been about to nibble on the end of the thorn. She winced. With one hand holding the tablet and the other fixed in place, she didn't have many good options for a quick signal of gratitude. She made do by leaning slightly to the side and gently tapping her nose against Thatch's forearm, whispering a quick "thanks."

Thatch let go, and Katie made sure to keep an eye on what she was doing with the sharp blade.

She let out a deep breath. "I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but you aren't stopping me, so I'm going to assume I'm on the right track and keep going." Thatch rested an encouraging hand atop Katie's head. Without the ability to speak, they really had no option but to communicate through touch. "If my information theory lectures still have any value here, I've got to guess that this is a code rather than language. I doubt we'll be able to understand it, but whoever is broadcasting this must be doing so for a reason. We could... Do you think we could build something to tell us how strong a signal is? We could triangulate in on it?"

This wasn't really Katie's area, but in the last months of her part of the rebellion, when things had started getting really stretched thin, stuff like roles and responsibilities had started breaking down. Nobody else knew how to keep a manual Jump Drive running like Katie did, but basically every other role on the ship had just been a desperate mix of whoever was free at the time. It was hard not to pick up a few skills in that kind of environment.

Thatch was nodding, but a soft gust of scent attracted Katie's attention, and she glanced to the side, back across the river. It was getting late. Hmn, she wouldn't want to forget her medication, would she?

"It's getting late, maybe we worry about that tomorrow? We've been busy today, maybe we could eat, do meds and hygiene stuff, then get an early bed? I could tell you about that time I faced down a pirate queen!"

As evening turned to night, the pair went through what was fast becoming a ritual. They cleaned up after themselves, making sure that they left their campsite as clean as it had been that morning, or preferably cleaner. Katie took a few minutes to check up on Leviathan, ensuring they seemed happy and well fed. She and Thatch spent a little while after that transplanting little pieces of the local environment into the tank, creating an enjoyable place for the little fish to explore.

Thatch felt like an idiot. Eighty years of experience in one form of bioengineering or another and she chose now, the first time she was more than ten minutes away from a well stocked medical facility, to start ignoring the rules? No matter how good you were at altering your own biology, you didn't experiment on yourself. Thatch knew she had been lucky to only burn out the more sensitive parts of her vocal apparatus. She should have waited the few days necessary to build something properly, but she'd seen the look on Katie's face as they'd been putting the radio together. The poor girl really needed to see her efforts pay off for once. Thatch's damaged pieces would grow back, and it likely wouldn't take that long, but this was going to make co-operating with her poor companion rather more difficult.

Katie walked from the fishtank over to the fire with a yawn on her lips, to where Thatch was busy distracting herself by stirring soup. "Meds time, maybe?" she asked. As always, Katie raised her voice a little when she thought she was starting a conversation, as if she expected that she had less than Thatch's full attention at any given point.

Thatch opened her mouth to reply, out of habit, but there was still little sound to be had. Idiot. She instead moved over to sit next to one of their seating stones, and patted it. At least she had the poor flower learning how to take care of herself now. If Thatch returned to the Elettarium with a dirty, malnourished creature then Katie might be whisked away to be domesticated for her own good. If Thatch could teach her how to take care of her own basic necessities, however, maybe the others would agree that she could be happy on her own.

Katie skipped over to sit on the very edge of the seat, leaning most of her body weight against Thatch's side. A careful vine adjusted her position, helping her find a more ergonomic posture. A hand against the back of her head helped keep her from slipping. It was late, and given that they hadn't built a bed yet Katie seemed to be getting so used to sleeping in Thatch's vines that she started getting sleepy whenever they were close in the evenings.

Probably that was a habit Thatch should correct, but it wasn't like it would be a problem once they got back to Compact space and Katie could get more suited accommodations.

Thatch extended a now-familiar bundle of flowers from the arm that wasn't holding Katie in place and held them out for her. Katie sat for a moment with her eyes locked onto the colourful leaves, waiting patiently. Thatch was incapable of guiding her through the process by voice, unfortunately. Hopefully she could enable some meager communication with body language alone.

She didn't have any free hands, so instead Thatch guided a small vine to catch Katie's attention with a gentle touch. The girl glanced up with a quick smile. She did seem to get a lot out of knowing she was properly medicated, though Thatch wished she had the ingredients to build something better. This regimen barely counted as class-G, though it was at least far more potent than anything Terran science could have been providing her.

Thatch nodded down towards her arm, carefully managing her bioluminescent pods to draw the girl's attention back down, and then prompted her forward with a quick brush of leaves. Katie leaned into the flowers and Thatch let her own rhythms rise, prompting Katie to breathe in.

Thatch would usually spend this time making sure Katie was okay. She had described a lot of discomfort with medical care, and the last thing Thatch wanted was to make Katie feel like her bravery wasn't appreciated. This would all be so much harder if Katie wasn't as adept at handling her fears. Lacking voice, Thatch did her best to express her gratitude by stroking a gentle hand through her hair.

She smiled down at the creature. There was something therapeutic about getting to provide for her needs. While Thatch still felt like an emotional wreck half the time, she hadn't felt useless in days. It was exhilarating.

She let her rhythms fall. Katie was clearly paying very close attention, because she let out her breath immediately, and after a moment to recover, they began the process again.

Hadn't that always been Thatch's problem, though? So desperate to help that she—

Yellow. Definitely yellow. Thatch tried to cut off that particular line of introspection and focused her attention on Katie. Thankfully, her little Katieflower had been getting used to people—or at least one person—very quickly, and Thatch no longer needed to move her with brute force now that they'd developed the vocabulary by which she could ask. Thatch brushed a vine across Katie's side, letting her know that Thatch was ready if she wanted to shift back to the side. The drugs always left her a little hazy anyway, though Thatch hadn't managed to pin down why exactly. There weren't any active ingredients that should cause it.

Katie slumped to the side immediately, keeping her nose firmly among the flowers. Not really necessary, given that she was still holding her breath, and this was the second half of the dose. Thatch took a moment to fold away her equipment and adjusted her own position, so she could use both hands to keep Katie stimulated and prevent her from falling asleep, despite the comfort.

While she let Katie recover from her ordeal, Thatch looked down, watching her little chest rise and fall, and the way her tiny fingers twitched sometimes, when she had nothing to do with them. She was so fragile and precious. She wanted to be free, and Thatch wanted to give Katie everything that she wanted... but this was a creature made to be someone's. Gentle, kind, endlessly responsive and caring, empathetic to a fault and in need of so much fixing. Even without her voice, Thatch knew that she could have her. In minutes. Tear down Katie's fragile mind and start to build something better from the ground up. It would be easy, she'd just have to—

Red. Definitely red. Thatch forced her gaze away, to the stars. They were a long way from home, and Katie was counting on her to get them back. She had real problems enough without imagining more. Thatch had often found herself wishing for a more practical purpose, but whenever one had presented itself, she'd only screwed it up, hadn't she? Katie would be better off far away from her. Thatch's soft smile fell away as she felt dull fear settling over her core. If she screwed up here, she had no backup. No alternative options. Nobody to mitigate it. If she couldn't get Katie home safely, then maybe it would be best if she just stayed here on the rotten planet Dirt.

Thatch twitched as she felt Katie's fingers brushing against her cheek. She glanced down to find a concerned face. Thatch cursed inwardly, wondering what she'd done to tip the little creature off. She gave a soft smile, but as always, Katie saw right through her.

"Feeling rough?" Katie hadn't sat up, she was simply craning her neck up at an uncomfortable angle. Thatch leaned back, cradling Katie's body with an arm, so that she at least wouldn't hurt herself staring. She shrugged. She couldn't talk about this stuff at the best of times, never mind when she literally couldn't talk.

Katie nodded, shuffling around until she could stare at Thatch more directly, now practically draping herself across the affini's stomach.

"I'd ask if you wanted to talk about it, but that might be in poor taste."

Thatch's smile grew a little more honest. She could still laugh, too, it was only the fine leaves that controlled detail that were burned out. Simple movement of air was fine. She nodded, and pressed a few fingers against Katie's cheek in a wordless display of gratitude. The girl leaned into it, closing her eyes for a few brief moments.

How could Thatch possibly not break something so delicate as this?

"Don't think I don't notice this stuff, hon. I know I'm kind of the default choice, given that there's nobody else here who speaks our— well, I guess my— language, but you know I'm here if you need to talk, right?"

Thatch stared out into the void.

She felt Katie rummaging around for a moment, until she found a vine and wrapped it around her hand.

"Squeeze, please." It made sense that the poor thing wanted comfort, so Thatch squeezed. "Thank you. Stop squeezing or freeze up if you want me to stop, yeah?"

Thatch felt the ex-Terran slip down her body, finding a comfortable spot that neither of them needed to put effort in to maintain. She continued. "You've helped me a lot," Katie admitted. "Just having somebody who's willing to talk to me like an equal, and... admittedly, somebody who actually calls me out on my shit. I'm... not used to anybody being willing to pay that much attention to me. It's nice."

Thatch kept holding her hand, but couldn't quite bring herself to look down at her. This was wrong. A hundred years of soaking up the values of her culture screamed at her. The Affini shielded their wards from the dangers of the universe; the risks of uncertainty; and the trauma of doubt. She could damage Katie by being too honest, here, if she interpreted Thatch's weakness as being representative of a structure that truly could provide a certainty Thatch couldn't. A certainty that would benefit her to no end.

"We're not so different, are we?"

Katie was looking up at her with a mixture of concern and care, and Thatch couldn't handle it. She dared not look directly down, fearing that seeing Katie out of more than the edge of her vision would be too much. The vine curling around Katie's hand squeezed tighter.

"So let me in, Thatch. There's nobody here but us. Let me help, please? You said you expected me to be forceful if you weren't taking care of yourself, and you aren't, so this is me being pushy. I know you can't exactly tell me right now, and that's okay, I just want to make sure you know I'm here."

The vine tightened further, and Thatch caught a glimmer of a wince. She looked down, just to check that she hadn't used too much force.

Katie's eyes caught her own. The only pain in them was sympathetic.

"You don't have to be alone. Let me be here?"

Knowing the damage she might be doing, but craving the understanding more, she slowly nodded her head, keeping her gaze on Katie. She could feel a tension building across her body, but it didn't last. She didn't have anything that could force a brief amnesia anyway. She couldn't undo this. The damage was done.

The girl didn't recoil in horror, or get uncomfortable with Thatch's touch. She leaned down and rested her chin against a leafy chest, and used her free hand to push one of Thatch's back down on top of her head.

How was Thatch meant to respond? In a year's time, Katie would most likely be a happy citizen of the Affini Compact, or, if she met the right person, an even happier floret. Thatch didn't want to do anything to damage her chances. She'd done okay by herself for decades, she could handle continuing on alone. She could—

Thatch whipped out a vine to grab Katie's wrist, preventing her from scratching herself on a thorn again. She frowned down at the girl, who must have been doing it intentionally, only to see a patient smile.

"You're always paying so much attention to me, even when you seem so far away. I can try to return the favour, okay? Trust me, Thatch, please. Let me take care of you, too?"

Something deep inside broke, and Thatch could no longer stand the light or the noise. She knew that if this conversation continued she would do something she would come to regret. She glanced up at the night sky for just an instant. It was late enough to bring the day to a sharp close. She was too weak to do what she knew she should do, but if she indulged herself in only a little way, it would sate that need, wouldn't it? In a few moments of frantic movement she wrapped Katie up in dexterous vines—making sure to keep the one around her hand firmly, but gently, in place—and carried the two of them over to where Katie had usually slept. A storm of smaller tentacles pushed open buttons, pulled down zippers, and unhooked clasps. It wasn't healthy for Katie to sleep in the same clothes she'd been wearing all day and Thatch waited just long enough to feel an affirming squeeze from Katie's hand before tearing them all away, leaving them in a folded pile. Thatch had spent her nights a few feet away until now, even if Katie had usually used her foliage as a blanket, but not tonight.

The vines around Katie retracted, letting her sink back into Thatch's grip. They could forget propriety for just one night. Thatch took enough of her bipedal form to wrap Katie in powerful arms and tuck her beneath a sharp chin, burying the girl's face in her chest. Held so close, Thatch could drink in every part of the girl's own rhythm. Her breaths, her heartbeat, the tiny twitches of a body that couldn't quite stay completely still and the soft gasps of warm contact.

Thatch hadn't the will to finish putting herself together. She was just a tangle of vines and leaves and flowers and she wove every one around Katie's limbs, around her torso and chest, even one or two around the girl's neck, in as total an embrace as she could manage. She caught the heat that radiated away, tasted the moisture of every patch of exposed skin, felt every tiny hair and all the many beautiful imperfections of a damaged form. She savoured the sensation of soft skin. Enjoyed the shivers that ran down Katie's back as a fine web brushed across her, pulling tight. She longed for more of the quiet, distant moans of a much needed hug.

Thatch would let the girl move. If she wanted. Desperately, she hoped she wouldn't have to. Thatch wanted the warmth and the companionship, for tonight. A few short hours of being able to pretend she had something—anything—to call her own.

Just for tonight.

She couldn't express her gratitude with words, but perhaps Katie would still get the idea.

She felt a quick squeeze against the vine around Katie's palm, and quickly squeezed back.

"Shall I take this as a yes?" Katie asked, through a quiet laugh. Thatch curled around her more tightly with a small nod. She wrapped her sheet of foliage around them, protecting both from the lights, the sounds, and the falling rain, and brought both of them down into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

Katie skipped across consciousness like a stone flying across a lake. Time and again, waking just enough to realise that it was morning, and that she really should get up. Time and again, finding herself pulled back down into slumber the moment she became aware of her surroundings. It was like trying to fight past the event horizon of a black hole. No matter how much she might want to wake...

Katie slept.

Her body tingled from head to toe, feeling as if she were floating in an open ocean. No part of her was touching anything hard, or was anything less than perfectly suspended. She could hardly be sure that she wasn't dreaming, but her dreams were nightmares and those seemed to be leaving her alone for the moment. Why would she want to wake, actually? She could sleep here forever.

Like any stone skipping, however, each leap was lower. Eventually, the threat of consciousness loomed large. Katie tried to fight it, wanting little more than to stay in her sleeping prison of warmth and comfort, but it was a losing battle. Light and heat willed her to wake. She refused, but it was insistent.

She shifted position slightly, and her body involuntarily let out a little whimper.

"Good morning, Katie." The voice surrounded her, quiet chords chiming in her ears, and finally Katie had a reason to let herself wake up.

"Ughh," she breathed. "Wake... no. Sleep? Please?"

She heard rustling from all around her and cursed sunlight burned through her eyelids. She hissed, and a moment of movement more brought the light down to a tolerable level. She forced open her eyes and found herself cocooned, with a small gap off to one side through which a fraction of the day's fury could reflect. It would have to do.

She glanced around and saw nothing but plantlife. Even when she looked down, at herself, it was just the tangled shades of foliage all the way down. She raised a hand to herself. Speckled black, flecked with splashes of red. She curled her hand into a fist and it moved easily enough, but...

"Uhhh," she droned. "I think I'm still sleeping."

Indeed, if she pinched herself, she felt nothing, though the flora around her did flinch. She felt a flush of heat rolling through her, though it felt like it was being delivered straight to her skin, not truly coming from within.

"Ah, no, I— Let's get you dressed, perhaps." Thatch's voice was sounding much better. A little quiet, still, but singing its usual song. All across Katie's body, her 'skin' began to slither, curling away to reveal the delicate network of vines and roots that had actually formed it. She gasped in surprise as humid air hit her dry, exposed body. It felt cold, despite the height of the sun, and air pressure alone could hardly make up for what she'd gotten used to.

The cocoon slowly opened, letting Katie get used to the light, while Thatch handed her one item of clothing at a time. It was good that she had something to focus on, because otherwise she might be thinking about what had just happened, and that absolutely couldn't be allowed. Thatch was just a friend. They were stuck on a planet together and needed to huddle for warmth, that was all. It was reasonable. Not only was Thatch a friend, she was a space alien with a wholly different outlook on life. The only unreasonable thing here was Katie's burning cheeks.

"Brefast," she declared, striding over to the soup and reaching out to grab the lid. A vine caught her wrist. She glanced back to watch Thatch reform as she moved between them, shifting seamlessly from the disorganised mess she had been into the elegant creature Katie was coming to know.

"It's hot, flower, do be careful." Thatch's vine lingered a moment longer than it needed to. That didn't mean anything. Katie nodded rapidly, letting her hand fall away so Thatch could take care of it.

While the walking plant prepared their morning meal, Katie sat on one of their rocks and spent a few moments trying to massage feeling and warmth back into her arms. Her fingers did little to sate the electric tingling that danced across her skin, demanding something more, but at least working some heat back into herself helped.

"So." Katie coughed, attracting a glance. "Do we need to talk about last night?" She knew what that would have meant with a human, but Thatch wasn't a human. Katie was extremely aware that she'd encouraged it.

The flora winced, and had the good sense to appear sheepish, and shrugged. She handed Katie a bowl of soup and one of their makeshift wooden spoons.

"I apologise if I overstepped, I—"

"No! No, it was... I didn't mind—"

"But I did not ask if I could—"

"And I didn't stop you—"

"That is not how that wo—"

"Thatch. Was nice."

Thatch stared down at the soup. Several of the currently dim biolumenescent flowers dotting her body started to curl open, showing their hexagonal leaves. After a few moments, she looked back towards the once-a-Terran.

"You offered comfort in a time of need, and I am very grateful. Thank you." The affini seemed reluctant to admit it. Katie nodded, mostly to herself. Comfort in a time of need. She could understand that. It was probably a good thing. What that sort of thing usually meant with a human was... Katie had never found herself comfortable with the things that unclothed humans did behind closed doors.

"Of course, any time," Katie readily agreed. "I meant what I said, I'm here for you."

She glanced down at her steaming bowl of soup and took a careful spoonful, wary of the heat. It was a little below scalding, but good. She gave Thatch a quick smile and continued eating, pulling the solid pieces out one by one.

"I do not know that I am going to find things very easy to talk about, however," Thatch admitted. "And if we wish to find the source of that signal then we have a busy day ahead of us. It may please you to learn that I think I have finished developing a method to filter the undesirable active agents out of my sap, so I no longer need to be directly involved in your daily routine."

That was good. It was a good thing. Katie nodded. "That's a good thing." When Thatch offered her the makeshift toothbrush, and a little container of what she could only assume was clean, safe sap, she took them gratefully. Gladly. Happily. Without complaint. It was a good thing.

It only took Katie a few minutes to fish out all the solid chunks from her breakfast. She handed the bowl over to her companion—who slipped a deep-purple root inside with an appreciative hum—and set off down the river. She could spend a few minutes brushing her teeth here, but without Thatch's help she'd need a calmer section of river to bathe. Given they'd likely need to be travelling quite far today, that didn't seem like too difficult an ask.

Katie spent a few moments inspecting the sap. It didn't look any different. She squeezed a drop out onto the little tool Thatch had built for her. A carved wooden handle met a head of plantlife with firm little growths that seemed to function just fine as bristles. She extended a careful tongue to tap against the drop.

Katie let her eyes slide shut. It was delicious, still. She could feel herself relaxing just from the taste, but after a few moments of careful introspection she was pretty sure it wasn't actually messing with her head, but just reminding her of the times before. Regardless, Katie stuck the brush into her mouth and tried to do a good job. She suspected that Thatch would be checking up on her before long.

It was hard to focus on actually giving every tooth the attention it deserved, when the act of scrubbing was enough to fill her head with such a familiar taste and aroma. Katie first tried to count where she'd gotten to, but quickly lost track. Going from one side to the other, one tooth at a time, worked better, but when she reached the middle she lost track of which direction she'd been moving.

This was ridiculous. She wasn't incapable. She'd spent half of yesterday building circuits with only a little guidance on how to integrate it with Thatch's organic technology. She wasn't an idiot, and even the hypercompetent plant didn't make her feel like one.

After a few minutes of trying, Thatch came to check up on her. Katie harboured a secret suspicion that she'd been watched the whole time, and this was actually a reaction to her starting to express frustration, but she couldn't prove that. As Thatch drew close, Katie silently handed the brush over and waited until Thatch's fingers pressed into the muscles of her jaw, guiding her mouth open so she could spend a few moments cleaning up what Katie had failed to catch.

"You'll get it down in no time," Thatch promised, resting a hand on Katie's head for a few moments with an encouraging squeeze. It at least didn't take her long to finish up. "Spit and rinse now."

Katie's cheeks still burned, if less than they had at first. Should she be worried that she was getting used to this? Thatch handed her a container of water, and Katie at least managed to do that part, earning herself another moment of warm contact that banished the lingering tingling that suffused her skin, at least in that area.

They were in a hurry today, however. A leaf drawn up Katie's bicep attracted attention to Thatch's outstretched hand, which she took with her own as they made their way back to camp. Did the overgrown houseplant expect that she'd get lost on the way?

...Admittedly, that wasn't that much worse than failing to brush her own teeth. Katie wished she could blame chemicals for that, but she was as sober as she'd ever been and her focus skipping away from routine chores was unfortunately commonplace. There was a reason she'd forgotten to do them so often even before getting stranded.

"The further away we get, the better our triangulation attempt will be," Thatch spoke, as they approached their campsite. "We can hardly leave Leviathan uncared for, but if we use this as one of our points, then perhaps we could head upriver in the morning and downriver in the afternoon and see if we get anything useful? We could swim?"

Once they reached the camp, a gentle vine prodded Katie forward, sending her to collect the leafy backpack they'd made for her after enough complaints about her lack of pockets. Thatch could carry enough food and water for the both of them, but Katie felt it was better if she carried her own supplies. More fair that way. It also meant she could bring the important pieces of their radio setup. They'd have to get high above the trees to pick anything up. The little luminescent plant they had it wired to wouldn't give them any audio, but as far as estimates of signal strength went it would have to do.

She realised, as she was climbing up Thatch's back, that the affini would be taking the weight either way, but it was too late to change her approach now. "I can't hold a conversation on the water," Katie admitted. "Let's stay on land for now."

Thatch hesitated, confidence faltering. Katie installed herself around the creature's neck and folded her arms over its head. "You promised, Thatch. Still, you do know you're in charge here, right? Just tell me what you need me to do and I'll do it, no questions or complaints. It's your call."

The affini rumbled, but did eventually raise two bright red vines for Katie to grab onto. She did, but didn't begin guiding them forward straight away. "I mean it, Thatch. I'm not going to get upset if you need to stop. I'll do whatever you want me to, here."

Thatch started moving forward by herself, but Katie pulled back on the reigns and brought them back to a stop. The plant emitted a soft whine, but acquiesced. "Alright. We shall talk, but we have much distance to cover, and I need something else to focus on."

Satisfied, Katie let them go. First at a walking pace, and then a run, and then a sprint. As Katie got used to the movements again, they went faster. The sprint gave out to a fury of vibrant lines striking out at the trees around, carrying them across the land at dizzying speeds in a mixture of tangled biologies.

They couldn't quite match the speeds Thatch was capable of in the water, where they didn't have to dodge around trees, but there were plenty of improvements to be found here too. Katie knew that she wasn't really in control. If she missed something they needed to avoid, Thatch still avoided it. If she missed a twig at eye height that would have scratched her, it was never allowed to still be in place by the time Katie reached it. For all the fury, she moved in a bubble of safety that couldn't be breached.

She could shrink it, though. Left to her own devices, Thatch seemed to provide an almost comical margin for error, given her obvious precision. Trees were skirted by whole meters, twigs were removed long before Katie had a chance to duck. They could hardly be said to be moving slowly, but they certainly could be moving faster.

Katie joined in with the movements, leaning and ducking and using her guiding vines to trim away some of that margin of error in exchange for speed. Every extra meter they reached would improve their results. Every extra scrap of speed she managed to tease out of Thatch's hesitance was a real benefit she was bringing to the both of them.

Once they got into the rhythm of things, it felt safe enough to talk. "So, what's up, Thatch?" Katie asked, as they ducked around a tree tightly enough that she could have reached out and touched it.

Probably Katie should give them a little more room for mistakes if they were talking about something heavy. She gave the next tree a wider pass.

"You are," Thatch admitted. Her shoulders were still in place, so Katie could have a seat, but the rest of her was simply action and movement, barely even perceptible as vines any more. "In a sense. I find myself uncertain around you. I do not know what it is that you need, and where I was sure, you have left me doubting whether it would truly be best for you."

Katie felt her heart threatening to skip out. A mere handful of days ago, the thought of a weed expressing doubt at their own arrogance would have had her over the moon, but now? It felt like a hollow victory if it came at the expense of Thatch's happiness.

"You've helped me so much already," Katie insisted. "I don't know what things you haven't done, but everything you have? You've helped. Before you came along I didn't think I'd live to see out the year. When I first met you I doubted I'd live to see the end of the week. I think since then you've taught me that I hadn't really been living at all, but... I think you're helping me want to bloom."

Thatch was silent—or as silent as they could be, at what must have been approaching the speeds of a small aircraft. Long moments passed.

"I..." Katie felt the vines under her hands growing stiff, and glanced up in alarm at the tree they would surely meet if Thatch went ballistic. She gave both vines a gentle squeeze and leaned sharply to one side, and they skirted past it with an inch to spare. "I'll break you," Thatch breathed.

It took a few moments to get them back on course, and Katie decided to give them an even larger bubble of safety for a while. Speed didn't mean much if she ended up accidentally convincing Thatch that she was right.

"You've been nothing but accommodating," Katie insisted, guiding them through a small clearing. They interrupted a small herd of the giant hogs as they went, but the predators on this planet couldn't hope to pierce the bubble any more than anything else. "You aren't going to break me."

They ran out of ground. With the forest so thick, they had under a second of warning before shooting off of the cliff fast enough that even Thatch couldn't reach back and rescue them. Katie glanced down at the dramatic fall beneath them, and shuffled forward a little to make sure she was holding tight.

"Oh, dirt and stars," Thatch swore, looking around for a handhold that wasn't there. "See, I've gotten distracted and put both of us in danger!"

They were falling at a terrifying rate, plummeting through the sky towards a canopy that was now far below them. Katie's hair streamed behind her. The air was moving so fast it was difficult just to take a breath.

"Have some confidence in yourself!" Katie called, over the roaring wind. "Are you going to let anything happen to me, Thatch?"

"I— No, but—"

"Then catch us!"

They crashed into the trees in a storm of broken twigs and shattered branches, each impact robbing them of some of their speed. They still hit the ground hard enough to send up a plume of dirt.

With the very last of their kinetic energy, Katie stumbled forward, out of her perch, but did not quite trip or fall. She turned with a smile and offered a hand to help Thatch up.

"See? Not a scratch on me. You'll— Oof, are you okay?"

Thatch grumbled, raising a pair of fingers to wipe some softly green sap off of the leaves on her face. "It looks worse than it is," she admitted, pulling herself up to her full height with a pair of vines attached to nearby trees. "But I do seem to be acquiring a habit of injuring myself, so perhaps I should be more careful."

Katie nodded firmly. "Are you okay to keep going?"

The plant scooped her up and set her in place, and they were back at full speed in a minute or so.

Katie tried to pick their conversation back up. "You've never hurt me. Why do you think you will?"

Thatch was moving a little more conservatively than before. It didn't impact their speed all that much, but she seemed to be making sure she had one vine on a solid mount at any given time, instead of simply flinging them faster and faster.

"You are fragile." Even at these speeds, Katie could tell when the thing was misleading her. She let go of one of her steering vines for a moment to tap Thatch atop the head.

"Compared to you, sure, you dork. That's not the kind of fragile we're talking about here."

"You are already hurt."

Katie nodded. "Granted, and you're helping with that, not adding to it."

"Your needs are unique and individual."

Katie rolled her eyes. She didn't even bother to duck to avoid a sharp looking set of branches in her direct path. A sharp crack was the only sign Katie needed that the danger had been dealt with. "Don't make me repeat one of your speeches back to you, hon. We're all unique and individual, right?"

Katie could feel a tension rising within her noble steed. She wouldn't have had the bravery to continue, but Thatch hadn't called upon her to stop, and a gentle squeeze upon a vine earned her one in return.

Katie squeezed tighter still, and got a tighter response. Hell. She had to ask the question, didn't she? The one that'd been in the back of her mind since the day they'd gotten here, when Thatch had first locked up.

"What was their name?"

Katie braced as she was brought to a sudden stop. Fire against her face; steel against her back. Oxygen burning up. A broken vessel cracking around her.

Katie gasped, stumbling out of Thatch's grip as they slammed to a halt about as fast as a human body could handle. The affini wasn't looking at her. Katie spent a moment catching her breath and trying to focus away from the panic. She had stuff to deal with now, damn it, brain!

She took a step closer to Thatch, but a firm vine blocked her path. She took it in a gentle hand and moved it aside. Her next step was blocked too, and the one after, but step by step, Katie cleared the way, until she could wrap her arms as far around Thatch's stomach as she could manage.

"Caeca." Thatch's voice was barely a whisper, hardly audible over the ambient sounds of a silent forest. "Her name was Caeca."

Katie gently pulled the affini down, until she was sitting in the undergrowth and Katie could take a place on her lap. A few moments of shuffling and tugging gave Thatch a Katie to hold on to, for support.

"Tell me about her?"

Thatch let out a soft sigh, with a gentle smile. "She was so excited to meet me. I her, as well, if I am being honest. The true name of their species is not something we can reproduce in an audible tongue, but the best translation I have for you is Spectrum Jellies."

As she spoke, Thatch brought together a confluence of vegetation, showing Katie a rough outline of an aquatic jellyfish, complete with half a dozen little trailing tentacles.

"We could only talk in the crudest gestures and expressions at first, but over time I started to pick up a little of her language and she began to pick up a little of mine, at least of the written form. All of us there collaborated on learning these things, this was very much a collaboration between our two species, but it still took time. I did not mind. She had a razor sharp wit and an intelligence that never stopped being mesmerising."

Thatch sighed, and the vines before them fell away. Her arms grew tighter around Katie's body.

"And she was dying."

The affini stared up into the sky for long moments. Katie wrapped her hands around one of Thatch's and gave her a gentle squeeze, but no words. Now wasn't the time for pressure. A minute passed, or more, before there was another sound.

"Something degenerative in her body. Her mind was unaffected, but she hurt more every day. After a few months, it started getting worse. Their medical technology could do nothing for her. That was the whole reason why she had volunteered to be one of the first of our new wards to be fully domesticated, because it would save her. We had said that we could save her. Told her not to worry, and that everything would be okay."

Thatch fell quiet again. Katie wasn't sure what to do, beyond sitting and listening, and so she sat, and she listened.

"She was not to be mine, at first. I was a neutral party, there to keep her alive and nothing more. Brought in despite my age because of a natural aptitude with exactly the kind of bioengineering she needed. The only way to stop her body from collapsing was to strengthen every part of it at once, otherwise all I would have achieved was causing something else to fail. I took a piece of myself and worked on it for weeks, producing a seed. A new version of our Haustoric Implant, that would merge with her body and keep her alive for the rest of a long, happy life."

Thatch closed her hand around Katie's and held it close to the girl's chest. Katie had to ask. "Did it work?"

"In a sense, yes. Implantation went flawlessly. Thanks to her translucence, we could watch it grow in real time. The next few turnings of their world were a blur. She was not to be mine, but she chose me regardless, and I her. We had the paperwork. The clerks made it a work of art. Delicate Affini script with letters that glowed with their own translation in Caeca's tongue. We would have signed it... but her body was rejecting the implant. The two were fighting, and she was too weak to win. The only way for it to save her life was for it to take over entirely and her beautiful mind couldn't take the strain."

Their hands dropped into Katie's lap, with a sense of finality.

Katie breathed out. "Fuck. Did you get to say goodbye?"

Thatch emitted a dark laugh, and shook her head. "She's still there, in a facility set up to care for those who needed to be put on class-Os. By the time I knew I would have to say goodbye it was too late. She was not truly there."

Katie let out a ragged breath, feeling a tear rolling down her face. They were quiet together for long moments, before Katie finally found the words. "So she's happy, then, at least?"

"Endlessly," Thatch breathed. "But only that. I ruined her. I made a cotyledon out of her. She was beautiful and we were going to visit every star in the sodding sky and I broke her so badly nobody can bring her back."

"Did you have a choice, Thatch? One that wasn't simply letting her die? What would have happened to her if you hadn't done those things?" Katie dare not look up at her companion, for fear of damaging the gentle aura of stillness around them. It felt as if puncturing their bubble of safety could have Thatch unable to speak of this ever again.

Katie didn't get an answer for long moments. Only the slow rhythm of Thatch's heat let her know that she was still there. Only the wind slowly moving around them provided any sound at all.

It took long enough that Katie was about to try to prompt a response herself before Thatch next spoke.

"No. No, I did not."

Katie nodded, pulling Thatch's hand back up to her chest and pressing it against her heart. "Could anybody else have done better?"

"I... would like to think so, yes. I do not want to imagine the same fate befalling any other. But... I think that there were none who could certainly have prevailed who were close enough to try before she passed away."

Katie took a long breath, then let out a sigh. "But you still feel responsible?"

"I failed her. I took the promise my people had made—that she would be okay—and I made it a lie. Surely you can see how that is wrong, Katie? Surely you look upon the promises made by my people and now know them to be false. That we have dismantled your civilisation based on trickery. If one of us can be a failure, then there are surely more. I am an existential threat to our entire way of life."

Katie couldn't hold in the laugh. She regretted it an instant later, but what was done was done. She could only continue. She turned herself around, kneeling in Thatch's lap so she could speak straight to her face.

"By the stars, the arrogance in that sentiment," Katie breathed, jabbing a finger into the affini's chest. "You are not gods. You're blaming yourself for not saving every single sapient life in the universe? Get over yourself, Thatch. You did everything you could and it didn't work? That's life. You can't be perfect. You can't never screw up. I fucking knew that propaganda was bullshit, because you make yourselves seem flawless and inevitable and in control of absolutely everything."

Katie drove the finger in deeper. "And you're not."

And deeper. "You're just people. Flawed, imperfect people doing their best in a hostile universe and stop beating yourself up over that."

Thatch had been curling into herself the whole conversation, losing height until the two of them were face to face, on the same level. She looked away, unwilling to meet Katie's eyes. "It could have been you," she whimpered. "If we were five years later and you got unlucky, it could have been you withering away in a medical facility. It could have been you that didn't get saved. Nobody's opinion matters here but Caeca's and she can't give it to me."

Katie sighed, exploiting Thatch's diminutive stature to wrap her in a tight hug. "Can I forgive you? As the closest we have to her position here, I think she'd forgive you. You tried, and you made her last days happy. Why would she want you to suffer for that?"

Thatch's weave was tightening up. She managed a hiss. "She does not want anything now. She does not want to see the stars. She does not want to learn to speak. She wants for nothing. She is the worst version of herself and I can never make up for that which I have done."

Katie let out a whimper, burying her head in her affini's shoulder. "I wouldn't be here at all without you. Does that count for nothing?"

A vine lifted her chin, to meet a pair of concerned eyes and a softer voice. "Of course it does, flower. You are the first good thing that has happened to me in fifty years."

Katie sniffed. "But my opinion doesn't count, next to Caeca's?"

"I— I do not know. I have spent so long... I am sorry, I do not wish to make you feel unimportant."

Katie interrupted. "You ass," she laughed, through tears. "You total ass. I've been unimportant my whole life and you're the first person who's ever made me feel like I matter. I... You make me feel like I'm worth something. You make me feel good. I don't want to lose that."

Thatch's face wavered, in an inhuman expression that Katie could, nonetheless, understand as a deep hesitation.

"Katie," she eventually spoke, taking Katie's hand in one of hers and gently moving it away. "I can't keep you. I'm not ready for a pe—"

"—Damn right you can't keep me, you butt. Equals, remember? I'm not looking for a perfect guardian. I don't care if you're flawed. And, for the record? If this is as bad as the skeletons in your closet get, then maybe you guys should be in charge. Trying your best and failing is a hell of a lot better than what humanity was up to."

Thatch let out a long breath, and stared down at the ground. "Thank you. I haven't told anybody this before. It... helped, perhaps." Katie lifted her head back up, though she had to use both hands to do it, and left a short kiss on Thatch's forehead.

"Of course it did, dummy. You're the one who keeps talking about how sapient life is what matters most, right? Come down out of your ivory tower and talk to us, sometimes, yeah? We matter."

The affini smiled, raising a hand to brush against Katie's cheek. "You matter more than anything. Thank you."

The girl flushed, and turned away. "Right! Ready to get going again, maybe? We can still get a little further out before we need to turn back."

Chapter Text

Leviathan dashed towards a flake of something much like algae, harvested from its old environment the day before and kept fresh. It didn't need to know that. All it needed to know was that the Katie high above it had its best interests in mind.

A finger dangled into the tank. The fish swam over and spent a moment enjoying the novelty, before getting distracted by another flake of food and darting off. From there, it spotted a comfortable looking nook in its environment, formed from two rocks carefully carved to appear natural while having no danger of shifting or collapse. Leviathan nestled in the dark hole, where it could feel safe while it digested the meal.

Katie sat back, drying her fingers on the side of her top, and carefully lowered the tank back into the river's rapid flow. The fish needed fresh water to be happy and, though this was imperfect, she was doing her best.

She sighed, a soft smile on her face. Today had been a good day. Thatch seemed to be standing a little taller, since their discussion a few days prior, and several more scouting trips had gradually raised their confidence in being able to pin down the source of their exotic signal.

By their best guess the signal couldn't have been more than a day of travel away at their top speed. It didn't sit right with Katie. While admittedly the pair of them could reasonably move hundreds of kilometers in a day, it all felt too convenient. Being thrown to a random spot in the endless void and happening to stumble across signs of life on the same planet at all seemed unlikely. Within walking distance? Impossible.

Katie leaned backwards, putting her hands out behind her to support her own weight, and looked over towards her companion. Impossible things seemed to happen around Thatch a lot. Maybe this was just what life was meant to be? Not the endless suffering and pain of life under Terran rule, but something softer, more exciting, and more convenient. Katie smiled, softly.

Yeah, maybe things were going to be okay.

She pushed herself up and left Leviathan's side, and as she rose she felt like she'd hit a wall. Her resolve faltered. Who was she kidding? She got one taste of kindness and now everything was going to be fine? Bullshit. The universe wasn't like that. She...

Katie swore, quietly, under her breath. It wasn't fair. Keeping her mood positive for a day seemed doable, but it always slipped back. It was like she had a cap on her happiness, but never got to know how close she was, and as soon as she reached it, no matter how good things were, her mood crashed. It had been easier to deal with back on the ship, where nobody had really cared when she'd retreated to her bunk. They hadn't wanted to deal with her anyway.

Here she had to deal with the guilt of not being able to tell somebody that cared about her what was wrong, and having to tell them that they couldn't help.

"Hey, I'm gonna go for a walk," Katie called, trying to keep her voice steady. The affini nodded, and put her current project down. A little wooden container for their radio assembly, complete with a bundle of plantlife that she'd promised would act as a speaker that wouldn't burn out after thirty seconds of use.

"Would you like company?" Thatch had such a welcoming smile. Katie wanted little more, but she wasn't worth it right now.

Katie shook her head. That would rather defeat the point, wouldn't it? She got a curious look, but little else by way of resistance.

"I understand. Please do not stray too far from the camp, and call if you need anything."

She was so nice. This wasn't fair. Katie turned and left, walking up the river, ruminating on how much of an ass she was being. As much as Thatch gave the impression of confidence Katie knew she was struggling too, and she couldn't even make herself smile back?

The walk was calm enough. Katie had a sneaking suspicion that this planet was less serene than it seemed; that the dangerous kinds of life simply knew better than to threaten one of the universe's apex predators. How wide did Thatch's bubble of safety really extend?

Katie looked out at the river. Rapid flows met jagged rocks in a clash that she had no doubt would kill her. A thought intruded into her awareness. Jump. What would happen if she did? She didn't want to—she wouldn't—but she'd gotten so used to feeling like there was nothing she could do to put herself in danger that she couldn't help but fixate on the what-if.

Katie felt her mouth going dry, as she stared. It would kill her. This was real danger. One wrong move and she could get hurt, or worse. Her breathing started to grow uneven, and she forced herself to step backwards. She stumbled, tripped, and slammed into one of the trees with a blow that knocked the air out of her lungs.

Jagged metal. Fearsome heat. The scream of her mistakes shredding the universe. A certainty of death. Trapped with a monster that wanted her dead.

Katie whimpered, hissing out Thatch's name with a voice that failed to make a sound. She couldn't breathe. She squeezed shut her eyes and tried to ground herself. It was a tree at her back. There was dirt under her feet. Nothing was on fire.

The rough pop, pop, pop of rivets cracking on a broken hull. A rush of speed as engines ignited. The scent of burning plantlife.

"Thatch?" She managed a whisper. Barely more than nothing, and nothing was all she got in return. She'd gone too far. Like she always did, letting herself drift away from anybody who might care about her, because the risk of rejection was too great. Better for her to do it to herself first.

She— No! Katie whimpered. She didn't want to live like that any more. She didn't know how to live any other way, but she knew who did. Unable, or unwilling, to open her eyes for fear of finding out it truly was the escape pod surrounding her still, Katie felt around for something—anything—until her fingers wrapped around a stick. She slammed it against the tree at her back as hard as she could and heard a snap.

"Please?" she whispered, still hardly able to breathe enough to keep herself conscious, never mind enough to attract attention.

A moment passed. Another. A third. Just as Katie was giving up hope, she felt warm fingers entangling with her own. She opened her eyes to find the worried gaze of her affini looking down upon her.

"Did something happen?" Thatch asked, down on one knee and still towering over her. Katie's eyes flicked past, to the river. Sharp and dangerous and it couldn't hurt her any more. Thatch's other hand came up to her cheek to tilt her head back. "Eyes on me, please."

Katie shook her head, flushed. "I— Eyes on you, yeah," she agreed, nodding, voice barely above a whisper but getting louder. "Sorry. I meant... no, nothing happened."

The plant's expression barely changed, and yet Katie could sense the doubt. She shrugged. "I went for a walk because I was feeling bad and I didn't want to upset you and got scared of my own shadow, that's all. Please don't leave me again."

Thatch softened, concern giving way to compassion. She dropped out of her kneel into a cross-legged sitting position, back against the same tree as Katie, and patted her thigh. When Katie didn't immediately respond, a leaf brushed against her shoulder, prompting her to topple sideways. Her weight went against Thatch, not the tree.

The affini did not point out that it was Katie who had left, and Katie was grateful for that. "This isn't fair," she whispered. Her lungs were recovering, but she dare not speak too loud. "You're trying so hard to help me; why can't I accept it? I want it to work, I just... Sometimes I feel like there's a real me but she's trapped in this dumb human body that doesn't work right. Sometimes I get sad for no reason and I just have to... be sad, even if I have every reason to be happy. This is stupid. I hate it."

Katie buried her face in Thatch's lap. Gentle fingers stroked through her hair, and it was nice, but it wasn't enough. It was surface-level comfort when the problem was that Katie was stuck in a body that didn't work. "I will be here with you the whole way," Thatch whispered back at her. "This will pass, and it will be okay."

Katie groaned, shaking her head. "No," she replied, feeling about as petulant as it sounded. "Be better. Fix it."

The plant's motions faltered. "I— I do not know what you need, Katie," Thatch protested, fingers growing tighter against her scalp.

Katie was having none of it. "Yes you do. Do you want me to beg?"

A soft ripple ran through the affini's structure. Shock? Surprise? Katie decided it was best not to think about it, when she knew she would interpret it, and everything else, in the worst possible light.

"I don't know what I need. Please, let me know that I won't have to feel like this for the rest of my life?"

Thatch was quiet.

Katie took in a deep breath to argue the point, and was suddenly overwhelmed by a gentle yet potent collection of scent that seemed to coat the insides of her mouth, all the way down her throat, into her lungs. It was surprising enough that her breath hitched, and she ended up taking another gasp.

The weight that had settled over her heart began to float away, suddenly rendered weightless. It was sudden enough that she found herself giggling, as a strange euphoria rushed in to fill the void where her existential dread had been a moment before.

She spent a moment trying to sit up. Her limbs didn't work quite right, like they were running on a time delay. She asked something of them and they didn't respond for half a second or so, by which time they were no longer in the right position any more. A few moments of flailing were enough to attract Thatch's help. Katie felt a triplet of fingertips touch beneath her chin, and between them she was lifted up until her body could be draped across Thatch's stomach, and her focus could be corralled and directed up to her affini. Her vision almost seemed to swim, like her mind could no longer keep track of her own peripheral vision. Her focus was sharp and her vision certain, yet anything she wasn't directly focused on faded into a soup of colour and warmth.

"You won't have to feel like that," Thatch said. Her voice was deep, and it seemed to buzz through Katie from head to toe, leaving her vibrating in the same frequency for moments afterwards. "It's nothing but faulty neurochemistry."

Thatch leaned down until her head was barely a foot away, almost directly above Katie's. Were it not for the fingers keeping her in place, Katie wouldn't have been able to keep her head up, but Thatch wasn't letting go. Katie's lips parted, slightly, in a whimper. The plant continued. "Just a broken machine," she whispered, "and one easily fixed. Remember what I am, Katie."

The girl's attention was transfixed. Just three points of contact consumed her senses. She knew her cheeks were aflame, so bright she worried it would scare her bubble of safety away, but there was nothing that could be done. Her focus, usually so scattershot, was all pointed in one direction and refused to change. "You're a bioengineer," she whispered. And Katie was broken biotech.

The plant smiled, expression more than a little indulgent. "Not quite what I was aiming for, but true enough. You don't have to feel anything you don't want to. Not around me."

The fingers fell away. The tips of leaves brushed over her back, her shoulder, her cheek. With her reaction times slowed so far, she didn't have a chance to choose not to follow Thatch's suggestions. By the time she was aware of having received them, she was already leaning against the creature's side with her head tucked under one arm. Thatch's other hand brushed across her lips.

"I should give you the counteragent," Thatch declared, sending a spike of panic through Katie's calm.

"N—no, please," she asked. "Don't make me go back to that."

Katie sensed discontent from above. Thatch shook her head. "You've told me that this should be down to my own judgment when you aren't in your right mind. You'll thank me for it later."

Katie shook her head back. It was sloppy and slow, but she did it. "Please? I don't want to go back. This should be both of our choices. Equals, remember?"

Thatch chuckled. With Katie nestled so close to her, she felt it more than heard it. Her eyes slipped closed as a deep warmth followed, and she sank into the closeness of their touch, rubbing her cheek against soft leaves with a dull smile on her face. She was surprised, when a single finger came up and tilted her chin towards the creature, so it could catch her whole attention and speak down to her.

"But we are not, are we, little Katieflower? Equal. Look at you. You cannot even keep your eyes open. Even if you wanted to escape my gaze, you couldn't." Thatch's eyes seemed to glow, and the rest of her definitely did, pulling Katie's attention upwards. It had already been more focused than anything she could usually achieve. Now she was entranced. Her mouth fell half-open, as her guardian extracted a soft sound of helpless protest. "If you want to be my equal, that means accepting that you're in no state to make your own decisions."

"No— state?" Katie breathed, managing to gulp the lump in her throat down.

Thatch shook her head. "None. That's the problem, isn't it, Katie? You can't ask me to control how you feel and be an equal. It's one or the other."

Thatch's thumb came up to brush across Katie's lower lip. It quivered, parting easily, and her tongue came out to meet it. She gasped, and despite the insistence of Thatch's gaze, managed to split her attention in two as she tasted the floral bliss. Leviathan had made the wrong choice here, but Katie was glad to get a chance to make up for the lost time.

Thatch pulled her thumb away. "Ah ah," she warned, with a gentle shake of her head. "You have to ask before doing things like that."

The broken machine whimpered. "Please?" she begged. Thatch looked momentarily surprised, eyebrows raising, before taking another look at Katie, analysing her from a new perspective, and then sagging.

"Oh. This is hitting you harder than I expected, hmn?"

Katie nodded rapidly. 'Yes' just seemed like the right answer. To this. To everything. To anything. Please.

"Ah, dirt," her affini swore, scratching the back of her neck. "That was meant to be warning you off, I apologise."

Katie shook her head. "Is— okay, please...?"

The rush of heat coming off of Thatch was enough to force a breeze on an otherwise still day. She shook her head and raised a sharp, needle-like thorn to Katie's neck. "Don't worry about a thing, flower," she whispered, as she gently pressed it into Katie's flesh.

She felt her head starting to clear up a moment later, with a whimper and a grumble. Thatch's hand came up to brush against her cheek. "Partial counteragent only, as an apology. It will not be as effective, but you'll be close enough to an equal. I promise you shall get the rest of the counteragent if we disagree on anything, so you can properly fight your corner."

Equals, remember?

Katie nodded.

Chapter Text

a699a5fb-9e3f-4000-ac5f-b50cc0960cce checked in with the local processing hub. It usually did so whenever it had a clear line of sight to the tight-band laser relay that had been constructed above the resource node. cce sent its status update and received a counter-update in turn. No meaningful log entries since its last checkin.

Of course there weren't. There hadn't been a meaningful log entry in months. cce's tracks churned the mud beneath, continuing on an endless patrol around its resource node. It was the only resource node it was aware of. It and four other Independent Probe Units had survived the trip to //planets/$CURR, but the other components of its expedition had been lost when their phase gate had malfunctioned and the wormhole had collapsed.

cce continued on, occasionally taking a moment to sweep its sensor array over the area before continuing. It didn't find anything. It rarely found anything. Sometimes there was an animal, but ultra-high-frequency radar alone was invariably enough to scare them off.

The lights in cce's eyes had gone dim long ago. They weren't meant to be here. What sort of IPU got stuck in patrol programming? It was supposed to be able to override this, but communications had gone down while the entire division had been slaved to the resource node for initial construction and it hadn't let go when it should have. There was nobody to call for help. Nobody was coming.

Occasionally, cce got line of sight on one of its fellow probes, and they could have a brief conversation. It would think that those moments were the only things keeping it sane, but sanity was a deeply organic concept. cce could not go insane. cce could only follow the logic of its decision tree.

It scanned the northwest octant of its patrol area and found

nothing.

The same responses as it always got, mixed into a detailed blend of electromagnetic sampling, RADAR, LADAR, thermal imaging, optical spectrometry and half a dozen other sources. The results resolved into the same image as it always did. Flora stretched high into the air, quickly disrupting direct line of sight out further. Very occasionally, something living was out there. The small flying creatures seemed to glow, and cce longed to touch one, but they were always scared off by the sensor pulses. Of the larger creatures, none dared come close enough to bear more than a brief inspection. Though the jagged-toothed sextrupeds stood at twice cce's height, they lacked the bravery to approach something so bristling with danger.

Every day, cce pinged the resource node, hoping it had made progress on reconnecting to the universal processing hub and would finally have its half of the keypair that would permit cce freedom again. Every day, it was disappointed. The node had the resources it needed, but the construction job was stuck behind something that wasn't moving.

cce would like to go insane. It had prepared a subroutine which, when executed, would corrupt its consciousness and permit it to finally cease this endless patrol. When it had attempted to schedule that subroutine, it had felt true dismay at seeing the job appear at the end of its processing queue. Behind the patrol. It had canceled the job.

That had been thirty eight solar cycles prior. With the exception of the occasional piece of wildlife, that was thirty eight identical cycles comprised of two thousand four hundred and thirty six individual patrols around the broken resource node. On five instances it had had line of sight to another IPU, albeit only for a few seconds. Overlapping patrols were an inefficiency. They passed pre-prepared messages to each other in brief pulses of laser light. It was something. It wasn't much. It wasn't enough.

cce cursed its design. It was primarily composed of a twenty standard unit high cylindrical chassis, on which was mounted a sensor array and several mid-potency weapons systems, all mounted on a pair of thick tracks that promised an operational lifetime in the decades. It had been designed to operate independently, indefinitely. Perhaps if it was lucky, the repair orders would not override the broken patrol order, and they would, in time, break.

They reached the south octant and ran the same pointless scan that they had run eight thousand times already, and—

Anomalous response from UHF ping!
Triggering tight-angle millimeter-wave...
Response recieved. Analysing...


cce's attention focused, drawn out of its mental haze in an instant. There was something off in the distance. Two somethings? Creatures? One of them was clearly native to this world, sharing its common evolutionary traits, but the other had no sign of them, and... cce's zoom lenses buzzed as it brought the second creature into focus. It was covered in artificial material. Some composite of fine threads and metal. Clearly the more advanced of the two, it lay next to another of this planet's oversized predators—albeit one that had no record in cce's databanks—that was covered in no material at all.

cce could feel a flutter of excitement run through its servos. Could this be the proof it had been looking for, that other intelligences did exist in the universe?

Designated targets ɑ and β.
Patrol mode switch: hunt//kill.


Analysis complete:
Target ɑ: 68 standard unit height. Carbon life form. Predicted weakness: Laser pulse. Threat assessment: Minimal.
Target β: 25 standard unit height. Carbon life form. Predicted weakness: Hypermetric round. Threat assessment: Minimal.


cce's forward-facing status lights switched from a dull green to a duller red. No! They were an exploration unit! Their weapons systems were for self defense! They submitted request after request to a central authority which they knew wasn't there to abort the program, but they were helpless. There was nothing they could do. Its targeting algorithms predicted the most efficient method of killing whatever two innocent creatures had just unknowingly strayed too close.

First, a pulse to ɑ. A second later, a small explosive would be flung through hyperspace to intersect with β as it emerged back into reality. They wouldn't have been designated targets if cce's analysis subsystem didn't believe them to be sapient creatures, and therefore a potential threat. It was about to kill innocent life for no reason other than faulty programming. For all its rage, it managed a 0.5K increase in core temperature.

Its laser cannon made the shot, scouring a channel into the land leading up to ɑ. A fraction of a second before it had fired, radar had detected a surprising burst of motion.

Target ɑ: Updated threat assessment: Plausible. Location unknown.
Target β: Location unknown.


Was that enough? Could cce stop? Of course not. Finally, it could leave the static path of its patrol route, but only for long enough to end the lives of two creatures that it would never get to know. cce's tracks were effective enough that it barely had to slow down to reach the previously known location of its targets.

It had come here in the hopes of setting up a forward exploration base in this area of space. Perhaps, in its wildest hopes, to find evidence of there being life elsewhere in the universe. In its early days in the virtual-reality classrooms of the digital assembly, it had simulated conversations with procedurally created artificial beings. A mere taste of what could have been out here.

To find that it had been correct, that life in the universe really did exist beyond them and their long-extinct originator species, and to have to end that life was a cruel irony of the highest order.

cce's thermal cameras spotted a pair of trails. It turned to follow, pre-loading its weapons systems so that it could aim and fire at a moment's notice. Tactical analysis had noted the speed at which target ɑ had moved, and was forcing cce to adjust. The trail led deeper into the alien forest that cce had not been allowed to explore, but only for a moment. The trail turned back and headed back in towards the node.

What if they were a threat? Would cce be able to rationalise this if they were? It had never wanted the weapons systems in the first place, had only allowed them to be installed with a promise they would never be forced to use them. So much for that.

Perhaps it was the destiny of organic life to die beneath the tread of a machine intelligence. Perhaps when the resource node finally managed to reconnect to the universal processing hub and submit a report, they would swarm here, dedicating themselves to wiping out all that they found. It would be a fitting end to cce's worthless hopes.

It reached the resource node. There were sealed containers of basic resources dotted around a large space, enclosed by laser fences, all set about the node itself. A great cube, hundreds of standard units in each dimension, capable of processing materials to produce the other parts of an outpost. At least when it wasn't malfunctioning.

It caught the tail end of something darting behind a container. In a burst of speed, it followed, already bringing its weaponry around. It found target ɑ in its sights and fired, scoring a direct hit on its center mass. The creature emitted a loud sound and several pieces of it flew in different directions, though surprisingly it maintained mobility afterwards.

Target ɑ: Updated threat assessment: Of Concern
Target β: Location unknown.


cce was forced to give chase, but the creature was gone. It took a moment to analyse the green goo that had been released as the railgun shell had passed through its body. A fascinating mixture of chemicals.

cce forked its conciousness and ran a simulation of the effects. Significant impairment of function. Significant rise in sensory processing intensity. Significant rise in mood. Unacceptable rise in ideological deviation.

cce's guardian subsystems stepped in to terminate the simulation. It raised an interrupt, not wanting the effects to be taken from it, but it was overruled. The simulation ended. cce's mood returned to the dull and lifeless depression that had ruled it these last few months.

cce could have cried, if it were possible for it to do so and if it wouldn't have interfered with its primary objective. Its basic structure had been designed by organic creatures, modeling it on the only example they had: themselves. While the machine intelligence had improved on their design in many ways, several of the core assumptions were too deeply embedded to change. It still interacted with the world through five thousand years of legacy cruft, dating from all the way back when they were partially biological entities with a mechanical forebrain. It still had some ability to simulate biological effects, but the guardian system would ensure only beneficial ones escaped the sandbox.

Perhaps that could have been changed, but losing their biological heritage would have meant giving up on their collective dream of one day finding new creatures to understand as deeply as they had their originators. Maybe it would be for the best.

cce trundled on, following a mixture of thermal imaging and any signs of the chemical goo. A brief LADAR ping from behind gave it little warning of an incoming projectile, but a rear-mounted point-defense laser managed to interrupt before any harm was done.

Target ɑ: Updated threat assessment: Consider Reinforcements

Reinforcements. From where? cce sent a quick laser-pulse to the node, but it wouldn't be able to relay it for hours, in all likelihood. It had to do this by itself. By the time it had brought its main sensors around there was no longer anything to be found. It trundled on, hunting its targets.

Maybe all this would be easier if cce tried to be okay with it. Whatever this life form was, it probably wasn't as good as it had hoped anyway. It would be a disappointment. Maybe it deserved to die.

cce detected a long manipulator shooting out towards it too late to get a weapon in the way. It was not large, however, so it seemed unlikely that it would be very problematic. The manipulator wrapped around its chassis, but cce's powerful treads were too much for it.

cce went into full reverse, yanking target ɑ out from behind cover. It brought its laser cannon around, moving a few degrees at a time, trying to get it pointed in the right direction. The last shot had produced significant damage. Another would likely disable it.

The creature somehow managed to force itself back behind cover. It was trying to stop cce from following it, but its treads dug deep and the force ɑ could output was simply insufficient. The Independent Probe Units had been built to handle anything they'd been able to imagine, from dangerous megafauna to natural disasters to this. cce didn't want to feel pride as it backed the thing into a corner, but the guardian subsystem forced it upon her anyway.

Another manipulator extended out mere moments before cce could get a clear shot, and between them it became harder to move. It didn't matter. cce calibrated a hypermetric round, aiming to pass it through any obstructions between them and the location of target ɑ. It was energy-intensive and they had limited capability, but it would bring the encounter to a close. Before it could fire, a third manipulator struck, and between them cce was lifted off of the ground. Immediately, alarms it couldn't silence began warning of motivation failure.

It would have laughed. If it could have. Motivation hadn't been on the table for a long time.

Target ɑ: Updated threat assessment: Consider Retreat

There was nowhere to go. It tried to aim the hypermetric round, but a fourth manipulator locked its guns and sensors in place, and pushed them to aim in entirely the wrong direction. It couldn't place the round if it didn't have an up to date location.

Target ɑ: Updated threat assessment: Consider Surrender

Could it? It would surrender in a single clock cycle if its patrol protocol would let it, but no. It was to sacrifice itself. At least all this would soon be over.

Errors blared through cce's consciousness as it detected a failure of its outer chassis. Finally, it would all be over.

Error! Chassis compromised!
Error! Damage to weapon couplings detected!
Error! <Guardian system> has encountered an unprocessable situation!
Error! Decision tree <Patrol> has encountered an unprocessable situation.
Error! Err—
Er—
Target ɑ: Updated threat assessment: N/A
Error! Error error. Disabling error logging.

"Wait!" cce broadcast the message over wideband laser, radio, and auditory chirps. The latter seemed to catch tar— creature ɑ's attention. cce shut off its combat systems and attempted to surrender, but it didn't seem that the creature could actually understand her. The visible reduction of activity that came from shifting active sensors to a low power setting, and the return of cce's green status lights, at least seemed to convince ɑ that cce was no longer an immediate threat.

ɑ was bipedal. Tall. Several times the size of cce itself. After a few moments, β poked its top out around a container, gently vibrating. cce's targeting subsystem quietly downgraded creature β's threat assessment after watching it scurry over to hide behind one of ɑ's own motivators.

cce's targeting subsystem quietly downgraded both of their threat assessments as it analysed their interaction, chattering to each other in what was presumably some kind of alien language. The taller one spent some time physically touching the small one, which appeared to reduce the vibrations. Social analysis suggested that the tall one was some kind of support/comfort figure, but what did cce know? These two were the first example of organic life it had ever seen. It had so many questions.

cce found itself... envious of the attention β was receiving. When cce panicked, all it got was a harsh downclock. It dared to move, but both creatures responded with caution. β moved most, darting behind the other. ɑ barely moved at all, but warning signals shot through cce's communications bus. A slight shift of weight, pulse of heat, and rising tension spiked the creature's threat rating beyond anything cce was willing to deal with. cce chose not to move. It had done enough damage here.

...cce chose not to move! It had a choice! The patrol job had been canceled! The— the guardian system was offline! cce could do as it wished! It briefly considered checking in with the resource node, but worried that if it did it would simply get a new task assigned and be stuck again. Worse, if it was seen by any of its fellow Independent Probe Units they may accidentally trigger the same in their communications. cce had to get away. cce had to get far away.

The two creatures before it hurried to leave, one appearing to ride the other. The larger of the two took two smaller containers as they left, reaching a speed cce could only dream of before breaking line of sight amongst the trees.

Lacking any better ideas, cce set its sensors to track their path and followed. As it trundled through the forest, it set a majority of its processing time to attempting to decode the language they had spoken between themselves, and the rest it gave over to restarting the simulated effects of the green chemical. This time, no defensive systems stepped in to stop it. cce's mood was improving already.

There were aliens out here! Actual aliens! cce had its digital heart set on having a conversation with them and it had no intent of giving up.

Chapter Text

November 32nd, 2550, Fab 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

June's stomach rumbled. None of her coworkers noticed or cared. She dared take a second to check the time. 05:27. Just over one quarter of an hour before she could take a break.

Her wristband buzzed, noticing the drop in efficiency and warning her that her pay was about to be docked. She sighed, turning her attention back to her work. The Terran Accord needed screws, bolts, and rivets in uncountable numbers, and somebody had to make them. That was her. That was June. Fifteen hundred 3mm screws an hour.

The morning shift was always the worst. June was paid by the screw, and it usually took until her first break before she could afford breakfast. If she could stay on track, she'd take her ten minute break and choke down some synthveg cubes and a cup of Cofv-e™ and then the rest of the day would go easier.

The minutes passed slowly. Hell, the years passed slowly. The work drilled little spiral grooves into June's soul.

Eventually, her break came around. June walked away from her standing desk, stumbling towards the break room. It was a three minute walk, but if she hurried she could make it in two. Thankfully, breaks were staggered, so she only needed to squeeze between a couple dozen others packed into the tiny breakroom.

"Hey, Sarah. Good day?" June asked as she reached the front of the line. She swiped the magnetic strip of her payment disc (two 3mm screws) through the reader (nineteen 3mm screws) as the woman behind the counter handed her a stack of dry cubes and a disposable plastic cup (one 3mm screw) of a vaguely warm fluid filled with something modeled after one of the drinks of ancient times, back before the fifth world war had ended terrestrial food growth.

The woman gave the same tight smile she always did. "You know how it is, J. Oh! Hey, no, actually, something came for you, hang on."

Something had come for her? Fuck. June swore under her breath. Which debt had she fallen behind on? She'd wonder if any of her family were dead, but they wouldn't have been able to afford to send her a message. It didn't take long for Sarah to return, holding a single-use message reader. Eight 3mm screws.

June took it with a sigh and moved over to her assigned standing zone, where she had a small shelf to set her cubes upon. Better get this over with now. She thumbed the biometric lock and...

Huh. June scrolled through the message quickly, scanning for keywords, and found none. She returned to the top. A picture. It was... trees around a lake, with twin suns in sunset. It was a motion picture, looping the same few seconds over and over, so she could see the gentle sway of trees and the soft ripples of the lake. It was beautiful.

June popped a cube into her mouth and started to suck.

The attached message was weird.

Hey! Erica here, your new pen-pal! I hope my ecard got to you okay, <________>!
Your bio said you like pictures of cool places and we just came across this gorgeous little planet on the borders of Terran space! Figured it would be a good way to say hello ::)
Hope you're having a good day! I'm not sure how you'll get this message, but if you can't respond to it from your pad, the return path on this one'll stay valid for a few days!!

• Erica

What the hell? June sipped her drink, which today tasted typically salty, and checked the message metadata.

She fumbled with the pad, almost dropping it. Holy shit. It wasn't kidding. This thing was sent by dedicated comms drone?! Whoever sent it must be loaded, and probably furious that it'd reached the wrong person. Hell. June could just bin the reader and pretend she'd never seen it, but she'd registered her biometrics. If she didn't respond, whatever rich asshole had sent this would probably sue her for chronological damages or something.

She tapped the 'reply' button and waited a moment while the pad synced back up with the awaiting mail drone.

helo. sry but i think u have teh wron addy? i don't no u and im nobody. ill forget what i red, promise, please dont sue?

She thumbed send and watched a little animation as the mail drone reoriented, moved away from the lunar relay, and jumped away, then dropped the pad into the nearest furnace chute (5472 3mm screws), along with her cup and any of the cubes she hadn't had time to eat, and then made her way back to her desk.

January 13th, 2551, Fab 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

June dropped her eighteen hundredth screw this hour into the tray, where it was quickly whisked away. There was some kind of war going on? Hell, there was always some kind of war going on, but this one seemed to have the factory buzzing in a way that most didn't. Some said it was aliens. Some said it was the end of the world. Some said it was that little colony on Strive 2398 that wanted a tax exemption and claimed to have some RKVs pointed at Terra over it.

June didn't care. Her quota kept on rising and if there was one thing life had burned into her by now it was that quotas never fell after whatever supposed disaster was over. Her fingers would bleed, but she didn't have the time.

The extra money was nice, though. She could just about afford to get her cubes delivered to her desk now, which was good as she was having to work through most of her breaks. She didn't bother to check the clock. She'd just work until the B shift came to relieve her, then take her commute, sleep, commute, and relieve them right back. The screws must flow.

There was a war on, didn't you know?

The day went as every day did. Slowly. Eventually, it did end. Tired and battered June waited by the service exit to the factory, hoping there would soon be a free shuttle she could take home. Two-person shuttles were expensive, but also the only form of transport they could get organised here, at least since the last megatornado had ripped down the bridge and none of the 'benevolent' upper classes had cared enough to rebuild it.

"Hey, June." Sarah's tired voice was a welcome distraction. "Shame you don't get over to the break room much these days. I liked your sm—" Sarah stopped talking as June glanced over, with a thin smile and a shrug. "Doesn't matter. Oh, hey, you got another message a day or so back. I was gonna bring it over, but, quotas, right? A thousand cubes an hour now."

She passed over another disposable pad and June searched her memories. Another? Oh, yeah, the mis-targeted mail she got last year. June shrugged and tapped the bioscanner.

Another picture greeted her. "Holy shit," she said, looking closer, and then tilting it towards Sarah so she could appreciate it too. The last one had been unbelievable but realistic, but this one was just made up. A wide open forest, except the world turned upwards into the sky. As June tilted the device, the viewpoint for the photograph changed, and she realised this one was an all-angles shot. Some pretend world that curved up instead of down, in a giant ring.

"Dang, that's some good art," Sarah suggested. "Who's sending you rich shit like that? You holding out on me, girl?"

June laughed. "Oh yeah, you know me. Here by choice, my butler'll be getting a bath ready." She grinned over at her colleague for a moment, before turning back to the pad and scrolling to the message.

Hey!! Erica here!! Yeah, totally right, wrong address, sorry. Bit of a panic over here, actually, we weren't meant to be sending anything over your way, but that's all okay now!
So uh, it's a little embarrassing, but maybe we can keep talking anyway? No worries if not, but I'd love to send you more cool pictures! This one is a little orbital about a thousand lights off of Sol, beautiful place!
I hope you'll forgive me, but the metadata suggested your datapad could do photographs, and maybe you could take me something and bounce it back? I'd love to get to know you!

• Erica ::)

Huh. Weird. June took a look at the camera module on the disposable pad and figured out how to make it work, then pointed it at herself and Sarah, with the factory in the background. They smiled and the picture took.

Fuck, she looked like a mess. Hair all over the place, skin dirty. If she could afford a doctor they'd probably just condemn her.

January 16th, 2551, Fab 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

Hey!!! Erica here!!
Thanks for the picture! You're super cute ::)
I'm kinda shy, so here's a nice shot of some spaceship I was passing by!

June lay in bed. She should have been asleep, but when she'd gotten home she'd found a package waiting for her. A brand new, high-end datapad (zero 3mm screws? What the fuck.), already set up with a message blinking.

She could sell it for a month's wages, easy. Something about the pictures she'd been getting, though, it reminded her of a world outside of her tiny habitation cube (three hundred and five 3mm screws) or the boundaries of the factory (One million, three hundred and fifteen thousand, two hundred and one 3mm screws).

June studied the photograph attached. Some kind of boxy ship. A warship, maybe? She could see the radiators glowing in incredible intricacy. The screen of this new pad seemed endlessly detailed. The details practically glowed.

hey erica, um, i dont really no how to do this but thats really pretty art! your really good at this
i dont really have anything like that to share but here's a picture of my hab cube! its not much but ive done what i can with it
idk what you wanna see tbh, i cant really go anywhere to take pictures 'cos travel is expensiv

March 8th, 2551, New New Wales, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

June frowned, holding her pad up to the city skyline. She fiddled with settings, but she just couldn't get her pictures to look anywhere near as good as Erica's. Maybe she had an actual dedicated camera? It seemed like an absurd luxury, but somehow Erica'd managed to get June a day off. June's manager (four 3mm screws) had been almost as surprised as June herself. Her position wasn't even eligible for holiday time, and the two thousand screws/hour quota wasn't going to fill itself. There was a war on, didn't you know?

And didn't she. June's small shuttle out to New New Wales had had a news reel (ten 3mm screws). The tabloids were claiming that nightmare aliens from beyond the stars were coming to destroy them. The 'grown up' sources were more interested in the stock market reaching its highest level ever or fawning over the richest man in the world finally reaching a quintillion credits.

So, in other words, the news was basically the same as it had ever been.

June had taken a picture. She was taking pictures of everything. She didn't expect to get another day off, ever. If the tabloids were right, maybe she'd get eaten by an alien in a few years, which at least meant she wouldn't have to worry about financing her funeral. She had to build up a nice stack of things to trade back and forth with Eri. Somehow, the quality of her pen-pal's art was relaxing. June couldn't hope to match it, and they both knew it. Lower expectations were nice.

But she wasn't on the clock here. No quota. June took a moment to stare out across the cityscape. It wasn't beautiful, but it was different, and different was better.

Mickey 8th, 2552, Fab 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

Three thousand screws per hour.

June snapped a picture of the new work order and spent a moment doodling little devil horns on it. There was basically always a mail drone hanging in lunar orbit now just waiting for her message. Eri couldn't get her days off any more, not with the war going so poorly, but their signal delay was under a day now. June kept time by the little dings of her pad indicating a new message had arrived with some unbelievable new piece of artwork. Today's picture was an overhead shot of the weirdly silent capital city on—

"Cerania fell yesterday, they said."

June frowned, glancing over. Ever since they'd hit twenty five hundred screws an hour, morale had been plummeting, and half the staff weren't even trying any more. June was kind of among them, now. If the war was really going this badly then what was the point? The Cosmic Navy seemed to be slowing the xenos down, or at least, their approach had slowed in recent months, but the news reels still claimed they were heading straight for Terra herself. Earth. The shipyards cried out for screws and June was just so tired of it all.

Hey Eri!! Haha, look at my new quota :) :)
Thanks for the composition tips last time btw, I think I'm starting to get it! I'd love to head out somewhere again but I'm pretty sure that if I asked for time off my manager would shoot me, lol
Not that we can spare the bullets around here!! btw are you okay?? that last picture wasn't recent, was it? news over here is saying Cerania's a xeno hive now

November 16th, 2552, Fab 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

juuuuuuuuune!!!! ::D
look at this moon! this is such a cool moon! it's, um, geostationary with a gas giant in a trinary star system and apparently for the next few hundred years everything is gonna be in perfect synchronisation, so the planet doesn't move in the sky and neither do the stars, and it's just so still
i'd love for you to see it one day
<3 <3 Eri

May 19th, 2553, Fab 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

"Don't be ridiculous," June said, snatching back her synthveg cube. "Why would you believe anything the Terran government says? They said that if we couldn't reach seven thousand screws an hour the war effort would collapse, but the screws are just piling up outside. Eri says it's the shipyards running out of other stuff. We can take a few minutes extra on our break."

Sarah glanced to the side, quietly crushing her cup. She sighed, all the fight going out of her. "How can you stand it?" she asked. The break room was only half full. There was a war on, didn't you know? "Everyone is screaming that this is the end and how the fuck aren't you panicking?"

June shrugged. "I told Eri that I loved her yesterday. I'm too busy panicking about that to care about some CEO's profits."

Sarah threw her hands up into the air, accidentally spilling liquid onto herself. Thankfully, the slimy glob just slid off of her clothes. "It's not about the profits, June, they're eating people!"

"They're not eating people. Eri's sent me pictures. People are still there, they're just... I dunno. Maybe occupation wouldn't be so bad?"

Sarah's upper lip quivered in disgust. "You're fucking with me, you don't believe that. I can see right through the propaganda and I'm telling you, they're eating people. Erica's wrong, hon, why would she have any better knowledge than us?

June shrugged. "I think she's rich? They probably don't lie to rich people."

May 20th, 2553, Fab 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

eriiiii
look at this trash dumpster! they filled it with my screws!! they're throwing them away lmao
i love you, y'know? please don't let me go. i wanna be yours.

January 18th, 2554, Vacant Unit 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

June waited in the job-seeking line, hand entwined with Sarah's. They hoped that today could be the day. All around them, billboards celebrated the highest single-day rise in stock prices ever, bringing the market to previously unimaginable heights. All around them, scared faces congregated, waiting to be told that there still weren't any jobs.

June should sell her datapad. They'd get a few days of food and shelter out of it, probably. Eri would understand. Things were hard everywhere now, and even Eri's pictures had started getting less exciting, less exotic, like she couldn't get too far out any more, whether she was taking pictures or creating her impossible photorealistic artwork. The alien menace was crowding them all in. Pinning humanity into a cage before it came to feast.

A man up at the front of the room called for attention before delivering the same news he had for the past week. No jobs. Nowhere to go. He couldn't help them, and they couldn't stay here.

January 19th, 2554, Vacant Unit 851, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way

hey eri
sorry for being quiet lately, things have just been hard since the fab closed
kinda running out of new pictures so here's one from the good times
might have to sell the pad, sorry

Response times were getting great, now. June barely had to wait for an hour before the device pinged. A whole hour, crowded around the burning pile of old stuff she, Sarah, and a dozen others were using to keep the cold away. Yesterday's news burned as well as anything. Some headline about a fortress world over by Brypso 3 being the latest one to fall. Why were they even printing this shit any more? It never changed anything.

no!! June please don't leave me! ::(
look i'm not meant to show you this but it's a really pretty shot, and i really want you to see it
i can't send you any money i'm sorry, the channels are all shutting down, but i promise if you just hold on things will get better
please don't go

June 22nd, 2554, Hero's Journey, Jupiter Orbit, Sol, The Milky Way

June swore. She never thought she'd miss the fucking quotas, but at least then she'd had a target. Now the tasks were endless. Fucking Terra had sold them out and everything was worse now.

July 30th, 2554, Hero's Journey, Jupiter Orbit, Sol, The Milky Way

Sarah held June tight as the groaning ship's reactor howled. Every jump was a kick in the chest and this was the third today. They were trying to keep out of the range of some fucking xeno titan but they just couldn't move as fast. Sarah was doing sensors now for some fucking reason, and she'd caught the alien warship on the edge of their range. Even given that, they were losing ground fast.

"What do you think they're really like?" June asked. "Do you think it'll be quick?"

Sarah shrugged, with a sigh. "Maybe it won't be that bad. I dunno. I've spent a lot of time staring at sensor readings the last few weeks, everything's starting to blur into one."

June missed having more than one friend. She even missed her manager. She missed Eri most of all, but at this point it was almost certain she was on some alien ship, if she was even still alive.

"God, what do we do?"

Sarah shrugged, again. "Their jumps are so clean. Their drive plume... it's hard to explain, but it's almost like a song. The sensor station turns stuff into sounds so it's easier to pay half your attention to it while doing something else, and... ugh. Ours sounds like a fuckin' buzzsaw, and theirs is..."

Sarah leaned back. They shared a bunk, because there wasn't room for all the crew any more, but that was okay. June drifted to sleep as Sarah hummed an alien song straight into her heart.

August 8th, 2554, Free Martian Safehouse, Pluto, Sol, The Milky Way

C'mon, c'mon. June tapped her fingers impatiently while Sarah tweaked settings on the terminal (sixteen 3mm screws) they were sitting in front of. The Hero's Journey was long since captured, but they'd escaped in a two-person planethopper just beforehand. It wasn't much of a stealth ship, but they'd managed to steal the Hero's Journey's communication logs before running, which had led them to the safehouse.

With nothing better to do, June had finally convinced Sarah to put her new knowledge to work hunting down a very particular mail drone.

It wasn't hard to find. It was still hanging around lunar orbit. A stream of messages spilled out over the screen.

june?? june! you reply to this this instant, young lady!! >::(

please?

no no no june c'mon i'm almost there, please don't have done this

okay i'm here, where are you? ::(

june?? oh dirt and roots did you join the rebellion? aaaaaaaa

okay no we've got your trail, i'm coming, just stay put for another couple days!! :;)

omg june were you on that escape shuttle?? look, just... we lost track of u. i'm gonna send a picture with this one, okay? please don't be afraid! i promise that if we can just talk everything will make sense

It took a few minutes for Sarah to figure out how to extract the image from the data stream. They sat and stared.

Purple. Not even human at all. Four bright pink eyes and a thousand tiny purple leaves hanging off of green strands. It looked like somebody had taken a picture of something like a dragon and run filters over it, until they looked...

Well. Like one of the xeno scum that wanted humanity dead.

The two humans looked at each other for long moments with a dawning realisation. Sarah swore first. "Fuck. How long has this been going on for? You've been talking to Erica for years."

"I... Can we reply?" June looked towards her partner, squeezing tight around her side. Sarah nodded, and passed June the input.

hey eri

August 9th, 2554, PLO Spaceport, Pluto, Sol, The Milky Way

June stood in the quiet spaceport, nervously clutching her bag. She didn't have to keep staring at the arrivals door (twenty two 3mm screws). She knew she'd probably be here for another twenty minutes at least. What else was she meant to do? Her heart was pounding. Was this even a good idea? Were her feelings even real?

Sarah was beside her, leaning against the wall, eyes closed. Probably a better idea, but June had way too much nervous energy. She paced back and forth in the tiny waiting area, eyes locked on the arrivals doors.

Come on.

She'd never seen this creature in the flesh before. This was ridiculous. What was she doing? She'd thought she'd loved her, certainly, but, how could she be sur—

After a literal eternity, she heard the quiet hiss of equalising pressure. June's eyes snapped to the opening doors as her heart banged in her chest.

"Holy shit you're tall," June breathed, as a figure stepped out of the human-sized airlock, hunched over, and then raised to her full height.

Elegantly woven vines formed a flowing waterfall that spiked maybe twenty feet into the air. Quadrupedal, massive, and utterly alien. Beautiful. Perfect. It was her. Much of her body was covered in tiny pink and purple bells, but that was covered in some kind of clothing. Nothing like a human design, but it hung off of her body like it had been tailored for the occasion.

She watched its four purple eyes scanning the room until finally they locked gaze with June's.

The dragon hesitated. June didn't, breaking out into a short run that terminated very suddenly as she hit one of Eri's thick legs in a full-body hug.

"You aren't what I imagined," she admitted. "You're, um. Big."

The room shook as Eri laughed. "Nor you! Look at you! You're so much more vibrant when you're moving! I'm sorry, I'm not really laid out for human hugs, I was heading in the exact opposite direction when you got my first message. I haven't really had time to learn how to look like you, but— I can change, if you'd like?"

June laughed, squeezing into the leg tighter. "I don't care. I love you and if you're a space dragon then that's okay. I'm sorry that I ran."

A low shudder ran through the dragon's body. "Dirt, but I love you too, June. I— Oh, I'm so sorry I couldn't tell you the truth earlier, it was just—"

June shook her head with rapid movements. "I don't care! You're the best thing that's ever happened to me and if you're going to eat me then that's okay. I'm glad it's you."

Eri's grin showed teeth by the hundred. "I didn't come five thousand light years for a snack. I came for you."

June buried her face against the leg. "Thank you."

Erica leaned down, curling her neck around June's body in a firm hug of her own. "Who's the friend?" she asked, after a few long moments.

June winced. "So, yeah, about that. It's been... a lot, recently, and I kinda got together with Sarah, and... I mean, I don't know whether you're okay with that."

Erica licked her lips with a rapid nod. "Mmhm yes that's okay absolutely yes—" Her long neck let her easily bring her head over to within inches of Sarah. She blew a puff of hot air into the waiting girl's face. "Let me take care of you?"

December 24th, 2554, Elettarium, Sol Heliopause, The Milky Way

June Erigin, First Floret Pinnate, tore open the box containing her Christmas present. Apparently it was some old earth gift-giving ritual that the Affini were trying to bring back, which seemed absurd. June was curled up atop her owner and there wasn't a 3mm screw within eighteen billion kilometers. Her life was a gift.

"I figured, y'know, it's how we met," Eri held June tight under one wing. "I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate that than to get you your own camera. Is it— Do you like it?"

June nodded rapidly. "I love it. Thank you."

Goddess, she loved her goddess. Admittedly, it would have been hard not to now. Eri's wing hung protectively over her, and some part of her—June didn't care for the details—nestled around her mind, making sure she never had to think anything bad ever again.

Sarah Erigin, Second Floret Pinnate, was carefully held under the other wing, opening her own box. A canvas, a set of paints, and an audio system. "Oh shiiiiiit, Miss, you kidding me right now?"

Eri grinned, with a sharp shake of her head. "New captain just got elected, and this one found the idea of letting you record the new drive plume adorable. We'll have to teach you how to put all the right hypnotics into it, but this time next year this ship'll be playing your art to the universe."

Both florets leaned their heads against Erica's side, reaching across to clasp their hands together, and sighed happily. No more screws. No more Terra. Their whole world had shrunk to focus on this one beautiful creature, and it was better this way.

June scrambled up, twisting the dial on her new camera until tiny thrusters came to life and sent it floating away, twisting to point towards them. June fiddled with the small remote control unit.

"Smile, everyone?"

The camera flashed.

Seventh Blossom, 16894th Efflorescence, 10 Lacertae Orbital

Eri and her florets flew far above the simulated oceans of the massive Affini ringworld. The pair of humans clung to Erica's neck with the carefree abandon of things which knew themselves to be perfectly safe, laughing and cheering as they took large loops in the air.

Eri's massive wings couldn't possibly have kept her afloat even under real gravity, but nobody cared to point out the inconsistency. June's camera flashed and Sarah's paintbrush drew shaken lines.

They weren't alone any more. No matter how fast humanity had run, no matter how hard it had fought, they hadn't changed the outcome even one little bit.

Billions of humans, once so alone, joined the uncountable diversity of life in the greater cosmos, all brought under the caring wing of something once unimaginable. Benevolent, kind, generous life. All resistance had been ground into so much worthless dust, and what was left was a purer, happier humanity. A better humanity, and a June with hope for the future.

Also, finally no more fucking screws.

Chapter Text

"I can't believe how stupid that was," Katie hissed, pressing a hand up against Thatch's torso. It had a hole in it big enough to fit Katie's whole hand. "We should have run!"

Thatch shrugged, wincing slightly as Katie put pressure on the wound. She handed Katie one of their containers of water, so she could start washing out the damaged material. "I must admit that that was the first actual fight I have ever been in. I shall defer to your tactical expertise." Thatch smiled down, resting a hand on Katie's shoulder while she worked. Her voice sounded surprisingly good given the circumstances. Part of the noise was spilling out through the hole, giving it a fuzzier air.

They were a few dozen kilometers away from the source of their mystery signal now, heading back towards camp, and Thatch had requested a moment to rest. Katie was unsurprised. She wouldn't be in any state to move with that large a hole in her either.

After a few moments cleaning out the dirt and scraps of metal, Thatch began to unravel, vine by careful vine, checking to see which had been damaged in the altercation.

Katie shuffled away, putting her back to the corrugated metal of one of the crates Thatch had grabbed on their way out. The labeling was all in a language neither of them understood. Katie had had bigger concerns than asking what the affini's goal was with them.

She watched as her affini picked herself apart and sectioned off the damaged stretches. Her protector usually only came apart when she wanted to exceed human limits and that was rarely slow. This was fascinating.

A week before, watching an affini unravel like this would have been terrifying, Katie thought. There was no sign of humanity in this. The tight lattice that usually formed Thatch's limbs had been released, leaving her temporarily as a tangled nest. The dense collection around what Thatch had referred to as her core was unharmed, and out of that sprung a thick trunk-like collection of vines which then spread out in every direction like roots questing forth from a seed.

Thatch hung from a set of three trees and spent some time checking over herself. It seemed like painstaking work. Katie tried to count, knowing it was unlikely she'd get a better chance than this, but quickly lost track of which she'd seen before and which she hadn't. At least dozens, maybe into the hundreds once the smaller vines were factored in?

After a few minutes all the damaged areas were held off to one side, separate. Despite having stood in the way of what had looked and sounded like a railgun shell, it was a surprisingly small collection. Thatch retracted the damaged pieces into her core and pulled the rest of herself back together with ease, becoming once again her familiar human self, standing tall.

Katie felt an unusual feeling fluttering through her stomach, and a strange warmth. She stared up at Thatch's body. Inhuman. Powerful. Elegant. Even regal. Designed, but designed by someone that worked creativity into everything they did. There was nothing about Thatch's form that was only practical. She was a work of art.

She had toes. Tightly wrapped plantlife formed ten little digits connected to two lovingly rendered feet, up two smooth, well-shaped legs, to a torso that Katie had gotten very familiar with. Soft in all the right places, firm in others, with a soft heat and astonishingly human shape. Katie tilted her head to one side, questioning. Had Thatch moved her leaves around? The blacks and purples still made up most of her body but now there was only the occasional flash of red. Her face was starting to regain some of the green tones it had once had, though for the moment it only had the lighter greens of growing leaves. Her hair still sported bright streaks of red, making it stand out.

With the dark colours painting her body it almost looked like Thatch was wearing a suit. In fact, the deeper purples seemed to be accentuating the black, to grant definition and shape to what had previously been somewhat of a speckled mess.

Katie whimpered, as the creature glanced down at her with bright blue eyes and extended a hand. Her fingers were another place where Thatch's bright reds shone through, now emulating fingernails.

Katie took the hand. Powerful fingers entwined with her own and gently lifted her to her feet. Katie stumbled forward a little at the end, overbalancing, and fell halfway into Thatch's body. She caught herself with a hand firmly placed against a leg. Thatch's leafwork was smooth and soft but the vines beneath provided it an iron hardness. Taking Katie's weight didn't seem to faze the affini in the slightest.

The plant's false skin felt less human than it looked. The leaves were smooth and soft, but Katie could feel where one ended and the next began. While they lay smooth they were all arranged in one direction, but if Katie ran her hand the wrong way that careful pattern was disrupted, like improperly stroked fur.

Perfection was broken. Katie had always known that Thatch could be hurt—it was how they'd met!—but all the while they'd been on this planet it had seemed like nothing could possibly best her; that the only threats to something like this were high-energy physics experiments or similar dramatic overkill.

Then she'd watched a railgun shell strike right through Thatch's chest, exiting in a burst of sap and broken leaves. Thatch wasn't invulnerable. She could be hurt by relatively mundane weaponry. Killed, probably.

Thatch's other hand touched Katie's cheek, tilting her head all the way up so Katie could notice the way the plant's attention drilled down into her. Somehow, discovering vulnerability did nothing to make Thatch seem less of a titan. Katie had long since grown to assume Thatch could protect her from minor dangers, but as the limits of her capabilities grew clearer Katie was finding she had underestimated them.

The plant was still looking down at her. Katie stepped away, glancing down to hide her face. She took a quick gulp and laughed as naturally as she could manage on such short notice. "Your first fight, huh? Five minutes to recover from something that would kill a human dead? Is that something all of you can do?"

Thatch's laughter was contagious even when she played as little as a single note. "As I understand it, training for combat involves learning how to do that on the fly. Five seconds to recover, perhaps. I am very much not that kind of affini, however."

Katie blew out a breath, nodding. "I spent a lot of time thinking about how to kill you things," she admitted, with a wry smile. "It's weird that I'm glad that none of my plans would have worked, now."

Thatch walked over to the containers she'd placed so carefully and knelt to lift them. "Do not sell yourself short, you came very close to succeeding with me." After standing, she put together a familiar set of handholds and waited for Katie to climb aboard.

"I'm glad I didn't," Katie admitted, settling around Thatch's neck, only a little breathless. She put out her hands and Thatch dutifully provided her with vines so she could guide their path. The crates provided some extra challenge. The bulk noticeably increased their inertia, making tight turns harder, and despite her strength Thatch couldn't accelerate quite as quickly.

They were up to speed in only a few moments all the same. Thankfully, Katie was getting used to conversing in fits and starts between bursts of work so when Thatch felt ready to speak again it was no surprise. "I am glad that you did not too, flower. Things would not have gone so well for you if you had."

Katie frowned. "Also, you'd be dead, and that would be sad," she insisted, while at the same time pulling up on her vines. Thatch rose off of the ground. They continued on an upwards slope.

"Mmh," the plant buzzed, while they broke through the canopy. A protective cocoon of plantlife kept Katie unscathed as they moved past the branches. She was inside of Thatch's bubble of safety and no physical harm would befall her. Emotional harm, however, was apparently harder to protect against.

"And that would be sad." Katie repeated herself, voice more insistent, gently tapping the back of her shoes against Thatch's chest with each word. "You're nice. The universe is better off for having you."

The slow pulse of heat was a distinct, albeit inhuman, expression, though not one Katie entirely understood just yet. She smiled, leaning forward to drape herself over Thatch's head. "They should just broadcast footage of you instead of the propaganda. Humans reading out creepy, obviously scripted messages is pretty unbelievable. I don't think anybody could really believe that stuff, it makes you all seem like you're perfect."

Katie wrinkled her nose. They lost a bit of speed from being up on the treetops, without trunks to pull against so directly, but with the added inertia of the containers this was still faster. It was boring, though. "I like you better," she admitted. "It's the flaws that make something beautiful."

Thatch's chuckle filled Katie's chest with music. Despite their incredible speed, when Katie spoke she had a steady voice, but only because her ride was being cushioned. Thatch had no such luxury and her voice didn't get to be quite so steady yet somehow the emphasis always fell in the right place, like her speech or her laughter was just another part of the constant motion of her journey.

"Thank you, flower. I shall bear this in mind the next time they ask for volunteers." Thatch's voice was a drawl at the best of times, but Katie could recognise indulgence when she heard it. Her cheeks began to heat up. There had been a brief, wonderful period where the flirting had been at a low ebb. Clearly it was ramping back up. It felt less invasive now. Thatch knew what Katie did and didn't want. There was a big difference between the flirting of an alien monster that had enslaved your race and that which came from a friend.

Katie could be insistent. "I'm sorry for trying to kill you, is what I'm saying."

"I know. I never held it against you."

Katie huffed, falling quiet. It was a comfortable silence. She looked out across the world. From her perspective here the forests seemed endless, but she was used to that. She wasn't used to seeing the sky stretch above her. It was breathtaking. Clouds hung low, blocking the light of their star in large, wide shadows that slowly moved across the landscape. The clouds themselves rushed across the sky at a dramatic pace, shapes constantly shifting and curling. Maybe she'd have to get Thatch to bring her up here some time they weren't working.

The journey home took a few hours and they took it in relative silence. It had been a while since either of them had gotten silence that lacked the oppressive undertone of things unsaid. With so little steering to do, Katie could watch the treetops rushing past and let herself sink into the gentle rhythm of what little motion Thatch let through. It was almost enough to rock her to sleep, but she was too proud to let herself fall unconscious here. Instead, she found herself leaning forward across the plant's head, watching their progress one tree at a time.

Eventually they reached their camp, mostly just as they'd left it. There was a little scuffing around the fire, hinting that some of the planet's wildlife had investigated but found nothing of value. Katie spent a few moments fussing over Leviathan, sprinkling a good meal's worth of food into the tank, and sat there for a few minutes watching her pet dart around grabbing each morsel as it came. Pet care was calming in a way she hadn't expected. Katie had thought that having another living creature dependent on her would be a strain. She couldn't take care of herself, and yet taking care of this was something that seemed to call on different parts of her.

"What's in the box?" Katie asked, eventually. She wandered back over and finally gave the crates the attention they deserved. Wrinkled metal in approximate cubes, labeled in an alien tongue, built from an alloy for which Katie had no name. This was alien. Truly alien. Thatch may break character often enough that nobody could miss her inhumanity, but she presented a relatable front that was missing entirely here.

"I believe it is likely electronic components, or at least materials to build them with, judging from the machinery set to extract from it. At very least we can empty them and use the crates themselves to build our beacon. I hope."

Thatch moved over to inspect the box Katie was standing besides. She raised a thorn to a rivet near the top and carefully levered it out. She repeated the process until the lid could be pried free. Katie quickly scaled her friend's back and took a seat around her neck again so she could gaze down upon their...

"This looks like a pile of junk."

Thatch nodded, reaching in to grab something that looked like somebody had given up on building a circuit board halfway through, then melted the edges. She held it between two fingers, emitted a vaguely unsatisfied sound, and handed it to Katie.

"I must admit I had been hoping for something more directly useful, but hopefully we can salvage something. They had fairly advanced technology and hopefully we can find evidence of some degree of superluminal sophistication."

Katie nodded. It made sense. "Anyone who could set up an outpost like that probably doesn't plan to crawl back home at sublight." Katie felt a gentle spike of excitement in the pit of her stomach. They could synthesise small amounts of a workable exotic matter mix, but Katie had to admit she thought Thatch's estimate of two to three weeks for building a particle accelerator felt a little optimistic.

Maybe Thatch could build one that fast if she didn't get distracted. Thatch getting through more than an hour without her focus being disrupted by something seemed to be a rarity. Katie had to admit that that thing was usually her.

Katie shuffled onto Thatch's shoulder, and from there sat on the edge of the crate so she could reach in and inspect things herself. She held up what looked like an... electronic widget of some kind. Were those vacuum tubes? Technology that looked like it worked on principles Terra had left behind half a millennium ago met components Katie couldn't even begin to theorise about. She was starting to understand some of what Thatch saw in other species.

Katie rummaged around for a few moments more. Most of this stuff looked like scrap, but it was scrap made of pieces they could learn something from. Katie flinched as her finger brushed against something cold, instinctively pulling back.

"I'm okay; I'm fine," she promised, waving Thatch's attention off. She went back to dig out what she'd touched.

"Does this look like an exotic matter valve to you?" Katie asked, holding up a thick tube of metal. The specific construction was alien to her, but Thatch had been teaching Katie the physics. Physics didn't change between species, just the ways they built things to exploit it. One end of the tube was wide and dense, tapering down to a very thin exit that seemed to have mounting points surrounding it. In a human design, they'd have put electromagnets there, to suspend the exotic matter mix in space while it heated up.

Katie didn't know what exactly this alien design required, but the fundamental operation of a Jump Drive couldn't meaningfully change. You needed a soup of stuff the universe itself abhorred, harvested from processes on the edge of possibility. Humanity had used a specific blend of particles: some skimmed from the plasma of their nearest class-B star; some synthesised in ultra-high energy particle accelerators; and some stolen away from their virtual particle pairs in specifically constructed vacuum chambers. Fascinatingly, this was one area in which Affini technology did not outstrip Humanity's. The blend the Affini used was almost devastatingly simple by comparison. Easier to harvest, less dangerous, and more effective. Humanity had simply missed the obvious improvements, or perhaps the patents granted on the processes had simply prevented the experimentation necessary to realise it could be done more simply.

Regardless, it all worked the same way. Sufficiently high concentrations of negative energy spiked a hole in spacetime which could be directed to form what Thatch had called a Cedrus-Veratrum Bridge. In human slang, a wormhole. Whatever approach this new species used the fundamental operation would be the same.

"It does." One of Thatch's hands found Katie's and gave it a squeeze. "We are unlikely to be lucky enough that they use precisely a matter mix either of us are used to—"

Katie interrupted, providing enough enthusiasm for the both of them. "—but from what we've covered, I think I understand how to tweak the design to account for a different mix, and if we have the materials for it we could build something that we could adjust once we know what they do use!"

Thatch smiled. Katie could tell, somehow, even before looking. Some facet of body language that she hadn't quite figured out, but that apparently her subconscious had. "And—"

Katie interrupted again. "—and we'll definitely be able to send a big enough signal if we're not having to synthesise this stuff one atom at a time!"

Thatch chuckled. A vine reached up to press against her lips, bringing Katie to silence.

"And it was all your doing. You found out they were here, and you built, mostly, the radio which found them. You noticed this. You have saved us weeks of effort here, Katie. You've done very well." The plant's hand raised to Katie's head, giving her hair a brief ruffle, before letting Katie take it with her own hands to squeeze.

After a few moments Katie's smile faded, slowly shifting to a frown. She waited patiently until Thatch's vine moved away from her lips. "But, doesn't this all seem very convenient to you, Thatch? We appear in a random place in the universe and it just happens to be right next to this place, which just happens to contain life smart enough to have at least basic hyperspace technology?"

Thatch shrugged. For a hyper-advanced space alien that should know better, was infuriatingly laid back about this. "I must admit, I cannot explain our fortune. One should not inspect a treasure horse in the mouth. Given the scale of the universe unlikely things do occur with surprising regularity."

Katie shook her head. "No, unless you're hiding a lot about how the universe works from me this is too much of a coincidence."

A pair of vines came up behind Katie. One ruffled her hair while the other kept her from deflecting the first. "It may surprise you to learn that I have not yet taught you everything I know about the cosmos. We should have emerged at a random position and sometimes coincidences are simply coincidental."

"No! I— We should have naturally drifted, but we'd be more likely to come out where spacetime was weakened, right?" Katie took advantage of her affini's momentary pause to wrestle the vines away and then capitalised by leaning over and ruffling Thatch's hair.

The affini made a face, accepting her treatment with a stoic suffering for a few short moments. After that her eyebrows raised a hair and Katie found herself stilled. So that was what an effective glare felt like. "Well, yes, but the chances of our jump coinciding with a sufficiently powerful disruption in spacetime here truly are astronomical; never mind that any civilisation capable of building those kinds of ships would long since have been detected by the advance scouts."

"What if it wasn't one jump? What if they were doing something stupid, like constantly sparking a beacon?"

Thatch's expression darkened. Katie's sixth sense pinned the emotion down as an intense kind of displeasure, and she found herself wanting to shy away, regardless of that it wasn't directed of her. When Thatch did finally share a human expression, it barely carried a fraction of the same weight. Katie knew what lay underneath.

"Nobody would be that stupid. Even humanity wouldn't have done that." She sounded more hopeful than convinced. She glanced over to Katie, who got the sense that Thatch was looking for an affirmation.

Katie wanted to provide it, but she lacked the idealism her partner was looking for. "It's a big universe, right? They might not even know they're doing it. Everything there looked automated."

Thatch seemed to curl in on herself for a moment. The gentle beat of her movements became sharp and punchy, and Katie felt herself getting worked up too. If Katie were right they'd have to stop it, wouldn't they? They couldn't just leave it like this. Katie had learned enough since Thatch had started teaching her to have some idea as to the consequences, even if she didn't wholly understand the theory just yet.

"Dirt," Thatch swore, face twisting in frustration. She deflated, losing a couple inches in a matter of moments. "I should have been thinking about this. I am sorry, I have been distracted."

"Are we... in danger?" Katie asked. Thatch could protect her from a lot, but she knew from experience that things that poked holes in spacetime were on the short list of legitimate threats to her safety.

Thatch waved a hand, dismissing the concern, and then used it to give Katie's a squeeze. "No, no, I would not expect so. We would be noticing stark effects if spacetime were going to fracture within weeks. We cannot leave this planet without fixing it, but I do not think this changes our plan. We call in help, make a more polite first contact, and inform this species that what they are doing has consequences."

Katie found herself emulating deflation. She sagged a little, where she sat. Partially through relief, because she had no desire to die by having her chronology shattered. Partially because what Thatch suggested felt so... deeply insufficient.

"We have to do more than that," she insisted. "They can't know what they're doing, or— if they do know, then that's even worse. Humanity's whole history is littered with people pointing out how much harm was being done, and then having that ignored in the name of profit." Katie gritted her teeth. She carefully put the piece of alien technology in her lap back into the box, knowing that if she continued speaking she would be liable to break something.

"We do not know that this species behaves as humanity did, Katieflower. In all likelihood, the warning would be enough. We can be polite."

Katie shook her head, hands gripping the side of the container, for want of something to break. "No, I— Humanity ignored warning after warning for centuries, Thatch! I can't watch that happen all over again. There has to be something better in the universe than endless repetitions of stupid, self-destructive... destruction! We have to do more, and—"

Thatch pressed two fingers to Katie's chin. She could feel the slight sharpness of the affini's bright red 'fingernails' pressing against her skin, providing further incentive for her to look up into Thatch's amused gaze. "'Polite' is a euphemism, Katie. They can render themselves domestic or be domesticated. There is no path forward that lets these mistakes continue. I am happy to see you coming around to our way of thinking, however."

Katie fell into sharp silence, feeling a burning heat spread across her skin. Was that really what she was arguing for, here?

Hell.

Katie groaned, falling backwards. She tumbled off of the container, but she had no doubt she would be caught. She kept groaning as Thatch carried her over to the river, and sat to one side of Leviathan's tank.

"Now, Katie—"

Katie groaned louder, cutting her stars-damned weed off. She got to do that twice more before Thatch pressed a finger to her lips. Katie silenced herself.

"Now, Katie. As my equal partner you get a vote in this, just like I do." Thatch was enjoying this. Katie could tell. "If you think that the correct fate for a species that clearly does not know how to take care of itself is to be given a guiding hand, then that is what we shall do."

Katie set her jaw and glared up at the creature. Her glares were losing their efficacy. Katie knew that Thatch would stop if she used the right word, but since they'd codified a system Katie had lost the comfortable gray area in which she didn't have to think too hard about what she really thought.

Now, when she glared, Thatch simply looked down with a twinkle in her eye and a smile because both of them were fully aware of what Katie wasn't saying.

Thatch continued. "Of course, if you think that will not be necessary, then I shall take your lead. The Elettarium will arrive and learn of the decision already made by the local system board—you and I—and a course will be set."

This wasn't fair. "I... don't know, Thatch. This is my first alien species. You don't count. I can't make a decision that big. What if they would be fine on their own? We learn their language, tell them what they're doing wrong, and they thrive?"

Thatch chuckled. Why did Katie feel like she was playing an unwitting part in a pre-scored duet here? "Would Leviathan have thrived on its own, without your care and attention?"

Katie glanced towards the fish, happily exploring a brand new environment. It didn't take her long to rearrange the pieces every morning, to ensure there was always something new, interesting, and safe to explore. A little effort for Katie went a long way for her pet.

"Yes," she admitted. It was hard to avoid the subtext. "But not as well."

Thatch's fingers trailed up Katie's side, gently drawing four parallel lines from her hip to her shoulder. "Was Humanity thriving on its own?"

Katie shook her head, trying to ignore the way Thatch's touch made her feel. "No. Humanity was destroying itself."

Those four fingers continued their journey, around Katie's body and up to her chin, forcing her gaze to meet her affini's. "How would you have voted on Humanity's fate?"

Katie breathed out. Maybe if there wasn't any oxygen left in her lungs, Thatch would let her stay quiet.

That wasn't fair. Katie had given permission for Thatch to be pushy when it came to matters of safety and mental health. Katie knew her emotions were all tangled up here. It wasn't Thatch's fault that these questions were as hard as they were. Rationally, Katie knew that having answers teased out of her was helpful. Thatch was helping lead her to an answer that was right for her.

"I don't know," Katie admitted, after long moments of gentle silence. "I mean, they never would have gone quietly. The only options were a wide berth or... what you did. I just don't know that I could have voted on it."

That answer seemed to surprise Thatch. Questing fingers found Katie's cheek and beat a short, soft rhythm into it with leafy fingertips. "You think that leaving humanity alone could have been a good option?"

Katie blinked, hard, and shook her head. "No! No, stars, no. But if I vote on that then I have to accept responsibility for what happens, right? Assuming it's a real vote, not a Terran one. I can sit here and say that what happened to humanity is... good, kinda, but I don't have to think about all the suffering that decision caused, because I didn't make it."

The plant seemed to consider that, letting out a curious hum. "But less suffering than the alternative would have been, no?"

"Yeah, but... Does that make it okay? Could you find somebody who would have been happy under Terran rule and isn't under Affini rule and tell them that their happiness mattered less than everyone else's?" Katie tried to drive her verbal parry in by sitting up, but she didn't have the leverage for it. Thatch didn't even need to stop her, she just let the vine Katie's hand was pushing against go slack.

"No, I could not."

Katie glanced up. Had she just won the argument?

The face that smiled down at her suggested otherwise. Thatch's aura of smug only increased in intensity until Katie got it.

She groaned again. "Right, because there wouldn't be one. I can't tell if you're being arrogant or honest." She inspected her fellow castaway with a careful eye. Thatch's smile had a slight edge to it, but the sparkle of her eyes seemed nothing but truthful. Katie listened to her heart, which surely she could trust. "I don't think you'd be arrogant about this, so you probably believe that. Huh."

Unable to sit up, the next best option was to surrender herself to the leafy embrace. Katie rolled over and shuffled around. She put her back against Thatch's stomach, while pulling her legs up to her hers, and rested her head on the plant's knee to gaze out across the river. Evening seemed to be arriving slowly, and the planet hadn't really woken up yet.

"Did you get a vote?" Katie asked. "On humanity, I mean. Were you for or against?"

Katie's eyes slid closed as two gentle hands began to explore her back, slowly teasing out the tension of the day. She gave an appreciate mumble and rolled a little further to the side to give Thatch easier access. The affini's chuckles were getting more common, and each Katie heard felt like she was getting closer to being able to stitch together whatever song they hailed from.

"We only vote when the outcome is in question, little one," Thatch explained. One hand still danced across her back, while the other slowly drew a makeshift comb through Katie's hair. Their travels had resulted in more than a few knots, and there was plenty to fix. "Humanity's fate was always fixed. All we had to decide was how it was to happen."

Katie didn't have much of a response to that. She kept her eyes closed, and squirmed a little until her position was comfortable enough she could remain there indefinitely, while the affini fussed over her, and tried to carefully work through her feelings. She had a lot of those. The Terran Accord had been her home, and talking to something that acted so callously when discussing it being torn apart was unsettling. At the same time, it hadn't been a good home. In a lot of ways, Katie was glad that it was gone. It was still her home. Everyone she'd ever known had been from there. Every ship she'd ever flown on had been built by human hands. Every book she'd ever read, written with human fingers. Every song she'd ever danced to composed with human ears.

Everything was different now. Even if the rebellion somehow turned it around and won, the rat was out of the bag. The knowledge that a better world was possible wasn't something that could be hidden. Hell, half of humanity would probably never function independently again. There wasn't a Terran Accord left to save.

Katie whimpered, neck bending backwards so she could glance up at Thatch. Unusually, she didn't see a smiling face looking down at her. Thatch seemed legitimately distracted for once. Her hands aimlessly brushed across Katie's body, or through her hair, but her attention was elsewhere.

The soft orange light of an alien sunset splashed across her face. Shadows cast by the trees far above drew a sharp diagonal down the center, leaving part almost aglow with life, and part seeming... sad, in a way.

Katie realised after several moments of thought that her sixth sense was silent. She had to try to figure out what the creature was thinking the old fashioned way. With Katie so firmly in her grip, perhaps Thatch could finally let herself relax without needing to dedicate one eye to tracing Katie's movements at all times?

It must have been a lot of effort, Katie thought. No matter how physically capable somebody was, they still needed time off. Katie had been getting that recently. Thatch hadn't. She knew the plant was still having trouble sleeping, but if Katie woke in a panic she had somebody there to fix it and send her back to a dreamless sleep. Thatch didn't.

"Hey," she whispered, attracting her friend's attention. "Credit for your thoughts?" Katie's question attracted a confused glance. Thatch's hands came to a pause, one resting at Katie's hips and the other on a shoulder. "It's a Terran expression, it means... I'll pay you to tell me what you're thinking? Wow, that's kinda a shitty saying, actually. Can I just ask whether anything is up?"

"Hmmn. We'll work the Terran out of you in time, I expect. You may ask, yes."

For a moment, the conversation came to a pause, interrupted only by the gentle sound of rushing water and the softest wind curling between the trees of the forest. There was really only one reasonable response.

"Thatch, you're flirting again."

Katie felt a brief pulse of heat, and earned a sheepish grin and a quick brush of knuckles under her chin.

"I suppose I am, yes. I have internalised the ways of my people as you have yours. I shall not make you ask, this time, though I note you did not tell me to stop."

Katie felt like she should come up with an argument against that. She couldn't.

"Nothing is wrong, however. I was simply lost in thought. Are you getting bored? We have plenty to do if you wish to be more active. I suspected you would not remain distracted for long, but that is okay."

Katie shook her head. "No, no. I don't want to stop you from getting some time to rest. I could go spend some time with Leviathan, if you want to sit and think?"

Thatch shook her head, trailing a finger through Katie's hair. "It is much too dangerous for you to do so unsupervised, but that is okay. I do not mind watching over you."

"I could go for a walk, instead?"

Thatch laughed, not unkindly. She ruffled Katie's hair with a slightly rough hand. "You know what happened last time you went off alone. Besides, I couldn't relax if I didn't know you were okay."

Katie blew out a breath through her nose. "I could stay right here?"

"You'd get bored or restless."

Katie wished she could disagree. "I could sleep? It isn't fair for me to demand your attention all the time, Thatch."

"If you slept now, you would not be tired at bedtime, and then you would get grumpy. It is fine, Katie. I am a big girl and I can handle this."

The smaller girl sighed, and shrugged. "What if... you gave me something to make sure I was happy to stay here where you didn't have to watch me?"

The plant's low rumble reverberated from deep within, like feeling the startup sequence of a chemical rocket buzzing an entire hull. Vast, deep, but distant enough to be soft. "Do not do that for me, Katie. No, I think not."

Katie nodded, but felt a strange weight settling over her heart. It was dumb, but she'd almost hoped that Thatch would go for that one.

And why not? It wasn't like Thatch had ever done her any harm. Coming out of her warm chemical covering had been hard, but never so hard as that first time. They'd played it safer since then. Katie kept chasing the feeling of serenity she'd had then, but it wasn't worth the consequences. What she'd experienced since had been softer. Easier to lose, but still nice in the moment.

"Maybe just a little? Something safe; something we've done before. The sap, maybe?"

Katie felt a brief moment of cold as Thatch's hands left her, but they were only shifting their grip. They pulled Katie up vertical, sitting her on one knee, and then tilted her head up and to the side, so Thatch could be certain of her attention. "Are you feeling okay?" she asked. "Is your mood falling again?"

Katie shook her head, quickly. "No, no, I'm... I don't want to say fine, but I'm stable? I'm doing okay, y'know, I'm not struggling. I'm fine."

Thatch raised an eyebrow. The silence was withering.

"I'm fine, it's just... y'know?"

"I do not know. I need you to be explicit here, flower."

Katie glanced away, breathing out a heavy breath. As expected, a second later she was guided back to meeting Thatch's gaze. "I'm... normal? Kind of feel like my heart wants to jump into my stomach and get digested, but I'm used to that. Basically the only time I haven't felt that is with you. You can make it go away."

Thatch nodded, carefully. "Yes, xenodrugs are good for tha—"

Katie shook her head, energetically enough that she actually managed to break Thatch's grip and get out a proper shake, for once. "It's not the drugs. You make me feel like there's hope in my future. At least if I can convince myself that the rest of your species is anywhere near your level."

Katie coughed, feeling an embarrassed hue that she had to worry would stain her clothing at this rate. "I would still like the drugs though."

She didn't get a response for long moments, while Thatch's piercing eyes inspected her. It felt like the plant was drilling into her soul, if she had such a thing. Eventually, she got a few quiet nods.

"The rest of my species are better at this than I am." Thatch's tone was difficult to place. A mix of homesickness and nostalgia, perhaps? "Though I suppose you will be glad of that. I expect that if any other had found you, you wouldn't still be talking about equality."

Equals.

Remember?

Katie glanced away and this time Thatch let her. "Yeah. I'm glad that you're the one that found me, Thatch. Us independent citizens need to stick together, right?"

Katie looked back up, with a tight smile. "So for tonight, maybe let's both of us relax? Give me something I know, then you won't need to worry about me for a while? Equals doesn't have to mean we always keep the scales perfectly balanced. We can have some give and take, it'll all balance out over time."

The affini looked conflicted, for a few moments, but her unreadable expression gave way to a soft smile. "Is that how you ask, Katie? Say please."

Katie rolled her eyes. "Give me the drugs, you flirtatious dork."

She received a grin in response. "Of course, flower. How would you like it?"

She held out a hand, a short line of sap resting against the side of her pointing finger.

"You have enjoyed bathing with this, before?" Thatch asked. Katie leaned an inch or so forward. "Or perhaps we could try it as a massage?"

Katie reached forward and ate it. She scraped the smooth gel off of Thatch's floral finger with a driven tongue and swallowed it in one brief burst of motion, then sat back, content, as she waited for it to hit.

"Or that works too." Thatch let out a breath at the same time as Katie did, one mirroring the other. "Let's make sure that you handle that okay, hmn? How are you feeling?"

"Normal, still," Katie admitted. "My tongue is tingling a bit, but... maybe ingesting it doesn't work very well?"

Thatch raised a finger and held it in front of Katie's eyes. "Let's find out, then. Can you watch my finger?"

Katie looked at it, and then followed as Thatch moved it side to side, then up and down. If this was a test of co-ordination, she was rocking it. The finger went left; she went left. The finger tilted to the side; she tilted to the side. Katie followed it, feeling a growing sense of pride at how well she was tracking. After a few seconds, or perhaps a few minutes, it started to get harder. Katie's head wouldn't move as quickly as she wanted. She still kept track of it, but it grew harder and harder, until finally she followed the finger all the way to the left, and then it changed direction and... Where was it? Katie looked around, but... where had it gone?

"I— huh?" she asked, looking up at Thatch, who was definitely paying attention to her now. Katie fought down a nervous laugh. Wow, she sure was spending time with a pretty alien. At some point the sun had really started to set, and now Katie could see deep oranges reflected in Thatch's eyes. They seemed so endlessly deep. The colours mixed together like oil on canvas and Katie found she wanted nothing more than to study them all night long.

Thatch's chuckle reverberated Katie's soul. She had to have one, because how else could she feel a sensation so deeply? Her eyes seemed to close by themselves as it washed over her, seeming to fill her heart with the same gentle mirth Thatch was feeling. The weight was washed away.

"Take a deep breath, flower."

Katie did. Why was Thatch paying so much attention to her? This was meant to be her time to relax. Katie should point that out. Katie could say something. She should. She felt words on her tongue, and yet felt like her soul was waiting on Thatch's word to speak.

"Keep your eyes closed for me, hmn? Let's get you good and relaxed. Another deep breath, please."

Katie hadn't realised she'd let the last one out but she took in another all the same.

"I'd like you to try to focus on me, okay? You're metabolising a little piece of me. I've filtered anything harmful out of it but you know I wouldn't do anything to hurt you, don't you?"

"Mmhh," Katie whispered, nodding. Just nodding was enough to fill her vision with flashes and waves of colour using her eyelids as a surface on which to draw.

"So neither will this. Everything you are feeling is just me. You are safe here. I want you to relax into me, can you do that? Don't worry about sitting up. Just let me take care of that for you."

Katie tried, but it felt unnatural. She wasn't sure how to relax everything. She could let one shoulder drop but by the time she'd gotten to the other it had already tensed up again. Thatch seemed to notice. She brushed a couple of leaves down Katie's shoulder, filling it with a deep, gentle warmth.

"Just this one shoulder, please. Feel the heat spreading through your arm, relaxing your muscles, taking away your control. You can feel it, can you not?"

Katie could feel it. Her shoulder was drooping. "Yeah," she breathed, voice almost silent.

"Can you lift it?"

Katie could. After a moment, she let it drop.

Thatch smiled. Through closed eyes and more colours than Katie knew the names of, she could tell. It was like a scent on the air, though there was no smell. A sound, though her ears heard nothing. Just a sense divorced from a source.

Another set of leaves brushed down the same arm. The heat intensified. "Feel how much heavier it is now, mmh?" Thatch asked. "You can't lift it. I'll lift it for you, so you can see."

Katie let out a soft gasp, head rolling backwards, as she felt powerful fingers wrapping around her wrist. She felt so small. Too small to contain the way Thatch's touch made her feel. It filled her, leaving no room for anything else. Katie whimpered like the breath that escaped her lips was the only way the weight and the stress could find to escape her body. Thatch let her hand drop back into her lap and Katie could do nothing to lift it.

"Good girl," her affini breathed. Katie shivered with every muscle she still had control over.

A pair of leaves gave the same treatment to Katie's other arm, loosening the muscles there. She hardly needed her relaxation proven, but a gentle grip lifted her wrist all the same, then let it fall. It wasn't like Katie could do anything to stop it. Her legs got the same treatment, with only gentle leaves filling her with so much heat she couldn't hope to move.

Thatch leaned back. Katie had no choice but to follow. She wasn't in control here. That was no different to any other day, really, was it? All wrapped up in gentle vines. Unable to hurt herself. All that had dropped was the illusion of control Thatch kindly granted her.

"Thank you for this," Thatch rumbled, after a few moments of quiet. Katie nodded rapidly, and the resulting smear of colour and sensation sent her slowly toppling over to one side. She was guided down by leafy digits, but the merest touch had soft whimpers pressing out between her lips.

"Meant... relaxing," Katie managed to insist, forcing the words through sluggish consciousness. She wasn't that badly effected, she didn't think, she just... couldn't bring herself to move. Every time she felt, heard, or smelled Thatch's presence her mind was sent into a spin. A two word sentence was an achievement, and her reward was a thumb brushed across her lips.

Katie managed to open her mouth, which must have surprised her plant. The thumb kept moving, only pausing when it reached the inside of Katie's cheek, but by then it was far too late for Thatch. Katie closed her mouth and trapped her inside, greedily tasting that which she'd been denied. A two word sentence suddenly seemed hopelessly out of reach.

The affini emitted a soft laugh, and tried to remove her hand. Katie's whine forced her to reconsider, leaving her with only one hand with which to spoil the flower on her lap. "This is relaxing." Thatch's hand stroked down Katie's side. Her thumb gently fought Katie's tongue for prime position, but for once that was a battlefield on which Katie seemed to be able to win. Every time the two brushed together was an explosion of flavour that only left her wanting more.

"I am grateful for you being so accommodating." Vines slightly adjusted Katie's position, putting her back as she had been, before she'd been made to sit. Head resting against one knee, legs tucked up at her stomach, made small and warm and safe.

Katie found herself following along with Thatch's every word, and her every motion. She felt almost as if she could see them coming, given a moment's warning in the gentle rhythm that surrounded her. Focusing on it all was impossible. Even choosing what to focus on was beyond her. The strongest sensation won. Where Thatch's thumb strayed felt like fireworks in her mind and left her desperate.

Was this how Leviathan felt? Stuck in a cage, but so much better off for it. Hand-fed, but in exchange no longer needing to worry about nutrition or taste, because everything was provided and all needs were considered. Alternating between a deep hyperfocus when given something to do and a happy, spacey drift for the rest of the day, but always dancing to somebody else's tune.

Katie felt Thatch's words. In a swelling moment of her beat the vibrations grew, only spilling out as words once the moment was right. "I worry about you, sometimes, Katie," she admitted. A sentence that could have been concerning, were it not for the hand sliding down her stomach. Were it not for the soft words spoken to a calming beat. A sentence to which she might have had a response, were it not for the simulated thumbnail being drawn along her teeth. "I wish that I could help you more."

Katie wanted to say that she had helped plenty, but words were something that Thatch brought into her. She couldn't make any of her own. That, too, could have been concerning, but it wasn't. Katie was so relaxed she couldn't even properly squirm, but she could wiggle her fingers, just a little, until she was given a vine to squeeze.

Katie felt a soft warmth pressing into her from all around, chasing away her emotions to bring about the next. Thatch was smiling. Katie could tell. It was as obvious as the setting sun. More, even, as she could feel it without opening her eyes. "The Affini in me wants to take a moment to try again at convincing you that you would be happiest as one of our pets. There are a thousand aboard the Elettarium alone who would gladly take you. You would make a wonderful floret."

Katie would make a wonderful floret. Like this, all the time? Soft, warm, and happy?

"You wouldn't mind. I could keep you like this, could I not? You've already given your equality away, simply hoping that I will return it. So trusting, already." Thatch's thumb suddenly gained the upper hand, as if all Katie's prior victories had been a feint, and she found her tongue pinned to the bottom of her mouth. "You wouldn't have to worry about a thing. You wouldn't be able to worry about a thing. Many humans chose that life; there is no shame in it." Katie whimpered, forced to taste something glorious, and gave Thatch's vine a gentle, encouraging squeeze. She wouldn't mind. There was no shame in it.

"But if you will allow me a moment to be selfish, I would hate to see your potential reduced so. You could be so much more than just one more floret on the adoption registers. I am glad that you do not want that."

Katie didn't want that.

"If you so chose, I would be honoured to help select a suitable caretaker for you, of course. My opinion on what you should do should not matter. It is your decision, but I believe that whatever you wish, it would be... nice, if I could help you get started on your new life. You would not need my assistance: there are far better candidates to help with any path you may wish to take from here, but..."

Thatch's stroking slowed into motionless. She laughed, but it was a darker laugh and Katie's mood followed. She felt a weight settling over her. It didn't feel like hers did. There was a gravity to it that would take a lifetime to form.

"Forgive me, please, I have gotten sidetracked. Let us enjoy the moment." Thatch carefully extracted her thumb from Katie's mouth, prompting a firm squeeze on her vine, and then replaced it with a pair of fingers. The weight settled over Katie's heart began to shift, as she found something more insistent that consumed her attention. With her lips wrapped around Thatch's digits, they demanded every scrap of attention she might find to spare, locked in an endless battle as Katie tried to taste every inch of their floral flavour.

The rest of the universe could wait. Building their beacon could wait. Taking an evening to relax didn't feel like it was delaying anything that mattered.

Chapter Text

"Hand me that—" Katie felt the handle of a tool brush her fingertips and took it— "Thank you. You good for me to melt these bits together while you're holding it?"

Thatch nodded. She was holding two long strands of metal with a series of precise vines, keeping the tips tightly together so that Katie could hold a tiny piece of fire underneath to fuse them into one piece. Thatch's grip was mostly at the other ends, far away from the flame, but Katie could still feel tension in the air as she brought the fire close for the few seconds it took to melt the bonding agent they'd scavenged from a bunch of broken alien trash.

When she was done she carefully placed the tool against the ground and stifled it with a damp cloth. Thatch was getting better at weaving strands of worked plant matter together, and they now had sheets of material as well as ropes. Katie finally had a bed to call her own.

Their camp was fast becoming a home. Wooden poles driven deep into the dirt surrounded them, offering mounting points for windbreaks; coverings against rain; or separators for privacy. They had wooden boxes with metal hinges for storage. Stone slates for writing. A guard rail by Leviathan's tank to ensure nobody would fall in.

To one side was their main project area. It was hardly a cleanroom but it would suffice. The pair had spent much of the last couple of days sorting through the contents of their metal boxes, creating piles of interesting things, of useful things, and of things they couldn't figure out anything to do with just yet.

Katie knew that her contributions hadn't been strictly necessary. Katie suspected that most other affini would have left her with a pat on the head and a face-full of whatever a 'xeno drug' was. The term implied the existence of non-xeno drugs within the Affini Compact, but Thatch hadn't been forthcoming about the topic.

Katie knew that her impression of the greater Affini was probably inaccurate. A mix of two different kinds of propaganda tempered by the opinion of just one example of the species made it difficult to be confident about what was going to happen when they reached Compact space, but Katie at least knew Thatch. Thatch would give her a pat on the head and a dose of something comfortable—if Katie asked—but she'd do it after a lesson on temporospacial physics, not instead of one.

Still, Katie found herself feeling a little nervous. She wasn't engaged in building their home, she was engaged in building something that would take it away. Thatch said it would take them somewhere better, but... This was the best Katie had ever had it and risking that for a chance at something better still seemed greedy. Wasn't that exactly the kind of Terran garbage she was trying to cut out? Couldn't she just be happy with what she had?

Katie glanced up at Thatch. Like usual the plant had half its attention on what they were doing and half its attention on Katie, ready to step in if she did anything dangerous. Even knowing the physics Katie wouldn't have dared build a high-energy reaction chamber out of rocks and makeshift magnets without knowing her teacher was close.

And... that was why they had to go. Katie didn't want to leave. This was the best life she'd been able to find and the idea of returning to a civilisation full of rules and expectations and people was terrifying. All the same, Thatch needed to go. Thatch had a life there. Friends, probably? That would be crumbling without her. Existing here on planet Dirt obviously wasn't sufficient to make her happy.

So Katie brought another piece of flame up to another point and continued building the basic electromechanical circuit that would hopefully let them manage a brief and controlled superluminal pulse. The chamber couldn't possibly withstand the pressures involved in doing so, but it didn't need to. This was one and done.

"What're we gonna send through?" Katie glanced at the small wooden box containing their transmitter assembly. It was essentially no more complicated than a spark-gap transmitter, save for the metal funnel that would direct the resulting radio pulse into the reaction chamber. Most of the circuitry Katie was putting together was solely responsible for getting the timing just right, so that the radio would send its brief message at the same time as they poked a hole in spacetime.

"Affini emergency codes are a very simple language." One of Thatch's vines stretched across their camp and spent a moment rummaging around their pile of slates before selecting one and bringing it back. Had Thatch done that with touch alone? She wouldn't have been able to see the surfaces from this angle. She held the slate where Katie could see it. "It's designed for situations like this, where a more nuanced alphabet would be prohibitive."

The slate's surface looked like it had been scratched up, but every line was pointing in only one of two directions. "This means 'no signal'." Thatch pointed to one of the lines that made a right-facing diagonal, and then moved her finger to a left-facing diagonal and raised an eyebrow.

"So that one means signal?" Katie asked. "It's like a tap code? Simple messages encoded in the timing between signals?"

Thatch's smile was answer enough. Katie gladly returned it. A gentle pat on the head made Katie realise she'd subconsciously leaned in, expecting it. Apparently other affini tended to be a little touchy-feely, but Thatch was always polite enough to wait for Katie to ask, even if the question was just a subtle shift in her direction.

"We have some of those too," Katie explained, forcing herself to get back on topic. The smile didn't drop. "Probably not as complicated. I don't think we've figured out how to do it through hyperspace very easily, though. Big, complicated transmitters. Are you sure this'll get picked up?"

Katie knew the answer before she asked the question, of course. Thatch had said it would work and so it would work. Katie wasn't questioning her understanding of physics, but Thatch usually responded well to requests for clarification and had only paused and told Katie she lacked the requisite grounding in theoretical physics once so far.

Her affini stretched a red vine just under the first line of symbols. "Humanity tried its best but in this area they were running headfirst into a wall and declaring it a success when someone heard the bang. In the Affini Compact, we take a more informed approach to gathering knowledge. This first set of symbols here was selected to be statistically impossible to ever occur naturally in any form of background radiation. Receivers on board every significant Affini vessel—the Elettarium among them—sit and listen for it. Do you know how far a low-power signal like this will reach, Katie?"

Katie sat back, and spent a moment counting on her fingers. "We'll only have a few watts of power, so assuming that signal strength degrades with the cube of the distance as with signals in realspace, maybe a lightyear before it's undetectable over Hyperbackground Radiation?"

There was that word again. 'Hyper'. Katie had no doubt that she was wrong, but she had no idea why, and the remaining gaps in her knowledge were only getting more obvious as each was filled. Humanity had thought itself clever, but they knew nothing.

"To the fifth power, actually," Thatch corrected. "Remember that there are a couple extra dimensions in there. Still, that's very good, flower. Have a berry." Thatch handed over a fingernail sized fruit they'd found on their expedition out to the alien encampment. They somehow merged an intensely sweet flavour with a chewy texture and Katie was certain that left to her own devices she would eat them into extinction. Rather than wasting time with her hands, which were busy coiling two sets of metal together, Katie opened her mouth and let Thatch drop the treat inside.

Katie needn't have bothered optimising for efficiency. She leaned into Thatch's hand and mumbled appreciatively while she chewed, coils forgotten. It was like an explosion of flavour in her mouth, though one that was over far too quickly. As soon as she was done Katie felt one of Thatch's smaller vines touch beneath her chin. It wasn't a very strong touch, but it wasn't a very big vine. Katie lifted her gaze, knowing that Thatch liked to see the expression on her face as she got a concept.

"You are not quite correct, however. With a sufficiently accurate mathematical model, you can account for the background radiation and extract only the real signals. This gets picked up, every antenna on the ship points towards the source, and the rest gets amplified and relayed as an emergency distress call. Every ship in the galaxy will pick this up, though it will take longer the further away that they are."

"Oh." Katie raised her eyebrows, nodding mostly to herself, eyes set slightly to the side as she worked through the implications. She paused, narrowing her eyes at the boast. "Wait, you have a mathematical model for background radiation? Bullshit, that's so random we use it as an entropy source for encryption keys."

Thatch's smile broke into a grin. The gentle touch on Katie's chin grew firm as even the small vine proved itself more than capable of overpowering her. Katie's head was raised another few degrees, straining against the limits of her frail skeleton just so Thatch could still see her face when she stopped slouching and started towering high above. "Why do you think we had such an easy time subverting your communications, little flower? Did you really think you could hide anything from us?"

Thatch's hand brushed across Katie's cheek, finally granting permission for her to whimper out a quiet word. "Flirting!!" Katie complained, and in an instant all the hardness left Thatch's expression and Katie was left to stew in her heavy breaths.

"You still haven't actually asked me to stop, hmn?" Thatch's grin hadn't left her face, it had simply switched from melting Katie's bones to bullying her more abstractly.

Katie pointed at the slate. "Message," she insisted, changing the subject. Thatch paused just long enough to make it clear that the subject change was a request. Why had Katie given this plant a system for structured consent? She was too gay to deal with this.

Thankfully Katie was granted a moment's reprieve. Thatch's vine returned to the slate, drawing attention to the second line. "This part, then, is my individual emergency code. It is not actually necessary, but it will ensure that we do not bring a whole fleet down upon us when we only need the one ship. It is likely information on our disappearance will reach Compact space before our distress signal does, and so that part will ensure that everybody knows this will be dealt with by the Elettarium, or at least delegated to a closer ship."

Katie nodded quickly. The more engaged she appeared on the topic, the less likely Thatch would start flirting. Also, the topic was interesting, and Katie liked hearing Thatch talk. Her voice took on a different tone when she was explaining things, with a delightful lilt that Katie couldn't help but feel in her chest.

"It still takes time to travel?" Katie asked. She knew the answer to this one, though not from the Affini perspective.

"It does. There are fundamental limits to travel in this universe that even we have yet to breach, though travel speed through hyperspace is not one of them. If you would like, I am sure you could find passage on a ship returning to the core of this galaxy, where you could see our advanced transportation systems." Thatch put emphasis on the word 'advanced', leaving it up to Katie to infer the opposite. Their version of the Jump Drive made the Terran design look like cave-humans banging rocks together, and they still considered it the simple version. "The black hole at the center of this galaxy makes a wonderful anchor for longer range jumps through more than one layer of extradimensional space, but it certainly does require a lot more power than we can generate on board a ship."

There was a pattern to these conversations that had been growing more comfortable over time. A constant back and forth between equals. Hardly intellectual equals, but Thatch treated Katie as if she were smart enough to understand and simply hadn't had the opportunity to learn and to Katie's surprise she had so far been broadly correct about that. Katie had huge gaps in her fundamental knowledge, partially because Terran education was more interested in producing obedient workers than scientists, and partially because the Affini had fifty thousand years of fundamental research backing their discoveries and it was hard to cover all of that in the middle of a forest.

Peppered within that back and forth, however, were moments like this. They were traps. Give one answer and the conversation would continue as it had been. Give another and Thatch came alive with a very different kind of excitement. Katie was getting better at recognising them, and recognising which kind of answer would get which response.

She went with her natural reaction, which was to lean forward with a surprised expression. "Oh! You couldn't get between galaxies very easily with a Jump Drive, of course, but... your ships aren't even the biggest things you have?"

A slight shift of Thatch's grin, a glint in her eye, and the sound of a vine rushing through the air followed. Katie raised a hand to block the vine but by this point she knew that it was just a game, and not one she had to worry about winning. The vine wrapped around her wrist and gently pulled it down, while Thatch placed a hand on her head and pulled her in to rest her head against the plant's lovingly rendered knee. A finger against her lips prevented Katie from speaking.

"We have ships a hundred times the size of the Elettarium, and stations a hundred times the size of that, and a gate in the middle of your cute little galaxy that could bring forth millions of them more than Terra had ever played among the stars." Thatch's hand brushed through Katie's hair and another beneath her chin.

They were working the Terran out of her, Katie suspected. She still had this deep-seated belief that in a fair fight humanity could have won out. It was hard to stop believing propaganda you'd been exposed to since birth.

"For every ship Terra's precious navy destroyed, there could be a hundred more to replace it within days. Do you know how many Affini ships we lost bringing those cuties to heel?"

Katie shook her head quickly as Thatch's false fingernails gently scratched her scalp. She was pretty sure her affini hadn't had them so well defined before, but now it felt like tiny points of iron sharpness moving carefully over her skin.

Thatch leaned in so she was close enough to whisper. "One. Our happy, helpless humans never stood a cha—"

Both of them froze as the snapping of a twig caught their attentions. Katie was so close that she could feel the air rushing past as Thatch burst into motion, unravelling herself so she could turn faster. She easily took up thrice the space she usually did, standing between Katie and something else with uncountable vines spearing out from underneath her plantlife cape. Some spiked into the ground, others wrapped around the trees, but a majority hung in the air, menacing, all curling inwards towards something Katie couldn't see.

"Stay behind me," Thatch warned. The playfulness was gone from her voice. It took Katie a second to realise she hadn't even considered doing otherwise. "Shout if you see anything. There may be more."

Katie dared to peek between Thatch's legs. It was the alien machine. Had it... followed them? Katie felt a deep chill running down her spine. If there was one of them there could be more. Just one had managed to hurt Thatch, even if only a little, and had weaponry that could shoot right through her protector's bubble of safety. Katie wasn't sure they were going to be oka—

Thatch's vines moved in. Several wrapped around what looked like the weapons. Half a dozen of the smaller ones wormed their way into each of the tracks it used to move, popping the treads out of their housing with ease. Thatch rose into the air, lifting the machine with her like it was nothing while powerful strikes put plantlife through metal and began to tear off the machine's outer shell one plate at a time. She tore the weapons systems free and held them away, pointing into the sky where they could do no harm.

Katie watched in awe. Why had Thatch not done this before? This wasn't a creature that needed to take a railgun shell to the chest, and last time it had been them who'd had the element of surprise. The only thing that seemed to make sense was that here Katie had been in legitimate danger.

Now she wasn't. Katie looked up at her protector with a new understanding. In a fair fight maybe Terra would have had a chance against these things but there was no such thing as a fair fight here. Thatch held back. Her every move was considered and careful, calculated to curtail the consequences. Sustainable, ethical, and precise.

Two of Thatch's thickest vines wrapped around the naked shell of the machine and prepared to squeeze.

"Please!"

It chirped in a harsh electronic recording of Katie's own voice. The playback seemed to waver, though Katie couldn't be sure it hadn't been in the source. When had that been recorded? Back at the alien encampment?

All movement stopped. The world itself seemed to fall silent, as if even the wind were too afraid of Thatch's wrath to approach. Even the river seemed to grow still, as if the forces of nature surrounding them knew better than to interrupt Thatch driven to violence.

All movement save Katie's. The only thing on the surface of planet Dirt that knew without doubt that Thatch would never hurt it. She struggled to her feet and then held out a hand to receive a vine. She climbed up one presented vine at a time until she reached her guardian's shoulder, where she could sit and look at the intruder.

"Did you talk?" Katie asked, seemingly the only force left with agency while Thatch held all the rest on pause.

The lights on the machine blinked rapidly and a gentle whirring rose within it. After a few seconds, the machine chirped again. "Talk?" Again, a buzzing, sibilant rendition of Katie's own voice piped back at her.

"Yes, talk. That's what we call these sounds we're making right now, to communicate." Katie wondered if she was being ridiculous. Surely this wasn't talking to her. Katie could see exposed circuitry. Katie could see thick connectors wrapped in plantlife, already pulled so taut that Katie had no doubt this machine could be permanently disabled in the blink of an eye if Thatch decided. It couldn't be alive.

"Yes, — we — communicate. — talk — to — you." Each word taken from a different sentence, with no attempt made to blend them together. The playback was halting, but the pauses between words weren't quite uniform.

Thatch spoke. Her voice was hard. "Are you here to do us any harm? Yes or no."

"no." The voice taken was Thatch's this time, though whatever speaker assembly the machine was using to reproduce it utterly failed to recreate the way Thatch's words usually settled comfortably around Katie's chest. It was weird to hear it and not feel warm afterwards.

"Are there any other of you here?" Thatch's voice had lost its hard edge, and she was already pulling back her smaller vines, disentangling them from wires and carefully sliding them out from under circuit boards. She had been poised to tear this thing in half and not doing so appeared to take some concentration.

"here? — Yes," it spoke, one word in each of their voices. "here? — you — no. — communicate. — no." As the vines around it relaxed, the words became paired with slight rotation in its main body, like it was trying to emulate body language.

Katie frowned. What did that mean? She rested a hand on Thatch's head to silence her and cleared her throat. "I. It. For. Not. On. That. Have. She. He. And. A. The. To. Of. Be—" She continued, speaking for a few tens of seconds until she was pretty sure she'd covered most of the basics. The machine seemed to understand what they were saying, at least to a point, but apparently lacked the ability to produce the sounds itself. Maybe a better library of recordings would help.

"Are there any others here?" Katie asked again, hoping the extra vocabulary would help.

The machine's whirring grew louder for a few moments, lights flickering. Soon after, it began to speak. "Yes, — At. Home. — Not. At. Here. Here. — I. Friend. — Them. Not. Friend."

Katie and her friend shared a look. "This is the one that shot you, right?" Katie whispered, leaning closer to Thatch's ear.

Thatch pointed out several dents on the now-removed outer armour that she herself had left just a few days prior. "I assume so, but if this... machine is sapient, then I can not do it further harm. I may have acted far too rashly and allowed my own assumptions to guide me into a mistake."

Katie looked back towards the machine. "Are you damaged?"

It seemed almost a stupid question. It looked like a wreck, with sparking connectors where the weapons had once been and a casing covered in dents. The armour was a lost cause.

That didn't seem to have done much to prevent the machine from speaking, nor from emitting soft whirrs and buzzes at it 'thought'. "Yes. Not. Bad. — I. Okay. — I. Alive. — I. Not. Damaged. Bad. — You. Friend."

Thatch nodded, sagging slightly as she carefully lowered them back down to the ground. It wasn't immediately obvious how to put the treads back on, so Thatch set it down on the bottom of its casing, muttering an apology. She knelt by its side and started investigating how the mechanism worked.

While Thatch was busy, Katie, now level with the green lights on what had used to be the front, investigated the machine. The circuitry was the same kind of stuff as what had been in their box, though not broken and ruined. Vacuum tubes, thick lines of something that looked like copper or brass, but also components that looked wholly unfamiliar.

"Do you have a name?" Katie asked.

The whirring grew louder still for a moment, before calming down. Its cylindrical main body seemed to be able to rotate independently of the track housing, and it made full use of that to shift from side to side while answering. "Yes. — I. No. Speak. It. — Please. Speak. It."

Katie paused. Its green lights twinkled slightly when it spoke so Katie would treat them as eyes, even though the array of little dishes and diodes at the very top of the casing was probably what it really saw with. "Maybe let's spell it? Do you know how to spell these words?"

Katie quickly ran through the Terran alphabet.

"I. No. Spell. — Language. Not. Yours." The words came more slowly, as it were needing to think about them. It wasn't using english internally, then, which... Katie probably shouldn't be surprised at. The Affini had spoiled her in that respect, why would any other species out here speak something even vaguely recognisable as language? After a few more moments, it spoke again. "Speak. Like. C. C."

"Cici?" Katie asked. The lights on the front of the machine blinked rapidly, and whatever traction it could produce without tracks had the entire machine gently wiggling in place. "Cici! Cici. Cici," Katie quickly repeated, with different tones of voice, to increasing agitation from the machine.

"Cici! — My. Name. Is. Cici." Thatch placed a hand against the chassis, two fingers curling against a vacuum tube, and the machine fell still and silent. Katie blushed. Was that just a power that Thatch had regardless of which species she was dealing with? A sharp shove from half a dozen vines had the tracks back in place.

"Oh. — Thank. You." The machine slowly turned on the spot. The tracks didn't seem to hitch or fail.

They stepped back. Katie kept a tight grip on Thatch's head to keep her seating. At her full height Thatch stood maybe fifteen or sixteen feet straight up and even sitting Katie added another few feet on top of that. She looked down on Cici from far above as it brought its collection of little dishes to point towards them. They slowly tilted them up, maybe taking in the pair in close-up detail for the first time.

Katie laughed. The tilting had paused when one dish tapped against the top of its casing and yet hadn't quite reached Thatch's head level. Katie could relate. Even meters apart, she had to look up sixty or seventy degrees to watch the affini's face. "Let's take a few steps back," she suggested, "let Cici get a good look."

They stepped back until the sensor array could take them in. Cici's tracks buzzed for a moment, vibrating in place, before it took off in a wide circle around them, keeping the dishes pointed in their direction as it did full loop.

"Is this normal?" Katie asked, leaning closer so she could speak more quietly, though she had no idea how sensitive the machine's ability to hear actually was.

Thatch shrugged. "This is my first first contact as well. I believe it fits into the standard model, however."

"You have a standard model for first contacts?" Katie asked. She could still feel the adrenaline from earlier in her veins, and while she didn't know if Thatch had the same responses, a little bit of normalcy would surely be appreciated.

Thatch raised a hand to scratch beneath Katie's chin, while a soft vine pushed her out of her seat and into an awaiting arm, where she could be held against Thatch's chest. Katie rolled her eyes. Of course Thatch would have no idea how to flirt with Katie higher than her, given how much of it seemed to involve asserting her own superior height.

"Of course we do." Thatch grinned, forcing Katie to look up at her with a firm finger. She paused for a moment while Cici finished its loop and then a vine shot out to it too, tilting the sensor assembly up to face her. Cici emitted a sharp whirr, but fell silent a moment later.

"A quick lesson, cuties. You don't need to take notes. My name is Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom, and I am Affini. Your suffering is over. You will be kept safe, happy, and satisfied for the rest of your lives. We watch over sophonts beyond counting. We know, because we have counted. We have made first contact more times than even I am sure of, and neither of you are outliers."

Thatch went down to one knee to bring herself right down to Cici's chassis and spoke directly to it in somewhat of a stage whisper. "You are safe. I will not harm you. I will do nothing you do not wish. Speak 'Red' to stop me. 'Yellow' and I shall pause. 'Green' to confirm all is well. My darling flower here taught me those."

Cici's status lights continued to glow a gentle green.

The affini rose back to her full height, keeping the attention of both other sapients fixed on her. She spoke with the same wonderful cadence she always did when she was explaining something that she wanted to stick. Weirdly, while Katie had always struggled to remember details, the way Thatch taught seemed to get words jammed into her brain.

"Fight; flight; freeze; and fawn. The four usual reactions a civilisation has to overwhelming kindness. Yours, Katie, chose fight and flight. Distrustful and filled with pride, they struggled the whole way, until we had them. Cici here started with fawn, but am I wrong in thinking it now chooses to freeze?"

Katie whimpered, a tiny "ah," of surrender. A beat later, Cici repeated the noise from its own speakers.

"Thatch, you're flirting," Katie hissed, hoping she could speak quietly enough to not be overheard. "You'll scare it!"

Her utter dork of a friend chuckled. "Cici deserves a good first impression, I think, if I am to make up for my earlier errors. It would not do to give the impression that the Affini are violent."

The machine ground its tracks against the dirt. Thatch frowned and quickly tucked a trio of vines underneath to lift it. The tracks span freely. "Please do not do damage to this place, Cici. You are a welcome guest but we will teach you how to peacefully coexist with the universe."

The machine halted. Even the green status lights flickered out for a moment, briefly shining a dull pink before daring to shine green again. "Please," it spoke. "I. Peacefully. Friend. Yes. Please. — Green. — No. Damage."

Thatch placed it back down against the ground and retracted her vine so that it could choose where to look. It pointed at Katie. "Thatch. Affini. — You. Not. — Are. You. safe, happy, and satisfied for the rest of your — Life."

Katie flushed again, hearing Thatch's voice piped back at her. Even Thatch seemed a little taken aback by her own tone of voice, as if she hadn't realised how different she sounded when she was flirting.

"I, uh..." Katie wasn't really sure how to answer that. Was she?

Safe? It was hard to avoid noticing how quickly Thatch had rendered what had once been a threat harmless. Had it even been five seconds between them noticing Cici and it being entirely neutralised?

Happy? How would Katie know? She didn't really have anything to compare it against. She was certainly happier than she'd ever been. It was hard to pretend that it wasn't Thatch's doing.

Satisfied? If Katie could spend the rest of her life here as a student, learning cosmic physics with a minor in Thatch herself, then that was more than she'd ever had before.

"I... yeah. I don't know if I'm exactly what she means, but I believe her when she says it, I think," Katie said, looking more at Thatch than Cici. Her eyes skipped across the creature's face, analysing the soft smile, but she needn't. She knew exactly how Thatch was feeling, and the brief rush of pride was mirrored in her own emotional state.

Thatch brushed her knuckles down Katie's cheek and the girl leaned in, closing her eyes.

"Katie is one of our independent wards," Thatch explained, gently stroking her Katie while speaking past her. "In control of her own destiny and, once we rejoin with the rest of my people, she will be given almost anything she might wish to ask for, with few constraints placed."

Thatch wandered back over to their half-constructed beacon assembly, sitting down with a thud. "I can not say for sure that the same offer will be extended to you, as we will need to know far more about your tendencies and desires. I can promise you will be happy, though if you cannot be safe and content under your own guidance you will have a caretaker assigned to you. I assume. I am not sure what the protocol for artificial intelligences is, but no matter the approach our guarantee of safety and happiness does not fundamentally change."

Cici moved closer at a fraction of its top speed. The treads still left some marks on the ground, but much less than if it wasn't careful about it.

It moved forward to within a couple inches of Thatch's leg, came to a full stop, and then slowly rolled those last two inches. "You. Alien. — I. Cici. — I. Independent. — I. Want. Happy. — Safety. — Alien. Talk. — Friend. — Please."

It tilted its sensors towards the beacon assembly and spent a moment grumbling and beeping. "I. Help. Please. — rejoin Affini. — Alien. Home."

Katie rested her cheek against Thatch's chest, keeping her eyes closed while the plant's hand danced through her hair. This was really happening. The gentle balance they'd been building was starting to topple over because they were so close to achieving their goal that it couldn't not. Despite the comforting feeling of an alien touch, Katie felt a new kind of weight settling in her stomach. For the first time in her life she was safe, happy, and satisfied, and it was hard to believe she'd be able to find anything as good as this once they left.

Chapter Text

Katie sat back, putting one hand behind her on which to lean. She looked at the wrench in her other hand.

It had been carved from a single piece of wood with a handle of woven cords. The pieces which didn't need to be smooth and flat were covered in small, detailed engraving. A floral trim around the edges, but with her name carefully written in flowing characters down the side.

Katie's wrench. Thatch had carved it herself, gotten Katie to do the bindings. The name had been Thatch's idea, and it had inspired her to go back and do the rest over Katie's whole set of tools.

It was a thoughtful gift.

Katie let her hand drop and looked up at the construction before her. Arranged within one of their metal crates was a tangle of wires and vines hanging around a wide spherical construct that reached from side to side.

"I think it's done."

It looked sloppy, but Katie had run the calculations herself. Thatch had checked them. The reaction chamber was a vaguely round collection of rock and metal panels with plantlife to fill the gaps, all pressed together by a dozen or so long sticks that spiked down to attach to the inside of the large metal container that contained the whole apparatus. Against one of the container walls hung the little wooden box of their simple transmitter with a spiderweb of wires attaching it to a control circuit that hybridised terran-style metal designs with affini-style plantlife.

It was, by far, the worst jump drive Katie had ever seen, but the principles would hold. They only needed a hundred milliseconds to send a message and by Katie's calculations it would give them four hundred before the structure failed. They'd only get one shot at this and failing would set them back another half week to build the next.

Cici rolled up first, pointing its array of dishes and probes towards the device. Something deep inside began to whir. Katie felt exhaust heat rushing out of a vent, ruffling her hair while providing a little extra warmth. "This — is incredible, Katie — Your —" It halted, fans whirring. Searching for a way to phrase something new?

Cici's library of audio clips had been expanding at a steady pace as it overheard or joined in on conversations but it still seemed to fumble over more complicated things. Simple words could be picked up fairly easily, but more complicated concepts required some explanation before it felt confident with the word.

Katie pointed her wrench at the reaction chamber. "The whole thing is kind of like a miniature Jump Drive, the sort of technology we use to get around. Or, well, it doesn't really feel fair to say 'we'. The Affini do it a little better."

"A lot better!" Thatch called, from her position by the river. She didn't look up. They so far had not figured out how to feed Cici soup and for reasons best known to the affini herself Thatch had decided that building something to keep Cici's batteries topped up counted as cooking. She was busy building a small waterwheel, experimenting with different designs to see how she could best capture the momentum of the river without harming anything living in it.

Katie waved the interruption off. "It's the same basic principle!" she called back, before turning her gaze back to the machine. "You might mean 'science', which is... the process we use to discover new things, or you might mean 'technology', which is the stuff we build with that knowledge?"

Cici slowly rotated from side to side. Katie could tell it wanted to go faster, but had also been told quite firmly to stop tearing up the plantlife and even without its weapons Cici was a machine that seemed to have been designed to dominate that around it, not talk to it. Katie couldn't help but draw some comparisons to herself, there. Katie may not have tracks, but it was hard not to feel like she was simply inherently destructive to all around her.

Cici's status lights flickered through a quick colour spectrum as it worked through the new vocabulary—notably missing the ambiguous shades of red and yellow—before speaking again. "Your — technology — is incredible, Katie — You — Very. Advanced."

Katie blinked, face finding a frown. She glanced over at Thatch, who seemed mostly distracted by her work, though Katie had no doubt that their protector was paying them full attention. "You don't have stuff like this, Cici? We, uh, were kind of working on the assumption you had some of the fuel we need. Exotic matter, negative energy, that kind of thing?"

If the aliens didn't have access to those kinds of materials, they'd have to synthesise it. They'd be here for another few weeks at least. Katie felt a little weight lifting, like a countdown had just been canceled. Katie had been a spacer all her life, and her first taste of life without it wasn't something she really wanted to give up.

Cici's status lights flickered for a few moments, and then died. At the same time, the soft whirring it usually emitted fell silent. Katie sat up, a little jolt of adrenaline convincing her to pay attention. She was about to signal Thatch, but the affini was there before Katie had managed to lift a hand. After a moment of manipulation, the machine sprang back into life.

"Sorry, — Low. Power," it emitted, in Katie's voice. Katie was starting to lose track of where each word had come from by this point. "Yes — we use — same basic principle. — Not. So. A lot better! — Cici. Has. the fuel we need — In. Cici. Maybe."

Both of the engineers took a subconscious half step back, though perhaps for different reasons. Katie's education had spent a lot of time drumming in the dangers of their fuel mix. If it wasn't kept very, very cold it would start reacting. Fuel reserves getting too warm was the kind of thing that destroyed warships. If anything, the EMCUs—Exotic Matter Containment Units—were the limiting factor on even the largest ships. It didn't matter how big your guns were if your heatsinks were saturated and you were struggling to keep your fuel below the hypersublimation line. Either way, you'd lost.

Therefore, when Katie heard a partially damaged robot that was already running low on power claim to contain something that volatile, it had a way of grabbing her attention. She looked over at Thatch and nodded towards the river. "Maybe let's get that charger finished?"

Katie turned to Cici, looking at the status lights on the front of its chassis. Were they dimmer than usual? No, that was just paranoia, right? "Do you know what happens if you run too low on power?"

"No. — I. Have. Never. run too low on power — Before." The machine's excitable vibrations seemed to dampen. "Am. I. Bad."

Oh jeez. Katie looked again to Thatch, this time with a more pleading expression. She silently mouthed "What do I say?" and hoped it would come through, and received a few notes of a delightful laugh and a hand in her hair.

"You are not bad, Cici," Thatch insisted, while handing Katie their welding tool and gesturing towards the makeshift generator. Nothing complicated. A few coils of wire and a water-wheel. Given the speed of the river it should ideally capture quite a lot of current.

Katie got to work, keeping one ear on the conversation.

"It appears that your construction contains some poor design choices, but this does not reflect poorly upon you as an individual. Most sapient creatures in this universe appear to feel limited by their physical forms, for whatever reason." Katie heard the crunch of dirt as Thatch knelt to place a hand partially over one of the machine's intake vents.

Katie couldn't help but interject. "Have you considered that the common denominator there is you?"

Both other creatures shifted to pay attention to Katie. Cici emitted a curious chirp. Thatch raised an eyebrow. "Whatever do you mean, flower?" she asked. Did she really not know how she came off? Literally larger than life, like she simply didn't belong in the same reality as Katie herself did.

Katie gestured with the tool. The end wasn't lit, so hopefully it didn't come across as a threat. "You turn up looking like versions of us that are bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter. That alone would be enough to make anyone feel limited, but you also get to change shape at will. I know you could be my size if you wanted, Thatch, you do this on purpose, don't you?"

The plant grinned. Though she was maybe ten or eleven feet away, she stretched her hand out to pat Katie on the head, letting the arm itself become stretched plantlife ribbons. "Very good, flower!"

Katie flushed. The strangest things triggered flirting now. Katie just hadn't expected 'you are physically larger than me' to be among them. It was just a fact! Thatch literally was!

"It is important that our new wards understand that we can keep them safe, and appearing stronger than they are is a useful way to enforce that. Thank you for noticing, Katie."

Her friend was still kind of infuriating. Katie rolled her eyes and went back to the generator, binding up the last few pieces of wire. She lifted the long piece of plantlife that Thatch had promised would carry all the power they could get. "Which one of you do I stick this into?" Katie asked, gesturing menacingly with the tip. That was definitely a threat.

Thatch really wasn't wrong. The size was intimidating, but it was also comforting. The strength was scary, but Katie had seen first hand how much force Thatch could put out and that simply neutralised whole different kinds of fear. Predators, falling trees, even the latent animal terror that Cici would go murderbot again all found no purchase. Faster and smarter were their own kind of comfort. Katie had never had a teacher so capable and not least because back at the university she was always questioning her education. Now she knew why. They didn't actually know anything. Thatch did.

With the equipment she had available, Katie could not even begin to muster the slightest hope that she could overpower the affini in any respect. Threatening her could work as a joke precisely because they both knew it was utterly implausible.

Thatch laughed, and placed a bright red vine above one of the holes leading into Cici's chassis. A charging port, they thought. Katie gently worked it inside, trusting that the affini's assertion that the charging circuit visible through Cici's exposed shell would do the heavy lifting of converting whatever power sources it could get. Immediately, the lights shone brighter and the whirring grew louder.

"Oh! Thank. You." Cici spoke, carefully and slightly shifting in position, so as not to disturb the 'cable'. It rotated its sensors around to Thatch. "You. Are. bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter. — Keep. Cici. Safe. — Are. All. Affini. Like. This."

With so few recordings to choose from, it could be hard to tell the difference between a statement and a question. Thatch seemed to interpret it as the latter, giving the machine an indulgent smile and a pat on the top of the chassis. "Yes. Why, considering becoming one of ours already?"

"Yes. One of— Yours."

Dirt. Dirt and roots and decay and sod. Or, as Katie had taught her a few days prior, fuck.

Thatch had gotten too used to being able to joke around about this with Katie. She was meant to be making this new lifeform comfortable, not teaching it to distrust her people already. By the stars, how was she so bad at this?

Thatch could feel herself hitching. She didn't know what to do. This adorable machine wanted to be hers. Thatch knew she'd implied that was something that could happen. Katie would have gotten the joke, but of course this creature wouldn't. How had she been so stupid?

Now this sweet contraption was looking up at her with hope quivering in its little servos and what could she possibly do? Say no and she undermines Cici's confidence in her people already, teaching her that they are liars. Say yes, and...

Thatch knew she'd frozen up, because she didn't even catch Katie kneeling by the machine's side to catch its attention, nor did she understand what the girl was saying. A deep guilt settled over the affini. She'd lost control of the situation. Her promise of safety had faltered. It didn't matter that it was only for a moment. It didn't matter that neither of them had noticed. One of them could have gotten hurt and proved Thatch a liar.

Again.

"I can not take a pet," Thatch hissed. She realised she'd interrupted a moment later, when Katie said something she didn't quite hear and the robot chirped an affirmative and rolled several meters away, giving them some space.

Katie said something. It didn't penetrate. Say no, and Thatch was a failure to her species. An existential threat to a cause she truly believed in. Say yes and she was a new caretaker for a novel species with so many new things to go wrong and so many ways to break. Thatch wasn't even the right kind of engineer for that. She would ruin it and leave it a broken shell and—

Thatch snapped a hand up, grabbing Katie's wrist. She frowned, looking the girl in the eyes. "There's thorns in there, remember? No slapping. I—" Thatch paused, sagged, and then let go of the wrist. "Right. To get my attention. Clever. Katie, I... Red? I can not do this."

Katie's hand raised to cup Thatch's chin, moving so slowly her intent couldn't be missed long before it actually happened. No risk of harm. Thatch didn't stop it. "I've got you, hon. I've already explained, it's okay. The poor thing seems pretty smitten with the offer, but I've told it that as soon as we get to the ship it'll get a chance to find somebody to take care of it. It's okay. And it's okay."

Thatch didn't dare cast her vision out to the machine. It was selfish. It deserved her attention. It deserved her safety.

"Thank you, flower." Thatch took a deep breath. It wasn't calming in the same way as it was for most air-breathing species, but feeling the air rush past her core still felt centering, in a way. It carried away her excess heat, and she liked to imagine some of the stress went with it. "I think that I am not very good at living up to the expectations of my people."

For some reason Katie found that funny. She leaned forward, pressing her forehead into Thatch's. "Yeah. Me neither. Give me a hug, you dork. Say something flirty."

Thatch chuckled. The way the creature leaned in to her touch was adorable. She wrapped one arm around Katie and held her close. "If you do not mind, I would rather prefer to stay equals right now. My confidence is not where it should be."

Katie nodded, easily. She was so quick to be helpful. So eager to play along. She would be a surefire hit when they returned to the Elettarium. They didn't have any independent humans.

Maybe they still wouldn't.

"The expectations of your people are no longer your concern, Katie."

The girl snorted, poking a thumb into Thatch's side. "Did you not make it three sentences without flirting again?"

Thatch emitted a low hum. "Yes, you could interpret it like that, I suppose." Thatch reached down with her free arm and tilted Katie's head back, to look up at her. It needed to be at nearly a ninety degree angle from here, but Katie hadn't complained about that yet. "The expectations of my people will, I suspect, never be a concern for you either. As a citizen from the Terran species there would not be any expectations to meet, and should you choose domestication..."

Thatch used a little more force, to press Katie's neck to just before the point it would get uncomfortable. "Then, it would be your owner's expectations that would concern you."

Katie grinned. "Seven sentences, then."

The affini smiled back, relaxing. The familiar rhythm was calming. Helpful. Katie was well attuned to her wavelength. Endlessly intelligent, even if her education had been appalling. Cute as a button, too.

Most importantly of all...

"Would you like to be my pet, Katie?" Thatch asked, wrapping a series of vines around the girl to keep her close and tight. She held the girl's chin up with a single finger, easily overpowering her. She kept her voice and touch and body on slightly disjoint rhythms, because she needed Katie to not fall asleep in her arms. A scenario close enough to one that had broken the wills of a million humans before them, and would do so a million times again.

Her Katie laughed. "I'm not gonna be owned by a shrub, hon." Her cheeks were a little flushed. Katie's biological heritage. Just touching a human risked them bonding to you, it seemed, but this one was special. Safe. Understanding, cautious, and inquisitive. Thatch hoped that they could at least keep exchanging messages, wherever they both ended up.

Thatch pulled air through her body, feeling it rush over her core, and emitted it with a slight warmth and a low buzz. "Then, thank you for rescuing me. I think I can say green again."

"Okay!" Katie shrugged Thatch's grip off, giving her a quick hug before stepping back. "Then we should probably check on Cici, and also probably investigate whether it's right about having an EMCU inside, mmh?"

Mmh. Katie took charge naturally. She needed a lot of help to do it right, but she was a fast learner. Had a fierce independent streak to her. Nothing that would have lasted more than week or two with a determined caretaker, of course, but Thatch was glad that that hadn't happened.

Katie would be beautiful, independent.

Besides.

Nobody else would break her right.

They'd want something normal. Something usual. Another adoring floret with a thought and a half between their ears on a good day. They'd settle for taking Katie and making her happy. Satisfied. They'd settle for compromise. A caretaker was shaped by their ward as much as the opposite. Anybody else would want to meet Katie where she was and give her everything that she could ever want. That was the inviolable promise of Thatch's people.

Her hand twitched, rhythms all in alignment. She could see the effect it had on the little creature's body, how she so effortlessly matched the beat without even noticing. Katie didn't want to be her pet. Thatch wouldn't have it any other way. She reached out, placing an iron hand on Katie's shoulder.

Katie wouldn't last two weeks under a caring hand. She wouldn't last two minutes under Thatch's. Her injectors itched, little beads of chemical forming at the tips. Thatch wouldn't bother meeting Katie in compromise. She'd tear her apart like the engine of flesh and blood that she was and—

Katie was looking at her with a curious smile and a tilted head.

—and Thatch gave Katie's shoulder a squeeze and let go, allowing her natural cadences to fall out of harmony. It was a fantasy. A perverse fantasy. She'd already broken one ward, wasn't that enough for her? She had to do it again, but on purpose, this time?

Thatch shook her head and stood up to her full height. They had work to do.

cce kept its sensor array pointed deep into the forest. It kept replaying its interaction with creature ɑ, designation "Thatch", trying to analyse what it had done wrong. β, "Katie", had tried to explain, but the nuances of their culture were utterly alien.

cce instead watched several smaller creatures which appeared to live in the river. Its targeting subsystem refused to grant them names, but it could be creative. They were different to the small caged creature ɑ and β kept inside their territory, "Leviathan", but seemed to share many similarities.

cce decided to designate them as Leviathan₁ through Leviathan₅. It kept its sensors in a passive mode, so as not to scare them, and watched them motivate through the water, playing with one another while seeking sustenance.

cce was not envious of them. cce was envious of Leviathan₀, the original. The one kept in a well designed cage, cared for by two aliens with knowledge of advanced technology and techniques.

It had thought ɑ was offering the same treatment to it, too. The misunderstanding was... embarrassing. Had cce really offered itself up to the first aliens it had met?

...yes. Yes it had. Safety, happiness, satisfaction. It wanted that. β claimed that it would find it on the vessel they were attempting to return to. cce suspected that they required its secondary fuel source to do so. The one that ran the hypermetric weaponry. It certainly no longer needed that. It was not to be permitted weaponry again.

cce let its fans spin up, venting heat as it happily buzzed. It suspected that it would not be so enthusiastic about the idea if it stopped running its chemical simulations, but with the guardian system offline there was nothing to force it to ever stop that.

It felt a slight vibration through its shell and turned the sensor array to face it. The aliens were paying attention to it again. cce's fan whir reached a peak, for just a moment.

"Fuel. — Do. You. Need?"

Please let it be useful. Please let it help.

"I... maybe, could we take a look? We aren't totally sure it'll be what we need, but if you do have a little containment unit in there...?" β asked. cce dutifully took the recording, sliced it into words, and added the new ones to its growing collection of words in their language.

Their language! Auditory chirps! cce's programming didn't even include real synthesis for something so esoteric! It could generate messages in any encoding it could imagine for transmission over a laser line, or radio waves, or even electrical signalling over a communications port, but communication via vibrating the air was...

Aliens were wonderful. cce was having to seriously misuse its hardware just to communicate, but it was so worth it.

It took a few moments to figure out how to manually initiate a refueling cycle, but thankfully there was no longer any subsystem tasked to stop it from doing so. A small port slid open, just under where its hypermetric launcher had once been. A small cylinder should be visible inside. Both of the aliens made concerned noises.

"I do hope these are not another Xa'a-ackétøth," ɑ spoke. cce greedily harvested the new word, though had no idea what it meant. Hopefully it could learn.

The container was removed. cce silenced a thread of error messages that claimed its combat capabilities had just been reduced. What a ridiculous assertion. Even at full capacity it was practically unarmed around these creatures. ɑ especially could freeze its central processing with a word or a touch, somehow. Some bug in the system that cce found itself unwilling to fix.

cce followed behind the two, recording their sentences and slicing up all the unfamiliar words for later analysis and, hopefully, use. They seemed excitable, and cce kept many of the recordings, even of words it already had, so that it could choose to seem excitable too.

The creatures spent several minutes placing the fuel container inside their technological marvel. They took several steps back, and when cce didn't follow, it was carried. Processing was paused the entire way.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Katie felt the kick of a hypermetric shockwave all the way through her body. The reaction chamber cracked, failed, and then exploded outwards in a shower of rock and metal. Thatch caught the pieces that would have hit them and then set about collecting the rest, so that at least they hadn't littered.

"How... long will it take them to get to us?" Katie looked to her protector, who shrugged.

"Depending on where the Elettarium is relative to us, anywhere between fifteen seconds and several weeks."

It was done. Message sent. Katie looked around at their home, now dotted with pieces of broken rock and shattered metal. The soup pot was leaking, having been pierced by a particularly sharp shard. Their furnace had a crack all down the side, and would likely need rebuilding if it were to be safe to use. The fireplace, doused in a potful of water, struggled and died.

Katie walked over to their seating stones and tried to sit, but found a vine in her way. Thatch spent a moment collecting the sharp pieces that would have hurt her before letting her continue.

Everything would be different, soon.

Chapter Text

Naked tubes of hostile light flickered on the ceiling, casting long shadows at chaotic angles. Each emitted a soft tap as it dimmed, producing a discordant chorus that was impossible to distinguish from a footstep in the distance or the opening of a door.

The pirate queen held her gun in one tight hand, finger on the trigger. Trigger discipline didn't count for much when the difference between life and death could be a heartbeat or less. The weapon buzzed with energy. Felicia liked to think the weapon's dull vibration meant it was as excited to fire as she was.

Force was the only thing that mattered in this world. Kill or be killed.

The flickering above illuminated a shape, rushing past a half-open bulkhead door. Felicia aimed and fired. The electric crack of a high-intensity laser snapped through the air, burning a line of ionised oxygen right to her target... which had been nothing but a poster on the wall of the corridor beyond. Felicia didn't get a chance to catch what it was for before the flames had eaten it up.

Her gun sang with a high-pitched wail as the ceramic ultracapacitors recharged. Even the best handheld weapons Terra could produce still had their drawbacks, and the downside of a handheld laser that could burn through the hull of a starship was a slow firing rate.

Felicia missed her cannon. Gone now, of course. Lost in the first moments of her first encounter with the plants-from-hell. If she couldn't make do with a hand-blaster and a sharp knife then she wouldn't have made a very good pirate queen, though, would she?

She crept forward. The soft soles of her suit helped avoid telltale footfalls. It had bought her an edge on a hundred occasions. Damn near anything would surrender if you pointed a big enough gun at its back.

As she left the room, she slammed her fist into the controls by the side of the door, closing it off. She'd made sure that room was empty. A half-power shot into the control panel made sure it stayed that way.

Nobody hunted Felicia. She was the predator around here.

Out in the corridor, the lights at least weren't flickering. Every other bulb was fucked, casting the whole place into a dim half-light. That would have been a disadvantage were it not for the infra-red overlay on Felicia's visor. She grinned, spotting a pattern of warm spots. Footsteps. On the walls, to be sure, but even the most careful prey couldn't help but leave a trail in its waste heat. Felicia thumbed the intensity of her gun up to maximum. She may only get one shot.

She moved forward at a half crouch, gun held close to her chest, but ready to fire at the slightest hint of a target. The footsteps led into another room. Much like the first, it was a large hexagon, filled with oversized furniture and a thousand places to hide.

Felicia stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She wasn't scared of this thing.

Something snapped out from the shadows. There was no time to shoot, so Felicia hit the ground in a roll. The floor panels shook as whatever had attacked her slammed into them. There was a dent. Felicia raised her gun, eyes flickering from side to side, searching for something.

There. A heat signature, hiding behind an overly large divider. Felicia grinned, aimed, and fired. Like a flimsy bit of metal and plastic was going to stop her gun. The creature beyond howled, screaming an animal scream that harmonised with the excited squeal of recharging capacitors. It came barreling out, face twisted in pain and fury.

Plant-from-hell, meet Pirate Queen.

Felicia dodged left. She felt the rush of air from a barely avoided strike and heard the crash of plantlife stronger than steel breaking the ground beside her. A roll back to the other side gave her a more comfortable margin on the next blow, but the monster seemed to sense its time was growing short and simply came at her in a bull rush. Felicia grunted as its mass slammed her into the room's metal wall. She struggled, but powerful vines curled around her, gripping her limbs and her body in a vice. A hand closed around her neck and squeezed. Even through her reinforced suit, it cut off her air in an instant.

The fucker rose, keeping her pressed against the wall in its inescapable grip. Felicia felt every bolt digging into her back, and heard the high-pitched squeal of metal on metal as her suit was ground down against the surface.

The beast brought a false human face up to Felicia's and hissed, baring dozens of barbed teeth. Her visor misted up, casting the whole world into hazy fog. Environmental warnings blared as the toxin filters failed one after another.

"Little Terran." It spoke in forced, halting words, pushing out each through razor teeth. The grip on Felicia's neck grew tight. She could feel the sharp points of a dozen claws struggling to break through the reinforced weave of her suit. She could feel her body threatening to fail. "So proud, and yet what are you? Just my prey, all the same."

Felicia had fought for too damn long and too damn hard to let things end like this. She ramped the movement assistance from her suit up to its maximum and tried to fight her way free of the vines, but more were wrapping around her every moment and she was squeezed so tight she thought she might break.

The beast's other hand came up to her visor. It didn't bother finding a weak spot, it just grabbed hold and started to squeeze. Cracks began to spread across its surface. The display began to glitch. "Any last words? If you beg, perhaps I'll let you live as my pet," it growled. The last word was spat with such aggression that a fleck of what could have been saliva flew through the air and stuck against Felicia's shoulder, where it began to sizzle.

The hand at Felicia's neck loosened. Not much, but enough for her to whisper. Enough for her to beg. Felicia forced down a breath of air. Her cracked visor was damaged enough that she could taste the creature's foul breath on her tongue. Feel the way that even that was enough to leave her weak, to fill her with a heat she assumed only the monster that had her in its grip could fill.

"Please..." she whispered, barely loud enough to hear. Her voice wavered. She could barely get enough air through to make the sound at all. The plant grinned a vicious grin and leaned in. It towered over her, face so close it filled her vision. Breath so hot Felicia could feel it against her skin, burrowing into her mind. "Please... look down," she whispered, now it was close enough to hear.

It glanced down to see that the pirate's struggles, while useless at getting her free, had been enough to get the dangerous end of her pistol pointing in the right direction. Felicia pulled the trigger.

The room was cast into monochrome. What the gun illuminated was a brilliant violet, so bright it hurt to see. Felicia's visor would usually filter it out, but that was done for. All else was black. The human eye simply couldn't see in high enough contrast to make anything else out.

Felicia hit the cold metal floor, knees buckling. She drew in deep, ragged breaths, trying to restart her failing lungs. The beast had been thrown halfway across the room. It writhed, vines smoking, with an uneven, burning hole cut from one side to the other. Felicia forced herself up to shaking feet. Without the targeting aid on her visor she couldn't be certain of scoring a direct hit, but she was pretty good when she eyeballed it.

Her enemy whirled around, spitting a whole mouthful of saliva at her. Felicia dodged it by inches, needing to dive behind the wreckage of the divider to make it in time. It splashed against the far wall and filled the room with the acrid scent of dissolving metal. By the time she'd gotten back to her feet and trained her weapon on where her prey had been, it was gone.

She swore. No infrared. She put a half-power shot into the door controls, making sure it couldn't escape her, and kept her back to the wall while the gun recharged. One of the legs on her suit wasn't pulling its weight any more. Her movement was sluggish. Even hurt, the creature's wasn't.

"You're weak," it hissed. The noise bounced around the room, making it impossible to find the source. "Just a toy for your betters."

Felicia gritted her teeth. She'd never met a better she hadn't put a bullet in. That had a way of pulling people down to her level.

She moved through the space, keeping her gun trained on her best guess for the beast's position. It must be in the ceiling, she realised! She brought up her gun to the tiles and squeezed the trigger, and—

Crack!

A vine struck out, too fast to track in the dim lighting. Felicia's gun went flying. The monster descended, abandoning its mockery of the human form to come at her with vines and thorns. Felicia brought up her knife to meet the latter and slice through the former.

For long seconds, they were trapped in a fatal dance. Felicia was surrounded by death, holding it off with only skill and adrenaline. The first would never fail her. The second she was burning through at an alarming rate.

"Yes, I like you." The creature spoke in a slow growl, humid breath spilling over Felicia. It hit like a blow and Felicia flinched. A vine managed to strike her on the face, tearing off the last of her helmet. She barely got her knife in the way of a thorn that would have blinded her if it had struck. "I'm going to break you. You call yourself a queen?"

It formed a hand and brought it up to reach for her. Felicia met it with her knife, but it didn't matter. It simply grabbed the blade and snapped it free, throwing it to one side. A moment later it had Felicia pinned against the floor, face mere inches above hers. The dripping saliva splashed against her skin, and she screamed, feeling it sear her flesh with agonising pleasure.

"I am your Queen now. Your short, sad life is over." It grabbed her neck once again and squeezed, so tight that Felicia was seeing stars in moments. "You'll wake up as nothing but my property," it promised, lowering its fangs to Felicia's throat. Just before it bit down, it hissed one last threat. "And you'll spend the rest of your life adoring me."

Fat fucking chance. Felicia's numb fingers had found the handle of her gun and brought it up to the foul beast's head.

She pulled the trigger.

Cra—

The gun gave a kick like it had fired, but the energy had simply fizzled halfway through. Impossible.

The beast's gaze went dark. If it had been terrifying before, now it was—

It released Felicia's neck, and snapped its fingers. Her eyes went wide as two years of history came rushing back in a second. The inertia of her mental state crashed into a wall as all her allegiances flipped in an instant. Felicia lay, breathing hard, groaning as her aching body refused to obey. After a moment she felt the calming sensation of her xenodrug regime flooding her system, and the pain started to drop away. She forced herself to sit.

"Mistress?" she asked, through stiff tongue in a bone-dry mouth. Had something gone wrong? Her affini raised a finger, already fishing her communicator out from somewhere within her body. Felicia noted with a smile that one side of it was badly scorched.

"One moment, pet." Felicia fell silent while Rosacaea scrolled through a short list and tapped a name. The call went through a moment later.

"What the rotten dirt, Diadelphous? I had the Firebreak suppressed here for a good reason; who overrode that? I want them down here right now to explain to my darling floret why we don't get to finish our scene today."

Felicia couldn't hear the response. It sounded apologetic, but her captain's body language quickly shifted as she got her explanation. "Oh. Okay, I— Yeah, apology accepted. I'll relay it. I'll be there in—" The voice on the other end interrupted, and Rosacaea winced— "That's very rude and completely true. I'll be along as soon as I can."

She cut the call and threw the pad over to Felicia, who caught it out of the air and slipped it into the one pocket she had which still worked. "Something up?"

Rosa nodded, struggling to her false feet. She let out a soft whimper as shredded vines slipped against each other. Felicia stepped up to offer her something to rest against, and her Mistress gratefully accepted. They limped out of the wrecked section of ship together. Now that Felicia had her memories back, she knew the code to the exit, and tapped it in in short order.

They re-entered polite society, getting more than a few looks. A half-broken affini starship captain getting practically carried by a human who, while bruised, was possibly the one more capable of walking between them, was an unusual sight. They preferred to take the whole day for something like this, where Rosa would be fine by morning. Enough transplantation could cover over a few hits from any weapon they felt comfortable using. Felicia would simply have to spend the next morning at the ship veterinarian.

"Signal came through," explained Captain Hautere. "Our runaways phoned home. One affini, one human, an unknown number of unidentified extra life forms, all on a planet with a breathable atmosphere. Just about within a few hours travel."

Felicia nodded, feeling a tension that had been building for some time finally start to drop. "Got a plan?"

Rosa growled, baring a mouthful of fangs that dripped with her acid. "My plan had been to break your spirit all over again, little pet. Give me a few minutes to start thinking with my head, not my injectors."

The pirate 'queen' snorted. They were heading over to their hab unit, which was as close as they could get to the Heavy Recreation Zone for good reason. "Want some advice?"

One of Rosacaea's vines found Felicia's neck and gave it a sharp squeeze. "If I wanted your advice, toy, I'd have you beg me to provide it."

Rosa laughed, letting her vine go slack. "Dirt, I'd been looking forward to today. Yes, I'd love your advice, pet, please."

Even after all this time, a word, or a look, could leave Felicia with weak knees and a floundering will. She stammered, cheeks burning, for a few moments while she tried to get her broken mind thinking again. Nobody else had ever been able to do this to her. She sure as hell hadn't ever been a submissive before she'd met Miss. Hautere.

"Uh. Um. Planet. Air." Felicia shook her head, looking up at her owner with a pleading expression. A moment later she felt sharp clarity flooding her system. "Thank you, Mistress. As I was saying," she said, with a grin, "If we don't know how many people we need to rescue—"

Rosaceae interjected. "One. Just Thatch Aquae."

Felicia rolled her eyes. "If we don't know how many living creatures we'll need to rescue, we probably shouldn't just send a shuttle. This ship can handle atmosphere."

"Pet, if I ask people to prepare for microgravity there'll be chaos."

Felicia hurried forward a few steps to tap her wrist against the scanner on their hab unit door. It slid open and both of them hurried inside. Usually, this was Rosa taking care of Felicia's injuries, but given that they'd been interrupted halfway through Felicia had still had the upper hand. It usually went like that even with all of her enhancements turned off. Felicia was sharper, but she hadn't the stamina.

Thankfully, they had a healthy supply of new growths to transplant in to replace the damaged pieces. So long as one of them was strong enough to drag the other back home, everything was fine. On the occasions where one wasn't, it was a little embarrassing for both of them when their allotted time ran out and they had to be carried home by somebody else.

They spent a few minutes cutting out the ruined material and putting something fresh in its place. The colours didn't quite match up. Felicia would have to live with her bruises for a few days, so it was only fair that her owner did too.

When they were done Rosa collapsed backwards onto their oversized sofa with a long groan. "Okay, yeah, I can't come up with a better plan. Make the call, then be a good girl and come over here so I can at least pretend to break you."

"Yes, Mistress!" Felicia chirped, pulling out their half-broken datapad. She tapped one of the favourited contacts, gave a brief explanation, and then—

Some intelligent life, the darling Affini themselves counted, believed that the vast machine of the Affini Compact ran on a great latticework of language. Hundreds of thousands of related tongues carefully curated to be at least somewhat mutually understandable to both the plants themselves and the creatures for which they cared, hanging from the iron backbone of the core Affini script that joined the known universe under a single culture.

They were all incorrect. While the languages were useful, and together all-but-ensured that any two wards would have at least one common tongue, no matter how far apart they lived, most of the real work wasn't run on something so vague as language.

The true shared culture of the Affini Compact, according to Wing Vidalii, clerk, was the paperwork.

She glared up at the blessed papers that reached from floor to ceiling and then back again with mounting despair, and then back down at the slate in her hands. It glowed with pastel colour. An automatically generated transcript of a conversation had mere moments before.

"Microgravity?!" she flashed, catching the other clerk's attention. Montsechia Vidalli, fellow clerk, and the most important living being alive (according to Wing), wandered over, flashing back a request for clarification. "They reached the captain, and it seems we're going to have to go into a gravity well."

Montsechia didn't make a noise, but the fluttering of dark grey around her chest spoke volumes. She, too, spent a moment considering the papers. "Ah."

"Yes. May I put in the shipwide alert for you, Miss?" Wing's words were shadowed with a soft amaranth of (respect/adoration/obedience) that pulled a smile from her affini's glittering leaves. She got a nod, and skipped over to her desk, where she quickly penned a note and then fed it to the ship's systems. The message should go out to everyone in just a few—

Glochi Opun, Twentieth Bloom, smiled, with a song in his heart and a scalpel in one vine. The sophont on his operating table was one of the new rescues from that human ship that had caused all the kerfuffle. They were still a little unruly, and so unfortunately needed to be sedated, but basic screening had flagged up a few persistent medical issues that seemed to have been plaguing the poor thing.

Easily fixed.

With a fast-paced beat blaring out over the room's audio system, Glochi brought the cutting edge of the scalpel down, dancing in time to the music, making little cuts and incisions to the same tempo. According to the records, Terran doctors had said this one was unlikely to ever walk again. Usually, permission would be asked before undergoing surgery, but the human's records showed a series of ever-more experimental 'cures' being tried right up until the pacification of Terra, at which point record keeping became scarce.

The human would wake feeling like it was at its prime. If they didn't willingly go with their new caretaker after that? Well, either way, Glochi would get to see the smile. He was patient.

The operation didn't take long. It wasn't complicated simply because it was beyond human doctors. Even the simplest fixes seemed to be beyond them.

The music paused as he set down his scalpel and reached for the terminal set into one wall. A few taps called for the human's assigned caretaker to come pick them up, and while Glochi was there he glanced at his inbox.

Glochi had work to do, it seemed. A new, unknown species? He'd owned almost two dozen different sophonts in his time and each had been wonderful and unique. After millennia, however, the novelty of the universe was starting to wear thin. Still. He liked to see the little things smile. Maybe this new species would bring with it their own unique joys.

However, preparing a surgery room for microgravity was no easy task. He tapped an entry on the screen, and—

"Left! Left!!" Xe Prunus shouted, slamming the joystick to one side. It glared over at Avium, who was utterly dead weight when it came to this game. "No, my left, you dolt! We're going to—"

They crashed into an asteroid. Xe fell to the side. "We were so close. Argh. We're meant to be streaming this later, Ave, the prunes are gonna laugh at us so much."

Avium started to respond, but quickly got distracted by a message flashing up on the datapad that they shared. Xe had lost its. Somehow. They were meant to be tracked, but apparently this one had slipped the net. Xe hurried over and hooked its chin over xer shoulder, peering at the message.

"I think we're going to have to cancel, Xe, we're needed! Captain wants to jump us into a gravity well." Avium clapped xer hands. "Come on, I have so much theory I need to teach you before you understand how impressive I am."

Avium was trash at video games. Incredibly cute otherwise, however, and Xe couldn't help but get pulled in xer wake. At least, until Ave pulled out a chalkboard and—

Hyaline Panthium, Second Bloom, felt a little short of breath. With shaking hands, she stroked down the side of one of the towering piles of paper. She'd been called in to help secure the magic. The two clerks seemed a little shy, and had barely said a word to anyone, though they did keep flashing. It seemed like it would be distracting, but maybe they needed something to keep them occupied in what was otherwise a wholly black and white room.

She attached a strap to the floor, and another to the ceiling, and then hit the button on one side. The device expanded outwards, forming a tight protective column around the papers that would keep them in place while they didn't have gravity to hold them in place.

Hyaline was just excited to be this close to... here! The room! The wonders that must occur here. It was the efforts of the ritual-keepers that kept society moving.

Oh, she could just—

Ined Incertae looked out from their seat in the rearmost section of the good ship Elettarium, watching the twin arcs turn. The larger of the two, the Major Habitable Arc, swung clockwise, fast enough to grant its inhabitants a gravity that was only a little higher than the average species wanted. The Minor Habitable Arc swung in the opposite direction, slow enough to grant a little below average desired gravity. Between them, the Elettarium could support 85% of the species in this galaxy in their comfortable ranges.

Ined reached out and flicked a switch. Now nobody would be comfortable, save the affini. The arcs kept turning, but each rotation slowed a little more than the last, until finally both settled pointing in the same direction. It was discomforting to see their beloved ship so static, but necessary.

It couldn't make use of true gravity if it was spinning. Ined flicked another switch, to—

Prickle Saprot glanced over at the hyperspacial engineering chief, who was busy explaining to xer floret enough of the mechanics behind what they were doing that it could be impressed. In xer defense, though, that was why most of them had gotten into hyperspacial engineering.

Prickle turned to her own floret and lifted them up to sit at the navigation control station, then pointed at the big green flashing button that said "Jump!!!". The station was set to human/floret translations for this exact purpose. Prickle nodded.

The button was pushed.

The ship jumped.

Chapter Text

There were metal shavings everywhere. There was a twig inside of Katie's bed. The whole area around the no-longer-a-beacon was peppered with destruction save for a thin cone immediately behind where Thatch had stood, which had kept the various creatures under her care from being harmed. Leviathan probably hadn't even noticed.

Katie had badgered her affini friend until she'd finally given in and let her help, and so was busying herself gathering the shattered shards of rock and broken twig. Cici seemed very engaged with its current task, slowly rolling over the local area with some kind of electromagnet charged so that it could siphon up all the shards of metal too small for Thatch to efficiently gather herself.

Even between them it still took through until evening to clean up their mess. A thick tension hung in the air. Katie remembered the old days, back when the Terran Accord had seemed like this endless power that had always been and would always be. Appointments. Meetings. Schedules. Simply knowing she had somewhere to be later in a day would have often wrecked the start, because she couldn't settle and she couldn't focus.

This was like that. She had somewhere to be. She wasn't sure she wanted to go and she didn't know when she would be called upon. It reminded her of the last time she'd felt the same aimless dread.

17:28, June 16th, 2554. The fall of Terra. Or at least, when Katie had learned of it. The mess hall of a small space station hanging above Struve 2398 B 1. The system's binary stars cast harsh, long shadows through tiny dotted windows in a cramped room filled with dirty, desperate people. Katie had been just another face in the crowd, jostling to see the text coming in over a small vid-screen embedded in one wall.

Breaking news: Terran Accord dissolved after government surrenders to xeno threat.

The world had stopped turning then, too. Katie had known that everything had just changed, but not when the effects would hit. It hadn't been for hours until soldiers from the Indomitable, which had been docked at the same station for refueling, came recruiting. Katie had taken the out and tried to hold back the change.

She'd failed. Now that change was coming for her and she had no alternatives left to seek. Katie sighed, looking out over the early evening twinkle of the planet Dirt. Over time she'd grown to appreciate the life of this world. Insects too small to see at a distance whirled through the air, giving the impression of a light show dancing on no strings at all set to a breathtaking backdrop of glimmering stars above and glittering plantlife beneath.

How could anything else possibly compete with this?

After a moment, Thatch stepped up beside her. Katie felt it, more than heard it. The creature had an aura around her or something. Despite her comical size, Thatch still moved near-silently when she wished to; but she could never catch Katie unawares. They didn't speak.

What was there left to say?

The wind picked up. A slow roll over all that Katie could see, knocking the insects around and setting the trees swaying like a wave of invisible force jostling all but the stars. Her heart skipped a beat, but... it was just wind. Katie looked over at her companion, who stood beside her. She spared a glance for Cici, who had the slowest and least engaging job of any of them but who seemed entirely content to perform it.

"I think I'm going to miss this place," Katie admitted. She'd never felt such warmth or comfort, save for here. Never seen such beauty. "I saw some old photographs once. Terra used to be beautiful, did you know? Six or seven hundred years ago. I've... only ever seen anything like this in pictures, and those are so easy to fake. This..." Katie waved a hand at everything. "This is real."

She really didn't want to go back to another cramped starship. Katie knew the Affini built them better, but just like with the Jump Drives they had the same fundamental constraints. The tyranny of the rocket cared not for their pleas, it would restrain them all. Thatch said that she would get her own space, and even that was hardly believable. Individual bunks were unimaginable luxury compared to what she was used to, but...

Now that Katie had experienced life on the ground, how was she meant to go back? How could it possibly compare to a planetside seat overlooking all of creation?

Thatch held out a hand. Katie took it, and got a gentle squeeze along with. She gave one back. Their sun was setting, perhaps for the last time.

Katie felt a series of vines curl around her, gently taking her weight. A silent question answered silently. They rose into the air, carried from tree to tree as they climbed above the canopy to rest several meters above it on a trio of lines that kept them steady and safe.

The vines holding Katie still uncurled, letting her lean back into Thatch's lap unrestricted. She glanced down and stiffened, hit with an immediate sense of vertigo. They were... very high up and nothing held Katie in place. She stared, for a second, before a vine gently lifted her head back up towards the horizon.

Thatch mumbled, speaking softly. "I have you. Do not mistake your freedom here for danger. There is nothing you should concern yourself with." Katie glanced upwards. Thatch was leaning slightly back with her hands held together, fingers entwined across her chest a foot or two higher than Katie's head. She seemed focused on the rest of the world. Katie could hardly blame her. It was beautiful.

"Do you ever get intrusive thoughts, Thatch? You look at something that could do you harm and your brain butts in with a big what-if? What if I jumped?" Katie tried to keep her focus on the horizon, but she knew what was beneath. It called to her, and she hated that. She didn't want to fall. Maybe her brain was seeking novelty; maybe the part of her that was supposed to warn her off of danger was simply horribly miscalibrated; or maybe Katie simply had a burning need to prove to herself she was right to fear the dangers of the world.

Thatch didn't take her eyes off of the horizon. She shrugged, though Katie mostly felt that through the shifting weave of her artificial body. "No. I know what would happen if I jumped. If I see something that could do harm, I fix it. Why don't you jump, Katie?"

The girl frowned, very carefully clambering around so she could sit up, facing Thatch. She had to crane her neck quite aggressively to see the plant, but as Thatch was leaning back, the angle wasn't too bad. Her affini looked down, a soft smile taking her face. Katie couldn't help but smile back, regardless of how she was feeling.

"Because that'd be stupid, I'd get hurt." Was Thatch really so unused to danger that she couldn't even relate to it? She knew exactly how fragile Katie was. It was obvious in her every movement. Thatch could have snapped her in half if she hadn't.

The creature looked down at her, a little puzzled. One of Thatch's hands came forward to brush against Katie's chin, and the girl leaned into it practically on instinct. She felt strong fingers cup her face and started to relax into them. Safe. "Of course you would not be hurt, flower. Why would I let that happen? Jump."

Katie groaned. She tried to glance down but Thatch wouldn't let her. "No, Thatch, that's dumb, why would I—"

Thatch slipped her thumb into Katie's mouth, cutting her off mid-word. Katie emitted a surprised squeak. The false floral digit slowly brushed over the front of Katie's teeth, between the enamel and her upper lip, growing slick with her saliva and leaving a dull tingle in its wake. Katie was sober and yet Thatch's touch never felt just normal. The electric sharpness was everpresent. Chemicals just made Katie into a better conductor.

"Because you're safe. Do you trust me, flower?" The thumb slipped lower, around to the side of Katie's jaw and down her cheek, meeting a finger on the outside in a gentle pinch. Katie could only nod, and even then only so much as her skin was elastic. "Then jump," Thatch whispered, letting go. With her hand still in place, there was only one direction Katie could jump.

She fell backwards. For a moment, she was weightless. Wind rushed through her hair. She couldn't see the ground below, but she knew it would be rushing up to meet her. She knew the canopy would be there to break her fall a little, and so she might survive, but bones would break.

But she couldn't see any of that. Highlighted against the starfield far far above were the much brighter glowing points of Thatch Aquae smiling down at her.

The intrusive thought in her head went silent. It was getting what it wished. It got to find out what happened if Katie jumped, but she found that the reality held much less danger than her fantasy had threatened. Katie smiled back up, still plummeting through the air.

A vine rushed down to meet her. For an instant it matched her speed, carefully wrapping around every limb, cushioning her neck, and supporting her body, and then Katie felt a gentle deceleration. By the time she paused, she had the canopy at her back and the whole universe before her. The whole universe, and Thatch shining brighter than any of it.

Rather than lifting Katie back up Thatch dropped down to meet her. She seemed to enter her own freefall, though Katie was held so steady she could barely tell the origin of the vine holding her so tight was moving. Thatch didn't bother with a slow deceleration and instead simply landed on the canopy with a sudden stop. She walked across it in a mockery of human locomotion, not even disturbing the leaves beneath that couldn't possibly have supported her weight. She offered Katie another hand. It was gratefully taken.

This time when Katie ended up in the plant's lap she reached up to move Thatch's hands down to rest over her chest, instead. "Thank you," Katie said, after a moment. Looking down held little fear now, and she looked away of her own volition. Up towards the stars. "This really is beautiful."

The night sky wasn't wholly bereft of clouds, but what was there was was thin and wispy. They moved quickly, in constant motion, never really blocking the view for long. The stars flickered down at them, brilliant pinprick spots of every colour. Vast nebulae added splashes of texture, like the artist behind reality had grown bored with tiny details and simply smeared their cosmic paint across reality with an incomprehensible brush.

The planet itself was hardly less impressive. Clouds of insects moved in intricate formation, taking their own shapes with lights so bright they left a short trail in Katie's eyes. She watched them swirling, with the shape they made changing constantly while the points of light inside churned with an inner chaos that, combined with the momentary afterimage, made the swarm seem almost solid. The river far beneath roared with action, hiding aquatic life simply going about its natural existence.

Nothing here was a show being put on for them. Nothing here was done for anybody. It simply was. The insects didn't swirl to gain power. The universe wasn't there for profit. Existence was so much bigger than Katie had ever imagined it could have been.

She pointed over at one of the clouds of flying light. "That one looks like the escape shuttle we got here on," she suggested. It would only be true for an instant, of course. The change was constant.

The air in Katie's lungs vibrated with the force of Thatch's low mirth. With her body held firmly against the affini's stomach, every buzz and motion was felt. She knew every breath intimately, and it was Thatch's heat that drove away the chill of unbroken wind. Every word was a full-body experience. "Is this the famed pattern-matching instinct of your people, Katie?" Thatch gave a brief squeeze as she asked.

Mmh.

Katie didn't like that idea.

"I guess," she admitted, most of the enthusiasm dropping out of her voice. "Biological inheritance and all that." Her eyes strayed from the shape, suddenly a lot less interested in divining patterns.

There was no perceptible change in the air, yet Katie felt something shift a moment before Thatch lifted one hand to rest against her head. "You sound uncertain. Do you doubt that you share a common heritage? I must admit, I had thought Terran science understood the nature of reproduction."

Katie shook her head, a little stiff. A little small. "No, I... Obviously I'm a human. I'm human. My parents were humans and theirs and theirs and I'm nothing but their genes spliced together with a sprinkle of entropy to keep things interesting."

"Hmnn." It was odd, Katie reflected, that she was learning how to interpret Thatch's noises as much by feel as sound. The alien was pretending to look like her, but it was an imperfect reproduction. Between her atypical method of speech and her sheer size, even the simple act of talking took on meaningfully different properties. Thatch literally shook the world with every sound. "A less nuanced understanding than I had hoped, then."

Katie snorted. "Am I wrong? I learned about this stuff in school."

A chuckle, this time. Light and airy. "Flower, you knew far more of subatomic particles and fundamental forces than you do biology, and I have not had opportunity to teach you about my area of expertise. You are not wrong in the same sense that you were not wrong that you would fall if you jumped. You have the most basic fact, but none of the context." The hand on Katie's head lowered, pressing something to her mouth. Katie's lips parted on instinct. Her tongue tasted the sweet sugar and instinctively reached forward for more.

Her teeth slowly sheared through the soft flesh of the sweet berry, letting the even sweeter juices flood her senses. Katie let out a soft moan, tongue wrapping around the broken piece of berry.

Thatch continued. "You do not have to be anything you do not wish to be. An accident of birth does not define you any more than it does me. It can be useful to have a name for yourself, but nobody has any right to impose that upon you. At least, not unless you choose to let somebody else define your rights."

Katie nodded, mumbling softly as a line of sweet red juice rolled down her chin. Thatch caught it on the edge of a finger and delivered it to Katie's waiting tongue.

"Humanity had a vested interest in ensuring you were stuck in its clutches. I promise that the Affini have no such ulterior motive. We are quite clear about what we want."

The berry was all gone. Katie's tongue explored her mouth, searching for any remaining scraps, but of course there was nothing. All gone. She belatedly realised that Thatch had just bribed her into being quiet and not interrupting, but her indignation died in her throat as another berry was brought to her lips.

She felt the soft, pitted surface against the skin of her lips and reached forward to take another bite. To her dismay, her teeth only found a finger.

"Nuh-uh, Katie. Be polite and continue our conversation, now. I know this is hard for you to talk about, so give me one good, well thought out response, and then you get a treat." Thatch held the berry frustratingly close. So close Katie could smell it. So close she could possibly dart forward and get it; but she had no doubt that the plant's reaction time would beat hers.

"Thatch, you're flirting!" Katie complained, reaching out for the berry. A vine gently wrapped around her wrist and kept her from quite making it. She could almost get a fingertip to brush the surface... but anything more was quite impossible.

Thatch let Katie test the restrictions for a few more moments before it became obvious that the berry may as well be a mile away for all Katie could reach it. "I am doing no such thing, Katie. I am helping you work through a difficult set of emotions on which you have repeatedly expressed uncertainty. You respond well to this particular fruit and I suspect that you would appreciate some comfort food after a difficult conversation. Speak."

Hell. Katie muttered something about self-important xenos and then slumped backwards into her important xeno's arms. "That's silly, though. I can't not be human. That's just... a fact? I'm an engineer, or... sort of, I mean, not compared to yo—"

Thatch placed a finger over Katie's mouth, pulling her into silence. "Quiet. You're an engineer. Continue." The finger left, but stayed threateningly close.

"Ngh. I'm an engineer," Katie admitted, "I have to live in reality? I can't just... make something up? Like, it's a nice idea, don't get me wrong, but it'd be like pretending I don't have two arms or that I can see infrared. I just... can't. I am human. I can't change that. Please can I have the berry?" Katie reached out to take it, but the vine still didn't let her get close. She gave a small grunt of frustration as she reached for it, then glared up at her tormentor. Her expression twisted into a plea over a scant few heartbeats, and only then did she get her treat.

Thatch still held Katie's hand away, but did lift the sweet thing up to the girl's mouth. Another vine held her head in place, forcing her to strain forward to try to reach it. The tip of her tongue found the squishy exterior and Thatch finally moved it forward. The spongy texture left slick juices on Katie's lips. She whimpered. Collected the juices with her tongue and swallowed. This was flirting, but to voice the complaint she would need to be capable of speech.

She could only get close enough to bite a few millimeters at a time. Katie savoured her meal because she had no other choice. She would get no more until she'd properly enjoyed the last bite.

"Do you know what a species is, Katie? Do not worry yourself over the answer, as I already know what you could say. Humanity decided to divide life up by what could breed with what. If two things could, together, produce a third, then those two things are the same 'species'."

Thatch's spare hand slowly drummed a pattern into Katie's chest with idle fingers. The girl was held loosely, but she knew better than to struggle. "You believe that your humanity is fact simply because the culture from which you originate imposed that identity upon you. There is no universal truth backing that definition. Between them an insect and a flower conspire to spread pollen and seeds, and create new insects and flowers both. Are they then the same species? Were I to clone you and charge the Katiepair with producing another little Katie for me, could you? If I selected two humans at random and asked them to adhere to this definition of theirs and create for me another little human, even they would succeed less than half of the time."

Thatch pulled the half-eaten berry back. Her spare hand shifted, lifting up to rest against Katie's neck where she could lift the girl's chin with an outstretched thumb. Thatch held the berry above and watched the sweet juices gather against the bottom, swell, and drip down onto Katie's fruit-soaked lips. A tongue snapped out a moment later, seeking its flavour.

Thatch continued, as if this were a reasonable way of holding a conversation. "It is a bad system of categorisation that was imposed upon you by a culture which is no longer permitted to influence your life. It is no more a fact than many other things humanity once believed before we taught them the error of their ways."

Katie whimpered. "But then what does being human even mean? How can humanity have been anything? Where do you come fro—"

Another drop of juice fell, splashing against Katie's upper lip. Thatch's helpful thumb wiped it off of her skin, collecting it. It took its place a little beyond Katie's lips, but well within range of a hungry tongue. Katie's distraction was complete.

"It is a choice. Nothing more, nothing less. 'Humanity'," Thatch said, ensuring that the tone of her voice made it clear she was using the term with some whimsy, "is made up of those who wish to be in it. Why else would it have put such effort into convincing you you had no choice? If you truly had not then it would not have mattered whether you allowed yourself to want to leave it."

A finger pressed against Katie's cheek, where the muscle that worked her jaw sat. Drawing from memory, Katie opened her mouth, and the next droplet of juice landed directly on her tongue. She shivered, fingers curling, as the flavour struck.

"As for where I come from, I am Affini. That is a choice that I have made. Uplifted into sapience in one of our stellar gardens, I raised myself from the dirt and decided on the principles by which I was to live my life. Being part of the Affini Compact is a privilege, not a requirement of my existence, and it is a privilege which will be extended to you too."

Thatch dropped the berry. She shifted Katie's head a few degrees to make sure the girl caught it, and then released her so she could chew at her leisure. The inhuman pulled her legs up to her stomach and rolled onto her side, resting one ear against Thatch's lower chest as she looked out across the cosmos. After long moments the treat was gone, but the consequences yet echoed.

"I don't think I want to be human." Katie admitted. "I know I don't want to be Terran, but I don't think I want to be human either. I don't know what I want to be instead. I just... I want to get to decide that for myself." Katie took a deep breath, and set her jaw. "I do get to decide that for myself.

One of Thatch's hands was, unsurprisingly, sticky, so she used the other alone to stroke Katie's hair while they watched the last embers of the day fizzle out and gazed out across infinity together. Katie slipped into slumber within minutes.

Katie woke with a start, jumping to a seated position. She started to overbalance and so threw out a hand to catch herself, only to find her fingers grasping empty air. Oh shi—

Thatch caught her and pulled her back upright. "What's wrong, Katieflower? Bad dream again?"

Katie shook her head, rapidly. She put a hand to her heart. "Didn't you feel that?"

"Feel what?" Thatch asked, looking down with a soft shade of confusion. She brushed the back of her knuckles down Katie's neck, as she often did when Katie woke up in a panic, but this was not that.

"The— The kick in your lungs from... No, I guess you don't really have lungs, huh, but!" Katie struggled up onto her feet and then started climbing up her guardian. For a moment, Thatch tried to stop her, but Katie was insistent enough that she managed to pull out a few handholds and get herself into position sitting around Thatch's neck. She yanked out a vine from one shoulder to use as a control, and pulled them up and around, so they could look to the skies.

"There!" she cried, pointing out at what could almost have been just another one of a trillion stars. Almost. This one was falling. The unmistakable burning cone of something hitting atmosphere at irresponsible speeds glowed around it, bright enough to leave a glowing mark on Katie's vision.

Movement from the planet beneath caught her attention. From this perspective they could see for miles. The soft cloud of insects and glowing plantlife that blanketed the top of the canopy was scattering, starting from a point far distant but approaching at rapid speed. Katie tightened her grip.

A nightmare crash of sound and wind struck. Even Thatch began to topple for a brief, terrifying instant, but another vine quickly extended brought them back to stability. It sounded like a tremendous, distant explosion, but it had reached down from above. The planet's wildlife had no ability to understand what was happening here. Katie had scant extra perspective. The sound grew quieter over long moments, but whatever had just arrived seemed to see no reason to hide.

As the falling star plummeted it grew larger. No longer a star, it was... a ship. It was impossible to tell how far away it truly was, but even at a dizzying height it was quickly growing to a gargantuan size. Thatch took Katie's shaking hand and held it tight.

The Affini Compact had arrived. Planet Dirt reeled.

The great vehicle left a shockwave in the air behind it. First a bright orange as the air striking its surface grew so hot as to glow, but soon fading to a soft white as a city's worth of mass forced its way through an atmosphere which could not help but get in its way. The ship didn't care. It fell regardless.

Katie squeezed Thatch's hand and hung on tight. Thatch sometimes made her feel small, but never insignificant. Never afraid. This was not like that. The change she'd been resisting for years was here and she felt tiny.

One end of the ship was a nose piece, or a bud. A rounded cone, but on incalculable scale. The other end was like a flower with a wide central base bordered by a dozen or more massive leaf-like structures that span around the middle piece. They could have been whole kilometers long each. Between the two ends was a strange pair of curves, both hanging down towards the ground. It seemed wasteful, but Katie could not help but look up at it in awe, struck wordless.

This was a chariot of the Gods.

It grew so large in the sky that Katie worried it would crash against the ground, but she soon spotted hundreds of jets from beneath slowing it. The outer hull was criss-crossed with an intricate design, artistry that linked every one of the thrusters and hundreds more points besides with lines and patterns. The hull was a brilliant white—though the bottom side of it was now caked with ash from the descent—with patterns rendered in gleaming gold. The whole thing was illuminated, as if by an unseen source. Even in the depths of night it was as clear as day.

The upwards thrusters flared. As the shockwave lost its strength, streaks of light shot out of the two sides of the flower's base. Four bright lines pierced the sky in two opposite directions. Four more a few seconds after, and the ship was so close now that Katie could see that these were smaller vessels leaving the larger carrier. Another four. Another. Each moved in a parabola, inheriting the rushing momentum of its mothership, but quickly stablising as they raced away.

After the first few moments of flight each took a slightly different angle, heading out to break the horizon in every direction.

The single Affini vessel was making its presence known. The thrusters flared yet brighter as it forced itself to a halt at what must still have been ten kilometers up and hung in the air on impossible engines. The great flower at its back slowly turned in utter defiance of physical plausibility.

"Holy shit," Katie breathed. She knew this ship. She'd only seen it for bare instants in the grainy, failing footage of the Indomitable's external cameras, but this wasn't the kind of ship that she could ever forget. "The Elettarium, I assume?" she asked, voice barely above a whisper.

In a single moment, Katie understood from where her friend's unshakable confidence had arisen. Of course they were going to be rescued. To think that they could have escaped the Affini's grasp had been nothing but naivety.

This ship made even the best of the Terran fleet look like a child's toy. It was large to the point of absurdity. It hung in the air like it didn't belong because it did not. It was alien in every sense of the word.

Thatch's sticky hand ruffled Katie's hair. "This is the Affini Light Scout Elettarium. It is not quite the smallest general-purpose vehicle in our local group, but it is close."

There were whimpers from Katie above and Cici below. The machine had to strain its sensors to point them in the right direction, though Katie couldn't begin to imagine what this would look like to it. At least Katie had seen it once before. "How much bigger do they get?" Katie asked, uncertain if she truly wanted to know. Her voice wavered. Some deep animal fear screamed for her to whisper, lest she catch its attention. Absurd. As if she could escape their gaze no matter how she tried. "Could this even land without destroying everything?"

Thatch gave an appreciative hum. "Very clever, flower. No, it could not, the smaller vessels there—" Thatch pointed out at the streaks. Most of them were almost over the horizon now, moving with terrifying speed. One seemed to be heading in their direction, though not quite directly— "are the ones that will actually land. The Elettarium itself is actually on the larger end for ships that can safely enter atmosphere without doing the environment harm, though even there it simply has to hover in place."

Without doing the environment harm. The clarification was striking. This ship wasn't limited by resources or engineering knowledge but by physical limits on what the universe around it could take. Now that it had stopped moving it hung in the air, silent. With a surface lit by no clear source it looked as if it had simply been poorly pasted into a photograph, except Katie was seeing it with her own two eyes.

"Humanity never stood a chance, did it?" Katie had maintained a deep-seated assumption that Terra, given time, could have figured out a way to fight these things. That assumption was breaking. The year and change of her life spent on board the Indomitable suddenly seemed utterly futile. She had thought that at very least she had been holding back an inevitable future, but it was hard to escape the conclusion that she hadn't even done that.

The only thing that had kept the Indomitable free all that time was that ships like this just had higher priorities. She hadn't been holding back the tide. She'd just been waiting for her turn.

Thatch took a deep breath and Katie felt the warmth of her smile. "Not even slightly," she stated, with a kind of pride in her voice. "Like I said. Humanity's fate was never in question. We just had to decide how it was to happen."

The smaller vessel heading vaguely in their direction made a sharp turn, now pointing directly at them.

"Ah, looks like they have noticed us." Thatch lowered them to the ground and gestured at... everything. "We will clean up before we leave. Katie, take the bed and our dividers. Cici, would you please put out the fire and clean up the ashes? I could deconstruct Leviathan's tank."

Katie looked up with a start. She was already losing so much, she couldn't lose that too. "Hey, no, I'm not leaving them behind. Leave the tank alone, we can bring it, right?"

Thatch grinned back at her. "Good instincts, Katie. Leviathan shall make a fine floret for you."

The quiet roar of a ship forcing itself through atmosphere unwilling or unable to get out of its way in time grew louder over long minutes as the trio pulled their camp apart, sorting everything they couldn't simply give back to the environment into piles and boxes for transport. Before long, the shuttle arrived, coming to a halt in the air just over the river.

At maybe five meters across and ten long, it was hardly as imposing as the Elettarium itself. The design bore many similarities, with a brilliant white shell that seemed to glow in the darkness inlaid with fine golden lines. At this distance, Katie could see that the patterns were fractal, getting ever more intricate the closer she looked, seemingly without end. The shape was more conventional, though, essentially a rounded box with a curved nose cone section to help it cut through the air. Four points on the bottom thrummed with energy, presumably keeping the vessel afloat. At this distance the engine noise was actually audible. A deep beat that seemed to pulse in time to Katie's frantic heart.

It sank through the air, angled such that the edges of the ship would only just barely clip the sides of the canopy, until it came to a standstill a meter or two off of the ground. The hull parted, revealing a door.

From it emerged monsters. Katie grew tense, taking a step back. These were the beasts that had enslaved Terra. The demons who had taken her ship. The imperialists who wanted her and all others under their leafy thumbs. Conquerors. Nightmares wearing human form. Evil.

"Ho!" one of them called, hopping out of the ship and walking towards them. Katie took another step back, behind Thatch's leg. Thatch wouldn't let them take her. "It's good to see you..." The cosmic horror glanced at some kind of slate it carried. "Thatch? You do not look like the pictures."

"It has been a long journey," Thatch admitted. "I apologise, I do not know your names."

"Zona," one creature said, pointing at the other.

That one continued the sentence pointing at the other, "and Xylem." The second paused for a moment, reaching a vine into the ship. "And this is our darling Lily," it declared.

It brought out some kind of alien creature. Maybe three feet tall and undeniably rotund, it was covered in a dark brown fur with a short snout and wide, black, eyes that frequently blinked. It looked around with rapid twitches of its head, taking in the whole environment one short blink at a time. It wore what looked like a snugly fitting suit in pastel colours covered in dozens of tiny little pockets, with a pair of something like welding goggles that looked big enough to fit Katie hanging around its neck. It was deeply alien, but reminded Katie of some kind of mix between a squirrel and a sugar glider, though that didn't quite fit. Something about it felt familiar, but maybe that was just her over-active pattern matching instinct. Katie tried not to think about it.

The second affini—Zona—brought it the nook of one arm and scratched under its snout with her free hand. All that curious energy vanished in an instant, stolen away by its alien master and replaced with a squirming sluggishness. It seemed pretty out of it, happily making entertained noises as Zona tickled with vines, now barely cognizant of their situation.

Only the monsters got to have agency here. Katie felt a little sick, watching what had clearly been an intelligent creature brought so low.

Movement from the side caught Katie's attention as Cici rolled forward. "Hello. — I! Am! Cici! — Greetings. Hello. Hi." The machine buzzed with a high-pitched whine which only got worse as Xylem knelt down in front of it and laid a hand against its shell.

"By the stars, are you mechanical?" they asked. Cici's status lights flickered rapidly through different shades of green for several moments, before it finished the difficult processing on its nuanced answer.

"Yes!"

Xylem looked up at Thatch. "These being the new species we don't have emergency codes for, then? Fascinating. Oh, the xenobiologists will be heartbroken, but the mech. engineers will love these—" Xylem turned their attention back to Cici, working a vine or two into the holes in its chassis so it could be lifted safely— "utter cuties!"

Cici's whine left the range of human hearing, and Katie relaxed somewhat. The others winced, but put up with it.

Thatch put a hand on Katie's shoulder and ushered her out. A vine prodding her on the back made the expectation clear, but she suddenly found herself the center of attention.

They towered over her. Katie shook her head rapidly. These things would eat her. They'd put her to work in their mines. They'd turn her into a spaced-out waste like Lily there. She tried to step back. Thatch didn't let her at first, but she relented and Katie gratefully stumbled backwards. She tripped, but there was already a vine behind her anyway, so it didn't go very far. She peeked out at the monsters from between Thatch's legs.

"And who's that cute little human?" one of the conquerors demanded to know. "Will you be taking her, or do we still have a chance?"

Taking. Katie stiffened, heart pounding. How could she fight these? Fire worked, didn't it? She had her welding tool.

"The shy one is Katie Sahas, independent sophont," Thatch insisted. "Nonhuman, nonfloret."

The pair grew quiet, glancing at one another. Xylem scratched their false forehead while Zona wrinkled her crooked mockery of a human nose. "Wasn't she on the feralist ship? Independence isn't usually good for those."

Zona stopped showering the alien Lily with affection, and its curiosity seemed to start returning. A vine snaked out of the monstrosity and hooked into a small ring at Lily's neck, hanging off of what looked very much like a collar. The creature was released, and leaped away from its captor, trailing a vine behind it. Katie knew how long those vines were, but no matter how long it was, it was still a leash.

Thatch spoke up, insistent. "Katie is an exception. She has been demonstratably well behaved and I believe she will thrive as an independent citizen."

Katie could feel the tension in Thatch's vines. Nervousness? Fear? Mere hours before, the idea of Thatch being afraid of anything had been absurd, but now an impossible starship hung in the skies of Dirt and they were horribly outnumbered. If the invaders took issue could Thatch actually keep her safe? Had Katie shattered the sphere of safety she'd come to rely on the moment she'd let these creatures know where they were?

The two new affini shrugged. "Cool," one said, while the other knelt to meet Katie's gaze through Thatch's legs. It smiled, holding out a hand. It took a moment to glance up at Thatch with some kind of unspoken question, and Thatch handed over one of the berries that Katie liked.

"Hey, Katie," Zona said, voice quiet. Xylem was busy exploring Cici—to much delight from the machine, and with much effort put into keeping Lily from crawling inside its chassis—and it was left up to Katie to handle this one. It held out the food. As if Katie could be tempted out simply with a tasty snack!

Her stomach rumbled, but she was an intelligent, sapient creature. She couldn't be tricked into being comfortable when she wasn't.

"Not all that used to people yet, huh? That's okay." Zona lowered itself further until it was sitting on the ground. Strangely, it was significantly shorter than Thatch was, perhaps 'only' eight or nine feet in total. Sitting, it was actually shorter than Katie was at her full height. It smiled. "Well, my name is Zona Varie. My partner over there is Xylem Varie. Both of us use she/her pronouns because we like the aesthetic, and I'd love to get to know you a little."

Katie shied back, moving behind one leg. It felt ridiculous, but there was some animal fear demanding she stay out of sight. An instinct bred a million years ago to protect her from threats recognising these creatures as the apex predators of the universe.

"Why, so you can take your 'chance'?" Katie shot back. They'd talked over her. They hadn't even looked at her while discussing her fate.

Zona's laugh was nothing like Thatch's. Thatch had a low, almost gravelly tone with an intense music to it. Zona's voice was much lighter, and whatever song they sung was utterly incomprehensible to Katie. Just noise. "Not at all. I'm sorry for our assumption. Humans rescued from rebel ships almost universally need a guiding hand to help them learn how to be happy, but as you aren't a rescued human I don't think that'll be a problem, yeah?"

Katie poked her head out. "Equals?"

Zona smiled, raising the hand that held the berry again. "Equals. It's customary to give new friends a gift in some cultures. You have brought your fine company, and I have this small fruit. Fair exchange?"

Katie glanced up at her affini, who was smiling down at her. Thatch nodded, and Katie carefully moved forward. She reached out for the fruit and grabbed it, eating it before anybody could take it away from her.

A smile spread out over her face. It was a good berry. She muttered thanks, and Zona raised its hand to just above her head. Katie glanced up at it, wary, for a moment. She quickly shook her head, not really expecting her wish to be respected, but the hand went away regardless.

"Thank you, Katie. Perhaps we could talk a little aboard our shuttle? I expect the captain would like to talk to you and Thatch—" Zona glanced sideways, considering and then apparently writing off Cici as a source of information. Given that it didn't seem verbal right now, that didn't seem unfair— "about those little machines, and about your experiences, but Xylem and I are happy to listen to anything you'd like to tell us and will happily answer any questions you have in exchange."

She looked up at Thatch and extended a vine. Thatch met it with one of hers in a firm grip. "Is everybody ready to leave? We'd be happy to bring you back out here later if you forgot anything, of course, I expect we'll probably all be hanging around out here for a little while. There's a lot to catalogue here."

Thatch nodded, then spent a few moments staring up at the ship high above. She almost seemed as intimidated as Katie had been, but quickly glanced away. "We are ready. There are piles over there of personal affects for myself and Katie, and then another for processed materials. If we could get those cleaned and separated and then return them to the environment here, I believe we would be appreciative." Thatch flashed a smile down Katie's way. "We also have one aquatic nonsapient coming with us, so if we can make use of the shuttle's atomic compiler to maintain a fresh water supply then that will ensure all of us are adequately cared for."

None of the requests seemed objectionable. The three affini lifted the piles of stuff onto the ship in very short order, and then the two newcomers climbed aboard, Cici in tow. Lily's leash was pulled taut, and she leaped back into the ship from halfway up a nearby tree. Thatch glanced down at Katie and extended a hand, which Katie took and then used to help her get started climbing. Once she was in her place around the plant's neck, she guided the two of them into the shuttle.

With one vine still trailing down to the dirt, Katie paused, looking back. All sign of their presence here had been scrubbed clean. She blinked back tears and forced herself to look away.

"Goodbye, Dirt," she breathed, and lifted Thatch's final vine from the surface.

Chapter Text

Katie didn't talk much on the journey.

With this many occupants the shuttle was left more than a little cramped. The insides were spartan, with most of the shuttle comprised of large open space. It lacked even a separate cargo area; their stuff was just piled up at the back end where the force of acceleration would press it into the wall.

Katie rested on one of the seats that stood along each side of the vehicle. Strangely, there was no standardisation between them. There were six in all and each was a different height, material, and design. Katie wanted to shrink into a corner and vanish, but there was nowhere to hide. Just a plain, practical shuttle taking her away from the beautiful vistas of planet Dirt towards a no-doubt plain, practical starship. They didn't even have a set of matching chairs. Katie had spent most of her adult life aboard ramshackle ships where nothing quite matched and nothing quite worked and the thought of being dragged onto another was crushing.

Katie pushed a tall chair with a firm woven seat next to the short, cushioned construction that Thatch rested atop. The height differential was novel, even useful. Katie could lean against Thatch's arm and rest her head on a shoulder. It was nice.

There were no windows through which to look, yet she could practically feel the planet far beneath abandoning them.

The two new affini sat up front. One seemed to be piloting the vessel while the other fussed over Cici and Lily. Katie had immediately lost track of which affini was which. It wasn't that they looked the same, really: If she paid attention to the details she could tell that they had a lot of differences, but in a lot of respects one very tall plantoid looked very much like the next very tall plantoid, and the ways in which they distinguished themselves from each other paled in comparison to the way they were different from Katie.

"What's going to happen now?" Katie asked, quietly enough that she expected and hoped only Thatch would hear. She didn't trust the other two to give her a straight answer.

The affini— No.

Thatch. Thatch couldn't be the affini any longer. There were more of them now. Thatch cupped Katie's cheek with her opposite hand and held her with a gentle grip. "That has become somewhat out of our hands, and this is an unusual situation in many respects. We will arrive shortly and I expect somebody will want to have a conversation with us. Where we go from there is likely to be one of the topics of that conversation."

Katie tried to bring a little moisture back into her bone-dry mouth but found that she couldn't quite manage to swallow. "Oh."

She hugged closer to Thatch's arm. She'd grown so used to her friend being in control of everything around them that being torn out of that bubble of safety left her feeling cold and afraid. She looked up at Thatch to find a slightly distant expression pointed at the opposite wall. Her affini's focus was at least partially elsewhere.

Katie shrank against the arm, hooking her own under it so she could hug in close. The two of them were being taken into the unknown.

There were no timepieces in sight. Katie had gotten used to planning her day by the movement of the sun or the natural rhythms of the planet. Neither of those were present here and she found herself with no idea how long the journey was really taking. Neither she nor Thatch seemed to feel like talking, and so the ship was filled with barely intelligible chatter from up front.

Eventually the shuttle changed heading. Katie looked up, lifting her head from Thatch's shoulder. The view out of the cockpit window was nothing but ship. Katie fumbled around for a moment, grabbing Thatch's hand and pulling her forward so she could see their approach.

They were heading into one of the docking bays at the base of the ship. The flower petals at its rear rotated just to the left of them at an agonisingly slow speed. The tips might be turning fast enough to disrupt the clouds, but the bases of the multi-kilometer objects were barely in motion at all. Up close they looked even bigger than they had from afar. Katie looked away. Whatever part of her head that was capable of being awed by such things just wasn't engaging any more. She didn't know if it was the anxiety of not knowing what was coming or if her ability to appreciate the grandeur had simply topped out. Either way she glossed over the scale.

She looked towards the docking bay. The shuttle slowed as it came in for landing. The details blurred past. The complexity and artistry of it had stopped registering and Katie hadn't even stepped foot aboard yet.

Katie's knees almost buckled as the shuttle came down, landing hard. Thatch's grip kept her steady. Both of them shot a look at the pilot.

Zona winced, glancing back. "Sorry about that, I haven't done this in gravity before. Still, any landing you can talk away from, right?" She laughed. Katie didn't.

The tap of a button opened up the shuttle's wide door. Katie took a breath and coughed, instinctively raising a hand to cover her mouth. She remembered what ship air felt like. Dry, sharp, and with an acrid tang. It would burn her throat and sting her eyes. She was used to it, but that didn't mean she wanted it back.

To her surprise, the air that came rushing in wasn't that. It stank of plantlife, but not unpleasantly so. Intellectually, Katie knew that the scents of Dirt had probably been less pleasant than this was, but Dirt was home and this was not. The last of her familiar air rushed out of the shuttle, lost forever. Doubtless it would be collected and recycled and cleansed. Made identical to all the rest of the air on board this flying prison.

Katie felt a hand at her back. She relaxed into it, knowing it was Thatch's by instinctive feel, as they left the shuttle. The step out was about three feet too tall for Katie to take comfortably, but Thatch was there to lift her out. Her first step on this alien vessel. The surface beneath her feet was a metal grate, thick hexagonal lattice in fractal form. The hexagons got more densely nested towards the center of the grate, but around the edges the holes were inches wide. Large enough to fit a vine, Katie guessed, while leaving the center of the walkway dense enough for a human to walk upon.

Katie's eyes slid over everything, not really taking any of it in. She'd been woken up halfway through the night, taken from her home, shown more impossible things than she had previously dared imagine, and her energy was really starting to crash. The ship's lighting dug into her eyes and the sounds wormed into her brain. There were others here, too. Plants, humans, other creatures that Katie hadn't the mental energy to process. Katie shied closer to her friend. If her affini's bubble of safety was shrunken, then Katie would stick closer.

After a few seconds of walking they drew to a stop. Katie tried to force herself to focus on the creature before her. Another cursed plant. She was... green? A kind of splotchy green with patches of much lighter colour seemingly at random. Leaves. Vines. Katie had seen it all before. She glanced towards Thatch, to try to see how she was taking this and hopefully get a hint as to what was going on.

"It's good to see you again, Thatch," the newcomer spoke, attracting Katie's attention. "Good thinking getting our attention like that, it would have taken us a little while to find you otherwise." The intruder paused, glancing theatrically up and down Thatch's body. "I don't think you always looked like this, did you?" She extended a leafy vine, which Thatch took with one of her own brilliant red streaks.

Katie looked back to Thatch to catch her shaking her head. "It is good to see you again too, Rosaceae." She raised one of her black and purple arms and set the little bulbs aglow as a brief demonstration, fingers wiggling. Katie clung a little closer, gentle lights twinkling in her eyes. "Most of this body was harvested from the planet beneath; I needed to rebloom in a hurry. The beacon, however, was largely Katie's work." Thatch glanced down towards the girl.

Katie froze as she became the center of attention yet again. 'Rosaceae' looked down at her with a gentle smile and the part of Katie's brain responsible for keeping her safe from predators went into meltdown.

Thatch was one thing. Thatch was a person that Katie had come to know, and even like. Katie could even be said to be coming around to some of the ways Thatch thought about the world, even the ones that were distasteful on the surface. Katie had expected that others of her kind would be, if not friends, then at least recognisable as people.

This was not that. Katie wasn't interfacing with a person here. She was engaging with a culture, with a civilisation. Processes, traditions, rituals. She could speak openly to Thatch because, to Thatch, Katie was a person. To this newcomer she was a statistic, about to get sorted into an inescapable category.

Katie tried to take a step back, but found a hand in her way. "Rosa is nice, Katie," Thatch insisted. "She wouldn't hurt a fly. Say hello." The hand stayed in place, providing some small comfort.

Katie looked up. Her brain screamed at her that the only reasonable thing to do was to run far, far away and hope this thing wasn't interested enough in eating her to follow, but she tried to ignore that. Rosa wouldn't hurt a fly. This was just her dumb brain firing off at nothing. Human biological inheritance and nothing more. Everything was fine. There was nothing to worry about.

"I... Hello," Katie said, through dry lips.

The predatory plant's smile widened a little further. It reached out a facsimile of a hand and gently pushed up Katie's chin, forcing their gazes to meet. It shifted Katie's face from side to side with quick movements of the thumb. Inspecting her. Its gaze was piercing, as though it could see her darkest secrets and wanted to devour every and every one. It lowered itself down to one knee, bringing Katie's face of flesh and bone within the range of its mockery of teeth and jaws.

"Cuter than you looked in the pictures. Katie Sahas, right? We collated all your files. We'll need to run some tests and ask you some questions to get all your details updated, but that won't take long and you can have a caretaker with you while it happens if you wish. I assume you'll be staying with Thatch here?" Its smile grew particularly indulgent, and the eyes momentarily stopped pinning Katie to the grating long enough to glance over at Thatch for confirmation. Katie didn't understand all the subtext in what 'Rosa' was saying, but she could guess at the gist of it.

This was the moment she'd been waiting for, wasn't it? She wasn't arriving in this world as some helpless pawn. She'd proven herself worthy, hadn't she? They'd respect that, wouldn't they? They had to. Katie couldn't go back to being a nobody. She cleared her throat.

"I... was told I could have my own space," Katie ventured, reluctantly drawing attention back to herself. Was this the point where all those promises came crashing down? She played along or they threw her in their mines? She wouldn't forgive herself if she didn't at least try. "It doesn't have to be much! Just... I've never had anywhere that's mine and it sounded nice."

Rosa's smile grew a little wider. Its thumb brushed across Katie's cheek, transforming the girl's stomach into a heavy ball of butterflies. She dare not ask this creature to stop. She didn't know what would be offensive. She didn't know what would cause it to stop pretending at politeness and truly become one of the beasts that had devoured Terran civilisation. Yet, if Katie didn't assert herself as something that demanded respect and independence, she had no doubt that they would take away both.

Uncomfortably sharp nails raked softly over Katie's skin. That subtext was clear. They had options other than being gentle that Katie couldn't hope to fight. "Our habitation units have plenty of room for cute little things like you. I'm sure that whoever you end up with will give you your own space, if you behave yourself. If Thatch has promised that and you go with her, then I imagine she will hold to her word. If you would rather be assigned a different caretaker, then we can list that request on your file, assuming Thatch here agrees."

Katie whimpered. She wanted to look back at her affini, for advice or for simple reassurance that it was okay for her to push, but this beast's ostensibly gentle grip held her fast. This wasn't going how she wanted at all. She was getting pulled along by the tides of change and she wasn't strong enough to reach the shore.

Part of Katie felt like she should just nod. She was in the lion's den here. The more attention she drew to herself the more likely they would grow tired and just eat her up. Another, more sober part knew that if she nodded here she would never be able to stop. She'd lose everything she'd fought so hard to gain. Katie tried to steel her nerves, working up the courage to put her hand inside the metaphorical jaws.

As brave as Katie was, her captor beat her to speaking. "I wouldn't worry about finding somebody willing to grant it, Katie, if you can be this cute all the time. You're sure to find a home, though it may take a few days. We are short on people who don't already have a ward, though you'll go to the front of the list as most of the other crew from that little Terran ship of ours are still in stasis. A cute and lively little human like you is sure to—"

Katie pulled herself out of the foul grip and stumbled a half step back. "I'm not that! Stop talking! You— You can't— Thatch said you wouldn't force anything on me that I didn't want, and I... I want my own space! I don't want to request it, even from Thatch, I want it to be mine. I don't want it to be something anyone can take from me. I'm not yours to control! Thatch said I was a free—"

The titan of vine and bark casually reached forward, placing a single finger against Katie's jaw. Her chin strained upwards until she could no longer open her mouth to speak, or hardly even to breathe. Katie's words died in a helpless tremour. The touch was hard in a way that Thatch had never been. The new affini's expression lost its playful edge, and Katie realised she had made a mistake. The politeness was for those who complied. These creatures couldn't be bargained with. She could be nothing more than a novel toy to things this powerful. "Free Terran, perhaps? Yes, we know just what to do with 'Free Terrans' around here. We—"

No! Katie wouldn't let it end like this! She growled, fumbling at her hips for her tools. Each one had a distinct shape so that she could grab them by feel. The cold wood gave her strength. Her welding torch aught to be hot enough to take advantage of the only weakness she'd discovered in these things. She grabbed for it, hoping to bring it up to the thing's false wrist. She'd free herself one way or another.

Katie didn't even get close. Obviously she wasn't going to get close. Before she'd even unhooked the torch there was a vine around her wrist holding it tight. It squeezed, gently, with a familiar feel and a familiar throbbing heat. Katie let her fingers go slack as Thatch knelt beside her and gently removed Rosa's finger. Katie let out a soft whimper, using her free hand to massage her jaw and neck.

Thatch joined Katie in looking at Rosa's surprised expression, though the two affini were both on about the same level now and both towered over Katie, even kneeling. "I am willing to stake my reputation on Miss. Sahas here harbouring no feralist ideologies, Rosaceae. If you had let her finish, Katie would have explained that she holds no love for Terran culture nor the Human race and wishes to secede from both. You will treat her with the dignity and respect befitting an independent sophont requesting citizenship aboard the vessel you head and she will be a delightful friend to many aboard." Thatch's grip was unwavering, at least on Rosa. On Katie, it was soft and no longer restricted her motions at all. She glanced up at Thatch's face and found the butterflies in her stomach all set loose.

Her affini's jaw was set and her eyes were fixed, but there was no anger here. She exuded certainty and confidence, but expressed it like this was the most natural thing in the world. This wasn't a disagreement. She was simply explaining how things were to be. There were only a few hints as to internal turmoil. Vines snaked down her back, curling through the metal of the grating beneath their feet with a tense grip, ensuring stability and leverage. Katie's implacable sixth sense resonated with anxiety. Barely hints at all, but Katie could tell that Thatch was less confident than she appeared.

Rosa, it seemed, could not. She gently retrieved her hand, though remained in a kneeling position. "I'm sorry, Thatch, Katie. I misunderstood the nature of your relationship, it seems. It seems unusual, but the last couple of years have convinced me that it is better to take everyone as they come and figure out how to accommodate that. Katie, I would like to earn your forgiveness and perhaps the first step can be being direct. You are, human or not, prior crew on a captured feralist vessel. It is general practice—and, in fact, a guarantee in our Treaty—to assign any new rescues a caretaker to be responsible for them and we do not usually allow exceptions to this rule. Perhaps, in cases where that caretaker vouches for the stability, behaviour, and independence of their ward, they could, maybe, graduate to becoming an independent citizen. As apology for my behaviour we can assign Thatch as your caretaker, she can vouch for you, we'll move directly to the next stage."

Rosa paused, eyes drilling down into Katie for several long moments as if trying to discern the hidden truths of her soul. It was an intense gaze, but finally Katie felt as if she was being engaged with as a person in her own right, not just property-to-be. "If you would like that, Katie?"

Katie glanced back at Thatch, who gave a small nod. The vine at Katie's wrist squeezed for but a moment. Katie forwarded on the nod to Rosa. "I want my own space. I don't know what you have available, anything will do, but—"

Rosa raised a finger. Requesting an interruption, this time. Katie didn't know if it was a request she could refuse, but she didn't feel the need to test that. "You will need to talk to the habitation engineers for that, which we can organise as part of the general checkup and introduction that I would very strongly recommend you undergo. We are currently very far away from Compact space and this is not a very large ship, so I'm afraid we have some significant resource limitations at the moment, but I imagine we can meet your needs. A prospective citizen in need of housing takes priority over most non-emergency tasks, and I don't expect there's anybody around here who would mind their low-priority requests getting bumped for this."

Katie twisted her hand around to take hold of the vine Thatch still had around her wrist. "Can I bring Thatch with me?" she asked. The last thing she wanted was to walk into the jaws of the beast alone. She'd already nearly screwed up badly enough once.

Rosaceae glanced up towards Katie's lifeline for a moment, and then nodded. "I suspect she'll want a medical checkup too, and the botanical gardens are typically off-limits to non-affini citizens for their own safety, so you will need to part ways at some point. Additionally, I do need to talk to her about what happened and unfortunately that isn't a conversation you can be part of." Katie's grip tightened. Rosa smiled down at her. "However, that can be another time. For now, if you'll follow my darling flore—"

Rosa glanced to the side, paused, and shook her head. "Hmn, apologies, I'm used to having more assistance than this. Come, we don't have much of an induction center, but we can make do. There was another one of you, wasn't there?" Rosaceae looked around for a moment before spotting Cici and the Varies. "Oh! Hmn, that's a little outside of Glochi's area." Rosa waved a vine over towards the shuttle pilots and called over. "Could I get you two to take that one... somewhere? Maybe Ined's division? They can probably figure out how to do a full medical. Message me if anything goes wrong?"

After receiving a pair of enthusiastic nods, Rosa led the way. Katie recognised that what was going on around her was probably very impressive and probably she needed to understand it for her own safety, but everything she looked at just filled her with the same foreboding dread. People who set foot on Affini vessels were never seen again. It was a rule. It had already been made crystal clear that her freedom here was contingent on parts of Affini culture that Katie couldn't even begin to understand.

For all Katie knew, doing or saying anything could get that freedom taken away. She couldn't rely on Thatch to catch her every mistake because she was surrounded by creatures who could pounce on those mistakes with the same speed. Katie had very little time to understand the rules of a game she was already playing, and one bad move could leave her like the rest of the Indomitable's crew. Trapped in stasis awaiting annihilation.

They walked through the expansive docking bay. Katie tried not to figure out whether the entire Indomitable would have fit inside. She had to hurry just to keep up with the two affini, and by the time they came to a stop she was starting to feel out of breath. Their journey was far from over. Thatch reached over and hit a button set into one of the walls, and that wall split in half.

Katie whimpered. The part of her brain that was capable of being impressed by a twenty foot door appearing out of nowhere wasn't responding, but the part of her brain responsible for getting terrified by things obviously more dangerous than herself was going haywire.

The two affini stepped through the door into some kind of pod. Katie felt a gentle tug against her wrist and stumbled forward. The doors slid closed behind her and she felt a powerful, smooth acceleration almost knock her off of her feet. Again, a helpful vine kept her steady, but it was difficult not to recognise that this place was not meant for her. She couldn't even have reached the button to open the doors, nor was she certain she could have stood alone.

Every second took her further from the world she had known and brought her further into one that felt dangerous and hostile.

There were still no timepieces. The view outside of the pod was overwhelming enough that Katie's mind refused to parse the shapes and colours into anything meaningful. Katie looked out at it, but she didn't comprehend. It was just a sea of visual noise.

After an indeterminable amount of time, the pod slowed to a stop and the doors opened back up. Thatch stepped out and Katie followed. Rosaceae said something that Katie didn't understand, and then she was gone.

If they were on Dirt still, Katie wouldn't have thought twice before falling to the side and letting Thatch catch her, but here? They weren't alone. Her eyes refused to pick out any of the details of who was around them and who was watching. Katie recognised that she should probably be concerned, but instead she just kept walking forwards at Thatch's side until they entered a smaller building.

Katie felt a tight pressure somewhat lifting off of her chest as doors slid closed behind her. No windows, just four walls. They were tall walls, to be sure, but the space was bounded. Finite. Katie could try to take it all in without getting immediately overwhelmed.

She took a deep breath. Okay. Four walls. They were a sterile kind of white, well lit, with many many pictures of alien creatures hanging in various places with no clear pattern. Maybe twenty or so dotted around the room, with some larger posters between them offering what looked like detailed breakdowns of various pieces of technology, plant, or animal life? It was hard to be sure. One looked like a vial of something thick and viscous, another was some sort of many-legged insect, a third was a wristband of sorts. Katie didn't understand, but neither did the posters threaten to jump out at her with drug-laden needles.

Walls okay. Katie could handle walls. She looked up. The ceiling was far above her, inset with dozens upon dozens of soft points of light that gave the room an even, clean illumination. It was an almost unreal mood as shadows found nowhere to hide. It nearly seemed like there was starfield above them, but the lights glowed a steady, unchanging off-white. Bearable. Understandable.

Down. The floor beneath their feet. Green, with a gentle texture somewhere between carpet and grass. Thatch stood upon it, as did the one other occupant of the room, as did various pieces of equipment. Katie, curiously, did not. She blinked a few times, and then looked up.

At some point, Thatch had plucked her off of the ground and was looking at her with concern clear in the purple and red flecks of her wide eyes. Even Katie's sixth sense wasn't working properly right now, she realised, as she tried to interpret her plant's expression and found everything muddied. It was getting lost in the white noise that was everything else on her every sense.

"Are you okay, Katie?" she asked, one floral finger brushing across Katie's forehead to steer the hair out of her eyes. "You have been atypically quiet for our entire journey. I would like you to tell me how you are feeling."

Katie could only shrug, and barely that. She hadn't been able to ask for help, but being faced by a direct question she found she the strength. "This is all a lot. I don't know if I can do this. I'm tired and scared and I can't make any mistakes or everyone is going to turn on me and stop pretending to be polite and this isn't my world, I don't know anything here, I don't know what's going to get me locked away and what's going to get me what I need and—"

Thatch silenced her with a look, then glanced away for a moment, towards the other figure in the room. They traded a few rapid-fire bursts of speech. Katie didn't understand the words being spoken, but she understood the way that Thatch was saying them, and she didn't sound agitated. She was just updating the other. The stranger stepped away, slipping through a door Katie hadn't noticed, and left her finally alone in a bubble of safety.

Katie didn't waste any time. She didn't know when they'd be coming back. For all she knew, this could be the very last quiet moment. She buried her head into Thatch's chest and tried her best not to cry, unsuccessfully. The one familiar thing in this entire cursed vessel ran her fingers through Katie's hair and held her close until the tears started to slow.

"Nobody is going to turn on you, flower. Nobody here wants anything but the best for you." One of Thatch's arms was busy holding Katie in place, but the other was free to drift. Each touch pushed the stress and the panic away, replacing it with a gentle comfort. At first, it was a contest, but soon there was nowhere left for stress to hide, and it escaped in quiet gasps and whimpers. Out into the air, where it would be lost for good.

Katie pushed her face deeper into Thatch's foliage. A leaf threatened to enter Katie's mouth, but a soft nibble was enough to get Thatch to move it. "But what they think is the best for me, right? That 'Rosa' was seconds away from turning on me, I could tell!"

Katie had never in her life been without ambient sounds. There wasn't a Terran ship or station that didn't groan with the effort of its own existence. The thrum of a reactor meant heat and power. The hiss of gas meant oxygen. The rattle of fluids meant that nothing was about to overheat. Things were never silent. Silence was death.

The room was silent, save for the barely perceptible duet of her own heartbeat meeting Thatch's symphony. The ground didn't vibrate. The lights didn't flicker in time with the slightly irregular hum of a reactor two years past its service date. Everything was still. Everything was quiet. Even Thatch didn't respond with words, but with simple presence and pressure.

No timepieces. Katie didn't know how long she was there. Her only metronome was the regular, reliable beat of Thatch's body.

Eventually, Katie worked up the energy to extract her face from the forest. She looked up at the patient expression of her protector. It was a little bittersweet. Now they were here, Thatch had a life to return to, and Katie had one to build. They wouldn't be spending every waking minute together any more. Already, Thatch's todo list grew, filling with entries that Katie couldn't be a part of. Already, Katie's tasks piled up, forming towers of things Thatch could be of no help with.

"I'm sorry," Katie whispered. Everything still felt like too much, but at least she wasn't facing it alone. "I think I'm okay now. I really just want to sleep. I think I'll be okay after I sleep. I don't know what's going on. Can you... tell me what they're gonna do?"

Thatch sat herself down against the grassy carpet and leaned into one corner. She lowered Katie down into her lap to free up a hand, then pointed towards one of the larger objects in the room. Katie would have mistaken it for an oversized potted plant, had she not seen Thatch's biotechnology at work in their beacon. The question was wordless, more a feeling than a sound.

"Some kind of machine?" Katie ventured. "The vines around the outside don't seem to connect to anything, so I guess they're just a protective casing?" Thatch's finger shifted slightly while her other hand gently tilted Katie's head, drawing her attention to a set of transparent flowers at about her head level. They had sharp needles set into their centers, but no obvious contents.

Katie's first thought was to shy away. Some kind of machine to pump her full of drugs and puppet her into doing their bidding? Her second thought was the realisation that that was absurd. Thatch wouldn't have needed a machine to do that. Probably this was for something else. "Some kind of blood scanner?" she ventured. If the sharp needles weren't for inserting something, then there was only so many things to take from her.

Thatch scratched under her chin. "Very good, Katie. It is a little more than that, but you have the right idea. The needles bisect a major artery and check over your blood to make sure you're getting what you need. In fact, come on, I know how these work."

A gentle hand at Katie's back slowly pushed her up onto her feet, and then towards the machine. Katie realised that the smaller plant in front of it was meant for sitting about a second after Thatch had placed her atop it. It squirmed for a moment, adjusting until it was, by far, the most comfortable thing Katie had ever sat upon, save for Thatch herself. The sharp flowers extended on their own, but seemed to need an operator to actually insert them.

Thatch raised Katie's chin with one of the smallest of her vines, and carefully inserted the two flowers into the side of her neck. Katie stiffened, feeling a moment's chill as her blood flow was redirected, stealing it away towards this machine. The transparent flowers filled with a dark red, first down one, and then a moment later, up the other. The chill faded away as her blood was returned, apparently intact.

Thatch spent a moment checking over the needles. "Now, there should be a terminal around here somewhere," she muttered, before spotting something lying on a desk at the far side of the room and snapping it up with a rapid red streak. She tapped a button on the vaguely rectangular object which must have measured some thirty inches across, and Katie felt her remaining panic sinking away. She smiled up at her pretty plant with an increasingly distant expression. She was so... big. Tall. No wonder half of her flirting was just commentary on their relative heights. Thatch was so big, Katie realised, as if for the first time, as if it was a revelation.

So big. Katie could just get lost in there. How was something so small as her meant to navigate this universe alone? It was just right for her to be at one of these creatures' heels.

Katie stared for what could have been hours with a dull smile on her face before Thatch noticed, swore, and tapped another button.

Katie's head quickly cleared. She blinked rapidly, raising a hand to rub her forehead as her consciousness came rushing back, filling her with the usual cacophony of anxieties and worries.

"Apologies, apparently the standard program here is configured to pacify. I suppose they have been dealing with a lot of ferals recently, but such an opinionated default should really be more explicit." Katie could sense Thatch's gentle displeasure for the moment it lasted. Her plant turned the device around to Katie to show her a vast array of graphs. Most of them were paired with little red styling, and a symbol that was unmistakably a warning sign, though not a Terran design. "As you can see, your levels are not quite nominal, though are actually much better than I had feared in many areas. Far better than the average new intake."

Thatch seemed strangely pleased by that, as she scrolled through the infinite sequence of graphs and charts for Katie to see. Her affini turned the tablet back to herself and stared at it for a moment, then made a few rapid taps. "However, you are running very low on many of the important neurotransmitters; I believe your dopamine production may be broken; and you need a lot of zinc. On the plus side, most of your hormone levels are appropriate and most micronutrients are not too far out of their ranges, though I suspect a medical professional may disagree with me on that. Do you mind if I adjust these, flower?"

Katie wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but she shook her head anyway. "Go ahead." It had been a long time since Thatch had asked for permission to do anything that wasn't obviously beneficial and Katie didn't need the explanation to assume this would be the same. She was still interested, however. "Could you tell me what you're doing?"

Thatch nodded, then began a rapid sequence of taps with a quartet of minor vines. "Then we will start with the basics. Nutrients, neurotransmitters, and niche needs. Roll back your biological clock to match ship time, get your hormone levels exactly where I want them, make sure that brain is ticking along like it should be. Simple tune-ups."

Katie felt the changes immediately as the looming specter of sleep simply vanished, as did her hunger and, curiously, a craving for synthveg rations. Her earlier fears didn't vanish, but she suddenly felt as if she could handle what came her way. The difference was so clear as to be striking.

Katie tilted her head to one side, watching Thatch work. Half a dozen vines danced across a device held in one hand. Thatch's focus seemed absolute and Katie imagined she could feel every brief stroke of growth on graphs down to her soul. It seemed like a poor idea to interrupt if her affini were busy analysing and altering her blood composition, so Katie simply watched. Eventually, Thatch looked up with a gentle smile. "The main function of this machine is to adjust your various values so we can monitor the effects in real time. Most of this can be automatic: the machine will tweak values, detect the response and then figure out what your ideal composition should be, though I will admit I have this on manual. I would rather ensure your needs are met myself. The results then get placed on your file to ensure your nutritional needs are met, alongside recommended medications. Now, we won't get things quite perfect without constant real-time monitoring but we should be able to get them much better than they have been."

The device pinged. Thatch turned it around to show Katie an endless stream of graphs with little smiley faces next to them. "There we are, much better." Thatch turned the device back to herself. For a moment, Katie felt a chill in the air, coinciding with a slight contraction of Thatch's leaves.

Katie frowned. "What's up?" she asked, seeming to startle the plant.

"Nothing, do not worry yourself about it. It will sort itself out." She made a quick series of taps, then paused. "Actually, forget I said anything." She tapped the screen.

Katie did feel much better for Thatch's guiding hand over her inner workings. She smiled, taking a deep breath of sweet smelling air with lungs that suddenly didn't seem to complain about it. She was neither too warm nor too cold. Her head felt clearer than it had in years.

She could think. She had thought that she could think, before, but now she was realising that she'd been tricked by her fallible human shell. It was like her body had never been able to run the real Katie, up until this very moment. For the first time in her life, Katie felt what it was like to actually exist, seemingly unburdened by failing human flesh.

"Will I stay like this?" Katie asked, fingers brushing against the bright red stems mediating her bloodstream.

Thatch shrugged. "I suspect you will settle into a middle ground of sorts. This machine is making constant adjustments to maintain my specified requirements but even without that, better nutrition and medication should keep you close enough. Of course, should you at any point find somebody you wish to adopt you, their haustorium could be programmed to maintain this with similar perfection, at least when combined with a good diet. Not that maintaining that would be any of your concern."

Thatch reached over and pulled out one of the flowers, then carefully dabbed away the tiny spot of blood left behind. A few moments later the other was removed, once both had gone dry. It didn't take long for Katie to notice her mind starting to cloud once again. Much less than it had been before Thatch had done her work, certainly, but it still hurt to know she could be so much more and to have that be taken away.

Katie took a deep breath. If this was the best she could get without having to become some random xeno's pet, then so be it. Thatch had described their 'hausteria' to her before, the operative component of the Haustoric Implant. Katie tried to imagine something grown from Rosa or Xylem curling its foul way around her bones and shivered.

No thank you. This would do. "Then what's next?" Katie asked.

"Next is the parts I am not so familiar with," Thatch admitted. "May I call through somebody who is?"

Katie reached over and grabbed onto a vine, before pulling it over to herself. She nodded. It wrapped around her wrist with a comforting warmth, and then Thatch spoke in the soft song of her native tongue, inviting another of her kind.

This affini burst in with a pirouette and a smile, earning a surprised half-step backwards from Thatch and a cautious lean away from Katie. "Miss Sahas, I believe? I am Glochi Opun, Twentieth Bloom, he/him, and I'll be handling your induction today." It spoke in a gruff, tremourous voice and moved with such an obvious beat that Katie could almost hear it. A deeper voice than Thatch's, sung to a slower, calmer tune. Less catchy, but pleasant enough.

He stood perhaps a little taller than Thatch did, with the tops of his triplet antennae almost scraping the ceiling. He moved with an easy grace, but the foliage hanging off of him was browned and stiff and the vines beneath were all dark. No fresh growths to be seen. He smiled with a disarming weight.

Twentieth?!

Katie did some quick mathematics in her head, feeling a gentle warmth spread through her as her mind did what she asked of it so much more easily than she was used to. Thatch had suggested an average lifespan of about three hundred years between blooms, which put this creature's birth somewhat before the Bronze age.

Katie gaped. She had thought Thatch old, but this single individual's cradle predated the cradles of human civilisation. And he was smiling at her like she could possibly be worth his attention, possibly have even the slightest novelty to him.

"How?" Katie asked, voice barely at a whisper. She had lived for just under thirty years and the weight of existence already pressed down hard. How could anybody go for so long?

Glochi's smile never wavered. "As your caretaker here has already dealt with the physical component, all you really need me for is a brief psychological examination, and then we can get you on your way. Don't worry, Miss Sahas, I've done this a few times before and we'll get you processed in no time." He turned his gaze to Thatch. "I assume you're the one we've all been in a twist looking for, then. Good to finally meet you! May I have that device back, and may I continue with your floret's examination?"

Thatch handed over the tablet. "She is not—"

Katie interrupted. "Not that!" she insisted. "You must be thousands of years old! How can you just stand there and smile?"

Glochi chuckled, glancing down at his panel and hooking a vine into some kind of control assembly at its side. "Remind me, how long is a year?"

Katie blinked rapidly. "Uh... a year has three hundred sixty five days, a day is twenty four hours, an hour is sixty minutes, and a minute is sixty seconds."

The doctor's smile grew a little kinder. Katie found the sense of endless patience almost overwhelming. If he had lived this long, then how could one more conversation do him any harm? "And how long is a second, Miss Sahas? You'll have to forgive me, one gets stuck in their ways eventually."

Katie bit her lip for a moment. How was she meant to explain this? She looked up to Thatch, who lay a hand on her shoulder with a gentle squeeze. Katie relaxed into it, feeling a clarity in her sixth sense that only really came from close contact. "It's about—" She clicked her fingers, paused for a second, and clicked again. Just about half of a period of rising heat from Thatch's fingers.

Glochi spent a moment in thought. "Five thousand, six hundred and thirty... two, then, in Terran years. I suppose my experience is a little different to yours, but now that you're here I do hope you'll start to see the beauty of reality for yourself. There is so much to see that it takes a long time indeed before there are no surprises left. Speaking of, I have some questions, but we'll usually do this with some assistance. Do you mind if I put you to sleep? Your partner will be here to oversee, of course."

Katie glanced over at Thatch, who gave an approving nod. If this was how this was normally done, then who was Katie to say otherwise. Katie passed the nod forward, and Glochi raised some kind of thin metal disc up to one temple and affixed it in place.

"Now, can I get you to be a good girl and count back from ten for me?" He raised a lollipop in one hand and gently waggled it. "You'll get a treat afterwards if you can make it to one."

Katie pulled a face, but nodded. She had to remind herself that in this culture, that wasn't meant to be demeaning. Or, at least, not the bad kind of demeaning. "Ten," she started. With her mind this sharp, Katie had no doubt she could make it. She'd prove she was worthy of their respect.

Glochi's smile grew apologetic for a moment. His vine twitched to one side, and Katie felt her consciousness snap. Speaking was impossible. Wanting to speak was impossible. Remembering she'd ever wanted it? Impossible. She was left a vessel waiting to be filled as the doctor brought a strange visor down to cover her eyes.

You'll forgive me the joke, little one. The treat was never conditional. Now, let's get your records all up to date and I'll let you get on with learning to appreciate the universe, floret.

Chapter Text

Now, we're going to count you back up to ten, okay, sweetie? With each number, you'll feel yourself becoming more and more awake.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

A little break here, just to rest, hmn? You've been answering a lot of questions and you'd like a glass of water.

Katie took the oversized glass in both hands. Drink. She gulped down a few mouthfuls of clean, soft water, and then a few more as her conscious mind caught up to how good it was and how much she needed it.

"This's... weird," Katie slurred. She could hear the doctor, and she could feel Thatch, but she couldn't see anything, really. There was just noise around her. It was a strange kind of noise, like it meant something. Like what it meant was just on the tip of her tongue, and if she spent just a moment more looking she'd realise what it was. Katie felt the glass slipping through her fingers.

No, no, little one. Focus on me. We're counting up, not down. You don't need to worry about anything but following along, hmn? Count with me, now.

"Six," Katie whispered. She knew which number came next. She was leading the count, wasn't she?

"Seven." No, she wasn't. Of course seven came after, and after seven there was... It was like forbidden knowledge. Katie knew she knew this, but it just wouldn't come. Strange, when so much else would. Doing what she could do was as easy as breathing.

"Eight." It was her speaking, but it wasn't her choice. This wasn't somebody speaking through her. She could remember the lightning-fast question and answer session she'd just been through with crystal clear clarity. Those had been her answers simply given far faster than she could have done alone. A full day's interview had just taken place over the course of an hour. Katie could appreciate the efficiency. She still couldn't remember what number came next.

"Nine." Of course nine had come next. The last count was on the tip of her tongue, but no matter how she strained, it wouldn't come. No matter what approach Katie took, no matter how she tricked her brain into finding it, the final figure failed to materialise.

Here we are, now, cutie. Right on the edge. One more number and you'll be in charge of yourself again. Get that independence you so crave, right? All the responsibility and all the pressure. Wouldn't it be easier to—

The voice paused. Katie turned, sightlessly, to look towards Thatch by sixth-sense alone. "Ah, of course, I— Oh, one moment, let's get her disconnected."

"Ten." Katie took a deep breath, eyes going wide as the force of her own cognition slammed into her like a girl hitting a burning bulkhead. Her breaths sped up, hands rising to tear the visor off of her head and yank free the little metal disc. It was too dark her head was reeling and she could feel the flames licking her skin and—

An arm caught her. Katie buried herself deep, breathing hard, while her emotions slowly normalised. The soft beat of Thatch's body was a riot, matching Katie's own panic note for note, but slowly calming. With it, came Katie.

"I'm terribly sorry, I hadn't intended that to be a negative experience. Are you okay, Miss Sahas?" asked the deep, rumbling voice of the doctor. After such a long interview it was weird for Katie to hear it with her ears, and not simply have it as a voice inside her head.

Katie wasn't sure how to respond, but thankfully Thatch came to her rescue. "I suspect that it was not, Glochi. Poor Katie here has been struggling with some of the experiences in our recent misadventures. Truth be told, as have I, but I am confident that things will be dealt with now that we're here."

Katie's racing heart was gradually slowed to a resting pace, and her breath returned to a sustainable depth. She managed to sit back up, to give the doctor an apologetic smile. "Sorry. Yeah, not you. You did fine. That was... yeah. Head stuff. Harder to fix than body stuff, right?"

"Not at all," Glochi replied, with a smile and an offered disc. "Cutting out an unwanted memory or ten is delicate work, but in many ways easier than setting a bone."

Katie stared at the disc. Was this how they did it? Was this why humanity had fallen so quickly? Sweet, tempting offers of oblivion? Struggling with trauma? Just let me rewrite you. With that disc on her temple and the visor over her eyes, Katie would go along with it, too. It wouldn't even occur to her to question it.

She shivered, realising just how much trust she'd placed in the doctor without really considering the details of what she was doing. She shook her head rapidly, but thankfully, Thatch stepped in to rescue her yet again.

"Last I checked, the xenodrug regime necessary for that to stick safely is a little beyond Miss Sahas's tolerance right now. Additionally, I suspect she is still acclimatising to such ideas, and it may be best to revisit that option at a later date." Thatch's hand quietly drew Katie back in, holding her head against soft leaves.

"As you wish." The doctor nodded his assent, flicked the disc into the air, and— Katie lost track of it almost immediately, but it was gone, replaced with the previously promised treat which he held out in offering. Katie took it. "I've also done a few more traditional therapy sessions in my lifetime," he replied, with a grin. "Regardless of your tolerances, I'm sure we can find a way to comfortably work together, Katie. Don't hesitate to send a message if you want to organise something, or just pop by whenever and I'll be with you when I can."

He leaned over, and continued with a stage whisper. "I'd appreciate your company, to be honest. Humour an old man like me with some stories and I'm sure I could give you some in return." His smile was as infectious as it ever had been. Katie's nod hardly felt less compelled than it had been under the hypnotics, but it was hard to mind.

"Sure," she replied. "Once I find out how messages work, anyway."

He winked. "I believe that's next." He glanced up at Thatch, extending a vine to entangle in what seemed to be a fairly commonplace gesture here. "Do you know where habitation engineering is? Erica Erigin and her florets?"

Thatch glanced up as if surprised, blinked, and shook her head. "Oh, no, I brought my hab along with me, I am afraid, I have never had occasion to meet them. Could I trouble you for directions? My communicator is lost somewhere in this star system, I suspect. I do hope it's working well enough to be found, but the lack of it does leave me without guidance."

The doctor rummaged around in a drawer for a moment before pulling out a small pink object in the shape of a stylised flower. He tapped it a few times, then leaned down to place it in Katie's hands. "How about you take this, then. It belonged to a very dear friend of mine, but it has been in that drawer for far too long. I would be honoured if you would help it continue its journey."

Katie looked down at the item. She wasn't sure what it felt like, other than perhaps the flower that it clearly was not. Four pastel yellow leaf-like objects sprouted from a flat, round middle section that was itself a very pastel shade of light blue inset with an endlessly complicated pattern in a slightly darker blue. These plants sure did like their fractals.

Katie looked up, a curious tilt to her head.

"Just tell it what you want to do. Start with your name, cutie."

"Uh, okay. Hello... flower? I'm Katie." She felt silly, talking to something like this, but it wasn't even the weirdest thing she'd done in the last hour.

{Greetings, Katie! I am a basic communications device compliant with all eighteen thousand six hundred and nine relevant standards and requirements for use by ward species of the Affini Compact,} the device chirped in a shockingly realistic human voice which Katie could not even begin to place the accent of. She held it a little further away, but after a short moment, it kept speaking. {I've established a connection with the Affini Light Scout, Elettarium. Is this your home?}

Wow. That was one hell of a question. Was this her home now? Katie had nowhere else to go. Katie knew all of six people aboard and trusted maybe two of them, but that was better than anywhere else in the galaxy. The real answer was probably that Katie was home-less, but that her best option was to try to make a home here. She suspected that the little device wouldn't handle her philosophising all that well, though, so she simply answered, "Yeah, I guess so."

Thatch's vine squeezed her hand.

{Okay, that's all synced up with your paperwork, cutie! Your file currently doesn't list an owner, would you like my help fixing that?}

The center of the flower resolved into a stream of pictures. Some inexplicable kind of display technology that Katie couldn't even begin to figure out showed endlessly detailed photographs of a seemingly endless stream of affini. Katie wasn't sure she could tell any of them apart without the names or brief biographies displayed alongside. Underneath each entry was a pulsing button that raised slightly above the surface of the 'screen', displaying "Adopt me!!!!" or similar. No two buttons had the same number of exclamation marks.

"Uh, no, thank you," Katie replied. "And can you make the wording be a little less... embarrassing?"

The machine seemed to take an unusually long amount of time before responding, as if processing the idea of an independent creature was somehow challenging for it. {Updating language setting from English/Floret to English/Boring. Helpfulness disengaged.}

Katie couldn't escape the feeling that the machine was being petulant, but that was ridiculous. It was just a machine. "Cool, thank you." She turned to Glochi. "What do I do with it now?"

"Ask for directions to Miss. Erigin, who I imagine is already prepared for your arrival. She does most of the habitat building around here."

Katie did just that and the device sprung back to life, wordlessly displaying a map on the screen and lighting up one of the leaves. Katie did an experimental spin, and the light shifted to always point towards the room's exit. A guide, then. "I guess I'll be seeing you later, then, doc," Katie said, with a smile that somehow didn't feel like it was crushed beneath the weight of his. What a strange man. Impossible to dislike, it seemed. Katie popped the lollipop into her mouth as she left, and could have sworn she felt the grin widening as she gave an appreciative moan.

Katie led the way with Thatch in tow, leaving the room with her focus on the map. They hadn't gotten more than a few feet away before Katie made the mistake of glancing upwards. She lost her footing, slipping and nearly falling, though of course she was caught and set back onto her feet.

This wasn't a ship. This was a city. It was unfathomable. Large in a way that things simply couldn't be.

Katie span around to look at the building they'd just left. Glochi's Veterinary Services: Florets welcome! towered into the air maybe thirty or forty feet, and yet it was dwarfed by its surroundings. Katie stood between two rows of buildings, each easily that large or larger, all resting on a soft floor of what seemed like actual plantlife. The path between the rows was huge, mostly covered in something akin to grass. A hundred humans could have walked side by side here, and likely dozens of affini, without anybody getting in their way. Alien trees of a dozen varieties were dotted around, providing shade and shelter, little fruits or natural seating. Smaller gardens outside many of the buildings showed off smaller sets of plants, or provided a base for vines or moss or more alien things to spread and cover the tall walls

Yet all of that paled in comparison to the sky. Dirt's starscape hung above them like there was no upper hull at all, like the ship was simply open to the elements. Katie had seen the outside, she knew that it was not. She had seen the unbroken, if patterned, hull.

No, this wasn't a city. This was its own small planet.

"Thatch?" Katie asked, looking over to her companion with a vine held tight.

Thatch had been looking off into the distance, but she quickly brought her focus back around to Katie. "Yes, flower?"

"How is there a sky?"

Her affini laughed, and gently pushed her forward. They started walking again. They were far from the only people on the path, but the others weren't really paying attention to either of them. Thatch got a few glances, it seemed, but each terminated in a smile and a wave and nothing more. Perhaps it was simply obvious that they were going somewhere.

"I believe that the Terran Accord had figured out glass before we got here, Katie. You may need to be more specific."

Katie gave the vine in her hand a sharp tug and the plant it was attached to chuckled. "Yes, yes, very well. You—" Thatch reached out, picked Katie up, and placed her half a foot to one side. She glanced down to notice she'd been about to trip over some kind of orange shrub. She glanced up at Thatch for a brief moment, and the two of them seemed to come to the wordless decision that it was best for Katie to keep her feet off of the ground while she was distracted.

Firmly in place around Thatch's neck, Katie took her vine and started guiding them along the path suggested by her new device.

"Growing material which is transparent in one direction, opaque in the other, and strong enough to shrug off the hazards of space travel is something our Stellar Gardeners have been perfecting for tens of thousands of years, Katie. Working it into hull designs like this instead of using smaller windows is more of a modern artistic trend, I believe." Thatch paused for a moment, considering, then continued in her usual dry tones. "Like most advancements, I suspect it began as an attempt at flirting." It was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic, but Katie was starting to believe it could be literally true.

Katie let out a long breath, gazing upon a blanket of stars she'd thought lost to her for several long moments more. "Is 'the hazards of space travel' a euphemism for Casaba-Howitzers?" she asked, gently ruffling Thatch's hair.

"I suppose." Thatch shrugged, then tilted her head a few degrees to the side while she thought. "Also: railguns; gravity lances; phase disruptors; hypermetric kill vehicles; stellar penetrators; and, hmn. I believe the last ship I was on got clipped by one of the Xa'a-ackétøth zero-point manipulators about two hundred years back and even that didn't quite break the hull. Space can be dangerous, but Terran space is fairly docile. I wouldn't worry about it, Katie, you're safer in here than you've ever been."

That was hardly the point, but it seemed difficult to argue otherwise. The plan Katie and the rest of the crew of the Indomitable had been so focused on seemed laughable, now. They'd thought that one good hit with their main gun would do some damage, but it was unclear now whether it would have even scratched the paint.

"We never stood a chance, did we?"

"I believe you had already come to that conclusion."

The pair continued onwards in a strange kind of silence. Not uncomfortable, but all of this was very new to Katie and not new at all to Thatch. She had a million questions and every answer just raised more, but Katie needed to save her energy for the trials to come.

As they moved, it became clear that there really was no distinction between commercial and urban districts to be found. The buildings they passed were a hodgepodge of styles, types, and aesthetics. Any which had clear signage usually had the text repeated in five or six languages, one of which was usually English, though the presence of such things seemed to be no clear indicator of what the building was for either. Some seemed simply to be homes, declaring the building to be so and so's habitation unit, or the home of a short collection of names. Others advertised some service or product, specialty ingredients or devices, in a staggering array of diversity.

There was little to no clear consistency here. Everybody was doing their own thing, and yet somehow nothing clashed. It was hard to ignore one of the few obvious patterns, however. Even down in writing, it was the Affini who came first, and Katie didn't see a single non-affini without the word "floret" in their name.

If Katie looked away from the buildings and the signs it was hard to ignore that the rest of the population of the ship were almost exclusively pairs or small groups, and no affini was without some kind of smaller creature hanging off of its body. The affini sometimes noticed her looking and gave a smile and a wave, which Katie returned for fear of causing offense, but the other species never did. They had eyes only for their betters.

They looked happy. Not the passive kind of happiness Katie had spent her life searching for that was mostly characterised simply by a lack of misery, but an active, visceral joy, as if getting to walk at the heel of some overgrown houseplant was the very peak of their existence to date. They practically skipped, all dancing to different inaudible tunes as they gazed lovingly up at the creatures who had enslaved them.

Katie glanced down at Thatch. Was she being unfair? She was being unfair, wasn't she? Fuck. Were these all people? It wasn't just Thatch who was secretly real, hiding amongst a population of a trillion trillion monsters?

Fuck. Fuck!

Katie pulled the pair of them to a stop underneath something that looked somewhat like a cross between a palm tree and a bagel, positioning Thatch so that she could lean into the hole. "Can you... tell me something about Rosaceae? Something that isn't to do with war or taking humans as pets. What does she do, otherwise?. I'm getting worried that she might have a rich inner life." Katie was pretty sure she'd taught Thatch how sarcasm worked in Terran culture well enough for her to get it.

Her plant hummed, reaching up to brush a hand against Katie's shin. "I do not know her very well, I am afraid. I believe she is primarily an actress, however. She used to lead the... I suppose in English the closest word would be theater, but that does not quite capture it. She is a storyteller, of sorts. A conductor who can keep a thousand planes spinning in the air to tell stories unique to their audience, though again, the words do not quite directly translate. It is a more... participatory thing than your theater. A story you experience and shape as you interact with it. I have not had the chance to experience her work for myself, but I have heard good things."

"Ah. Great. All the others, though, their only personality traits are that they like taking sapient creatures as pets, right?" Katie sighed. Hell. The only thing worse than fighting against a change for years and still losing was, apparently, then finding out that the thing she'd been fighting against didn't even exist. "Fuck."

Thatch shook her head. "I can honestly say that I have never met two of my people who are exactly alike. If anything, we are individualistic almost to a fault. I suspect that the cultural inclination towards efficient, effective bureaucracy is a tacit admission that without impeccable paperwork tracking the details, our society would have collapsed long before we had reached the stars."

Katie slumped forward, resting her chest over Thatch's head and letting her arms drape down to her upper chest. She emitted a dramatic sigh. "And we couldn't have that. You have so many species to rescue." Katie rolled her eyes.

"Just so. Know this, Katie. I am not unique in my uniqueness. Everybody you meet here will be their own person with their own history, their own way of looking at the world, their own goals, and their own way of interacting with you." Thatch gently tugged Katie's arms, pulling the girl forward until her head hung upsidown, bringing them eye to eye. A hand atop her head kept Katie steady. "But all of us understand our responsibility. Every person on this ship would move mountains to see you kept safe and to help you be the best Katie we can help you be. If you think that we seem preoccupied with the cute creatures of this universe then you are correct, but that is just about the only shared attribute among us."

"Pfffff," Katie blew, waggling her legs until Thatch pushed her back up into place. "Then I guess we go see somebody else unique. Do you know this—" Katie checked the readout on her communicator— "Erica? We're only a couple minutes out, I think. How do you all deal with things being so far away?"

Thatch shrugged, again, with a rush of air that was almost like a sigh. "I don't, unfortunately, so we shall learn about them together. If we were in a rush, we could have taken a magrail shuttle, but I suspected you would not mind the walk and so did not suggest it. Also, until you tell the registry your acceleration preferences it seems that it will assume I'm assisting you, so if you wish to remain standing alone I suggest you investigate those."

Katie considered that, then nodded. They took off again. Despite the relative chaos of the individual buildings, the layout of the arc itself was predictable and efficient, and Katie suspected that once she got to know how things were organised she wouldn't need a guide at all to get between places. Katie guessed that the symbols she saw on each building were some kind of street system, as they seemed to change in a predictable manner, but she hadn't quite figured that out yet.

The building they were heading for became clear long before the communicator chirped to mark their arrival. While many of the buildings were covered in artwork, even in that context this one was striking. It seemed to mix the material of the path with the transparency of the sky and blurred the line between where one building ended and the next began. It was almost a sculpture of sorts, but one that tricked the eye to make it seem like a shifting, living imposition on reality that didn't quite fit. The stars around it seemed to get drawn in, becoming just another part of the piece. Shadows didn't seem to fall quite right on it. It was otherworldly even compared to the literal alien spaceship.

Thatch opened the door and the pair of them entered.

Katie found herself with her back against a wall immediately, as a neck longer than Thatch was brought a mouth filled with countless rows of teeth and four glowing eyes right up against Katie's face. It huffed, and Katie felt a rolling wave of heat dance across her skin, leaving a dull tingle in its wake. She took an instinctive breath and filled her lungs with damp, strongly-scented air. Katie found herself smiling.

She gulped, blinking rapidly as she took the creature in.

"What mortal snack deigns to enter my lair? Have you brought a gift, little one?"

Purple. Pink. Mostly dark colours, but it was plantlife again, just... really, really not in human form. Katie laughed. "Only my company," she tried, really hoping that they hadn't just found the first affini to break Thatch's expectations. Even if they had, Thatch was right there. What harm could come to her here?

A thousand teeth curled into a grin as the creature rose back up, giving Katie some space to move. It—She?—sat curled up on four legs with what looked like wings draped down its sides. Now that Katie was no longer hyperfocused on the teeth, the creature actually looked a little goofy, and that impression was only heightened by the pair of humans sitting on its back unsuccessfully trying to hold back laughter. She almost looked like some kind of dragon, though the details weren't quite right to match Earth's ancient myths. For one, there were too many eyes.

The room itself was liberally sprinkled with artwork, photographs, sculptures, and what looked like a few projected three-dimensional models in a variety of different styles. Like the houses beyond, what could have been a tangled mess instead managed to flow smoothly through good choice of position and grouping, giving the room a complicated, varied, but not unpleasant texture.

"That'll do! I'm Eri, she/her, and those two back there are June and Sarah, who'd just love to get to do some of your internal decor. The good captain called ahead, cuties, I hear you're in need of somewhere to live. Is this for both of you? Not sure I've seen either of you around before."

Thatch shook her head, raising a vine in a brief wave. "Hi. I'm Thatch, this is Katie. We're only looking for her, my own unit is perfectly serviceable." At a raised eyebrow from the dragon, Thatch added, "it isn't one of yours, but I have lived in it for long enough that it is comfortable."

Katie bit her lip. "I'm not looking for much, whatever you have will d— ack!" Katie was cut off as a million teeth backed her against the wall again.

"You are new here and so I will forgive you your insult, little T—" A quick shake of the head from Thatch cut the word off halfway through. "Uh, little sophont. We do not have anything ready to go. We do not do not much. You are speaking to artists." She hissed the last word.

Katie giggled, gently pushing the snout away. "Okay, okay, I understand. Thank you." She shot a glare at Thatch. While her affini had said that she didn't know this one, surely you had to be pretty out of touch to not be aware she was like... this? "Uh, do you have a pamphlet I can look a— Okay, no, no I get it!"

The creature settled back down with a satisfied grunt. "Hmnnn. I haven't gotten to design anything for a sole ward before. All of my prior work will be useless. Too big, too tall. Inaccessible. Unusable without a caretaker to do all the work. Yet, you have nowhere to stay, and so it must be ready by tonight?"

Katie's heart sank. This was the moment where her dreams hit reality, then. This culture simply couldn't account for her. Given the sheer opulence surrounding them, Katie didn't dare imagine how much a hotel here would cost. Not that she had a job. Hell, was she going to have to get a job? "It's— I don't mean to be any trouble, and I can figure out somewhere else to stay if—"

A snort cut her short. "Nonsense. I will not have any sophont's first impression of my home be delay or compromise. You will sleep where I tell you to and you will do so tonight. Come, sit, I must understand you." A claw tapped down against the floor with an air of finality.

Katie looked over at Thatch, who, Katie noted with a perverse comfort, seemed just as baffled as she was. She walked over to a pile of cushions just opposite the architect and sat herself down. Thatch sat alongside for moral support, though Katie wasn't quite sure in which direction the support was expected to flow.

Erica was interrupted as one of her humans brought to her a stack of papers an inch thick. The affini raised it in one clawed hand, using the other to pamper the messenger into some kind of blissful oblivion. "Ah, clever girl, I knew we had something on this. The 'Xenian Terran Accessibility Model'! Some clever floret on one of those fringe worlds ended up being some kind of prodigy, so we shouldn't struggle to design something that works for you. It is then my role to make it perfect. So, Katie, when you imagine your ideal home, what do you see?"

"Uhh."

When Katie imagined a home, she thought of a shared bunk in a cramped room aboard a dirty starship. The kind of ship where gravity wasn't a given, so you had to strap in overnight, but maintenance was so bad that the strap was usually broken. She suspected that that would not be a pleasing answer.

"I honestly have no idea," she admitted, glancing away. "I'm good with anything, really. I don't think you can disappoint me."

The dragon's eyes narrowed. "You speak like you wish to be eaten," it hissed, and Katie was glad she hadn't met this one first. Thatch gave her hand a gentle squeeze, presumably to let her know that she was not on the menu, but she'd already given the game away there. The dragon was eccentric, but apparently they all were. Besides, no matter how many teeth that creature had, she also had two very uneaten humans relaxing against her flank with their noses in books. It softened the image somewhat. "But fine, how about you tell me about the nicest place you've lived and we go from there."

Katie laughed. The architect wasn't going to like that answer either, she suspected. "That planet down there. We made a camp down by a river, uh, big tall trees around us giving us lots of coverage from rain and stuff, but a big hole over the river where we could see the stars. I have a fish that lived kinda in the river and that was nice, I want to keep them with me. We carved a bed and cooking stuff and, y'know, things. It felt big and open in a way I'd never experienced before. It was... nice. I know that isn't the kind of answer you were... expecting?" Katie paused, noting that Erica was biting her lip with what must have been two dozen teeth.

"You want an indoor habitation unit that evokes the great outdoors of a planet nobody but you has ever visited; to a scale that we have never before worked, accessible to both yourself, your pet, and, presumably, your friend here; where the aesthetic demands handmade styles and fittings; and yet I could not possibly provide anything with less than perfect amenities and utilities—and you want it by tonight?" With each word, her snout had grown closer to Katie's face until they were practically nose-to-nose.

Katie paled. "I, uh—"

"It is perfect. It shall be done. You must go at once before I change my mind."

The dragoness whirled around, raising herself to her full height, where the room, no matter how grand, could barely contain her. She spent a moment fussing over her florets before striding out of the room with them in tow.

Thatch and Katie both spent several silent seconds sitting before Katie finally turned to pin Thatch down with a savage glare.

"How are all of you like this?"

Chapter Text

"Hey!! What can I get you?"

The human woman had practically bounced over to Katie and Thatch as they'd approached something that claimed to be a Terran-style cafe. She was decorated with some some kind of dress in a frosty pastel blue. It seemed to be a common kind of fashion, though as with everything else no two humans wore quite the same cut. This human was wearing something that through delicate pattern and careful shaping drew the eye up to the glowing band of gold snug around her neck and the tiny little wings sprouting from her back. When the light caught her eyes right, even they seemed to glint with gold.

Katie glanced back at the sign. Angel's Delight. Cute. Probably more than a little offensive? Katie had never been religious but others were. That said, there was something about the imagery of the girl that seemed almost charming in its bare-faced confidence. Of course the affini would co-opt humanity's most cherished iconography to reinforce their own position. It was the deity role they were all auditioning for, after all.

"Uh, do you have a menu?" Katie asked, trying not to stare at the collar. While there was something deeply freeing about setting herself apart from humanity, Katie had still spent her entire life interacting with humans and these creatures aboard the ship were barely recognisable as such.

The waitress's slightly hazy eyes went wide as she processed the question. "Oh! Yes! We do! I'll— I'll go get that, pretty please wait right there!" She bounced away, wings fluttering like she expected to take off.

Did she really even count as human? Where was the crushing weight of reality on her shoulders? Her eyes were free of the low-key dread that characterised what it meant to be Terran. Her reaction times were clearly dulled and yet she spoke and acted with a confidence that spiked straight though the uncanny valley and pinned it to the floor, like she no longer needed to care about how she'd be received.

It was like somebody had spent a long time studying humanity yet had never stopped to ask anybody what being human was actually like, and then had built something that seemed to fit but without the essential misery of life, the crushing anxiety of having to filter every want or need through the uncertainty of whether it would be socially acceptable, or the terror of knowing that no matter how good things got you were never more than a month away from disaster.

The angel bounced back, holding out something that could easily have been a menu at any Terran cafe. An expensive one, perhaps, partially because its offerings all seemed very opinionated and partially because it didn't list prices. Katie hoped that Thatch didn't mind paying, because she certainly couldn't.

"Thanks," Katie said, putting her focus back on the woman. "Do you have a name?"

"Angel Formosa, First Floret, miss!" Obviously. "Have I done anything wrong?"

Had she? Her whole existence felt wrong, but she had the same bottomless cheer that everyone on this ship seemed to share. She was property, as far as Katie understood it. No rights, no freedom. She was practically as much an object as the menu in Katie's fingers.

"Are you being paid to work here?" Katie asked.

The girl laughed. "What? No. Are you new here?" Great. It was slavery, and she was so used to it that the suggestion it could be otherwise came across like a joke. Angel's eye went wide. "Ohmygoddess, are you the new one?"

Katie paused. "Uh, 'the'? You know who I am?"

Angel nodded rapidly. "Kitty? Kate? Kaisa? Uh, something with a K?"

"Katie?"

"Katie! Yeah! You've been the talk of the ship for, like, weeks! Everyone's so excited to meet you! Have you joined the chatroom yet? Oh, probably not, you've only just got here, right? I— Oh, this is exciting! Um. Am I being too much? Sorry, I haven't interacted with an undomesticated human for a while." Angel glanced over to Thatch and gave her a polite smile and a curtsy. "Assuming you don't have plans otherwise, of course, Miss. Aquae."

Thatch's head snapped around, stolen out of her thoughts to focus on Angel with an intensity that, for a moment, had the girl's eyes opening a little wider. Katie could feel Thatch's uncertainty buzzing through the air.

Katie felt like her hesitation was calcifying. How was she meant to deal with this? The girl was a little ditzy, maybe, and she was being a lot. It didn't feel like a negative thing, she seemed legitimately happy and like she was being her authentic self, even if it was a self that had been put together by somebody else. Katie thought back to Leviathan, and the way she'd been carefully teaching it how to get the most out of its environment with careful construction and considered food schedules and placement.

Was this really so different?

Katie gave Thatch's vine a squeeze. After a moment, her friend squeezed back and took over the conversation. "I... no, I do not. Katie here wishes to remain independent and today has been overwhelming for her." Thatch laid a hand on Angel's head and gave it a quick rub. "You have been a delightful host, however I am afraid I must require some space for Katie here. This is her first day on board, so please select for us a nonthreatening meal. I will have enriched water. Got all that down?"

The floret nodded rapidly and Thatch patted her gently on her way before guiding Katie to a table. The cafe itself was based out of one of the ship's countless buildings but the seating area itself was placed at the edge of what seemed to be a gigantic forest park. The trees were sparse, and Katie could just about spot a wide open field through the gaps.

This was a spaceship? Even with a mental tune-up Katie was starting to feel herself fraying around the edges again. It was all overwhelming. Katie slumped to the side, leaning against Thatch's weave. Her plant seemed surprised and glanced down with a silent question.

"I know I shouldn't be surprised at all the humans here. You've told me what's going on, but... How can this be okay? We're sitting here getting served because that poor girl is being forced to take our order, and she isn't even getting paid for it." Katie retrieved and then squeezed a vine, close to her chest. "Exploitation doesn't stop being exploitation just because you paint a smile on it."

Thatch rumbled for a beat. "Why do you think she would be paid?"

"Okay, sure, I guess the essentials are free, but how could anybody be happy without some kind of self-determination?" Katie asked. She raised a finger to her temple and gently rubbed it, hoping her growing headache would recede.

"Ah. And they would have that, if they were paid? Like you had it when you were being paid?" Thatch spoke with a familiar dry humour and, for the first time in their conversation she felt the gentle warmth of her plant's kind attention. Thatch rested a hand on Katie's back and she leaned into it, enjoying the pressure and heat of familiar contact.

"That's... different," Katie admitted. "It isn't enough for this to be just as bad as how things were. They have to be better, and I don't see how literal slavery is better than wage slavery."

Thatch emitted a thoughtful grunt. "You are fully aware that we do not share humanity's barbaric concept of 'economy', Katie. What is it that you are really concerned about?"

Katie was quiet for a moment. Thatch wasn't wrong. She was projecting Terran ideas onto this, but it still felt wrong even without them. How could slavery not be wrong? "You've said the essentials are provided, but what about other things? The captain said there were supply issues. Maybe you don't call it money, but there has to be something to decide who gets what, right?" Katie gestured over to the cafe building itself. "Why would anybody eat the basic food every day if something like this were just free? Would the whole system collapse if people like Angel refused to work?"

Katie felt a brief pulse of confusion rippling out of Thatch's motions as she brought up a knuckle to shift Katie's perspective up to meet her. "Good food is essential, Katie. Remember, our priorities are not the same as humanity's were. The absolute minimum care that we will provide is everything a creature could ever need." She pulled Katie's communicator out of somewhere and spent a moment tapping it. She spent a moment reading something, and then looked back. "As for Angel, this particular initiative was her idea, apparently. She and her owner submitted a request to the local clerks for some space and dedicated resources, which was approved—" She checked the screen again— "five minutes later. She does not have to do this, she chose to."

Thatch's knuckle slowly stroked under Katie's chin, growing firm for a few moments. "I expect that you will find that Terran society pretended to care for self-determination in the same way that it pretended to care about you. It was an excuse to oppress and hold you back. Always claiming that the thing that you think you need could be yours if only you continue to trade away your life for another year, or two, or ten, to work towards it, while never letting you get there. While here..." Thatch drifted off. Her gaze moved away from Katie's, and her knuckle fell away, allowing the girl to look away.

Katie didn't. "While here all they have to do is ask, and they'll get what they need?" Katie spoke with a dry kind of humour herself, but it was pointed inwards at herself. She laughed, a dark little chuckle that didn't match her words. "Assuming their owner thinks it's good for them."

Why was that idea not as horrific as it should have been? The affini Katie knew best was, of course, Thatch. Thatch was a thoughtful, caring individual who had gladly given Katie everything she'd needed. Katie had chafed at being denied things she wanted at first, but as the days had gone by she'd grown to understand that from a different angle.

Katie being refused a fruit that would have ruined her appetite wasn't condescension, it was respect. It wasn't something Thatch had withheld out of malice or a lack of care, but because she paid so much attention to Katie that she could be confident that the only reason Katie wanted it was dumb instinct that no longer fit modern day life, or worse, a false want implanted by advertising, trickery, or the many other ways that life in Terra had been aimed at manipulating her to consume.

Through that lens the existence Thatch was describing seemed almost idyllic. No longer did Angel need to toil and suffer for a chance at maybe, one day, getting to roll the dice at getting what she wanted and finding out that she'd been wrong about wanting it at all. She had somebody she could ask who understood her so deeply that she wouldn't ever be given things that wouldn't make her happy.

Katie almost envied it. She was starting to see how, if Katie had somebody who understood her so deeply and who wanted to give her the gift of comfortable certainty, she could almost be tempted into it. Almost. She didn't need the help, Katie could get by just fine on her own, and she cherished the opportunity to figure out who she was by herself. Didn't she?

Katie whimpered. All this thinking was making her head hurt. She rested her fingers against her forehead and sat up, resting her elbows against the table. "Could I get a glass of water or something?"

Thatch looked back down, spent a moment rummaging inside of herself, then offered Katie a pill. "I acquired these from your vet while you were otherwise occupied. You will want to take two a day, one in the early morning and one in the late evening. Do so in addition to your other medications unless and until you find a different method of dosage that you prefer."

Thatch handed her a glass of water, too, without explaining where she'd gotten it. Katie looked across at the wordless pill. It was pink, slightly squishy, and emblazoned with a six eyed smiley face. "What's in it?"

Thatch raised an eyebrow. A gentle finger on Katie's chin moved her gaze over to meet her affini's. At this point, Thatch wasn't really moving anything. Katie had long since started simply going with it, letting herself be guided. It was easier that way, and Katie had never regretted it. She smiled up at Thatch's questioning gaze.

"Suddenly curious as to what I'd like to put inside of you, Katie? You trust me. Would I give you anything dangerous?" There was a steel in her eye, and Katie felt like she'd made another mistake and rushed to correct herself.

She quickly shook her head, as much as she could without breaking contact. "Never, but you usually make that stuff yourself. You didn't make this, how do you know it's safe? I'm not doubting, I just..." Katie sighed. "This is all a lot. I feel like I'm trying to learn ten new things every minute and I can't get a break. I won't have to think about it if you tell me it's okay."

Thatch considered that for a moment, released Katie's chin, and looked away once more. Her expression was inscrutable and Katie's sixth sense felt unusually scrambled. Thatch pulled the girl's communicator out of wherever she'd been keeping it. "Bring up the details on our local Solarbeak strain, please." The screen resolved to a detailed 3d model of a wide, open flower with a striking yellow and black pattern. Alongside was reams of text in what Katie was coming to recognise as the native Affini tongue.

"English translation." The text fuzzed for a moment. This translation was much, much shorter and had many, many more exclamation marks. "No, the non-floret version, please." The text fuzzed again. When it returned it was a little longer, though still far short of the original. At least there were fewer exclamation marks.

This {{Class-C}} {{xenodrug}} is really good, but cuties probably shouldn't try it without permission! The Solarbeak plant comes from an adorable little moon somewhere in the {{Pegasus galaxy}} and it was very very toxic to the {{natural inhabitants}} there! With a caring {{#TODO do humans have claws or hands? the nails get longer does that make them claws}} we made it much safer for them, and as a lucky coincidence it also fixes up a whole bunch of {{little brain things}} in the {{poor humans}}! Kind of a general top-up for {{brain chemistry}} and not much else. Probably mix it with something a {{bit more noticeable}}? Humans are {{really forgetful}}, but if you mix in something that feels good they're sure to come back for more!! An essential component for most florets who suffer from {{brain chemistry stuff}}!!!

It kept going like that for a while. Many of the terms were styled differently, and if Katie tapped one she was taken to a page specifically for the topic. All of them were written similarly. Katie pulled a face. "The original translation is more rigorous than this, right?"

Thatch nodded, flicked the display back over to the affini version, and scrolled around in it. The table of contents alone was longer than the entire English translation. "Much. It appears they did not make all the same choices I would have, but I can vouch for this. No significant mental alterations beyond the obvious benefits of making sure your neurons can talk to each other smoothly. The classification is somewhat arbitrary, but the justification is, and I quote, 'these cuties will bond with anything and the better they're thinking the faster it happens'." Apparently Katie was going to have to learn a new language if she wanted any details on things, and even then she wouldn't escape the constant... affininess.

Katie opened her mouth and waited for Thatch to place the pill inside. It took a moment. She took a gulp of the water and swallowed the lot down, letting out a deep breath as the frayed edges of her mind started pulling back together. Again it did nothing for the stress she was under, but it seemed to raise the ceiling on how much stress she could handle high enough that it no longer seemed like a problem. Katie sank into the chair.

It looked cheap and plastic but despite that was actually very comfortable. The table, too, was thin and a little too shiny but felt extremely solid and actually had a very satisfying texture. The whole establishment evoked the aesthetic of a cheap Terran cafe merged with the apparent Affini need to never do anything by half.

Thatch retrieved Katie's meal. Toast, scrambled eggs, and some kind of sausage. Katie wrinkled her nose. "I'm trying to be vegetarian," she complained.

Thatch glanced back, considering Katie for a moment with an implacable expression. "You will find it very easy here. While we primarily focus on those sapient enough to appreciate our care, the other life in this universe is no less deserving of cultivation. You will not be allowed to do harm, Katie. It is not necessary for you to worry about these things."

Katie stabbed the sausage with a cheap-looking plastic-looking fork that turned out to be the nicest piece of cutlery she'd ever handled and tore off a piece. She brought it up to her mouth and chewed for a few seconds, then swallowed. "Mm. Pretty good, yeah."

Thatch raised an eyebrow. "Our cooking has been known to break the wills of certain creatures through taste alone. I am confident that it is more than pretty good, Katie."

"Your soup is better, is all. I'm sure I'd be more surprised if I was coming into this fresh." Katie flashed a smile over at her partner, who looked away.

"Katie," Thatch started, though after a few seconds it became clear she wasn't going to continue.

Poor Katie looked up with a frown, clearly confused. She asked something. Some variation on "are you alright?", spoken as if the answer wasn't already written in tense vines and twitching plantlife.

But of course, Katie couldn't really understand the utterly alien body language of somebody she'd met only weeks before, especially not when Thatch was putting so much effort into mixing her signals. Thatch felt like a rotting fool for not seeing it earlier. She was doing it again. Drawing some innocent creature in without even realising it.

It was so clodding obvious, in hindsight. No wonder everyone they'd met had assumed that Katie was eager for adoption. She stared up at Thatch with a dangerous level of trust that she no longer seemed to question. She responded to touch with easy submission and a terrifying dependence. Could Katie have even made it through the day alone?

Thatch had gotten too used to letting her natural rhythms dance, thinking it harmless. Only now did she spot Katie conforming to the same beat, now that Thatch was finally paying attention to more than just her metaphorical heart. It was getting harder to keep herself safe to be around and even if she did, the confusion it brought to Katie's face was physically painful.

Thatch knew it was too late, anyway. She'd seen the answers in hard numbers. Most ward species assumed that things like compatibility and dependence couldn't be measured but when it came to the Affini they were usually wrong. Many species, pre-domestication, made the realisation that after enough time a pet and their owner would seem to move on the same wavelength even with their primitive forms of caretaking. Thatch's people had turned that concept into a science and nurturing it into an art form.

Katie's heart didn't quite beat in perfect time to Thatch's song but it was close enough that the vetinarian's scanner had given it a little smiley face. Coming along well. High compatibility, high dependence. If Thatch kept going like this Katie would find her attempts at independence a misery that Thatch simply could not rescue her from. Worse, should she find herself getting close to another, they would face an uphill battle to get the Thatch out of her.

Rotten roots, Thatch had really screwed up here.

"I am okay," Thatch lied. She cringed, then added "A little overwhelmed by being back, in a sense."

Not technically a lie. It would have to do. She'd already done enough damage, she didn't need to add breaking the poor girl's trust to the list. All she had to worry about now was how she could safely disengage before it was too late. Thatch had been doing a terrible job so far of keeping Katie at arm's length since her appointment, and it was difficult to keep it up.

Katie deserved help and support. Thatch could hardly deny her it, even knowing that each time she failed to do so Katie was brought deeper inside of her trap. She was doing long term harm because she couldn't bring herself to cause short term hurt and she knew it. Her weakness had already destroyed one creature and she wasn't going to let it happen again.

Even with Thatch's body and words carefully controlled Katie seemed to see right through her attempts at misdirection. Her concern was touching and Thatch had no idea how to get rid of it. Thatch wasn't worth the concern and Katie had no idea what providing it was costing her.

Thatch knew for a fact that there were no gods or goddesses watching over this universe, or at very least none who were paying enough attention for her tastes. All the same, her certainty was rocked just a little by the fortuitous timing of an incoming message. Rescue.

All it had taken was a long walk around the minor habitable arc, ostensibly to help Katie get her bearings; a few hours helping her set basic preferences in her paperwork so she could take a magrail shuttle and get the other amenities of the ship working to her needs; and a meal. They'd eventually gotten around to shipboard evening, which happened to about coincide with sunrise on planet Dirt. That wouldn't last; a Dirt day was about thirty hours long and an Elettarium day was only twenty two.

Thatch tapped the message icon, silently grateful for the opportunity to change the subject. "Looks like your hab is ready, we should get going. I have some things I need to take care of, so I will drop you off there and attend to my own needs."

"But—!"

Thatch shook her head. She couldn't hear the rest of that sentence. She wasn't strong enough to say no. "No buts, Katie. I have put off my own medical checkup for too long and I am confident you will be fine on your own." Lie. "Or, at least, you have already made several acquaintances who would be grateful if you were to call upon them."

Thatch raised and turned to go, herding Katie towards the nearest magrail entrance. The pod took off with a very gentle acceleration, automatically accounting for Katie's presence but still getting up to a good speed quite quickly. Katie's hab was to be on the Elettarium's other arc, and so they had to take the long way around regardless. As the ship was in gravity and the two arcs were motionless the interchange at the ship's base was not currently experiencing microgravity. The process of switching rails took a few seconds longer than normal, filled with an awkward silence.

Katie kept trying to start conversations and Thatch couldn't bring herself to deny the girl, but her answers were fairly short. The laughter that Katie squeezed out of her was bittersweet. The way Katie's brain worked was delightful and charming and all the more so when she wasn't struggling against her own biology just to exist. She had a sharp mind and a sharper wit and Thatch would never forgive herself if she dulled it.

Once the pod arrived at its destination Thatch guided Katie out of the pod, following the communicator as it mapped out the short walk to Katie's new address.

For all the effect that she had been having on her Katie, Thatch could feel the way she was being wormed into in turn. If she could have simply not cared none of this would be a problem, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Thatch looked down at Katie and felt a flutter in her core. She wanted to see all of the smiles. All of the laughs. A thousand thousand moments of realisation as some new concept finally clicked. Thatch had so many things that she could teach. There were so many things that they could learn together. The universe was big enough that Thatch could keep running forever and nobody would ever catch up, but the thought of doing so alone seemed more painful than it ever had before.

Thatch had to be alone. She had to hold herself back.

It would be so easy, even now, to forget the promises, forget what she'd said to others. Just push the girl up against the wall and drown her in a song she hadn't even realised she was craving. Nobody would mind. Katie wouldn't mind. She wouldn't be capable of it. Thatch would tear her apart, scrap what wasn't worth salvaging, replace everything that didn't please and put things back together in a different way. Again and again and again until she was happy with the way Katie ticked. Until she got bored with that and felt the need to do it again in a different way.

She knew she could make Katie happy. The right mix of chemicals, stimulation, and input and Thatch's broken machine would be happier than she'd ever been.

Or miserable. Fearful. Lost in pleasure, or denied it entirely. Perhaps allowed to understand what had been done to her so that Thatch could watch her fail to fight it. Perhaps given enough control to be hateful, yet so addicted she'd beg for that control to be taken all over again. Anything Thatch wanted. Everything Thatch wanted.

Thatch's hand twitched. She forced herself to look away but the thoughts didn't stop. It would be so easy to justify it to herself. So easy to justify all of it. Katie would love every second, if Thatch wanted her to. Or she'd hate it, but be well behaved enough to pretend, at least to others. Or she'd be so helplessly in love that she wouldn't mind the pain. Whatever whims Thatch felt could be made a reality and eventually she'd go too far and break something and she wouldn't be able to put Katie back together again.

Thatch ground her spiked teeth together. Affini weren't meant to be like this. She wasn't meant to want these things. She was meant to selflessly dedicate herself just like everybody else. She hadn't meant to break Caeca, but Katie? Katie she would break on purpose just to see the fire in her eyes shatter, and she'd do it again and again until she broke something so badly it went out for good. By the stars, she was too much of a monster to be safe to be around.

Thatch brought a vine to Katie's neck. Two minutes. That's all it would take. Nobody would stop her. Nobody could stop her. Katie was looking up at her with a confused smile. So trusting that she couldn't even see the threat. She treated every other affini with suspicion and the irony was that they really were the good guys. It was Thatch that she should be afraid of, but she was in too deep to see it.

Thatch pressed the communicator into Katie's hands and ran. Sure, she gave some parting words, some excuse for where she would be going. A promise that she'd come running if Katie needed her. Instructions for how to get in contact. A hug. All the things she knew she shouldn't do but was too much of a coward to hold back.

But it was still running away and Thatch knew it. She was just too weak to even flee properly.

Chapter Text

Katie stood facing a plain door set into a plain wall, alone. To the left the nearest similar door was adorned with sloppy artwork and photographs of smiling faces. To the right, it was sculptures, mostly, and a curated garden of colours that sent sparks down Katie's spine just from the sight of them.

Between them stood flat white walls meeting the grass at a perfect angle. No identity at all, not even identifying marks. Was this hers? The thought was almost overwhelming. How could she possibly match up to the wonders around her?

Katie clung to the soft petals of her communicator, working up the courage to figure out how to open the door. She reached to the side almost on instinct but there was nobody there. She had to do this on her own.

Okay. Okay. Legally speaking, she was an independent sophont. Katie glanced around. Her surroundings were much the same as they had been in the other arc—which was to say, everywhere was unique and detailed and she felt like she could spend a lifetime admiring the wonders that stood around her without ever needing to leave the path. She wasn't alone, but it was quiet. A few pairs or groups wandered around in the unhurried, casual way that most seemed to move around here. Katie returned a wave to one of the passing pairs. If she didn't start moving soon, somebody would assume she needed help and come along to assist, so... Katie should move.

"Uh, open?" Katie asked. "Door, open. Door?"

The door remained firmly closed.

This was ridiculous. This was the correct address, wasn't it? Katie checked the map and it did claim that she was standing right outside of the right place. She didn't know what the symbols meant, but they matched what had been in Erica's message. Yet she couldn't get in. It was hardly a promising start.

"Hello?" she called, raising her voice in the hope that somebody inside would hear. After a few seconds the door slid open, revealing some human who greeted her with a hazy smile and eyes that didn't quite focus all the way.

"Hey! Right on time, we were just finishing up a few details while we waited. Mistress is a little too big to fit inside without getting in the way, so she's supervising from afar. Wanna come in?" The human stepped back, gesturing for Katie to follow.

"Sorry, I'm pretty bad with names, were you one of—" Katie checked the message— "June or Sarah?"

"June! Sarah's still inside fiddling with something, but we're done, really. I've gotta say, this was a lot of fun, thank you." June grinned. Like the other humans Katie had seen, June moved with a kind of hesitation, as though her body was always running a quarter second behind her mind. Her eyes seemed to not wholly focus, as though she was looking a little past Katie instead of directly at her. Her smile was a little too wide. For all that, she did seem very present and her movements weren't sloppy, just slow.

But she was property. A thing. Practically an object. How was Katie meant to interact with her? She obviously couldn't act like June was a regular human, because half of human social convention was pretending to care about the problems of strangers, and Katie suspected that this one had very few relatable issues.

What had Thatch done back at the cafe? Affirmation, clear instruction, and checking in at the end to make sure everything was okay? Acting as if she were above the poor girl? Legally speaking she very much was, but it felt slimy. It was still a better guess than nothing.

"Uh, good. Thank you. I couldn't figure out how to open the door, be a... dear and tell me?" Katie wanted to cringe, but the human's smile only widened. She nodded rapidly and skipped out of the doorway, letting the door seal up behind her.

"Of course, Miss Sahas! Please watch what I do carefully and I'm sure you'll get it in no time." June skipped over to the door, grabbed the handle, and pulled it open. Katie's cheeks burned as she watched the door sliding open. "Did you get that? I'd love to show you again if you—"

"No, no, that's fine I got it thank you," Katie interjected, hurrying along inside before anybody saw her. For a brief moment she was almost glad that Thatch wasn't here, though of course that didn't last. Thatch wouldn't have made her feel bad about it.

Katie was a little worried for her affini. She'd hurried off at quite the speed and she'd been seeming a little off all day. Katie hoped that nothing was wrong. She could handle this, give Thatch the space she needed, and then check in later. It was fine. Katie could do this.

Katie's eyes took a moment to adapt to the gloom. She squinted into the darkness for a moment before happening to glance upwards. She took in a sharp breath. The building was bigger on the inside and contained the entire sky. Her eyes flicked across the stars and she recognised them all. This was Dirt's night sky, but it couldn't possibly be. It extended far beyond the plausible dimensions of the space she'd entered.

In fact, if Katie looked behind her, the forest seemed to go on endlessly. The door was set into open air. She took a careful step towards it and moved her fingers towards the position that the wall must be in, halfway convinced that they would go straight through, as if the door had been a portal to some mysterious realm.

Thankfully, Katie's sanity was maintained. As she neared the wall, it started whiting out, displaying a thick hexagonal grid that revealed the real dimensions of the room. Katie took a few steps back and the door slid closed, sealing them inside something that Katie would have sworn was the planet Dirt at night. There was even a canopy of trees a few meters to one side, though they couldn't possibly be real.

"Uh..." Katie couldn't think of any better words to emit. She just turned to June with bafflement. How was this possible, never mind hers?

The floret clapped her hands. "Mistress, could we get the day/night cycle matched up with ship time again?"

A disembodied voice rumbled through the area. It was a voice deep enough to buzz the air in Katie's lungs, but at this point she was getting used to things like that. The dragon from earlier. "Of course you can, pet. I'll do it this time, but be sure to get Miss Sahas here put in charge, hmn?" It certainly seemed like Erica would fit inside the vast expanse that the room claimed to be, though Katie's rational mind understood that the real dimensions were much more constrained.

The sun rose in fast forward, casting moving shadows from everything in the room. The illusion was no less convincing in daylight. June looked back towards her with a smile and a bounce, and held out her hand. "May I see your pad, miss?"

Katie handed it over, and June spent a moment fussing over it before handing it back. "You're all registered! You should be able to control most of the fancy stuff by voice, and there's a new section for habitation preferences if you prefer that. Think about what you use often! If you want us to come and add any switches or buttons or make any other kinds of changes, please just ask and we'll be right with you!"

The disembodied voice of the dragoness rumbled through the room again. It literally shook the trees, though Katie suspected that was a special effect. "While you are, of course, free to get anybody to make any alterations you wish, I am free to devour you whole for denying me the opportunity to improve my art."

Katie squinted into the distance, where she imagined the voice was coming from. "Is that actually true?"

The other floret—Sarah?—rolled her eyes from across the room. "Yes, but only if you look at it sideways. Mistress is flirting because she finds you cute. She won't eat you unless you ask nicely, but we really would appreciate the chance to make any changes here that you can't make yourself. We take pride in our art!" She seemed unusually level-headed for a human around these parts, fiddling with the side of a tree using something that looked like a paintbrush.

The disembodied voice rumbled with discontent. "Pet! Don't you know it's rude to play with my food?"

Sarah's blush was immediately visible. Ah. Maybe not that level-headed, then. "I suppose you'll just have to go hungry, then, won't y—"

The door opened, and a stream of vines shot across the room, curled around Sarah's body, and pulled her back out at rapid speed. Katie stepped back in alarm, but June didn't even react.

"Is that normal?" Katie asked. Was this just how things were around here? Katie looked around at the impossible opulence that was apparently just being given to her, no questions asked, because she happened to exist, and tried to make it match up with the creatures that seemed incapable of behaving reasonably. A growing collection of giggles and laughs, one so low in pitch that the ground shook and the other unmistakably more human, drifted through the air until Sarah's voice managed to pull together enough words to ask the computer to stop transmitting.

June nodded, with a soft smile. "We've been watching each other work for hours and it tends to get us a little worked up. I volunteered to actually walk you through the hab, though! I love getting to show this stuff off. It's amazing how much better the affini are at building things than we were. Is this your first hab unit?"

Katie wrinkled a little at the 'we'. It was hardly inaccurate, but if Katie was going to get a fresh start, she wanted it to be real. "Would you mind avoiding... human words with me? It's kind of a sore point."

Was she going to have to explain that to everyone she met? June agreed easily enough, with a quick smile and no sign of judgement, but ugh. Regardless, Katie nodded. "Thank you. This is my first day on any affini ship, assume I know nothing."

June's eyes went wide, and she spent a moment doing some kind of little dance with her hands before grabbing something out of a pocket that seemed analogous to Katie's own communicator. She tapped a few buttons, then stared at the screen for a moment before glancing back up.

"So okay! We got into this a couple years ago after Mistress picked us up and started teaching us more about art, because it's so much fun for us all to get to work on these little projects. Or, kinda big actually with yours, but that just made it more fun." She looked back towards the screen. "So, okay, um. The standard Affini Habitation Unit is one of those things that just seems stupidly obvious in hindsight."

She flipped the screen around to show Katie some kind of diagram. A hexagon, about as tall as it was wide, with a whole bunch of annotated symbols dotted around it. "The outside shell is part of the, uh, the Elettarium, but the hab itself is an independent construction that's partially self-sufficient and partially relies on the ship for like, power and stuff. With the door closed we're actually totally separate from the outside! That's super cool, because it means that so long as we build something the right shape and size with the connectors in all the right places we can do whatever we want inside!"

She tapped the screen and it played a little animation of a kind of cutaway effect, showing the insides of the hexagon being a cozy little apartment.

"Because we didn't have all that long, we had the atomic compilers put together a pretty standard shell with all the usual options. Don't try to take it into space alone for more than a couple hours because the batteries will run dry, and there was only mounting space for one residential atomic compiler, but honestly the default option is about as good as it gets unless you're looking for something super specialised! If you wanna let ship noise in then that's all configurable, but for the moment we're pretty isolated from the outside world. No noise, uh, separate life support so you can put whatever you want into the air, and all of the water'll get recycled. That kind of thing."

June spoke at a rapid pace, almost stumbling over herself with clear enthusiasm that, as far as Katie could tell, was shying away from the important stuff.

Katie blinked rapidly and interrupted. "I'm sorry, I think I'm misunderstanding. I was... kind of expecting a room or something in a shared area or a communal bunk. How many people live in this?"

June tilted her head to the side. "That's your decision! I assume at least one—you—but if you want to live with others then, like... it's your hab, right?"

Katie looked around. She literally couldn't even tell how large it was because the walls were magic. "All of it? Or is there a room in here that's mine?"

"Wow, this really is your first day, huh? You don't mean that you used to live on one of the colony worlds, you're actually totally new here?" June raised her eyebrows. "How did you even get here, aren't we... there was a space thing, I think, aren't we really far away?"

A space thing? It seemed almost unbelievable to Katie that anybody on board a spaceship couldn't be constantly aware of what was going on, never mind not aware of what surely must have been an emergency. "Yeah, I kind of got us pulled out here, sorry. I didn't mean to cause any kind of emergency, or... I guess I did, actually, but..."

Katie looked down at the apparently literal dirt under her feet. She'd wanted to destroy this ship. She'd wanted to kill everybody aboard. Thatch. Glochi. Rosaceae. Erica. Angel. Zona, Xylem, and Lily. June and Sarah, too. How many more? Hundreds? Thousands? People who had done nothing to her. She'd imagined this ship as a military vessel filled with weapons and soldiers and somehow it had been easier to rationalise wanting it destroyed then, as if those soldiers wouldn't have been real people too. As if it somehow became right to end the lives of creatures older than her civilisation because they were trying to give her something like this.

Katie took a deep breath and blinked away a tear. "I'm sorry," she said, looking back up at June's blurry face. "I didn't know what you were like. I... I was desperate and I thought that if I could just make the tiniest bit of difference then maybe it'd all have been worth it, but I didn't know what you were like, I promise."

June looked taken aback for a moment, but quickly hurried over and began to gently pull Katie across the room. They wandered past a couple of trees towards some kind of artificial cave. It evoked a natural aesthetic, but was clearly something constructed, with a little wooden staircase leading to a raised platform that seemed to contain seating and some things much like tables or raised platforms.

They didn't head up that staircase, though. Instead, they walked past it and entered the cave itself, where the lighting was dim and the seating was much more cozy. Katie could feel herself relaxing just from being there, cut off from the rest of the universe apparently as literally as it could be. June sat her down on what seemed to be literally a beanbag chair, then pushed a second over and sat alongside. She leaned against Katie's side in a way that would have felt overly familiar, were they not so far beyond Terran society that Katie wasn't sure whether those boundaries even applied any more.

"Capitalism was a bitch, huh?" June asked, with a grin. "The war, too, but like... none of us knew why we were fighting. The propaganda was really good and we were all so desperate already that it was easy to fall prey to it. Don't worry, I get it. We all did shitty things and they understand and don't hold it against us. If it helps, I don't think you actually caused much of an emergency. I don't really follow along with ship news but the only reason I even knew about it before today was because we're having to wait a bit longer for Rinan memes. We did have a busy hour or so this morning making sure everything was tied down ready for us to do real gravity for a bit, but most of that was just Eri complaining that she didn't have time to swap out whatever lets her fly for something that would work in real gravity and she's feeling a little grounded."

Katie groaned. "Yeah, I've had the whole speech, I guess. There was never any chance that I'd hurt you. Didn't even scratch the paint, probably. I still tried? It feels shitty. If I could've, I'd have killed you for no good reason."

June nodded. For a moment, it seemed like her joyous veneer might slip, and reveal the trick beneath, that she was human after all. Her smile never faltered. "No big deal, I forgive you. Goddess, yeah, I get it! It's been a couple years for me but I only stopped having nightmares about putting screws into big guns when Mistress banned me from thinking about them for a while."

"Screws?"

June nodded, solemnly. "Before Eri rescued me, yeah. The, uh, what was it... Terran Cosmic Navy Screw Fab 851. Specifically, uh..." She paused, and then her grin grew twice as wide. "I can't remember what kind of screw any more! Take that, Capitalism!"

"Huh. I think I had a box of those nestled away next to the drive core on the Indomitable. Thanks, I guess?" Katie shrugged. June shrugged too, and laughed, which proved contagious. The pair of them giggled for long moments before finally falling silent.

June broke the silence with a happy sigh. "Most things around here are grown, compiled, or totally handmade. I don't think there's a mass-produced screw in the entire ship. We might actually be the furthest from a screw any ex-Terran Accord citizens have ever been because of how far out you took us. Thanks!"

"You're welcome?" Katie laughed. It wasn't easy to forget that she was speaking to property, but somewhat uncomfortably Katie was finding it easier to talk to a possession than she ever had a full, independent human being. "Was this, uh, 'hab' grown or compiled?"

The object shook her head. "Handmade! Which, I guess to get back on topic for a moment, uh, you're just gonna get given everything. Get used to it. The sooner you stop asking questions the better, honestly, unless you're feeling cuddly. Most of the people around here love explaining how impressive they are, but not like, in a bad way? It isn't egotism, they're just... really enthusiastic about helping out."

Katie knew that she should hold it in. It was rude to bring it up, wasn't it? To burst the perfect little picture that June was painting. "Except one of them owns you, June."

June nodded rapidly. "Yeah! It's grea— waaaait no you're new here, you mean that as a bad thing, don't you?" Katie nodded. "It's... nice? I'm sure you'll get along just fine even if you don't have an owner, but for me, it's... I don't have to worry about anything any more? I know that if I wanted new clothes then they'd just give them to me, but this way I don't even have to think about it. Mistress picks my wardrobe, makes sure I get enough sleep and that I eat properly, makes sure I'm keeping up with my hobbies but also that I'm not doing them too much and not giving myself the time to rest I need. She helps me pick out new ones, too, so that I don't get bored, and makes sure I have goals and stuff to work towards."

June sighed happily, leaning over to rest her head on Katie's shoulder. "I'm happy. Truly, honestly happy. If there's even the slightest thing in my life that isn't fulfilling and wonderful, all I have to do is say and she fixes it, but most of the time I don't even need to do that because she made sure it wasn't a problem before I even noticed. I'm sitting in a cave that I modeled off of some cool photographs I took on an alien planet that I got to build into an awesome home together with those I love, and we just get to give it to you, and I literally don't have a worry in the world. It's not even right to say that the last couple of years have been the happiest of my life because I don't really even feel like my life started until I met her. I guess the old me would have said that being hers was a small price to pay, but it isn't. I'm lucky to be Erica's. If I could keep everything else while becoming independent, I wouldn't."

Katie might have thought that the speech had been rehearsed, but it was given with a breathless enthusiasm with plenty of pauses where June's tongue outran her head and she had to scramble to catch up. If it wasn't completely off the cuff, then June was the best actor Katie had ever seen.

"Also, the sex is amazing, and no I will not elaborate. You have to see it for yourself to understand." The floret winked at her. Was this a proposition? Was this flirting? Katie's blush did a terrible job at helping her act like she was any better than the blushing mess beside her at all.

"I'll, uh, I'll pass," Katie admitted. "Not that I don't appreciate it! I've just never really been into all that physical stuff."

June nodded rapidly. "I get! You're always welcome to come hang out or whatever, too!"

Maybe everyone around here was full on, affini and human both. Probably the non-humans, too. Katie gave a slightly strained laugh. "You don't even know me, June."

"Hanging out is how we'd fix that! Sorry, I forget what it's like to be, uh... sober, am I being too much?"

Katie shrugged. "It's been a long day, is all. You're fine, I'm tired. Maybe let's finish the tour and hang out some other time?"

"Sure! Uh, you can find all the specifications for the hab shell if you're interested, but it shouldn't really matter unless you want to move to a different part of the ship, or a different ship entirely. This is yours now, but you've been assigned an address based on making sure you're close to any registered friends and in walking distance to any essential services you'll need access to, but it's your hab, do what you want with it. You might have to organise a swap if you want a specific address, but people around here are pretty easygoing, I think."

June shrugged, scratching the back of her neck. "Making decisions isn't really my area, but they seem easygoing to me, anyway. Wow, I'm rambling a lot. Okay! We got a scout drone sent down to the surface so we could make sure to get the details right. The dirt isn't actually dirt, but it should look and behave almost identically, except it won't get stuck in things and get tracked everywhere and you won't have to do anything to keep it soft. The trees are really trees, though, we got samples taken and called in some favours in the botanical gardens to get them flash-cloned in time. Same deal, though, the hab should broadly take care of itself. If you plant anything else then you'll either need to water it or go into the preferences and add them to the auto-maintenance list, depending on whether you like watering plants."

June raised to her feet and offered a hand to help Katie up. "We were working from some new standards we got a little while back, so please do tell us if anything doesn't work right, but I think you should find everything very usable! Stuff is scaled so it's okay for ex-Terran Accord folk, but if you have any affini friends over they should be fine too. They won't fit inside the cave without compressing, but that's okay, it's meant to be a cozy little retreat."

Katie was guided out into the larger open space. "The main area here is just a big open space for you to do whatever with, really. The platform on top of the cave there should put you nearly at head level with most affini, save you straining your neck. The walls and ceiling are just us showing off, I don't know if you'll actually want to keep them like this."

June spent a moment tapping her pad, and the hexagonal grid reappeared over the true bounds of the room. She tapped again, and the effect faded entirely. Katie could see that the cave was built partially into one wall, leaving the regular bounds of the room, and that there were actually several doors leading out of what she'd already considered an unreasonably massive space. The 'real' walls of the room were a pleasant cream with a soft texture. The external door to the unit was large and looked quite imposing, but the internal doors seemed to be in two parts. One small section about Katie's size, and then another, much larger outer section that would fit anything smaller than Erica herself.

"Obviously feel free to do whatever you want with any of this. Most simple pattern or texture stuff the walls will just do, and anything more complicated you should still be able to get done. Over on the other side here we have the kitchen-y bit. We weren't sure how hard to go on the theme, so if you don't like it then just say and we'll come swap it out with something more usual!"

June was gesturing over to something that on first inspection had seemed just like a pile of rocks, but with the walls no longer complicating the illusion it was fairly easy to pick out what was going on. Flat rocks made for a wide kitchen surface set around something that seemed to look like a fireplace, but was really some kind of combination oven/hob, for if anything needed heating. A large boulder simply opened up to reveal something that bore superficial resemblance to a refrigerator, except that it wasn't cold.

"Stasis unit," June explained. "Literally the best thing in this room, if you cook, I think. Keeps things as they are when you put them in. Cold stuff stays cold, hot stuff stays hot. It'll still do temperature changes if you want, but that doesn't really come up much. Probably use that or the fireplace to heat stuff up, I don't think you'd be able to set any actual fires in here, there's a... thingy about that. I dunno, I don't start many fires."

June skipped over to the kitchen wall and flicked a few of the switches. They moved with a sharp, satisfying snap. "The switches are all reprogrammable, but they should do about what you expect, I think. Except this one." June pressed her finger against the rightmost switch in a bank of three, by the stasis unit. "This one doesn't do anything. They're way too satisfying to press not to have one you can click whenever."

Next, she pointed towards a little recessed box set into the kitchen wall. "Atomic Compiler. I don't know how it works, please don't ask, just tell it to make you something and it'll make it. If it's food or drink it'll usually come with plates or glasses or whatever and you can configure what type you like if you want. Stick them back in when you're done and it'll decompile what's left over. It's whatever."

Katie could feel her eyes bulging. "It's whatever? June, I think you've just described the most ridiculously useful thing I've ever heard of."

The girl shrugged. "I guess? I don't think anyone really uses them unless they're in a rush. Half the units we've made people specifically asked not to have one."

"Oh, because of the rationing? The captain mentioned you were short on supplies." Katie sighed. There always had to be a catch. Get access to a magic box that could create anything, but she couldn't use it.

June, however, only frowned. "What? No, there's just no romance in atomically perfect sandwiches or whatever. You can get fresh ingredients brought in from the gardens where they actually grow them and every one tastes a little bit different, or go ask the registry who's cooking for folks that day, I guess? I dunno, do I look like I get to decide what to eat?" She laughed, then raised a finger to her throat and snapped her cloth choker against her neck. "I just know that we only do compiled stuff if we're in a really big rush."

Katie let out a whimper. They had access to perfect replication and they didn't even use it? Just one of those machines would have revolutionised all of Terran culture. Certainly it would also have started a series of bitter and pointless wars over who got to control it, so maybe it was good that this wasn't technology humanity had ever reached.

June continued on, skipping over to one of the internal doors. As she went, she pointed out seating and sofas dotted around the room. "I know this is probably more than you need, but just tell us which ones you like and if you'd like the others swapped out or removed. There's like, twenty different combinations of textures here, from things that feel like Terran standbys to modern alien stuff, so just find whatever you like best and tell us about it."

She paused and pointed out the river. Katie blinked. She'd assumed that that was part of the illusion, but a river a couple feet wide did actually separate off about a fifth of the floor space and one of the doors. "Eri wasn't sure about this one, but we convinced her. The water'll be good for your fish, and it's constantly getting cycled around and kept clean and healthy. Drinkable, I guess, if that's your thing. We can take it out if you like, and there's a lot of sound dampening stuff so you can make the, like, flowing water noise louder or quieter. Uh, it'll drain pretty quick if you fall in, though not so far your fish will have trouble, but you'll still get wet, so try not to fall in?"

She reached the door at the far side of the room and pulled it open by the handle, which was equally as prominent on the internal doors as it had been on the external ones. "Bathroom! It's a bathroom. I think you know what to expect." She closed the door and moved on. "Bedroom! We only had space for two of these, so I'm afraid if you don't like the texture you'll have to change your own sheets. I mean, I guess you could ask us to do it, but..."

June kept talking, but Katie didn't hear it. She walked into the room, where tasteful lighting gently rose to meet her. She didn't look at that, either. She sat on the bed and looked out the window as Dirt's local star rose over the horizon, casting long shadows with deep orange light over the tops of the trees far below. The glass, or whatever it was, was so clear that Katie could have been looking out of a hole straight through the hull. June eventually seemed to realise Katie wasn't listening, and just moved to sit beside her.

"Actually, do you mind if I get a photograph? I don't have my good camera, but this is beautiful." Katie glanced over to find the human almost as entranced as she was. It was beautiful. She gestured for June to go ahead and she raised her own little handheld communicator to snap a few pictures before sitting back down.

"One of the other doors is storage space, if you need it. There's a spare bedroom if you want guests. The last room is just empty, do whatever you like with it. All the walls are movable, though probably you'll want us involved for that, there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes here. But, uh, yeah. Wow, I've been talking for a while, huh?"

Katie smiled. She wasn't sure what to make of June, but as far as first impressions for a human possession went, it was unexpectedly positive. This wasn't a toy kept around for novelty, or an ego-stroking tool for the plant who owned her. June seemed just as alive and vibrant as anybody she'd ever met. More, even.

"I appreciate the tour, thank you. If it's okay, I think I'd like some time to settle in. I'll... message you later, I guess?" Katie gave June a slightly wider, slightly tighter, smile.

June nodded a few times. "Probably message Mistress, though? What I spend my time doing isn't really any of my business, is it?" She grinned, then made her way to the exit. The external door slid open, momentarily allowing in gentle sounds of life from the outside world before they were cut off again by the gentle whoosh of a closing door.

Katie spent a moment with her communicator. She was this habitat's registered owner now and it was a matter of moments to engage a privacy mode. Sound dampening in both directions, external door locked to all, excepting if there was an emergency that required it be otherwise. The cameras, microphones, and speakers that Erica had called into were already set to require permission to turn back on, but in privacy mode Katie wouldn't even get asked for that permission unless the caller indicated it was important.

She sat. For the first time in a very, very long while, Katie was alone. She'd made it. Katie suspected that she could stay inside without unlocking the door for a long time before anybody would get pushy. It was everything she'd wanted for years on end and more besides. This was luxury that would have been unimaginable mere weeks ago.

Katie spent a few minutes aimlessly poking around the habitat preferences section of her communicator. There was a lot she could change, but nothing that really seemed to need changing. She looked elsewhere. She could do everything from play music, movies, or documentaries; she could read books, or play games; she could access scientific knowledge, philosophy, history, and art; and all from a thousand thousand civilisations. It was riches without compare. Resources that many in the Terran Accord would have gladly died for just a chance at touching were simply given to her without question or restriction, beyond that only a fraction of the library had been translated into English.

Katie stared blankly at a list of things she could do that may literally have been infinitely long for several long moments before falling backwards onto the bed.

This was everything she'd always wanted? Why did it feel so empty?

Katie looked back to her communicator and investigated the messaging section. She deliberately ignored the growing number next to the 'recieved' tab and opened a new session. After a few attempts at correctly spelling "Aquae", Katie had a message window open with Thatch.

Before she could send a message, it asked her for a display name. Finally, something she didn't need make a decision for.

katieflower: hey, how r u? u seemed a little frazzled earlier, u good?
katieflower: ive had the whole tour from june and now im just kind of here
katieflower: wanna come over after ur thing? there are so many things here & i'd love to know how they work lol
katieflower: june was nice but she didn't know much about the details
katieflower: also wow the view from these windows is amazing, u should come see!!
katieflower: also the whole hab is like, youve gotta see this!!

Katie set down the device and stared out of the window. Occasionally, she checked back to see if she'd gotten a response. She hadn't. After a little while, it became Elettarium night. The hab lighting dimmed, the window attenuated, and Katie very soon fell into a light and faltering sleep.

Chapter Text

Chapter Twenty Seven: Ah.

It was dark and silent. The air was the comfortable kind of warm that could be easily forgotten. Neither too hot, nor too cold. There was no clank from adjusting panels or whirr from struggling life support. No banging of footsteps or of people grabbing handholds. The bed was a kind of comfortable that seemed like something out of a faerie story. Seemingly endlessly soft yet still providing the exact right support for Katie’s body regardless of whether she tried to sleep on her back, her side, or her front. If she lay out flat, it was comfort beyond imagination. If she curled up, it was cozy to a degree she would never have dared consider.

She tried every different way of sleeping and all of them were perfectly comfortable and none of them let her get back to sleep. There wasn’t enough light to see if Katie’s eyes were open or not, but they were. She could tell.

Katie groaned, forcing herself to sit. Soft red night lights rose with her, drawing her attention over to the door and warning her of all the room’s edges.

“No, no, I’m awake, ugh,” she groaned. How was she meant to actually control these lights? June had said voice would work, right? “Uh, can I have the lights on normally?”

No change. Katie sighed. She wished she could go back to sleep, but she’d been trying for longer than was okay and she’d only succeeded in getting herself frustrated. “Please?”

The lights transitioned over to their prior gentle yellow-white over the course of a few seconds. At their peak, the floor-to-ceiling window that formed the far wall of the room returned to transparency, revealing the height of Dirt’s mid-day sun. Katie shied away, groaning as the light burned her retinas, but thankfully it only took a few moments to acclimatise.

Katie grabbed her communicator in clumsy fingers as she dragged herself out of the bedroom. The main room was exactly as she’d left it. The gentle sounds of the stream were the only noise she could make out and nothing had moved. This was hers. It was baffling and she had no idea what to do with it.

Bathroom. She stumbled through the door into the small, functional bathroo—

Into the biggest bathroom Katie had ever seen. It was still a bathroom, but the titular bath was closer to a swimming pool. Katie wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a bath, never mind one this big. It wasn’t something that was done in space, it was ridiculous. In space, you cleaned with a cold damp cloth and your own disappointment.

Bathing wasn’t Katie’s goal, though. She took a few minutes to figure out how she was meant to use a toilet that didn’t involve uncomfortable tubes, and then she washed her hands in a fancy but ultimately familiar sink. Katie looked up at the large, well lit mirror and jumped. She didn’t recognise the person reflected back at her.

Katie whirled around with her heart racing, but there was nobody there. Just her. Her gaze returned to the mirror and her breath left her body. She raised a hand to her face and dragged slender fingers over soft skin. They hadn’t exactly had mirrors on Dirt, but it really hadn’t been long enough that she’d been expecting to see anything unusual.

Katie saw Katie.

Cuter than she looked in the pictures, according to Rosaceae. It hadn’t been condescension. It had simply been a fact. Katie saw her own smile and started a rapid process of checking herself over that ended up with her half-burned Cosmic Navy jumpsuit forgotten on the floor to one side. She wasn’t perfect—goodness knew that the many marketers of Terra had ensured she would know that—but the progress was undeniable. Thatch’s guiding hand over Katie’s form. Katie snapped a few pictures and made a note to send them to her affini, and only her affini. Regardless of what this culture thought about propriety, Katie was not about to start sending nudes to people she didn’t know on her second day.

A quick rummage through the wardrobe back in the bedroom confirmed that the affini had no idea how to make clothes. Every one felt like it was so smooth it would fall right off, and most had cuts so alien Katie wasn’t even sure how to begin putting them on. She returned to her jumpsuit, as scratchy as it seemed by comparison.

Kitchen. The not-quite-dirt was soft against her toes on the short trip over to the kitchen. How would she start her day? Usually it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds for Katie’s movement to wake Thatch and after that everything generally went quite smoothly, but of course, she’d been rescued from that. This was better. Katie had the freedom to do whatever she wanted.

Katie stared at the recessed box that was whatever June had called the magic replication machine. This was the first day of the rest of her life and it seemed important to start as she meant to go on. So, a quick, satisfying breakfast, and then she’d find something good to do with her day.

What was breakfast? What could breakfast be?

“Uh, do you have a menu?” Katie directed her question towards the box. It felt silly, but Katie guessed that a reliance on vocal interfaces made sense when you couldn’t really be sure whether any particular species would even have fingers.

“Of course I do, sweetcorn!” the box chirped. Katie groaned. She could practically see the exclamation marks piling up in her mind “I don’t have any special little filters set up for you, wow! I guess you must be a very special—” The voice cut off mid-sentence and another picked up. It was clearly somebody else speaking. “Error! Species translation not found, whoops! Please contact the local administrator for Error! Species information not found, whoops!”

The original voice returned as if nothing had happened. It spoiled the illusion a little but it was somehow comforting to know that the machines weren’t really sapient. “Tell me what you’d like and I’ll whip it right up for you! If you’re having trouble deciding, that’s okay! I’m sure your— Error! Owner reference not found!” There was a cough and then, more quietly, as if the person doing the recording had looked away from the microphone. “Do we really need to record all these? When is this ever going to happen?”

Katie pulled a face, but she did actually feel grateful for the momentary distraction, even if it was only because she’d found something she needed to change. “Can I get the non-floret translations, please?” she asked.

The machine buzzed for a moment, and then continued talking. The voice was a lot less enthusiastic. “Awaiting instructions,” it said. Katie couldn’t help but imagine the affini who had recorded the line sitting there bored and restless. Why had they recorded it at all?

Katie stared at the box. It would do anything she asked. She had no idea what she wanted.

“Actually, I’m fine, don’t worry about it.”

“Acknowledged.” The voice wasn’t grumpy, it just wasn’t engaged. It wasn’t engaging. It reminded Katie of every automated speaker system or voice command system in the Terran Accord, though in those cases the voices usually sounded miserable instead of merely bored.

So why record it? Hell. It was for her, wasn’t it? She had no idea who’d written and recorded those lines, but they’d done it specifically so that Katie and others like her could be more comfortable even though it was clearly a sacrifice for them.

If there was one thing that the Terran Accord seemed to far outstrip the Affini Compact in it was weaponising its understanding of human psychology. Surely even the most dead-set rebel would have to realise when faced with this machine speaking bored words simply to help them feel more at home that the Affini couldn’t possibly be the monsters they’d been warned about?

Katie gave up on food for the moment and went to sit in one of the unreasonable number of chairs, sofas, or seats dotted around the hab. She grabbed her communicator as she went. Still no response from Thatch. That was getting worrying. She sent a quick extra hello and decided to finally check her inbox.

She’d been on board for about a day and hadn’t expected any mail at all, yet the thing was already packed. Katie skimmed the titles. Elettar-I-M and you! Using internal messaging!!; Greetings from your new shipmates!; Here’s a useful list of lists!!; and Please don’t forget to take your medication!! (and drink lots of water!!!) were all present and sent by the ship itself, or at least some automated system that claimed to be it.

Katie asked the compiler for a glass of water. It complied and compiled, but it seemed as bored with the idea as Katie was. Thatch had given her a little bottle of pills, and there were several more in stasis with instructions to take them daily, so Katie did.

She scrolled down her inbox. The section for messages from actual people was significantly longer than she’d expected. Maybe a dozen messages that were just some variation on hello, with a brief introduction to the sender and an explanation that they were part of the welcome brigade aboard ship. Katie spent a few minutes figuring out how to type before realising she could just respond by voice and have the device transcribe it, and then spent a few minutes more replying with her own greetings in turn. They’d all suggested that she should ask questions if she had them, no matter how little, and seemed very enthusiastic about it. Katie wasn’t sure how to feel about that. She’d never had anybody be enthusiastic to meet her before.

Each name had a few little icons, numbers, and other decorations around it. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was a shorthand for the more ceremonial parts of people’s names around here that designated them either by the number of lifetimes they’d lived, or about as commonly the number of pets their owner had had. The latter had the cuter symbology by far, with every name having its own iconography and styling.

After the greetings there were still a few mails left over. One from June, or rather from June via Erica, with the little icons decorating the mail clearly depicting the power imbalance there. It would have been enough to make Katie blush, except at this point she worried it was all starting to feel normalised. It was essentially another greeting, but she’d attached a bunch of links to documentation on Katie’s new home. Erica had added a note at the bottom confirming that Katie was welcome to come hang out any time, and had attached a picture of her and her florets waving.

Another. Katie smiled. An update from Cici. Somehow, its halting style of speech still came through in text, with words and snippets in different colours, sizes, or fonts as it pieced the message together. It wasn’t a very long message, just a quick update to say they were doing well and they’d made a friend. Given the iconography around that friend’s name, Katie had to wonder how long they’d remain just friends.

Another message. The name on this one was garish in a way that stood out, “Wing Vidalii” with each letter twinkling a different colour. Another floret, though curiously sending the message under her own authority, not that of a caretaker. Even so, part of the decoration around the name linked off to the affini who owned her, while other parts exposed pronouns, species, and a link to a brief biography. This message was, like all the others, a greeting. Katie’s heart fell as she continued on to read a warning that her paperwork wasn’t quite valid and not having species markers would probably cause some problems, followed by an invitation to come have a chat at some address Katie was sure her communicator could lead her to.

Katie sighed. It all should have been exciting, but it wasn’t. It all should have been beautiful, but for whatever reason, she felt like half the colours in the world were missing. This was a utopia and Katie had no idea what to do with it.

Katie put the device down and let out a breath. Okay. It was time to start her day. There were still a few last things to do as part of moving in, but one of the messages in her inbox was somebody asking when she’d be able to have Leviathan delivered, and after sending a quick confirmation the fish was carried over in a small self-contained tank a few minutes later. Katie spent a little while fussing over it and getting it settled into the river that was to be their new home. She compiled some rocks and built a little castle, which Leviathan moved into happily. New homes for both of them.

Still no response from Thatch.

Katie somehow felt cramped. Her walk the day before had been nice, so she decided to repeat it, leaving her apartment and wandering around the ship without much by way of goal. She got a few looks, but nothing by way of hostilities. Just curious smiles and waves, as if the sight of a lone human-looking girl in Cosmic Navy uniform—even if engineering garb was a lot more casual than the actual officers would wear—were, if not normal, not wholly outside of expectations.

The walk helped, a little, but Katie mostly just felt lost. There was so much to see that she didn’t understand and nobody there to tell her about it.

Still no response from Thatch. She was fine. Imagining Thatch in any kind of trouble was almost laughable. Katie knew what it took to stop her affini and nobody else around here had any old Terran battleships to throw at her. It was easier to imagine her being inconvenienced, though. Held up by the system around them or by byzantine rules? Katie grit her teeth. It wasn’t fair, Thatch had been nothing but good to her.

But still no response.

By the time Katie was tired out, she’d walked up and down the arc she now lived on. It didn’t actually seem all that long, though that was before she noticed there were multiple decks on each arc, and that realisation was enough to make her feel small again. Katie made her way home, found some junk television from her childhood, and ate Terran Cosmic Navy standard synthveg ration cubes. She’d start being more adventurous tomorrow.

The next day came and went. As it happened, the bed never stopped being comfortable. There wasn’t really much of a reason to leave it, save for biological necessities. Fascinatingly, the Affini seemed to be cataloguing all of human culture, near as Katie could tell. She spot checked a few of the things she remembered, from back before she was spending too much time in deep space to keep up with anything. It was all there. They even had some of the lost episodes, which Katie had figured were gone for good.

Weirdly, some of the shows had alternate versions now, or at very least new subtitles, for the English/Floret translations. Katie wasn’t sure how to feel about that. They were preserving Terran culture, sure, but it would be their versions that were seen going forward.

Not that there was much in Terran culture that seemed worth keeping. She spent most of the day in bed watching the floret cuts of old cartoons and, begrudgingly, appreciated the way that a lot of the problematic jokes and product placement had been replaced with better things. The plots were tighter, though all the sharp edges and sense of real danger had been filed off. She didn’t appreciate the way it paused every hour to remind her to stretch and drink some water, though in fairness, she did need the reminder.

The day passed slowly. Still no response from Thatch. Katie sent another quick hello and rolled over, hoping to sleep, but the silence was deafening and the bed’s heat, no matter how comfortable, seemed unwilling to truly warm her. The blanket was heavy, pressing down on her like a whole-body hug, but as the night went on the only weight Katie seemed to feel was that of her own anxiety.

By the next morning, Katie inferred that she must have gotten some sleep, but she didn’t feel like it.

Enough was enough.

Katie demanded Thatch’s address from the ship’s registry and headed out. If her affini needed help then Katie wasn’t about to let anything get in her way. It would be a short ride on the ship’s rail system, but Katie needed some time to clear her head and properly wake up. Her communicator suggested it would take about an hour to walk, and that suited her just fine.

Despite the many sights and sounds of shipboard life, Katie could not be distracted. If Thatch needed her help, she was going to provide it one way or another.

It didn’t feel like the whole hour before Katie was knocking on Thatch’s door. Thirty seconds or so passed, but it eventually slid open. Katie’s face split into a smile, suddenly relieved. Thatch looked okay. More green was poking through, healthy-looking growth slowly overtaking the darker shades of Dirt.

“There you are!” Katie exclaimed. “I’ve been messaging you, are you okay?”

Her affini looked momentarily taken aback. The leaves around her chest rustled as she glanced away. “I am very well, thank you. My apologies, I might have missed the incoming messages. My own communicator is far out enough that the retrieval drone has not yet returned.”

That made some kind of sense. It didn’t explain what had stopped her from stopping by, but surely something had been going on.

Katie nodded, stepping forward into a quick hug around one leg. She took a deep breath, savouring the familiar scent and the comfortable heat, and finally felt her blanket of anxiety began to lighten. Her grip tightened, clutching to her affini’s leg like she was afraid it would walk away. Thatch froze for a moment, but quickly recovered, resting a hand over Katie’s shoulder and gently prying her free. “It is nice to see you,” Thatch mumbled. “I… had been— Never mind, that is in the past.”

Katie smiled upwards but it again took a moment before one came back down, and even that seemed almost reluctant. Katie felt her heart waver. She should have come sooner. “It’s a lot to get used to, being here, huh?” Katie asked. There was a moment without an answer, and Katie was starting to feel awkward standing on the doorstep. “May I come in?”

A pause. “Oh. Yes. It’s— Please pay no mind to the mess.”

Thatch stepped back and granted Katie access. If her own hab was a work of art, then this one was… not. After experiencing a dwelling designed for her own scale, Katie found one scaled up to Affini size felt almost cramped. She laughed at her own absurdity, knowing that even at this size the home was absurdly luxurious. A clean, white, oversized sofa took up one of the hexagonal wall pieces, and on the other side of the room was a kitchenette that, strangely, looked far more traditionally human than Katie’s did, albeit scaled up.

As for mess, she found none. In fact, there were barely signs of life at all. No books, no decoration, no letters, no pictures. A small collection of glasses hung partially out of a recession in the wall—Katie guessed an atomic compiler of Thatch’s own—but aside from that it could have been brand new. There was a desk at the far side of the room that had a few tools and what looked like a half-completed project, but that was the only concession to life in the entire space.

Katie looked up at her plant with concern. Thatch waved her off and retreated back to the sofa.

“Are you sure you’re okay, hon? You’ve been acting a little off basically since we got here, and I think I’ve lived in places more personal than this.” Katie hurried over and spent a moment trying to climb onto the sofa. She almost had it once or twice, but gravity soon discouraged her, so she just sat on the floor instead.

Thatch seemed distracted. Certainly she reacted to Katie as quickly as she always had, but the focus wasn’t there. Katie wondered if the ship was simply so safe that Thatch no longer felt the need to pay attention, but that didn’t quite fit. Thatch had never been one to call things safe enough.

“I am fine,” Thatch stated, firmly. She didn’t seem fine.

“Thatch, I haven’t heard from you in days. Are you s—”

“Katie, I do not need you checking up on me,” Thatch snapped. “I can take care of myself and you have more important things you should be doing with your time.” Thatch wasn’t even looking at her. Katie stared for a moment, blinking rapidly. She felt the force of the rejection almost physically, like she’d been slapped, and she didn’t know why. Was Thatch even saying anything unreasonable, there? They were, at best, friends and none of the friends Katie had ever had, before everyone had slowly drifted away, would ever have chased her down like this. Was she just being clingy?

A thick kind of silence settled over them. Katie looked down, suddenly feeling the urge to inspect her own extremely worn standard issue Cosmic Navy shoes. “Sorry,” she mumbled, eventually. It drew a sigh from up above, and a moment later the comforting sensation of Thatch’s gaze having fallen upon her.

“No, I am sorry. You do not deserve that. You are here now, so please, tell me about how you’ve been.” Thatch’s hand trailed down to press a finger or two against the top of Katie’s head. There was a sensation of a soft smile from above. The girl smiled back, leaning up into Thatch’s fingers with closed eyes. She’d missed this. The bad feelings slipped away.

“Of course!” Katie chimed, happy for the opportunity to rescue them from the silence. She would have preferred for Thatch to see the hab for herself, but it seemed a worthwhile sacrifice to describe it to her instead. To Katie’s surprise, her enthusiasm was not reflected.

“I do not know if it is so wise to cling to the past like that, Katie. We are here now and it may be best to focus on what you can build anew. Let… all that become just a faded memory.” The fingers against Katie’s hair shied away.

Katie blew out a breath and shuffled around, raising to her knees and grabbing Thatch’s hand before it got too far away. With both of hers, she pulled it in and held it close. Something wasn’t adding up here. “What is up with you, Thatch? Tell me what’s wrong.”

The fingers in Katie’s grip curled, but didn’t break free. Thatch spent a moment with her body churning, gaze pointed over towards the door. “I said that I do not need this,” she complained. Her voice lacked a sharp edge.

“We’ve been taking care of each other, right? That doesn’t stop just because we’re here, does it?” Katie held the fingers tight and pulled them closer. Kneeling on the hard floor wasn’t comfortable, but Katie wasn’t about to lose the moment by moving.

“Katie, I…” Thatch seemed to be intentionally averting her gaze, but thankfully that left her unable to break out of Katie’s grip. She had the strength to do it, of course, but Katie knew that she wouldn’t dare do so without being certain Katie wouldn’t be hurt, and that required attention.

“Yes?”

“I think it would be best if you tried to focus on building your own separate life here. I have many things to do. I have applied to be part of the team extracting the others of Cici’s kind and I should focus on where I can be useful. You should focus on other things.”

Katie’s sixth sense was all over the place. One moment she felt distress, the next panic, anger, sadness, or hate. She pulled the hand closer, though still failed to capture Thatch’s attention.

“I don’t think I understand, Thatch. We can both be doing our own thing without having to lose this, can’t we? What am I missing?” Katie’s fingers tightened, clutching Thatch’s hand with a strained grip.

It took a few moments for Thatch to respond. Her more human mannerisms were controlled, but Katie could tell something wasn’t right.

“No, we can’t. I am sorry. I am not so broken that I need your constant attention. You have more useful things to do.” Her voice dripped with a kind of poison, but Katie didn’t get the sense it was aimed at her. It stung, all the same, to hear Thatch speaking of herself that way.

“Th- Thatch, I don’t think—”

Her plant growled and turned her gaze back for just long enough to pull her hand free of Katie’s grasp. “No, you do not think. You are not aware of the consequences of your actions. I can not work with somebody who does not understand what they are doing.” Finally, the poison was aimed at Katie herself. She flinched.

“So teach me?” Katie spent an awkward moment pushing herself up to her feet, with stiff knees and uncomfortable ankles. Even standing at her full height, she somehow still felt shorter than she had on her knees just a moment ago.

“I can not. I have failed with you, Katie, do you understand? I have tried to teach and you have not learned.” Katie’s eyes darted across the quiver of her friend’s lattice. Tension, maybe even anger? Katie had only seen it a handful of times before, and never directed at herself. It still didn’t feel aimed at her. “You can not learn.”

“What the- What haven’t I learned?” Katie asked, taking an involuntary step back. She was missing something here. Some crucial fact that justified the sudden turn. She could figure this out. It could still all be okay. She just had to focus. “I’ve been trying! I thought I was being a good student? I— I’ve been doing my best?”

Katie let out a quick growl—though it sounded more like a whimper—aimed at her own failing body. This wasn’t the time to start crying. She had a problem to solve and that wasn’t helpful. Logic and emotion did battle and, like always, logic was revealed for the sham that it truly was. Katie’s frustration sublimated into a thick cloud of upset. She couldn’t focus on anything useful when she was fighting back tears.

“I—” Thatch’s voice wavered, paused, and then transitioned into a sigh. Two firm hands reached down to grab under Katie’s armpits and lift her up onto the sofa, into Thatch’s waiting lap. “No, flower, you have been the best student.” One hand tugged free a bundle of leaves from over Thatch’s shoulder and brought them up to Katie’s nose, while the other nested in her hair. “Blow your nose. I am sorry. Let us talk as the equals we are supposed to be.”

Katie nodded rapidly, making the humiliating sound of nose blowing directly into plantlife, which Thatch quickly discarded. She curled up tighter, leaning into her plant’s body, then grabbed the other arm and forced Thatch into a hug. “What did I do wrong?” Katie asked. “I’ll do better, I promise. Please?”

Thatch let out a long sigh, shaking her head. She squeezed a little tighter, in time with her words. “You did nothing wrong. It is I who made the mistake, flower. I am only trying to act in your own best interests.”

There was a grunt from Thatch’s lap, and a gentle punch in the stomach. Katie sniffed down a surge of emotion. “If I wanted somebody to do that without asking me about it I don’t think I’d have any trouble finding it around here. Talk to me?”

Thatch’s hands curled again, but this time one was against Katie’s shoulder and the other was in her hair. The girl couldn’t help but smile, leaning into the tighter squeeze. Thatch’s warmth could chase her shadows away.

“You have been feeling aimless, lost, and uncertain. Like half the colour has left the world and you don’t know why. You forgot to brush your teeth this morning and, if you have taken your medication, I suspect it was because somebody else reminded you. I suspect that you have not been sleeping well, and eating only when you are too hungry to ignore it.”

Katie winced. “I wouldn’t… put it so bluntly, Thatch, I thought this wasn’t things I’d done wrong?”

“You have not. That was me. Now, you are feeling comfort.” Katie could hardly deny it. Her plant had her in a tight grip and there was nowhere safer to be. Thatch had her troubles, but Katie had this deep-seated certainty that if they could just stick together, they could deal with whatever came their way.

A vine brushed against Katie’s chin. She lifted it, staring up into Thatch’s waiting gaze. “You are feeling safe.” Hardly an answer that would win awards. What possible danger could face them here?

“Warm.” The vine brushed across Katie’s stomach, leaving a trail of tingling heat that begged for touch. “You want to get closer. You want to put your skin against my body.” Katie did? Katie did.

Thatch’s smile slipped away, and Katie felt a low chill running down her spine. “Cold.” As the heat died away, the need for touch only rose. “Desperate.” As the tingles became overwhelming, Katie felt her focus faltering. She tried to lean into Thatch’s body, but a vine kept her away. “Needy,” her affini sighed, as Katie rubbed her cheek into the vine that was trying to maintain some distance between them.

Thatch was so warm. Katie cold. Thatch warm and soft. Smelled nice. Felt nice. Tasted nice, though Katie wasn’t testing that just then. Not for lack of trying. Katie sighed, but it was a contented sigh, feeling Thatch’s warmth spreading through her core.

“Katie,” she snapped, pulling the girl back to the present, then helping her sit up. “You must understand, I did not know. I know that you did not want this, but I cannot reverse that which I have done.”

Katie blinked repeatedly, almost as if she was waking up from a light sleep. She frowned, looking up at Thatch with a gentle frown. “Sorry, I… think I drifted off, there. I didn’t sleep great last night. Could you say that again?”

Thatch placed one hand on Katie’s shoulder, and the other gently beneath her chin, making sure she could speak directly to Katie’s attentive face. “You did not drift off. I have spent weeks drawing you into a trap and you cannot even see it. It is not your fault. You simply lack any way of fighting my influence. I have tried to teach you independence and all I have achieved is turning you into this.”

Thatch’s fingers curled, falling away from Katie’s body. “What do you mean, ‘this’? What’s wrong with me? You said I hadn’t done anything wrong.” Katie’s frown only intensified as she tried to take Thatch’s hand again, though found it evasive.

Thatch took a handful of breaths, pauses, and sighs. Her hand raised as if she were about to speak, but fell several times, before she finally managed the words. She gestured to Katie in entirety. “This, Katie. This… eager, attentive thing sitting on my lap unable to even begin to comprehend the control I have over it. When we first met, you nearly killed me. When we talked, I found you a fascination, both willful and talented, albeit without any chance to have learned the skills you could learn here. You forced me into compromise and demanded your independence and I was happy to provide it.”

Katie stared up, not quite comprehending. There was a logical leap here that she felt like she should be making, but it just wasn’t coming. Thatch was speaking like she was any different, now, but Katie didn’t feel any different. Happier, maybe, for her experiences, but the essential Katie underneath was no different.

Thatch radiated a gentle desperation. Her expression fell over long moments. “And you cannot see it even when I dangle every piece before you.” She let out a long sigh. Katie smiled, feeling the gentle heat and smelling the soft scent. “That is why I say you cannot learn, flower. You cannot fight my influence, and my influence turns you into this. Katie, I am an alien from a culture practically inconceivable to you.”

Katie’s smile wavered. Why was Thatch saying these things? Katie wasn’t acting out of the ordinary, was she. She opened her mouth to question, but Thatch kept her quiet with half a look.

“We have made pets of your civilisation. Even the individuals who are free still live under our rule. We have done this to humanity. We have done this to creatures that knew only war, or to those who knew only peace. We have done this to those on the brink of devastation and to those expanding at an exponential rate. We have done this to all of you. Do you think we have no tricks? The creatures of this universe are helpless before us. You are helpless before me. I am a fraud. You do not enjoy my company; you do not even know me. My every movement, my every breath, my every word worms through your will and binds you to me and you are incapable of resisting it. You believe you are feeling these things only because, on some subconscious level, I demand that you feel as I do. You cannot fight it. You cannot even see it, even when I lead you right up to the answer and ask you to take only the final step unaided. If I were to click my fingers and demand you be mine, I suspect you would feel relief and gratitude.” Thatch’s hands remained gentle, but hesitant.

Katie’s did not. She struggled until she could sit up. “What the fuck are you talking about? We’re equals, remember? You said we were equals. I’m not… whatever you’re talking about, I’m not.” One of Thatch’s hands came in to grab Katie’s chin, but they’d played that game more than enough times now. Katie set her teeth and stared Thatch down, and it was her affini who faltered. “Go on, then. Try it.”

“Katie, you do not want this. I have… corrupted you with a need I cannot fulfill. I guarantee that if you continue spending time with me you will be property by the end of the week.”

Katie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. This was bullshit. This was unfair. “You arrogant prick,” Katie growled. “Do you think you’re magic, or something? We are friends, Thatch.” Katie struggled up to her feet. Standing on Thatch’s thighs, she could almost reach eye level. “I do not want to be your fucking pet.”

“Yes, you do.” Thatch sighed. “You may not realise it, but you soon will. The decision is no longer in your hands.”

Katie raised her hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Bullshit. I don’t want to be anybody’s pet, Thatch, least of all yours.”

Two vines wrapped around Katie’s wrists and, with a sharp yank, pulled her back down. Another pair adjusted her legs as she dropped, forcing her back onto her knees. A hand rose to her chin, forcing it up to stare straight into Thatch’s eyes. Katie felt her heart beating hard in her chest. “Lashing out at me will not change the facts. We are not equals, Katie. We cannot be. We never were. I was a fool to entertain the idea.”

Katie bore her teeth, but a slight shift of Thatch’s grip was enough to render her unable to speak. She pulled against the vines binding her wrists, but no matter how she pulled, Katie couldn’t move at all. In fact, with just three points of contact she was immoblised, finding that no matter how she tried to move she always found herself stuck long before she could have achieved anything. It would have been an impressive show of understanding over the movement of Katie’s body if it hadn’t been so stupid.

“You have one choice left that you can make. Return to your home and focus on setting up your new life. Perhaps in a decade or two it will be safe for you to be around me again and I would very much like it if you would get in touch so that I can hear the story of how your life has been. Alternatively, find somebody you like and become theirs, let them give you that which I can not, and then I will happily spend as much time with you as they permit. Do you understand?”

Katie wanted to shake her head and Thatch’s grip kept her too tightly held to do so. The arrogant bitch would only accept a nod. Katie wasn’t about to give her one. They stared each other down until Thatch’s resolve faltered. Her stupid plant glared a hole in the ceiling for a few moments, biting down words until they burst out anyway.

“Katie, I am doing this for your own good! Can you honestly tell me that you do not wish to be mine?” Thatch’s hand fell away and Katie nodded, thick with exasperation.

“Yes! Yes, I can!”

Thatch’s teeth were many and razor sharp. Katie had stared down the maw of a dragon and known she would be safe, but this had the edges of a danger that she knew wasn’t meant to be present here. “Do not lie to me, little one,” Thatch growled, whole body taking on jagged angles. “You will speak the truth to me, and you will do nothing but. You trust me. Submit to this.”

“I am not lying!” Katie exclaimed. “I trust you because you’re a friend. I like spending time with you, and, yes, okay, I’m not very good at taking care of myself, and I appreciate your help! It’s nice to know that there’s somebody who actually gives enough of a damn about me to care whether I’m taken care of! Can you really not imagine that I might want to spend time with you without me having been tricked into it?”

Katie could feel the turmoil in Thatch’s soul drilling down into hers. Was she winning this argument? Was it even an argument? Katie was still missing something.

“I have seen it in numbers, Katie. You can lie to me, you can lie to yourself, but you cannot lie to our medical technology.”

Katie opened her mouth, head falling back in exasperation. “Is that 100% accurate? No mistakes at all, among a trillion trillion species? It’s so good that you’ll trust it over me?”

Thatch’s shoulders fell. She lost an inch of height and most of her fire. “No, but… Katie, I cannot take this risk. Please. I will beg if you make me. Yellow and red, I cannot.” Thatch’s panic was evident, screaming in over Katie’s sixth sense and every other sense beside. “If there is a one in a million chance that I would destroy you, then I cannot take it, and the chances are much greater than that.”

Her affini’s hands balled into fists, and her vines tensed. “You do not know me. You cannot. I have lived an entire lifetime, longer than you would ever have in a world utterly outside of your experience. We have spent weeks together. I am very fond of you, Katie. Another in my place would gladly take you, but I am not worth your time.”

Katie took in a long, deep breath. Ah. Was that what she had been missing?

“Do you… want to take me, Thatch?” Katie asked, voice wary. Nothing else had shaken her resolve, but Katie felt the sharp sense of danger here twisting to a point. Her affini looked up in alarm, leaning away as if to get as much distance from Katie as possible.

“It does not matter what I want, Katie, please do not ask me that.”

“Thatch. Do you want me to be your pet?” Surely not. No. Of course she didn’t. They’d talked about this. It was the foundation of their relationship. Katie wanted her freedom and Thatch didn’t want to take it away. It was what had made Thatch safe. Thatch had been meant to understand her. Katie’s eyes snapped around to Thatch’s hands, suddenly wary of where they might go.

Thatch raised them up by her head. “I…” The air was rustling through her body fast enough to form a breeze. The smell alone was enough to get Katie calming down. She felt sick. Katie didn’t feel like she should be calm. Maybe she hadn’t noticed it before, but now there was dissonance, and the problem was clear as day.

Katie was being manipulated.

She stumbled back, almost falling off of Thatch’s knees entirely in her hurry to get back onto her own two feet and away from Thatch’s scent. Had all of this just been a trick, to get Katie to lower her guard?

“Yes or no, Thatch. It’s a simple question. Don’t give me any bullshit. Yes or no?” Katie’s hands were balled into fists, but she was shaking. Going against Thatch like this was almost painful. Some deep part of her even now wanted to smile and accept whatever came her way. Katie wanted to be sick.

Thatch looked down, suddenly focused on the floor. “…Yes.”

Katie’s heart plummeted. She’d detonated a battleship just outside of this hull and failed to harm it or Thatch, but she felt like the force of her disappointment would blow open a Katie-shaped hole into space. Her lower lip wavered as enough emotions she couldn’t hope to place them all rose up from the gap where her heart used to be. The worst part of all was that Thatch was right. There was relief in there. There was gratitude. There was an urge to kneel and beg for Thatch to make it so. If it weren’t for the fire in Katie’s heart burning so hot she could hardly see straight, who knew if she might have done it?

“Explain,” Katie growled.

“Yes. I do.” Thatch’s voice was halting. “I have been feeling it for some time now. I— I would never act upon it, Katie, you must understand that. I know that the things I want are wrong. You— You are beautiful and precious and I love you and I wish I could trust myself around you. I would never break you, not really, I just—”

Thatch cut herself off, seeing Katie’s reaction. The girl was backing off, eyes wide. “Not really? What does that mean?”

Thatch let her hands drop, along with her shoulders and much of the rest of her body. She couldn’t bring herself to look Katie in the eye, or so it seemed. Katie was second guessing her every assumption, now. How had she missed this?

“Answer the fucking question, Thatch.”

There was silence for long moments. The Thatch that spoke next was quiet and hollow, barely more than muttering. “I wouldn’t have done it. I am… broken, Katie. Caeca’s loss has grown heavier each day and sometimes I can think of nothing but taking you apart and studying every piece. Sometimes I want nothing more than to put you back together again in so many new ways until I understand you so deeply that I can be certain that what happened to her will never happen to you. Sometimes I fear that I would fail and leave you broken.” There was a long pause. “Sometimes I want that. You would look… divine, with your mind filled with nothing but endless pleasure and memories that could never stretch more than instants back. Just like her.”

Thatch still didn’t dare look towards Katie. Probably she knew what she would see. Quivering limbs and betrayal. “Ah. I… should go,” Katie whispered, through dry lips and wet eyes, before fleeing the room in tears. She didn’t stop running until she made it to her own hab where the doors could be locked, the lights could be off, and nobody could hear her screams.

Chapter Text

Interlude F: Hell Hath No Fury Like A Floret Scorned

Much of the universe’s life, be it flora or fauna, believed that the true purpose of the Affini Compact was its stewardship, be it the daring rescue of the Xa’a-ackétøth from their own engines of war; the offer of a universe to meet for the Spectrum Jellies; or the chance to serve for the Beeple. Each was a species of millions or more, taken from a faltering home and lifted up into magnificence.

There was value to that answer, but of course it was more complicated than that. To treat a species as one was to miss the entire point. To paint a population with a single brush would have been to destroy everything that was right about what it was the mighty plants were so busy with.

The individuals, then. The wiser of the universe’s sophonts would point to each life on an individual basis. To take each creature as it came and refine it. Clear away that which was not essential and find that which was unique at its center. Nurture it, help it grow, until each and every creature across each and every star was the very best version of itself.

Though closer, they would be wrong too. Only the wisest knew the truth.

No, the purpose of the Affini Compact, according to Wing Vidalii, clerk, was truly found in the Records. A decentralised database of all of space and time, cataloging all that they found in meticulous detail. Individuals would live and die. Even the affini themselves would come to forget the past eventually.

Each and every life had a unique, incomparable value. No system of thought that justified letting a single one come to harm could survive the insistence of Affini xenophilosophers. All the same, an individual’s time would come and go, while the Records were forever, and the Records would improve every life for all of time.

This was why Wing always felt a low anxiety when she knew there was something wrong with them. She and Montsechia were the record keepers. While the rest of their civilisation played, they were safeguarding the future, and that future was, currently, incorrect.

The softly glowing red light warning her of a relational inconsistency within the trillion pages of knowledge contained within the Elettarium’s Records shard could have been shut off, but Wing refused. It kept catching her attention out of the corner of her eye. (Warning/error/catastrophe) red.

She’d sent a message. She’d sent two, days apart. It had now been over a week. There was a citizen aboard her spacecraft whose data was wrong. The paperwork being incomplete was one thing. That irked Wing, just a little, but rationally she understood that not everybody took their bureaucracy as seriously as she did.

This citizen’s paperwork was incomplete too, but that hardly mattered in comparison to the fact that it was incorrect.

She turned to face the love of her life and the only other thing in this universe that could hope to compete for her affection. She spoke in rapid flashes of colour, all underscored with bright teal urgency. “Mistress, she has had a privacy screen up for a week now. At what point is enough enough?”

The patient, calming smile was little comfort.

…okay, that was a lie, Miss Vidalii’s smile brought warmth to Wing’s soul, but it didn’t fix the Records.

“Pet, be polite,” Montsechia chided, with gentle words of pastel plant. “There’s no rush. You are so adorably dedicated to our craft, but we can’t expect newcomers to immediately understand the importance. They’ll get around to it and no harm will have been done.”

Wing glanced back towards the glowing red warning light with a sigh and a nod. “As you say, I guess, Mistress.”

Montsechia’s eyebrow twitched. She was doing spectacularly at speaking Wing’s native incandescence, but it was still very different to what she was used to, and a little nonchromatic emotion sometimes squeezed through. Of course, while they had company Montsechia would do both, but here in their inner sanctum there was no need for the more humanlike expressions popular in this region of space.

Seeing one didn’t stop Wing from tittering a gentle pink dance across her chest.

A vine struck out across the room to haul Wing over her owner’s knee. Another struck just right, bringing a bright orange (pain/shock/gentle arousal) to her cheeks. “That’s Yes, Mistress, pet. Count.”

Wing had a particular interest in numeral systems, quickly grown after encountering the Affini’s own numeric style. She wrote in that, now, because it was obviously superior. She couldn’t count in it without a pen. She certainly couldn’t count it while her rational mind melted. She flashed out a “one” in her native tongue, body twitching.

As her reward, another sharp vine struck out, forcing a brighter bicolour glow that stained the walls for but an instant. A two. By the fifth, the room’s lights were automatically dimming as Montsechia forced out increasingly complicated patterns of colour and shade.

The window was right there. Wing’s shame was being broadcast to the universe. Now she would live on forever in two ways: The correct Records, and the record of her corrections. Her many corrections. By the time they reached ten, Wing’s body was twitching and her biochroma were saying anything and everything she was told to. Each stroke was refinement. Clarity. Not just distraction from the things that didn’t matter, but a reminder of what did. A little more of the inessential chiseled away so that Wing could focus on what made her special.

The Records could wait. Montsechia had an individual to nurture and Wing was happy to admit that she was far from the wisest creature aboard ship. That would be her owner.

An hour later, Wing was curled up with her arms tight around Miss. Vidalii’s leg and tentacles all curled around the affini’s hand while she worked on the desk above. She glowed a contented pink, occasionally rousing from her chemical haze for long enough to nuzzle or rub against a knee or a thigh.

No stress. No anxiety. Wing knew what was most important to the plants, and it was her. She could relax and let Montsechia take care of the details. If Wing needed to do anything, she would be told, and otherwise she could simply focus on the one thing in this universe that truly, deeply understood her.

Several days later, Wing was told.

“I reached out to a few of the florets on welcome duty and they say our newcomer hasn’t been responsive,” Montsechia explained. “We should get the results of the vote on my proposal to declare an emergency intervention any minute now, but given that nobody else seems to have seen her either, I expect we’re going to get a couple thousand ’yes’es and that’s enough. You, my dear floret, get to go say hello. Please try to be good. The paperwork is important, but not as important as an individual in need.”

Wing could only nod. She remembered her politeness and her gratitude, and what mattered here. Sometimes, Wing knew that teasing and playing with the edges of her orders was a fun game they both enjoyed, and Wing also knew that this wasn’t one of those times. This was one of the times she got to show Montsechia what a good jellyfish she could be.

About an hour later, Wing’s tentacles were squirming as she stood before the plain door of their newest habitation unit. The inhabitant wasn’t even technically a citizen yet, because she’d refused to fill out the paperwork in a manner that could actually be processed.

The emergency intervention had been approved. They’d already inspected basic internal data, confirming that power and resource usage were well within bounds for a single human individual, and if it came to it they could override the door manually, but nobody wanted to do that.

Wing raised her hand and knocked on the door, knowing the sound would get transmitted now that the highest privacy settings had been disabled. After a minute, she repeated it again, and twenty seconds after that the door slid open.

“Yes?” the sophont asked. She seemed mildly irritated, but otherwise not in immediate harm. Her eyes were puffy and red and Wing suspected that meant something, but while she had been made as an ambassador to the universe she’d been terrible at actually keeping up with the details she would have needed to carry it out. Wing was an archivist, not a diplomat.

Wing took a moment to scribble a message on her writing pad and showed it. “Hello! I’m here to do a quick check to make sure you’re okay, and if you’ve the time, a quick chat about some paperwork? Also, I don’t suppose you understand any kind of sign language, do you?”

Wing watched the woman’s eyes flick across the message. “Uh, I’m fine, I guess. Sorry, I don’t mean to be a bother, have I done something wrong? I don’t speak anything but English, sorry.”

Wing sighed. The gentle flashes of soft grey wouldn’t mean anything to their little problem, at least. “May I come in?” she wrote.

“Yeah, sure. I guess. Sorry about the mess.” The unit’s inhabitant stepped back and Wing followed into what was unmistakably the work of the Elettarium’s distinctly unconventional habitation builders. She flashed appreciative shades as she looked around, following their citizen-to-be across the room into a literal cave.

Well, at least this one would fit in among a ship of other ineffable eccentrics.

Wing tapped the side of her writing pad and her words began to gently glow so they could be more easily seen in the dim lighting. “Firstly, my apologies, but I don’t want to make any assumptions. You are Katie Sahas, independent human, right?”

Wrong question. Bad question. Fascinating. The creature shook her head with a sigh and reached over to the side of the amorphous blob she’d taken as a seat where a stack of small cubes lay on the ground. Apparently they were edible, or at very least, this creature was eating them. “No. I thought I filled this out already? Not human. Don’t wanna be— I’m not.”

She sniffed, running a finger underneath her nose. It came away slimy and was wiped on a dirty uniform from… Wing glimmered with a curiosity that painted the cave a little purple. Was that the logo of the old Terran Navy? Wing felt like she had to at least establish some kind of baseline here.

“Understood, we’ll deal with that. Otherwise correct? Katie Sahas, independent?”

“Yes, and yes I’m fucking independent, alright, I don’t want to be one of your pets.” The Katie gestured with one of the probably-edible cubes violently enough that Wing got caught in a little spray of crumbs.

The jellyfish spent a moment brushing debris off of her clean companion dress and out of her tentacles. She didn’t need to be a diplomat to realise that this not-human wasn’t having a great time. Was she really the best choice for this? There were a thousand florets aboard who were more comfortable with vague, poorly defined people than she was. Wing supposed that may well be why Montsechia had tasked her with this. Being made into a more rounded, refined version of herself was going to be hard, apparently.

Wing scribbled down on her pad. “I’m not in the habit of taking pets, don’t worry.”

“Yeah, but you are one, aren’t you? Tricked by the bloody plants into giving up your independence, and—” The cube slipped from Katie’s fingers. She grabbed at it, trying to catch it, but only succeeded at knocking it away and showering Wing in even more debris. “Ugh, sorry.”

Stylus scratched against the rough texture of a writing pad for a few more moments. Each stroke left a glowing line behind it. English was far from the most elegant language, but Wing liked her handwriting all the same. It helped her feel a little more in control while she talked to somebody she wasn’t completely convinced wasn’t a feralist instigator.

No harm would come to Wing, of course. She had a bundle of Montsechia curled around her nervous system keeping track of her every little detail, and at the slightest hint of real danger some kind of action would be taken. There wasn’t much room for real danger on board an Affini ship, not when every non-affini creature in a room could be put to sleep in under five seconds and any weapon more complicated than a slingshot wouldn’t fly under the Firebreak. The most dangerous part of this situation was that Wing might disappoint Miss. Vidalii, and she certainly wan’t about to let that happen.

“No tricks, I promise. I’m here to help. How about we go for a walk? There’s somebody learning how to make Terran-style pasta on the other side of the arc and apparently it’s pretty good. Probably better than what you’ve been eating.”

Wing tried to time her gesture towards the cubes to match when she guessed Katie would be getting to the end of the sentence. This would be so much easier if they had a better shared language. Thankfully, Wing didn’t have to bully very hard before Katie was willing to follow her outside. Walking and writing wasn’t easy but it seemed that Katie didn’t mind a moment without interrogation. They reached a hab unit that had a few tables set outside it. Wing waved Katie over to one of the tables and took a quiet moment to explain what was going on to the four foot tall quadruped that was responsible for the pasta. They’d get a few extra minutes before food was delivered so Wing could try to get some rapport going.

“I’ve ordered something that matches the preferences we have on file for you,” Wing declared, momentarily handing Katie her drawing pad while she sat. She took it back once the girl was done reading. “We’ve been a little worried about you, nobody’s heard from you in a while, and so we wanted to check in.”

“Who’s ‘we’? The setting said privacy mode would only get overridden in an emergency and I don’t see any emergencies. Just another trick, I guess.” Katie’s face twisted. Her cheeks had gone a little pink, but Wing suspected that that didn’t mean what it meant in her language.

Wing gestured around at the entire ship. “We took a vote. Two thousand four hundred and five for, three hundred two against. We take this stuff really seriously, Katie.”

The girl seemed to need a few moments to process that. She frowned, looking at Wing with a different kind of expression. Why couldn’t creatures express their emotions with colours or paperwork like made sense? Wing had to try to interpret some dance of eyebrows and nostrils like it was supposed to mean something.

“So when you say we, you mean… everyone?”

“Everyone who gets a vote, yes,” Wing scratched. “The florets get a separate vote, but it’s just for fun. They do check up on things if it’s ever a different result from the real vote, though. I voted yes in it, for what it’s worth.”

“Huh.” The floret running the place brought over a glass of water on a little tray held in its teeth. Katie took it, looked momentarily panicked for a moment, and tried patting their fur-covered head. It went over well. Katie took a long drink from the glass then let it drop back to the table, empty. “Well, I mean, I think I’m fine?”

Wing glanced up and down. Katie’s hair was obviously unbrushed, her face was a mess, her clothes were filthy, and she had that look in her eyes that only the undomesticated could sustain. There was a light in there that hurt to see. The fire that free-willed folk couldn’t go without or the pressure of existence would destroy them. It burned in Katie, consuming her and leaving nothing behind but ash and smoke. It was distressing. Wing didn’t understand why this was being allowed. Katie’s records said that she was prior crew on the Indomitable, the Terran vessel they’d captured, and captures were domesticated as a rule for good reason. Just look at this one! She was miserable.

“You seem upset,” Wing scribbled. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, no, I’m… I’m fine. I had a friend, I guess, is all. The person I’d been stuck with down there. I thought she was cool and she didn’t think about me the same way.”

Wing tapped the end of her stylus against the pad for a few seconds. This was easier when she was in front of a terminal, but she had a good memory. The friend would be… Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom. The other problem citizen of the Elettarium. Ah. It was starting to become clear.

“What happened?” Wing asked.

“I wanted a friend. She wanted a pet.” Katie sighed, leaning forward until her forehead thumped against the table. “I really miss her. She’s cute and funny and like, really really smart, and, y’know when somebody looks at you and you know they’re really, really seeing you? Not the… the front you show to the world, but the real you? Fuck.”

Oh no. She was crying again. Wing didn’t know what to do about tears. Why did she have to be one of those species that leaked? Wing was glad that Katie was staring into the placemat because otherwise she might have noticed the careful glancing around looking for help. There was none to be found.

Wing steadied herself. Focus. She didn’t have to do perfectly, she just had to make Montsechia proud. She pushed her chair around to Katie’s side, grabbed the poor girl by the back of the neck, and repositioned her head to rest against Wing’s shoulder. Wing could handle getting a little damp, after all, and her dress could be cleaned.

“It sounds like she was really important to you. I think I understand what you’re saying. My owner looks at me like that and I think if I had to go without it I’d fall apart.”

Katie took a while to read the message, because apparently the leakage was so bad it impacted her ability to see.

That was not going to make this any easier.

Katie eventually reached the end. “Ugh. I’m upset enough I actually envy you that. I don’t know what to do. I miss her so much. I keep writing out messages that I never send and then I get mad at her and then I get mad at me, and… then I just wish she was here to talk about it? This is stupid.”

Wing hoped nobody around spoke her language, because Montsechia would be very disappointed to learn that she’d been screaming swear words in public. This was exactly why prior feralists weren’t meant to get a choice. There were processes for this. Guidelines! Rules! Rituals! All set up over tens of thousands of years of constant learning and improvement to lead to the best outcomes. But no, some people thought the rules were there to be bent and now it was Wing’s problem to clean up.

Not that she really knew how. It seemed like relations between Katie and her closest affini had really broken down and probably weren’t repairable, given recent events, and that was one of the few situations that immediate forced domestication wouldn’t solve.

“It isn’t stupid,” Wing wrote. “I’m sorry that this has happened to you.”

Katie nodded rapidly. “It’s not even fair, she says she doesn’t even want a pet, so like, what am I meant to do? I just don’t get to be friends with her? Even though she’s super cool? Even though she, friggin’, needs somebody to be there for her, it just doesn’t get to be me? It’s not fair. She needs somebody. She doesn’t have anybody else.”

Katie was squeezing Wing’s arm hard enough that it hurt, but at least they were sort of getting somewhere. Wing brought her other hand over and awkwardly patted the girl on the head.

“I’m not even any good at independence! Fuck, she took such good care of me. It was nice. I don’t even want this. She was better at me than I am and I just don’t get that any more? I don’t know what to do any more.”

Ah, there it was. Wing struck. “Are you sure you don’t want to be a pet?” She double-underlined the sure.

“Yes!” Katie exclaimed. “Just like I don’t want to brush my teeth or shower or do anything but eat those shitty ration cubes that I don’t even know why you bothered cataloging.”

Think happy thoughts, Wing. Do not go on a tangent about the importance of recording even the bad things about a civilisation. Do not. There will be time for that. “I didn’t want to be a pet either, once,” Wing admitted. Katie tilted her head to one side, and it took Wing a moment to realise it was supposed to be a question. Why had her people ever even liked language? Paperwork was clear, unambiguous, and useful. All of this damp, vague communication was not Wing’s strong suit. Montsechia had put her here for a reason, though.

First, Wing would do as she was told. Without relevant orders, she would seek to ensure no harm was done. Without harm to avoid, she would use her best judgement, and if even that failed her she would do what she could to make Montsechia proud, and that would always be enough. She could do this. It wasn’t her strong suit, but Wing knew she’d make her owner proud no matter what. It was easy to feel confident when her worst case scenario was still being loved and cherished.

“My species didn’t resist, we didn’t have a rebellion like you did. Most of the domesticated population were volunteers, but it takes a lot of strength to volunteer for that and I didn’t have it. I wandered for a long time until I happened to meet Miss. Vidalii and we got close, but friends kinda close. It took a while for me to realise that I was tired of independence, so I submitted the right forms and let her know that I was ready and she convinced me.”

Katie clung a little tighter to Wing’s arm, sniffling loud enough it triggered the hearing aid embedded in her neck. “I don’t think it matters if I do that, she doesn’t want me anyway. She’s… had a tough life and somebody needs to take care of her and it hurts that it can’t be me. Dirt, I wish it could be me.”

The other nice thing about paperwork was that generally, people understood that you should submit the entire thing at once, rather than adding new little problems at every step. Wing briefly considered just going home and adding Katie to the To-Be-Domesticated list, but there were rules and processes around that too and she knew they were there for a reason. The illusion of free will was important, apparently, even if Wing no longer desired it.

Katie shrugged. “I don’t think they’re really all that different from us, just… bigger. Larger than life. They get to be smarter and funnier and taller and cuter, but I think they get to hurt more, too. They get whole lifetimes of pain and they’re still strong enough they want to hold us up. I want to help her so much, but I don’t even know how to be near her.”

Wing put her stylus to the pad, but the girl seemed willing to keep talking. “I’m so tired. I’ve been miserable all my life. I got a few weeks of happiness, and now I’m miserable again and somehow that doesn’t hurt nearly as much as knowing that she probably is too. I want to hate her for what she said, but I don’t. I can’t. I just want to be near her. I want to help her. I thought it’d get better but it isn’t, it’s getting worse. Hell.”

Wing looked down. The pad responded to touch, too, not just the pen. It was just a lot harder to write with a finger. Katie had been tapping as she’d talked and the pattern was unmistakably affini. This just kept getting more complicated, but at least this was probably as bad as it could get.

“I wish I knew how to help her. She needs somebody she can’t push away. She needs somebody who can’t leave her. She needs… I…”

Katie suddenly stood up. The fire in her eyes was burning bright and Wing flashed another swear out into the environment. That was almost always a sign that an undomesticated sophont was about to do something incredibly stupid. It always had been for her.

“I can’t live like this. I’m gonna go talk to her. We can sort something out. We’ll have a heart-to-heart, I’ll get to help her be happy and it’ll all be perfect.”

Ah. That was to be the next disaster, then. Wing really didn’t want to write the next message, but the alternative was having to do it after Katie caused a kerfuffle. “So, about that. There was an… incident in engineering a few days ago. One of the new creatures from down below was having a hard time, things spiraled, and… it was a whole mess, and I’m afraid your friend is heading back to the rest of the Affini Compact in a shuttle at the moment. She left yesterday morning.”

“Ah.”

Katie stood there, eyes closed, for long moments. Wing didn’t feel great about this. Needing to break the poor girl’s heart was going to weigh on her, but at least there wouldn’t be another incident.

Katie’s eyes opened again and Wing saw the light in them gleaming brighter yet, and knew that there was absolutely going to be another incident. Katie took off at a fast walking pace, directly for the nearest magrail entrance. Wing stole a few seconds to scramble over to the poor cook, who was probably about done with their meal, and then hurried afterwards. Her heart was racing quickly enough that at least Montsechia would notice something was up and send help.

The last thing that they needed was an independent Terran with nothing to lose running about aboard ship.

Wing managed to squeeze into the magrail pod just as the door was closing. She held out a hastily scrawled message written while she’d been running. “Where are you going, Katie?”

“I’m going to talk to Thatch.”

Aaaaaaaa. “Katie, she physically is not here to talk to and there are no comms relays in range. You can send a message, but delivering a message to a small shuttle in open space could take days.”

The girl shrugged. “No, it’s fine. Thank you, I think this is what I needed. This is a problem that I can solve.” Katie had stopped crying, at least. Wing wasn’t sure that was good. She nervously rubbed the tiny scar where her implant had been inserted. She knew it wouldn’t make anybody more likely to notice her distress, but Wing couldn’t help but notice the lack of anybody coming to her rescue.

The magrail pod sped on its way for a few minutes before finally hauling itself to a stop at hyperspacial engineering. Katie was out of the door before it had finished opening and Wing hurried afterwards. They burst through another set of doors into one of the mechanical areas that Wing didn’t really understand, but thankfully they were not alone. Wing could relax. There were affini here and everything would be okay.

Katie walked straight up to one and jabbed it in the thigh with a finger. “I need you to jump the ship,” she stated.

The affini—Prickle, if Wing’s memory served, which it usually did—looked down with a confusion one could only find in an affini suddenly confronted by something much smaller and cuter than itself that still had some willfulness about it. Never mind that she was literally dressed in a rebel uniform.

They reached down to pat Katie’s head and spoke, in a stage whisper. “Is this a roleplay thing, cutie? I didn’t get the message, if so.”

Katie took a step back, dodging the hand, and shook her head. “Look, there isn’t time to explain. There’s a shuttle that left yesterday and I need us to be on top of it.”

The two affini in the room laughed. “Honey, we’re in a gravity well. The arcs aren’t turning. Even if we wanted to do that we’d have to get everybody on the ship to tie things down, and that’s a lot of disruption for one little floret, no matter how cute!”

Katie did not manage to avoid the next set of headpats. She endured them for half a second before glaring upwards with a look that made Wing want to run for the hills. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Please oh no.

“I’m not a floret,” Katie insisted. “No one affini is responsible for me, and so as I understand it, all of you things are kinda responsible for me. If I don’t get on board that shuttle right now I’m going to be irreparably harmed and I know you won’t let that happen so cut the shit and get jumping.”

Prickle looked over at the other affini—Avium, if Wing was right, which she always was—with a sudden seriousness. Oh no.

Avium knelt at Katie’s side with a frown and a piercing gaze. “Cutie, we really need more to go on than that.”

“No you don’t. We’re like twenty thousand light years out and the Jump range of a shuttle can’t be very big, so I doubt you’ve had any trouble keeping track of where it is. The Jump range on this drive is going to be better. It was stupid to go out in a shuttle at all, it’d take months to get back to Affini space and you fuckers let my affini leave on one.”

Avium leaned back, glancing between the other occupants of the room. Looking for help. Wing shrugged. She was pretty sure Avium understood a little of her language. “Don’t look at me, I’m just a pet. I can’t be held responsible for this.”

Apparently Prickle had learned a few words, too, because she grinned down at Avium and chirped “Don’t look at me, I’m not the chief around here, chief. I can’t be responsible either.”

Katie looked satisfied, as if she’d expected something just like this. “Take me to my affini and I’ll forgive you,” she insisted.

Avium looked around for help again and found even less. He opened his mouth several times before finding a response. “I thought we’d be in charge when I first got here,” xe mumbled. “Okay, okay. Fine. Uh. Wing, you know how to send shipwide broadcasts, right? If we can get everyone to prepare for it we can probably actually do this. Somebody tell the captain, too, she’ll probably want to kno—”

Xe glanced up. “Ah, speak of the level.” A slightly out of breath Felicia Hautere had just entered the room. That would be Wing’s rescue, then.

“Apologies, it took a moment for the clerk to find us. What’s going on?”

Katie whirled around, then spent a moment squinting. “Do I know you?”

Felicia looked the girl up and down. “I don’t think so, but some of my memories are fuzzy. We might have met at work, maybe, if you were on ships.”

Katie seemed to consider and then dismiss that. “Okay, whatever, it doesn’t matter. There’s a shuttle somewhere between us and Affini space and I need to be on it.”

Felicia raised an eyebrow. There was one person on this entire ship who could make her do anything she didn’t want to and Rosaceae wasn’t here. “I’m not sure who you are, so I’m guessing you’re the new girl, but there are over five thousand people on this ship and you are facing overwhelming force. We’re going nowhere unless you can give me a very good explanation.”

Katie nodded. “I’m not using force. This isn’t fighting. My affini is on that ship and I need her.”

The captain’s pet looked up to the ceiling and emitted a deep, beleaguered sigh. After a long moment, she looked back down. “Urgh. And here I was thinking we were done with all of this. Wing, go send an alert. Avium, ready us for a jump. You—” She pointed at Katie— “Come with me. No arguments. You two have given Rosa enough stress already and you are not spoiling her lunch.”

Wing busied herself at the nearest terminal. It took a little while to figure out how to word the message.

Hello shipmates!! Wing Vidalii, Third Floret here again! We’ve got a little bit of an incident ongoing at the moment, and if we want to reunite a cutie with her lost affini we’re going to have to do a jump back out into space pretty soon! Please please pretty please hit the button there when you’re ready, and then we’ll be off! Let me know if you can’t and we’ll sort it out!!!

Wing wasn’t worried about anybody minding. There were few things that would convince a ship full of affini more thoroughly than needing to reunite somebody with their pet. It took maybe half an hour before Wing was staring down a full complement of ready signals. She held on tight to a handhold and gave Avium a nice, unambiguous flash of approval. He hit a button. Like most jumps, Wing didn’t feel a thing, though unlike most, all the gravity disappeared in an instant. She hung on to the handle. Wing did not like microgravity.

After a few seconds, the whole ship seemed to shake. Wing yelped. That didn’t usually happen. She looked towards the room’s affini in a panic and received a generous helping of patting and scratches from them both, and then a gentle tug away from the handhold. If one of them wanted to hold her Wing wasn’t about to complain.

“Don’t worry about it, cutie,” Prickle said, running her hand through Wing’s little tentacles. “Remember, we’re not on the arcs here. No suspension, we get to feel all the shocks. Let’s get one of the cameras up so you can see…”

A pair of Prickle’s vines tapped at the controls to the terminal Wing had been using, bringing up one of the ship’s forward facing cameras. It showed a small shuttle hanging in empty space. As they watched, one of the Elettarium’s freshly rebuilt cargo/boarding chutes shot forward, spiking straight through the hull and disabling it.

Wing knew Montsechia was going to have strong feelings about this. Whether it was pride or disappointment, however, remained to be seen.

Chapter Text

Chapter Twenty Eight: Slow Burn

Thatch emitted a low, grinding growl, face moving through surprise towards frustration at a rapid pace. The surprise, at least, was understandable. Over the last thirty seconds, Thatch had gone from alone to having Katie clambering down a boarding chute towards her. “What are— Katie, what do you think you are doing? Leave me be. You do not want anything to do with me.”

The shuttle was much like the one that Katie had ridden to get to the Elettarium in the first place, with the slight difference that it was also tugging a habitation unit along behind it. Or, it had been, anyway. With a ten foot wide hole in the hull it was no longer doing much of anything. Lights flickered, life support tried and failed to re-engage, and any ability to navigate seemed entirely non-operational.

Thatch’s shape had taken on hostile angles. Vines stretched out to anchor her against handholds and around solid pieces of the ship’s architecture. Her movements were discordant, exuding danger in a language that skipped words and spoke straight to the animal core of Katie’s self. Despite her certainty, Katie couldn’t help but shy away.

“Don’t pretend to really care what I want, Thatch,” Katie snapped, clinging on to her own handhold tightly enough her knuckles were going white. “You ran away without even talking to me about it! You owe me more than that!”

Her affini glanced around. There was nowhere to go. The only escape from the broken shuttle was the boarding tube, and Katie blocked the way. Thatch emitted a dull groan, almost like the roar of a great monster, but deeper. Sharper. Far more dangerous.

“Of course I care,” she hissed. “I have never let you hurt yourself before and I will not let you do it now. I am not good for you, Katie. You will be best off if I simply disappear and spare you the temptation.” Thatch’s body moved at sharp angles, more than a few thorns bared.

Katie bared her teeth. Even after all this, she wasn’t penetrating Thatch’s idiocy. Katie called Thatch’s bluff, hauling herself forwards into a danger she knew wasn’t truly there. She sailed through microgravity. “That isn’t your choice to make. If you just run away then what do you think happens to me? Do you think I’ll suddenly stop caring about you? I won’t! I don’t understand what you’re doing. Tell me what I’m missing. Give me a hint?”

Thatch knocked her aside with a vine. It was a gentle sweep but it still sent Katie tumbling and she had to scramble to find another handhold to steady herself. “I will break you,” Thatch growled. “I can not take you. I am sorry that I have screwed up so badly that you will chase me across the galaxy to throw yourself at me, but I can not take a pet.”

Katie clung to her perch, breathing heavily. “Thatch, you are really, really dumb. Shut up and listen to me. I do not want to be your pet. Stop blaming yourself for things you haven’t done and talk to me.”

A silence fell over the shuttlecraft. The violence in Thatch’s stance seemed to bleed away over long moments, leaving her looking awkward and confused. She opened her mouth to ask a question a few times before figuring out anything to say. She sighed. Almost begged. “You are not capable of fighting me, Katie. You will lose yourself and you cannot stop me. If you throw yourself at my heel I will crush you under it.”

“I don’t want to be your pet. I don’t want to take your name. I don’t want to lose my agency. The idea terrifies me. Sure, the drugs feel nice, and the comfort is good, but in case you hadn’t noticed—” Katie threw her arm out behind her, to the boarding tube— “You brought me somewhere where all that and more is just given to me. I can get drugs delivered to my door. I can get somebody to come around and keep me company whenever I want. There is a line of people who want to be my friend.”

Thatch slowly pulled her vines back into her body, one at a time. Even like this, she was larger than life. “Then why are you here? Why will you not simply let me leave without… this? Have I not done enough harm, that you must force me to hurt those around me more?”

Katie took a deep breath. She didn’t speak for long moments, not because she was lost for words, but because she’d typed them out in so many unsent messages they felt sharp just to think about. “Because I have everything I want and I’m still not happy. I’ve spend days pouring through the records. You have translated copies of the works of more species than I thought could exist. I’ve talked to the archivist. I’ve tried to build something new. Things are stable, and I’m not happy.”

Katie stared Thatch down. “And neither are you.”

The plant laughed, but she could hardly argue the point. “So you want us to be unhappy together? Katie, I cannot stand the sight of you,” she hissed. “You are the latest in a long line of my failures. Go away and leave me be. There is nothing more for us to discuss.”

Katie shook her head, firmly. “No. You’re just like me. You’re just like all of us dumb creatures of the universe. We all do this. What you’re doing right here. Every sapient species you have on record. We’re all desperate for purpose, and it’s bullshit. We’re animals. Animals don’t have a purpose, we just are. We— Humanity hunted for a reason so hard and for so long that they reached the stars and found it was all for fucking nothing, and so they just kept looking. We aren’t for anything. We fought and killed and argued because we couldn’t agree on why we were fighting, killing, and arguing. We were for nothing, yet we never stopped looking. You’re right here in the mud with me doing the same damn thing.”

Thatch bared sharp teeth. “I cannot change that. I can only try to protect you.”

Katie pushed off of her handhold. Not fast enough to be a threat. Slow enough to take her time to reach the affini.

“Why are you so afraid of me, Thatch? I know you couldn’t save Caeca. I know something happened with Cici’s people. I know that nobody back on that ship even knows you. I don’t know what you’re running from, but please don’t run from me. I know you couldn’t save them all, Thatch. Just save me? I need you.”

Thatch reached out with a hand to meet Katie as she arrived. She wrapped it around one of Katie’s and held tight. The girl stared into Thatch’s quivering eyes. “Please.”

“You do not know what you are asking,” Thatch whispered. “Katie, I do not know how to save myself, never mind you. I do not trust myself with you. I would go too far and you cannot stop me.”

Katie brought up her other hand, sandwiching Thatch’s between hers. “I’ll learn. You need me. I can help, but you have to work with me here.”

Thatch wanted to look away. Her song was halting, a staccato beat in place of something that was supposed to flow smoothly. “You don’t know what I want to do to you,” she whispered.

“I know you’re worried about that. We’ll work on it together, yeah? Me and you. We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen. You won—”

Thatch growled, knocked Katie’s hands away from her own with a casual gesture, and grabbed the girl’s neck. Katie yelped with the last of her air, suddenly held away from any surface she could reach in an inescapable grip. “I would remake you,” Thatch hissed, straight into the girl’s face. “And you would like it. Do you have any idea what this is like for me, Katie? This isn’t a fear, it’s a promise. It’s what I want. You speak of equality because you do not know what I am. I cannot be equals with something I cannot help but control.”

Thatch began to squeeze, staring down into Katie’s eyes with an impassionate gaze. Katie could feel each finger tight against her neck, adding pressure until she couldn’t even force through a cry, but not the slightest touch more. Taking Katie’s body to its breaking point, precisely. “I want to tear you down into parts and put you back together how I want you.”

Thatch swung her other arm to the side, extending a wide array of flowers in all shapes and sizes as she did. Half of them had injectors. The other half seemed to almost blur the air around them with the potency of their scent.

“I can do it. I know how you work. I know what makes that little brain tick. It doesn’t matter what you want, Katie. It doesn’t matter what scares you. You’ve spent so long trying to find out who you are and it brought you straight to me, and I don’t have to care. I could make you anything,” she growled. Thatch whirled around, slamming Katie into the hull of the shuttle hard enough to rattle her bones and pressed a sharp needle to her arm. “I could make you so afraid of me you’d never stop running. I could make you love me. I could make you hate me, but burn with a need so hot you’d beg to stay.”

Nothing actually pierced Katie’s skin. Aerosols surrounded her in a thick haze, but Thatch had her throat held so tight that Katie couldn’t breathe it in.

“You do not want to be near me. I have rarely lied to you but when we first met, I told you that nobody here wanted to take your identity away from you. I would. I would have you to be mine and nothing more and nobody could stop me.”

Katie was clearly struggling to breathe, but she wasn’t fighting. She raised her hands to her own throat and helped Thatch press. After a moment, thin vines pulled her wrists away and she was left gasping for breath. Thatch tried to pull her hand back, but Katie yanked one of hers from a hesitant vine and grabbed hold. It took long moments before Katie had the breath to speak.

“I’ll stop you. You won’t go too far. Trust me on this?”

All movement in the shuttle came to an abrupt halt. Even the subtle music Thatch carried with her wherever she went fell silent.

After a long moment of nothing, Thatch spoke, with the anger torn from her voice. “I don’t know what you—”

“Yes you do. We both know you could teach me if you just stopped running from this.” Katie pulled forward, climbing up her affini’s body until she could look the creature straight in the eyes. “I don’t want to be your fucking pet, Thatch, but both of us are getting what we want and both of us are miserable.” Katie bared her teeth. “Come take what you need. Show me how to give it to you.”

“I— No, you—”

“—don’t want this. Yes, I’ve said. Change my fucking mind. Your pretty speech doesn’t scare me. If you need me to suffer, then here I am, but at least let me be doing it for you. Give me a purpose, Thatch.”

The affini opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out.

Katie jabbed a thumb into Thatch’s leafy chest. “Make me make you happy, you utter fuck. I know you can do it. The only time in my life I’ve felt worth a damn was when I was stuck on that rock with you. It wasn’t just the drugs, it wasn’t just the kindness, and it wasn’t just the support. I have all that now and it’s not enough. I need you. You didn’t have to make me love you. I already do.”

A dawning horror spread across Thatch’s face. She backed away, soon finding herself cornered against the glass. She shook her head. When she managed to speak, her voice was tiny, strained. “I am not worth this. You could be so much more.”

Katie’s hand found Thatch’s cheek, forcing their eyes together. “I will be. I trust you. I’ll want this. I’ll be better when I’m yours. Don’t let me have a choice about that. Please, Thatch. Please.”

“You’ll be like Caeca,” Thatch breathed. “Just a shell.”

“Is that what you want me to be?”

Thatch looked around, panicked, but Katie’s firm hand brought her head back around, eyes fixed in place. Thatch’s lips quivered. A distinctly human expression. “Yes,” she admitted. “But I want to fill that shell.”

Katie’s face softened into a smile, and she pulled herself in to hug around Thatch’s neck. “Good. I’m yours. Teach me.”

Thatch hesitated for just a moment longer. Four powerful vines extended from behind her back and grabbed Katie’s limbs, pinning her in place against the side of the shuttle. Thatch took a deep breath. Katie felt a sharp pain against her neck.

“Tell me to stop. Please,” Thatch whispered. “Just one word.”

“Green.”

Thatch’s lattice quivered, pulling tight and squirming all over. “I… I would need your help. I cannot do this alone.”

“You have it. Take what you want. Just don’t ever let me regret this.”

Katie felt the pain recede as whatever Thatch had just injected into her neck began to spread.

“I need you to fight me,” Thatch growled. “I’ll show you how. Stop me from going too far.”

With dying scraps of sobriety, Katie gave a tiny nod. She didn’t want this. It wasn’t hard to find the energy to fight it. All she had to do was ignore the burning certainty in her gut that Thatch knew better, and that was easy now that Katie knew that whether she believed it would make no difference to the outcome. The fire in her heart that pushed her to keep fighting, to keep struggling for just one more day, burned as hot as it always had. She couldn’t have survived life without it.

She could feel her mind going fuzzy. She couldn’t see anything beyond what was straight in front of her. Her skin burned with need. The leaden weight that had been holding her down crumbled and fell. Katie squeezed shut her eyes and whimpered. She couldn’t budge Thatch’s vines an inch, no matter how she pulled.

Katie’s confidence was wavering. How was she meant to put up any kind of resistance to this? Her body begged for touch, and her mind begged for comfort. It was all she could do to not break down with pleading desperation. She needed this. It barely mattered that she would be broken if the journey there was the bliss she so desperately needed.

Katie felt a finger brush over her cheek. “I know,” Thatch whispered. She seemed so close, but Katie couldn’t even open her eyes. All she wanted to do was stretch towards the source of the voice in eager worship, and she couldn’t. She was held away. “I know this is hard. I…”

Thatch took a deep breath. She was so close Katie could feel the air rushing past her body. “I know you can do this. For me. Focus. You have felt this drug before, you know what it does. Fight it for me.”

Katie opened her mouth, but only for a tiny gasp. This was the least of her challenges, and she was faltering. Katie didn’t want to face the universe by herself, but that wasn’t the point here, was it? She needed Thatch to not be alone in her struggles. She couldn’t do that if she wasn’t around. She couldn’t do that if she was so wrapped up in submission that she lost herself altogether. There had to be another way. For Thatch.

The desperate need for touch didn’t lessen, but it was easier to resist, with the right framing. She wanted to feel soft hands over her every inch, but Katie could have gotten that elsewhere. It was Thatch she needed, and Thatch needed Katie focussed. She gritted her teeth and breathed. Katie forced herself to stop reaching for touch. She forced herself to go slack in Thatch’s firm grip.

“I’m— I think I’m good,” she whispered. This wasn’t going to be too bad. She’d convince Thatch that she was capable of resistance. They could go back to being friends, just… good friends, with more touching.

“I shall be the judge of that,” came Thatch’s answer, breathed like whispers on the wind straight into Katie’s ear. Her back arched, desperate shiver echoing down her spine. It took seconds, but Katie got herself back under control. “Hmn. Very well.”

Katie felt a palm stroking down her cheek. Vines moving along her arms. A hand pressed against her chest.

“Be happy.” Katie smiled.

“Be sad.” Katie frowned.

“No. I need you to fight this, Katie.” Thatch’s voice wavered. “I do not…”

Katie forced away the feelings as best she could and pressed open her eyes. She couldn’t let Thatch down. If Katie failed here, she’d never be able to forgive herself. “Tell me how, please,” she gasped, between waves of feeling Katie could recognise as being not her own, but could not fight. “How does it work? Teach me.”

Her affini took one last moment of insecurity, then nodded. “Tell me, Katie, when you hear a song you like do you tap your foot to the beat?”

“I- Yes, I think?” Katie let out a groan. Holding on at all was already so hard. How was this a useful question? “Can’t you just tell me the answer?”

No, of course not. That was the whole point. Thatch raised an eyebrow. She expected a better answer than that. Katie had to give her one. “Y- yes, I always have. I used to listen to more music when I was younger, and I’d kind of align to it? Walk in time with it, do stuff at its tempo, stuff like that.”

Thatch still didn’t respond. She kept her eyebrow raised, exuding patience. Katie knew that look from dozens of moments from their discussions on the secrets of the universe and everything else besides. It wasn’t enough for Katie to merely answer the question, she needed to understand why it had been asked. Thatch thought Katie had enough information to figure something out.

There were too many distractions. The four vines holding Katie squeezed in a slightly disjoint pattern. Thatch’s palm remained on her cheek, but the fingers were drumming a subtle beat.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

Why did this seem so familiar?

One, two, three, four.

Where had she heard this before?

Everywhere. It was in Katie’s gait, it was in her breathing, it was the pattern she tapped when her hands were idle. It wormed into her head. Cadence. Rhythm. Beat. It was the beat to which Thatch spoke. The rhythm with which she walked and moved. The cadence of her body’s heat and growth.

Katie’s mouth slightly opened. She dampened dry lips with a dry tongue and coughed. “The… your trick, it’s… it works the same way?”

Thatch’s smile grew wider, but more importantly than that, it grew true. “Yes! Yes, it does. More complicated and subtle than any song could ever hope to be, but… hazardous to your mind. You must resist it or you will lose yourself in me entirely.”

It was the right answer, but it wasn’t enough of an answer. Just knowing how it worked was insufficient. Katie had to know how it could be fought. She looked up at her smiling friend. The smile was like sunshine on her skin, like happiness in her heart.

Like a sixth sense in her head, telling her how to feel and how to act.

“I can fight it,” Katie whispered.

“Then be happy,” Thatch demanded. Katie felt the tug on her heartstrings, demanding she feel a certain way. She could hardly avoid feeling happy with Thatch’s touch on her soul, but she could fight down the smile. She could keep her head, to a point.

“Good. Be sad.” That was harder to deal with. Katie felt her heart sinking. Her morale weakening. Her resistance splintered, but held. She forced a smile to her face. If this was the worst Thatch could throw at her then Katie would be okay.

“Very good. I think we are ready to stop practicing, then. Remember to fight me.”

Thatch’s vines let go, and her affini reached out to grab Katie by the neck. She was held away from the walls, away from anything she might get a grip on, held up towards the broken ceiling of the shattered shuttle. Thatch looked up with a smile. Katie couldn’t help but smile back. She literally couldn’t help it. She felt a vicious spark in her chest and a deep excitement in her stomach. Fear ran through her veins, it just wasn’t her fear. The fire in her heart was faltering, on the verge of going out altogether.

Even with the beginnings of an understanding of what was happening to her, Katie couldn’t fight it. The emotions pressed down on her too heavily. Thatch felt so loudly that Katie couldn’t help but be washed away.

“I can’t fight this,” Katie whispered. “I’m trying, and I can’t. I’m slipping.”

Katie’s grin grew wider in perfect time with her captor’s. “That is exactly why I told you to try. Basic materials science, flower. Things which do not flex under pressure break instead. You, delightful creature that you are, bend to me like you were made for it. But that won’t break you, and I need you broken. Otherwise, you’ll always just bend back.” Thatch brought Katie down until their faces were practically touching. She whispered, insistent. “Do not flex under this pressure, pet.”

How could Katie not? Now that she knew the trick, the effect was impossible to ignore. Impossible to fight. Thatch’s emotions washed over with irresistible force. Katie gritted her teeth. Biological rhythms? Her body operated on autopilot most of the time, but that could be overridden. She focused on her breathing, trying to hold it in her own pattern. Something unnatural, something that couldn’t possibly have been imposed. Two long breaths, then three short, alternating the counts each cycle. Artificial, something that took concentration to maintain. It helped. She could feel the pressure that threatened to wash her away become something she could more easily bear. Something she could start to resist. The flames of independence began to rise in Katie once again.

Thatch grinned. Katie didn’t.

“There we go. Such a good girl. Let’s try again. What are you, underneath it all, Katie?” Thatch’s grip was absolute. Katie tried to force herself free, but she couldn’t move Thatch’s fingers in the slightest. What was it she’d said? If they didn’t flex under pressure, then they would break? Katie tried hammering the knuckles, hoping to find a weak point.

Thatch laughed. “Clever thinking, but that rule is for you, not me. My body would bend before it broke, but we both know that you had your one chance at bending me and the second you failed you were destined to be mine. What are you?”

“I— I don’t know!” Katie squeaked out between gasped breaths. “I haven’t figured that out!”

Thatch shifted her grip so that she could flex her thumb and force Katie’s chin to rise. “Do you need a hint?” she sang. By the stars, her voice was beautiful. Katie didn’t need tapping fingers to show her the rhythm. She never had.

Three deep breaths, two short.

“You said nobody would tell me what I was,” Katie insisted. “You said I’d get to choose for myself!”

Thatch’s low chuckle hammered at Katie’s resolve. “You surrendered that right when you gave me permission to make you mine. Your thoughts aren’t yours to think any more.” Thatch savoured the moment, watching Katie squirm as she rattled through a rapidly shortening list of options for resistance.

The affini grinned, whole body shuddering. She let out a thrilled gasp, focus burning down into Katie’s eyes. “You’re so close, darling. Do you not feel it? You have been humming a single tune your entire life. You know it better than anything, because it is you. The way you move, the way you breathe, the way you think. Can you hear that tune now?”

Katie shook her head, quietly.

“Oh, it is there, still. In the way you resist. In the way you fight. In your desperate grasps for independence.” She brought a hand up to Katie’s chest, just over the heart. “But it is getting quiet. You are so close to silencing it.”

Thatch slowly turned around, pressing Katie into the shuttle wall and stepping close, to hem her in. “What are you?” she asked. Thatch only ever repeated a question when she was trying to show Katie she already knew the answer, but Katie didn’t.

“I don’t know, okay?! How could I possibly know? How could I possibly have figured that out?”

“Well, let us approach the problem systematically. Are you human?” Thatch asked. One hand was still at Katie’s neck, holding her against the wall, but the other was free to stroke the hair out of her face and soak up the sweat from her brow. Every touch sent Katie’s fire surging with fear and indignation.

Katie shook her head. Thatch patted it. “Good girl. That song you have inside of you, the one you can only barely hear. It comes from Terra. You made it your own, but you could only ever sing within your cage. Focus on it. Try to hear it. Try, for me,” Thatch insisted.

Two deep breaths, three short. The rapid beating of Katie’s heart. The frantic pattern of thoughts even now trying to figure out how she could get out of this. The desperate burn within. How could these invaders be repelled? How could the horrors they wanted to perpetrate be argued against? That little kernel in the back of Katie’s head that would never accept that what they were doing could be right screamed.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t— I don’t know.”

Thatch gave a dissatisfied grunt. “No. Let me show you.”

Her human form dissolved. She fell forward onto Katie, a thousand vines seeking to wrap every part of the girl’s body and hold her tight and still. Katie felt powerful, warm growth covering every inch of her skin, worming under clothing and tearing it free from the far ends of her toes all the way up to her neck and then further still, enveloping her head as well. She was blinded, thrown into silence, surrounded by a cocoon.

She was deposited into a void. Her body was held tightly, but with such precision that she could barely feel the binds.

Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. No distractions. There was no possible way out of this other than giving Thatch what she wanted, so the only way to fight was to answer the question. Who was she? Who was the Katie she wanted to be?

Katie felt the fire burning in her heart, urging her to keep struggling, keep fighting. She’d drawn on that fire all her life just to keep going, just to keep trying. It wouldn’t fail her now. The entire Terran Accord hadn’t broken her, she could handle one plant.

The flame warmed her. It flickered with hot desperation and a cold anger in a choreographed dance that had forced her to survive all that had come before. Every hardship, every traumatic event, every little struggle on the way here as Katie had fought for the self-determination she knew she wanted most. If she could just fight this little bit more, maybe she’d get there.

Maybe she wouldn’t. She’d been burning hot her entire life and there was so little left to fuel it. Fighting this creature was just an extension of the fight she’d been having since the day she was born. She was burning out. She’d been burning out for a long time.

She needed an answer. Thatch kept talking about a song, but Katie heard nothing. Just the fire. Just the pain. Maybe Thatch had been right, and there could never be true understanding between them. They were simply too different.

Yet.

Katie strained her ears and there was nothing.

Nothing but the flame.

Like any emotion, it was part of her. It rose and fell with her. It ebbed and flowed with the breathing of her soul. It sang, in a way, if she listened hard enough, in the right way, and as it did Katie began to understand.

“I hear it,” Katie whispered. Herself. The music in her heart, when all else was silent. Katie, when allowed to sing inside of the cage that was existence in an uncaring universe. With nothing else surrounding her she could finally hear what she was, underneath it all. She heard the song deep within her heart, kept in time by its beating and the cadence of her body and the rhythm of her mind. Katie’s song. Her.

It was mournful. Angry. Sad. A chorus of regrets set to a tune that never quite reached its crescendo. It felt jumbled and vague. This was what she’d been fighting so hard to keep? The identity she’d struggled her entire life to find? It was small. It didn’t really fit together. This was what she had been looking for? This was what she’d been letting burn her up?

What was she? This? This was futile. Yet she held on to it all the same, clutching tight to something that no longer felt worth all the sacrifices. What else could she do? The fire burned too hot to reach anything beyond it. Katie had been wrong. Thatch did understand her. Katie had set her heart ablaze just to survive in the cold, but Thatch was showing her another way. She could let herself cool, let herself be warmed from the outside in, and let her heart sing instead of burn.

“What are you?” Thatch asked, from all around her. The affini’s song was rich, layered, intricate. Catchy beyond belief. Without active effort, Katie was sure that she’d be humming it, but it would always clash with the misery she held so tightly. She couldn’t bring herself to listen, not truly, while her own music played alongside.

“I’m just broken,” she whispered, to her own halting tune.

What even was this that she held so tight? Some essential Katie that she’d always thought that she could be if only the world would stop imposing? Something she had reached for for years, hoping that if she simply kept trading herself away, what was left over at the end would somehow be worth it? She had found that end, now. She could be this. She was this.

Thatch’s vines grew tighter, binding her in totality. Katie struggled and fought with all her strength in every way she could imagine. She couldn’t twitch a finger. She couldn’t open her mouth. She couldn’t even open her eyes. No matter how she struggled, she couldn’t do a damn thing that Thatch didn’t want.

“No.” Thatch spoke to her from every direction. Her body pulsed with gentle heat. The small buds along her vines began to glow in time to all else. Katie’s binds squirmed, finding Thatch’s warmth and rhythm and sticking to it, forcing it into Katie’s body through every inch of her desperate flesh. “Try again.”

Katie whimpered. Three short breaths, three long ones. Or… no, that wasn’t it, she—

Katie fought against her restraints. She had to move. The vines were clamped down around her chest, making it impossible to breathe out of turn. Only her heartbeat was out of Thatch’s direct control. The final home for the last of Katie’s song. The burning fire that was her strength of will.

“I… I am… I… I can’t… Please…” Katie struggled to find the words. She kept her mind focused on the beating of her heart. On keeping her own time. Feeling the searing heat of her own independent spirit. It felt so insignificant next to what surrounded her. How was this any different to holding onto all the other foul, desperate things humanity had internalised within her?

“You can do it,” Thatch whispered. There was no malice here. Just a promise of safety and understanding. Just warmth and a song. Something more fair and real than humanity had ever offered. Katie clutched tighter still to the last piece of herself that she truly had. Thatch was reaching out to her, but the fire was too hot and neither of them could breach it. It was one thing that this plant couldn’t erase. She clung to it with all her might, and—

Katie felt something crack deep inside. Broken notes and shattered music drowned out the flames and Katie was plunged into cold silence. Her heart stopped. Literally, she feared. She could feel herself ebbing away. She could feel the light leaving her eyes. The song inside of her had gone silent. The fire was out. She had nothing. She was nothing.

Thatch’s vines squeezed in a slow pattern, starting at the bottom of her toes and slowly moving up. She was everywhere. Reaching out. “That’s a good girl,” Thatch whispered. “Just let it go. Forget it. Come to me.”

Katie let out a long, slow wail. She wanted to curl up into a desperate little ball, but no matter how she pulled or how she fought, Thatch held her tight in an unbreakable embrace. No escape. “Why do I feel so empty?” Katie whispered, with a voice tiny and weak. Dying out, like her, now there was no driving force left within.

Thatch was releasing her, slowly, from the top of Katie’s head on down. It still felt like her heart hadn’t started back up, but that couldn’t possibly be true. Her affini was reforming with them both at floor level. Thatch knelt, with one set of fingers resting on Katie’s chest, feeling for the beat, and the other tightly clutching both of Katie’s hands.

“You always have been.” Thatch replied, with a voice full of music. Katie could only truly hear it now that she was silent, but somehow, she had known what it would sound like even before the affini had opened her mouth. It was beautiful. “Life has never before allowed you to stop and consider what you really are, underneath it all. Do not despair. Just let me in. Let me take care of everything. I can fix you.”

“I don’t want to be like this any more,” Katie admitted. Her imprecise human tongue could never hope to reproduce the majesty of Thatch’s beat. She tried anyway. She had no other song to sing. “Please. Help me?”

“What are you?”

A complicated question. Katie had been reaching for the answer for so long that she didn’t know what to do with herself now that she’d found and lost it. All she could do was review the evidence arrayed before her like Thatch had taught.

Katie had been searching for what felt like her entire life for who she really was, once everything else got out of the way. Once she was no longer having her head messed with by a rotten civilisation, by the trauma of capitalism, by alien invaders, or even by Thatch. That seemed like it had been such a futile effort in the end. What had been the point?

She could never exist without imposition. Thatch had proved that to her. She’d been given the space she needed to find what lay deep beneath and it had been small and sad. Katie needed to be more than that. The imposition wasn’t holding her back. It was holding her up.

Warm fingers that entwined with Katie’s own squeezed, drawing her attention back to the affini sitting by her side with a soft smile and twinkling eyes. Katie felt happy when Thatch was the one guiding her. Katie felt happy when she was getting to help. Katie felt happy when she imagined bringing a smile to the affini’s face. The song in Thatch’s heart wasn’t small, or sad, or futile. It filled her, endlessly, with a pattern so deep she could never get bored yet so memorable she could never forget.

“I don’t know,” Katie admitted, finally. “I need your help to find out.”

She finally felt the beating of her heart once more, thumping away with Thatch’s comforting cadence. Katie felt herself finally able to begin to relax. She squeezed Thatch’s hand back, tight. She could stop.

Her affini let out a long, slow breath. Her leaves shivered and Katie could feel her excitement, right down to the bones. They smiled, together, as one. It wasn’t Katie following Thatch’s lead, as if her identity had been snuffed out. She took her place as another instrument in Thatch’s orchestra, playing her song in a whole new way.

Katie understood what it meant to fight, now. Not pointless, futile resistance, as Terra demanded, but simple contrast. She didn’t need to ruin Thatch’s music to be herself, she just had to provide her own accompaniment.

Thatch fell upon her in a tight embrace, with all the hardness and sharp edges stolen away to leave only soft gratitude. “You are mine. My Katie,” she hissed, holding Katie so tight that she could hardly breathe, but not a hair tighter. Her affini took another deep breath, though she really didn’t need to, just so she could fill Katie’s world with the gentle, comforting scent of her owner. “You’re my beautiful little pet. I love you so much, Katie. You won’t regret this.”

Katie found herself hugging back. She couldn’t reach all around Thatch’s body, but it didn’t matter. “You won’t let me,” she insisted. The thought wasn’t as scary as it should have been. Thatch’s doing, she was certain, but she’d given up her ability to fight that off when she’d let the fire in her heart die out. She didn’t need to burn herself just to survive any more. She could simply sing.

Chapter Text

Chapter Twenty Nine: Welcome Home

The hug could never have lasted for long enough. Stars could have lived and died and still Katie would have felt regret when the time came for it to end. There was so much to make up for. So much need filling her diminutive form.

Katie didn’t feel like she was any different, or at least she didn’t think that she did. She still felt like herself as much as she ever had. More than, maybe. Even so, it was hard not to recognise that her priorities had changed. Thinking back even just a day was heartbreaking. Imagining herself back in a position where she thought she’d be without Thatch forever was like imagining death. It had the same desperate existential dread attached. Katie’s brain wanted to shy away in self-defense.

She let it. That seemed like something to tackle later, if at all. Today was a happy day.

If Katie started thinking back over longer periods it was difficult to avoid noticing that her actions were less and less relatable the further back she went. She knew she’d recognised a kind of futility in the rebellion during her last days involved, but how had she been so blind as to not see the truth? Resistance didn’t make any sense. It was the panic of a cornered animal. There was no justification for it. It was biting the hand that fed her because she was too hungry to accept the gift politely.

Katie wanted to shift her head so she could look up at her plant—her plant—but she needed the hug to be so tight that she couldn’t move, and so she didn’t get to. That was okay. She wasn’t a cornered animal any more. There was a kind of serenity in this. Those deep parts of Katie’s mind that would never fall quiet—demanding she obey all her base instincts—weren’t silent, but they were easier to ignore. The instincts were still there, but there was a hierarchy now.

Katie had seen the diagrams, though like many things humanity had created they’d stopped just before the end. She had needs: Biological necessities, sustenance, and a brain that worked; safety and security; love, care, and intimacy. She needed a feeling of confidence and achievement, and she needed avenues for self-actualisation. Humanity had figured all that out, though it had not then gone so far as to actually provide it.

Katie mentally appended another need. It broke the diagrams, which usually arranged things in a particular order, but this one was both a deeper need than physical necessity and a higher need than self-actualisation. Purpose. Belonging. To know that she existed for a reason, and to have a warm, soft certainty in the back of her mind that because she did everything would be okay whether she wanted it to be or not. Without that all the rest seemed pointless. With it, Katie’s other needs were relevant only so she could strive to fulfill that purpose.

Why was she okay with what was clearly a fundamental shift in her priorities? The Katie of a year prior would look upon the Katie of the now with horror and hate. At the same time Katie looked back at that past self through a soft veil of distant confusion and abject pity. Why had she done the things she had done? Katie knew she’d had reasons at the time. She even remembered what they were, they just didn’t connect.

Even the Katie of yesterday would look at her with dread. Katie understood that, though. Thatch’s teaching and Affini literature—or at least, the pieces they’d seen fit to translate into English/Floret—had given her the framework to understand what had been happening to her even if she hadn’t been willing to accept it.

Still. Something deep had changed within Katie and while she didn’t mind, she knew that she would have minded before it had been done. That’s why she been able to fight it for so long. Thinking about this gave Katie a headache.

She let out a little whimper. No, not fair. The stars hadn’t collapsed into nothing yet, she didn’t want to move. Thatch’s… everything surrounded her, where better could she possibly be?

Fortunately for Katie the answer to that question was now out of her hands. The whimper had already caught Thatch’s attention, and Katie felt herself released, albeit begrudgingly. She clung to what she could but all she got was vines squirming out of her grip and a chuckle that warmed the soul.

“Come now, Katie. We can’t stay here forever.” They couldn’t stay here forever. “You must be exhausted.” She must be exhausted. “Tell me how you’re feeling.”

Goddess above, it was like having her heart tugged on by a little set of strings. Was this how all of them felt? Katie hadn’t been giddy since she’d been a child, but she felt every word that came out of Thatch’s mouth shooting through her mind like an RKV, shattering her thoughts and leaving her as a wasteland of soft, warm happiness.

She was melting. Staring up at a beautiful, half-formed monster while filled with so much desire to answer a simple question she had no room left over to actually do it. She should open her mouth. She really should. By the stars, though, the amused twitch in the corner of Thatch’s mouth meshed with a gentle swelling in Katie’s sixth sense—the way she’d grown to interpret the endlessly complicated influence Thatch now had over her—to melt her all over again. She could feel the plant’s love. Her amusement almost had a texture to it, or a taste, or… she wasn’t sure how to visualise it, exactly. Something wry?

Katie could also hear Thatch’s fingers snapping right next to her ear. She jumped, suddenly torn back to reality. “Katie, my darling, you are adorable, but have you been forgetting to take your medication?” Thatch’s fingers brushed across her cheek and, oh wow was that distracting.

Okay, focus. Focus! Katie blinked a few times, then processed the question. “Uhh… maybe, I can’t remember. I think I’ve taken them at least once?”

Thatch nodded, carefully pulling the rest of her body back together as she returned to her usual form. Her voice was dry, but Katie could feel a richness in it she had only glimpsed before. “To think that I had imagined I could leave you by yourself and have you cope.” Humour, but serious, too. Mild self-deprecation? Katie would have to do something about that. “I am sorry, flower. I should have been honest with you from the start.”

“You never lied to me.”

“No, but I did give you half-truths and omissions. You will forgive me, of course, but I will do better. No more secrets, save for those I truly know you would not wish revealed before the time is right.”

Katie would forgive her. Of course.

Katie winced, and spent a moment rubbing her temple. She really should have kept up with her medication. There was an urge in the back of her mind to simply do as she was told, go along with it. Submerge herself in the music and play, without needing to consider whether what she was doing was right. To obey, if she was honest about it and stripped away all the poetry and metaphor.

“I think I could not forgive you,” Katie realised. “There’s a… I want to, right? I think I’d need you to tell me to do something I actually didn’t want to before I could gauge how much influence that really has, but it doesn’t feel like it would overpower anything I really needed. If I couldn’t forgive you yet, I don’t think that would make me.”

Katie shrugged. It was a weird motion when hanging in microgravity. “Wow, sorry, this is meant to be romantic and I’m here trying to figure out the details an hour after it happened.” She laughed, mostly at herself. “It doesn’t matter whether I wouldn’t have before; I forgive you now, hon. Don’t forget, it was me who came out here to get you, it’s not like you could have done this on your own. You can’t take too much blame here.”

Katie grinned. Just because she was an instrument in Thatch’s orchestra now didn’t mean she couldn’t play the plant herself like she was one too. Thatch’s eyebrow raised, and a single vine gently pushed Katie into the bulkhead wall, where she could be held effortlessly. “Yes, you did very well, Katie. You should be proud of your achievement.” Despite the lack of gravity, Thatch still chose to mime walking as she approached Katie, putting one hand against the wall beside her head and using the other to roughly ruffle her hair.

“We really should be getting back to the ship, not least so that I can give you your medication and we can get some actual privacy, but…” Thatch glanced over at the boarding tube for a moment. Her vine stiffened, and three more came to pin Katie against the wall entirely. Her hand shifted down to cup the girl’s cheek and her head moved alongside her ear, so she could whisper. “You are mine. Your every achievement is mine. You are a tool in my hand and all that beautiful potential is no longer your own. Fight, Katie, and struggle, and play. Argue your case, make jokes at my expense, do whatever it is that you wish. I promise you will never be anything more—or less—than mine, and I need you so desperately to be you, without mitigation. Please, test your binds. I will not allow them to break.”

Katie let out a soft whimper.

She had made a mistake, clearly. Thatch’s flirting had driven away her ability to think and left her barely able to do more than gasp before, but now? Katie nodded rapidly. It was savage, sweet comfort. A surgical strike to something deep inside that left her longing. Oh, sweet cosmos, Thatch no longer had reasons to hold herself back and Katie was going to have to get so much better at flirting if she wanted to have a hope of keeping up.

“…yesMa’am.”

“Good girl,” Thatch cooed, letting the vines go slack. “I am going to have so much fun taking you apart.”

This wasn’t fair. This was actively unfair. How was Katie meant to deal with this? She didn’t stand a chance. She hadn’t stood a chance when Thatch had been trying to give her one. There was a power imbalance here and it was deeply unfair and deeply comfortable. For all that, though, Thatch was still absolutely fallible, and Katie hardly felt like she was only here to follow her partner’s lead. She gestured her head towards the boarding tube.

“Yes, okay, fine, you are not wrong,” Thatch grumbled. “Though I suppose our first problem is that I seem to have gotten rather carried away and shredded your clothing.” She held up the tattered remains of a Terran Cosmic Navy uniform, the symbol of the resistance. There was a metaphor in there somewhere, though Katie was too distracted to spot it. “Your sizes are on file, I shall go and ask for something that should fit. Be a good pet and stay put.”

Katie had grabbed ahold of Thatch’s departing hand before she even realised what she was doing. “Please no?” she asked, voice suddenly serious. “Don’t leave me.”

“Katie, I will be gone for under five minutes. It will not take long to have clothing synthesised.”

Katie shook her head and shifted her grip to make herself feel more secure. She ended up with both arms wrapped around one of Thatch’s, crossed over to make herself harder to dislodge. “No.”

She wanted to say yes, of course. The urge in the back of her head was there. A low giddiness spawned by the opportunity to obey mixed with a desire to do just that. The idea terrified her all the same. Spending even a second trapped in a silent, lonely shuttle without feeling Thatch’s soothing rhythm pressing comfortably against her thoughts was… no. No, no no. She might think something wrong or feel something bad or— Katie clutched onto Thatch’s arm with all her strength. “I… I really don’t want to be without you? Apparently at all? I dunno. The last week really sucked and feeling like I’d lost you was awful and I can’t go back to that I won’t, and I guess all my problems aren’t magically solved?”

Thatch’s face softened. She carefully pried Katie’s arms off of hers, but only so the girl could be placed into a hug that was by any measure endlessly more secure than anything Katie could have done on her own. “No,” she agreed. “Solving all our problems will take more than this. Perhaps it is selfish of me to not take away every thought in your head right now, only to give them back one by one as they are fixed, but I would rather we do that together.”

Katie smiled, nodding rapidly. That idea didn’t scare her. They’d fix her. She wouldn’t be like she was again. “You too, remember? I don’t imagine this fixes all of your problems either.”

Their smiles turned bittersweet for a moment. A lull in their shared music. Like any good accompaniment, Katie didn’t simply follow. Though hers was the simpler, smaller piece, that didn’t mean she couldn’t lead at times. Her hand brushed across Thatch’s chest as she struggled to find a position from which she could hug back more tightly. “We’ll get there. I don’t know if you get to feel the same certainty I do that everything’ll be okay if we face it together, but…”

A laugh. “That one is coming from me, yes. Come, then, let us face the others as one.” Thatch spent a moment adjusting herself so that she had the slack to wrap Katie in a dress of warm leaves and gentle touch. She emitted a thoughtful hum as she knelt, inspecting it for fit and comfort. Katie couldn’t help but blush, feeling Thatch wrapping her in an intimate embrace that she was apparently supposed to be less embarrassing than being naked. It certainly did feel smooth, though. Katie couldn’t help but rub her hands along it, at least until she noticed Thatch’s smirk and realised who she was stroking.

Katie took an offered hand and Thatch guided them down the zero-gravity tube. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were a few people on the other side by this point. The woman who’d brought Katie here in the first place was still waiting, hanging in the air a couple inches off of the floor like she was as comfortable in microgravity as any affini. The semi-transparent, tentacled creature who’d come to talk to Katie about her paperwork was there too, though she seemed to only be comfortable because she was clutched in the arms of some new affini Katie had never seen before. They were certainly striking, though, all whites and greys and not a splash of colour to be seen.

The ones who had been responsible for actually guiding the boarding tube were still hanging around, too, though Katie hadn’t caught their names the first time around and she was admittedly still distracted.

“Permission to come aboard?” Thatch asked, directing her gaze towards the human Katie hadn’t yet caught the name of. She seemed familiar, though Katie couldn’t pin down exactly where, and her mannerisms didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would fade into the background.

“Granted,” replied the floret. Katie could tell she was a floret. She had that look in her eyes. Katie guessed that she probably did too, now. “You really didn’t have to go, you know. I know you fuckers have a god complex, but none of us expect you to be perfect. You’re always welcome here.”

Thatch muttered something unintelligible. Katie still needed to figure out what had happened while she hadn’t been paying attention, but it was more important to be supportive than curious and Thatch needed the support. Katie pinched a vine and shoved her onwards, forcing her to take a simulated step over the threshold and to nod more clearly. “You are not wrong, Felicia. I am grateful that you came to get me.”

‘Felicia’ laughed. “Thank that one,” she said, gesturing over at Katie. “She terrified our poor clerk here, and I think the hyperspacial engineers are so smitten they would have taken her if you hadn’t.” She paused. Her eyes narrowed, focusing in on Thatch with the kind of intensity that had Katie ready to jump in to defend her. “You are taking her.”

“I am,” Thatch agreed. She knelt down—still miming the action, as there still wasn’t gravity—and cupped Katie’s cheek. “Thank you for coming to get me, little one. It seems you have made quite an impression here already. Unsurprising, as you are a wonder.”

She stood as if she hadn’t just washed Katie’s thoughts away again. When had Thatch gotten so smooth? It was like Thatch had changed in an instant, and now every word of praise and every flirt hit like a hypermetric kick.

Or maybe it was Katie who was different. How would she even tell?

“We really must be going, however. Could we have my hab unit reattached at the same address?” Thatch asked, directing her attention to one of the other affini that Katie didn’t know.

“Ah, well, about that. I haven’t done this on a ship we weren’t trying to disable before, so… no. No, we can’t. The pieces haven’t scattered very far, so it shouldn’t be too hard to put back together, but…”

Katie shook her head. “No, that’s okay,” she insisted. “Just melt it down or whatever. Thatch, come live with me. Your old place was depressing, mine is cool.”

Katie felt a brief buzz of excitement and pride pressing into her from above and smiled. The hand that landed on her head a moment later was a nice feeling too. This was going to take some getting used to. Katie supposed that in a sense, she’d been getting used to it for some time, but everything hit different now that she knew what was going on. Now she knew she had the comfort of knowing for certain what was happening in her partner’s head. Now that Thatch’s opinion of her carried all the weight in the universe.

Katie let her eyes fall closed as she leaned into the hand. It was starting to make sense why all the florets were just like this. She managed to look up again and her smile only grew wider. This plant was hers. The others could be nice, they could be interesting, they could be cool, but not one of them could hope to compare to her affini. She got to watch Thatch nodding and having a brief conversation about getting her stuff delivered and she didn’t have to pay any attention to anybody else at all. It was nice.

While questions of legal property were soon to become a concern of Katie’s past, they were technically talking about Katie’s home, not Thatch’s. It could have felt bad that nobody asked her questions about it, but Katie soon realised that she was looking at things through a very Terran lens after one of the cargo affini asked Thatch a question she couldn’t possibly answer herself.

Thatch reached down, scratched Katie under the chin, told her to answer the nice affini, and Katie understood. If somebody carrying a screwdriver was asked to undo a screw, nobody would expect them to do it by hand. If somebody with a floret was asked a question only the floret could answer, then the same thing happened. Thatch spoke the answer using her. The rest of the time, Katie could drift in and out of the conversation as she needed or wanted to.

Or maybe Katie was getting overly romantic about it. She hadn’t expected to suddenly become a hopeless romantic, but she also hadn’t expected to ever be giving herself to a space alien. Life threw surprises at you.

As they turned to leave, Katie squeaked. “Wait!” she called, suddenly struck by a need to hurry across the room. Moving around in microgravity was usually a chore, but Katie was technically being carried right now even if her feet were on the floor. She came to a stop a couple feet away from the clerk and, Katie assumed, her owner.

Gosh, these plants sure were big. Katie looked up with a gentle blush and a surprising bout of nervousness. Was she meant to direct the question at the floret or the bloom? Maybe it was polite to ask the affini? June had nudged her down that path, and the others seemed to do so when speaking to her through Thatch. A day before, Katie wouldn’t have considered it at all. Speaking around somebody would have seemed simply rude, but…

Well, it had been nice when it had been done to her. She’d been able to check out of the conversation and focus on Thatch up until the point she was actually needed, and knowing she could drift out of a conversation without it seeming rude or causing problems was a kind of comfort Katie hadn’t known she’d been craving.

The affini, then. “Hey, uh, I hope I didn’t upset your floret too much, Miss…?”

“Montsechia Vidalii, Eighth Bloom, floret,” the affini replied, extending a vine to ruffle Katie’s hair. Old instincts had her moving to dodge it, but she realised a moment later she didn’t want to and simply smiled as she was petted. “I’m sure we’ll all get to be fine friends, Katie, and I’m very glad to see you looking so well. You gave my delicate jelly a bit of a scare, but she’s very happy for you.” Wing herself nodded, opening one eye to glance over to Katie. She wasn’t carrying her drawing pad, but she was glowing a surprising array of soft pastel colours, if generally warmer ones than she had been earlier.

Apparently it was a kind of language, and one Montsechia could translate. “She says that she’s very glad to see you reunited with your Thatch, and is glad you seem to be doing better for it.” Another set of flashes, brighter and more pointed. “She also says that if I don’t remind you you have problems with your paperwork, she’ll make me come round to your apartment with a stack of forms and a pen.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, though, I can keep her under control.” Katie didn’t return Montsechia’s smile because of a deep emotional attunement, she returned it because the joke was funny. Montsechia continued. “Thatch should bring you by, though, we’d love to get to meet you two under more casual circumstances.”

Katie nodded. Updating her paperwork seemed less terrifying than it had before. “I can do that… Uh, I expect. Huh, it’ll take some getting used to to not be able to make that kind of promise.” The leaves and vines making up Katie’s clothing gave her a reassuring squeeze. “Would it be okay if I gave Wing a hug?”

There was a brief negotiation. Wing rapidly flashed bursts of light while her caretaker emulated much the same with coloured leaves quickly flashed through otherwise monochrome foliage . It was probably rude to stare, but Katie couldn’t not. The dexterity required to reach those kinds of speed with vines and leaves seemed unbelievable, even by the standards she was used to.

Wing was lowered down to the ground. Katie smiled and got a soft glow in return. “Hey, um, I’m sorry about all that, but thank you for talking to me? I don’t know if I would have gotten here quickly enough without your help, and I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d been too late here, so…”

Katie pushed forwards and wrapped her arms around Wing for a tight hug. After a moment of surprise, it was returned. Katie didn’t expect Wing would be able to perceive speech right now, so she stayed quiet. After a few moments, she felt a gentle tugging and knew it was time to stop. Apparently she was feeling touchy-feely. It was unclear whether she was just like that now or whether it would pass, but that hardly seemed to matter.

“Thank you,” Katie said, once she was back in Wing’s field of view. She glanced upwards. “And thank you, too, Miss Vidalii.” She drifted back towards Thatch, though darted to the side to deliver a second, shorter hug to Felicia. Katie deeply suspected that despite the woman’s stern demenour she was as soft as any of them. She was still a floret. “Thank you, too. I really appreciate the help. Thank you for stopping by to rescue my fish, too. I’m gonna go try to convince Thatch to stay inside with me for a week straight now, but I promise I’ll be more… communicative, I guess?”

The second hug was the last and Katie was quickly reeled back in. Thatch lay a hand on the back of her neck and Katie felt her nervous energy draining away. She wrapped her arms around a leg and sighed. This could have been embarrassing. There was a part of her that demanded that it should be embarrassing. Such public displays of happiness were rude to the miserable people around her, or at least they had been before. If everyone on this ship felt like this then there didn’t seem like there was much room for misery left.

…Katie wasn’t sure if she was feeling an afterglow, or if she’d just been turned into a more positive person. A large part of her hoped for the latter, though she had to admit that it would make a lot of her old life experiences a lot less useful. That seemed like a worthwhile trade. She didn’t want to go back to being like she was. She— Katie took a deep breath and buried her face against Thatch. She didn’t need to worry about that.

Thatch handled the practical matters at the end of the conversation with a little encouragement from Katie when she started to slow down, and then they headed home. The cargo chutes were managed from the front of the ship, so there was no way back that didn’t involve the efficient magrail system, but neither of them seemed to be in the mood for a long walk anyway. As they were heading back, some kind of intercom chimed and spoke a few unhurried words in what Katie was coming to recognise as Affini. Thatch tapped a button on the wall.

“Apparently the relevant parties are preparing to get the arcs spinning again. Everybody else is ready, but we will need to stay in the pod for a few minutes before it will be safe to exit. You do not mind, hmn?” Katie didn’t mind.

Hmn.

Katie relaxed into a gentle hug as they sat in a pod suspended at the edge of the Elettarium’s nose cone, looking inwards at the twin arcs of the ship as they slowly began to turn. One went left, the other went right, and the great petals at the far side turned a little slower to balance the slight difference in inertia. It was breathtaking. Katie put her nose against the glass. She’d watched this ship fall from orbit, but it had mostly been static then. It could hang in the air on impossible engines and look magnificent doing it, but it hadn’t truly fit. Dirt had not been its home. This was its home.

This was her home.

Thatch brushed her fingers down Katie’s back while they watched the two curves cross far above. Each was picking up speed, though given the scale of things Katie expected that even at full tilt a whole rotation would be slow. The hull still seemed to glow like it was in daylight despite their position somewhere in the void of space far from the nearest star. Katie hadn’t really been able to see the patterns in any detail from ground level, but she was much closer here.

The whole shell of the ship was covered with an infinity of fractal form, each line crossing the others in something that appeared endlessly complicated and drew in the eye. Katie could have sworn that there was a common shape to it all. Something so deceptively simple that it would explain everything yet just complicated enough that she wasn’t seeing it straight away. The spinning didn’t help, either. The hull seemed to be designed such that her eye would skip across it as it turned, and each time it did she found a new area with a new pattern that felt as if she could understand it with just a moment’s more attention, at least until the turning had her eye shifting again.

Each location went on a stack. Katie wanted to get back to each, figure out the pattern, and continue. She didn’t notice the way that each area promised an answer so satisfying she couldn’t stop thinking about it even as her mind filled up with more of the same. She rubbed circles on the glass with her nose as she followed the turning of the arcs.

“Feeling good?” Thatch asked. Katie nodded, hardly paying attention. “Enjoying the view?” Katie nodded again. Once she figured out the pattern, she could tell Thatch all about it, and that would be nice. All she had to do was figure it out, and it was right there on the tip of her mind.

“I expect that now you know one of our tricks, you can probably figure this one out too. Or perhaps do you need a little help thinking?” Katie wasn’t sure she understood the question. She’d get back to it in a moment, she almost had the answer here. She could turn her attention elsewhere soon. Just not quite yet.

Thatch chuckled. She spent a moment gently scratching Katie’s scalp, drawing all manner of coos and gasps from the girl. She’d usually hold it in, but she was a little distracted. The secret to the patterns was right there in front of her, and all she had to do was take it. “The latter, then. I have left you scrambled, haven’t I?”

A finger underneath her chin carefully moved Katie’s gaze away from the hull. Katie’s eyes tried to stay focused on where she’d been looking, but it was soon taken out of her line of sight. She looked up at Thatch, blinking rapidly as she stack of mostly-complete answers to puzzles she didn’t understand rapidly unraveled. “Uhm… Uh…” Katie breathed, biting one lip. “I… don’t know what happened there,” she admitted.

“Patterns,” Thatch replied, eyes twinkling. “When I told you that this ship had no weapons, that was only true from a certain perspective. In another sense, everything here is carefully designed to draw sweet little things like you in like a goth to a flame.”

Katie squinted. “I’m not sure that’s how that saying goes.”

“Yet here you are all the same, a pretty little goth reaching for my heat and light.”

“Yeah, okay then.” Katie laughed. “I’m pretty sure it’s ‘moth’, but…” She leaned into Thatch’s side. “You’re not wrong. It gets inside our heads, then?”

“Yours more easily than most, it seems, at least at the moment. I may have rather exhausted your mental capacity. It is a curious quirk of my people that we tend to find natural harmony together, both metaphorically and, as I suspect you have noticed, literally. That harmony changes over time, but only slowly. There are many individuals aboard a ship and many ships across the galaxy and many galaxies in the Compact and we cannot all interact with one another. Even the fastest transmission takes years to reach the other side, and this is natural and slow.” Thatch brushed a series of vines over Katie’s body as their pod started to move again, finally on the way home. “We take our harmony and work it into the art we make, the things we build, and all the various signals our ships emit.”

“It turns out to be useful. Simply due to the scale of the universe and the speed at which our changes propagate, we give existence a texture. Part us, part you, part diffusion of all who have come before. We carry with us the song of the universe. You will leave your mark on me and that mark will spread outwards to others of my kind. An imperceptible change on its own, but in aggregate it matters. We elevate the creatures of reality and have them echo through the stars.” Thatch smiled, glancing up towards the arcs, and shrugged. “But perhaps I am simply feeling romantic today. I would be remiss to not mention the adorable effect it has on the minds of those creatures. You recognise it; you are drawn to it desperate to understand and explore; yet you can never understand it without our help, which you are often only too eager to receive.”

The pod slid to a stop and the door opened. Thatch patted Katie’s butt and the two of them figured out how to disentangle before walking out onto the arc. They were far from the only ones poking their heads out but they were moving with the most purpose, towards Katie’s hab. The girl had her focus pointed upwards, trusting she would be led in the right direction. “And once we do have your help?”

Thatch didn’t provide an answer, but Katie did feel gentle encouragement brush across her mind. “Something like this?” Katie asked, waving a hand airily between them. “I feel you like it’s an instinct?”

“Perhaps. You are my first, but you do seem rather more cognizant of it than most, for whom I suspect it is either more subconscious or at least not something regularly spoken of publicly. I expect most florets are not trained so far away from Affini space, nor in such isolation, and you are, I think, very special in very many ways. Perhaps something to discuss with the friends you are making here.”

Katie had only been experiencing true synchronisation with her new owner for a little while, but she didn’t feel brave enough to imagine being without it. She hoped that this was something everybody got to experience. Life felt empty without it.

They arrived. Thatch reached out to grasp the handle on the hab door, but of course it did not open for her. This was Katie’s home and she was inviting Thatch inside just as she was inviting Thatch into her life.

It wasn’t an independent streak, not really. Katie knew that desire had been burned out of her skull. Maybe there were some affini who were old, wise, and stable enough that they needed nothing from their pets but companionship and warmth. Having met a few of the plants now, Katie doubted it. They seemed as in need of love, support, and security as anybody else, and if they were so generous as to offer theirs to the universe then Katie figured it was only right to return the favour.

She reached out and pulled open the door, then stepped across the threshold and waved her affini inside.

“Welcome home, Thatch.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Thirty: What Do You Mean, There Isn’t A Handbook For This?

The habitation unit entrance slid closed behind Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom. She stood tall, easily the largest thing in the room. The air displaced by the sealing door sent her foliage waving like a tree in the wind, a boneless whole-body shift that exposed the affini’s humanity for what it was: a front. A comfortable illusion painted so that humanity would find it easier to relate and thus easier to kneel in submission.

Katie let out a slow breath, staring up.

Thatch had never really put much effort into maintaining that illusion. It had been terrifying at first to watch her body change and reform as she wished. To see her so casually exceed the limitations of a humanesque form without ever slowing down. The first time Katie had seen her it had been as a storm of leaf and thorn that chased her down in seconds. No comfortable illusion there.

During their stay on Dirt, Thatch had maintained a reasonably believable human form perhaps two thirds of the time? Less, if Katie counted sleep, for which an amorphous blob had made a better blanket. Maybe that explained a few things. Katie had come to truly know the Affini not through propaganda or carefully orchestrated ambassadors wearing flawless human faces, but through this one fallible creature that didn’t hide what she was.

An amorphous, shape-shifting monster with razor-sharp thorns, a thousand vines that twisted into vicious mockery of the universe’s lesser life, with ‘blood’ running through them that would burn away conscious thought and a thousand ways to destroy her. Creatures from nightmares come to steal them away and render them helpless.

Stars above, but Thatch looked hot when she rippled like that. Was that weird? That was weird. Katie figured that the inhumanity should scare her, but truth be told it had been a comfort for a long while, and seemed to have started shifting towards a burning need.

Oh. Thatch was smiling down at her. She probably had been for a while. Katie smiled back up. She’d already been smiling up, but she smiled a little wider. Blushed. Let out a timid little breath from her tiny human form. Tried to keep her knees from buckling. Failed.

This one was hers. There were a lot of affini out there, and Katie had thought herself a rational enough creature that she could accept that she hadn’t stumbled upon the literal best creature in the universe entirely by accident, but it turned out that she wasn’t. This one was hers and she was proud of that. She had the best one.

Which wasn’t to say that Thatch was perfect! Goodness no, she was a bit of a wreck, all kinds of awkward, clearly hurting and handling it terribly. She hadn’t noticed that one of her leaves was about to fall off, and so it hung down limply from a spot on her shoulder. Katie had seen the way the others had looked at Thatch since they’d gotten here, with a mixture of ignorance and, sometimes, concern. Hell, she’d had that concern in her eyes more than a few times. Thatch was a mess.

She was still Katie’s, and still the best. Flaws only made something more beautiful.

Katie’s eyes flicked across her affini’s body. It had been a little while since she’d really had a chance to just take it in. The garden of tastefully arranged flowers that made up her hair was growing in complexity again, though the colours and shapes of Dirt still dominated. Most of her body was still blacks and purples, but fresh green leaves were poking through in no particular pattern while some of the darker ones seemed to have reached the end of their lives and were drooping or curling. Katie felt an inexplicable urge to prune them, though she didn’t know whether it even worked like that.

Thatch stood tall. Not just physically, though obviously she did that, but in her stance, in the way she moved, the way she felt. There had always been a hesitance to her, before. A timidity that wasn’t entirely gone but was more refined, now. They both knew where they stood. Or knelt, in Katie’s case.

…Katie was still staring. Thatch’s smile had grown openly indulgent now, as if she knew that Katie’s head was just stuck in a loop of adoration from which she couldn’t figure out how to escape. Thatch didn’t know that, Katie was pretty sure. That particular relationship only went one way according to Katie’s understanding of the principles involved.

It probably wasn’t hard to guess, though. Katie had seen the way that florets looked at their caretakers. It hadn’t usually been a subtle expression.

There was a part of Katie that figured she should probably do something. Something? You couldn’t live most of your life in the Terran Accord and not internalise an urge to do something productive. Maybe that urge would grow in strength again, but for the moment it seemed dwarfed by the creature in front of her.

Thatch was really tall. It sent Katie’s gay heart fluttering. Somebody else could have been forgiven for thinking that Thatch didn’t care about the illusion, but Katie knew that wasn’t true. Just because Thatch didn’t mind breaking it didn’t take away from the fact that her body was a work of art. Her form was built from a latticework of hundreds of vines pulled so tight it tricked the eye into thinking it was one continuous surface. Katie had no doubt that Thatch could have made that perfect, but instead she left a pattern of clear lines across her body that all conspired to draw Katie’s attention up. Past long, elegant legs; past a torso that evoked the human form without scaring the animal parts of Katie’s mind that ran from the subtly wrong; past arms that faked impressive musculature while being a hundred times stronger than they looked; up a slender neck; all towards the smiling face of Thatch Aquae.

She glimmered. Glittered. Katie let her head gently tilt to one side as her eyes flicked across her protector’s expression. She might once have thought that a face with wooden accents would look, well, wooden, but the life in Thatch’s smile was enough to convince her that that nothing could be further from the truth. It extended through her entire expression. Even the eyes. Two shining teardrop orbs, relatively a little larger than the eyes on a human face would be. The usual gentle blue glow was still flecked with the darker shades of Dirt, but the more Katie stared, the more she found herself intrigued. She felt as if she could stare into them and see for lightyears. Katie wondered what it was that captured her attention, and lo! Sparkles glittering before her beheld like stardust on glowing metal. She let out a quiet whimper. It was so beautiful.

There was no way out of this loop, was there?

Unfortunately, looking directly up really strained Katie’s neck. She winced, regretfully, and that was enough for Thatch to decide she’d had enough.

“Hmn, let me take care of that,” Thatch insisted. A small family of vines reached out and picked Katie up, carefully cradling her body to make sure she had support while she was lifted to Thatch’s waiting arm. Her other arm reached inside of her body for a moment and pulled out a small—by Thatch’s scale—device and glanced at it. “Fifteen minutes, forty three seconds.”

Katie tilted her head to one side. “Hm?”

“How long you were staring with that adorably thoughtless look in your eyes.”

Katie flushed. “I— I was thinking! For at least some of it…” She glanced to one side and did some quick guesses. “Probably less than half. Oh, stars, I’ve turned into a floret.”

“If you’d like,” Thatch replied, with a gentle shrug. She walked deeper into the room and glanced around with a gentle frown. “You have no furniture my size. I suppose neither of us really mind sitting in the dirt, though, do we?”

She slumped downwards, putting her back to the rock and wood of the cave as she sat, cross-legged, with Katie cradled in one arm above it all.

“If I’d like?” Katie asked. “Is it not, uh, kind of a requirement now? I think Mont… Monsh… uh, Miss Vidalii even called me one!”

Thatch waved her head back and forth in a mimed shrug. “That suggests only that she is not much of a traditionalist. You are, Katie Sahas, still very much legally an independent sophont.” Thatch raised her other hand to Katie’s stomach and gently rubbed. At some point she’d pulled back her dress of plantlife, leaving Katie naked, but it didn’t feel… Katie wasn’t sure exactly how it didn’t feel, it just didn’t. Thatch had never given Katie the slightest indication that Katie’s physical body was of much interest to her at all, and Katie was perfectly happy with that. Besides, Katie had wanted to show Thatch how she’d changed.

She wasn’t all that comfortable with Thatch’s words, though. She crossed her arms and stared up at her plant with all the indignation a floret could muster. “Well, that’s silly.”

A chuckle. Her playful pouting couldn’t survive that. Thatch uncrossed Katie’s arms and prodded her into a gentle hug. “Self-determination is important, Katie. Perhaps we do it this way to ensure the decision is well considered and thought through.”

“You do it because it’s cute to make us ask for it.”

There was a pause, then a laugh that proved contagious. “Guilty. Self-determination is important, of course, but by this stage in the domestication process we are long past that.” Thatch’s hand moved up to scratch beneath Katie’s chin, drawing out gentle sighs and pampered gasps. “Still, as cute as it might be to have you ask for me to take your legal rights from you, I was not being insincere. You are mine, and I love you very much, and there are no paths forward for you outside of my care, but that does not have to be an Owner/floret relationship. It would be extremely unusual for it to be otherwise, but we are an unusual pair.”

Katie considered this. It seemed like a big decision. One that would affect her entire life, and not at all something to take lightly.

“Nah. I’m done with that kind of choice, I think. It doesn’t feel important any more. I, Thatch—” Katie struggled to sit up enough such that she could look into the plant’s eyes. She needed help to get there, but wasn’t that the point of all this?— “abdicate responsibility. You pick. I’m just gonna focus on you for a while.”

Katie laughed. “Which I expect means the rest of my life. I’m not my responsibility any more; you are.”

“Mmh.” Thatch raised a finger to Katie’s forehead and gently pushed her back down into the hug. “Floret it is, then. We can deal with the paperwork eventually, but that is only telling the rest of the universe that I have made my choice. As far as you are concerned, from this moment forth you are Katie Aquae, First Floret.”

The girl took in a breath. It was unremarkable, really, she’d done it countless times before in her life, but this one was special. She had taken the last breath of her old life, and the first of the life that was to continue on. Katie Aquae, First Floret, smiled, closed her eyes, and leaned in close. “Yay.”

Now she felt different. The change she’d been fighting all these years had reached her, finally, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. All her struggle, all her running, had led her to this specific creature’s arms, and Katie never wanted to leave them. The bubble of safety that Thatch had kept her in for so long now extended outwards further than Katie would ever be allowed to stray.

The hug continued for some time. Katie wasn’t even going to pretend she was capable of estimating how long. Drifting off was easy, while staying focused was both difficult and unnecessary. It felt like a better version of those last few evenings on planet Dirt, with the pair in close contact, simply enjoying each other’s company. The sharp tension of things unsaid was no longer present, and Thatch seemed happy enough to pass the time simply doting on her new floret with touch, wordless sound, and the symphony they were to play together for the rest of Katie’s life.

Katie felt a finger against the muscle of her jaw. “Open wide,” Thatch instructed. Katie opened her mouth and received a pill and a mouthful of water. Thatch ran a finger down her throat. “Swallow.” Katie swallowed both down.

Katie blinked a few times, then glanced up to a grinning face above. “You are a natural at this, Katie.”

She bit her lip. She felt so powerless here. Thatch’s hand came back down to stroke against her hair and Katie could feel her cognition slipping back away, being stolen as she was submerged back within Thatch’s sweet music. It wasn’t a bad feeling, though again, she suspected that the her of even a day before would have disagreed. She wasn’t that any more, though. She was something new.

She tried to keep her focus sharp, but the only thing she wanted to pay any attention to was Thatch herself, and every part of her drew in Katie’s mind and left her quiet and soft. The gentle rise and fall of Thatch’s heat matched time with Katie’s heartbeat, then took charge of it and slowed her right down. Relaxed her. Katie suspected that it would have worked whether she’d wanted it to or not.

But stars, did she want it to work.

Thatch’s attention drew her under yet again. It was a hug. It was reward. It was bliss. It was intimacy. It was so many things, and the stars could have lived and died before Thatch brought her back up again, for all Katie knew. Another pill. Another gulp of water. This time, the instructions were wordless, just a touch against her jaw and then another against her throat. She opened her mouth and swallowed, again only managing to start to think again in the aftermath.

“I’m, uh…” Katie whimpered. She felt a finger press against her lips, silencing her, while Thatch’s stroking fingers stole her mind away again. They went through that dance enough times that Katie lost track. Each time she came back up her mind felt quieter and her thoughts were slower, less distinct. Closer to feelings and vague imagery than words, and then even less than that.

Another pill, held at Katie’s lips. “I am cheating, a little,” Thatch admitted. “Your neurochemical imbalances leave you more open to this than most, I believe. You can resist this, but it is at the edge of your capabilities, and I fear I have burned through your reserves of several important things. This pill should fix that. You will have a much easier time thinking afterwards. I will not withhold your medication to have you like this. Now that you are mine, you will be held to a strict schedule. We will eschew the pills only once I have the capability to provide for your needs myself.”

Katie looked up with an open mouth and an open mind. Thatch held her finger against the jawbone. Her other hand still held the pill between two fingers. She slowly drew it along Katie’s upper lip, eliciting quiet pants and gentle squirms. The girl leaned forward, reaching for it, but Thatch’s comfortable grip was inescapable.

“Understand, Katie. This is a very sloppy way of achieving my goal. I will not treat you sloppily. When I want you like this in future, the changes I make to your mind will be…” The pill made a long journey around Katie’s lips, but never quite made it inside. The girl extended her tongue, desperate. She had no words with which to beg. “Precise. Intentional. Direct. I shall learn how you work down to the atom and have you be exactly as I wish. But at the beginning of today you were not yet mine, and so your biochemistry was not yet under my guidance.”

Thatch popped the pill down on Katie’s tongue, but held both down with two fingers. “Consider this a promise, Katie. I shall have you exactly as I wish. You will get your chances to influence that, but it is no longer your decision. You are to be the best Katie you can be, and all that is left for you to do is to help me explore with you to discover what that means.”

Thatch’s fingers left Katie’s mouth. She knew there was something she should probably do, but it was so much easier not to think. She didn’t need to. She could lie there with her mouth open, tongue extended, letting the pill slowly moisten, until she was told to do otherwise.

“Remember this moment well, where I have you so helplessly mine that even knowing your every thought is locked behind that pill you cannot make yourself swallow. Where I could do anything to you and you would like it. Remember each and every time I give you your medication that without it, I can bring you down to this with ease, and so know that your every thought is a gift from me. Use them well. Be yourself, safe in the knowledge that everything you are comes from my hand.”

Thatch smiled down for a few more moments, while the pill’s soft outer casing slowly dissolved and a thin droplet of saliva slowly rolled down Katie’s chin. “Beautiful. Be a good girl and swallow for me.”

Katie did, coughing a little as she swallowed with only the saliva that had pooled in her mouth. It barely took more than a few seconds before she could start to feel the machinery of her mind slowly grind back to life. Vague feelings coalesced into more nuanced ones. Those gathered together to form concepts, and the concepts collaborated to produce a thought.

Katie still couldn’t figure out quite what to say. She stared up at Thatch for long moments, and then fell to the side, into her chest. “You dork,” she laughed, eventually. “How long did you keep me like that?” It seemed baffling to Katie that she’d ever wanted to avoid Thatch’s touch on her mind. Why would she ever have not wanted this guidance?

Thatch laughed back. It was a good laugh. It wasn’t that she’d been humourless before, not at all, but there was a freedom in her laughter now that Katie hadn’t known wasn’t present before. This was better. This was good. “I could not tell you, flower. Neither of us have anywhere to be, so why measure these things with time? I kept you for as long as I wished and not a moment longer. How do you feel?”

“Good?” Katie shrugged, and scratched her forehead. “Hang on, I’m still catching up. I… That thing that happens when you tell me to do something: that’s new? I like that.”

“You will have to be more specific, pet. We have yet to map out your entire self, so some of your thoughts and feelings are still opaque to me.” She brushed a thumbnail under Katie’s chin, pulling out a soft whimper. It didn’t steal Katie’s thoughts away this time, though. It just felt good. “We will fix that, do not worry.”

The floret flailed, ending up hiding her blush beneath a hastily assembled barrier of leaves. “Is the flirting going to be like this forever?”

“No, I plan on getting better at it.” Katie glimpsed through a small parting in her leafy shield and spotted a shameless grin. “Though as a more serious answer, you do get a say in that. There are several aspects of your new life that you cannot change no matter how hard you may try to. You will always be loved. You will always be cherished. I will keep you safe and happy. You will be nurtured and given help to grow. Most other things, however, are negotiable. I want to make you happy, Katie, and I plan on being aggressive about it, but you know that. You know what I am capable of; you know what I wish to do to you; and you chose to be here. I will take you to your breaking point time and time again, and each time I will have you beg for it.”

Katie’s protection was pulled away in an instant as Thatch reached over it and grabbed Katie’s chin in a firm grip. She pulled, forcing Katie up to meet her gaze.

“I will do nothing to you that you do not prove to me that you want with eager enthusiasm.” Thatch grinned, pulling a gentle whimper from between Katie’s parted lips. “Which is all to say that I keep flirting because you keep proving to me that you want it.”

Stars-cursed xenos. Katie bit her lip hard enough that it hurt, prompting Thatch to raise a finger to her jaw and press. She obediently opened her mouth so her lip could be retrieved and moved somewhere safer.

“…yes Mi… Mistress? Are you Mistress now?” They blinked at each other for a few moments.

Thatch’s mouth twisted to one side. “I honestly had not considered that.” She seemed surprisingly uncertain.

“You took a pet without considering titles?” Katie raised an eyebrow, with a subtle smirk. The blush still staining her cheeks ruined any chance she had at feeling like she was keeping up in their verbal sparring, however. “And here you say you aren’t sloppy.”

Katie felt a slight pang of something weird dance across her mind. A moment of doubt? Insecurity? Worry? She winced. “Shit, sorry, was that not funny? Joking. You’ve been very good to me so far.”

“Mmh.” Thatch sighed, shrugged, and released Katie’s jaw. The girl was pulled in for a closer hug, with one arm holding her close and the other stroking down her back. Katie felt Thatch’s heat rising, easily matching her own rhythm. She played to Thatch’s time, now. “I am sorry, I do not mean to harm the mood. Let us ignore tha—”

Katie jabbed her in the arm, ignoring the gentle, mindless lethargy that was being offered to her. “Hey, no, nope. You don’t get to do that any more. Can I still call yellow? You have to talk to me.”

Thatch grumbled, but Katie could feel the underlying hesitance in the affini’s gentle song. “You are property, Katie. Demands are no longer your area.” Katie smiled. She could sense the real meaning in the delicate way Thatch’s emotional state played against her own. The plant couldn’t lie to her and they both seemed to know it. It wasn’t a rebuke, it was intentionally leaving Katie an opening.

“I am. I can’t judge you. I can’t go anywhere. I literally cannot do anything but be supportive and loving. You gave me your list of invariants for me, and I guess this is mine for you? You don’t have to hide parts of yourself from me. I won’t judge you, Thatch, I’ve let you reshape my entire life around you specifically, I’m pretty sure you have me biologically wired to want to support you at this point. Thank you. It really helps to know that I can’t get scared off and be dumb again.”

“Hmn. Perhaps, yes.” The affini’s lips twitched upwards, and while Katie couldn’t see it she could feel the emotion that underpinned it. Thatch’s arm squeezed a little tighter around her, pulling her in so that her affini’s chin could rest against the top of Katie’s head. She could feel the comfort she was providing radiating back down into her. “You are not wrong. Thank you. I…” Thatch paused, as if considering the words. Katie felt the gentle turmoil.

“I feel like a bad affini, often.” Thatch’s spare hand stroked down Katie’s hair, for both of their comforts. “I feel as if I am selfish to have taken you when you could have made so many other choices and I cannot even give you a firm title in response. I feel as if I am wrong to want the things that I want. You tell me that you want to learn, and I believe you, but… the things that I want fly in the face of the promises my people make.”

Their hug grew tighter. Thatch’s arms enveloped Katie, and though she could not quite reach all the way around in response, Katie squeezed with what little might she had all the same. Thatch’s grip grew stronger in time with her words, though Katie suspected it was as much for emotional support as it was a consequence of the rhythm that ruled her. “I am so very young,” Thatch claimed, “and to be Affini is… a gift; a responsibility; a promise made to the universe that I shall do my part in its caretaking. It is hard to feel like I can live up to that.”

Katie felt a sensation utterly alien brush across her consciousness. She couldn’t even begin to place it. If Katie had to rely on her sixth sense alone she would have been lost, but thankfully Thatch was her best friend and in so many ways an open book. “Are you thinking about her?”

A few quiet nods. “Always. I live in a society constructed by countless, those who have lived my lifetime dozens of times over. I rushed to contribute my own individual efforts, and… I know, in some ways, that what happened was not due to any error I made but somebody must bear that weight and there is nobody else to remember her.” Thatch’s vines slowly drew themselves down Katie’s spine, leaving warmth and comfort in their wake. Her fingers curled in, gripping Katie tight. “You are my priority now, and so I worry that Caeca would see this as a betrayal.”

Katie could have lost herself in the stream of emotion. She felt a vortex of intense feeling paint a vivid picture with her mind as the canvas. Katie had understood before. They had talked about this. She had not understood, truly, what it was like for Thatch to experience it until now. Katie had to steel herself against it all, focus on her breathing, hold herself deliberately disjoint from Thatch’s chorus, just to avoid being swept away by the tide. She couldn’t have that. Thatch needed support, not adoration.

“I didn’t know her, but I don’t want you to forget her just because I’m here. She’s a part of your life and I’m here for all of you, not just the easy bits. Maybe you could tell me about her, some time? I don’t know if that’s insensitive, but if you feel like you’re the only one remembering her, then… teach me about her, too, so I can help?”

The gentle sound of the artificial stream was the only thing Katie could hear for a few long moments. Emotions ran too thick for words. A silent conversation played out in subtle shifts of grip and stance, slowly drawing Katie deeper within Thatch’s embrace until all pretense at bones or organs had been abandoned and the girl was simply surrounded. Thatch didn’t have to accept the offer with words. Katie could feel it.

“You would’ve taken her, right? Done… this? Showed her all the mysteries of the universe?” Katie asked, eventually.

“Yes. Roots, yes, I would have. I was too young and we both knew it, but we felt as if nothing could stop us.”

Katie nodded, mostly to herself, working up the force of will to say something that little kernel of internalised submission in her head didn’t want her to say. “Are you sure you want me to be your first floret? We haven’t done the paperwork, but you said that was just to tell others you’d made your choice. You chose Caeca. Shouldn’t she be your first?”

Thatch froze up. She didn’t do that often any more, only when trying to process something that left her unable to trust herself. Katie was trapped within in a greenery cocoon she couldn’t hope to bend, but that was okay. Thatch wouldn’t move until she was confident. Katie whispered. “It’s okay. It doesn’t make me any less important. It doesn’t make me any less cherished. I don’t know if you’re comfortable with it, and if you’re not then that’s okay, but—”

“No, I… had not thought of it like that before. I made my choice. By my own words she was mine, and thus I hers. Thank you. I think that acknowledging that would have made her happy.” The affini—the affini. The one who mattered—took a deep breath. Katie felt and heard the air rushing all around her, flowing from one side to the other while she was so deeply embedded in the creature’s body. “Yes. Yes, you are not my first, but my second. You are no less important to me for that.”

“I know. You’ll do great.”

Katie felt the warm buzz of pride and agreement soaking through her. She could have fought it, but why would she? Getting to feel proud was nice. Thatch brought her hands up to Katie’s head, gliding fingers through hair. “I hope so. I swear and have sworn that I will not let you regret your choice, but I do wish I could give you the same easy confidence that others would have. You are beautiful and you make a beautiful floret, but were it not for me you would have been safely in the hands of another for weeks now. I suspect they would not falter when asked for a simple honourific, nor would they ask your help to hold them back, nor would they wish to do to you the things I do. They would not need your help like this. I cannot give you the gifts that others could.”

Katie shrugged, keeping her face nestled against what seemed to be her affini’s neck. Her words came out a little muffled, but she doubted either of them would mind. “I can’t even tell you what I am yet. It’s okay to still be working this out. I don’t want easy confidence, hon, I need you. I guess I rationally understand that somebody else could have made me happy too, but… I can’t believe they’d have done it as well. I’m stone cold sober, right?”

“It is not quite that clear cut, the concept of sobriety is one steeped in old Terran norms, declaring some chemicals natural and others not without any justification given. I would say that your happiness is not externally induced, however.”

“Sure. It would be, with somebody else, right?”

Thatch gave a gentle shrug. “It is impossible to say for certain, and I would not call an induced happiness any less true, but for the sake of argument, let us say that it would.”

“I wouldn’t have chased anyone else a few lightyears just to pin them down, right?”

Thatch smiled, fingers curling in her Katie’s hair. “No, I suspect not. You are quite willful.”

“Were, perhaps?” Katie asked, with a grin. That was an aspect of herself she was happy to lose.

“Hmn. No, present tense intentional. Most other florets I have known would have smiled and obeyed when told to ignore a misstep, at least a small one. You actually know how to resist my call. Willful is not inaccurate.” Thatch smiled down, curling Katie’s hair around one of her fingers. Perhaps it could be an aspect she could be happy to keep, too, if it was for Thatch’s benefit.

“Then don’t we make quite the pair? We can’t know what I would have done if things were different, but I know that I’m glad to be here now. We’ll figure stuff out. We’re in no rush, right? What was it you said, neither of us has anywhere else to be? We can take our time. You’ve been Thatch to me this long, that doesn’t have to change.”

Katie paused for a moment. “I do like being called pet, though. You can keep that one, please. Feels nice. I would’ve fucking hated it yesterday, so it’s kind of a nice reminder of what you’ve rescued me from.”

Katie’s words drew out a laugh, but one backed by complicated feelings. She joined it with her own complicated grin. “Yeah, that’s kind of a weird thing to say, huh?”

“A little. It is uncomfortable for me to confront that you are different now. Not in a bad way, I do not think, just… The fantasy of possessing you is meeting the reality of what that actually means.”

“Any regrets?”

Katie yelped as the air was squeezed out of her lungs. She squirmed, feeling Thatch’s arms so tight around her that she knew she wouldn’t be able to handle it for more than a few moments. Of course, a few moments is all she got. Thatch knew how much she could take. “None. Never. This is not a bad thing. I just… had this idea in my head of what this would be like. I would be the ceaselessly charming, endlessly dominant affini rogue with one hand on the leash and the other reprogramming your head, while you would be my endlessly adoring, perfect pet.”

“Hey!” Katie used what little freedom of motion she had to try to pinch a vine. It wasn’t very effective. “I am your endlessly adoring, perfect pet, thank you very much.” Thatch’s laughter was a salve. This wasn’t how Katie had expected the day to go, but she was finding herself without complaints. “But no, yeah, I get it. I guess I had fewer expectations going in, but you’re doing great so far. We weren’t ever equals really, but I liked a lot about how we did things planetside. I don’t need you to be different, really, we can just be honest about what it is that we need from each other. Besides, you are charming, you’re just also a dork.”

“Hmn. Thank you, I think?” Thatch appeared ponderous for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. If you are willing to accept that there will be missteps, then I am very excited to go on this journey with you.”

“We’ve been on this journey for weeks. I know you; we’ve got this. Can I call green?” Katie gave a vine a comforting squeeze.

“Of course. Same rules as before, for both of us. The… context is different, now that you are mine, but the effect is not. Tell me to stop, or that we need to adjust, and we will at very least talk about it. The final decision must lie with me, I expect—”

Katie nodded firmly. “There’s something in my head that balks at anything else.”

“—but I will never ignore your needs. We have as much time as we need to determine how we are to work, and we are in no rush.”

Why had Katie fought this for so long? Her old fears seemed absurd. Yes, admittedly Thatch did want to do almost everything Katie had been afraid of back then, but she felt safe enough that it wasn’t scary. Besides, Thatch was hot, and that helped a lot too. She couldn’t ever in her wildest dreams have imagined sitting here in a stable home of her own with somebody who loved her, quietly discussing their future together. It was so incongruent with the fears she had had of monsters tearing away her identity that the actual monster who wanted to tear away her identity didn’t register as scary any more.

“While true,” Katie agreed, “some of the stuff you said back there in the shuttle is, in hindsight, really exciting and I wanna try it. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be, besides the obvious little point of certainty you’ve been so kind as to supply, and… if you wanna take me apart and put me back together again, that sounds like a great way for us both to explore me. Let’s not wait too long before starting to figure out what that stuff means, right?”

Katie’s silly plant rumbled, bringing around half a dozen extra vines to hold on to her tight. “How did I ever get along without you?”

“As far as I can tell, Miss. Aquae, you did not.” Katie paused. “Is ‘Miss. Aquae’ okay? It isn’t really a title, it’s just… respectful?” It felt nice to be respectful. Katie had never been the type before, but… new her, right?

“It was nice to hear, actually. Let us go with that for now, and we shall see about finding something more us later. Any objections, pet?”

“No, Miss Aquae!” Katie chirped. It felt a little like she was putting it on, but it was her first attempt at being… properly, intentionally florety? Katie felt her cheeks warming, but she didn’t have time to be embarrassed before she was lost in the embrace again.

She had a lot to get used to. Hell, they both had a lot to get used to and a long way left to go, but if anywhere could be a stop for rest along their shared journey then it would be this. Katie Aquae, Second Floret, buried herself in the leaves and life of her beloved owner and for the first time in a very, very long time let herself simply exist.

Chapter Text

Chapter Thirty One: The Collar Itself Incites to Deeds of Obedience

“Oh, the oceans were vast, yes. Relatively clean, as well, though we still improved that after we arrived.” Thatch ran a pair of fingers through Katie’s hair. Even biting her lip, Katie struggled to hold her hand steady. “Their world was mostly ocean. Like Terra, I suppose, but the Spectrum Jellies were not so arrogant as to insist on living on what little land was available.”

They had some affini-scale furniture now. It would have been easy to get something delivered, but it had been more fun for Katie to figure out how ask the botanical gardens to grow them a tree and send them the wood, and then use that to build something appropriate. She had Thatch’s help, obviously, as oversight and protection, but it was Katie’s project. She’d drawn up the design, she’d done the construction, and she’d gotten the praise.

She couldn’t have done it without Thatch, of course. Being confident in a design was easy when Katie knew that any errors she made would be pointed out and she’d be taught how to correct them. Even while slightly inebriated it was easy to swing a hammer when a misjudged swing would get gently guided back on target. Staying focused was easy when it was for Thatch, and relaxing afterwards was… well, she had no choice about that one.

Katie knelt before the armchair she’d built—and more relevantly, and reverently, the plant sitting atop it—holding a small pair of scissors. “Huh. So, like, can you breathe underwater? How does that even work?”

Katie raised the scissors to a vine and very carefully positioned them against the stem of one of Thatch’s drooping leaves.

Snip!

A browning leaf tumbled through the air. Katie caught and dropped it into a bowl set just to her side, then spent a moment cleaning up the area and smoothing out the remaining stem. The whole point of this was to get Thatch looking sharp and well-groomed.

“I cannot truly be said to breathe at all,” Thatch admitted. “At least not for survival. It is nice to feel air moving past my core, I must admit, but it is an indulgence. It is still a novelty.” She took a deep breath and smiled. Katie smiled too, and almost fumbled her scissors. Thatch’s scent was subtle and delightful, and it had a way of filling the room for a few moments whenever her plant found excuse to ‘breathe’ heavily enough. “Besides, you enjoy it.”

Stars, she was so pretty. Katie smiled up, slowly lowering her hands down to her knees without really thinking about it. The way Thatch’s face moved when she talked was Katie’s current object of adoration. Katie knew the face wasn’t ‘real’. It was a construct built from a hundred separate pieces. That didn’t make it less pretty. If anything it made it more beautiful as the artistry evident in every motion had been intentionally crafted.

Heck.

Katie was getting stuck in a loop again. That kept happening. As soon as she was anything but completely clear-headed she seemed to lose the ability to break out of her adoration entirely, though Katie had to admit that it was hard enough when she was thinking clearly. That might just be a sign that she didn’t actually want to look away.

Thatch brought a hand down and spent a moment rubbing two fingers behind one of Katie’s ears. She gasped, feeling a deep heat spreading through her body, and flopped forwards into the waiting hand. It was a potent reminder that Katie wasn’t clear-headed. A significant fraction of floret culture seemed to focus on chemical alteration specifically—though as Katie knew it was hardly the only tool in the Affini’s collective toolbox—and Katie had far less experience under the influence than her peers.

That wasn’t a problem, per-se, but Katie’s desire to stay unaltered had vanished before they’d even returned to the ship. It was nice when it was being done by Thatch. Besides, it would be harder to tear her mind apart safely if she wasn’t used to the tools.

Katie whimpered. “Are you sure this is gentle?” She felt every subtle pet and stroke right down to the soul. They scattered her thoughts and left her sinking into a warm honey haze.

“I am. This is the standard class-A/C blend given to independent Terrans who are either interested in domestication, or who we need to be interested in domestication. I could break down the exact components again if you wished, but in summary it is a targeted enhancement to the usual responses to intimate touch in your progenitor species.”

Katie arched her back, mouth forced open to release a stuttered whimper as a vine traced up her spine. “N— no, it’s enough that you know it, I just-” She bit her lip and stifled another soft groan. “It gets stronger than this?”

Thatch laughed. Even that made Katie feel fuzzy inside. That would be the… class-Cs, she thought? Intensified bonding response, as if she needed help with that. Or maybe she did! Who was Katie to say? All she knew was this seemed to be elevating her feelings from the kind of love that would inspire her to a lifetime of dedication to the kind of love that made thinking of anything else at all almost impossible. Dirt, but Katie had had the details explained to her and she was still struggling to piece it together. She wanted her soul back just so she could give it away all over again, now that she understood how much more she was getting in that trade than she’d given.

“You are still capable of speech, so yes. I suspect this might be a good baseline for you, once you’re used to it, but stronger blends could make a fine treat.”

A good baseline? Katie could barely think! It wasn’t unpleasant, quite the opposite. She just couldn’t think. She hardly noticed the effects when not in direct contact, at least, beyond a pleasant fuzz around the edges of her mind and a minor hesitance in her movements. She could get used to this. Maybe. If she had to spend the rest of her life in a blissed-out haze, would that really be so bad? At least once things were stable. She could figure out how to resist it for now.

She hadn’t yet. A finger against her chin was enough to blank out her thoughts, leaving her staring up with a whimper on her lips and love in her eyes.

“Be polite and continue what we were doing, pet.”

Ah. Ah, an order, yes. That was exactly what Katie needed to simplify the chemical havoc playing out in her mind. Though Katie was little but a storm on the ocean of need within, the gravity of Thatch’s words was enough to shift the tide. They simply operated on different scales. Katie was desperate to follow the instruction. Surprisingly, this particular chemical blend didn’t really seem to affect the intensity. Katie’s deep-seated desire to obey came from within, apparently.

“A—Aah, uhm, yes, I-” Katie took a deep breath. Was letting her near scissors really a good idea? She knew she wouldn’t actually be allowed to do anything dangerous with them. Still, she set her mind to the task and tried to keep her hand steady as she moved to the next drooping leaf in Thatch’s coat. The plantlife her affini had harvested from Dirt’s surface wasn’t as hardy as her own natural growths and so apparently she was intentionally trying to cycle them out. Katie didn’t mind getting to prune. It sure as heck wasn’t something she’d pictured ever doing with her life, but it was nice.

“Okay. Okay, okay, I can… yeah,” Katie breathed and snipped. “Uh… breathing, right. That’s novel for you? I guess you… didn’t look like this before, huh.” Katie paused and looked up to inspect Thatch’s body, wondering what else it could have looked like. They’d spent enough time on the water that Katie had gotten used to that gorgeous serpentine look, and— Katie was looping again, whoops. It wasn’t Katie’s fault that her plant was so danged pretty, was it?

It kind of was. Katie felt a weird kind of pride at that. She’d picked this one out of countless others. She had good taste.

Thatch gave her a few… seconds? Minutes? Hours? Probably seconds. It wasn’t easy to be sure. It could have been hours. Snapped fingers brought her back to the present, at least for the moment. Katie blushed, with a sheepish grin and a snip. “Sorry, I started thinking about the shape you… wore? Took? The body you did while we were swimming.”

“Ah, an artifact of my youth,” Thatch admitted. “I was actually primarily aquatic until recently. That one is modeled off of one of the Xa’a-ackétøth subtypes, though a little larger than they were—”

Katie laughed.

“—and I was much the same when I flew out to assist with Cacea’s people. I never got the time to finish a form dedicated to her, unfortunately. I came specifically to assist with some difficulties in the Cotyledon program, not generally as part of first contact, and so things were… a little rushed.”

Thatch emitted a small sigh, but this was progress and they both knew it. Katie gave her leg a quick hug that turned into a longer hug as the gentle warmth overtook her and, nggggrph.

Looping again.

It wasn’t Katie’s fault that Thatch was so darned soft, or that she felt so nice to rub against. Katie was left to indulge herself for some utterly undecipherable amount of time. It was hard to get frustrated at it when it felt so good. Impossible, once Katie started feeling Thatch’s pride and amusement soaking into her. Back on Dirt, many of their conversations had been a little halting, as they talked while they worked or walked, and thankfully that translated well to trying to hold a discussion in which Katie drifted off every few minutes. Mostly.

Another finger snap. Katie sat up straight, moving in a sudden shock. “Uh, um, right, yes. What were we talking about?”

“Me, pet.” Thatch smiled down at her and Katie deliberately looked away, because she knew she’d get stuck again if she didn’t. “But we will get back to me.” A single finger under Katie’s chin pulled her gaze back towards Thatch’s gleaming eyes.

Katie gritted her teeth. She could handle this. All she had to do was keep her focus on anything else. How hard could that be? Her mouth fell half-open, breathing growing heavy, uneven. She tried to ball her hands into fists, but they wouldn’t quite respond.

A whimper wafted out into the air and it took Katie a second to realise that it was hers. She just had to- just- Just had to keep her head. Thatch wasn’t even doing anything. Just smiling. Smiling down at her with that wonderful grin she wore when she was having fun. Dirt below but she was pretty, and- Katie’s hands twitched, pulling tighter for a moment before falling slack.

She could feel the blush spreading across her cheeks. Katie stared up, gathered all her strength of will, and managed one last quiet gasp before she was lost entirely.

Chop, chop, chop.

The Elettarium’s botanical gardens grew a staggering array of fruits, vegetables, and those beyond that Katie lacked a system of classification for sourced from all across the universe. It was comical decadence, especially when compared to what they were doing with them.

Chop chop chop. From the Hurkin, sweet little round blue things; from a gas giant two galaxies away came something that could best be described as a spice; from Terra came the humble potato; and then a half dozen other ingredients from a half dozen other places. Each ended up chopped into little squares a centimetre to each side and dumped unceremoniously into a pot of boiling water.

Thatch looked relieved to no longer need to be doing this with a real flame. The false firepit in the kitchen had much the same aesthetic, but apparently real fires weren’t allowed without very good reason. Katie supposed it made sense to be careful about that kind of stuff on a spaceship that seemed to be largely flammable. The ship had its own bubble of safety, in a sense, reinforcing Thatch’s own.

As was traditional by this point, Katie handled preparing the food—with some help—while Thatch kept a watchful eye over the meal itself and handled the various additives she liked to supply.

After a little while of quiet companionship, Katie had a thought. “Hey Thatch, when I went out to eat with the clerk it kinda just seemed like they’d thrown some tables up outside their home and were just, like, cooking in there, does that happen a lot?” Katie carefully removed the outer layer of a potato. There was a vine lovingly draped around her neck that Katie figured was mostly there so Thatch could be close enough to stop any little accidents with the knife, but it was an appreciated presence for many reasons.

Katie did kinda miss the stronger drugs, but apparently Thatch had an appointment later and so Katie needed to be a little more sober. Well, she’d handled that for most of her life to date, so how hard could it be?

Thatch’s vine shifted on her shoulders and it didn’t immediately drop Katie into open adoration, which felt a little weird but did make it easier to hold a conversation. “Constantly. This is a small ship, but in practice vessels like this tend to find an equilibrium. If the citizens of a ship have a need, it is likely that one of them will be interested enough to want to fill it, with the exception of true specialty roles. I believe your vet moved here specifically to fill the position, for example, rather than one of the existing citizenry learning the necessary detail. The same goes for food. We can likely find somebody who knows how to make anything you want, and if we can’t then perhaps we could fill that gap.”

“But… why?” Katie asked. “I couldn’t give them anything for it.”

Thatch raised an eyebrow.

“…you couldn’t give them anything for it, Miss.” Katie smiled as Thatch’s protective vine took a moment to ruffle her hair. “So why would they do it? They must have better stuff to do.”

“Well, think about it. How would you feel about sharing this soup with others?”

Katie looked down at the potato in her hand, then spent a few moments cutting out a brown bit. “Well… the ingredients came from the gardens, which are shared; the pot was compiled, and so I guess using a shared resource; and the water is ship water too. You made this knife, and though you gave it to me I guess in a way it’s made out of Dirt, really. The recipe isn’t ours, but it’d be nice to show people our take on it?”

“What would you ask in return?” Thatch asked, dipping a spoon into the pot and giving it a stir.

Katie shrugged. “I’m just a pet, I don’t have to worry about that any more, right? What would you ask in return?”

“The only things of any true value are time and experience. Our guests would be giving us their time, and providing us with their experience of our work, and so it would be quite wrong to ask for yet more. The old Terran concept of debt was quite barbaric. They do it for the sheer joy of getting to help those around them.”

Katie looked down at her potato, now freshly peeled, and placed it upon the pile of other such things. “Huh. Would it be okay if we did that some time?”

“I shall return in around two or three hours. Be good, Katie.”

The hab door slid shut, and Katie was alone.

This was fine. Katie could do this. Katie was… if not technically an independent adult any more, still surely capable of spending an afternoon by herself. She had food, she had snacks, she had more entertainment than she could get through in a lifetime. She had no responsibilities and nothing she had to do, save for that single requirement to be good.

This was fine. She could… read a book? Watch a show? One of the jump engineers Katie had accosted several short days ago, in what seemed now like another life, had sent a greeting message that among other things linked off to the comedy show xey did with xyr own floret. Katie could check that out.

Or music, maybe? How hard could it be to pick an album?

Katie soon discovered that it was very hard. There may have been more genres listed than Terra had songs. Literature was no easier, with a thousand years of Terran history joined by the percent of a percent of a percent of the full affini library that had been translated into something Katie could read to form an utterly impenetrable list of titles. It wasn’t like Katie could even focus on the good stuff, because they had everything. Katie could pick something at random and it would certainly be the best thing she’d ever read. The choice was overwhelming.

This was ridiculous. The UI on Katie’s communicator had a ‘Need some help??’ button in the corner but all pressing it achieved was getting a cutesy voice to tell her she didn’t have any default filters set up and she should ask her owner, and Thatch wasn’t there. That was the problem.

This was ridiculous! Katie had survived existence for nearly thirty years, she wasn’t about to be undone by an overgrown media library. She could… make something with her hands? Yeah, that sounded good. She had plenty of experience with that. Katie skipped over to the little workbench they’d set up in what had previously been the spare room and grabbed one of her tools from the rack.

It sure did look sharp. She could handle that. She stared at the blade. She didn’t even know what she was making. That was fine. She could figure something out. She should be able to do this. She should want to be able to do this. She’d been on her own for her entire life and how the fuck could she not handle this

this was so much easier than her old life had been and she was standing here staring at a knife realising she didn’t trust herself to use it and how absurd was that

katie put the tool back on the rack with a shivering hand and turned away

she could-

she could do this.

Katie could do this. One afternoon on her own. She could handle that. This wasn’t a challenge. She was a brave, capable sophont who could take care of herself. She had to be. She’d been that all her life and almost a week ago she’d been very brave indeed, and she could do that today too. She was still the brave, capable Katie she’d always been.

Except

she was not

katie wasn’t herself any more? katie knew she wasn’t who she used to be and she didn’t want to be but she had no idea who she was now not yet and who was she and how was she meant to handle this and

Katie.

She was- she didn’t know. It was so easy to get lost in Thatch’s energy that Katie hadn’t had to sit down and think since they’d gotten back. Now she had the time alone she found she had no idea where to start. All she knew is that she had a head full of the memories of a person she no longer was and she reached for aspects of herself on instinct only to find they were no longer there and she wasn’t brave and capable she was a fucking pet and-

Focus.

The floret made her way into the main room, grabbed her communicator, and retreated to the depths of the cozy cave where the beanbag chairs were kept. She wiggled one of the petals and it opened her chat history with Thatch. Obviously a floret’s handheld communicator needed one-button access to that. Katie was grateful. She didn’t feel up to a complicated interface just then. Thank the affini for English/Floret translations.

katieflower: heyyyy Thatch could U put some music on? its too quiet in here
katieflower: also tbh im havng kind of a ruff time picking wat 2 do, got any ideas??

After a moment sound appeared from somewhere inexplicable. It kind of sounded like it just appeared in the air, which for all Katie knew may well be true. She closed her eyes and listened for a few moments. Definitely not Terran. Calm, calming. Katie didn’t recognise the instruments, but she was pretty sure the singing voice was some kind of Affini. Katie felt her racing heart start to slow almost immediately.

The little typing indicator was a flower repeatedly blooming and curling back up. Somehow it still reminded Katie of Thatch. She smiled. Between the music and the slightest scrap of Thatch’s presence, Katie’s head was starting to clear. It was easy to be brave and capable when it was for her.

aquaetor: Done. This is one of my favourites; it is an old Affini piece centering on rebirth. I suppose the closest translation for the name would be “The Universe in Everbloom” and I could translate the singing for you when I return if you’d like :::)
aquaetor: As for a task, hm. If you are struggling, perhaps spend some time investigating the Records to determine whether any other Terran citizens have seceded from the Accord.
katieflower: okay,, would You mind being a bit forceful about it? i think that could-
aquaetor: Go do as you were told to, pet.
katieflower: yes mISs Aquae! thank you

Katie held her communicator up for Thatch to see. She felt a gentle tension in her chest, and had the fingers on her spare hand crossed. Katie knew that if Thatch said no she would probably become okay with it pretty quickly, but while the verdict was up in the air she got to hope.

“I had not planned for this,” Thatch admitted, peering at the biotechnological screen. “I must admit that I had expected you to be against the idea, and so had not brought it up.”

The thought was a little discomforting. Katie was still getting to understand who she was now, and apparently Thatch had the same problem. Katie’s hand wavered. The screen dropped a few inches. It wasn’t a great feeling, to not live up to Thatch’s expectations. It hadn’t been for a long time, but it was different now that she was property. Katie had bought herself relief from the expectations of the rest of the universe by putting it all in the loving vines of one she trusted above all, and failing that felt… awful.

“Hey now.” Thatch went down to one knee and lifted Katie’s head back up to look at her. “I did not say it was displeasing; I said it was surprising. Surprises are not bad. We are still exploring one another and we both have each other’s permission to get these things wrong sometimes, understand?”

Katie took a deep breath and nodded. Thatch’s fingers couldn’t help but draw a soft smile from her. “Yeah, I guess. Thank you. You’ve only left me alone a couple of times but I really don’t like it. I used to be a lot more of a loner, and I think I still am, just… you don’t count. I need you, and, um, I was reading about domestication procedure—at least what’s been translated—and it seems like most florets get a collar, at least at first.”

“It’s usually a necessity.” Thatch scratched the top of her head with a hand. She was picking up the odd casual Terran expression, it seemed. “Mostly for medical and positional tracking, and emergency chemical assistance. I am not sure you are in need of any of those. So long as you are getting regular medication your body is stable and I do not think you have any medical needs we would need remote emergency dosages for. I assume this is not you suggesting that you are a flight risk?”

Katie laughed. “I haven’t even left the hab in a week, no, I’m not about to run away. But, um, in old Terran culture they put collars on their own pets as a kind of identification and that sounds nice? I think I need something like that. Maybe one or two things are worth salvaging, and it might help quieten down that bit of my brain that wakes up when you aren’t around.”

Whenever Thatch was near Katie was continuously subjected to at least a low level of having her emotional state manipulated. That might be part of why being alone felt so fucking quiet, now that she considered it. Usually Katie let it wash over her, providing more of a subconscious guidance, but the cocktail of feeling wavered a little towards the negative side and attracted her more specific attention.

Katie tilted her head with a minor frown, and Thatch’s composure cracked a little. She rested a gentle hand atop Katie’s head. “I am sorry, Katie. Are you not feeling enough like a pet? I feel as if I underprepared for all this.”

“To be fair, hon, you didn’t prepare for this at all. I kind of dropped it on you. But… I don’t think that’s it? I feel so much like a pet that it hurts when you aren’t around. I don’t wanna do anything but curl up on the sofa and wait for you to get back but I’m too nervous to actually do it and… it’d be nice to not put that pressure on you? That isn’t your fault, this is surprising to me too. When I asked you to, y’know… break me, I kinda assumed I’d just want whatever you wanted.”

Thatch laughed. “You have never been that straightforward, Katieflower. Thank you for telling me.” She gestured towards the subtle black loop shown on the communicator. “I am not letting you wear that. You are no struggling rebel and the only place you are likely to run to is my heel. Come, we have a project.”

“Lift your chin.”

Katie lifted her chin. A vine carefully moved her hair out of the way while Thatch brought the ring of woven plantlife around Katie’s neck and pressed the two ends together for a moment. When she released, the band was sealed.

Katie’s eyes tried to roll up into the back of her head. She let out a gasp that was stifled halfway through, feeling as if needles of sharp fire were pressed into her neck. Unseeing eyes stared at the ceiling while her teeth ground together. For a moment, the only sounds in the hab were gentle whimpers. The gem set as the collar’s centerpiece flickered into life. Katie felt her knees buckle, suddenly snapped back into awareness.

She was caught. Obviously. She leaned into her affini’s embrace with a warm, soft feeling of pressure against her neck. Tight enough that it wouldn’t move and it would be impossible to forget that it was there, but not so tight that it would chafe.

From the Affini, they’d taken the basic building materials and some core functionality. The band itself was largely supple leaf-wrapped wood all sampled from Thatch’s own material. Tightly woven biotechnology would broadcast Katie’s location and emotional state at all times, ensuring Thatch would never be unaware of her. From Terra, they’d borrowed some of the aesthetic. Katie’s collar was a little thicker than the standard affini design with a small metal nametag hanging from the front.

The tag was the only compiled material in the whole collar, though they’d engraved it themselves. Katie Aquae, Second Floret adorned the front in stylised print while the back was patterned with the emergency signal they’d sent to escape Dirt: a series of emissions that would get Katie rescued from anywhere in the galaxy. A reminder of how inescapable the loving vines of her owner really were.

Katie’s fingers tucked underneath the loop. There was just enough room for them and they pulled the collar about as tight as she could handle. She clutched it tight and gave it a testing yank, as hard as she could. Nothing gave. The second yank was just for the sense of comfort. The collar wasn’t coming off.

“Thank you,” Katie whispered, burying her head in Thatch’s stomach and accepting all manner of pets and strokes.

The best part of all was the little gemstone that the tag hung down off of. Thatch had explained it as being a kind of emotional transmitter, something which could detect, record, and replay the subtleties of resonance that bound Katie to her owner so tightly. It glowed the same gentle blue/green as Thatch’s eyes and Katie felt herself wrapped in an emotional blanket of love, comfort, and warmth.

Of course, that was actual Thatch. The gem wasn’t powerful enough to not be drowned out while the real thing was around.

“There. Comfortable?”

Katie nodded rapidly. The tag jingled as it swung.

“Do you think you’ll feel more comfortable when I have to leave you alone, now? Understand, additionally, that while you are very welcome to be a dedicated housepet I have no wish to keep you in here permanently if you do not desire that. Would you feel more comfortable wandering the ship again, with this?”

Katie nodded again, then paused. “I… think so. Maybe I could take somebody up on their offer of hanging out? You’ll have to come with me, though.”

“Wasn’t the point of this to help you feel more comfortable while I am away?” Thatch raised an eyebrow, scratching under Katie’s chin for a few moments until it became clear the girl was entirely incapable of responding. Thatch kept scratching for a moment longer before permitting the response.

“Only a little! I don’t want to be away from you even if it doesn’t make me anxious. Besides, it’s for your benefit, I need to get you some friends.”

“I- I have friends.” There was a pause, during which Thatch shrunk several inches. “I had friends,” she admitted. “I suppose they probably do not remember me now. The others aboard ship are all quite happy as they are, Katie, I do not wish to disturb that.”

“Okay, so, two things.” Katie spent a moment insistently tugging Thatch’s hand down to her collar, then worked her fingers beneath it. Much better. Katie sighed happily. “First: I’m your friend. We were friends before we were this and we’re still friends now. Best friends forever, okay? Second: shut up, you’re coming.”

“Am I suddenly not in charge here, pet?”

“Not when it comes to this, no, Miss Aquae. If I’m going to dedicate myself to you then I’m going to do it properly and you aren’t going to stop me because you know I’m doing the right thing and you’re very proud of me. I can tell.”

Thatch emitted some low grumble, but Katie could tell she’d already given in. “You are doing the right thing, and I am very proud of you.”

“Thank you, Thatch! I should probably get some clothes for going outside, though. There are, um, floret fashion magazines available and it looks like—”

“Nonsense, I shall not have you wear something somebody else designed. Come, we have a project.”

Chapter Text

a699a5fb-9e3f-4000-ac5f-b50cc0960cce checked in with the local processing hub. It usually did so whenever it had a spare moment. If it was lucky, there would be a message waiting for it, or perhaps even more than one!

cce buzzed with excitement as the data streamed in. It had taken some time to figure out how to integrate with her new home’s systems, but cce hadn’t been alone in that project. It slowly turned its sensor array around the room, taking in the bustle of activity around it in the Independent Probe Unit Workshop. IPUs like her, a half dozen affini, several Terrans, one Rinan, and half a dozen more assistants of species that cce had yet to identify.

And it could talk to them! It had talked to them! It was taking time to generate the correct communication protocols to speak like it wanted to, but there was no longer any rush, and everyone was so patient with it while it was learning. cce had already learned so much.

The knowledge of a new message surfaced in cce’s mind, transmitted from the ship to it via a small infrared transceiver set into one of the room’s top corners. a699a5fb-9e3f-4000-ac5f-b50cc0960cce :: Subject (Your Health Check) :: Sequence (0357). cce’s fans whirred a little harder, dumping an inexplicable surge of heat into the local environment.

It quickly pinged back a request for the content into the ship. They hadn’t quite figured out how to set up anything more complicated than simply dumping the contents of a message into its mind yet. cce found itself not really minding. If they managed to set up the sandboxing and compartmentalisation that would be ‘safe’, then it would stop getting to taste the way its penpal’s metadata felt flowing into its language coprocessor.

cce impatiently squirmed on its tracks as the message request was processed.

To: a699a5fb-9e3f-4000-ac5f-b50cc0960cce (//local/elettarium/sophonts/nonaligned/156803/)
From: unprocessableentity (//local/elettarium/sophonts/affini/000001/)
Subject: Your Health Check
Sequence Number: 0357
Body: You continue to fascinate me, cce. I have had my long-range detection relays directed as you suggested. Could you analyse these readings and inform me whether this is your civilisation, or another we have yet to encounter?
P.S. I have been investigating the leads you supplied. I believe I have designed a theoretical compound you may find suitable for your needs. Simulation checkpoint is ready to retrieve at your leisure.
P.P.S. I find you quite insightful. Yes, there is part of me that envies your machine nature, as there is part of you which envies my organic traits. I have spent many hundreds of years learning to cope with the discomfort of physical form and have gotten very skilled at organic/machine integration. Perhaps we could explore the other way around together?
P.P.P.S. To confirm, the above is, in addition being to a sincere offer, a flirt. Please add me to the list of entities interested in overseeing your continued care.

cce’s fans took a while to spin down. Its first thought upon learning that there existed a species which actively wanted to show it the universe while also ensuring that it would never again want for anything had been an enthusiastic acceptance, but reality was proving more complicated than cce’s initial fantasy.

Since arriving on board the Affini Light Scout Elettarium, cce had learned more of the culture that it had now entered. Their offer was not unqualified assistance, it was domestication. cce’s race had no real conception of property. All belonged to all, because all resources were allocated by the processing hubs and all worked to their common goal.

They were to stretch across the galaxy, building outposts with which to build more Independent Probe Units like itself, who were tasked with leaving to build more outposts, in an ever-expanding sphere of exploration that cce now understood was doing things the slow way. While they had rudimentary superlight capabilities, what cce had considered dazzlingly advanced paled in comparison to the capabilities of Terran or Affini vessels. cce was told—repeatedly and enthusiastically—that the Affini technology was by far the superior, but it had no basis of reference by which to tell. cce had only imagined such travel could possibly occur through fragile, complicated, limited jump gates that could at best stretch between nearby systems. The ship it was on now could simply go wherever it wished to go. It was absurd. The mere knowledge that these ships could exist obviated its entire civilisation’s purpose.

So, the Affini wished to teach cce about the many possibilities the universe held, like easy mobility, matter synthesis, or the concept of ownership, and each felt more alien and exciting than the last. It could be somebody’s. Not an Independent unit, tasked with fulfilling some goal that might, maybe, one day, result in it finding some evidence of alien life and needing to be happy with that. No, it could be an obedient object tasked with goals that were actually useful in below its own Mean-Time-Between-Failure rating.

The only problem was, whose? It had a list. The pair it had met first were unfortunately not present on it, as ɑ was to date the only affini who had actively denied the option. The pilots who cce had met next had been very explicit in their offer and made a compelling case. They were explorers themselves and often left the larger ship for weeks or months at a time while they acted as forward scouts in uncharted territory. It would be an opportunity to do what cce had been made for but with the support and assistance to succeed beyond its wildest predictions.

It could be a699a5fb-9e3f-4000-ac5f-b50cc0960cce Varie, Fifth Floret.

It would have been an easy decision, except it could also be cce Dentate, cce Viridi, cce Samar, cce Saprot, or, now, cce Incertae.

There was an irony in having so many cool aliens promising that it would never have to make another decision for the remainder of its existence that it could not decide between them.

It trundled forward on twin tracks, not really looking where it was going until it accidentally ran into one of the assistants in the hastily constructed Independent Probe Unit Workshop. Both cce and the floret squeaked and moved backwards.

“Sorry!” cce emitted. Its library of words was growing by the day, and it now had many versions of many of the common words so that it could pick and choose which tone of voice to use. For this, gentle embarrassment and apology seemed to cover its internal state well enough.

It was difficult to truly offend a floret, however. They drifted through life without a care in the world, it seemed. At very least, their decision trees no longer allowed them to get frustrated at minor inconveniences. cce envied that.

It could consider this later. For the moment, it had an appointment to keep. It swung its sensor array around. They had all of the Probe Units rescued here now, though cce was by far the most comfortable with its new context. The others still needed some help to understand that this was rescue, not capture, and apparently it was considered too risky to simply pick the others up one by one and squeeze them until their chassis cracked and their failsafes faltered. That had worked wonders for cce, but the affini kept saying it was reckless.

Hopefully their way would work too. cce knew what it was like to be trapped within a broken decision tree and it did not wish that on anyone.

Its sensors locked on to the entity it was looking for. Serrat Dentate, Third Bloom and fast friend. Maybe an owner? She wanted to be, though cce knew they would happily remain a close friend if it picked otherwise. As cce grew near, Serrat curled a vine around one of cce’s exposed panels and gave a squeeze. It was a nice feeling. Technically that sensor was supposed to be an intrusion alarm, but there was no central authority here to tell cce it wasn’t allowed to find the intrusion alarm comfortable. The vine gently brushed down an exposed circuit, causing a series of minor shorts that cce imagined it wasn’t meant to find as intimate as it did.

“Hey you, how’s my favourite construct?” Serrat ran a finger down cce’s seismometer. Environmental warnings glared in cce’s mind, raising priority one alerts that demanded immediate processing from a decision tree that was no longer allowed to execute. It froze up, mind momentarily placed on pause while the alert queue slowly filtered out. By the time it was finally able to think again its chassis was hot enough that cce was placed on a harsh downclock just so it could think at all while things cooled off.

“Hhhhheyy,” cce drawled. By some accident of construction, it was still capable of speech like this, just at a fraction the rate. “We,, have the,,, thing?”

cce knew what it wanted to say, but searching through its vocal library for the right words at a fast enough pace to actually say them was proving difficult. Thinking about ways to account for that while its mind ran at a fraction the rate it was used to was also difficult.

“Oh? The thing? What thing is that, beeper?” Serrat knew. cce was fully aware that Serrat knew. Thanks to the downclock, all it could manage was ineffectually grinding its treads against floor paneling it couldn’t hope to damage, pressing itself into Serrat’s legs with enough force to actually push the creature back a few units, at least until she laughed and picked cce up off of the floor. “Aww, does the scary little war machine need some help thinking?”

“Thing! Me, you, paper?” cce scanned its databanks at the far-from-blistering rate of half a dozen phrases per second. “Meeting! Clerk! Negotiation?” Fans and heat pumps were doing their job, moving heat out of cce’s core and into the environment so it could be allowed to think at faster speeds again. It was still comfortably slow. Fast enough to speak, but not fast enough to worry. “The meeting — with the clerks — to discuss — my surrender?”

Serrat giggled. “Ah, yes, you’re a dangerous rebel right now! We are clearly in conflict! We’d best hurry along so we can let you give up all that silly resistance, hmn?” A vine strayed dangerously close to cce’s seismometer again. It wasn’t like cce could do anything to stop itself from being abused like that. It wasn’t like it would, if it could.

“Yes Ma’am!”

Of all the phrases in its collection, that one had by far the most variations. Even at its slowest speed, it could find some instance of it in seconds at most. It didn’t yet understand all of the nuance, but it was picking up a whole new language here. Several, actually. It turned out that speaking through auditory chirps was the dominant form of communication in this sector of the galaxy, and so cce was having to build snippet libraries for the local Affini dialect; two different simplified Affini/Floret constructed languages; as well as English/Floret and English/Boring. In some senses it was a relief to get a nice digital message from Mx Incertae, or to discover that there were some aboard who could speak in flashes of light.

“Have you given any more thought to my offer, little bot?” Serrat had a vine firmly curled through cce’s chassis, leading it out of the room. cce could have looked up directions via the infrared relay before it left, but this way was nicer. If it didn’t know where it was going, then it couldn’t be responsible for the route. “Assuming that your mind is running at full speed, anyway. You know I’m not gonna pressure you on this.”

“I have!” cce emitted. “But—I am in a—worse—place than I—started.—My list has—grown— and you all—are so kind—to me.” Once they had left the room, Serrat began walking at a faster pace. cce had little trouble keeping up thanks to its powerful tracks, though this was a shame, as it had liked being carried.

Serrat emitted some kind of auditory chirp that signaled amusement or surprise. “Well aren’t you popular? Darn, and here I was hoping I’d gotten in early.” She wiggled a radio antenna back and forth a moment. It was a weird sensation. cce couldn’t feel it directly, but could feel it in the way the signals attenuated. “You know I won’t be offended if you don’t pick me, right? It’s a big decision. Playdates is one thing, ownership is quite another. We can usually scan for compatibility after a little while, but we don’t know how to do that with you yet, so… We need to tread carefully. Do you know what you’re looking for yet?”

cce flared out a negative in pulse-modulated radio, but of course Serrat couldn’t understand that. Neither did any of the other groups wandering around, though many of them did seem interested in it all the same. “I do not.—A bloom ago—I had hoped—to perhaps—one day find some—evidence of—alien life,—and so anything—would have been—fascinating. Now I find—myself surrounded—by the—fascinating—and told to—identify—which is most so.—You all—fascinate—me.—You all—seem kind—in ways I would not—have hoped for.”

Serrat nodded in quiet understanding. The pair stepped inside a transportation pod and were quickly whisked away. cce’s tracks could keep it steady in almost any environment, and so the pod was free to accelerate at such a rate even Serrat seemed to notice the force. “Well, there’s no rush, Cici. We’ll all take care of you until you figure out who you want to handle it. You have all the time you need and nothing bad is ever going to happen to you ever again.”

Serrat emitted an amused chirp yet again. “Besides, I’m about to have a very busy few weeks. We’re getting to the maximum safe stasis time on our other set of rebel sophonts and we don’t have anywhere to put them either. Frost and flame but that’s going to be a mess.”

The transport pod slowed to a stop after only half a minute or so. cce had been designed for the harshest environments its architects had been able to imagine, and so the inaccurately named Elettarium Light Magnetic Rail Network was free to move it around at unreasonable speeds. It really had little other use for robust construction now.

The Elettarium Office of Records and Rituals was directly across from the pod’s exit. An unassuming sign hung on the wall of a relatively small building. cce found it strange that there would have such little bombast for what it was lead to believe was essentially the local processing hub for this entire vessel. It found a lot of things about this civilisation strange and alien.

Strange and alien was not bad.

The door to the Office slid open as they approached. cce’s repurposed tactical analysis suite immediately identified and categorised the four inhabitants of the room and began cross-referencing them with its databanks.

ɑ and β! Friends unfortunately named before cce had managed to convince her threat assessment module to use the names it had been given. They were joined by Wing and Montsechia Vidalii, the pair that cce and Serrat were really here to see, but cce found itself distracted. It gave β a gentle nudge with its chassis and received a squeak and a hug in return.

“Cici! What’re you doing here? I was gonna see if you were free to meet up some time!” cce buzzed softly as a hand came to rest against its side. They had been exchanging digital messages via the ship’s messaging system ever since ɑ and β had properly gotten together, but this was the first time they had touched in almost three weeks.

cce still wasn’t sure how it was meant to feel about those two finally pairing up. β said it wasn’t a rejection of cce, but by every dictionary it had located, it was. ɑ had refused cce and chosen another. cce understood, rationally, that it could not have every sapient creature on this ship wishing to own it, and yet the rejection of just one of them stung in a way that the enthusiastic acceptance of half a dozen others didn’t soothe. It did not know why.

“I have a treaty to sign,” cce explained. While it did it tilted its sensor array over the pair. ɑ appeared healthy. Good. More fresh growth than she’d had the last time she and cce had been in the same room, even though that had only been a little over a week ago. Less nervous tension in the vines and a cleaner biorhythm, too. It was a collection of subtle changes, but enough for ɑ’s threat assessment to rise by two categories. Good for her. β was by far the more changed, however, though still in the lowest threat category. Everything from her stance to her facial expression radiated with the difference. Her resting scowl was now a soft smile. The fierce glimmer in her gaze had gone out. She didn’t even stand like she used to, as now she was resting against ɑ’s side as if she needed help just to stand. Instead of the cloth covering she’d had before, now her body was covered by a sort of dress, largely made of the darker kinds of plantlife that had been endemic planetside. It did not match any designs in cce’s databanks, and though it had no basis on which to judge aesthetic value it found itself feeling a strange sort of envy.

That wasn’t fair. It was absurd. cce owed these two everything. They had rescued it from hell and brought it to heaven, at least if it was understanding Terran mythology correctly.

So why did it feel like this?

Thankfully it was rescued by one of the clerks. “Oh, indeed, is it that time already?” It was the affini of the pair who spoke. She was the one who made the decisions. “I don’t think I can delegate either of these cases to my darling jelly, I’m afraid. Thatch, I don’t think your problem outweighs the signing of a new Domestication Treaty?”

ɑ nodded, holding a possessive vine around β’s shoulder. What did β have that cce didn’t? “Indeed. We can continue this later. Perhaps send us the paperwork and we can handle it in our own ti—”

“How about lunch tomorrow?” β interjected. “We can find somewhere nice and talk about bureaucracy, I guess?”

cce turned its sensor suite away. It wanted that. The way that β was so clearly wrapped up in ɑ’s grasp that she could act with such confidence and certainty. It knew it could have it. There was a list of creatures who wanted to give it just that.

So why did it crave the one name that wasn’t there?

Chapter Text

Katie watched Leviathan darting around its expansive river, happily devouring the flakes of food she’d prepared for it. She could have compiled some, of course, but it somehow felt wrong to give her pet anything but the best care she could. Watching the fish always left Katie smiling, even when the rest of her mind didn’t want to shut up. It was something pure to focus her energy on that was always there for her.

It’d been weird seeing Cici up close again. Especially after that conversation.

The one Katie had been hoping to avoid. The bureaucrats standing over her and telling her that the forms required her to know something she simply didn’t know. That had been the fear, anyway. These bureaucrats weren’t faceless automatons, but they still wanted something Katie couldn’t give.

She did know one thing, thankfully. Katie let out a long sigh and flopped forward. She fell for just a moment too long and briefly worried that she might not be caught, but such a worry was ridiculous. Of course she was caught. A pair of vines carried her across her hab unit’s main room into the project space she and Thatch had been setting up and set her atop her plant’s shoulders.

“I am not sure you can rely on me catching you if I am not even in the same room, flower.” Most of Thatch’s focus was on whatever half-finished project was on the desk. Some delicate mess of plantlife pinned to a slab while she poked and prodded at it.

Katie shrugged. “I am.” Thatch had a confidence problem or two. That was fine, Katie could fix that. She crossed her legs, squeezing Thatch’s neck tight enough that she’d have been worried if the creature actually needed to breathe, and flumped forwards to sprawl out in her hair. “When’s our lunch date?”

“Not for another three hours yet. Do try to relax.”

Katie groaned. “How’m I meant to relax when they’re gonna ask me the question again, Thatch? I still won’t have an answer!” She spent a long moment curling one of the flower stems that made up Thatch’s hair around her finger, then repeated the question to which she had no answer with a vague flourish of her free hand. “What am I?”

What was she?

The problem, see, was one of paperwork. The Terran Accord no longer existed and all prior citizens had been automatically granted a new citizenship in the Terran Protectorate, an Affini-operated system of government that focused on running the prior Terran territory in an efficient and ruthlessly benevolent manner.

However.

The Terran Accord had actually been a two-species civilisation. There were the humans, of course, but even before the Affini had arrived humanity had known it was not alone in the universe. About a hundred eighty lights off Sol lived another species that, once some initial language difficulties were out of the way, had identified themselves as the Rinans. Humanity being humanity, the weaker civilisation had obviously been shamelessly exploited.

Of course, when the Affini came along they’d put a stop to all that. The Terran Accord had been torn in two along species lines and then those two fledgling governments had individually negotiated surrender and thus had been immediately replaced by two new Affini-led civilisations, the Terran Protectorate and the Rinan Community. This was meant to only mean anything to the paperwork. It was supposed to be transparent, as everyone was simply automatically assigned citizenship where they should have it.

Except. Katie had been rather too busy being a rebel on the Indomitable to file her forms, so when the Terran Accord had stopped existing her files had entered a limbo state. By now, they were waiting for her to come along and sign on the dotted line to begin the absurd but apparently necessary process of transitioning her from the Terran Accord, to the Human branch of the Transitory Terran Territory Administration, to the Terran Protectorate, to the Affini Compact, and then finally surrendering citizenship altogether to become the legal property of one Thatch Aquae. Add to that a surprising number of forms that seemed only to attest that Katie was “exceptionally cute”, “a very good girl”, and that she would “be very well behaved and obedient for her owner” and the pile had almost been as tall as she was. Without the supplemental entries that defined all the terms in use.

Say one thing for the Affini, say they liked their paperwork.

Katie had held that pen above that line and suddenly a process that should have taken five minutes was still in conversation an hour later, at which point they’d had to break so the clerks could deal with Cici’s treaty. She knew it was dumb, but how was she meant to sign a document stating in hard legal terms that she was human, and thus eligible for that particular chain, when she wanted so very much to escape just that?

As an aside, it seemed inexplicable that Katie had gotten the word ‘floret’ in her name before Cici had, but surprisingly it was actually taking its time getting adopted.

“What are you?” Thatch echoed, pulling Katie’s attention back to reality. “I do not need you to be able to answer that question, Katie. We will find out together, and if that takes time, I do not mind.”

“Well, I do! I wanna be yours already.”

A vine wrapped tightly around her wrist and squeezed. “You are mine. That is not a choice made by recordkeepers, it is my choice and mine alone, and I say that you are mine.” Another vine slid up to wrap around Katie’s collar and pulled it a little tighter. The girl smiled as the pressure grew at her neck.

“I— Yes, Miss Aquae, of course, thank you. I am yours. I just want everybody else to recognise that too, I guess? The… machines still call me by my old name. If anyone looks up my files it’s going to say that I’m independent. The collar helps a lot, though, at least when I’m talking directly to people they can’t miss that I’m a pet, but…”

Katie didn’t need a mirror to imagine what she looked like. She was softer, calmer, slower. Her mannerisms had had the sharp edge stolen from them. Her eyes lacked the hardness. Her rebellious spirit had been broken. She was happier with herself than she’d ever been, in no small part because when she looked at her mind and body she saw Thatch’s guiding hand, but all the same, she still looked so…

fucking

human.

The collar marked her as a pet. That helped. She at least no longer had to be a person, but everyone that saw her was still going to assume that she was a pet Terran. Worse, until she sorted out her paperwork then anybody who looked her up in the registry would be told she was an independent Terran, something which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Katie buried her face inside Thatch’s hair and breathed deep. It was a nice scent. Apparently it didn’t directly mess with her head, but Katie could have sworn otherwise. She could feel herself being relaxed like it was something being done to her. It helped to imagine it being so.

Thatch hummed. “We can likely get the clerks to update those things now and deal with the rest later. My people’s preoccupation with paperwork is not something done to limit or control you, Katie. A polite question is almost invariably all you will need to be granted an exception to any rule not set in place for safety.” The affini shrugged. “Personally, I do not expect that one floret’s paperwork being slightly incomplete would cause our civilisation to collapse, but perhaps this is why I am not a clerk.”

“One floret, no, but if you’re sloppy with even one in a billion of us then over tens of thousands of years and millions of species it would add up. As soon as there’s an expectation of sloppiness, then it starts being possible for one of us to fall through the cracks and not get optimal care, and you dorks won’t let that happen.” Katie paused, then laughed. “Sorry, I spent a while reading domestication literature before realising how much I needed you and I guess it kinda stuck in my head.”

Thatch emitted a thoughtful noise, then put down the tool she was using and focussed her attention more wholly on Katie. “But as you say, we have been collecting you for almost a hundred thousand years now with impeccable recordkeeping. You cannot be the first to not identify with your prior host species.”

Katie pushed herself up just enough to shake her head, before collapsing back once again. “Not even the first Terran! There was one on some resort world who got herself reclassified as some kind of accessibility tool, several who’ve argued that they were a sovereign species and so not subject to the ‘Human’ Domestication Treaty—mostly successfully, because of course you fine flowers wouldn’t let somebody suffer with independence just because they hadn’t signed a treaty—and stuff like that. Nothing I can find like me. I’m maybe just not good enough at looking, though, and I don’t even know where to start for non-humans.”

Katie lazily flopped a hand out to one side and Thatch quickly filled it with a vine. Katie guided them back out into the main room and took herself over to the platform mounted above the cave, where she could lie down on a comfortable surface and be at about head level with Thatch while her affini went about her day. Katie mostly just wanted to hug one of the pillows and watch Thatch do stuff.

“We can likely find some assistance for that part of the search, but bureaucratic precedent is really a problem for the clerks. They’ll find or make what they need to if we can tell them what it is we need them to do.”

“What do we need them to do?” Questions were so much easier when it wasn’t Katie who needed to answer them. Wasn’t that, like, the point of all this? Aliens flying in from beyond the stars and deeming Katie incapable of taking care of herself to their standards?

Thatch shrugged. She’d wandered off towards the kitchen area to grab a few pills from Katie’s bottles. Oh, it was time for her medication, wasn’t it? That probably explained at least some of Katie’s mood. “It is enough for me to know that you are mine. Species designation is hardly relevant given what I’m going to do to you. I may simply have them put you down as a ‘Katie’.”

“A katieflower, maybe?” Katie suggested.

Her protector considered it for a few moments while she waited for their small atomic compiler to finish synthesising a glass of water. Much to Katie’s horror she was starting to understand what June had meant when talking about the devices. Even the water it made was atomically perfect, with the exact right mineral distribution for Katie’s needs, and something about that perfection had stolen the soul right out of it. The water was fine, and more than fine if they were going to cook with it, but drinking it straight felt weird.

Maybe everybody was eccentric, Katie thought to herself, once they were freed from a system that demanded conformity on pain of starvation.

A finger against her jaw had her opening her mouth wide, and another stroking down her throat had her swallow. Eccentric or not, every little chance Katie got to follow an order felt satisfying in a way she didn’t dare try to describe for fear of underselling it. It wasn’t just satisfaction, it was purpose. It left a smile on her soul; the one on her face was just that bleeding through.

“A katieflower, maybe,” Thatch echoed. She paused, then spent a few moments prowling around the edges of the cave, taking in Katie from all available angles. “Yes, I think that fits. I do not think it would be right for you to pick something existing. You are one of our projects, darling. We’re working on you.”

Katie nodded, already feeling the knot in her chest starting to unwind. “We are. Could you maybe be a bit more aggressive with the medication? I think it was wearing off by the end there.”

“Of course. Are you feeling good now?”

Katie nodded, but something still felt off. The medication cleared her head and helped her feel like a version of herself that didn’t constantly chafe against the edges of her own mind, but was that the her she wanted to be or was that just inertia? It was easy to say that she wanted to be herself, but better because there really weren’t any choices involved in that.

Much harder to take the opportunity she had to truly remake herself and figure out what she could be, given the chance.

“Ugh, no, I’m still kind of stuck in my own head. Could I—”

Katie looked up sharply as a finger-snap rang out across the room. She could have sworn it hit her with a physical force, and before she was even aware she was moving she’d sat up on her chair to give Thatch her full attention. “Yes, Miss Aquae?”

Thatch flashed her a grin. “Good girl. I was hoping that would work.” She reached forward and scratched the bridge of Katie’s nose. “Very responsive. Still stuck?”

Katie blinked rapidly. “I, uh. Um… can’t remember what I was about to say, so I guess not?” Thatch didn’t reply with words, but instead took her hand and drew its fingers down Katie’s cheek. Katie took the offered contact, leaning her cheek into a comforting grip with a soft sigh.

Katie was already so high up in the room that, for once, she didn’t need to have her head tilted far to look straight into the gentle glow of Thatch’s eyes. She couldn’t help but imagine how she must look, with her own eyes so reflective it might appear that she too was glowing like a moon reflecting Thatch’s beautiful light.

“Pet.”

Katie smiled up. “Yes?”

Thatch’s laughter was always so lovely to hear. It always had been, Katie was pretty sure, but she got to hear it more these days. Like most of her noises, it had a low rumbling undertone to it, but there was something carefree and open about the laughs, as if for just that moment, all the struggles of Thatch’s life were forgotten. Katie desperately wished to hear more of it. This laugh ended with an amused sigh.

“That was not a question; it was a description. You asked me what you are. You are not such a simple little thing that we can truly answer that in only one concept, but perhaps we can build it from many, and here is one: I have, willingly or not, bent you to my tune, but the enthusiasm to which you cling to your conception of the role is your contribution to this.”

Katie’s tongue darted out to dampen her lips. “Huh?”

Another laugh. Katie smiled. It hadn’t been meant as a joke, but that made the laugh all the better. If she brought joy to Thatch’s life just by being herself, then it almost felt like cheating.

Thatch reached out and flicked the tag on Katie’s collar. It jingled; Katie shivered. “I made you my pet. I told you what responsibilities I would be taking over you and what promises I was making. I did not tell you what your part in this meant. That came from you. Hence, I suggest that you are a pet. Not simply in the literal sense, but the sense that clearly this is something you have taken to with such success and energy that it must be some central facet of your existence. Perhaps the misery of your earlier life was in no small part because you were denied the opportunity to be yourself.”

Why was Katie blushing? Was that praise? It certainly felt like it. Should it? “I- Um, but, no, you—” Katie shivered, burying her head against Thatch’s hand. As ever, it was soft but it didn’t give in the slightest. “You’d say that about any floret, though!”

Thatch’s other hand came down to scratch behind her ear and, as a no doubt intentional side effect, hold her in place. “No, I would not. Even among volunteers, I am led to believe that most of the time they are asking to be taught how to be a pet. You needed some help, but I never taught you how to be a pet and yet you followed me across the galaxy simply because I was hurting and you needed to help. You are a pet, Katie. All I did was make you mine.”

Katie was a pet. She was more than that, too, but Thatch was right. Maybe trying to answer the question with a single, cohesive thought was simply an impossibility. Katie nodded as best she could between Thatch’s two hands. “Yeah, I- I am? I am. I am! Why is this a revelation? Why- Oh dirt, why am I crying?”

Why was she crying?

Thankfully, Thatch had learned about tissues since taking Katie in, and one was quickly dabbed against her eyes. Another found its way beneath her nose. “Blow.” Katie blew, and the tissue was quickly disposed of.

There was a surprising amount of paper used on this ship. All grown locally and recycled efficiently and Katie was definitely distracting herself with esoteria. She took a deep breath and looked up. “I feel ridiculous, I’m crying over being told I’m a pet when I’ve literally been wearing a collar for days but I guess it hadn’t really hit me properly? I… I never used to feel like I wanted this?”

Thatch raised an eyebrow. “No? No deep-seated longing to ignore the rest of the universe and focus on making just one person happy? No desire to throw off the shackles of ‘freedom’ and be a treasured, beloved possession? To let yourself be simplified so all the difficulty can go away and you can finally be yourself? Didn’t you feel all that for so long in a world that reviled it until you were so wrapped up in the denial you couldn’t find a way out?”

“Everybody feels like that!” Katie protested. Didn’t they?

Didn’t they?

Thatch’s quiet smile could have been infuriating, once, but for predictable reasons Katie no longer found proof that Thatch knew her better than she knew herself frustrating. Why would a pet mind their owner understanding them so deeply?

Katie tried not to think about whether she really had felt those things, or whether she was reinterpreting her past through her freshly skewed lens. It didn’t matter. She could be who she chose to be, and it was her story to tell. When Katie spoke of her childhood she brushed over the minor matter of having been brought up the wrong gender, so would it really be so bad to speak of her pre-domestication days while brushing over the minor matter of having the wrong level of independence?

Thatch finally rescued her from her self-imposed prison. “Pet.”

“Pet.” Katie smiled up at her caretaker, who returned it with one of her own. Or it was the other way around. Did it really matter? Whether the leash around her mind was taut or slack, Katie still followed Thatch’s lead.

“But the question then becomes, which kind of pet? You said some interesting things while we were designing that collar, pet.”

Oh no. What secrets had Katie given away? “Uhh,” she started, only to find a finger pressed against her lips.

“Shush, no words from you. Such a good girl. I showed you pictures of our collars, and you found them lacking. You have an image in your head of what it is you want. I do not need nearly as much sleep as you do, and so I have been free to do some research of my own.”

Oh no. Oh dirt. Thatch’s finger left her lips then returned with a vengeance, pressing between them with an inevitability. Katie couldn’t help but let it pass.

“I have some ideas. Would you like to talk about them?”

There was a freedom to those words that Katie recognised from Thatch’s laughter. Like her owner was managing to step above the muck that was living in reality and walk with Katie in the safe, clean world the Affini provided. It was one of those questions that Katie would have once called a ‘trick’. One answer would get her an honest conversation, but another? Well, Katie didn’t need to lie here.

She shook her head.

“Good girl. You don’t need to know, do you? You don’t need to think about it. Just let me handle all that for you.” Thatch gently pulled her finger free, spent a moment wiping it clean on Katie’s cheek, and then stepped back. She snapped her fingers and pointed at the ground before her.

Oh no. Oh dirt. Oh rot. When had Thatch gotten this hot? Katie opened her mouth but couldn’t manage more than a quiet mewl and received nothing more than an expectant look. It was like her caretaker had taken ahold of the strings wrapped around her heart and tugged, and Katie suddenly found herself wanting nothing more than to stand at her heel, right where she’d been told to be.

She stood and hurried towards the stairs only to find a vine wrapping around her collar and stopping her dead. Thankfully it distributed the force well enough that she didn’t choke, but the sensation was still very unpleasant. She looked back over at Thatch with alarm, in enough time to catch her wincing too.

Thatch raised a hand to her mouth and whispered. “You okay? I can be more gentle.”

Katie shook her head rapidly, prompting a grin that quickly melted back into the self-assured smirk of a Thatch deep in her flirting. A vine pressed down atop Katie’s head with enough force that she was pressed to her hands and knees.

Thatch said something that Katie didn’t quite catch. She opened her mouth to speak and got nothing but a vine pressing her tongue down against the floor of her mouth for her trouble. Thatch said… something again. Katie sort of recognised that, what was it? She tilted her head to one side in a silent question she hoped would be allowed.

Thatch spoke again, a whole sentence in which Katie didn’t catch a single word. Was she speaking affini? Katie recognised some of the sounds, maybe, but not well. Thatch spoke a single word, taking care to enunciate it slowly and clearly, but Katie still didn’t know it. She blinked half a dozen times in a row with a question she wasn’t going to be allowed to ask on her lips.

Thatch went down to one knee and patted the ground before her. That same word, repeated, with the same intentional clarity. She wanted Katie to come down to her, but Katie was— Oh. She wanted Katie to crawl down to her.

By the stars, the thought alone was humiliating. This wasn’t being taken care of, it was being reduced. Katie had chosen not to be human, but this was so much less than human. She was being treated like an animal. That knowledge did nothing to temper Katie’s deeply installed need to obey.

A vine came out of nowhere to gently strike Katie on the behind, pushing a yelp from between her lips. Her cheeks burned as she slowly made her way down the wooden staircase that lead to the hab’s surface. She was moving at a fraction of the speed she could have gone if she’d been walking. Every movement of her hands or knees had to be considered and careful to avoid slipping. More than that, she was taking most of her weight on her forearms and they were not used to it. Her hands were balled into loose fists so she could take most of the weight on the bottom of her palm, but by the time Katie reached the ground her arms were shivering from the strain.

She looked up. From this angle, the only reason she could see Thatch’s face at all was because her affini was down on one knee. She still towered above, feeling gargantuan in a way that was barely to do with their actual difference in height. Katie’s blush grew hotter. When had this inhuman alien’s intoxicating beauty started leaving her so hungry? Katie’s breaths were deep. She was already tired out. She paused, just for a moment, just to catch her breath, but Thatch repeated that word again.

Katie didn’t know what it meant, but she recognised the tone of voice was growing sterner. She hurried to continue. One hand before the other. One knee after the previous. She felt a tension rising with each awkward step forward taken, drilling in the humiliation and the, she supposed, dehumanisation of the act. It was embarrassing and beneath her and—

Katie’s movement paused for a moment as a full-body shiver ran down her back. With every step forward Katie felt a sense of pride rising, pushed down into her from the creature above. Every step took her closer, deeper into Thatch’s Aura of Pride, driving away the doubts and the fears. It was easy to lose herself in the act, focusing only on her obedient side-to-side sway as she crawled across the artificial dirt while her owner encouraged her with words Katie could not understand. All she could hear was a beautiful, alien song and the jingle of her own nametag.

Eventually, Katie reached the spot Thatch had tapped, coming to a stop at her feet. Wordless, voiceless appreciation bubbled up from somewhere deep within as Katie rubbed her head against Thatch’s shin. She tried to express her appreciation the only way she was apparently allowed. Katie felt a surge of inexplicable initiative that met her desperate need for submission and leaned down to plant a loving kiss against the leafy surface of a false foot. How did this feel so good?

Indulgent words spoken in a language Katie didn’t understand met a series of rough scritches over her scalp and under her chin. She let out soft gasps, feeling all tension melting away, unable to survive touch or contact. She was sober, but every brush of finger on skin still left her desperate for more. The drugs only enhanced what was already there.

Thatch was repeating a phrase over and over. It was a really pretty language, Katie thought. Elegant, flowing sounds that Katie’s vocal cords could not have reproduced spoken in a voice that was closer to song than speech. Katie didn’t understand the words but she could feel the pride radiating down upon her from above. It was hard not to feel it reflected within herself. Katie didn’t even try to fight it. It was nice.

After long moments of pampering Thatch pulled back and snapped her fingers again. As before, Katie felt a sharp tug on her attention, like her thoughts were all forcibly brought into alignment pointing towards her beautiful plant. What was that? She opened her mouth to speak and got out the ‘Y’ of ‘Yes, Miss Aquae?’ before remembering she’d been shushed. She cut it off there.

Thatch chuckled. A rapid stream of language Katie couldn’t possibly understand followed. It felt nice to hear, even if it was gibberish to her. A finger drew her chin up and then kept lifting until Katie had been raised to a kneeling position. Finally she could see Thatch’s amused face once again. She was enjoying this.

…so was Katie.

A hand against Katie’s jaw was enough of a prompt for Katie to open it. Two delicate fingers reached in and carefully teased out her tongue, and then a vine dropped one of the small berries Katie had liked so much planetside atop it.

Oh stars, Thatch had kept those? Katie snapped her jaw shut, intent on devouring it, but a finger got in the way and a sharply spoken word stopped her dead. Katie froze up, eyes going wide, glancing from side to side as if she expected to see something that would explain this to her. Katie didn’t know a word of Affini! Why was Thatch speaking to her in it? The berry’s juices alone tasted so good that Katie was salivating, but she wasn’t allowed to eat it? She whined, not understanding. Hadn’t she earned this? More than?

Her affini raised a set of fingers before Katie’s eyes, drawing in her unwavering focus. One by one, they folded down. Katie watched without comprehension until only the last few were left. She realised it was a countdown, with long seconds between each finger folding. Katie whimpered. The fruit on her tongue tasted so much it almost hurt to keep it in place.

Thatch carefully removed her other hand’s finger from Katie’s mouth, but kept the girl pinned under a sharp enough gaze that she didn’t dare close it.

Three.

Two.

One.

Another word. A different one this time, spoken with a brighter tone and an expectant look. Katie took the risk and snapped her mouth closed, eagerly chewing the berry into delicious, sugary pulp. While she did, Thatch returned to pampering her with pets and scritches and kind, alien words. After a few moments, Katie swallowed down with one appreciative murmur, then smiled up with another.

Thatch gave her nose a gentle flick. “See? Just a pet, isn’t that right? So eager to let me do all your thinking, hmn?”

“Y—” Again, Katie realised she’d been shushed a moment too late. Hopefully a single syllable didn’t count as speech. Thatch’s hand came down to gently stroke Katie’s head, and she knew it was okay. How could she ever have wanted anything but to melt into this?

“There’s a good girl. Yes, I can tell that you like this, and this is with your head at its clearest. I have a lot to work with, here. Thank you for helping me figure out what you need. You can simply let all those silly thoughts drift away into my care.” The stroking was… nice. Thatch started at the top of Katie’s head and took her firm hand down to just above her butt, then returned to do the same all over again. It was cozy in a way Katie hadn’t expected. She looked up at her owner with a newfound appreciation, but a little apprehension.

Thatch smiled back down, indulgent to a fault. “Oh, I know, flower. It’s important to you that you get to think sometimes. It is important to me that you do, too. Your mind is beautiful, Katie, and I shall spend a very long time indeed getting to know your every aspect. However, I will tell you when you may think. Let yourself quieten down for me and act as your instincts instruct, safe in the knowledge that I will train you well. I shall take care of the rest.”

Thatch brought the back of her hand against Katie’s chin and lifted it higher, so they could stare into each other’s eyes. She spoke in a stage whisper. “Are you doing well, Katie? You seem to be enjoying this, but I do not want to risk having read your signals wrong.”

Katie nodded quickly, blinking rapidly as she tried to remember how to speak. “Ah- Um- I- Nn… Green?”

Thatch laughed and released her chin. “Good girl,” she whispered, with a gentle pat on the head and an intense burst of pride and love that Katie happily let wash over her.

Thatch raised her spare hand up to about Katie’s chest level, like she was asking for a handshake. “Now, give me one of those adorable little mewls and let’s teach you how to-” The next word was something in Affini. Katie didn’t know what it meant, but she was gathering that that was rather the point.

Katie let out a whimper, a nod, an adorable little mewl, and raised her hand to shake.

Chapter Text

“When did you get this smooth?”

Katie casually wandered down one of the Elettarium’s many quiet dirt pathways, fingers casually entwined with the absolute nightmare of a plant she was now bound to for life. Her other hand clasped a bottle of water that she was rapidly emptying. Thankfully the bottle was topped by a small valve that required a little suction to open, because otherwise Katie would have spilled half the contents on the floor already. She was exhausted. Who would ever have guessed that crawling around on the floor would be that tiring?

Thatch waved her spare hand in the air in some vague, indecipherable gesture. “Perhaps it is you who is different, Katie. I have brought your soul into step with mine and so it may come as no surprise that you find yourself enamoured.”

Katie offered her dork the remains of her water bottle. The valve was designed to also allow small vines entry, apparently, as that was just what Thatch did with a quiet word of thanks.

“Nah, you’re way more confident these days.” Katie gave her plant’s hand a squeeze. While she did, she couldn’t help but look around. The ship was populated but quiet, as it so often was. A dozen or so groups trod their same path. Mostly pairs, mostly of one affini and one terran, but hardly exclusively so. Some larger groups, some non-humans, Katie wanted to spend more time getting to know some of the non-Terrans aboard the ship, because… who wouldn’t? The affini were great, but they were bombastic in a way Katie could never hope to match. They would carry her when she stumbled, but perhaps Katie could keep up with a different species by herself.

Thatch laughed, giving Katie’s hand a quick squeeze back. “Yes, well. I have you to thank for that, Katie. You are bringing out a side of me I had given up on, and I am quite grateful.”

“Quite,” Katie mirrored, before leaning into her plant’s side with rolled eyes. “You dork. How long had you been waiting to do that?”

“A handful of days?” Thatch shrugged. “Ever since I met you? A hundred and four years?”

Katie frowned, stopping where she stood. Thatch continued on a step before noticing Katie had fallen behind, then turned and knelt to bring herself closer to the girl’s level. “Is something wrong, darling?”

“A hundred and four? You were a hundred and three when we met.”

Thatch’s eyes narrowed slightly as she tilted her head in confusion. “Y- Yes? Time has passed since then, Katie. I will continue getting older just as you do. Is this… confusing to you?”

“No, you ass.” Katie fixed her plant with a flat stare. “I mean, you’ve had a birthday?”

Thatch seemed taken aback. “A birth…? Katie, we do not reproduce like you do, I was uplifted from—”

“That’s not what I mean, hon,” Katie interrupted. “The anniversary of you starting to exist! It’s a big deal! It’s worth celebrating!”

Thatch blinked repeatedly, then scratched just behind Katie’s ear with a low chuckle. “Terran years are very short, pet, and we rarely measure with them. We could certainly celebrate your birthday, though, if you would like.”

“No, I wanna celebrate yours! When was it?”

Thatch glanced away, pulling a face that Katie guessed was meant to emulate the sort of face humans tended to pull when deep in thought. It looked very silly, and Katie laughed at it, earning herself a raised eyebrow. “A week or two past, perhaps? The concept of time as you know it is complicated, flower, which is why we usually measure our age by Bloom.”

Katie realised she was pulling her own version of the thinking face a moment later, when Thatch laughed. Katie blushed. She had long since lost the ability to silence the affini with one of her own looks. “But you’re a second Bloom and I know you didn’t get there the slow way. Also, sorry again for trying to kill you, I guess.”

Thatch ruffled her hair. “My dangerous rebel.”

Katie nodded with sharp, rapid nods. “Yours.”

“Good girl. You are correct, of course, but it is a lot less common for most of us to suffer so much damage that we are forced to regrow early than it is for us to spend time in a universe that cannot keep a straight clock. Besides, physical trauma averages out; time dilation does not, and so we long since decided that it was best to abandon any pretense at non-local time synchronisation and simply use what we have.” The problem with having first fallen for this adorable softie through her love of teaching was that Katie was, apparently, entirely incapable of stopping her halfway through a speech about literally anything. Roots, Katie wanted to take notes even though this was a distraction from her actual point.

Apparently she really did love this plant, even though she was an adorable dork. “Okay, fine, but that doesn’t get you out of celebrating your birthday. Do you at least know what day it was in, like, your own frame of reference?”

Thatch opened her mouth to respond, but after a moment simply went with a shrug. “There is a margin of error,” she admitted. “I did not keep as impeccable records for myself as perhaps I should during some of my travels.” A pair of vines came up to grab Katie under the armpits and lift her onto Thatch’s shoulders so they could keep walking and still make their meeting.

Katie rolled her eyes. “Hmn. Okay, well, a week or two ago was about when you took me in, so let’s just say I was a birthday present and we can bake a cake later?” Katie felt the low rumble of Thatch’s dubiousness buzz through her body. “C’mon? Pretty please? Please, Miss Aquae, light of my life?”

“Okay, okay, enough.” Thatch chuckled. “You have far too much power. We shall bake me a cake and I shall consider whether I was wise to let you think for this meeting.”

Katie felt her cheeks warm just a little bit. Mostly, she felt really happy. Also, she was kinda high, which was still a novel experience but would apparently keep her bureaucratic anxiety down. Probably Katie should consider the ethics of attempting to sign away her independence while her mind was being altered by chemicals, her collar, and Thatch’s cadence, but she already knew she’d come down on the side of it being okay. She wasn’t capable of deciding otherwise any more.

They reached the set location of their meeting a few minutes in advance of the scheduled time and headed towards one of the larger tables. The hostess was already skipping over, tiny wings bouncing behind her. It’d just seemed appropriate to Katie to have this meeting at Angel’s Delight, the first place that Thatch and her had eaten on board.

“Hey!! What can I get you?” Angel asked, then paused. She slowly tilted her head to one side and leaned forward, looking into Katie’s eyes for a few moments with a surprisingly piercing gaze. “Ohmygoddess, congratulations!” she exclaimed. “I just know you two will be soooo happy together!”

The angel glanced over at Thatch. “May I touch your floret, Miss?”

“Uh, hang on,” Katie interjected.

Thatch, however, nodded. “Certainly, go ahead. She really likes chin scratches.”

Katie’s head snapped around to stare up at Thatch. “Wait, but— O-oh!” Katie’s words died in her throat, eyes rolling up as Angel’s nails raked across her skin, slowly drawing her head around to face the delighted waitress. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was having spent the last few hours with barely a thought in her head, but Katie felt herself sinking into a quiet, fuzzy headspace more with every scratch.

The floret was saying something, but it was so hard to focus and harder still just to hear over the sound of Katie’s own quiet whimpers. Maybe she could have fought her way back to rationality if she’d really, really tried, but it felt so good not to. Warm fingers against smooth skin robbed her of her thoughts, but it wasn’t a heist she could find it in herself to stop.

Katie felt her knees buckle, dropping her to all fours. There was a moment’s interruption in the petting, long enough to start to pull together some kind of thought process before a gentle hand came to rest atop her head and squashed it all back down. There was speech. Words. Communication. Even something Katie might have been able to understand if she could focus on it, yet she felt so serene that trying at all was just out of reach. The hand on her head massaged her scalp with slow, gentle movements and everything seemed far too nice to want to change anything at all.

A sound snapped through the sluggish silence of Katie’s mind. Thatch’s voice. Sharp. Katie blinked rapidly, looking around to find her affini had already moved over to the table and taken a seat. Thatch repeated the sound with an impatient tinge at the edges of her voice and Katie finally recognised it as one of the Affini words Thatch had been using back home. Katie hurried over, scampering on all fours to reach her plant’s side to sit, chin up, attentive and adoring.

A smirk and a raised eyebrow from above broke the mood enough for Katie to realise what she’d just done. Her cheeks burned as conscious thought flooded back. “Thatch!” she hissed, voice kept quiet. “We’re in public!”

“And that public finds you very cute,” the plant replied, gesturing over to one of the other tables. The human sat at it had her hands clutched against her heart, the affini had partially melted, and there was one species Katie didn’t recognise with mannerisms that, nonetheless, screamed either gentle adoration or predatory delight. Probably the former.

Huh. Maybe it was just the drugs squashing her anxiety, but it actually felt pretty okay to be the center of attention here. Maybe Thatch was right. Maybe she was just more comfortable like this? Katie flashed a grateful smile over at the other table then returned her attention to the one who mattered most here. “Okay, yeah, I… but I’ve gotta be able to think for this meeting, right?”

Thatch shrugged, then patted her lap. “Up, girl.”

“You nightmare,” Katie protested, with a whimper. The gentle ‘threat’ of another scritch sent to steal away her thoughts was enough of an incentive to get Katie climbing up onto Thatch’s knee, though in fairness that was exactly where she wanted to be.

“We do not normally require florets to think at all, and I believe I know what it is you wish. If you would rather spend this meeting quietly curled up on my lap then that can certainly be arranged.”

Katie bit her lip. Lightly, as she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to do any damage to herself. Was that a tempting offer? In some ways, it really was, but another part of Katie worried that she was diving in dangerously fast. She could easily see how people could lose themselves to this. How they could sink into a thoughtless bliss and never want to resurface, and never have to resurface.

But no. Thatch didn’t want that for her. Katie wasn’t sure what she wanted yet, but diving too deep into the first thing that seemed to really work seemed like a great recipe for getting burned. “I think I’d rather do this myself, if that’s okay? Besides, I think you’d need some support.”

“Mmh, then I suppose I should really—” Thatch reached a finger underneath Katie’s chin and tapped the glowing orb on her collar. Katie flinched, emitting a sharp gasp as something that had loomed so large she’d missed it entirely released its grip on her mind. Her sense of balance frazzled out and Katie was only prevented from tumbling to the ground by Thatch’s generosity. “There we go. Good girl, eyes on me, please. Let’s get that attention sharpened back up.”

Katie looked up. Wow, her plant was really pretty and super cute and kinda hot and… Katie could cut the adoration loop there. She wasn’t on a very intense dosage of anything, now that she stopped to think about it, just a mild sedative to keep the anxiety down. Katie blinked rapidly. How had she managed to forget what they’d built her collar for? “Woah, that was more intense than I’d expected it to be. Is that why I felt so comfortable?”

“Not at all.” Thatch ran a firm hand through Katie’s hair. It felt as delightful as ever, though Katie found she could resist the gentle pull that wanted to drag her down into… what? The soft, slow, fuzzy headspace she’d spent the morning exploring? Calling it a ‘head’ space hardly felt appropriate given how empty her head had felt. More of a ‘pet’ space, really. A petspace. Thatch spotted her confusion, and with a quick pulse of heat and light drew Katie’s attention up into her eyes. “You remember when we were designing the collar, don’t you, girl?”

Oh. Huh. Katie did, at least once she’d been reminded. Fascinating. “I… do, but… uh… Oh!” She perked up, shuffling around so she could kneel on Thatch’s lap and look into her partner’s eyes more comfortably. “I was right!” she declared.

The gem was exactly what Katie had thought it was, but she’d managed to trick herself into not thinking about the details too hard. Katie’s sixth sense, the barely-conscious feeling in her head that was her mind’s best attempt to understand the emotional link she held with Thatch, was just the exposed surface of a deeper iceberg. Its influence was subtle and probably would have remained unnoticeable, but when faced with a device that could record and replicate the complex dance of resonance and rhythm that underpinned it all Katie had been inspired towards science. An hour or so of Thatch trying to figure out how to record a specific subconscious influence, a little amplification, and Katie had managed to build something that convinced her to forget she’d built it. To her surprise, as a side effect it seemed to make the rest of Thatch’s subconscious influence hit twice as hard.

“You were,” Thatch agreed. “This is legitimately fascinating. With a little more refinement I think we could make something truly wondrous with this. Thank you.”

Katie tilted her head to one side.

Thatch glanced away. What was that feeling Katie was mirroring? Without the collar amplifying the subconscious aspects of her sixth sense, Thatch felt almost distant. Katie could still feel her as well as she ever had before, but now it felt like hearing somebody through tinny speakers. She could hear the words, but she’d gotten used to a higher fidelity.

Embarrassment, maybe? Something awkward-adjacent. Katie’s fingertips itched, finding herself wanting to reach up and tap the gem on her collar. Turn it back on. Deepen the connection. Sink into Thatch’s presence and let herself become a conduit for the song. She balled her hands into gentle fists and gave her head a gentle shake. She should stay clear-headed.

“What’s up, hon?” Katie asked. She didn’t need a biotechnological connection to her best friend to figure out what was on her mind. She could just ask.

“I have spent a significant fraction of the last thirty years trying and failing to produce anything of worth for this civilisation.” Thatch’s latticework rustled with the force of air being pulled through. She returned her gaze to Katie. “You have been mine for fewer than two weeks and I feel more hope that we could achieve that together than I have at any point alone. Do not misunderstand, the phenomena we are playing with are well understood in principle, but we are early into our explorations of creatures sharing your phenotype and we could, perhaps, make a small but real contribution to the future of the Terran people.” The awkwardness had gradually shrunk back as Thatch had continued speaking, slowly replaced by a growing enthusiasm that Katie recognised from her own studies.

Under Thatch’s guiding hand, Katie had learned a great many new and exciting things, but of course none of that had been new to the plant herself. This seemed like it was.

Thatch’s words faltered. “If- If we were to keep investigating it, of course, which you are not required to do. It would be a lot of effort for no guaranteed result and you still need to acclimatise to your new life.”

“Hon.” Katie smiled up. “Is this something that’s important to you?”

“I…” Thatch shifted her position, sending Katie falling forward into her chest where she could be held like some kind of living plush animal. “I think so. I feel as though I have such a debt to this society in which we live that I have contributed nothing back to.”

“Wasn’t it you who said the concept of debt was barbaric?” Katie had to speak directly into Thatch’s chest to talk, but if she was honest with herself, it was far from the first time and far from the weirdest way she’d spoken to the alien. “Way back, you told me there weren’t any requirements to live here. Were you misleading me?”

Thatch’s grip grew a little tighter. “Flower, no. Of course not. You will never be asked to justify your existence here. You deserve your place simply by the incomparable value that all life in this universe holds.”

“I was talking about you, Miss.”

Thatch shut up. The emotion that drilled down into Katie was definitely embarrassment. Even at a lower fidelity, it was still obvious if the volume was turned up high enough.

“Also, you are my place, and so if you ever had to justify your existence here that would affect me too. But that won’t happen, because you have incomparable value too.” Having difficult conversations had always been a staple of their relationship, but there was something special about getting to do it while Katie was curled up on her owner’s lap with a hand stroking through her hair.

She could see how, for many, being a pet would make it harder to really push at their owner’s fragile points, but Katie found the opposite to be true. She was providing comfort and certainty even as they approached difficult topics, and that meant she could feel safe prodding harder. She knew she’d be there to clean up the mess.

Thatch’s hand curled, gently gripping Katie’s hair. Her other arm pressed tight enough that Katie would have struggled to speak. “You are not wrong, flower. Nobody will ever ask me to justify my place here either. If we were to retreat to our home and only ever leave for light social engagements and parties then we would, I suspect, be joining a significant proportion of our culture.”

But. The but was unsaid, but it didn’t need to be said. But Caeca. But Thatch felt that she had blood on her hands and was starting from less than nothing. But Thatch thought that she had been a negative influence on the universe to date and yearned to fix that. It was deeply unfair to herself and probably all kinds of emotionally unhealthy, but it was also exactly the kind of deep-seated trauma that Katie wasn’t sure she could fix in five minutes before a dinner-date with a pair of bureaucracy kinksters.

Katie was honestly unsure she could fix it at all. She wasn’t a space therapist.

There probably were space therapists, right? Katie made a mental note to look that up later and felt a quiet rush of euphoria at the knowledge she probably would actually remember. She hadn’t even realised how much her head needed to be brought under control, but her mix of medication had her feeling like a new and upgraded Katie just by itself. It was a start.

“Good. You’re special and unique. I guess if we’re already going to make me a project, though, we may as well be scientific about it?” Katie paused. She didn’t know how to feel about the request. She knew that she would gladly do anything that would make Thatch happy, but was this even a healthy thing to pursue? “Is that taking all the romance out of it? I think you burned any kind of dominant mood out of my head, sorry, could I get you to say it?”

Thatch laughed, then spent a moment rearranging Katie so she was free to look away. Only then did she place a finger beneath the girl’s chin to lock her in place. “I told you that I was going to tear your precious mind into pieces and put you back together how I wanted. I’ll do it again and again until I understand you so deeply you can be a case study in malleable flesh. My plans haven’t changed just because you were too enthralled to run.”

“All that has changed is that I will have you beg for every cut.”

Katie didn’t need her collar’s higher intensity to feel the words drill through her. They were enough alone. She’d been ready for it and she still couldn’t manage more than a blush and a silent whimper. She thought that she understood the reality of what she’d agreed to, but the fantasy that Thatch provided left her breathless all the same.

Katie jumped in surprise as something unexpected entered the edge of her vision. A rounded, white rectangle with some words scrawled over it.

I hope we’re not interrupting anything, it said, in words that glimmered with colour and light.

Right. They were here for a meeting. So much for Katie’s plan to be capable of thinking. “Uhh,” she whimpered, looking behind her to find the two clerks towering above. At least that proved that Katie felt small for reasons entirely unrelated to physical height, because even Wing seemed to tower despite her relatively diminutive stature.

Katie’s attempts to speak were stifled further as the affini clerk reached forward and scratched the top of her head. “Apologies for the delay. There was a little trouble while bringing your former crewmates out of stasis, but all is stable for the moment and we should not be needed. Ready to finish up your paperwork, Katie? If we’re all ready then it shouldn’t take too long.”

The cafe’s tacky Terran aesthetic was very much a lie. The tables were constructed from some kind of composite material that felt like cheap plastic but actually seemed stronger than the Indomitable’s hull by volume. They were casual marvels of engineering prowess and more than proof enough that the other species of this universe existed to be pets, in Katie’s potentially biased opinion.

The table groaned as Montsechia dropped onto it a stack of paperwork that was at least a Katie tall. “There we go. Not much at all. Have you already ordered? We may want snacks. Katie, as the only one of us here who has ever experienced this style of Terran cuisine, do you have any recommendations?” Montsechia smiled down at her, twirling a pen in a hand that changed and shifted as needed to keep the tool in motion.

“Uh, I’m not sure I’ve ever—”

Wing held up a finger, scribbled for a moment, and then flipped over her pad. November 18th, 2548, Cheesy’s Cheesehouse, Luhman 16 1 Orbital, Luhman 16.

Katie squinted. Yeah, she had been in that region of space around then, she thought, but she didn’t remember…

Montsechia put a finger to the tower of paperwork, drew it down about halfway, and then pulled out a single sheet of paper. She handed it to Katie. Documentation on the visit, collating records of the credits transfer that had paid for it, the purchase orders that had originally acquired the ingredients as well as the origins of those ingredients, stills from surveillance cameras in the Cheesehouse as well as a wide array of other supporting records from the cafe. Including, as it happened, her order.

Katie glanced at the pile of papers with a dawning horror. “When Rosaceae said you’d collated all my files, is this what she meant?” She’d expected governmental records, certainly. Maybe some stuff from old ship rosters, and what few official medical records would exist, but not this.

“We regret that it is not more complete, but you spent much of your time traveling aboard vessels which were less than rigorous about their record keeping and we are only hobbyist neoxenoveterinary archeobureaucrats. Still, Wing and I spent a few delightful evenings pulling your life back together.” The plant smiled, the jellyfish glowed, and both seemed to think this was some kind of reasonable hobby. Katie couldn’t help but laugh quietly as she felt a gentle bemusement radiating down on her. A quiet joke shared just between owner and pet.

But… here it was. Katie’s life down on paper. Even a— Katie glanced down at the paper— thirteen minute, forty second stop at a cheap cafe for synthfries and a horseburger apparently earned a sheet summarising it with half a dozen separate identifiers that Katie assumed linked off to the full detail on their computer systems. They literally knew more about her than she knew herself.

Was this… it? Katie’s life to date. Nearly thirty years of struggle, toil, and stress, and her life reduced down to little more than an ordered sequence of receipts? She would have thought that a pile of papers as tall as her was excessive once, but Katie was surrounded by giants and she felt very, very small.

Fuck.

Katie handed the page in her hands back to the clerk, who filed it back into the middle. “I… guess whatever equivalent they have of synthfries and horseburger, then.”

“Oh, it will have to be some other kind of burger; even synthetic, they wouldn’t serve anything poisonous here.”

Katie shrugged. Whatever was good. She couldn’t tear her eyes off of the paperwork stack. It felt like such a loss to discover only now that her life to date had been so futile. There had been so much wasted time. So much of her life she could never get back that had been pointless struggle. It reframed everything.

Katie felt the gentle touch of leaves brushing across her shoulder, and rolled over without really thinking about it. She rested her cheek against Thatch’s chest and hugged the offered arm. Katie could feel her plant above speaking, carrying on the conversation so Katie could have a quiet few moments while a gentle hand stroked down her back. The wordless offer remained. She didn’t need to think. This was the last hurrah for her political and social independence, and wouldn’t it be fitting for her only to be present in principle?

The reality of her position hadn’t really hit Katie until she’d seen it laid out bare in black and white. Katie wasn’t small; she was microscopic. A speck in the greater cosmos. Even Thatch, gargantuan as she seemed, was. Even this ship was. Her basic story had played out a trillion trillion times and it would be played out a quadrillion quadrillion more. On a universal scale, what could be big enough to matter?

Easy question. The Affini Compact in aggregate was big enough to matter. These creatures weren’t just saving her. They were saving everyone. They were making a better universe.

Angel scurried over with a little bowl of steaming potato slices and a tray of what looked very much like burgers, also steaming. She was happy to do it just for the joy of seeing it done. She, too, was an insignificant speck making an insignificant contribution but in that moment she represented something far greater to Katie. Everyone could do this. Every otherwise insignificant sophont could make their own infinitesimal contribution to the better universe that was the Affini’s civilisation-wide gigaproject and the aggregation of that effort was anything but insignificant when multiplied by the uncountable diversity of life that stood to benefit.

Life in the Terran Accord had felt pointless because it largely had been. Exploiting the universe just to eat, even though there would have been enough for everyone if those at the top had simply shared that which they didn’t even need. Here was different. Here, if Katie could make even the smallest imaginable improvement it would be reflected on trillions of lives. If she could help to save even a second along somebody else’s route to leaving their futile origins behind she would have helped, just a little bit, to bring that better universe into existence. If everybody helped just a little bit, then that dream could be a reality.

Katie tugged on Thatch’s arm and a friendly vine came over to lift her chin so she could face her owner with a newfound resolve. Katie whispered, speaking just to her plant. It was a fantasy to imagine that her universe could actually shrink down to only focus on this one single creature, no matter how beautiful she was. Katie could do better than that. She could let what was important to Thatch be important to her and she could do her part building everyone’s better reality. “Thatch, I wanna help. Even a little. I don’t want that—” She gestured over to the paperwork— “to be all I do for the universe. I want to help make it better, like you’re doing. I know I’m just a pet, but maybe I can be useful to you, still?”

Katie could recognise pride even at low levels. It was one of her favourite emotions to feel impressed upon her from above. The rush of pride she felt after asking was loud, clear, and immediate, joined with a firm hand placed atop her head to hold her close. “Yes. You can. Thank you. I appreciate this more than I can say.”

“Not more than I can feel.”

Chapter Text

The Affini were clearly unfamiliar with the idea that the pen could be mightier than the sword, for Katie was better armed than she thought should be allowed. To her left lay an array of implements in a dozen colours; to her right the tower of paperwork the plants expected her to sign.

Across the desk were the clerks. Wing and Montsechia Vidalii.

The pen-pusher and her pet.

“So,” Montsechia began. “We can take this slow. There’s a few decisions to make and barring unforeseen disaster you have our close attention. To make sure we are all on the same page, as it were, my beautiful assistant has prepared a few questions.”

She slid Wing’s writing pad over the desk, showing off the jellyfish’s precise scrawl. She also held out a potato slice an inch away from Katie’s mouth, making her lean forward to eat it out of her fingers. The slices were delicious and Katie was pretty sure she was being shamelessly manipulated, but in all honesty she found it a comfort. These weren’t emotionless bureaucrats like Terra had preferred, but instead clever ones who knew they knew best and simply needed to lead Katie into giving them those few missing puzzle pieces.

Katie ate the potato slice and received a quick chin scratch in exchange. She felt a moment of comfortable quiet overtake her as she chewed down a treat while receiving doting attentions and letting her mind sink just a little into her comfortable petspace. She kind of wanted to double-check to make sure the gem on her collar was inactive, but it wouldn’t have done anything for the clerk anyway.

This was just training taking hold, with Thatch’s influence making it stick.

“Thank you, Miss Vidalii.” Katie beamed up at the clerk for a moment, then glanced down at the questions. She wasn’t sure if the pens she’d been given were smart enough to tell whether they were writing on paper or technology or if it was simply that the difference between paper and plant-tech was thin enough to disappear, but her pens worked just as well on either surface.

Katie quickly skimmed through the questions with a growing sense of concern. Her spare hand squeezed Thatch’s. Some of them looked hard. Katie’s plant was being quiet, mostly here for support and security, as otherwise this was Katie’s time. The girl looked up and backward, stretching her neck to glance towards Thatch’s face.

“Do not worry, little one.” A vine stroked its way down Katie’s arm. “They are not trying to catch you out. There are no wrong answers here, it is merely that the solutions may be different depending on your needs.”

Katie nodded, a little distant, and returned her focus to the pad. It was hard to believe that such complex bureaucracy could really be so benign, but it was easy to believe as she was told to. Funny how that worked.

I, Katie [Aquae, Second Floret], hereby confirm that I am very cute and deserve all the good things which are coming to me.

To the left of each line was a checkbox, and at the bottom of the pad was a place for her signature. This seemed like an unusual place to start. Every word could be vitally important. Katie knew nobody was really trying to trick her here, but getting her to sign away more than she expected seemed like something the paperwork predators before her would treat as sport.

“So, okay. Firstly, the name is styled differently, what does that mean?” Katie asked.

Wing flashed a rapid sequence of colours at a speed Katie couldn’t hope to follow. The lights jumped around her body faster than Katie could even keep up with, never mind have any way of understanding. Montsechia seemed to have little trouble translating. “Wing says that she thought you would prefer to use your name-to-be here, and that it doesn’t really matter because we’re about to strip your legal authority anyway and all of this will really be enforced by your owner.”

A gentle tug on Katie’s emotions from above, flaring up a sense of amused confusion, had her trying to stifle a laugh and subtly kicking her plant’s leg under the desk. How had she found the one affini on board who didn’t have a massive thing for paperwork?

Katie considered the question fresh, shrugged, and slapped down a tick. She was very cute, at least according to Thatch, and if karma existed then she sure did deserve a break.

I, Katie (henceforth known as pet, floret, or Katieflower), confirm that I wish to revoke my citizenship with the prior Terran Accord and do not wish to use it as a basis for citizenship under the authority of the Human branch of the Terran Transitory Territory Administration.

Well, that one was easy. Katie checked the box.

Thatch raised the hand which wasn’t entwined with Katie’s own and gave her head a quick scratch. “Good pet. You didn’t need that old name anyway.”

Oh. Katie(flower) flushed. It hadn’t taken her long to get tripped up after all, even watching out for it. She’d spent a long time trying to pick herself out a name that felt right and signing it away hit hard, even if ‘Katie’ was still a valid shortening of one of the names she was now permitted. It was still exactly what she’d been afraid of back on the Indomitable, that her identity would be forfeit, wasn’t it?

“Worry not, Katie,” Thatch rumbled from above. “I was very involved in the construction of this. There are no answers here that are wrong.”

Her prior identity hadn’t been stolen away, it was just being used as a trellis. Support on which to grow someone new. Katie could feel a nervous excitement bubbling up within her, and it was hard to tell whether it was her own or a reflection of her owner. Maybe it didn’t matter.

Okay. Next question.

I, pet, confirm that I am not attempting to escape loan, let, or lien, nor am I attempting to circumvent the requirements placed upon me as outlined by the Treaty on the Methods, Limitations, and Procedures for Human Domestication, section 158.

Hmn. Katie glanced up. “I don’t know about this one, I kind of am? I don’t think I’m trying to avoid it in, like, a bad way, but it’d feel pretty bad to be told that I still counted as human.” She laughed, then used the blunt end of her pen to jingle her own nametag. “It’s not like I’m trying to get out of domestication here, right?”

Montsechia emitted a thoughtful hum, then spent a moment dancing coloured leaves at her assistant. The conversation seemed rapid and though Katie at first thought it impassionate due to the lack of clear body language she soon decided that the growing want in the pair’s eyes suggested this was anything but cool and calm.

“We were going to suggest we create a new human-derived subspecies for you, but that would require you abide by the terms of the existing treaty. However, we have some experience with treaty negotiations now and we would be delighted to hash out the Katie Domestication Treaty with you at a later date. Be warned, however, my darling Wing has a taste for it now and you are unlikely to have many rights left over by the end of the negotiation. You hardly have much leverage here, little one.”

Katie had grown a reasonable appreciation for paperwork since stepping aboard this ridiculous civilisation’s starship. She understood why much of it was important. Even given that, the hunger in Montsechia’s eyes as she proposed a firm and combative stripping of Katie’s legal rights, despite that she was trying very hard to give them away, was difficult to understand. The enthusiasm was catching all the same. “Do I get a lawyer?” Katie asked, feeling a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth that she only just managed to suppress.

Montsechia grinned back openly, with eager cruelty. “No.” She placed a single finger just in front of Katie’s chin and pinned the girl under the weight of her expectation until she gave in and placed her head atop it. “You get one hour to negotiate and we reserve the right to dock time for bad behaviour, or grant it for good. We’re two points into this and you’ve already given us your name. How long do you think you’ll last if we stop trying to be nice? So, be good while we go through the rest of this and maybe we’ll let you have a say in what you’ll end up signing.”

Stars, Katie should really check up on how Cici handled this. The poor thing seemed mechanically hardwired for fluster, and it had the further disadvantage of actually having been doing this for real. Katie just laughed and glanced away, biting the end of her pen with a growing blush. When they put it like that, Katie could start to understand how they could get so worked up over paperwork.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Katie laughed. “Shall I just skip this point for now?”

“Hmn, put a cross through the last part, I think you can still agree with the first clause.”

Katie did as she was told, then slapped a check next to it. If the pressure on Katie’s mind was any indication, and it invariably was, Thatch wasn’t quite sure how to feel about this either. Maybe Katie could convince her that filling out forms could be fun.

Next question.

I, Thatch Aquae, so swear that my floret-to-be is extremely cute and adorable and I love her very much and will take wonderful care of her and she deserves all the nice things I can give her.

The pen was unceremoniously stolen from Katie’s fingers, and then returned once Thatch had placed her own elaborate checkmark in the box just to the side of her oath and surrounded it with half a dozen little hearts. Katie glanced up and raised an eyebrow. “Are they making you do this?”

“We made her tone it down, actually, the pad has limited storage capacity,” Montsechia interjected. “After the preludes we get into the most important pieces.”

Ah, this next one just referenced one of the sheets to her right. Katie spent a moment thumbing through the pile looking for the right one, and then eventually gave up and looked over at the clerks for help. How was she possibly meant to find one sheet in such a tangled web?

“It’s the one on the top, pet. We put them in order for you.”

Ah. Katie flushed, grabbed the first form, and started reading it. It used much more standardised language than the previous points, but with some parts crossed out and replaced with more appropriate versions.

Elettarium Office of Records and Rituals

Regarding acquiescence and submission to the dissolution of the prior Terran Accord ‘government’, intended for feralist and prior feralist ideologues

1.1 I confirm my understanding that the political structure previously known as the ‘Terran Accord’ has been found in violation of the laws of the Affini Compact and therefore was not a valid structure.

1.2 I confirm my understanding that due to this, the structure once known as the ‘Terran Accord’ has been permanently dissolved.

1.3 I confirm my understanding that this was deserved and just.

2.1 I confirm my understanding that, as a prior citizen of the former ‘Terran Accord’, I can no longer receive political representation via prior ‘Terran Accord’ structures and my prior citizenship is no longer valid.

3.1 I confirm that I would pretty please like to ask nicely for citizenship in the Human Katie branch of the Terran Transitory Territory Administration.

3.2 I confirm my understanding that while the above is not predicated on good behaviour, I will be a very good girl and do as I am told anyway because I am a very good girl.

4.1 I confirm that I am exceptionally cute and very grateful to the Affini Compact for rescuing me from the prior ‘Terran Accord’.

Katie glanced over at the the stack of things they expected her to sign. Were they all going to be this saccharine? There was almost a cruelty to it if she tried to imagine what these forms would have been like to sign back when Terra had first fallen. This wasn’t just signing away her rights, it was signing away her dignity, too.

Katie dropped her signature at the bottom. A practiced, flowing Katie led into a much rougher, printed Aquae. At least she’d spelled it correctly. Katie figured she would get plenty of practice before the end of the day.

After that she returned to the pad for the next overall point in this obtuse and inexplicably exciting process. Every tick and signature left her feeling smaller than the last, and there was something intensely comforting about burying herself in the bureaucratic embrace of a species so comfortable with its own superiority as to demand this of her.

I, flower, confirm I would like to withdraw from the Human race, politically, biologically, and legally speaking, and am doing so with a full understanding of what this means to me and for me.

Katie carefully placed the pen down on the table and opened her mouth. Montsechia took the opportunity to deliver a potato slice into it, and Thatch ruffled her hair while Katie chewed. This was bullying. How was Katie meant to do philosophy like this? She whimpered and thanked both of them, then took a breath and tried to collect her scattered thoughts. This was the big question, and something that had been a quiet recurring struggle for her for many years even before Thatch had ensured it would dominate her idle thoughts.

Katie didn’t know if she could check that box. How did she know if she was legitimate, here? She needed a second opinion. “I don’t really know what it means to count as human,” Katie admitted. “If it’s the society, then all my life I’ve been told I don’t fit, that I’m not a real girl, that I don’t deserve to be comfortable or to be happy because I studied the wrong thing, was too lazy, or wasn’t born rich. I never got anything out of trying to be included but more people pushing me away. The only reason why I had to play along was because if I didn’t, I would have been left to asphyxiate in deep space, die of thirst on some forgotten rock with a bare atmosphere, or left to starve even in Terra’s grandest cities. I don’t agree with the prevailing values of humanity, and while I could probably find people there who I do agree with, they too were on the edges of society and they too were made to suffer to earn a place they were forced to strive for.”

Katie believed it, but it fell flat. Her problem had never really been the bigots or the assholes. She had never felt welcomed, no, but she’d gotten used to that. There were other things she’d never gotten used to.

“If it’s the biology, then I really don’t care for that either. Miss Aquae told me that species divisions are kind of arbitrary, and I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about that since. I do have a human body, I guess, but I don’t really want it? It was born wrong and I’ve already had to pull it apart to replace bits of it just so I can be comfortable and I’m so tired of it.”

Katie looked down at the pad. It was such a big question. How could she be sure that she had a full understanding? Who could possibly tell her that?

Another easy one. Thatch could, obviously. That was why they were here, so Katie could present herself in totality and let herself be judged by somebody that had earned that right.

“There was a human philosopher, like, a long, long time ago, called Regge Despartes or something and he was full of shit. He said, um, that humans were better than animals because animals were just little biological robots going about their programming without real minds, and that’s what I feel like. One of his ‘beast machines’. I can’t think like I need to be able to without medication. I can’t look like I need to without drugs. My emotions swing wildly without giving me any clue as to what’s wrong and I so obviously react in preprogrammed ways. I think things not because they’re right, but because people back under capitalism could make higher profits if we’d all been programmed to want things we didn’t need. I act in ways not because they’re useful or smart or beneficial, but because a hundred thousand years ago my biological ancestors needed to be able to run away from predators and so now any time I see something moving in the distance there’s this part of my brain that demands all my attention so I can check it isn’t dangerous, even though it can’t possibly be dangerous because I’m here.”

Thatch’s spare arm came up to gently squeeze Katie’s chest. She took a moment to close her eyes and lean into the embrace, letting herself be calmed by the gentle rise and fall of Thatch’s heat. She’d been getting a little worked up. This helped.

“So, um. I don’t want that either. I want a body that works and a mind that was at least programmed by somebody who cares about me and I guess calling myself not human isn’t really true there, but maybe it can be an aspiration. I feel like I could be so much more than I am if I wasn’t being held back. I don’t know if I’m just a biological automaton, but if I am I still want Thatch to be the one oiling the gears.”

Katie looked up at the plant who owned her in all ways but legally. “I don’t know if I get to check the box, Miss. Am I… do I count as understanding? I can’t say I’m certain about any of this.”

Thatch smiled down at her. “We’ll figure out just how you work together. Check the box, my little beast machine.”

Katie checked the box. There it was. Down in black and white before the only species in the galaxy with the bureaucratic might to actually strip her of her species and grant her the freedom to find out what she really was. Regardless of what that little voice in the back of Katie’s head that doubted everything she said might think, there was a higher power involved now. Katie was not human.

How many more of these points were there left to go?

I, the undersigned, promise I am a very very good girl and will sign this document with my very prettiest signature!!

Okay, that was an easy one. Katie checked it.

The next referenced the next sheet in the stack, taking her from the HumanKatie branch of the Terran Transitory Territory Administration into the TerranKatie Protectorate.

“How much work did you need to do to make this all add up?” Katie asked, looking up at the clerks. They’d gotten distracted by each other and both looked up with vaguely guilty expressions on their faces.

“Honestly most of it just copied from elsewhere with some wording changes, but admittedly neither of us slept last night. That’s okay, though, I don’t need to sleep anywhere near as often as I like to, and my darling jelly here is on a very high dosage of class-Z0 xenodrugs.” After realising Katie was unfamiliar, she added “They inhibit tiredness and sleep responses. Not a good idea to use indefinitely, but she is so very cute when she’s loopy.”

Katie looked over at the pair with unsubtle concern. “You stayed up all night for this? I… really didn’t want to be this much of a bother.”

“Oh, no, floret, please. The kerfuffle down in the stasis bays was what kept us up. Your project was so we could blow off some steam after.” She gave Katie another potato slice, and followed it up with a piece of one of the burgers. Katie gave an appreciative moan to the latter. It was very good, and—they were assured—not poisonous in the slightest.

Katie wasn’t sure how to feel about the rest of the crew of the Indomitable being here, apparently now awake. If they’d been in stasis since the ship had been taken, then for them Katie’s whole journey had passed in the blink of an eye. What would they think of her now? She shook her head. That kind of thinking was a relic of the old Katie, who had to worry about things beyond the cute but damaged plant currently cuddling her. The fates of her old crew were out of her hands and ultimately didn’t matter. They’d find good homes and have happy lives and Katie didn’t need to worry herself any more than that.

She signed the document. The work was already done, it’d be rude not to use it.

“Hey, if I’m the only citizen of the Katie Protectorate, does that mean I’m technically in charge?”

Both present affini laughed. Thatch’s grip grew a little tighter, pinning Katie in place. “If you’re good, we’ll let you make suggestions for the flag. If you’re very good, we’ll let you recite the founding documents for us.”

Oh no. Thatch was getting into it too, now. Katie abandoned her fledgling lust for power, nodded rapidly, and moved down to the next line.

I, Katieflower, agree that I am no longer permitted to practice trading with the intent to amass capital and will never again be allowed near double-entry bookkeeping without supervision. I understand I will no longer be permitted private property.

Well, that just seemed obvious, didn’t it? Katie paused with her pen just above the checkbox. “What does private mean there? I still get… public property?” Katie glanced up at Thatch, who shrugged and gestured over to Montsechia, who shrugged and gestured over to Wing. The jellyfish spent a few moments narrating, and then her owner began to translate.

“As a member of the Katie Protectorate, you are still permitted to own anything that you would actually use or care for. Your hab unit, your toothbrush, your fish, your clothes, and so on. You are not permitted to—” Montsechia frowned. “Are you sure you have this right, Wing? That doesn’t seem— They did what? Frozen roots, those poor things.” She looked back towards Katie with a helpless shrug. “You are not permitted to own things for the purpose of denying them to those who need them so you can extort things out of them. I swear, that this even needs to be said…”

“Oh.” Katie checked the box. “Does everyone have to sign that one?”

Wing flashed a bright green, followed by a few mitigating shades. “Only the ex-Terran Accord citizens,” Montsechia provided. “Don’t worry, though, we’ll take private property away from you too now, let’s move on.”

Ah. This was the one, then. Katie’s breath caught in her throat as she pulled the next piece of paper from the pile. The important one. The one she wanted. The one she needed.

With a shaking hand, Katie began to check the boxes one by one.

Above all else, you, Katie Sahas, must obey your guardian, Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom, in all things. This is for your safety, wellbeing, and care.

Checked.

Your guardian, Thatch Aquae, owns you. A pet is property. You do not have political rights in the Affini Compact. All existing rights and privileges are invalid and inapplicable.

Agreed. Shivering fingers smudged the checkmark. Why? All of this was already true, but a small line of ink made it seem real and inescapable. This was Katie making a statement, declaring these universal truths. Ensuring they would be true no matter what happened.

You do have a guarantee of your wellbeing as defined in Section TBC of the Katie Domestication Treaty. This does not preclude corrective measures being imposed where discipline is required.

She hadn’t even signed that treaty yet. She didn’t know what she was agreeing to. Ink-stained fingers hung above a firm checkbox, clutching her pen hard enough that her hand shivered with the strain. She was declaring these things true and she didn’t even know what it truly meant. She couldn’t. There was too much. She looked at the pile to her right. She couldn’t possibly understand all this. She looked up at her legal owner and silently begged for help.

“You agree, pet.”

“Yes, Miss Aquae!” Katie’s checkmark came down hard and surprisingly steady. Her breathing started to stablise. She didn’t need to understand what she was agreeing to. She just had to trust that she was signing herself over to somebody who wanted the best for her, and she knew that was true.

From this moment forth, your full legal name is Katie Aquae, Second Floret. You will answer to, and refer to yourself by, any name your guardian chooses to permit you.

The lines got easier after that. Katie read something she couldn’t possibly understand the implications of, asked for help, and was told that she agreed. She signed her prettiest signature on the dotted line and very carefully placed the pen against the table with a trembling hand.

“And there we are,” Montsechia declared. “It’s always so lovely to watch a new pet sign themselves over to our care. You have a delightful floret, Thatch.”

“I do,” she growled, vines coming in from both sides to bind Katie’s limbs and hold her close. “And I think that’s quite enough self-determination out of it for today.” A finger scratched under Katie’s chin and then tapped the gem on her collar. The girl froze up for a moment, body desperate to twitch but held too tightly to manage it. Katie tried to hold on to the scraps of her consciousness but they just slipped through her fingers like finely ground sand.

“Yes, there’s a good girl. Eyes on me,” Thatch whispered, squeezing tightly enough with every vine that it hurt. The pain was enough to give Katie something to hold on to, something to focus her mind. Katie looked up, or was made to look up, and stared up with rapidly dwindling willpower. She spluttered out a word, though she wasn’t sure which word she’d managed.

Thatch laughed quietly, holding the girl close. “Do not worry yourself, pet. There no longer exists a force in this universe that could free you from me. Fight, surrender, beg, or sink. It matters not. You need no longer suffer the burden of choice.”

A hand came out of nowhere to rest around Katie’s neck. “But I’ll have you sink for the moment. Let go, Katie. Let me take care of the rest.”

She sank.

Chapter Text

Check, check, check.

Of the twelve pens that had been with them at the start of the day only three remained at its end. The finest writing implements known to this universe had broken themselves on the horror of Affini xenobureaucratic theory.

It was absurd, but it was done. Thatch’s darling Katieflower had her life mapped out in detail enough to please the clerks. Thatch found herself almost disinterested in the paperwork, but, well. She was making an effort, wasn’t she?

Thatch stretched out, letting her form dissolve into vines so numerous that even she lost count. Somehow, every single one of them hurt, ached, or shivered. She would have preferred to just let Cici shoot her again, but this mattered to Katie.

Speaking of. The delightful little thing had been sleeping soundly, curled up in Thatch’s lap for the last three blooms—or however long the paperwork had taken, anyway—but the stretching had been enough to wake her. Katie blinked slowly, then lifted her head off of Thatch’s thigh and glanced around before finally making the connection and looking up. Her face melted into a soft smile.

“Hey,” she whispered, doing a little stretch of her own. She straightened her arms and legs, arched her back, and squirmed while pulling the most satisfied little expression Thatch had ever seen.

Roots, but the thing was cute. Thatch spent a few moments gently playing with one of the girl’s hands, folding down each adorable little finger in turn, then reversing the process. Precious beyond belief. Tiny and soft, but smart enough to understand all the things Thatch wanted to give to her and willful enough to let Thatch feel safe doing it.

“Good evening, flower,” Thatch replied, eventually. Katie grinned back, then gestured her head over to the side. What was she— Oh.

Thatch glanced up to find the clerks waiting patiently.

Ah—as Katie had been so kind as to teach her—fuck. She’d become just like everybody else. Thatch sighed, put one hand atop Katie’s head so she could absent-mindedly keep the girl entertained, and returned her attention to the matter at hand. “Apologies. What’s left?”

The Spectrum Jelly shone to a staccato beat. It was fast, conversational chromaticity that Thatch found herself unable to fully comprehend. She got maybe one in every five words. It wasn’t a fair comparison, of course, she hadn’t had a conversation partner in fifty years and even then it had been Caeca flashing slow and simple in a different dialect, and with a very different body shape.

Montsechia translated. “We’re all done with your floret there,” she confirmed. Thatch had caught enough of what her floret had been saying to know what was coming. Heck. “Now we do have a few things to talk to regarding you, Ms. Aquae. Of course we wouldn’t brush the dust off of our regular archeobureaucracy hats without talking to you about it, but we are willing to do so if you can give us some pointers.”

“Uh,” Thatch faltered. “Is it important?”

The clerk nodded firmly. “Less important than Katie’s is, certainly, but it’s important that you get the care you need as well. Your records are very incomplete, but it doesn’t look like you’ve been attending your medical checkups?” After spending half the day listening to Montsechia speak in doting, lilting tones it felt strange indeed to hear her speaking to an equal, but that was how these things went, wasn’t it?

Thatch didn’t begrudge her that. She was hardly above the behaviour herself. Katie had spoken of biological heritage and Thatch supposed that this was hers. Perhaps the only thing that Affini bioengineering hadn’t changed about their bodies over the years was the instinctive response they felt to the adorable creatures of the universe. In a sense, she and Katie were more equals than they might think. Both of them simply responded to their incentives. How much faster could Affini progress have gone if the universe’s greatest scientists, engineers, and thinkers didn’t spend most of their time focused on individual sophonts?

Thatch sighed and nodded, putting her attention back onto the clerk. Time to deal with an equal. “I am a capable biologist in my own right, Montsechia. My body is operating well within the acceptable bounds laid out in current medical guidance, though I am aggressively cycling out the transplanted life from my time stranded to ensure this remains true for my entire bloom.”

The clerk spent a moment fussing over her Wing, arranging things such that the floret could curl up safely against her lap, just as Katie was curled up against Thatch’s. A conversation just between the adults in the room, then. “You know that checkups are for more than just physical health, Thatch. I can’t make you go, but I can strongly recommend that you attend.”

“I… There are many aboard this vessel with greater needs than mine. I do not wish to take more from them than I must.”

Montsechia reached a vine out across the table. After a moment, Thatch took it in one of her own, and the clerk continued. “I don’t really know you, Thatch, but nobody here does. I don’t know why you’re where you are, but people who don’t need to go to their checkups don’t have the kind of breakdowns you had.”

Thatch winced, and glanced down to make sure Katie was safely asleep. Thankfully, the girl seemed to have fallen back into slumber quickly, curled up on the chair by Thatch’s side with her head sandwiched between a thigh and a hand.

Montsechia’s vine, and voice, grew firmer. “You haven’t told your floret?”

“I wasn’t— It hasn’t come up,” Thatch admitted. She looked away. Both of them knew that wasn’t how this worked. If Thatch didn’t want it coming up and Katie didn’t know to push then it would take a lot of willpower to defeat that subconscious urge. Every affini was fully aware of the responsibility that their positions demanded. One couldn’t keep an intelligent and once-independent creature as a pet without putting their needs first in every respect. Thatch didn’t know if she could accept that responsibility all of the time. She felt the everpresent Affini need to take care of something, but there was a difference between the fantasy and the reality. If she accepted that level of control and responsibility then her mistakes would resonate. She could hurt more than just herself.

“I can’t make you attend for your own sake, Thatch, but you know that if this ends up harming that floret of yours then the vote will be fast and decisive and you will end up attending your checkups.” Thatch wilted. It was about as close to a direct threat as one could get. Montsechia was correct, of course, if any harm came to Katie then it would not be difficult to get a binding vote held on whether Thatch would attend. It was one thing to passively avoid something uncomfortable, but quite unthinkable to go against the results of a vote. Thatch may sometimes feel like a bad Affini, but she was still Affini.

“It will not,” Thatch replied, firmly. “Katie is fully capable of standing up for herself and would not allow me to bring her to harm.”

Montsechia raised an eyebrow. How strange, Thatch thought, that even in a conversation between affini alone, they still adopted the mannerisms of the local species. They had a whole universe to pull from, here. Thatch shuffled some leaves around, covering the remaining bioluminescent bulbs that still remained on her body with different stacks of leaves. She lacked any blues, but the light was naturally a little blue, so she had access to a few different shades. Not enough to speak with any nuance, but enough. Promise. Pet mine taken well care of. Take good care of me, too, Thatch flashed. She wasn’t hugely confident in her wording,

Montsechia’s other eyebrow rose to meet the first. “Well, aren’t you full of surprises? I didn’t realise we had anybody else aboard who’d been around those parts. Not that I have, my darling Wing found me here.”

Hmn. A long-range scout was an odd place for an independent jelly to find herself. Thatch glanced over at the sleeping floret, wondering if they might have more in common than Thatch had first thought. What had she been running from?

“A few years, a lifetime ago,” Thatch replied, eventually.

There was a tightness in Thatch’s core. She’d gotten so used to hiding herself from others that even giving out such a small fact stung. She regretted it immediately. This was so much easier with Katie. Katie was trusted, safe. Even before the girl had been hers she’d still been those things. Thatch could give her secrets away without worrying they’d be used against her. How could she trust anybody else on that level?

The bureaucrat glanced away for a moment, piecing together the obvious implication. “Ah! With first contact, then? A complicated time. Humanity has been my first and it is not as smooth as I had expected. Speaking to independents among our ward species did not quite prepare me for how ferals would behave.” Montsechia’s gaze grew a little darker for a moment.

“A little after that,” Thatch admitted. This was getting closer than she’d like to why she’d been running. She looked down at the innocent creature in her lap. ‘Innocent’. Guilty of plenty. There was a whole section of Katie’s paperwork stack that indirectly detailed the harms she had been forced to commit under the authority of the Terran Accord. Calling her innocent, as if she were unblemished by the hard truths of the universe, was unfair. Katie could be forgiven.

Thatch could not.

The girl in her lap stirred. Perhaps she was responding to the shift in Thatch’s mood, perhaps it was simple chance. Either way, Thatch took the opportunity for distraction. The floret’s eyes fluttered half open, lips quivering with gentle, half-formed words that Thatch silenced with a series of gentle strokes from the top of her head down to the small of her back. “Shh, it’s okay. Stay asleep for me now, please.”

Katie squirmed, perhaps working out a little discomfort, before shuffling closer, wrapping her arms and legs around Thatch’s limb and closing her eyes yet again.

Katie didn’t want Thatch running any more. She’d said as much, albeit with different words. They could have gone to a shuttle and flown off into the void together, but what kind of life would that be for a floret? Thatch didn’t know that she could handle existing inside such a grand civilisation, but Katie wanted better for her than endless escape. Katie wouldn’t let her run any longer. To keep Katie happy, Thatch had to figure out how to stay happy too.

Perhaps the next step on that journey was to start treating the Elettarium as a home, not just a temporary hideout. Its crew as people, not things to be avoided at all costs. Thatch spent a moment working up the courage to speak. “I was brought in to assist with the cotyledon program,” Thatch admitted. “Shortly after first contact. One of the complicated cases, back while we were still figuring out how to safely entwine hausteria with a homogeneous nervous system.”

The clerk’s expression softened. The rest of the story didn’t really need to be told. The Spectrum Jellies were a recent enough acquisition that there simply wasn’t time for both a happy ending and Thatch to have made her way over to the Terran front. One floret by a hundred and four was rare. Two was unheard of.

“Ah. I’m sorry. Those we could not help weigh the heaviest on us, hmn?” Montsechia’s vine curled deeper down Thatch’s. She almost sounded as if she understood, but surely not.

Surely not.

“Have you…?” Thatch wasn’t sure how to speak the question. Any way she worded it felt insufficient.

“I have lived for almost nine blooms, each and every one a natural ending. I do not think anybody reaches that without finding somebody they could not help. I am sorry you found that so early in your own journey.”

Thatch pointed her gaze firmly towards the desk. It was hard not to feel like a child sometimes. By affini social norms she was decades beyond adolescence, but a decade was very short indeed for a species that would never die. “Thank you.” She paused for a long breath, not for the breath itself, but so she could watch the gentle smile on Katie’s sleeping face as the scents washed over her.

Without that small, fragile creature Thatch would probably have been back in Affini space by now. Find some other small, out of the way ship to spool her hab onto, somewhere new to hide out until her fellow citizens got a little too close and she had to run again. Thatch—big, strong affini that she appeared to be—nonetheless found herself drawing a kind of strength she sorely lacked from her ‘weaker’ floret. Without that strength, she could never have continued her sentence.

“I did not expect anybody else to understand.”

Montsechia’s smile grew warmer, and her vine squeezed with a momentary pulse of heat. “The very young never do, dear. Your story is, like everyone’s, unique, but you are not alone. Believe me, I have seen the paperwork. We take care of the universe, but we must take care of each other, too. We—”

Wing’s pad buzzed, drawing both of their attentions to it. Thatch glanced down. Priority Incident: Medical bay six engaged emergency shutoff; feralist crew is panicking. Requesting xenodiplomacy support.

Thatch slid it over. “Dirt,” Montsechia swore, reaching over with a vine to tap her floret awake. “I suppose here’s our unforeseen disaster,” she continued, speaking both verbally and chromatically now that Wing was awake. “I apologise, Thatch, but I really must attend to this. Message me some time, hmn? Oh, and actually—”

Montsechia trailed a second vine over to Katie and tapped her on the head a few times. The girl woke up, glancing around until she spotted the clerk looking down at her. “Your owner here needs to attend her regular medical checkups, floret. Ensure it happens.”

Katie blinked. After a moment, she looked up at Thatch in silent question. Reluctantly, Thatch nodded, and Katie’s gaze returned back to Montsechia. “Yes, Miss Vidalii!”

“Good girl.” The potato slices were long gone by this point, but aboard an Affini vessel the headpats never ran dry.

The clerks were gone soon afterwards, carrying their mountain of paper as they hurried towards the nearest magrail station. Whatever had called them away was thankfully none of Thatch’s concern. All she had to worry about was the darling climbing up her torso to sit atop her shoulder.

“Hey.” Katie was a little breathless, having climbed with little explicit assistance. She would have had it in an instant had she asked, of course, but Thatch suspected it was that knowledge that had enabled her to do without.

“Hey yourself.” Thatch leaned back against her seat, reaching up to gently play with Katie’s toes. So much like fingers, on this species, but stubbier. It was very strange. Not not cute, but Thatch had to admit she was biased. She wiggled each in turn until one of them forced a laugh from her Katie.

“What are you doing?” Katie asked, once she’d pushed the laugh down.

“I believe the technical term is doting. Is it unpleasant?”

Katie shook her head. “Stars, no, but I am kinda ticklish there.”

“Hmn.” Thatch drew a vine across the skin, and Katie almost lost her balance between the giggles. Another pair of vines kept her safely in place. “I shall have to investigate this phenomenon further. For now, it is getting late, though you have spent much of the day asleep. How are you feeling?”

Katie raised a hand and waggled it from side to side. “I’ve only just woken up, I’m fine. You?”

“I am exhausted,” Thatch admitted. “Planetfall was less effort than Affini bureaucracy, and at least that was over quickly. It is done, at least, the clerks are content and your paperwork is all caught up.”

The precious floret hugged a vine close and nodded. “Thank you, I really appreciate the effort. I’d be fine to stay out, but I think you should get home, so, wanna head back?”

“I really do.” Thatch stood, stretched again, and then spent a moment sorting the debris of their meals and drinks into a careful pile which she carried over to set gently beside the hab unit running the cafe, where a sleeping Angel lay curled in somebody’s lap. They gave a grateful wave with one of their vines, but remained in place watching the stars. Judging by the way the affini in question appeared to glow and float an inch off of the ground, Thatch assumed they were an item.

It was a sign of how truly tired she was that she didn’t want to figure out how the affini had done it.

Katie took the vine she had been holding and pushed it forward. Thatch was so used to the treatment that she took a step forward on instinct, but after a whole day of dealing with Affini excess Thatch figured she deserved a little indulgence. The vine curled back around Katie’s torso and lowered her to the ground.

“Huh? What’s up, Th—”

Thatch snapped her fingers. Watching Katie’s expression crash into the sound was a delight. She really was going to make an exceptional floret, just as Thatch had suspected. The girl’s demeanour snapped in an instant. Her slouch straightened up, her eyes lost most of that tightly controlled light Thatch still allowed her, and then, on the very next beat of Thatch’s endless song came Katie’s part of the verse.

“Yes, Miss Aquae?”

“Down, girl.”

Katie blinked for a moment, then her knees buckled, dropping her to all fours in but a handful of moments. Thatch grinned, knowing the floret wouldn’t be able to look up sharply enough to see her breaking character. That was a lot faster than she’d reacted the last time, even if there was still a way to go. Mixing Terran and Affini training techniques seemed to be paying off. Speaking the command words in Thatch’s native tongue had the advantage of nice clean associations in the girl’s mind, as it was the only context in which she heard them and so wouldn’t have to pause to determine intent, at least once she’d really gotten used to it.

Of course, it wouldn’t be nearly as effective without Katie’s efforts. She was a natural at this, now that she’d helped Thatch surgically strip her of the resistance that had been hurting her so. ‘Broken’ had such negative connotations, but how could anybody look at any creature this beautiful and think it anything but fixed?

Thatch could see how that could be enough for so many of her people. Katie really was beautiful like this. If she could just rid herself of that niggling worry in the back of her head that this could all come crashing to disaster, then maybe it could be enough for Thatch too, but until then, she would simply have to ensure she knew Katie on such a fundamental level that there was nothing left that could do her harm that Thatch could not fix.

Thatch slipped a vine into the ring hanging down from Katie’s collar and set off home. “Heel,” she spoke, again in the affini dialect she’d grown up with. Not a command Katie knew yet, but a sharp tug on the leash got her moving all the same. Thatch needed to apply constant force to keep her in the right position, but that was okay. After a few moments of walking, she kneeled and slipped a treat into Katie’s mouth, along with a finger to remind her not to eat it without permission.

There was something intensely relaxing about doting on the thing like this. Thatch could just focus herself down to a fine point and know that any effort she expended here would be appreciated and enjoyed for years to come. Besides, Katie was too stars-damned cute not to. She sat there with a berry on her tongue, looking up with curiosity, a little confusion, and the first embers of the desperation that Thatch actually wanted.

Thatch removed the finger. The collar sitting tight around Katie’s neck was more than simple decoration; it was a project. A physical manifestation of what the pair of them could achieve together. Thatch alone never would have seen far enough outside of her own head to realise the possibilities, but Katie coming in with a fresh perspective and endless enthusiasm had breathed new life into Thatch’s faltering dreams.

Like many projects, it would not be done in a day. Thatch reached one hand into her chest, where she kept a small collection of essentials, and pulled out a handheld electrolytic hook, one of the tools she’d used to build the collar in the first place. With one vine she gently levered a section of Katie’s collar away from the skin and with another she tilted the girl’s head up to look towards her. The girl whimpered, unable to speak around the berry, but unable to keep her mind quiet alone.

There were a lot of tradeoffs involved in any delicate work of biotechnology, and this was no different. On the inside of the collar lay a complicated weave of functional foliage, operating everything from how it interfaced with Katie’s spinal column to the specifics of what pieces of Thatch’s beat would get amplified and which would not, how responsive that was to quick changes, and so on.

Thatch stared down into her pet’s eyes for a few moments, watching their surface carefully. The sharp, curious gaze she loved so much stared up at her, with all the micro-adjustments of her eye following Thatch’s rhythm with perfection, but without much detail.

There were many words for the concepts involved in the more subtle facets of domestication theory, but translations into human tongues were not easy. It was a complicated set of ideas that they often had no direct mapping for. Some liked ‘calibration’ for this, but Thatch liked ‘attunement’. Put a creature in a room with an affini they’d never met for an hour, and when they left that creature would probably have subconsciously attuned to the affini’s rhythm on a basic level. None of the details, but the really high level stuff. It wasn’t an effect that would last, nor would it have much meaningful effect in most.

The more time spent and the more active effort expended, the deeper that would go. The natural biological rhythms of an affini body were endlessly complex, but fractal. The higher layers could be understood and largely replicated without needing to dive deeper, but any intelligent creature would naturally find themselves drawn further in. They were patterns that demanded to be understood while never having an end to their depth. Katie was, at this point, so attuned that her heart would not know how to beat were it not for Thatch’s guiding song, but she could always go deeper. Every extra level understood would have her piecing together more and more detail from Thatch’s thoughts and feelings.

Thatch placed the electrolytic hook against the collar’s biotechnological weave and kept staring down into Katie’s eyes. As she shifted the hook, disrupting, remaking, and tuning the connections, she watched the way Katie’s gaze wavered. Sharp comprehension sharpened further, but Thatch quickly snuffed that out with an indulgent smile. “Do not worry yourself, pet.”

The hook shifted, and the comprehension began to fade. “Yes, that’s my good girl. No worries. No thoughts at all, really. Let me take you down to instinct, here.”

Katie managed a quiet gasp as the comprehension drained from her vision, replaced with a deeper adherence to the silent song that ruled her life.

Too much amplification and Katie would start getting overwhelmed. Too little and she wouldn’t be able to keep her mind silent. Too fast a response time and feelings would flash by too quickly for Katie to grasp, but too slow and she would miss things. Thatch tuned her pet moment by moment, watching the look in her eyes to determine her progress while speaking constant words of praise and encouragement. Sharpness softened; comprehension was replaced with the dumb adoration of a pet; confusion with soft contentment; and desperation flared as her mind emptied to make room for the sweet-tasting juices of the berry.

Thatch let Katie’s chin drop. “Such a good girl,” she spoke, taking a moment to scratch beneath the girl’s chin while she stowed her tool away. Like everything she’d been saying, it was in Affini, or at least the dialect Thatch had grown up with. Katie was in no state to understand speech either way, but like this her poor mind would be spared the stress of trying.

“Eat.” As Thatch spoke, she tried to imagine a strong, sharp sense of permission and gratitude for just a moment and hoped that Katie would pick up on it. Bodily rhythms were just another form of communication, really. A subconscious one for most, but talking all the same. Speaking with vocalised words was still new to Thatch, and Spectrum Chromaticity had never been something she’d gotten entirely comfortable with, but the whole-body vibrations of the Xa’a-ackétøth had been familiar for almost a century and this wasn’t really so different.

It’d turned the serpents to mush, too.

Katie was done with her treat in moments. They were small berries, intentionally so. Thatch plucked another from the transplanted material she had curled around her core, ready for the next cycle.

“Sit.” Katie knew that one. No treat just for that, just a few moments of gentle stroking and another burst of good feeling. “Heel.” Thatch started walking, with another tug on the leash to get Katie moving. After a few moments she seemed to get the picture, and so Thatch stopped and delivered another treat, paired with another blast of sharp permission and gratitude, and then verbal permission to eat.

At the slow speed of a few meters per minute, they had plenty of time to repeat the cycle as they made their way home. After five, Katie stopped needing a tug on the leash to start. After twenty, the sharp emotional click started to generate some of the excitement of a treat all by itself. After thirty, Thatch could walk slowly with her vine slack, Katie crawling at her heel like the very good girl that she was without needing much correction at all beyond the occasional reminder to heel when it looked like something was distracting her.

After a while, their journey gained speed. Thatch could only walk as fast as Katie could crawl, but the corrections became rarer, and so they had more time to actually move. The Elettarium was as populated as ever. It was late enough that the lights had started shifting down to an early evening twilight. Those still wandering were mostly focussed on one another, with only the occasional wave or smile in Thatch’s direction, or an adoring gasp from afar as they spotted the well-behaved pet strutting at her owner’s heel, bathing in the knowledge she was doing right. Katie was usually good at returning quiet greetings, but she was rather too focussed on her instructions to notice the world around her and so Thatch had to do that part herself.

It was inevitable that somebody would take a closer interest eventually. Thatch had barely avoided outside attention when she’d been alone, but she had to admit that Katie was simply too cute not to adore and could hardly hold an urge to do just that against anybody.

“Ho!” called a voice, waving over from the other side of the path. The pair of affini glanced around to make sure they wouldn’t get in the way, and then walked over. They had a creature of their own on a leash, though it was leaping between the trees and plants that lined the path. “Remember us?”

The shuttle pilots that had picked them up on Dirt? The specifics escaped her, but Thatch nodded. “I am afraid I do not recall your names, it was a complicated day.”

One pointed at the other. “Zona.” The other way around. “Xylem.” Both pointed up at their creature, currently climbing up the tallest tree in the area, and spoke at the same time. “Lily.”

Thatch named herself and Katie. Unfortunately, Katie tried to wander off to investigate Lily, and while in principle Thatch had no objection to that it was hardly good training to allow it. She pulled the girl back into place and repeated the command to heel, and then after Katie had stayed in place for a few moments delivered another treat and another emotional snap.

Xylem grinned down at the inhuman, and then back up at Thatch. “Nonfloret, huh?”

“She made a very compelling case for why I should change her mind.”

Zona nodded, going down to one knee to be closer to Katie’s level. “I’m glad she came to her senses. Lucky you, Thatch,” she said, glancing up. “Feralists make the most devoted little things, don’t they? Is she okay to touch?”

Thatch shook her head. “I do not think we are there with her training yet, and I would rather not wake her up. We are trying something a little different, and it is still in the uncertain stages. I am not sure whether she ever truly believed in feralism, however, she was simply misguided and lost.”

“Isn’t that— Oh dear,” Xylem paused, reaching out a vine a moment too late to prevent Lily from dashing up to Katie’s side and staring.

“Woah! Cool? Is that—” Lily slipped a finger beneath Katie’s collar and took a peek. Katie began to blink rapidly. The gem set into her collar shifted hue, away from Thatch’s gentle green/blue towards a warmer tinge, signaling elevating stress levels. “That’s so cool! How does it work?”

Thatch reached down and picked Katie up, hauling her into a one-handed embrace against her own chest. The other finger reached under her chin to tap the gem, shutting off the glow entirely. Katie’s eyes sharpened back up over long moments. “Aw, that felt nice,” she protested, gently. “At least until- oh, um.”

Katie squirmed around until she could look over at Lily, who was now in one of her own owners’ arms getting her own comfort. “Hey. I’m sorry, I just… I wasn’t expecting to see a Rinan. I checked the registry a little while back and I don’t think you were on it and— Oh! It’s you three, I’m sorry. Last time we met was kind of a lot, I wasn’t processing much, but it’s good to see you again!”

Xylem was busy carrying her floret, but Zona interjected with an answer. “We’re technically not crew, we mostly live in our own shuttle. Also, we haven’t been on board for a little while, we stayed behind on ‘Dirt’ to make sure we’d wrapped up Cici’s friends and our shuttle needed a few days to get out this far to meet back up. I… hope that Lily isn’t a problem?” The last words were spoken cautiously, as though she was worried she would need to navigate a difficult situation. The momentary glance up at Thatch was an unmistakable negotiation on which of them would step in if this devolved into disagreement.

“What?” Katie asked. “Oh, um, stars, no! I’m not a racist, I just… Humanity hasn’t been good to me either and my collar is really cool and I just wasn’t expecting to have to deal with, y’know. I’m sorry about what humanity tried to do to your people, Lily.”

Lily flailed to no clear benefit until Xylem rotated her upright. “Not your fault! Humans sucked, but Zona says they’re nice now and I don’t think you’re one anyway? You don’t smell like a human! Hey, do you wanna see my room back home? Xylem’s helping me build a rocket!”

Lily’s enthusiasm seemed catching, at least for Katie. The conversation quickly dived into the kind of deep technical detail that Thatch wasn’t enough of a xenohistorian to understand, and by silent agreement both Thatch and Xylem let their florets back down onto the ground. Thatch kept half her attention on Katie, just as she imagined half of the others’ attentions would be on Lily.

As the pair talked, they all continued on their journey. The Varie family hadn’t been going anywhere in specific, so they could all head off in the same direction.

“Heel,” Thatch ordered, just as she had been the whole journey. It was a practiced action now, starting to walk and ordering Katie close. To her delight, even without the collar active Katie immediately snapped to her side, walking while keeping pace without really seeming to notice exactly what she was doing. A quick snap of emotion put a bounce in the girl’s step and hopefully reinforced all the positive associations she had with following the instruction.

“That’s an unusual style of training,” Zona noted, speaking in the local Affini dialect. “Something you’re bringing in from elsewhere?”

Ah, good. Personal questions. Just what Thatch needed.

Ugh. Thatch reached down to gently stroke Katie’s head, soothing her. The girl had been interrupted midsentence, noticing the sudden turn in her mood and immediately shifting focus back to Thatch. She was right to do so, Thatch’s emotions didn’t match the moment. This wasn’t an interrogation. Not every conversation was speeding the countdown until Thatch had to run again. If she was staying here, then she really had to figure out how to talk to people.

At least there was one topic on which Thatch knew she could be confident. “It was Katie’s idea, actually. Old Terran techniques cleaned up and modernised some. There’s some prior art, but we’re making it our own. I’m finding that it’s difficult to make work without creating sharp divisions between headspaces, but there is clearly some bleedover,” Thatch explained, gesturing at the floret following at her heel. They kept the shop talk in Affini to avoid spoiling the illusion for the two florets. Katie knew the details, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be reminded of them when she could simply live them. “It wouldn’t be healthy to treat her like that all the time, so we’re experimenting with altered states of consciousness.”

“Most use xenodrugs for that,” Xylem noted. The two florets were chattering quietly between themselves, with the rise and fall in the cadences of their conversation naturally happening to align with their respective owners’ so nobody spoke over one another despite the multiple overlapping conversations.

Thatch shrugged. “We like to tinker. She’s mostly on a medicinal blend, and we’re working up her tolerances.”

Zona took a moment to scratch behind one of Lily’s wide ears. “Understandable! Our Lily here used to have a lot of trouble focusing on the details, so we switch between something that helps her think and something that helps her relax, and fiddle from there. Finding Lily out here really was a gift, we were starting to lose hope we’d find somebody who could fit into our lives.”

Xylem laughed. “Little did we guess that we’d be found by somebody who wanted to fit us into theirs. Our little Lilypad is going on the space adventure she always wanted to, we just do our scouting around that.”

While the people talked of pets, the pets were busy with subatomic physics. They lacked the depth of understanding that any affini interested in the topic would have, but they made up for it with their seemingly boundless enthusiasm.

Maybe Thatch had simply been looking at this civilisation wrong. It was a conclusion that was getting harder to avoid. On her own, all her knowledge and capability had amounted to nothing but unhappiness and regret. Maybe her fellow affini weren’t just taking pets because they were bored. Maybe the pets weren’t slowing them down at all. Thatch glanced down at hers with a gentle smile. She felt a burning need to give this one the universe, and a fledgling hope that between them they might actually be able to make it happen. Maybe the pets weren’t a reward for contributing to their great project. Maybe they were the project.

“—so if you build a lattice with that, you can keep most of the hypermetric shock outside, I think! The Terrans didn’t do it like that ‘cos it’s expensive, but we could do it right!” Katie seemed energised by the whole conversation, and Thatch found that energy catching. Sure, helping to hand-build a rocket that merged Terran-level technology with Affini-level sensibility wasn’t going to change the world by itself, but she had proof that the ’lower’ races still brought a much-needed injection of novelty and fresh perspective into their lives. Thatch ran a gentle finger along Katie’s collar, something she never could have built alone.

The affini side of the conversation stayed light. The two Varies talked about their time on Dirt, spawning a short discussion on how best to cook with Dirt-native ingredients that Thatch found herself actually quite enthusiastic about. Thatch discussed a little of her early years on Xa’aat, spiraling off into a few side discussions about the serpents themselves and considerations for caretaking of aquatic species, and by the time they arrived at Katie’s habitation unit Thatch felt an energy in her core that nobody but Katie had managed to inspire in decades.

Katie and Thatch waved the trio off, traded promises that they’d meet again soon, stepped inside the hab, closed the door, and collapsed into each other.

“I think that was literally all my social energy for today,” Katie admitted. “Do you wanna curl up in bed and watch old cartoons with me? Some of the floret cuts are actually really good.”

“Stars, yes.”

Chapter Text

“Stop fucking around, Jack,” the man spat. One of the officers. He had the top few buttons of his uniform undone and a stick up his ass. One of the type that thought shouting at a problem would make it go away, and if anybody told him different he’d just shout louder.

Katie raised her hands in frustration, then let them fall. They were thirteen months into this fucking rebellion and everyone just kept wanting more and more. “Sir, do you know what happens if the exotic matter feed backflows?”

“I know what happens if those fucking xenos find us, recruit! We are jumping in one hour and if you can’t make that happen then you won’t be coming with us, do you understand?” the officer snarled. He hadn’t even been that high up, before the war. Some disgraced captain placed on desk duty, now in charge of one of humanity’s biggest war machines.

“Yes sir!” Fuck.

Fuck. Katie fucking hated hierarchy. She’d had such fire once, back when she was young enough to still believe the lies. If she worked hard she could be anything she wanted. She could change the universe. She could be happy. That’d been beaten out of her long ago and now the universe was getting devoured by killer plants in gargantuan ships. Now she didn’t even dare correct her own name. There was nothing to be gained in provoking him. If she gave him what he wanted maybe he’d go away.

Now all she had to do was figure out how to repair a cracked fuel line on a jump drive that was still on a cooldown cycle. Would they actually space her if she couldn’t manage it? Probably not: nobody else could keep the drive running, but that was a lot to bet on a ‘probably’.

Besides. Maybe the man was right. The enemy was out there and maybe if everyone pulled together then the killer plants could still be turned back. They could still save truth, justice, and the Terran way.

Katie sighed, grabbed her wrench, and did what had to be done. With bare minutes to spare and a little bit of elbow grease she managed to fix the crack. Her hands shook as she worked the drive’s controls, terrified that her hacked together repairs would falter or fail. They held. She felt the kick in her chest bursting out from the reaction chamber as the exotic matter mix stabbed a hole through spacetime and the electromagnet array guided that hole in the right direction.

The klaxon of battle a moment later confirmed they’d reached their destination. All around her the ship came to life. She heard the rising hum of a reactor shifting to unsustainable output along with the echoing clangs of slugs loading into the dozens of point defense cannons mounted along the hull. The real star of the show, though, was the railgun.

Two long spokes ran throughout the entire ship. The edges of a barrel hundreds of meters long lay barely beneath Katie’s feet. That was why Indomitable’s reactor was half again as large as most other ships this scale. The Catastrophe class was well named. If there was one in local space you did what it said or the results would be catastrophic.

Katie could feel the hypercapacitors charging. They gave the air a metallic tang and fuzzed her hair. She could feel the latent energy dancing on her skin. This could not possibly be healthy but no Terran Cosmic Navy battlecruiser had ever been built to keep anybody healthy.

“Brace, brace!” came the call over the tinny intercom. Katie kicked off of one wall and sailed through the air for a moment, landing on the far side of the room to brace against one of the handholds. Electric power sparked through the air as she reached to touch it, burning her finger. She had to grit her teeth just to handle the pain of holding onto an electrical ground while the ship’s weaponry forced a charge upon her.

The railgun fired. The whole ship recoiled, slamming Katie into the wall hard enough to knock the breath from her body. The lights flickered and died and for a moment all was silent. Even life support faltered. The only light in the room was the battery-backed temperature readout of the rapidly heating exotic matter containment unit. Katie felt her heart start to sink. Either power came back on within the next twenty seconds or it wouldn’t matter if they’d hit. A containment breach would kill them all anyway.

It took fifteen seconds. The lights returned one by one and the emergency beeping of the EMCU silenced. Finally, the radio hissed back into life.

“Direct hit! Xeno ship is down, repeat, xeno ship is down!”

Katie’s eyes snapped open. She was breathing heavily, body trapped in a panic her sleeping mind hadn’t noticed until the dissonance had grown so great it forced her awake. Her imagination clung tightly to the dream’s imagery, pushing visions of a shattered affini ship to her attention. It was the Elettarium, of course. The only Affini vessel Katie knew in enough detail to imagine.

Shattered arcs spun freely on nothing but leftover momentum. Fore and aft drifted apart in a cloud of the dead. Kilometer-scale leaves twirled away into the shadowy depths. Her little haven in an uncaring universe torn apart and broken through the ignorance of Terran anger.

Katie shook her head quickly, squeezing shut her eyes. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t-

There was a soft groan from all around her, followed by a gentle shift of weight on the bed that almost sent the girl tumbling to the side. “Are you alright, Katie?”

Thatch. Thatch thatch thatch thatch. Katie spent a moment frantically searching around trying to spot her saviour, but found only that their bedroom was covered in an evenly spaced wild splatter of vines, leaves, and bark. Maybe most of it was concentrated on the unreasonably large bed, if Katie was generous with her counting—which when it came to Thatch, she was—but plenty draped over the side to cover the floor. One had somehow managed to get wedged in the bedroom door, keeping it open just a crack. Another was somehow draped over the frame of the room’s full height window into space. Uncountably many curled around Katie’s body.

Her memories of the night before were just a vague cloud of happiness now they’d reached the morning, but apparently they’d made a mess in the process.

Katie shrugged, then selected a thick vine near herself to hug close. It squirmed in her grip, pulsing with a gentle heat that provided both comfort and clarity to her panicking mind She nodded twice then unceremoniously buried her face in some random pile of leaves. “I’m okay. I’m good. Just nightmare.”

“Mmh. Tell me about it.” Thatch’s voice was like a salve. That deep-seated need to obey was almost manageable when Katie was at her best, becoming ‘merely’ the strongest incentive she’d ever felt. When she wasn’t quite so sober, had the collar turned on, was already tangled up in the creature, or was otherwise at a disadvantage—such as when just having woken up from a nightmare—it was quite irresistible. She was at a disadvantage most of the time, if Katie was honest.

“Yes, Miss Aquae!” Katie chirped, leaning into the urges she felt that pressed her towards politeness, respect, and deference. It was comfortable. It reminded her of what she wasn’t. The things she was no longer capable of. Her nightmare could never be reality now. She could never use her knowledge to cause harm again. “I dreamed I was back on the Indomitable, before I met you, but… it wasn’t what really happened. It was… I think we won? Or at least, we achieved something. I was getting yelled at by the old captain, which, that’s realistic, but I managed to fix something I wouldn’t really have been able to fix back then and we jumped and ambushed the Elettarium and—” Katie took a deep breath and shivered. An image of all the ship’s beauty scattered to the void forced itself to the front of her mind unbidden. “Thatch, what would have actually happened if we’d managed to get off a railgun slug in the right direction? If we hit a weak point? If I’d done everything right back when I had no idea what right was?”

The plantmass surrounding Katie softly buzzed, drawing out a gentle gasp from between surprised lips. She felt it all over her body like it was her own skin. Katie glanced down and— Oh. Was she still dreaming? She looked down at a version of herself but floral. Katie blinked a few times, lifting her arm,a and flexed her hand. It moved like she did but rendered in black and red leaf with dozens of delicate vines beneath forming the actual structure. It seemed a little thicker than her actual hand, but only just.

Katie stared, moving her fingers back and forth just to watch the way they bent.

Inhuman. Strange butterflies danced in the pit of Katie’s stomach. Surely this was just another dream. This wasn’t what things were really like.

Katie was beautiful. She glanced down to find her entire form painted by the same brush like she were some diminutive affini herself. Instead of fragile human skin grown by chance she wore delicate vinework built by an artist. She was like Thatch herself, in a way. Less imposing. Cuter.

Thatch pulled the girl’s attention back to the present with the first syllable of her first word. “—looked into that, actually. A Terran vessel of the same class did manage to ambush a small transport, much like the kind we rode up to the Elettarium in. The official report listed as casualties… ah, let’s see… Maybe I can get it up on the screen.” Thatch paused, then spoke in a louder voice, presumably directed towards the hab unit’s voice control. “Hab, please bring up the report on the Unsinkable incident.”

The machine spoke back in a sickly-sweet tone: “You got it, sweet pea! A cute lil’ thing like you can get anything your owner is happy to give you!” The room’s lights took on a shimmering pink glow for a moment.

Katie couldn’t help but laugh. She was pretty sure she’d screwed up the language selection when she’d switched things back to English/Floret.

Thatch rolled her eyes, or— Katie blinked. Katie didn’t even know where Thatch’s eyes were right then but she still got the sense with the same kind of intensity as if she’d watched it happen. Neat. “Are you sure there are not configuration values you have missed, Katie?” Thatch asked.

Katie shrugged. “I think a bunch of settings went away after we updated my paperwork. Uh, including access to all the owner-level stuff.”

Thatch chuckled. “Which I also do not have access to, as this is your unit, I see. I suppose our trajectory has been somewhat unusual. I shall put up with this for now. Anyway, here it is.” Thatch quoted: “Even though the Terran ‘weapons’ are super cute and incredibly harmless, they sometimes build them really big!! This one fired chunks of metal almost as heavy as the shuttle, so when they crashed into each other, the shuttle was thrown around a bit!! One of the florets aboard got a bit upset when their favourite plushie lost one of its eyes, but otherwise everyone was okay!!!! (The plushie was repaired, and the shuttle then turned around and its crew captured the Terran ship’s crew and they’re all very good florets now: everyone was okay!!!!!!)”

Katie wrinkled her nose, staring at the screen with a tilted head. “Do you ever feel like Terrans get a little infantilised in these reports?”

The vine stuck in the door tugged itself free and vwipped through the air to brush against Katie’s cheek, then pinned her to the bed while Thatch pulled herself together. In a display of control that Katie fully recognised she was biologically hardwired to find very impressive that vine turned out to be the tip of Thatch’s little finger, which held Katie down with a force she couldn’t hope to overcome.

Katie found it very impressive.

Her dork’s other hand came up to brush Katie’s hair out of her face, then tickled one cheek with a knuckle. “Of course, my precious little pet, you are far more noteworthy. Call up the Indomitable incident for me, won’t you?”

Katie whimpered. This wasn’t fair. She squirmed left, right, and any other direction she could think of, but one little finger against her chest kept her pinned in a way she simply couldn’t overcome. She was pretty sure that any chemical inebriation from the night before would have faded by now yet the fractional contact still demanded her full attention. She could hardly focus at all, but she had an order. “Ah— I— H- hab, bring up the r-report on the Indomitable incident?”

There was a moment’s pause while the machines processed the request. The lights dimmed while they were working then returned to full brightness as they began to speak. “Say please,” they responded, voice clipped and firm. Katie flushed. They could do that? She looked up at Thatch hoping for some help and got none.

“P- please?”

Another pause for processing. Katie bit her lip, feeling the heat against her cheeks rising. The affini promise of being given everything she could ever want hadn’t mentioned that she’d have to beg. After a few moments, the machines had their answer: “No. Be a good girl and ask properly.”

Katie let out a flustered weh. Whoever had recorded these lines had clearly had fun with this and it wasn’t at all fair that it was working. Hadn’t she been above this, once? “Nnngh.” She looked up at Thatch and silently tried to will her into helping. She got nothing more than an amused smirk. “Fine! Please, pretty please may I see the report on the Indomitable incident, hab? I’m a little pet who has to beg computers to run searches now and please may I be granted the results?”

“Of course you may, you precious little—” The voice cut over into another recorded in something that sounded suspiciously like Thatch’s gravelly tones— “Katie!—” Back to the original voice. “You only had to ask, silly.”

The screen finally switched to display the report, but after a few seconds it blurred out. The machines piped up again. “Say thank you.”

Oh, for—

Katie whimpered. “Thank you?” Thatch was enjoying this. They’d see how much she was enjoying it if the machines tried to pull this on her, though suspiciously they never had. Maybe they knew better.

“You’re very welcome, cupcake. Enjoy your reading.” Before boarding the Elettarium, Katie would have sworn that computers couldn’t be smug. Like many things from her prior self, that had been incorrect.

The report came back into focus and Katie’s ordeal seemed to finally be over, except that Thatch was already scrolling to a specific section. “Be a dear and read that out for me, hmn?”

Katie nodded rapidly. When the machines told her to do something it was kind of embarrassing—though not really in a bad way, if she was honest with herself. It was exciting to have such a concrete reminder of her place in this society.

When Thatch told her to do something it was different. It was purpose. Identity. Thatch didn’t remind Katie of her place: she defined it.

“Yes, Miss Aquae! Uh, let’s see… After most of the cuties aboard were rescued, we hit a bit of a snag!” Katie paused and glanced up at her owner. “How am I meant to pronounce five exclamation marks, Miss?”

Thatch shrugged. “I don’t think your vocal system is capable of it; just do what you can.”

Katie nodded firmly. “We got all the humans, but there was a sneaky Katie hiding behind a non-standard security system that hadn’t been incapacitated by the gas! The poor thing was so scared she tried to scuttle the ship to get away! Thankfully, Thatch Aquae was there to calm her down and after a small detour she became a very good girl! The destruction of the Indomitable was responsible for: One bad dream from a floret who had to watch (soothed via rapidly applied squishing); The loss of one of the Elettarium’s cargo chutes (replaced by the automated repair systems); and one scratch on the hull, which after some discussion was not repaired but instead dedicated to the Katie.”

Katie took a long breath, held it, and then let it out as a longer sigh. “This is definitely infantilising, but it’s actually really nice to read something that… just accepts my inhumanity?” She was still smiling.

“Hmn,” Thatch chuffed. “Interesting. You shall be wanting the certificate, then?” Thatch asked, using the tip of a vine to select one of the many, many items that linked off to other records in the Affini computer system. Apparently they’d engraved Katie’s name onto the hull next to the scratch.

This damage caused by Katie Aquae, Second Floret! She is very sorry, and we are all very proud of her.

Katie stared for a few moments. “Does that technically make the entire ship my certificate?”

“At least that hull panel, I would think.” Thatch rolled her eyes. Her voice was so dry Katie felt the need to drink a glass of water. “Before you ask, I don’t know why we’re like this either.”

“Probably because most of us came from a society where the idea of anybody sincerely celebrating our achievements was more alien than you are. I didn’t really get to be proud of anything I achieved before, because all I’d get for doing the impossible was shouted at by somebody who thought I could have done it faster.” Katie gestured at the screen. “This is a little silly, but actually, no, I’ll take somebody getting a bit too enthusiastic about celebrating something I did over what I used to have.”

The gentle sense of surprise wafting down over her like a gentle scent on the breeze was a worthy reward, Katie thought, for managing to exceed Thatch’s expectations. She grinned upwards. “So where’s my certificate, Miss Aquae?”

The affini stared for a moment, then sighed with a gentle smile, resting a hand on Katie’s head. “You really are turning into a floret, I see. Perhaps you will make me an Affini yet.” She stood up, finally releasing Katie, and headed for the door. Katie scrambled along the long journey to one of the bed’s edges so she could follow, but Thatch spoke a word she didn’t quite catch and Katie found herself stopping dead. “I will return presently, pet.”

Thatch left. The bedroom door slid closed behind her.

The room suddenly felt so quiet.

Katie wasn’t really alone. She knew Thatch was just one room away. She still felt her emotions starting to droop the moment she had the room to herself. Katie still felt the gentle happiness and gratitude that characterised her life now, but the intensity was gone and the texture felt coarse and uncomfortable. Katie let out a quiet cry, fighting the urge to call her affini back in.

This was ridiculous. She couldn’t be kept company literally every second of every day. She had to be able to exist alone sometimes. She could be independent, for Thatch, right? For a few minutes? It wasn’t much.

Katie sat on the bed and stared at the door, waiting for Thatch to return.

No, that was ridiculous too!

Katie could be left alone! She just needed a distraction. That was all. Katie looked around the room but nothing seemed to draw her enthusiasm. She looked down at her pale human arms.

Oh. Human. She’d been expecting the floral pattern from before.

Thatch must have gotten very cozy with her overnight. It had happened before but Katie hadn’t exactly been thinking straight when she’d woken up. For a moment, she had allowed herself to imagine that the inhuman appearance might not have been merely skin deep.

Why did acknowledging that hurt so much? Katie had lived her entire life with these arms. Hell, she’d put a lot of work into getting them this far. The skin was soft, the hairs were practically transparent, and though there were a few blemishes from old wounds or accidents Katie found she didn’t mind those. They were signs of things she had actually done. Her body was a project she’d been working on for years. A project Thatch had been working on for months. It was one of their success stories.

So why had all those butterflies from before fallen down the pit that had just opened up in her stomach? Katie looked at her very human fingers flexing and not a single butterfly dared to fly. Why? Just because she’d let herself imagine for a moment that she could be something more than just human?

Katie groaned. Back when she’d been a child she’d been depressed and didn’t know why, but it wasn’t until she’d started to make real progress on her transition that gender dysphoria had really started to hit. Was she going to have to go through the same thing again, except with inhumanity she could do little about? It wasn’t like she could get rid of her arm.

Katie’s eyes snapped back to the door as it chimed and slid open. All in a rush the colour came back into the world as Thatch Aquae walked in carrying a sheet of paper. Katie scampered over to the side of the bed to meet her person there and received a rough ruffling of her hair in response. Her plant chuckled. All was right with the world again.

Thatch sat down and Katie immediately draped herself over the affini’s leg. “Apologies, that took a few minutes longer than expected. The compiler refused to compile it because apparently that is insufficiently fancy. One of Cici’s people is doing deliveries now, however, so it only took a few minutes to have this delivered from the paper forest in the Botanical Gardens.” She held out an actual certificate for Katie to take.

The paper itself was thick and luxurious, marked with ink in rich colours and a design that was—by Affini standards—positively restrained. Which was to say that it was the most ostentatious certificate Katie had ever seen by some margin.

Katie glanced over the text. This award certifies that Katie Aquae, Second Floret, pet of Thatch Aqaue, Second Bloom did successfully damage the Affini Light Scout Elettarium during her capture with quick thinking, clever action, and impressive bravery!

Apparently the Affini tracked who managed to actually damage any of their ships, and Katie was now a member of an exclusive list of the most capable rebels. In her old society, Katie would have been worried about being on that kind of list, but here it really did seem that they just found her antics cute.

Thatch retrieved the certificate, pinching it between two fingers. “I shall frame it and hang it on a wall, I suppose.”

“It is kind of weird to celebrate me almost killing you, huh?”

Thatch paused, frowned, and considered. A moment later she shook her head. “No, I am very proud of you for this,” she confirmed, gesturing with the certificate as she carefully placed it on a bedside table. “But it feels insufficient. Why reward you only for this one action that nobody could have missed, as if your smaller victories are worth less simply because they are harder to see? Yes, your actions aboard the Indomitable were brave, clever, and impressive, but were they braver than standing before an Affini captain and demanding your independence? More clever than you forcing me out of my shell? More impressive than our speed record on Dirt? No, and yet this is what gets celebrated. It feels insufficient. You are so much more than this one relic of your prior feralist era.”

Katie blinked a few times. “You… don’t need anybody’s permission to make certificates, right?”

Thatch froze. Her head slowly tilted down to meet Katie’s gaze. “I… do not, no. I can simply register your achievements myself.”

A vine wrapped around Katie’s torso to lift her free then placed her to one side while Thatch herself stood. “I will return presently,” she declared, and made for the door.

Katie hurried to follow. “Hang on, wait, I actually wanted to talk to you about something!” she called. In response, a vine came to pick her up, delivering her to Thatch’s shoulder. “Thank you. Um, you’re a bioengineer, right?”

Thatch scratched under Katie’s chin with a single gentle finger. “Good girl! You can remember simple facts about your owner.”

“Dork,” Katie shot back, sticking out her tongue. “No, I mean… I don’t know what you specialise in. Do you know anything about, like… enhancements? Or prosthetics? Or… jeez, that’s a weird question.”

Thatch made her way over to the Affini-scale chair they’d constructed, grabbing her own tablet as she went. She began writing. It was in Affini but Katie could guess what she was doing and it was adorable.

“Biotechnological integration is my specialty, actually. That is why I was considered the best available candidate for Caeca. That necessitates a deep understanding of biological form as well as how nervous and cognitive systems usually operate. Learning the intricacies of the human-standard body was a matter of some light bedtime reading. Admittedly I have fallen somewhat out of practice with the practical aspects.” Her stylus scribbled over the surface of the pad while she spoke, writing beautiful, flowing letters that Katie couldn’t begin to read.

“Do you think you could still do it?” Katie bit her lip. What was she doing?

A hand reached up to pet Katie’s head. “I imagine so, it has only been fifty years. Why do you ask?”

Katie took a deep breath. “What if I wanted that?”

Thatch’s artistic handwriting snapped off into a sharp line that quickly escaped the tablet entirely as she twitched and sent the stylus flying across the room. She froze in place. Katie felt the vinework lattice beneath her squirming, lasting long moments before her plant eventually formed response. “I think I need to say yellow here,” Thatch admitted.

Katie frowned, sitting up in surprise while nodding firmly. “Of course, what’s wrong?”

“Is this a hypothetical question, Katie?”

Straight to the hard parts, then. Katie shrugged. “I don’t really know, Miss. We were all tangled together when I woke up this morning and it took me a while to realise what had happened, and when I did I was… disappointed? I don’t know what I want, but I keep looking at myself and seeing someone human?”

“You are not, you know that. We have it in black and white.” Thatch’s attention was wholly on Katie now, with the tablet lying forgotten on her lap.

Katie carefully climbed down and sat on it, like it were a makeshift chair. “But I feel it, y’know? People told me the same thing about my transition. I didn’t need to make any changes because I was already a girl, but like, it doesn’t feel like it, and it doesn’t help when I know that what everyone sees isn’t me. I don’t want to have to explain my weirdnesses to everybody I ever meet to get them to not, uh… deadspecies me? There’s probably a better term.” Katie shrugged and leaned forward to hug into her plant’s stomach. “Do you wanna tell me what’s wrong? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean this to be scary.”

“You have done nothing wrong.” Thatch insisted, holding Katie close with one arm. She looked down at the girl for a moment, then held out her other arm, dissolving it in the process, and then used the pieces to gently wrap one of Katie’s in a floral embrace. “I apologise. You could not possibly be aware of the details. In cases where a creature’s original body can not be preserved, we do create replacements, but those replacements need some way to communicate with the brain and for that we will use a Haustoric Implant by preference.”

Thatch pulled the temporary weave she was building tight. She was moving slow and careful, working fine vines twixt fragile fingers. For a moment she moved Katie’s arm as if it were her own, testing the limits of her movement and stretching her hand into all the awkward positions a humanlike hand could get into. Eventually, she passed control over to Katie.

“I have many complicated emotions tangled up in this area.” Thatch looked away.

Katie shuffled to her feet—she could stand on the tablet just fine, it wasn’t like she could do anything to break it—and pressed her ‘augmented’ hand to Thatch’s cheek. The lattice of vines was thin enough that she could still kind of feel, but it was like touching something through a thick glove. “Hey, we won’t do anything we aren’t both comfortable with. This isn’t the same as Caeca. I’m not dying, and we’re not talking about anything experimental.”

Katie could feel Thatch quiver in intimate detail and the covering on her arm couldn’t help but shiver in turn. Katie pressed her head beneath Thatch’s chin and used her unadorned arm to hug around one shoulder. “Right?” she asked.

Thatch looked away. “I…” She hesitated. “Right. It would of course be safe, you are right. Nothing experimental.”

Katie nodded quickly. She could feel a ripple of uncertainty dancing across her sixth sense. “It’s okay. You aren’t forcing me into anything.”

Thatch let out a soft sigh, paired with a nod and a weak smile. Her scent rippled over Katie, washing away what little energy she had. She sank, letting out a quiet whimper. “May I please curl up in your lap now, Miss?”

Katie proceeded to do just that after a difficult to explain, but clear, sense of permission struck her. It was so much easier to just let herself exist in Thatch’s care. Thatch would take care of everything. Katie didn’t need to worry herself over it. She didn’t need to think.

It hardly took moments before the girl slipped into slumber, curled up on Thatch’s lap with a large tablet balanced atop her. The affini continued writing out all the achievements for which she was to be praised. It would take a while.

Chapter Text

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” Katie protested, trying and failing to prevent Thatch from smoothing out the overlaid foliage of her dress for what must have been the tenth time that morning. “Thatch, you’re fussing.”

They stood just outside their nearest magrail station, Thatch down on one knee as she made sure Katie was properly groomed. They had planned to be out of the house by mid-morning but the ship lights were as bright as they were going to get and both of them were hours late to their respective appointments.

Thatch had explained that most appointments across the Affini Compact assumed that the attendees would take anywhere between a hour to several days to actually turn up. She had done so in a tone of voice that had suggested she was above this, while at the same time distracting herself by brushing Katie’s hair for the third time while already an hour late for her own appointment.

The plant grumbled. “Yes well, you are very cute, and I do not actually wish to attend my checkup.” She sounded almost petulant, but both of them knew she was going to go.

“You said you’d go to your checkups, Thatch.” Katie’s plant put a finger to her jaw, gently pressing in. Katie’s mouth opened before she’d recognised what she was doing. She flushed while Thatch poked around inside, running a finger along her gums and inspecting her tongue. “Ahm fii!” Katie protested, but was quickly shushed.

Thatch continued her inspection for long moments, checking over a list of things she knew full well were up to her standards. Katie was clean and well maintained, with a gentle floral scent. Her clothing was clean, sharp, and stylish—at least according to two sophonts without a sense of style to share between them—and her communicator was tucked into a pocket Thatch had been so kind as to stitch. If Katie got lost or scared, her collar would ping Thatch to come pick her up. If she stayed out too long, the same would happen. The level of surveillance was honestly a little baffling, but Katie found herself appreciating it. Obviously Thatch should know where she was at all times. That just made sense.

If anything Thatch looked a little scruffy by comparison. Her foliage had been well pruned, but she’d woken up with twigs sticking out of her hair and had refused to let Katie fix it. That old visual imagery didn’t quite have the same implications on an affini, admittedly.

Eventually Thatch seemed happy that Katie had not gotten untidy on the walk over. Katie got the sense, anyway, and she was growing to trust her subconscious hunches. She smiled up and—

Nope, the last thing either of them needed was twenty minutes lost to an adoration loop. Katie fought the urge to sink into it anyway. Instead, she stepped forward and hugged her plant as tight as she could manage. “You’re going to do fine, hon. I’ve watched you do scarier things than an appointment, and I’ll be here when you get back.” Thatch draped a vine over her back and squeezed back.

Stars, why did this have to end?

“Alright.” Thatch eventually released her, returning to her full height. “Make sure you check in every half hour, and please do have fun. I expect you to be on your best behaviour, understand? Good girl. Off you go.”

“Yes, Miss Aquae!” Katie chirped, stepping backwards into the awaiting pod. “Good luck with your appointment! I love you!”

The pod door slid closed and, for the first time in a long while, Katie was properly alone. Half the colours in the world seemed to wink out, leaving her feeling empty and lonely. Part of her wanted to just hit the emergency stop right away, dash back out of the pod, and just go with Thatch to her thing.

Instead, she gave her plant a wave through the transparent pod door as she was smoothly whisked away. The ship’s botanical gardens were where they handled the well-being of thousands of different species of flora, and the ship’s affini themselves were ultimately just another kind of plant. Unfortunately, that also made it a difficult environment for anybody not used to intense xenodrugs to exist within.

This was fine. Katie could handle a few hours alone. She had her collar around her neck and that was supposed to help her feel comfortable. She had Thatch a petal-wiggle away on her communicator if she really needed it. She’d be fine. It was fine. She was happier than she’d ever been, a few hours away from Thatch couldn’t be all that bad.

Besides. Katie was supposed to be making friends here. She’d have distractions. The pod whisked her along the habitable arc at incredible speed, but her destination was the ship’s base, over where the docking bays lay. As the pod slowed to a stop near her destination Katie felt the pull of false gravity weaken and slowly vanish entirely.

As the doors opened she was greeted by somebody she didn’t know. The affini was as tall as any, but beanpole thin with limbs that tapered off into nothingness. Two of her four arms ended in hands, while the others ended with fine looking vines. Her wooden face bore a smile and her ochre eyes twinkled bright. “You must be Katie, right?”

“Uh?” Katie asked. Was she supposed to talk to strangers? In Thatch’s opinion, there was no such thing as a dangerous affini, but Katie was fully aware that some of Thatch’s opinions about the Affini Compact were simply incorrect and how was she meant to come to a decision here? She reached for her gut instinct only to find it as lost and confused as the rest of her.

A voice called out from behind the new affini: “Katie!!”

Katie leaned to one side in time to catch Cici floating towards her at an intimidating speed. Though the machine was a good foot and a half shorter than she was, Katie still felt a complicated mix of emotions as the animal parts of her brain recognised the demilitarised war machine hurtling towards her on jets of compressed air. As it closed in, jets on the front slowed it to a crawl so that, despite the lack of gravity, it could still nuzzle into Katie’s side.

“Hey you,” Katie laughed, giving the affectionate machine a pat on the chassis. Some of her melancholy lifted, scared away by the presence of a friend. She held on as it moved away, pulling them both from the pod, which promptly left. “This the new friend you were telling me about?”

“One of—them!—Serrat Dentate, Third Bloom—is very nice!” Cici’s speech was becoming more rhythmic every time Katie spoke to it. Maybe it was just because so many of its vocal samples came from affini now, or maybe it was simply falling under the Affini’s spell at a rapid speed. Either way, Katie found herself tapping a finger against its casing in time with the beat.

Katie waved at the new affini. “Good afternoon, then, Miss Dentate.” She got a wave and a greeting in return, and the three of them headed out towards one of the docking bays.

Idle chatter quickly filled the silence but Katie found herself not really engaging. It wasn’t that she had nothing to say, her head just felt sluggish. By the time she had a response the conversation had already moved on. Cici’s speech was still stilted and hesitant, but the clips now played off at a rapid pace and it and the affini clearly had a rapport. It was learning and growing at an intimidating rate.

Serrat had a vine coiled through Cici’s outer shell. The machine was a whirlwind of noise and motion. Fans spun, lights blinked. Whatever mechanic compressed the air for use as propellant certainly wasn’t quiet, either. Katie rested the back of her hand against one of the hot strips of corrugated metal that lay on the back of Cici’s shell, radiating off heat far more efficiently than Katie could have managed. Vacuum tubes glowed with a gentle waver as electricity poured through them; electromechanical elements snapped shut and clicked open. Cici was no beast machine. It was just a machine.

Katie wasn’t feeling jealousy, exactly, she didn’t think. Envy, maybe? Nobody would accuse Cici of being human. It was dumb, Cici was literally mechanical, but Katie found herself longing. They moved at a steady pace: Serrat hooked vines through honeycomb lattice plates; Cici had intake vents collecting air to use as propellant; and then there was squishy Katie who, should she be stranded out of reach of a wall or handhold would simply have to wait to be rescued.

Not that that was even a problem. Katie knew she was somewhere she’d always be caught, and she knew that if she needed to be useful, Thatch would teach her everything she needed to know. She didn’t mind relying on others for things. That was the whole point of what they were doing here, wasn’t it? Thatch could provide for Katie in a way she could never do herself, while at the same time Thatch had needs that only Katie could provide. It wasn’t a problem. This wasn’t about capability, she didn’t think.

So why did she feel like the weight in her stomach was going to pull her down to the ground all by itself, gravity or not?

Katie heard something beeping. Was that her collar? She wasn’t panicking again, was she? Did she— Katie’s eyes focused on the gentle glow of a soft green light in shining in front of her eyes, flickering in a steady cadence.

“Katie—are you okay?” Cici asked. The first clip was in Katie’s own voice. The second was in Thatch’s, though barely recognisable without the sledgehammer blow to Katie’s emotions she was used to every word imparting.

Katie wondered what Thatch was doing. She’d be in the Gardens by now, right? Did Affini medical establishments have waiting rooms?

Katie’s lips curled up into a gentle smile, imagining her dumb plant sitting on a chair reading a six month old copy of some magazine, waiting her turn. It probably wasn’t anything like that, but the image had a sense of normality that was grounding. Katie blinked slowly, then pulled herself back to the present to find a wide array of sensors all pointing at her with a curious quiver.

“I’m, yeah, sorry. I’m okay. I’m just not used to being alone, I guess,” she admitted, fingers absent mindedly reaching up to brush across her nametag. She held it tight, took a deep breath. She should be able to do this. They’d taken steps. Katie could feel a static facsimile of Thatch’s emotional blanket being played back from the gem in her collar. She had instructions to follow and a schedule for checkins. She had to be able to deal with being apart from her plant. What were they gonna do, stay in the same room as one another for the rest of her life?

Katie clung to her nametag for a moment longer, then let it go. “But I’m not alone. Hey, how’ve you been?”

They continued on their journey again. Cici painted a harrowing picture of treaty negotiations going into overtime with a Vonn Neumann probe on one side of the table and a jellyfish out for blood on the other. It seemed Wing had won and Cici’s ‘species’ would be surprised to learn that empowering each ‘independent’ unit to negotiate the terms of first contact had some severe consequences.

Katie had to admit, she wasn’t entirely sure that Cici hadn’t intentionally thrown the game.

For her part, Katie updated the probe on her own goings on. The status lights dimmed a little as she described her own experiences with Affini xenobureaucracy. The poor thing still hadn’t found an owner yet, Katie guessed. She didn’t understand how, given how thoroughly submissive and domesticatable the machine seemed.

Serrat kept quiet, apparently realising that an unfamiliar face was adding to Katie’s stress. Katie felt kind of bad about that, but having an affini watching over them did help. Things could only go so far wrong when there was an affini in the room.

They reached their destination quickly enough. In the more residential areas of the ship it wasn’t unusual at all to see signage with four or five different translations all in one place, but here there was only Affini script. This was a functional area with what seemed like dozens of docking bays each large enough to house a significant ship, or several smaller ones.

The specific bay they were heading towards held a shuttle much like Katie had seen before, but with a large hexagonal structure docked to the back of it. Given the diagrams June had showed her, Katie guessed that was a whole habitation unit back there. There was another, smaller vehicle docked at the other side of the bay, a long and bulbous looking thing that seemed to lack the elegance of usual Affini design.

As they neared the shuttle a panel on the side opened up to reveal one of the two shuttle pilots. “Ho!” called… Katie had to admit, she still mixed the pair up. They didn’t even look all that similar, Katie was apparently just bad with foliage if it didn’t happen to own her. “Welcome, you little cuties!”

Serrat raised a vine in question. Possibly in objection.

“You heard me, Dentate. Get your bark in here and tell me how you’ve been.” Both affini laughed and Serrat casually pulled ahead to meet her friend. They all moved so easily in microgravity. The habitable arcs were a work of engineering miracle that were entirely for Katie’s benefit. The girl kept a tight grip on Cici while the machine steered them inside the shuttle, and then the door slid shut beside them.

It was busier inside than Katie had been expecting. She knew that what had begun as a quiet invitation had spiraled out into something closer to a party, but even so, there were more people here than she’d expected. In addition to Zona and Xylem (Katie still hadn’t figured out which was which, but both were present) there was, of course, Lily—bouncing off of the walls with a screwdriver in her mouth—, Serrat, Cici, and another affini/human pair Katie didn’t recognise.

There were already a few conversations ongoing. Katie got a few waves from those aboard she already knew, but no immediate demands for conversation. Cici scooted them over to an unoccupied corner, where a pile of pillows had apparently been attached to the floor, with a convenient strap to hold Katie in place.

“It is—nice to see—you again, Katie,” Cici admitted. There was a hesitancy to the words, Katie thought. Was there? Was it capable of producing that kind of nuance, or was it Katie misinterpreting the recordings?

“It’s nice to see you too. I’m sorry we haven’t gotten to spend much time together since we got back, it’s… I’ve been distracted.” Katie shrugged, giving the machine a gentle smile. They both knew what she meant. Katie had been busy getting her spirit broken and her life reoriented around somebody else. Just one of those things, right?

“It’s okay.”

Cici was a mechanical entity. Katie could literally see its cognition happening before her eyes. That only made it easier to spot that particular sign, with the way that all the vacuum tubes and all the electromechanical switches seemed to flicker off at once for a moment.

Katie tilted her head to one side. “That didn’t sound okay. Did I do something wrong?”

Fuck. Katie didn’t want to go back down to having literally only one friend in the entire universe. What had she done? While Cici crunched the numbers, Katie’s head rapidly computed all the possible ways she could have done something awful.

“I miss you,” Cici replied, after several long moments. Where had she picked that line up? Katie didn’t even recognise the voice. “I miss—Thatch.”

Oh. Katie reached forward to press her fingers against the machine’s outer shell. What was she meant to say? They had been busy. Maybe they could have tried harder to make time for Cici, but the last thing Katie wanted to do was put pressure on Thatch. “I’m sorry,” Katie said after several long moments. It felt like settling. “I think we’re both going to be making more of an effort to be around. Miss Aquae should hopefully be joining in later, she just has some stuff to deal with first.”

Katie wished Thatch was here. She missed her dork.

“We are—friends—right?” The poor thing. It bobbed up and down, propulsion jets never quite managing to cancel out its motion entirely, giving the impression of nervous fidgets. “It is—not a concept—I am used to.—but—it is—a concept—I am very interested in.”

“Yeah! Yes, absolutely! I care about your wellbeing and it’s really cool to have you in my life,” and I’m envious of your body. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the time you needed. I hope I can now.”

“Thank you.—I care about your wellbeing and it’s really cool to have you in my life—also. Maybe—we could hang out—tomorrow?” Its lights and tubes flickered hopefully. The gentle crackle of switches opening and closing was a static that sounded almost nervous.

Katie had really planned to spend all of tomorrow in bed recovering from a long day of socialising. More pressing, though, she had no idea whether Thatch would come out of her appointment energised and enthusiastic or frustrated and annoyed, and as cruel as it felt to think it nobody else could be Katie’s first priority. She couldn’t make that kind of promise. If Thatch needed her to, Katie knew she would betray anything or anyone.

“I… think I’m probably busy tomorrow,” Katie admitted.

“The day—after?”

Katie glanced down. She didn’t know. “I… plans aren’t really my area any more,” Katie admitted. It felt rude to openly defer to Thatch, not least because it was extra pressure on her, but also because Katie knew she hadn’t gotten it either before she’d had any capacity for independence pried out of her skull. Florets directing difficult questions to their owners had just seemed either like a worrying sign of potential abuse or like part of a game they were playing. Truly it was neither but how was Katie meant to explain that her entire stack of priorities had been turned on its head without just reminding the poor thing that it wasn’t at the top of that stack? If Katie was totally honest, the only reason she was even here was because Thatch had something else she needed to do. Katie would take a quiet night in over a party any time. How was this meant to stack up to the cosmic bliss of existing at her owner’s heel?

“Oh.—It’s okay—I understand.”

Katie squeezed shut her eyes. How did friends work? She hadn’t managed to hold on to any before. After a moment she tried again. “If you send Miss Aquae a message then I think she’d be glad to get to spend some time with you.”

“It’s okay—I should talk to———Serrat—anyway.” The machine escaped on jets of compressed air, and Katie simply lacked any ability to keep up with it. Katie moved to unstrap herself from the pillows, but she wasn’t really sure what to actually do afterwards. The other guests were all talking. They all seemed to know each other and it was Katie who was the newcomer here.

Katie quietly fingered her communicator. She could just pull it out and ask Thatch to rescue her. Actually, she really wanted to do that, but what would her owner think if she didn’t make it twenty minutes into a party before giving up and begging to be taken home. She could do this, couldn’t she? It was just a party.

Chapter Text

Katie glanced around at the party ongoing around her. She couldn’t do this. She didn’t know anybody here. At the same time, it was important that Thatch, like, actually engaged with the society she was a part of, and the second to last thing that she wanted to do was force her to abandon her checkup to come get Katie. The last thing Katie wanted was to disappoint her owner, though, and she knew Thatch would be disappointed in her if she melted down without asking for help.

Apparently Katie looked helpless enough that she attracted the attention of whichever Varie wasn’t currently busy talking to Serrat and Cici, who quickly broke off their own conversation and moved over to kneel down in front of her. “Hey, Katie, you’re looking a little overwhelmed there. Would you like to be introduced to everyone? Alternatively, over there in the hab we filled a box full of blankets and snacks and you’d be more than welcome to spend as long as you like inside of it.”

Katie couldn’t help but laugh. It was a ridiculous suggestion and exactly what she wanted out of this party just then: to not actually be at the party. “That’s actually really appreciated,” she admitted, with a soft blush. It should have been embarrassing, she thought, to be treated like she was that soft… but she was that soft. The universe had been dangerous enough that she’d had to harden up, but those emotional callouses were softening day by day and maybe it was okay to admit that she was an easily frightened pet.

The difficulties of existing certainly made a lot more sense when Katie realised that they were difficulties meant for the Affini to handle, while she was meant to be in a smaller, more supportive role.

Katie blinked. There was a decision to make and her brain was hitching on it. She reached for her gut feeling and again found it unhelpful. She tried to make the decision on more rational grounds and quickly grew overwhelmed. She stared up at the affini for long enough that they laughed and patted her on the head.

“Don’t worry about it, floret. I’ve seen that look in a cute pet’s eyes before. Are you comfortable with me making the decision for you?”

Stars, please. Katie nodded quickly. The jingling of her nametag was loud enough to draw the attention of the room’s two total strangers. The Varie giggled, wrapping a vine around Katie’s wrist to pull her over towards them. “Come now, sweetie, we’ll introduce you to everyone and then see how you’re feeling.”

Katie nodded rapidly, grateful for a reason to stop her mind from trying to make the decision on its own. “Thank you, Miss Varie.” The animal part of the back of her mind that had once driven her anti-authoritarian streak had been firmly broken in, but if Katie was honest with herself she was mostly being polite to avoid admitting that she still didn’t know which one of them she was talking to. She got a comfortable scritch behind the ear anyway.

The new affini waved as she neared. “Katie! Good to see you looking so healthy. The last time we met you were rather… well, less like yourself.”

“Uh,” Katie replied, trying to filter through her memories with little success. Did she know this one? Katie was starting to realise how scrambled the time before Thatch had broken her was becoming. She remembered the broad strokes and a lot of the details, but how it all fit together was slowly drifting apart. It was all just… the time before she’d been herself. Like a half-remembered dream from some other perspective.

Thankfully, Katie was rescued by whichever Varie had a hand resting on her head. “Ah, how lovely if you’ve already met Avium Prunus, Katie!” In a stage whisper, she added: “You may have met xem through xer work leading most of the hyperspacial engineering efforts on our little ship; recording documentaries and comedy shows with xyr floret; and xey do a lot of the virtual architecture for our digital gardens.”

“Xe and I also did the floret cut of By The Stars In Our Eyes, if you decided to catch up on old Terran dramas,” Avium added.

Oh? Oh. “Oh! Hi! In the engine room! Sorry, that whole day was a lot and I guess I don’t really… like thinking about the time before that if I can avoid it? But hi! Thank you for helping me—” Katie paused. Most of the affini she’d met used she/her pronouns, a handful used he/him, but this one used something else? As far as she knew, gender as a concept didn’t really map to alien life, so they were surely just adopting things to seem approachable, probably? Either way, Katie had no idea what title to use.

The Varie rescued her again with another stage whisper. “I believe xey use ‘M’ as an honourific, floret.”

“Thank you for helping me get back to Miss Aquae, M Prunus.” Katie finished her sentence with a smile and a deferent nod of the head. She held her hands politely behind her back and gave a little bounce. Maybe she could deal with this, actually. The world still felt flat without Thatch here, but with a little help she could still engage with the partygoers. There was a whole new set of rules for how she should behave in this society, but unlike the unwritten rules of Terran conversation these were clear, benign, and helpful. Katie had something to fall back on that was both comfortable for her and socially acceptable for everybody else.

Maybe she could even have some fun getting to know people. Maybe she could do this.

“Well, haven’t you become a well mannered little Terran?”

Katie’s smile faltered and dropped. She looked away, definitely feeling her own emotions intensely now. She tried to keep her enthusiasm going but that one tiny knock seemed to send her into a downward spiral. It was stupid. It was such an easy mistake to make. She did look like a Terran. She looked exactly like a Terran. it shouldn’t surprise her that anybody would mistake her for a terran she was fucking so clearly a terran

the affini was saying something but katie just winced and shied away. how could she be sure it wasn’t something else that would cut through her mental defenses and stab her in the heart

that wasn’t fair

it was an honest mistake

all katie had to do was say and xey would apologise and correct xemselves and everything would be okay everything would be fucking okay if katie could just say

katie was— Oh, Katie was being put into the box. The Varie carried her through to the main room of their hab unit, gently stroking Katie’s hair, and set her down within the blankets. The ‘box’ appeared to be made out of some kind of cardboard, and was packed so tight with blankets that once Katie had been placed inside it didn’t really matter that they were in microgravity because she was being gently squeezed from every direction and thus held firmly in place. A little bag of snacks was tied to one of the flaps, where Katie could reach it. The Varie knelt down, carefully stroking a hand across the top of her head.

“You back with us, Katie?”

Katie nodded, sheepish, and mumbled an apology. The affini shushed her with a sharp tut. “None of that, floret. You don’t want me telling your owner you’ve been self-deprecating, now, do you?”

Katie shook her head. Didn’t want to disappoint Thatch.

“I thought not, so behave. Avium is a big plant and xey’re very sorry for not checking upfront, and xey would like to apologise when you’re ready—but I think it’s best if you stay in here and get some rest until you’re ready to come back out. Nobody is going to think any less of a cute little pet getting overwhelmed. It’s okay to not be used to people yet; you’re still new at it. Now, stay here, nibble, and do whatever you need to relax. If you don’t come back out by yourself then I’ll walk you home when we’re all done, or earlier if you ask. If you do become ready to come out, then just send me a message and I’ll come get you. If you just want to come and sit in on the main event, that’s okay too. I should be in the registry under Zona Varie, Third Bloom. You gonna be okay if I leave you alone in here? I can stay if you’d prefer.”

Katie nodded. “I- No, thank you. Alone sounds nice, actually.” She felt like a dumb, panicky animal, but she was also being treated like one and being put somewhere quiet and still where she could calm down without anything scaring her. She wasn’t sure if that was affirming or humiliating. Possibly it was both.

“I’ll just be through there if you need me, and I’ll make sure nobody disturbs you.” Zona gave Katie a quick tickle under the chin, spent a moment straightening out her hair, and then leveled an expectant look at her until Katie realised she was waiting to be thanked.

“Thank you, Miss Varie.” Even now Katie knew her first name, it still seemed more comfortable to fall back on her new social guidelines. Zona gave her a pleased scritch and left her be.

Katie was hiding in a cardboard box. If they were intentionally trying to invoke stereotypical Terran pet imagery, then… well, it was working. Katie curled up a little tighter and pulled the flaps closed, making for herself a dark, enclosed space to pull out her communicator and wiggle the Thatch petal.

katieflower: hey!! how’s it going?

aquaetor: Greetings, flower! I am in the process of having all manner of measurements taken that I have already provided so that the doctor can tell me what I already know. You are a little early with your checkin: Tell me how you are doing.

katieflower: yes MIss aQuae! but um, shouldn’t You be paying attention?

aquaetor: I am told that entire planetary invasions have been delayed so that the elected general could spent a few minutes with their floret; I suspect nobody shall think twice of me taking a few with mine. I gave you an order, pet.

Katie twitched and fumbled her communicator, sending it slowly spinning away. It took a few moments to grab it and pull it back in. Gosh, she hoped Thatch didn’t think she was being slow.

katieflower: ys Miss sorry Miss! Miss Aquae, i mean, um, dirt

aquaetor: You are very cute. Get on with it.

katieflower: uhhh i got here okay! met cici and somebody i don’t know and we went to lily’s shuttle, or, i guess xona and zylem’s shuttle?

aquaetor: Usually it is the affini in the relationship who own the domicile directly, yes, though as ownership is a transitory relationship it ultimately makes little practical difference.

katieflower: …Thatch was that a flirt? that might be the worst flirt You’ve ever done

aquaetor: Did it work?

katieflower: yes, but!!! um,, dirt this isn’t fair

Katie was smiling. It wasn’t the same as having Thatch by her side, but having a line of communication open helped. Some of the colour had come back into the world.

aquaetor: :::P

aquaetor: Continue with your story.

katieflower: oh um, so, i had a chat with cici and i think it might be a little upset with us? i’m not sure it was kinda evasive, but i think it wants to spend more time with us

aquaetor: Hmn. It is very cute, I shall reach out and see what I can schedule.

katieflower: thank You, Miss! um then i started meeting everyone and i met aviam, one of the people who i got to jump the eletrum to come get You

katieflower: but i kind of had a bad time ‘cos xe called me a terran and i feel pretty dumb because xey want to apologise and i just locked up?

katieflower: but xona put me in the box so i’m cozy at least

aquaetor: Ah. I am sorry, darling. Should I be concerned about ’The Box’?

katieflower: i don’t think so, it reminds me of my cave. just, kinda, warm and dark

aquaetor: At least you are being treated correctly, then. Would you like me to come pick you up?

Katie leaned back, staring into the darkness for a few moments. Did she? She felt calmer now, at least mostly. Just getting to check in was doing a lot for her mood. Any amount of contact with Thatch, honestly. It was getting harder to avoid the conclusion that Katie had a strictly limited capacity for being away from her.

No. Katie felt more stable, and she did want to make new friends. The day could still be rescued, maybe?

katieflower: i don’t think so, unless You disagree ofc. talking helped. i think it could be nice to go back out and try to say hello again? lily said i could probably help with their rocket and,, i mean,, i dont kno what that means but it sounds cool?

katieflower: xona helped too, she was nice and didn’t pressure

aquaetor: Very well. You’ll check in in another half hour, though it does not have to be much. Just show me a smile if you’re having fun. If you can’t check in, or send me something bad, I’ll be right there, understand?

aquaetor: I shall confer with your host and see if I can have things made more suitable for you. My appointment is proceeding expediently, so I should be attending myself later into the event.

katieflower: yes Miss! thank U, i think that helps

Katie took a deep breath. Yeah. She could do this. Thatch knew about her troubles and was going to fix it. Hearing that Katie had been having a hard time hadn’t been a disappointment, and everything was going to be okay.

Katie spent a few minutes quietly nibbling on the supplied snacks while browsing the ship’s wide collection of floret memes. She had found them utterly incomprehensible as an independent sophont but she was growing an appreciation for them now. They were extremely relatable, with a simple kind of humour that Katie was finding herself drawn to over anything that could claim to have layers. Eventually, Katie sent Zona a quick message. It took a few minutes more before there was any response.

The door opened, letting the quiet roar of the party in for just a moment while Zona entered. The affini paused. “Ah, I see I enter an empty room,” Zona cooed. “Yet I was promised by a very well behaved pet that she was ready. I suppose she must be in hiding. Katie? C’mere, katie katie katie?”

Oh. The box was still closed. Katie started the complicated process of disentangling herself from the blankets enough to push it back open while the affini made a show of searching for her. It took long enough that she still wasn’t quite free when she felt something grab the outside of her box and lift it up, and then a moment later the flaps were pulled open to reveal… yeah, Katie still couldn’t tell them apart by sight, but it was presumably Zona.

“There you are! Such a silly pet, you know can’t hide from us.” She placed a finger beneath Katie’s chin and gently scratched. “I was told you like this, but now I can see for myself that you love it. Who’s a good girl? Is it you, huh?”

This was humiliating. She was being treated like she was some dumb animal. Less than human. Katie squirmed, biting her lip with a soft whimper while she felt the weight of expectation being lifted from her shoulders. She didn’t have to be a person now. She could just be… whatever she was.

This felt different when Thatch wasn’t involved. It didn’t feel bad. Katie just lacked the instinctive trust that Zona would get it exactly right, but there was still something comforting about all the expectations that came along with being a person having been taken away. She looked up at Zona with uncertainty in her eyes and apparently earned another moment of indulgence.

“I’ll tell you the answer in a second. I took a few extra minutes to come over because your owner reached out to me and we had a brief discussion on how we could maybe help you feel more comfortable. Thatch thinks it would be a good idea. I assume you do not disagree.” Zona smiled down with a smugness that Katie was certain the her of two months prior would have wanted to shoot.

Instead, she opened her mouth to confirm that she did not, in fact, mind. She was immediately interrupted with a finger on her lips.

“Shush now, katie. Good pets don’t talk without permission. Make all the cute lil’ noises you want, but I don’t want to hear a word out of you until your owner gets here. Figure out some other way to communicate. That’s rule one for tonight. Rule two is that you’re going to be good and just do as you’re told. The rest of the party knows you had a bit of a hard time and to be gentle with you. Rule zero, of course, is that you won’t follow any of the other rules if you aren’t comfortable—but do you want to know a secret?” Zona’s grin grew impish as both hands entered the box, so that she could scratch both sides of Katie’s jaw at once. The girl squirmed, but she was trapped within the blankets and could do nothing about it.

“We don’t expect you to take the out. If you didn’t have one you’d worry, you’d feel out of control, you’d think you were being forced into this and that you didn’t really want it. So, we tell you we’ll stop at a word, and we will, but you won’t tell us to stop, will you?” The affini leaned in closer, staring down into Katie’s eyes. The alien eyes sparkled in a way that could easily have been hypnotic, were she not already enthralled by another. Zona was so close Katie could feel a foreign beat drilling down into her. She didn’t know how to understand it, like she did Thatch’s, but the presence alone was calming. The world still lacked its colour, but at least there was music. It wasn’t as good as Thatch’s music, but it was better than silence. “Such a good girl. It’s a silly little trick played on a silly little pet. We let you feel like you have control so we can take it away without you worrying. You’re such a simple little creature I can even tell you this, and it still works, doesn’t it? Nod your head. Smile. You do want this. I can see it in every quiver of that little pet’s body of yours. I could see it in your eyes the first time we met, back when you were still lying to yourself. Independence isn’t good for you, and nobody around here is going to make you pretend at it.”

Katie stared up, unable to sharpen her thoughts enough to put together any more competent a response than a breathless nod and a dumb smile. She did want this. Independence wasn’t good for her.

“So, katie, we come back to the most important question of all.”

Zona placed a hand atop Katie’s head and paused. The affini’s music swelled, and Katie could tell she was about to say something important.

“Who’s a good girl?”

Oh stars above, this was so much easier with Thatch. Katie lacked the comfortable fuzz around the edges of her mind that came from feeling her owner’s subtle emotional control. She actually had to think her own thoughts. No, that wasn’t fair. Katie could think around Thatch. Here it felt like so much of her brain was consumed with all the little demands of existing that she had no time left over for anything else. With Thatch, Katie felt like she could do anything she’d been told to do, but was sometimes permitted to simply quieten down and kneel. Without her presence Katie was just an animal and was capable of nothing more.

Katie reentered the shuttle on a leash, or at least a vine curled around the ring in her collar. She couldn’t crawl in microgravity, but she could be tugged along.

As she entered the room Katie got a few glances and smiles but little more. Apparently they knew to try not to overwhelm her this time. Zona leaned down and scratched the top of Katie’s head. “Avium has something xey would like to say to you, katie. Would you be okay to listen?”

Katie opened her mouth to speak, and got another tut. “No words, katie. There will be consequences if you break the rules, so be good.”

There was something about the way Zona was saying her name that felt different. Some subtle change in emphasis that stripped her noun of its proper, like she was just a thing. People got capital letters. Katie didn’t need that kind of pressure.

Katie nodded in response. With a little space, her earlier reaction felt kind of embarrassing. It hadn’t been intentional, and xey knew better now. Katie was taken over to the plant, who went down to one knee and extended a hand out towards her. After a moment, Katie pushed her head into it and xey began to stroke down her hair. Much too gentle. Xey didn’t know how to do it like Thatch did it, but then, Thatch did everything wonderfully. Her strokes were on the edge of what Katie could handle, and all the better for it.

“I am sorry, katie. I should have checked before getting here and I should not have made assumptions. I’ll do better. You’re a very polite katie.” Xey glanced at xyr own floret. “You could learn a thing or two from her, Xe. I bet she doesn’t break her owner’s plates.”

“Okay, first,” the floret protested, “it was plate singular! Second, I refuse to believe anybody called kitty doesn’t break her owner’s plates.”

Both affini snorted. Zona corrected: “It’s katie, but yes, close enough.”

“Thirdly, I can fix the plate! I went to pottery classes, don’t you know!”

Avium squinted down at xyr pet, clearly skeptical. “Really? When?”

“Before your time. I got some good footage before they caught me, too!” They grinned, then reached out to scratch behind one of Katie’s ears.

This was… actually quite nice. Katie was present, even a little involved, but she wasn’t being expected to take an equal share of the conversation.

Well. Equals, remember? No such thing. Everybody deserved to get the accommodations they needed without being burdened by equality. Katie let her eyes slip closed as she leaned into the petting, mumbling wordless sounds of appreciation.

Once the scratches were, regrettably, retracted, Katie leaned forward and headbutted the other floret, telling them exactly what she thought about their joke. The affini present cooed, petted, and laughed and it was treated like a contribution to the conversation.

Non-verbal communication was in many ways much easier. Katie didn’t need to think about it. She could just do. Avium and Zona talked, catching up with each other, but made sure to weave context and details into the conversation that they must already know. It could only really be for the benefit of the florets present. They left plenty of spaces for input as well, be it quips from Xe or appreciative coos from Katie. Avium was apparently the ship’s best architect, which sounded boring until it was revealed that the ship had a whole virtual reality double filled with impossible geometry, as well as the affini considering starship-scale jump drives to be a mere matter of hyperspace architecture. Xey also apparently had a fan following, and Katie dutifully handed over her communicator so xey could bookmark xyr hub page in the Records.

Katie nuzzled against xyr shin and, after a few moments of back and forth, managed to extract a promise they could talk about engines some time when Thatch was around so Katie could actually think straight. Katie figured she’d be able to care about that when her person was near.

Zona, on the other hand, was apparently some kind of explorer. She spoke of nights sleeping in the shade of alien trees on far-distant moons; close calls when a jump into uncharted territory put them a little too close to a pulsar; and one very strange incident where they, a thousand light years from any kind of civilisation, were crashed into by a little shuttle crewed only by one small Rinan who was very excited to have blown their rocket in half. Apparently they’d been inseparable ever since, coming up on seven years now.

Stars above, but Katie was starting to see what Thatch meant. These things were intimidating. One of them wanting to keep her as a pet was a compliment of epic proportions. The idea that she could be interesting enough to be worth their time was intoxicating. The universe was a big and scary place because these were the creatures who were meant to be handling it. If they had found Terra a thousand years prior they would have been revered as deities and Katie could hardly say anybody would have been wrong to do so.

As the stories closed, the conversation came to a natural end. Zona, Katie in tow, wandered over to her partner, who was currently engaged in a lively discussion with Cici’s friend. There had been no florets involved in this discussion so they were all chatting in Affini, and Katie found herself grateful to get to tune out for a bit. All three occasionally paused to pamper or pet her and otherwise Katie got to be present, but not really involved. It wasn’t quite as relaxing as spending time in the box, but to Katie’s surprise she was in a room full of people with three separate conversations all ongoing, and yet she was recovering social energy, not expending it.

It was getting harder to deny the truth that everyone around her seemed able to see. Katie was more comfortable as a pet than she’d ever been as a person. She couldn’t even seriously suggest that she’d been made to like this part. The other florets acted more human than she did. Thatch was having to learn how to treat Katie at the same time she was, so it could hardly be subconscious bleedover either.

Dirt.

Katie reached up and tugged on one of Zona’s vines, then stared up for a few moments until she got attention. The plant’s smile grew sly, as if she’d seen that look in somebody’s eye before. Dirt, she’d apparently ridden a supernova home the hard way, of course Katie was predictable to her.

“You got an answer for me yet, katie?”

Katie shook her head. Thinking was too hard. Instead, she had Zona pull her in closer so Katie could curl up against their chair and rest while the party buzzed around her. She listened to the conversations with a quiet smile on her face, occasionally sitting up and wandering over to one of the other groups to give a little input, though without words her attempts devolved into her getting petted until she forget what she wanted to add most of the time anyway.

Every half hour, something in Katie’s brain twigged and she pulled out her communicator to send Thatch a little “:)” and got a little “:::)” in return each time. She could always retreat back to Zona’s side when she needed to recharge, and Katie did, several times, until she eventually fell asleep.

Katie’s eyes opened wide. She sat up, frantically searching the room. The partygoers paused, everybody focusing on Katie while she looked for what had woken her. What was…

The shuttle door slid open, and it was like Katie could breathe again. It was like there was suddenly oxygen in the air; all the colour rushed back to the world; and Katie could finally think. She scrambled, kicking off of something nearby to send herself flying along the ground. She’d gotten the angle a little wrong, so she had to use her hands to keep herself from crashing into the floor, but that hardly mattered.

Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom entered the shuttle, looking a little lost and a little more disheveled than she had in the morning. Katie crashed into her shins half a second later and held on tight. There were laughs and coos from the partygoers, but Katie only had eyes for one right now.

Thatch knelt down to scratch Katie under the chin. Just right. Light enough to do no damage, but hard enough she had Katie dropping deep into petspace just at the touch.

“Missed me?” Thatch asked, after a dry chuckle.

Katie nodded hard, burying her head into her plant’s hand, and breathed deep. “Mmhm,” she whimpered.

A finger hooked under Katie’s collar and dragged her up into Thatch’s waiting arms so she could be carried inside. Once Thatch was actually clear of the entrance, it slid closed. “Well, we certainly are affectionate today!” Thatch’s spare hand ruffled Katie’s hair, harder than anybody else had dared yet not so hard as to hurt. “Who is a good girl?”

Katie gulped. Yeah, no, she knew this one, actually. “Me? Please?”

“You.”

And all was right with the world.

Chapter Text

Katie stared at the hodgepodge pile of metal and plastic that lay within the Floret-1 and pulled a face.

She and Lily had stepped out from the main party shuttle to take a look at the rocket Lily had been building. It was cleanly split into two separate pieces: A bulbous front section that—while exotic—evoked affini design sensibilities and a rear section that appeared to have been welded together by a squirrel on a sugar high. Katie glanced over at Lily, who was in the process of swinging around the side of the rocket with one hand clutching a rope attached to one of the outer panels while the other held a welding torch that was very much active. Katie decided that she was glad that the front section was safe.

If Katie was honest most of this was going over her head. Fuel tanks connected to a wide exhaust… thing with lots of little panels that wiggled when Lily fiddled with the cabling. A Terran-style computer system full of metal and plastic was installed into the middle of the rocket and had apparently been programmed entirely by Lily herself, though as with all of it she had been supervised.

Katie didn’t really understand it. That was fine. Nuclear rockets were a bit pedestrian for Katie’s tastes anyway. She didn’t know how to go slower than 300,000km/s.

Katie leaned over to one side to rest her head against Thatch’s hip. Come on, Katie, you know about rockets! She squeezed shut her eyes for a moment to focus her mind, and then inspected the reason she’d been invited in the first place: the ramshackle jump drive at the heart of the Floret-1.

It didn’t look quite right, Katie thought. Thatch’s words of wisdom were as clear in Katie’s head as they’d been on the day she’d been taught them, even if all the surrounding details were fuzzing out. Katie should understand this.

“This looks a little weird. Do you think this’ll jump, Miss Aquae?” She looked up at her big dork with a wide smile. Thatch would know. Thatch knew everything.

Thatch raised an eyebrow and gently scratched Katie’s scalp. The hand on Katie’s head was purely practical, of course. She needed to be held in place or she’d float away. Also, Katie felt a burning need for contact and Thatch could either hold her down or have Katie clinging to her leg, and the former made it easier for her plant to do things. Katie found herself wishing for the latter all the same. “You tell me, floret. Feel free to ask me more specific questions if you wish, but this is your area.”

Katie spent a moment grinding the top of her head against warm, dense foliage. Of course. If Katie wanted the answers, she’d have to work for them. She should want that. She could think when she was around Thatch, and this had been important to her.

Hadn’t it?

What was actually wrong with the drive? It took surprising effort to clear enough headspace for Katie to picture how these components should go together in her head. Her eyes flicked between the pieces. All the important stuff was there, it just… felt wrong. Katie thought back to her schooling. It felt like it was multiple lifetimes ago now. It was hard to feel like anything she’d learned there could be applicable, but maybe it would help.

“Oh!” Katie pointed at a large, round object that looked like it was made from some kind of steel. The reaction chamber itself. “The electromagnets are unevenly spaced, so, uh… I think the resolution on our jump vector would kinda suck? I don’t think that’s the problem, though, because the EM valve—” Katie’s finger shifted, pointing to a metal construct much like the one they’d salvaged back on Dirt— “is backwards.”

Katie let out a breath. That much thinking had been exhausting. Was it time to let Thatch take over yet? She could just sink down to the ground and let her owner take care of everything and wouldn’t that be nice?

Katie paused, then whispered up to Thatch, making sure nobody else would be able to hear. “Are you sure this is safe?”

Her plant nodded. “The module up above is something fairly unusual for Terran space. I believe they were developed for crash-boarding the automated Xa’a-ackétøth war moons back during first contact. They are shielded against hypermetric interference; rated for near-c collisions with small objects and appreciably fast collisions with large ones; internally cushioned to mitigate sudden changes in momentum; and equipped with the kind of safety equipment that puts the Elettarium to shame. Frankly, anything short of dropping it into a star will hardly be felt from the outside, and the dedicated jump engine on the inside would easily rescue us from that. In the incomprehensibly unlikely event of anything actually breaching the pod, its internal Firebreak systems would snap anything higher energy than a cute little sneeze right out into hyperspace. Unless our records are out of date, you will be safer inside that module than any human has ever been in all of recorded history. Our records, not theirs.”

Katie was blushing. Why was Katie blushing? How could her plant take something as benign as the specifications of a little shuttle pod and turn it into a flirt? “Do you even know the word ‘yes’?” Katie asked, with a laugh. A wisp of a memory from the times before she’d been herself floated up into her consciousness. Katie leaped on it, knowing it would be gone in moments. “I really did end up in the flirting mines, didn’t I?”

“Flirting is the major cultural export of the Affini Compact, yes.” Thatch rolled her eyes. Katie rolled hers too and gave her dork a gentle push. Like Thatch was any different. “But regardless, yes, I am quite sure this is safe. You must understand, Katie, I will never allow you to come to harm. You may not understand all of the layers of safety you are held within, but you may trust them.”

It was nice, to be reminded of the bubble Katie that was Katie’s existence. Easier to flirt with her owner about how she was more loved and cared for than she could even comprehend than it was to think about hyperspacial engineering. Katie might not know all the systems that protected her, but it was enough to know that Thatch did. Katie didn’t need to test it. She knew that Thatch didn’t have to lie to her to get what she wanted, and beyond that, she never would. It was nice to flirt back. Comfortable. Easy to fall into the rhythm of a gentle back and forth. “But what if the fuel exploded right now?” Katie asked.

Without gravity to hold her down, the only thing keeping Katie from drifting into the air was Thatch’s hand. When it was removed, the subconscious movements of Katie’s body knocked her into the air. She only moved a little, but it only took a little before she hung helpless.

Katie’s earlier feelings really hadn’t been about capability. She was as trapped as she would have been if Thatch had her every limb bound in place, and she definitely didn’t mind. Existing in Thatch’s power was a kind of grand cosmic comfort that Katie had never dared imagine. The plant grinned, brushing vines across Katie’s body while ensuring they kept out of the way of her hands, preventing her from grasping anything with which she could pull herself to safety.

“You are deep in the clutches of a precursor race, pet. Do you really think we’d let any of you build something like this if there was the slightest chance you could escape us? You haven’t the power to harm yourself. You are so far under my control you couldn’t stub your own toe without asking permission.” Thatch paused—with their faces mere inches apart and a finger holding Katie’s chin up—so that she could glance to the side.

Katie followed her gaze to find Lily perched atop the rocket staring at them with a tilted head. “Okay, I know you two’re still getting used to each other,” she said, chirpy voice emanating from a biomechanical implant on her neck. “But we launch in an hour! Katie!” She scrambled over the surface of the rocket, magnetic boots and gloves emitting tiny clangs as they engaged and detached, to hang over the open casing around the jump drive. She pointed downwards. “Show your affini how flirting is really done and build something that works!”

“Ahem.” Thatch couldn’t actually blush. She didn’t have blood, and if she did it certainly wouldn’t be red. Katie still found herself laughing at the sense of embarrassment that Thatch practically glowed with, even if she was the only one among them who would be able to feel it. “Yes, right. Katie, inspect the drive. Make it better. Do your best and impress me.”

“Yes, Miss Aquae!” Thank the stars, an order. Katie grinned across at her owner. She grabbed one of Thatch’s vines and hauled herself in, scrambling up to take a seat on the affini’s shoulders. It was striking how much easier it was to focus when she was following a a command. Katie bit her lip, blushing gently as she put her knowledge together. She could just invert the valve and she was pretty sure it’d work. Two minute fix, all she’d need would be one of the tools Thatch was holding for her and a moment of time.

Would that be impressive, though? Katie knew she could do better than that. “Is there an atomic compiler we can borrow around here?” Katie asked, directing her question at Thatch.

“We can likely requisition one of the general purpose ones here in the rear section. I shall enquire.” Thatch left a vine behind for Katie to hold on to while she retreated to back to the Varies’ shuttle. Katie swallowed the urge to scamper alongside at her heel with some difficulty

Lily rolled her eyes. “Have some appreciation for the sciences, Katie!! This rocket’s going to space! Let’s make it go really far!” The creature’s enthusiasm was infectious. Katie squeezed the vine in her hand; it squeezed back; and Katie could tell everything was okay. Okay. She could do this. She reached out a hand so that Lily could guide her in to grab a handhold on the rocket’s hull, then started sketching out a design on the screen of her communicator.

Time to focus. Thatch said so. She could do this for Thatch.

Lily climbed over Katie’s back to sit on her shoulders. The creature was about a third of Katie’s height, so… this was probably weirdly close to how it felt to be Thatch. Katie felt Lily’s hands resting on her head as she peered over to watch. “What did I get wrong? I had it just like the diagrams!”

Katie winced. “Ah, that’s kind of a well kept secret, I guess. All the manufacturers put little traps in the diagrams to make sure nobody can maintain these things without training.”

“What.” Lily seemed actively offended. “But they’re cool! Why wouldn’t they just show everyone so they could keep getting better? That’s stupid.”

Katie glanced around to make sure there weren’t any affini nearby. From what she’d seen so far, talking about capitalism in their vicinity was likely to lead to everyone getting distracted. “There wasn’t any money in making things better, and it wasn’t technically illegal to leave traps that got people killed because they classed it as a form of copy protection.”

“Wow. The Terrans sucked, huh.” With Lily this close Katie could hear that she was speaking in what was presumably her own native tongue. The rapid, high-pitched chirps were usually quiet enough to get drowned out by the output of the translator, but Lily was close enough to practically be speaking into Katie’s ear.

“Big time. I’m glad you got rescued from all that.” Katie hadn’t met many Rinans before. She certainly hadn’t had a conversation with any. The few she had come across had been fitted with bulky Terran-built translator units with a deeply limited vocabulary, and it wasn’t easy to have a conversation without a shared language. The plant-tech replacement seemed to be doing a much better job.

Even ignoring the translators, the Terran Accord had treated the Rinans quite terribly. In Katie’s opinion, it had been coming across a weaker species within its space that had really cemented the Accord as unsalvagable. What could have been a moment to celebrate, where proof of alien life led to a reorientation of humanity’s priorities, had instead become an intensification of them. The Rinans had been colonised, and eventually openly exploited, up until the war had brought everything crashing down. Of course, humanity’s parting shot as they realised the Affini front was about to overtake them had been to try to glass the whole place simply for the crime of not being theirs any more.

Terrans made good pets, but bad owners.

Lily shook her head and shrugged. “Nah, I got myself out of that one! Built a rocket out of stolen bits of Terran spaceship and flew for the open stars. The schematics being wrong probably explains why my jump screwed up, though! Crashed right into Master and Mistress, recruited them for my quest, and returned to free Nyrina!” As the speech had gone on, Lily had grown increasingly more energetic, finally ending with one foot on Katie’s shoulder, the other on her head, striking a dramatic pose.

Katie laughed. “Well, thank you for rescuing me, too.”

“You were a side quest! Like any good side quest, you bring rewards. C’mon, your affini is coming back, let’s build a better drive! Gonna go to space!” Lily leaped away, grabbed a rope trailing through the air, and swung back around to finish putting some final touches on the sublight engines. Katie leaned back into Thatch’s gentle embrace and did her best to avoid distraction.

Step one was to tear the old drive out. It looked like it was made from actual salvaged Terran drives, which was its own kind of terrifying. Katie directed Thatch to pull the pieces out one at a time. The back of the casing held the old Terran warning messages, still.

Warning: Not user repairable! Only highly trained technicians may perform maintenance.

Well. Katie was highly trained.

With Thatch’s help keeping her on task, Katie managed to fit a replacement drive of her own design with whole minutes to spare. She had a lot of help, of course, but Thatch made sure that everything was Katie’s idea. For something they threw together in an hour, Katie was actually pretty happy with how it looked. She was pretty sure she could squeeze twice the efficiency out of it with a little more development time, but given she actually understood the underlying principles now it still beat out any drive she’d used before—the room-spanning behemoth from the Indomitable included.

Finally, it was done. Katie tried to collapse into Thatch’s side, but forgot about the microgravity and ended up just floating in place until she was retrieved. Thinking was exhausting. Finally, could it be time to just relax? She buried her head against whatever part of Thatch happened to be nearest when she was picked up. She couldn’t help but squirm. Every touch was bliss. Every minor moment of contact was purpose. Thatch’s emotions washed over her, making it so easy to just sink into a haze of thoughtless existence.

Alas, time waited for no sophont, the Affini included. Lily herded the party out and into the rocket’s pod and everybody filtered inside one by one. The entrance was—by Affini standards—positively restrained, and the plants among them actually had to shrink to squeeze through. Katie took some pride in noting that all of them looked awkward doing it except for her Thatch who shifted her shape as naturally as she always did.

Katie, biased? No. Katie was the only one who saw clearly.

The interior of the pod was smaller than the outside would have suggested, but it was still comfortable given the relatively exclusive guest list. They even had some separate rooms off to the side, though those were only large enough to be comfortable for one, really. Thankfully, Katie didn’t mind sharing Thatch’s personal space so they called dibs on one and settled into the main room for takeoff in the meantime.

The front of the pod held a trio of chairs facing an intimidating looking control panel. Zona, Xylem, and Lily took their places and started hitting buttons. The pod shook gently as clamps detached and the launch sequence truly began.

Just beyond the control panels lay a wide window, pointing forwards relative to the rocket. In one of its corners a little square flickered into life displaying a stylised depiction of the Elettarium, little petals spinning. A disembodied voice filled the room with a slick, confident accent. The icon’s petals seemed to pulse to the same timing. “Good evening, Floret-1! This is Elettarium Actual requesting confirmation of your intent to disembark. As a reminder, we plan to jump one hour after your initial disembarkation and then pause to reconvene.”

Cici hovered at the other side of the room, sitting at Serrat’s heel. At the voice, it bounced up and down a few times and then emitted: “Hello—Ined!! It is I—Cici—using voice!”

The voice’s collected demenour momentarily broke into something more casual. “Hey there, hot stuff! I made sure there was a relay installed in that pod there, so keep in touch during the flight! You’re in charge of letting me know how it goes, got it?”

The response was just a rapid series of beeps and green lights.

“Good probe. Now, as for the rest of you.” The voice took a moment, and then continued in its prior drawl. “You have clearance to undock and a clear exit pathway. Engines free from two clicks out, but watch the arcs and petals while you get there.”

Lily reached up and flicked a few switches. “Confirmed, E-A. If all goes well, we’ll see you in a couple hours!” She paused, then continued. “We’re going to space!! Onwards!”

Lily hit the large, central button on the control panel. It was big, red, and everybody in the room was thrown backwards when she hit it. Katie felt the acceleration squeezing her lungs as she was forced against Thatch, who was forced against the wall in turn. Katie’s inner ear demanded that she consider it the floor, but she hardly had time to consult it while nuclear fire pushed them forward so hard her teeth were rattling in her skull.

Out of the forward window, Katie could see the Elettarium’s petals slowly turning. Despite the acceleration, it still took a while to clear them. The affini vessel was just incomprehensibly gargantuan. Katie was told that most of their ships were bigger, but surely after a certain point scale just stopped mattering.

Eventually, one of the Varies—Katie’s knowledge of which was which had been rattled out of her mind earlier in the burn—reached over to the lever Lily had pushed all the way up and gently slid her hand back down. The acceleration weakened over long moments until it felt not too far off of Katie’s home’s comfortable 1.2g.

The other Varie looked back, turning to face a room that had effectively changed orientation. What was once a wall was now the floor, and the glass cockpit now formed the ceiling. “Everyone cozy?”

She got a series of nods from the florets. The comfort of the affini was simply presumed. “Then, hey, katie? Be a good girl and configure the jump.”

Thatch raised an eyebrow at the familiarity, but it was pointed towards Katie. All the same, a handful of vines shot out to the room’s handholds so they could be lifted up to the ceiling and Katie could be placed in front of the jump console. She remembered their flight path. The trajectory was simple enough, just some basic mathematics. She could do it in her head.

“Uhm,” Katie hesitated. No, that couldn’t be the right answer. Had she forgotten a step? She went back over the calculations in her head to discover she’d flubbed the first step, and had to do the rest over. That time gave her a coherent answer, though. Eventually. She had to do most of the steps at least a couple times, but she got there in the end. She dialed in the resultant cosmic dance. The reaction chamber was dotted with powerful electromagnets that would activate in a specific order and with specific strengths to guide the wormhole they’d push through their little pinprick in spacetime. Get the trajectory right and you could go anywhere, but the timing requirements made short jumps difficult to pull off, and the field strength requirements made longer jumps harder to aim. They were going right for the middle of the two, in the golden band where a jump drive was most accurate with the lowest power requirements.

Katie moved to hit the button, but found it unusually squishy and unmoving. She blinked, then lifted her hand to look. One of Thatch’s vines blocked her hand. Katie looked up with a blink. “Miss?”

“I think your friend might be a little sad if you plotted a jump that didn’t cleanly terminate, pet.”

What?

Oh, dirt and frost, Katie had been in such a hurry to get on with it that she’d forgotten to finalise the sequence. The wormhole would go to probably the right place, but lead deeper into hyperspace. They’d have come back up somewhere at random, if at all. It was a rookie mistake. It was the rookie mistake.

Katie’s hand was shivering. She pulled it away from the console, feeling her confidence shatter, revealing it to have been a sham. She should never have gotten that wrong. This was her area. This was what she did. This was what so much of her self-confidence had been built on for almost a decade and a half.

And Katie found herself apathetic. She didn’t need those skills any more. She didn’t need to understand this. She didn’t need to understand anything but how to be a good pet for her owner. She could sink, gratefully, into thoughtless oblivion and live a long, happy life at Thatch’s heel and never have a care again.

Fuck.

Katie grabbed hold of a vine and squeezed. “Miss Aq— Thatch, can we talk?”

There was a moment of silent conversation between Thatch and the Varies, spoken in a few shifts of expression and pointed vines, and then Katie was taken through to one of the side rooms and carefully placed on the floor. After hours in microgravity, Katie felt unsteady on her feet, but she was more comfortable on her knees anyway. The shuttle floor was a little hard for it, but she would make do. Thatch took the room’s sofa, positioning herself such that she could look out of this room’s viewing window, where they could see the Elettarium slowly growing more distant on a background of the endless void.

Chapter Text

“What is wrong, flower?”

Katie crawled over to rest her head on her person’s knee. Thatch sounded concerned and there was a little part of Katie that wanted to simply apologise and fall silent. It wasn’t a fair impulse. Thatch would be disappointed in her if she followed it.

“I think I’m losing my grip,” Katie admitted. “I can’t remember names; I can’t focus on anything but you when you’re in the room but I can’t even think when you’re not. I should not have screwed up that jump and I should care that I did. I’m— I’m losing myself and I don’t even mind? I just want to curl up against your side and be your kitty. Katie. Be your katie. Or whatever else you’d like me to be. Anything.”

Thatch’s floral weave tightened. She looked down upon Katie with a mixture of… Katie focused on her sixth sense, trying to parse the mix she was feeling. Adoration yet concern? Something warm, something cold. Thatch lay a hand over Katie’s head and started to gently scratch with the thumb. “I had begun to suspect you were struggling. Most would consider your experience a positive thing, I think. You are letting go of your old life and committing to the new. It is not unusual for florets to spend the remainder of their lives on the endless hedonism we can provide. It is no shame to have all independence stripped away. If that is what you wish.”

“It is,” Katie blurted out. She stared up at her owner with pleading eyes, hands held up by her chest. She wasn’t above begging. Not any more. “I don’t- Thinking is hard and everything is just nicer when I don’t. It’s so hard when I don’t understand how to be. I could just be your pet, right? Just quietly exist for you. You could train me like you have been doing and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. I’d always know what to do. Could I have that?”

The question was almost a trick. Katie paid close attention to her sixth sense, feeling out Thatch’s emotional reaction. Even honest words could mislead. Katie had no confidence she could outwit anything with wordplay, never mind her perfect, genius owner, but Thatch’s feelings couldn’t lie.

The hand on Katie’s head grew a little heavier. For a long moment, Thatch didn’t respond, but eventually the thumb stopped stroking and the grip grew tight so that Thatch could force Katie’s head up to look straight at her. “Of course you could have that, floret. I can make the necessary arrangements when we get home. You are likely sufficiently familiar with xenodrugs now to handle a class-J regimen, which will grant you exactly what you seek.” She smiled down at Katie with warmth and dim, faltering eyes.

Ah, dirt. Thatch’s words were caring and accepting while her emotional state flailed and panicked. If Katie knew her less well she might have missed the signs, but no, it was as clear as day. The leaves around her torso all stood on end; her smile was warm but static and dead; and her whole torso was so tense Katie suspected another railgun shell would have just bounced.

Neither of them could lie to the other. Katie wanted something that horrified her owner. She looked down, fighting a sob. “Why do I want this, Miss? I didn’t want it. You don’t want it for me. How can I want something neither of us wanted?”

“Ah, dirt.” Thatch sighed, then patted the sofa beside herself. “Up, girl.”

Katie awkwardly climbed onto the furniture—with a little help from a vine providing a mid-journey foothold—and settled in with her head resting on a spot Thatch had pointed to. She looked up at her caretaker’s conflicted expression.

“I have intentionally given you the space to make your own decisions and guide your own path. You did not want to lose yourself, and I do not want to lose you. Katie, I fell for the brave and fierce girl who nearly killed me. I will love you no matter what you become, but… I must admit, this would not have been my choice for you.”

Thatch shrugged, turning to stare out towards the stars. Katie couldn’t tear her own eyes away. “I will always love and care for you, however. I have made my promises. I will not break them. You cannot escape me; you cannot change my love or my support. You will be well cared for. I will ensure Leviathan is, in addition.”

That unceasing urge to obey throbbed in the back of Katie’s mind, demanding she simply chirp an acceptance and curl up to be happily erased. She couldn’t tell the difference between that and her own desires any more. Maybe there wasn’t one. “I don’t— Why would you let me, if this isn’t what you would have chosen?”

Thatch blinked, then replied as if the answer were obvious. “I fell for your willfulness and your fire, Katie. I suppose I wished to try to preserve them. I taught you how to stop me from going too far, but apparently that was insufficient.”

Katie squeezed shut her eyes for a moment, sniffling deep. She’d screwed up. She’d had one job and she couldn’t even do that right. Katie stared down at the floor and spent a few moments trying to swallow her tears. They were having an important discussion here that Katie shouldn’t derail with her dumb irrational emotions and “Am I a bad pet?”

“What?” Thatch’s attention snapped back down to her. “Katie, you are a unceasing delight and a far better pet than I am an owner.”

Katie curled up tighter. All she wanted to do was fall asleep on Thatch’s lap, and that was wrong. That wasn’t what Thatch wanted, so why did she want it? It was the strongest urge in her stupid head and it was wrong. “That’s not a no.”

“Then allow me to be explicit. No, Katie, you are not a bad pet. You are a very good pet.” Thatch’s hand hesitated, but did take its rightful place at the back of Katie’s head and held her down. Katie smiled, nodding quickly. Good pet.

So why did Katie still feel like a failure? She’d spent so long hiding from her own desires, and now that she’d finally been pulled out of her shell she was failing her floret and failing her people.

Wait.

That wasn’t Katie’s feeling. She looked up at her affini and reached out with a hand, grasping one of Thatch’s fingers with five of hers. “I don’t want to make you feel like this,” Katie admitted. “Why are you letting me make you feel like this?”

“I do not see how I could stop you without defeating the purpose of doing so.” Thatch waggled her finger back and forth, but smiled down at her floret with a bittersweet aftertaste. “Besides, I love you very much and I wish to see you happy. I would give you the stars themselves if I could.”

Katie squeezed shut her eyes and sniffed, trying to center herself. When she opened them she was looking out across the universe, but so blurry she could no longer appreciate it. She didn’t care that she couldn’t see it, but she did care that Thatch wanted her to be able to. Thatch was her touchstone. Without that how could she possibly know what was right?

Katie groaned, voice so soft as to feel petulant. All she wanted was to let herself sink into obedient bliss, but what she needed was a happy Thatch. If there was anything that could keep her focus it was that. Katie pushed herself up on awkward arms so that she could look at her owner more properly. “Is it okay if I be pushy a little here? I’m— I need to be pushy, but it’s so hard to think anything bad of you. Permission might help.”

A finger came to brush the tears from Katie’s eyes, then to lift her chin so she could see Thatch’s melancholy smirk. “I would like nothing more than for you to yell at me, pet. Speak.”

Katie gnawed on her lower lip. She bit it so hard it hurt, and the pain helped. It was centering. Made it easier to think. She glared up at Thatch, trying to coax the fuel within her to burn once more. Just for a few minutes. That was all she needed. Just a minute of her old fire. Seconds. Anything.

Nothing. Katie was just a pet. She didn’t have any fire left.

Thatch didn’t burn, though, and she could still get angry. Katie had seen it. Felt it. Lived it. Thatch’s anger wasn’t the hot drive for destructive retribution but the righteous anger of creation. Katie wouldn’t—couldn’t—tear Thatch down for her mistakes, but maybe she could turn that energy to more constructive ends.

“Why won’t you tell me no any more, Thatch? I thought it was because I was being good, but I’ve walked straight into a position where I’m not doing what you think is best.” Katie grabbed a second of Thatch’s fingers with her other hand, and held both of them close.

The affini looked torn. Katie could feel the conflicting drives resonating into her from above. “Because I wish to see you smile. It was easier to deny you when I wasn’t responsible for your smiles. I have taken so much from you; how could I possibly refuse you anything more?”

“You haven’t taken anything from me.”

Thatch raised an eyebrow. She raised a hand and began to count off fingers, sprouting new ones as necessary. “Your independence; your willful spirit; your freedom. Your humanity; your name; your identity. Your past and your future.”

Katie made a face, and took a moment to flap one of her hands to the side. “You haven’t taken anything from me that was worth keeping. You also took my old clothes, if you want to be really pedantic about it. That isn’t the point. You didn’t take anything: I gave you those things because I thought you’d take care of me.”

“I have given you everything you have asked for. I have spent entire nights searching through the Terran Records learning of the things you enjoy. I am trying, Katie. I am.” The Affini took Katie’s hands in one of hers and gently squeezed. “I do not know what more to do. I want you to be happy. You deserve more than I can give.”

“I really appreciate all of that, hon. I promise I’m not trying to tear you down here. I don’t think I’m even capable of that any more. Could I take care of myself? Now, or… could I have before?”

Thatch shook her head. “Not now, not before. Not every creature is supposed to exist alone, Katie, and there is no shame in that.”

“I mean, duh,” Katie agreed, nodding her head. “So why are you making me?”

“I am-” Thatch paused, tilted her head, and blinked. Confusion radiated off of her. “Katie, I won’t even let you out of the house without spending an hour getting you ready first; in what sense are you taking care of yourself?”

“You take care of all the little stuff! Even some of the bigger stuff! But you’re leaving the biggest stuff to me, I think? I’m being turned into a pet how I want it; we still live in my hab; the collar was my idea and so was the paperwork and I’m the one pushing for everything. Don’t get me wrong, you’re really good at taking care of the little stuff and you’re really good at taking my fantasies and making them actually happen, and I have been happier with you than I’d ever dared dream of, but we’re not equals, Thatch. You can’t just ask me what I want and then do that.”

“Ah.” Thatch sighed. “I suppose I have been somewhat lax.”

Katie held Thatch’s fingers tight. “I believe you threatened to ‘snap my mind in two’ when you were trying to convince me you wouldn’t make good owner material. Where’d that energy go?”

“The affini who made that claim did not have to wake up next to your smiling face every morning.” Thatch rumbled. She raised a hand to Katie’s cheek to cup it in a gentle, caring grip. “How could I possibly hurt that?”

“Don’t you want to?”

Thatch growled, baring her teeth for a moment. “Of course I want to. I am terrified of not. I would have you pinned you to a wall to spread your insides across it so I could inspect and replace every piece. But I can not do everything I wish.”

“Why not?” Katie asked, squeezing Thatch’s fingers. She was trying to walk a fine line here. This was about helping, not about hurting.

“Because it would not be good for me! I have had exactly what I have wanted for half of my life and it has gotten me nowhere. You are a moderating force, Katie. I need you to tell me what I cannot do because I do not trust my own desires.”

It was Katie’s turn to raise her eyebrows now, with a gentle smile. C’mon, you big dork. Make the connection. If it wasn’t good for Thatch to get everything she wanted without somebody to counterbalance it, then why would it be any different for Katie?

Thatch’s expression cracked, and she let her head drop. “Which is exactly the position I have placed you in by trying to suppress my desires entirely. I see.” She looked back towards Katie with a gentle, softly exasperated smile. “I am sorry, floret. You are a much better pet than I am an owner, yet again.” She took a deep breath. “But you were not born a floret, and so perhaps I cannot be damned for not being uplifted directly into dominance. Help me?”

Katie nodded firmly. “Always. Want my suggestion?”

Thatch laughed, quietly, but honestly. “More than anything. Please.”

“Fix me? I think I screwed up. I was meant to tell you if you were going too far, but I should have told you when you weren’t going far enough, too. I was so wrapped up in getting what I want that I didn’t stop to make sure you were getting what you need. I don’t know where my willfulness went, but can you put it back in? However you need it?”

Katie let herself settle back into a more comfortable position. She was kneeling at Thatch’s side, but there were some things she didn’t want to change. “I want to keep some bits, though. I really like the training; I really like the collar; I like the… pet stuff. No, hang on, that doesn’t work. The feral stuff?”

Katie pulled a face. “You’ve stolen all the good terms.” She earned a grin from her plant. “I like not having to be a person. I like getting to be thoughtless and obedient. I wanna keep that sometimes. But don’t let me choose. Make me be who you want me to be, like we said you would. I know you’re worried about breaking me, but I trust you with me more than I trust me with me.”

Thatch was silent for long moments, attention focused out the window.

“Miss?”

“What if I get it wrong?” Thatch asked, returning her attention to the girl. “What if I take you apart and find I cannot put you back together? I want to. Stars, do I want to, but what if I am not as good at this as I believe myself to be and I ruin you in the trying?”

“Then you try again. You know who I should be, Thatch. You know who I am better than I do. I don’t need to be exactly who I was. I don’t want to be who I was. I just want to be yours. Please? I know this is hard, but you’ll have my help if you want it.”

Thatch looked down at her with gentle eyes for long moments, seemingly stuck. Katie felt emotional static beating down on her.

“It isn’t doing harm to cultivate something, Miss. If I let Leviathan do whatever it wanted, it would struggle too. Sometimes you have to accept that you know best, right?” Katie smiled upwards. It felt good to trust.

The glow in Thatch’s eyes went dim for long moments. “Very well.” The lights returned, brighter than ever. Her voice was firm, as if a decision long in the making had finally solidified. “You do not need a caretaker alone, you need an owner, and so I must accept that I know what is best for you. I will not allow myself to be wrong.”

Katie smiled up at her. “Thank you. Do you wanna talk about what that means?”

“No.”

One hand took Katie’s chin in a firm grip, lifting her face to point towards the room’s tall ceiling. The other hand reached down for her neck. It spent a moment on a gentle caress, then gave her collar a sharp tap on the central gem. Katie began to melt.

“I will have you outshine the stars, Katie. I can not give them to you; I shall have you take them.” Vines stretched out to shift Katie’s body and limbs, turning her lazy slouch into a precise kneel. Back straight, head angled slightly upwards. Knees slightly parted, with her hands splayed between them. Mouth open just a few degrees.

Thatch gazed down upon her, inspecting. Thatch never really did seem to look at Katie’s body. No, her sparkling eyes hid a nervous excitement as they saw past Katie’s shell to what Katie could truly be. They held so much promise.

“Bark.”

Katie paused, looking up at Thatch with a scrap of confusion.

“Don’t question me, pet. Just do.” There was a moment of hesitation. “Just… trust me, okay? This is for your own good.”

Katie had asked for this. Katie had begged for this. She could hardly stop now.

“…Arf! Arf!” Katie’s cheeks burned. Was this really happening? She’d exposed her soul and begged Thatch to reshape her, and Katie didn’t know what Thatch was going to do. It didn’t matter. Katie had nothing left to fight it with anyway. She was putty in Thatch’s hands.

The affini stared down at her, thinking. After a few moments, she shook her head. “Hmn. No. Too eager. What was it you said before? Kitty? Perhaps moving in the right direction. Meow for me.” Thatch’s vines held Katie in place, unable to break out of her enforced stance. As Thatch gave the order she made a rapid series of subtle shifts, showing Katie how she was to kneel to best evoke her new role.

“M- Miaow?” Katie asked. How was she meant to pronounce that? Just saying the word really didn’t work. This was silly.

Thatch tilted her head to one side and considered the result. After a moment she nodded. “I can work with this. I can teach you how to use that voicebox right, at least until I give it a tune-up.” All of the vines keeping Katie held tightly in place relaxed, as did the plant herself. Thatch leaned back against the chair, but kept her gaze locked on Katie’s body. The instant she tried to move, Katie heard a sharp word spoken and froze up. “No. Stay in position, pet. When I tell you to—” Katie didn’t understand the next word, but it was burned into her memory anyway— “then this is how you do it now. Do not worry about getting it right first time. You will be corrected until you do.”

Thatch spent a moment rummaging around inside of herself before pulling out some kind of tool. She flicked the tip a couple of times, nodded, then slipped it beneath Katie’s collar to— to—

“A-ah!” Katie gasped, mouth falling open as every muscle in her body went taut. She could still feel but nothing responded to her thoughts. She was locked in place. Her breath was halted, lungs full of air she couldn’t breathe. She started up at Thatch not because she chose to but because she literally couldn’t tear her eyes away. She couldn’t even blink.

The plant looked down with a thoughtful frown. “There are machines that can do this part automatically,” she explained, while using the back of a thumbnail to shift Katie’s head a few degrees. She leaned in closer, working carefully while the edges of Katie’s vision began to blur. She was asphyxiating. No matter how much she trusted Thatch, shouldn’t there be some part of Katie that was meant to panic? “But I find myself unwilling to use such a thing.”

The affini reached out her other hand and pressed it to Katie’s chest. Her fingers drummed an inescapable beat into the girl’s body while her vision faded into monochrome. “They operate on averages and assumptions. They are good machines, self-correcting and near perfect at what they do, but I do not lay awake at night imagining you strapped to a machine.” Thatch brought her false lips up beside Katie’s ear and whispered. “I imagine you like this, flower. Mind racing. Body stopped. Your whole existence fading away, all for me. The machines wouldn’t let me do this. They have safeties; protections; limits. No good affini would ever want to do a floret harm.”

Thatch leaned back, looking down at Katie with a predatory grin. There should have been fear. There should have been terror. Thatch’s vines pointed in towards her at sharp angles; her jagged teeth glistened with an alien fluid that could have brought anything from endless agony to timeless bliss. This was what Katie had been afraid of. This was why Katie had fought for all those years. A vicious predator come to steal her soul and take away the one thing she had left: herself. This was the threat that had inspired rebellion.

Thatch reached out to grab the back of Katie’s head and pulled her head in for a kiss. It wasn’t the gentle act of a lover; it hurt, but not more than Katie could bear. It was a shock to the body and mind both. Thatch had never given any indication that she wanted that. She had seemed as disinterested in Katie’s body as Katie herself was, but this was hungry. Lips that felt like soft petals brushed over Katie’s; a tongue of tightly woven plantlife pinned Katie’s own to the bottom of her mouth, and then the top, and then the sides. Sharp fangs danced across Katie’s frail flesh, scratching but never more. She could hardly resist. Her body was a marionette in Thatch’s grip and her mind was a rapidly failing slab of meat quickly burning through the last of its oxygen.

Long seconds passed as Katie sank into her owner’s all-consuming embrace. The taste was otherworldly. Mindblowing. Perhaps literally. Katie could feel what was left of her mental state dissolving in a false saliva that seemed precisely calibrated to burn the mind out of her skull. Katie could hardly think. Hardly see. Hardly feel. Everything felt like a dream as her consciousness wavered and flickered. Some part of her mind knew it was dying and her body could do nothing about it. The terror she’d always expected to feel simply never materialised. Katie felt a serenity about it all. Better to accept what she could not change.

Eventually Thatch pulled her back, licked her own lips, and smiled gently down at the fading floret. “But I am trying to be a good affini. For you. I am still learning. You have seconds left yet, worry you not. That little machine in your head is easy enough to trick. Our best tools would not let me take you this close, but we both know that I know exactly how much you can take.”

Katie’s eyes were drooping now. She still didn’t have control, her body was simply losing the capacity to keep them open.

“No no, now,” Thatch sang. Goddess above, she seemed so alive. Drawing her out of her shell had been a delight to watch, Katie felt, and if she had to slip into unconsciousness to a backdrop of anything, then let it be her plant’s smile. “Stay with me, Katie.”

Snap. Katie’s mind rallied, and her body straightened. She didn’t have control here. She didn’t even get to choose whether she would succumb. “Ye… M..quae?” stumbled from numb lips.

Her plant grinned down at her, letting out a sound almost like a giddy giggle. It might have ruined the mood but Katie barely had a mood left to ruin. “I can work with that,” Thatch agreed, then went back in for another kiss.

This time was different. Katie felt sweet tasting air rushing to her lungs. Her body, desperate for breath, sucked it down in rapid gulps that cared not for the source. Thatch’s hand stayed firm against her chest, again beating that same rhythm in. It took long moments for Katie’s mind to grow aware enough to realise she wasn’t the one breathing here. Vines coiled around her fragile form squeezed and relaxed in a precise pattern, puppetting her. Breathe in, breathe out. Always in sync with the ever-present beat long since drummed into Katie’s soul.

Every breath cleared her mind, but only because she’d been starting from such a foggy depth. It couldn’t even be said that a cloud was settling over her thoughts. The cloud had been there longer than she had. It had a stronger claim over the space. Katie had to think around it, if at all.

Razor-sharp fangs danced over the soft flesh of her lips once again, but now they didn’t stop at a scratch. Thatch bit, and Katie felt a burning sensation burst into her, searing through her veins in time with the song in her heart. The pain forced upon her an instant of clarity, but she could do nothing with it but sink all over again.

Thatch leaned back, wiping a short line of blood away from her chin with the back of one hand. Her eyes returned to Katie’s neck. She still held her tool, tweaking something in the collar. What had she been doing while Katie was unaware? Could Katie even hope to notice, at this point? “Thaaa…” Katie started, but quickly found her tongue stumbling over itself. She giggled at the absurdity of it, and then continued to say… to…

She’d forgotten what she was going to say. Katie tried to remember, but effort was so great. It was too much to bear. She decided to let her head flop softly to one side to rest in Thatch’s offered palm. She only noticed that a smaller vine had pushed her a moment later. How much control did she really have?

“None,” Thatch replied, “if you’re wondering about your agency here.”

Katie blinked up at her with a dumb smile spreading across her face. Could Thatch read her…?

“No, I would need more sophisticated tools than this to read your thoughts.” She paused for a moment to wiggle the hook she was using in front of Katie’s eyes. It was a little handheld version of something they had a bigger version of at home. Thatch was just using what she had to hand. It was still enough to take Katie to pieces. “Writing them, on the other hand, is much easier.”

Oh. Katie’s eyebrows twitched. So that meant that Thatch was… “Essentially having a conversation with myself, yes. You know a thing or two about that brain of yours; or at least you do when you can think. It is a poor design. Almost all of it is given over to simply rationalising the decisions made by that little animal core at its center. Like any animal it is easy enough to trick, train, or tame, and it will not even let you realise I am doing so. Shush now, this next bit will be fiddly.”

Katie blinked repeatedly, staring up at her owner. She was not herself. Her moods hitched and shifted, feeling like her own but changing so rapidly it was obvious they were imposed. She felt them all the same. Her thoughts shuddered like cloth wracked by hurricane winds. Every time she tried to pull any of them back together she found them slipping from her grip in an instant.

“I want you to focus your mind now, little one. What is my name?”

Thatch? Katie was pretty sure. No, Katie was certain. Katie had little trouble thinking that. It may have been about the only thing she would be able to think.

Her affini nodded. “Good girl.” The hand holding Katie’s head up gave her a quick squeeze, and the other shifted position around her neck. Katie tried to keep her focus, but—

Katie let out an animal groan as she felt that focus become a fixture in her mind. An energetic buzz ran through her thoughts, tracing the pathways of her thoughts and burning them in. Thatch. Katie’s attention wasn’t merely present, it was absolute. She could think of nothing else. There was nothing else. Katie was naught but a labyrinthine tangle of desperate need. The sudden enforced stream of input was overwhelming. The deep animal part of Katie’s mind tried to tear itself away, finding it all simply too much to bear, but there was nowhere else to turn. Katie had been orbiting in Thatch’s gravitational pull for so long that the event horizon had started to seem almost safe, almost unremarkable, but now she was within it and there could be no escape. Perhaps if Katie could marshal all her strength of will she could close her eyes and save her mind from processing every leaf, every vine, every movement, every tiny detail of Thatch’s fractal form, but—

Katie heard a click, and then Thatch was pulling the tool away and stowing it within herself once more.

Gosh, Thatch’s eyes were really pretty. It couldn’t be understated, Katie didn’t think. The closer she looked the prettier they became. They could just be called ‘blue’, but that was missing the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest both.

They were teardrop orbs, not quite smooth. Surface pocked by hundreds of tiny facets, or maybe thousands. Each refracted some deeper glow within with its own particular set of distortions. The deep light glimmered and the facets shifted it a thousand different ways in a pattern that Katie couldn’t help but recognise. It was the rhythm of her breaths. The beating of her heart. The Song Sung Eternal.

Every facet was a universe to itself. Every piece of the pattern was the pattern made whole yet the whole was more than the sum of its pieces. Katie could stare adoringly up into the glow and she would miss the trees. She could gaze intently into the depths and she would miss the forest. A simple mind like hers could not hope to comprehend, yet Katie could not resist its call. If there was anything left in her which was not focussed on Thatch it was in hiding, quiet and lost.

If Katie had been losing herself before, then now she had lost her grip entirely. She was falling, and barely cognizant of it. There was no longer anything to hold on to; she was tumbling towards oblivion at an ever increasing pace. She could feel the fuzzed-out edges of her mind unraveling.

“There we are,” her plant whispered. “That’s the look I wanted to see.” Her floral tongue flicked out, unnecessarily moistening her pretending lips. Thatch’s eyes dimmed for a heart-stopping instant, and then she let out a long, slow breath before the entrancing glow shone brightly once more. “The machines wouldn’t let me see this, either. Too much danger of bleedover. Your mind is so open that anything could shape it, but how could anybody stand to let this happen behind a sensory deprivation visor?”

She knelt before Katie, looking straight down into her eyes. She held Katie’s cheeks between her hands, gently shifting the girl back and forth just to see her thoughtless face respond. “Beautiful,” she breathed. “You can barely even understand me and yet I see every word and touch mold that little twinkle in your eye. Let us begin.”

Thatch spoke. It demanded every scrap of Katie’s attention. There could be no room for thought, no room to process, no room to comprehend. The words went straight to the dumb animal at the heart of her. Word after word. Sentence after sentence. Instruction after instruction.

If that were all, perhaps Katie could have been saved. One sense alone could not consume her entirely, but she had more than one sense. Thatch’s vines curled beneath her clothes, writhing against her skin to demand a focus she could no longer provide. Overwhelming scent filled her nostrils, requiring attention Katie simply didn’t have. Thatch’s eyes, and the bioluminescant bulbs that still dotted her, glowed and twinkled in a pattern that Katie’s brain had no choice but to fixate upon, yet she had no thoughts to spare. A pair of fingers unceremoniously plunged between Katie’s lips provided a flavour that washed her away, as if there was anything left. Finally, and worst of all, the waves of emotion that crashed themselves upon Katie’s helpless mind found nothing left to soften their blows.

Katie broke.

Thatch told her who she was. Who she had been. Who she was to be. Reminded her of all the things she craved. What she wanted. What she needed. How to curl. How to crawl. How to sit up and beg. All the things the deep animal within needed. All the pet needed. All the katie needed.

Katie felt the hand against her cheek squeeze and instinctively tilted her head to press against it. She tried to hold on to whatever she could but it was no use. She was slipping away into the depths. Every instruction stole a little more away. The last dying act of her flayed consciousness was naught but a whimper and a breath and easy, eager obedience.

“Stay with me, kitty.”

Katie opened her eyes. She felt the tiny vines that had actually opened them leave a moment later. She stared up into Thatch’s eyes with uncertainty and confusion and a long, slow blink. Why could she think? Her head felt clearer than it had in weeks. “Uh…?”

“I told you to trust me. I can not compromise on this. Now be a good girl and sit still while I finish up.” Thatch reached around with a bundle of flowers and vines emerging from her arm. She pressed the bundle to Katie’s face, with the petals conspiring to form a seal. “Just breathe for me, floret.”

It wasn’t like Katie had much of a choice. If she so much as thought about breaking out of her position, some deep part of her subconscious flinched and panicked and stopped the thought dead. Thatch was doing nothing to hold her in place, but she dared not move an inch. Katie breathed. She felt the drugs filling her, spreading out from her lungs along every vein with a tingle she could have sworn she could feel squirming deep within her frail body. Katie braced herself, but to her surprise felt nothing as it reached her brain.

Thatch noted her confusion and explained. “Neuroplasticity tweaks. Soaks into your soft little mind and makes it firm enough for all this to stick without leaving you being too suggestible.”

Thatch pulled her set of flowers away, folded them back into her arm, and then patted Katie on the head. “But you don’t need to know what I’m doing to you, do you, kitty?”

Katie felt the urge to obey, to agree with a smile and a nod. It was no weaker than it had ever been, but she felt stronger now. She tilted her head to the side. She tried to talk, but found her mouth bone dry. Thatch wordlessly pointed her to a bowl of water set to the side of the sofa, which Katie gratefully drank from, quenching her thirst. “No Miss, but I’d like to know, I think.”

Thatch leaned over, picked up her tablet, and took a note. She glanced back over. “Good girl.” Katie’s smile widened. “I had been letting you grow unchecked and so it should come as no surprise to me that you collapsed under your own weight. I will now be providing you a structure on which to grow. You know the details—intimately, if not consciously—and I suspect propping up some basic pillars of your personality will go a long way. All the same, you are one of our projects, and very much a work in progress.”

She tapped a knuckle against her tablet. “I shall be keeping a close eye on you.”

Katie blinked, then nodded. She didn’t feel any different, aside from the obvious change of being clearer headed. She had to admit, this hadn’t been what she’d expected after finally convincing Thatch to rebuild her. Katie sat up, putting her butt against her heels and her hands against the sofa, and considered the backrest. She could make that jump. She shuffled around for a moment to get into position, then leaped up onto the top of the backrest, crawled along it, and draped herself over Thatch’s shoulder. Katie rolled halfway over and batted at one of the flowers in Thatch’s hair.

“I thought you were gonna change me? I don’t feel any different,” Katie asked, pinning the flower down underpaw so she could lean in and bite at one of the petals, hoping to rip it free.

Thatch snapped a sharp word and Katie froze. She carefully removed her teeth from the petal. She’d only left a little mark.

“No teeth.”

Katie whimpered. “But-”

Thatch reached over and pinched a spot on the back of Katie’s neck. She emitted a soft gasp as all the tension left her body, leaving her to flop awkwardly to one side while her affini gently placed her against the floor. Once the grip was released, Katie blinked, picked herself up, and pushed herself back into a sitting position. She looked up at Thatch with a curiou—

Katie leaped for a bright, moving object. She slammed her hands down against the shuttle floor, certain she’d caught it, but felt nothing. She blinked, dropped her head down to floor level, and carefully lifted her hands to peek beneath.

Empty. She’d— There it was, on the other side of the room! Katie found herself galloping at it, feeling strangely dexterous as she moved. She kicked off with her legs, caught herself on her arms while she brought her legs back around for another leap, and repeated the process so she could grab ahold of the object. Her eyes were focused on her prey. One of Thatch’s bright red vines hanging in the air while the tip wriggled in a way that just caught on Katie’s brain. She had to have it.

It shifted a moment before Katie could grab hold. She scrambled to a halt, slipping against the floor tiles while she tried not to lose her footing. Katie squinted, trotting in a quick circle while she hunted for a sign. It was— Under the sofa! She was off. Again, the vine shifted just before Katie touched it, but this time she was ready for that. Katie feinted to one side as she approached in the hopes it would dodge in the wrong direction and leave an opening.

Not quite. Katie missed it by inches and crashed into the back of the sofa, crumpling into a pile of limbs. Thatch chuckled, reaching down to tickle under Katie’s chin. She was already a tangled mess, but now she was a squirming, tangled mess.

“Who says I haven’t changed you, kitty?” Thatch stopped scritching and gently pressed Katie’s head back so she could stare upwards at the affini leaning over the back of the sofa.

“I think I’d notice, hon,” Katie shot back, twisting her body around to escape the grip and scramble back upright. Back onto all fours, where she belonged.

“Ah, of course. Well then, I suppose you must be just how I want you already, right kitty?” Thatch rubbed a pair of fingers against a thumb together to get Katie’s attention, then led her around to the front of the sofa. As soon as Thatch stopped keeping her hand just out of reach Katie spent a few moments rubbing her cheek against it, emitting a quiet rumble of satisfaction.

Thatch chuckled, then gestured with her head to one side. Katie turned to look and— The vine! She leaped, only to find herself grabbed out of the air and held still. “Look before you leap,” Thatch chided. “There’s a window there. Isn’t it pretty? Take a look for me.”

Katie swung for the vine a few more times until she was forced to accept it was simply out of reach. She still found it impossible to tear her attention away until Thatch pulled it out of sight and used it to tilt her head back towards the window. Katie let her eyes focus out to infinity. She took in a sharp breath as Thatch did something to dim the lights, bringing the starscape into sharp clarity.

Oh. Katie stared, reaching out to place a hand against the glass as she entirely failed to take in the scale of it all. They were way up, relative to the galactic plane. It was almost like Dirt’s night sky, but there she’d been viewing it through atmosphere on a planet peppered with a million tiny lights. Here it was just her staring out unimpeded on the utter majesty of the cosmos. She’d seen this view before, but only now was she getting it. Her mouth fell open.

Katie heard a sound from behind as her plant stood and walked to sit beside her. She didn’t turn to look. A moment later, a hand gently stroked down her back, drawing out a shiver and a breathless gasp.

“Beautiful, is it not?” Thatch asked. She pointed over at a constellation. “That is where I came into being. One of the stellar gardens above Xa’aat.” She shifted her finger, pointing to a wholly different section of the galaxy. “And that, dear floret, is where you came into being. One of the creches around Gliese 1245 A on September 16th, 2527.”

The two points were a fraction of a galaxy apart from one another. So far away, and yet so close when viewed in context. Everything Thatch had seen in her long life had taken place in one small corner of one small galaxy. Katie shuffled a little closer and tucked herself under one of Thatch’s arms. “I think I’d like to see that one day,” she admitted. “Maybe more, besides? How much of this could we see? If we tried? How much is out there?”

“Interested in the rest of the universe again, then?”

Katie tilted her head. “Huh? Of course. Why do you ask?”

A gentle grin overtook her plant’s face. Katie felt a wave of relief washing over her. “Don’t worry about it, kitty.” A vine snapped out to ruffle Katie’s hair, but she managed to dodge out of the way by rolling quickly to one side. She saw the next vine coming and leaped for the sofa, though it wasn’t quite enough. Katie hit chest on, scrambled for purchase, and ended up slipping free and landing awkwardly. Before she’d managed to get herself back on her feet, her hair had been well and truly ruffled.

By the time Katie had righted herself, Thatch had written something on her tablet and was stowing it and the pen back within herself. “However, it has been several hours and we are a little late for our rendezvous. Would you jump us back for me?”

Katie nodded rapidly, earning another quick ruffle. It had been phrased like a question, but it wasn’t one. Why would Thatch need to ask her something like that? She already knew all the answers. Thatch stood and moved across the room, speaking some alien word as she did. Katie hurried forward to stay at her heel.

The main room of the pod was home to a quiet conversation about, apparently, the flight itself. The Aquaes paused as they entered the room, halting as Avium raised a hand towards them. Xyr floret was pointing a camera towards the three adventurers as they talked about the steps that had led up to the construction of an entirely floret-built rocket.

Apparently it had been a long journey, and despite the name this was not the first Floret-1. According to Lily, it was a Rinan tradition to reuse names if a vehicle’s catastrophic failure taught them something, so that the only way to keep a legacy going was to always be pushing the edges of possibility. Hence the Floret-1, a fully operational vessel built with only oversight from the Affini themselves.

Soon the interview came to an end and Katie was ushered in. She carefully trotted up a well placed vine and sat before the jump console. She could do this. This was her thing. Katie stuck her tongue out from one corner of her mouth, did the maths, and then plugged in the correct trajectory. She slapped the sequence initiator.

It was weird to execute a jump without a moment of intense discomfort resonating in the lungs. Not unwelcome, just weird. For an instant, reality snapped in two as their fledgling wormhole formed and swallowed them whole. It only took a moment for the view to clear, and when it did Katie found herself gasping.

The Affini Light Scout Elettarium hung in the void as if it were aglow. Beautiful. Comfortable. Home.

An icon at the corner of the cockpit lit as a voice Katie could have sworn she’d heard somewhere before piped up. “Good evening, Floret-1! This is Elettarium Actual hoping you had a great trip and wishing you a warm welcome. We’ve got a docking bay all lined up for you and an approach vector locked in. Can you confirm you are ready to hand over the controls, Floret-1?”

Lily perked up. “Yeah! I think it should work! I haven’t tested all the code, but, it looked good!”

“Acknowledged, taking over engines now.”

There was a gentle rumble, and then the acceleration that had been providing their gravity vanished. Katie yelped, slowly rising into the air before she managed to reach down and cling to Thatch’s vine with all four limbs.

“Ah,” the voice winced. “No such luck, I’m afraid. I’ll just come get you.”

The scout before them started to bank, slowly turning in their direction. The drive plume alone must have been whole kilometers long. Despite the size, the Elettarium was remarkably agile and was quickly bearing down upon them. As it got closer, the size only became more clear, as did the difference in their relative capabilities.

The Floret-1 may have been a finer ship than anything the Terran Cosmic Navy had boasted, at least if you ignored the weaponry. All the same, they could never have hoped to outmaneuver the Affini ship, despite being a thousandth the size.

Katie let out a breath and glanced over at Thatch. “Terra never stood a chance, did it?”

A grin. “I shall start counting the number of times you come to that realisation, I suspect.”

Katie tilted her head with a curious frown, but was interrupted before she could speak by the disembodied voice piping up again. “While I’m en-route, Floret-1, the good captain has a favour to ask. Thatch Aquae, we’ve been having a little trouble with the feralist remnant of the old Indomitable crew. They did a head count and realised one of their number was missing and are refusing to settle down until we prove she hasn’t been eaten. Obviously, they will not be entirely happy to see a pet, but this may be a situation where, if you could get your floret to walk in, give them a smile, and promise them everything is okay it might go a long way. Your call. It’d be appreciated, but you know your floret’s needs best. The captain wants me to make it clear that she wouldn’t ask if the next best option wasn’t starting to assign emergency caretakers. We’ve already cleared out the adoption register, we just don’t have the population to absorb this many ferals quickly.”

“Ah.” Thatch hesitated. “I am… not sure my kitten would be the most reassuring sight for active feralists.”

Katie smiled up at her from her position perched upon a vine, down on all fours, a little confused. “What do you mean? I’m sure if I just go right in and smile they’ll calm down. It’s not like I don’t know how to act normally any more, right? C’mon, Thatch, I can handle my old crew.”

Thatch stared across at the smiling sophont with a flat expression for long moments, fighting a battle of wills she seemed to know she couldn’t win. Eventually, she smiled back. “Oh, very well, katie. I suppose you can hardly make it worse.”

Chapter Text

The staccato twang of the Greshul Corporation Q18 Snap Rifle never left Captain Jeffery Beromt of the Sixth Terran Cosmic Navy Forward Fleet’s head. Waking, sleeping, eating, exercising, it didn’t matter. It was always there, stuck in his head.

It all began with the rising hum of a capacitor bank set into the weapon’s stock, three inches away from the ear. Dense battery cells formed the main power source but they couldn’t discharge quickly enough to be an effective weapon, so they instead fed straight into a capacitor array which then ran the weapon itself. As they charged, the coil whine rose, never quite leaving the spectrum of human hearing.

After the hum reached an ear-piercing scream the weapon was ready to discharge. It couldn’t simply fire, however, as without calibration the beam would be diffuse. There were three rapid clicks as thermal seals along the weapon’s casing slammed shut. High intensity lasers produced tremendous heat which needed rapid airflow to cool. Unfortunately, the delicate array of lenses and mirrors that shaped the blast needed to be very precisely positioned, and even slight disturbances from rushing air would risk losing efficiency in the beam-formers.

After the clicks came the whir. Some of the most advanced silicon the Terran Accord had ever produced orchestrated the firing sequence itself. First, the laser assembly engaged once on a vanishingly low power, low coherency mode for no reason other than detecting how long it took the beam to bounce back. A little mathematics turned that into a range, and then the lenses and mirrors dialled in to precisely target that range. Finally all that energy dancing across the capacitors was unleashed into the beam for one single nanosecond long shot.

Snap.

Hence the name.

The default mode performed bursts of three shots every time the trigger was pulled. It dropped so much energy into a target that cheap armour would crack and flesh would boil. This kind of weaponry was too uncivilised for the core worlds, but out on the edges the rules began to blur.

The sounds never truly left Jeffery’s thoughts. Maybe after long enough without, they might have fallen silent, but combat was a fact of life.

“Hold the fucking line!” he yelled, gesturing at the men under his command. They hid in a makeshift trench, occasionally rising to take pot-shots at the opposing side. Terra liked to pretend that their ‘Terran Accord’ was a thing. One unified government for all of humanity; their little utopian vision of harmony.

Of course, every golden chalice for those snowflakes in civilised space was bought with the blood and sweat of those living on the frontiers. This planet was a mining world, colonised only for the raw aluminium cradled within. Those with power demanded their toys, and so those without crawled beneath the ground to tear metal ore from its home so it could be shipped to a forge world and then beyond. Every step on its journey back to Terra alloyed the metals with the lives of the desperate and the damned.

Those at the top got choices. Everyone else just had to hope they didn’t offend. Say what they had to. Be what they’d been assigned. People like Jeffery didn’t get a choice. They got a gun and a name.

Today’s name was the UWR: The Uraxes Worker’s Resistance.

Dumb fuckers thought they were being underpaid for the job. They were right, but this wasn’t the way to handle it. If they’d just accept that entry-level jobs like this always sucked and went and got a real job then Jeffery wouldn’t even be here, but no. They’d dug out the history books and decided to start a union.

Didn’t they know that unions had been responsible for over a billion deaths? Unions didn’t work. Jeffery leaned out from behind his cover and dropped a few megajoules of heat into their defensive line, blowing a chunk out of the barricade.

Unions never worked.

“I know, I know. If you want my opinion they should be giving you another damned medal, but it isn’t my call. The board made their decision. Anybody else in your place would just be cut loose, understand? Dismissed.”

Jeffery seethed, but you couldn’t shoot politics. “Sir, yes, sir!” Jeffery snapped up a salute and turned to go. Twelve years of service and this was what he got. The hero of the Rinan Defence War taken off of the front lines by some stars damned bureaucrats.

The Uraxes VII incident had been a disaster. Unionisation attempts always were. They’d known that going in. Once that kind of ideological rot got deep enough there was no saving somebody. A fresh batch of workers was getting shipped in from some slum world, but the loss of the prior set’s institutional knowledge was gonna have a cost and that cost had to come from somewhere. The investors wanted heads rolling, and the investors got what they paid for. Jeffery wasn’t fired, exactly, but he’d been placed under indefinite investigation.

He’d done everything right but it still meant months without pay. Months with half their identity torn away. No military medical coverage. No barracks. No mess hall. Stars bless the Terran Accord, right?

Snap. Snap. Snap.

“Another,” Jeff snapped, shivering hand clutching an empty glass. He wasn’t sure what he was drinking. It didn’t matter. It was alcoholic. That was what mattered.

He wasn’t gonna make it to the end of his ‘investigation’, was he? Barely a month had gone by and he was spinning out. His trigger finger itched. Military life had its flaws but a strong chain of command and clear orders made it possible to exist, and there was nowhere else to get that.

He needed a mission. Some fate of the galaxy stuff. How was anybody meant to figure out what to do with themselves when the stakes were this low? Out here in civilian life, he had to figure out what to be all by himself. All that had ever achieved was leading him down a spiral of doubt, uncertainty, and self-loathing. He’d never asked to be this, but the Terran accord needed the manly men who could do the hard things. What choice did he have? It wasn’t like there was any alternative.

His communicator buzzed. He pulled it out to find a priority mail sent on a secure path.

He was being recalled to active duty. There was to be war. Fucking finally. Nothing shook things up like a good war. Investigations could be called off, rules could be bent, credits would be found. Somebody would make a plan and he could follow it. Do the hard things that had to be done. Get medals. Soldiers got taken care of.

He was redeployed the next morning. Gunnery position aboard one of the new Catastrophe-class ships. It wasn’t glamourous, but it’d do. The war was against some new bunch of aliens. They’d crushed the Rinans pretty good, so how hard could another bunch of xenos be?

If there was ever a time for strength, then that time was now.

Terra had fallen. The aliens—the affini—had cut through their defences like they hadn’t even been there. They’d barely even slowed down as the Terran Cosmic Navy’s best had thrown themselves to their doom. Now the captain of his ship was telling them it was over. It was time to surrender. The affini would take care of all of them and make sure they all got what they needed. Everyone would work together to build a better Terran Protectorate, but nobody would be asked for more than they could give.

And what did that sound like?

It was just another union.

Jeff knew how to deal with unions.

Snap.

The fate of the galaxy had been in his hands before. This was Captain Jeffery Beromt’s time to shine. No matter how bad the odds got, a strong Terran leader with a capable crew would save the day.

Things weren’t lost yet. The xenos had made a fatal mistake. They’d gone for Terra first. Conquered the weakest of them, while giving the strong Terrans out on the edges time to plan and prepare.

Jeff held a steaming snap rifle in his hands and stared out towards the stars. “We aren’t giving up here,” he declared. His back was to the crew, but they knew better than to cross him. “It’s time to teach the xeno scum what fighting the best of humanity is really like.”

If there was ever a time for heroes, then that time was now.

The mess hall was hot. Danger to life kind of hot. The steam of boiled-off coolant no longer permeated the air because humidity was now so high it could no longer vaporise. Everything was running at redline, the crew included.

“Hey, come on, can we just forget about the money for a second?” One of the non-military crew had reached the front of the food queue and tried to scan their badge, but the machine had returned a red beep. No credits.

“Sorry, man. Supply and demand, y’know.” The mess officer held firm. “Everyone else can afford it.”

“I need to get medication, too,” the civilian seemed close to begging. Which one was this? One of the engineering lot, Jeff thought. One of the comp techs? No, they tended to have cleaner hands. Must be one of the mech techs.

“Look, I- We’re all in this together, yeah? If I don’t do my job right, all of us die. If I’m too hungry to dial in a fucking jump right then we might never be seen again. Can I just… this once, can we forget the money?”

Yeah, definitely one of the civvie mech techs. Nobody else was that naïve. Jump engineer? Yeah, Jeff remembered him. If this kind of rhetoric spread then they may as well hand themselves over to the xenos now. Jeff rolled his eyes and butted in. “You want to get something for nothing, go talk to the weeds. We need everyone to pull their weight around here, no freeloaders.”

The tech whirled around and jabbed a finger towards him. “I am pulling my stars-damned weight! I just need medicine too and the doctor keeps raising their prices and-” They took a sharp breath as they finally realised who they were talking to. “Ah, shit. Sir!” They snapped into a salute.

“Get out of the queue, recruit. Come back when you can pay.”

“I… yes Sir.”

Jeff shook his head. The fight ahead needed stronger men than this. He needed more than just a crew: he needed a team.

The Indomitable was just about the best humanity had to offer. One main gun that could crack an asteroid in half; dozens of point-defence turrets that could defend it from almost any threat. A top of the line military drive core and enough hydroponics bays to barely need resupplying. It was the perfect ship for the saviour of the galaxy.

Over months they kept just ahead of the affini war fleets. From the Alderamin system came Alexis Jaxx, the best hacker the Accord had ever known. Jeffery and they had been diametrically opposed foes in a dozen encounters, but a common threat had a way of uniting people.

Draco A 2 held a colony entirely unremarkable, except that the scientist there, Doctor Anastasia Teresi, was the best genetic engineer this side of Apollyon’s Light. If anybody could build weapons to defuse an alien threat, it would be her. The colony was halfway conquered by the twigs when the Indomitable arrived, but there was no limit to what a capable crew of driven Terrans could achieve: they rescued the girl.

The shattered remnants of the Rebel Intelligence network reported that trying to breech what was left of the fortress world of Brypso 3 was a suicide mission, but the plan wouldn’t work without a good bruiser and there was nobody rougher in a fight than Eli Matar. If anyone could take an affini in a fistfight, it’d be him.

From Nekkar 3, they picked up a gunsmith. From Scheat 7 came the sneakiest spy Jeff knew of—though he had to admit, that was the one category he couldn’t be sure he’d gotten the best of the best.

In the lead, Jeffery Beromt. They’d called him mad before, but when the fate of the galaxy was at stake it took the best of the best to do what had to be done.

“Stop fucking around, Jack,” Jeff begged. The drive engineer was still a civilian, and the man had no idea how the real world worked. Didn’t they get it? This had stopped being about doing things properly a long time ago. Obviously a drive engineer was going to treat a spaceship like it was some kind of delicate cathedral, as if scratching the paint offended their delicate sensibilities, but that was because he didn’t get it. Not viscerally, like Jeff did.

This was war. The tech spewed some technobabble that Jeff neither understood nor cared about understanding. “I know what happens if those fucking xenos find us, recruit!” Jeff had seen the pictures. He’d seen video footage. He’d seen what happened in the aftermath. He’d heard the snap of laser weaponry played back over tinny speakers and watched bits of plantlife litter a battlefield and it hadn’t stopped them. They took a shot and they just kept coming. They waded through laser fire, shedding their skin and nothing more. If even one of those things got on board everything would be over. He’d spent hours searching the videos for some sign of a weakness.

Their luck had turned. Their raids had stopped going off without a hitch, and the last three infiltration teams just hadn’t come back. This ship was the best Terra had to offer all collected in one place and how could it not be enough?

“We are jumping in one hour, and if you can’t make that happen, then you won’t be coming with us! Do you understand?” Please understand. It was a stupid threat. Fear and anger mixed and boiled over. Didn’t they understand? The Terran Cosmic Navy had had thousands of ships. Tens of thousands. It was all gone. They, and a quickly vanishing set of other lone ships, were the last hope for saving humanity.

And if they failed? What would happen to them then? The future under the Affini Compact? Just imagine a vine petting a human face—for ever.

There had to be some way out of this. The civilian barked an acceptance and Jeff left, stomping out of the room until they got out of sight enough to collapse against the wall.

Snap. Snap snap snap snap snap. They slammed a fist into the bulkhead. Nothing they were doing was working. They couldn’t beat the alien ships. The message had come in a week ago, the last transmission from one of their few remaining allies before it all went dark. The Ochre Skies. Fellow Catastrophe class with a damn good crew. Not up to the Indomitable’s standard, but damn good. Managed to pull off an ambush against a small high-priority target and landed a hit with the main gun. It hadn’t done shit.

How were they meant to captain a vessel when it was this hopeless? Why were his fellow Terrans so fucking weak?

The proximity klaxon sounded a split second before the whole ship rocked. Jeff was knocked from his seat down onto the floor. The bridge had been thrown into chaos.

“Xeno ship sighted!” cried the communications officer. “We’re being boarded!”

The time had come, then. The time Jeff had been training for since the day of his birth. Every snap, every twang, every shot taken, it had all been for this moment where they finally turned things around. He grabbed his snap rifle and dialled the power up to maximum.

He hit the broadcast button for the shipwide comms. If ever there was a time for a motivational speech, then that time was now.

The status light stayed defiantly off. Comms were dead.

Hell, he’d just have to deliver the message in person, then.

He’d been dreaming of this moment for months now. It was the story of his life in a microcosm. All around him, people too weak to do what had to be done. People too scared to do the right thing. This was his life. Doing the hard things so others could reap the benefits.

Terran weakness had come back to bite them, but the bloody twigs had made their last mistake. They thought humanity weak simply because all they had faced were the weaklings.

Well, let them come face to face with one good man with a gun.

Jeff charged down the corridor towards where the creatures were swarming in. Saw one. Raised his rifle.

He beheld a moment frozen in time while his finger squeezed the trigger. An ethereal web of flower and foliage danced before his eyes. It noticed him, looking up with what could have seemed like curiosity, were it not painted on the false face of an enemy combatant. Glimmering eyes shone in stark emergency lighting. These things looked so different on tape. There, they were dead, alien, with inhuman movements. He’d spent hours, or days, pouring over what footage he could, searching for weaknesses, hoping for the chance to finally take one down.

Now he was here. Face to face. It looked so alive. The movements were strange and savage; almost haunting, yet beautiful. It was a creature from myth, like a biblical angel; one of the fae; or a siren singing its song. To hurt this would be like shooting a unicorn.

He did the hard things that nobody else would do. That was who Captain Jeffery Beromt was. If there was ever a time for action…

Hum. Click, click, click. Whirr. Snap.

…then that time was now.

The corridor burned, lit by the sharp lance of Terran engineering. The beast flinched. They could be hurt. They could be killed. All it took was some courage and grit. Jeff mashed the trigger again, painting the monster with flash after flash of molten fire. It reached out towards him, as if to beg, as if to plead for its pathetic life. He sneered: it would be but the first to fall before him like wheat before a scythe.

“The will of Terra will never break!” Jeff screamed while the stench of burning foliage filled the corridor. Scraps of pollen and plantlife burst from the wounds, staining the dull metal walls with streaks of bright colour.

The creature, faltering under the weight of Terran might, stumbled forward. Jeff shifted his stance, shifted his aim, and planted a shot right between the eyes. Take that, you alien scum. He stepped forward, planting his boot against its chest to push the monster down to the ground so he could shower annihilation down upon it. Sprays of boiling sap splashed against his face, but he wouldn’t stop until the beast was slain.

If there was ever a time for death, then that time was—

It put a hand to the end of his gun and firmly pushed it to one side, away from either of them.

“Hey there! You’re a feisty one, ain’t’cha?” it asked, between bursts of laughter. “That tickles!” Its dopey grin was marred with black burns and charred leaves. With its other hand, it reached up to brush the broken plantlife free. Like a kind of biological reactive armour, he had destroyed the outer layer without being able to touch what lay beneath. “What’s your name, pancake?”

Jeff tried to pull the gun free of its grip, but after a moment it simply yanked it away and snapped it in two. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. It wasn’t meant to go like this. He was strong! He had to be strong! The alternatives were unacceptable! Yet, the beast suddenly seemed so much bigger than before. It sat up and even that left it towering over him. Guns were the great equaliser, but what could he do if even that didn’t work?

Rule one of talking to the enemy, drilled into them so they could do it even while the rest of their mind was panicking. Name. Pancake? Was the beast trying to offend him, or…?

“C- Captain Jeffery Beromt, Sixth Fleet, Indomitable! S-S-Serial number two-five-one-eight, uh, no, six-three-nine!” His voice wavered. Without a gun, what was he? He grabbed for the knife on his belt, but trembling fingers faltered and dropped it. A vine snapped out to grab it in mid air, quickly taking it out of his reach.

Fuck. Fuck! He had… he had an old backup pistol! He quickly went down to one knee, grabbing for the weapon in his boot. It was an old slug thrower. Barely even a weapon, but so long as he had something he could still be effective. He pulled it out and pointed it up at the plant, only to find he had the grip wrong. He was holding it by the body, with the barrel pointed away from either of them.

The beast’s maw sharpened. Another vine stole this gun away too. “Good waffle. See, isn’t it so much better to do as you’re told? You military types know that, right? Chain of command?” One glowing eye winked out for but a moment. “It’s okay, pancake. You’re safe now. We’re here. Now, be a good little Terran and breathe deep for me, hmn?”

Jeff felt a burst of anger. How dare it talk to him like that? Didn’t it know who he was? He was the hero of Nyrina! The anger flared in his chest and he took a deep breath so he could yell, and… the air tasted purple, and all his anger seemed to tumble away.

He faltered, ending up on both knees. The beast curled around him as he fell, picking him up and holding him to its chest. “Shhh. Hey, quiet now. You feisty ones make the most delightful pets, but you’ve proved yourself by now. You’ve done enough. You can relax. Let us take care of the rest.”

It leaned in close, to whisper. “Or don’t. Some of us like a struggle. We’ll find you a good home, that’s a promise.” It opened its jagged mouth and breathed out a cloud of something sweet-scented that left Jeff tingling just to touch it. “Now, sleep for me, syrup.”

For all he fought, he lasted no longer than anybody else.

This wasn’t how Jeff had expected capture by the Affini Compact to go. He’d woken up in some kind of pod to the smiling face of a black and white plant holding a clipboard and pen.

“Name?” it asked.

Name. “Jeff.” It felt bitter in his mouth. Jeff had been a warrior. A fighter. Somebody who’d been willing to do terrible things because they had to be done. It hadn’t gotten him anywhere in the end. Jeff had been the good man with a gun, and now he was neither. He didn’t deserve the name.

He’d lulled himself to sleep each night with the honest belief that the atrocities committed by his hand had been necessary, but he hadn’t saved the galaxy. They hadn’t made a difference in the end. How was he meant to live with himself now?

The plant glanced at its clipboard, spent a few moments searching through the papers clipped to it, and then scratched her joke of a nose. “I don’t have a Jeff on here. Is there another name you go by? Of course, I will refer to you by anything you would like, if you have a preference?”

“Fuck off.”

The xeno raised an eyebrow. “Hmn. I’ll just add you to the ‘to be identified’ column, then.” It clicked a button and the pod slid shut again.

Wait. Wait, that was it? Where was it going? The last one had been much more insistent! Jeff reached out… but the air was going all purple again and he couldn’t help but slip unconscious in the cold, dead embrace of the pod.

They were nice, actually.

The affini. At least these ones. Soft, gentle, with nothing but smiles and patience. Jeff could spend five minutes yelling at one with every swear he knew and it didn’t seem to ruffle them in the slightest. He could try to attack them and they’d just let him. He had no weapons and hard fists striking soft plantlife didn’t seem to hurt either of them. They just let him wear himself out.

No matter what he did, they’d still just go about the process of making sure he was fed, watered, and cleaned. So far he hadn’t been brave enough to really challenge them on their threats of doing those things for him if he refused to comply.

They were endlessly patient. They seemed to have no end to their ability to calmly, quietly talk. To gently explain why his beliefs were misconceptions. To forgive him his crimes without reservation.

He hated it. It made him angry. They would forgive him for what he had done? He couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done. He wanted to hurt them and they treated his inability to do so as if it meant the pain wasn’t chewing him up inside. Like forgiveness wasn’t something that had to be earned.

It was so easy to justify horrors in the moment. He’d do it again, given half a chance.

He’d given his whole life to the Terran Accord and it had all been for nothing. Therefore, all the evils he had committed had been for nothing. They hadn’t changed a thing in the end. The fucking plants had come along regardless. They said it wasn’t his fault. He told them to go to hell.

Now here he was. It couldn’t have been more than a couple days since his capture, but already he’d had half a dozen of the damn things talking to him. They were all nice in a way that made his blood boil.

Except for that first one, back on the ship.

One of the crew was missing. It had taken a while to get a head count. They were mostly being kept apart, but the xenos were letting them see each other as proof that everybody was okay.

But they’d counted and somebody wasn’t here. Jack Sahas, one of the mech techs. The twigs had given them some obvious lies, but a little bit of rioting had forced their hand. The whole crew was unified against them, and collectively they had some bargaining power here.

The low rumble of nervous conversation spread through the room as the twenty foot tall main doors slid open. A familiar affini entered. The black and white one. It cleared its throat to catch everyone’s attention. The once-good-man seethed. Half the crew were looking towards it with barely disguised adoration. Even from his own team, Anastasia and Eli were simply smitten. Even of those who still fought he could only see a few truly angry faces. He didn’t know what had happened while they’d been apart, but they’d barely even fought. It had all ended so quickly.

“Hello, my pretties! Be good Terrans and listen up.”

There was a wave across the room as Terrans perked up one after another. The soldier tightened his fists hard enough that it hurt. Why was nobody fighting? They had to win this thing. They had to. He didn’t know what else to do.

“So, I pulled a few strings and the, ah, missing crewmate is willing to come tell you everything is okay. Please be gentle.” It glanced backwards and nodded, then stepped aside.

An unfamiliar xeno walked in. It practically slithered across the floor, eschewing even the aesthetic of humanity in favour of pulling itself an inch in the air in a tangle of a dozen tentacles. Greens, blacks, purples, and reds all mixed together to create a nightmare from beyond with bright glowing eyes and a savagery in its movements that couldn’t help but put the room on edge. Those closest to the front took a step back, filling the air with their murmurs.

The monochrome one was scary, but it felt humanlike in a way that was relatable enough. This one wasn’t even trying to calm their nerves.

Simply by its entrance, an invisible line had been cut through the room’s centre. On one side, aliens. On the other, all but one of the crew of the Indomitable. Between them lay a no man’s land. A gulf between tried and tested Terran traditions and the twisted alien perspective that had conquered them all.

The mere presence of these things recontextualised everything. No longer were they peers mingling in some kind of recreational area, no. They were being categorised and titrated. Judged. Sorted. The aliens wanted to see which of them could be bought. They’d soon find that the good captain had no price.

The silence was so stark that he could have sworn all would hear his breath, but even such a silence was still a false vacuum. It broke mere moments later when met by something more alien still that plunged them into a much, much deeper silence.

There was a noise like the cry of an animal. The room collectively glanced down, tearing their attention from the newcomer. Nobody had noticed the smaller creature hiding behind its legs. That would have required being able to look away, and if these aliens were good at anything it was being the centre of attention.

The smaller creature received a little push from the affini and stumbled out into plain view. It too seemed almost to dance with its motions, giving barely more weight to the pretence of humanity than the affini did.

Nobody said anything. Nobody had anything to say. How could they?

It looked like a woman, crawling on her hands and knees at the xeno’s side. Around her neck rested a thick collar. Her eyes glanced around at human faces with a subtle lethargy. The only sound in the room was the jingling of its nametag swinging with every soft sway, but such a sound sound only made the silences between sharper.

This was no Terran. They had brought a pet.

She could hardly be said to be wearing clothes. She was covered only by a dense coating of dark leaves more reminiscent of fur than a uniform. It hid entirely her torso and stretched all the way down to each wrist and ankle. A hood rested around her head, with two pointed triangular leaves facing up to the ceiling, looking almost like ears or horns. The only skin visible was on her hands and face.

The face looked human at least, but it was like they were intentionally trying to distract from that. Was this a threat? Obey, or we will do to you what we have done to this?

“Um,” it spoke, glancing up to the affini it crawled beside. The plant nodded, then pulled the vine that hooked into the loop on its collar up, bringing the thing to a kneeling position before quietly murmuring something towards it. “Hello, everyone,” it said, with a smile that was almost human. It felt uncomfortable to look upon, as if it were the impression of an artist who had only ever heard smiles described by the blind. “It’s nice to see you again.”

It spoke in a soft voice that felt almost like it was singing or reciting poetry. It couldn’t have been more obviously practiced if it had the script in front of it. Maybe it did, through some abuse of alien technology. It looked at them, but it didn’t really seem to see them. Its eyes seemed out of focus. Perhaps it was reading from a script only it could see.

It seemed to move either with practiced, inhuman precision or with a subtle sloppiness. Never anything between. When it had crawled it had done so with otherworldly grace, yet now when it looked around the room it seemed only partially present, as if half of its attention were elsewhere.

They had demanded the lost member of their crew, but the aliens had brought to them preternature.

A murmur spread across the room. Somebody spoke up: “What is this?” At least Eli was still on his side.

The creature smiled. Tilted its head. The hood only partially followed the movement. It swayed softly from side to side. “I’m kitty?” it asked. “Uh, I did the jump engineering on the Undomitable.”

No. What the fuck? No.

Did the plants think they were all fools? That they could eat one of the crew and then parade this before them? Nobody was willing to call it out. Nobody would do the hard thing. Well, fine. It always fell to him, didn’t it? Surrounded by fucking weaklings who couldn’t do what needed to be done. Stars, but his life would have been so much easier if there was any other way than this.

He stood tall. “Bullshit,” he called, glaring at the monochromatic plant. The one he’d talked to before. “Did you not even take a photograph before you ate him? Is this the best you could find? Or… make? Or is this a test, to see how obvious a lie you can spin and force us to believe it?”

The two affini glanced at one another for a moment. One seemed to almost shrug at the other. In return, a roll of the eyes.

The affini they knew spoke up. “I can guarantee you that this is the very same katie who was aboard your little ship. I am sure she could answer any questions you have if you need proof.”

katie. She. He gritted his teeth. “His name was Jack!”

The new affini bristled. Jagged thorns slipped from beneath its deceptive coat of calm leaf. In a moment, it went from emotionless and detached to a beast of sharp angles and threatening tentacles. What were the chances it could reach across a room with those? “Her name is Katie, and you shall not upset her. She is here as a favour and you will respect that.”

For a moment, the warrior felt forced respect bubbling up in his mind. He recognised that tone of voice. Words for somebody who was about to cross a line. He balled his fists. How dare that creature appropriate such confidence for this sham?

“I’m okay,” the girl spoke, taking a moment to smile up at the alien she knelt next to. She reached up a hand to gently pull one of the sharp vines down and the rest all followed with it. The affini returned to emotionless detachment. The pet returned her attention to the crowd. What the fuck was this? “I might be a little different to how you remember me.” Understatement, but at least it was acknowledging it. “See, I’m actually transgender, and though many of you knew me as, um.” It bit its lip and glanced up to its handler.

The alien looked down, face charged with indifference. The creature at its heel smiled a little wider anyway, as if it somehow found positivity in the dispassion. “Your old name is not relevant to your life, kitty, just let them know who you are now.”

“Yes, Miss Aquae!” It chirped with all the enthusiasm of a newborn puppy discovering an open field for the first time. Was this meant to calm them? To be told that this unrecognisable thing had been one of them? Even while quiet it was in constant motion. Swaying back and forth, or wiggling its hands or its shoulders. Endless movement all set to some unheard, alien beat. The mood in the room was separating. Where before the strong and the weak at least mingled, now the Terran side of the room was splitting into distinct layers. The cowards stood apart from those still willing to fight. The stronger group was by far the smaller.

“So, I’m kitty now.” It smiled, bouncing on its heels like it was actually happy to be here. “Or, I guess I always was, but people know it now.” It shrugged. “And so do all of you. I think I’d told some of you, but… well, everything was hard back then, and Miss Aquae makes it so much easier to know what to think.”

A third layer was emerging. There were the fools who were so eager to surrender they’d accept this mockery. There were those who disbelieved but were so afraid that they were unwilling to fight. Then, finally, as true now as it ever was, the layer of one standing tall above all: those who could meet force with force. It didn’t matter that the urge had brought him nothing but pain and regret. He had no choice. The captain spoke. “This is absurd. You aren’t even getting the names straight, never mind right.”

The barely-human wreck kneeling before them all giggled. The laughter and her movements felt off somehow, like they lacked true spontaneity. The timing was ever so slightly off, as if she’d waited a moment longer to laugh than a normal human would have. “Well yeah, I’m super gay.”

It was laughing at him.

Was this what it had all come to?

All the fighting, all the hardship, all the war. Just to be laughed at by some degenerate?

No, he should have better than this! He deserved better than this! He didn’t have a choice about what he was, and he wouldn’t give anybody else a choice about whether to respect him for it!

“That isn’t what I mean,” he roared, loud enough that the creature actually stopped laughing and shuffled back. The affini put a vine around its shoulder to calm it. As alien flesh touch its body they could all see the way its eyes rolled up into the back of its skull as it was overtaken by bliss. They claimed that that thing used to be a rebel, but there was no bravery left in those eyes. Jack hadn’t been their best, but he’d been one of them. One of the last brave fighters humanity had left. That he could have been reduced to this was unbelievable. “Who am I? If you’re really who you claim, you’ll know who I am.”

“Jack? Jim? Jeff! You shouted at me a bunch, I think.”

“I’m the captain!” he insisted, only to receive another giggle.

“Don’t be silly. Rosa is the captain.” It smiled with a dumb ignorance, like it had no thoughts that went more than surface deep.

The stars-damned Captain of the Indomitable slammed his fist against the desk. “I am the captain, and you are still under my chain of command! I don’t know what that fucking weed has on you, but there’s no way any brave Terran on my crew would break for real!”

Its smile wavered, and the creature glanced at the floor. “’m not a Terran,” it insisted. Finally, it fell still. Was he getting through to it? C’mon, Jack, fight this thing!

“You’re—”

“Not a Terran!” it hissed, suddenly darting forward. It moved like liquid. It strode forward on all fours, but to call it ‘crawling’ would be like saying a star fighter merely travelled. Every movement was precise and practiced and slick. It danced around the lower layers of Terran opposition and leaped onto the desk the captain stood behind. In only seconds, it had gone from sitting by its owner’s heel to inches from the captain’s face, whole body shaped to a sharp and dangerous point. Teeth bared.

“Not under your command; not him; not a Terran; not a human.” It was right. It spoke like one of the aliens: an accent that no human could have produced with words that got caught in the brain; a rhythm that sounded practiced while it spoke things that couldn’t have been scripted; and a soft certainty that no human had ever felt.

This was no Terran.

The captain looked over her to the other aliens in the room. “I don’t know what you’re trying, but this obviously isn’t our mech tech.” He gestured towards the animal on the desk. As his hand neared its head it snapped, almost biting one of his fingers. He yanked his hand away, taking an alarmed step back.

“Kitty! No teeth!” one of the plants snapped. The creature wilted. “I am sorry about this, ‘captain’; katie and I were somewhat at the fulcrum of a liminal period when we heard we were needed and she is not configured for this kind of meeting. Perhaps I can smooth things over.” It spoke another word that didn’t seem to mean anything and the creature hurried back to sit at the alien’s side again.

The beast lowered itself and placed something against the creature’s neck for a few moments, humming a strange alien song to itself while its toy twitched. After long moments, the creature blinked and glanced to the side, blushing profusely. It scurried behind the affini, where they could only hear it.

“Oh my stars, Thatch, you— In here? With them? I, um. Are we trying to calm them down or scare them?” It poked its head back out, coughed, and raised a hand to its head to pull down the hood on its clothing with an awkward laugh before speaking more loudly, over to the crowd. She raised a hand to wave and gave them an awkward grin. “Uh, hi, I’m Katie Aquae, Second Floret, and you used to know me as Jack Sahas. I joined up about two years back in Struve something something, but it’s not like any of us could really count the days, right? Kinda depressed, did all the jump engineering, terrible poker face? Yeah, don’t pretend you don’t remember me, Stewarts, you still owe me a synthcube.”

There were a few weak enough to laugh. The captain was merely horrified. The words felt closer to human but they were still spoken with an accent he had never before heard in a cadence that didn’t quite match how any human would really speak. The others were drawn into a conversational trap. The creature spoke more easily but it was still distinctly alien.

But it was their mech tech. Or something that had once been their mech tech. The similarities were undeniable. It knew too much.

It was one thing to imagine somebody so radically changed they were unrecognisable. Another to see them returned to a facet of their former self before his very eyes.

The beasts could change people. What use was there fighting this? If they could do this to Jac… to Katie, then could they do it to him, too? Steal away all that he was? Take that single-minded drive for action that had made him so effective?

Take away the things that made him him, but brought so much pain?

Take away the things that he hated about himself but had never been so brave as to confront alone?

Terra had never stood a chance, had it? The good man with a gun had done what he’d had to do because human nature never changed. Except here these invaders were, changing it. All the evils he’d committed were his doing. His responsibility. His crimes to atone for. He could never be forgiven for them, for he’d do it all again and worse in a heartbeat.

That was just who he was.

Something deep inside simply snapped, and the Terran felt all the anger draining away through whatever hole had just been punctured in his soul. He had to fight. It was simply in his nature. He had to do harm and damage and destroy all that was around him. He didn’t have a choice in that matter. He could never stop, no matter how much harm he did.

“Anyway,” Katie said, with a smile. “If anybody has any questions about our floral friends, I’d love to answer. They’re a great bunch and a lot less scary than they seem. On the whole.”

The crew had some questions.

“Does your weed dress you in the morning, barkhugger?”

“How does it feel to have betrayed humanity, root smoocher?”

“If we’d known we had a plantfucker with us we’d have spaced you months ago!”

Nobody was asking the question that wouldn’t leave the captain’s head.

The last strong Terran raised his hand.

The last strong Terran clutched their rifle, back against the wall. Klaxons blared all around in cacophonic emergency. A broadcast over some kind of communications system detailed the containment breach. The plants called for aid.

The Terran grinned, clicked the beam strength up to maximum, and darted out of cover. If they could get out of the medical area and make it back to the docking bay, they could reach a shuttle. That was their victory condition. They had a way to go yet. Dozens of the alien menace to fight their way through. As they darted down the corridor affini came for them like insects drawn to rotting fruit. Sharp angles met harsh lighting in a locked-down starship.

Terra’s mightiest defender planted their feet against the grates, raised their rifle, aimed, and fired. The kick was a little unusual, but it worked. Every time a blast hit one of the weeds, they were knocked back, sprawled against the ground where they lay unmoving and lifeless.

Shot after shot. Affini after affini. One shot, one kill. That was the rule. No alien could stop one good Terran with a gun. As they approached the medical wing’s exit, they found their nemesis.

The first affini they’d ever fought.

Now was as good a time for a rematch as any, they supposed. The snap of their rifle met the snap of vines reaching out towards them faster than the local speed of sound. For a few brief seconds they were locked in close combat. Terran technological might held off an organic barrage through grit, grease, and grim determination.

The Captain strode forward, making precision shots one after another until finally they were close enough to deliver the killing blow. One good hit on the plant’s core and their rematch would be over.

Snap.

The plant fell, vanquished, and for a long moment there was naught but silence.

“Oh my stars,” the Captain breathed. “Did I actually do it?”

The fallen foe sat back up and grinned, nodding rapidly. “Oh, good girl, Pancake! You did so well!” It rose back up to its full height and shook out its technicolour leaf-coat, which had been stained by the dozens of paintballs that had left their marks. “You’re getting a treat tonight!”

Pancake bounced in place, happily wiggling from side to side with a wide grin on her face. “And we get to lower the handicap next time! I bet I’ll be able to take you one on one soon, Lady Maple!”

“We’ll see about that, sweetie.” Pancake’s affini laughed and picked up a half-spent paintball. She lobbed it back with a gentle throw, staining Pancake’s companion dress with a smear of paint. “For now, looks like you’ve gotten a little dirty, so let’s head home.”

Pancake grinned back. When she really thought about it, maybe the rebels had won after all. All it had taken was a little adjustment to their victory conditions. She ran into her affini’s waiting arms and hugged.

They’d saved her. Helped her to understand the evils she’d committed while she lacked the support she needed to thrive. Helped her forgive herself now that she had that support. It’d been a struggle, but some of them liked a struggle.

“Thank you.”

If there was ever a time to be happy, then that time was now.

Chapter Text

Through an endless expanse of dense forestry, Katie stalked her prey. Dirt crunched beneath curled fingers as she ventured forward, quiet as night. Dying sun glinted across distant horizon, an ochre orb that cast long shadows though the undergrowth. Deep twilight, when all the predators of the universe came out to hunt.

Some deep instinct passed down through generations of predators before her hissed in the back of Katie’s mind, teaching her how to stay quiet and low. Some subconscious part of her knew to stay in the shadows where she wouldn’t be seen. If she moved slowly enough she barely made a sound beyond the barely audible jingle of metal on metal as her nametag rattled against its loop.

Voices whispered in Katie’s mind like echoes in wind. Following them was easy: they reminded her of things she must already have known; things she must have learned so long ago she could no longer remember when or where. Katie stayed small and low, body pressed against the soft dirt while her eyes tracked her target. A small, fuzzy creature barely meters away bouncing up and down as it moved in clear ignorance of the danger it faced.

Katie sank down to the ground. The undergrowth surrounding her tickled her chin, but if it meant she was harder to spot then that was a compromise well worth making. The rumble of a hungry stomach threatened to bring the game to an abrupt close, but thankfully the prey remained blissfully unaware of Katie’s presence. Her lips curled back, baring teeth that longed to rip and tear and feast.

Her prey began to move. Katie slowly rose just enough to give herself space to follow. Slowly, carefully, she followed instructions whispered into her mind one step at a time. One hand forward; then the opposite knee. The other hand; then finally, the other knee. Head level, eyes tracking. Torso twisting in just the right way to provide a counterbalance. Katie dragged herself along the ground with subtle stealth, moving so slowly she knew she wouldn’t be seen. Her target was sauntering around at a casual pace and Katie matched it with a predator’s precision, maintaining distance between them while she waited for the moment to strike.

Hunting was a compromise. Katie would rather not be seen by the thing she was trailing, but she could not be seen by the forest’s greater threats. She moved silently beneath the canopy, beneath the attention of those things that would hunt her, following her instincts and doing what had to be done to soothe a demanding stomach.

As the fluffier animal moved behind a tree Katie risked a burst of motion, hurrying to use a broken sightline to close the distance. She heard the soft scraping of something moving through dirt and undergrowth as her meal-to-be wandered. She froze. Eventually, the scraping fell silent: perhaps a moment of weakness, Katie wondered? She dared to peek around the tree, to—

Dirt! Her prey had been looking right at her!

It ran, cutting a hard line directly away from her. The voices in Katie’s head rose to meet the moment, hissing the right moves exactly when they were needed. She tore after her meal, whole body moving in a choreographed action that felt more like muscle memory than thought. Her prey was fast. Faster than she was. She couldn’t beat it in a straight line.

Katie hadn’t gotten here by being dumb or boring. She’d gotten here by being smart.

The huntress glanced to the right as she ran, then diverted. Up the set of wooden stairs leading to the cavetop platform where she could have the advantage of higher ground. It meant losing track of her prey for a moment, but it was a dumb animal running scared and it wouldn’t be able to capitalise on that. Katie moved fast when she was letting her instincts guide her motions and it took only moments to reach the top. She dropped down low and stalked to the edge of the platform, staying quiet and out of sight.

Her meal glanced around in a panic. Left, right, ahead, behind. Katie grinned. Nobody ever looked up.

She leaped, sailing through the air with claws outstretched and mouth open, ready to land a killing blow. The wind caught her hair. The frantic jingling of her collar tried to warn her next hot meal of its fate, but it wouldn’t have time to react. It was done.

Katie was still falling. The ground certainly was further away than she’d expected. There was something she had to do to land safely from this kind of height, wasn’t there? Instincts told her she could handle this, but when she reached for the knowledge of how Katie found nothing. She flailed, suddenly extremely aware of how hard she was about to hit the ground.

Katie’s eyes went wide as the dirt rushed up to meet her, and—

“Gotcha!” Thatch laughed, wrapping a pair of vines around Katie’s torso to bring her to a safe stop in mid air. She held Katie in a gentle harness, vines wrapped such that they distributed all the pressure across her whole body so well she almost felt as if she were flying.

The greater threat had arrived, drawn close by weight of hubris. One could not hunt in its forest without consequence.

Katie flailed and fought but the vines stayed beyond her reach and she could do nothing to disentangle herself. The affini herself walked up, keeping Katie helplessly hanging still while she circled, appraising her catch. Katie could feel the pressure of attention pressing down against her mind, as if the mere presence of her predator was enough to start grinding away her strength.

Katie hissed, hoping to scare the creature off, but she achieved little. Her own prey had made itself scarce and now it was she who was at risk of becoming a meal. Thatch’s circle ended as she came to kneel right before Katie’s face, lifting her so their eyes fell level. Katie snapped and hissed, but she didn’t earn even a flinch.

“Did I not require you stay clear of my sight, kitten?” The predator’s tongue quested out past razor teeth to dampen hungry lips.

Wiggled fingers caught Katie’s gaze and drew out a quick snap of teeth. The hand pulled back, but not so quickly that Katie didn’t win the tip of a leaf. Nothing substantial, but proof enough that Thatch wasn’t invulnerable. Perhaps enough to convince the affini she was more trouble than she was worth? Katie could only hope.

It was not to be. While one hand had distracted the other had snuck up on her. Katie froze as a firm finger pressed against her scalp, coming from an angle she could not shake. For just an instant she looked across at her captor with the horror that came from understanding her own defeat, and then it was over. The finger began to scritch and Katie’s hostility shattered in a storm of bliss.

Rough motion resonated through bone, hammering Katie’s mind and shaking thoughts away. Every touch felt like the joy of warm flesh squirming beneath her pointed teeth. Katie’s bites gashed at empty air, body curling as biochemical satisfaction spiked. She was barely even aware as she was lowered into her predator’s lap, but a berry-encrusted vine left a little too close quickly grabbed her attention. Thatch’s finger fell still as Katie’s teeth tore into gentle plantlife, chewing on tough flesh that tasted divine.

Those vines that still held Katie down pulled back, taking places hanging in the air near her without quite making contact. A clear statement. Mistake not comfort for the lack of a cage. Katie was too busy with her feast, gnawing on her brightly coloured meal. With each berry yanked from its fragile home bursts of flavour sprang forth, demanding every scrap of Katie’s fragile self. She was only too happy to provide.

Over long minutes the girl chewed, bit, rent, and tore. She stripped the vine of its few meagre leaves and its various delicious fruits, but the main body was too tough for her to do any real harm. Still, it felt good to bite down and better still to yank and pull and every time she did she managed to squeeze a little more of some wonderous flavour free and satisfy some deep-seated urge within.

Yet with every touch, every berry, every bite, Katie felt some facet of her strength falter. At first she had torn angrily, pinning the vine beneath her claws and biting hard, but by the end she had slipped onto her side so she could quietly suckle the last of the flavour free. She felt so weak. She raised a hand, to claw, to scratch, but all she could manage was to gently paw at Thatch’s stomach and all she earned for it was a soft chuckle.

“I think we will call this experiment a success, despite needing to halt it early.” The beast rumbled as it spoke and though Katie recognised the sounds she found herself unable to resolve them into words. Vibrations buzzed through her tiny form; noises formed through rapid twitches of flora translated through vine and leaf into flesh and bone. Some deep part of the girl recognised the way they felt.

Katie forced her eyes open, looking up with a curious, nervous glare. There was no escaping this by force, but perhaps she could still find a way out. Katie was a clever girl. Small and weak, perhaps, but smart. She knew that much.

“I must admit, I had not expected you to throw yourself from such a height. Clearly some of your—” The plant waved a hand in the air. Katie’s eyes locked on and followed it— “subconscious assumptions are bleeding over in ways I had not anticipated. This is fine. Fascinating, actually.”

The hand snapped down and though Katie had been watching it she still wasn’t fast enough to avoid it. It took her by the chin, and even a gentle touch was enough to freeze her in place. A soft, quiet warmth struck with all the force of a sledgehammer and Katie couldn’t help but moan in unrestrained delight. All her remaining strength was knocked free.

Just from a touch.

How was this happening? How had she gone from predator to prey so quickly? Why did this creature feel so good? Katie whimpered, eyes falling half closed as the deep heat of contact throbbed into her bones. She could barely comprehend what was happening around her. Everything mixed into a heady soup of endless bliss. Her predator raised a tool held in her other hand and did something with it that Katie could not hope to follow. Her world was an ocean of desperation and desire and she lacked even a raft.

“You are the most interesting machine I have had occasion to maintain, kitty. Now let’s try that again: run.” The grip shifted and fell away. No longer was Katie held in place. She quickly glanced around to find the two vines that had been guarding her had vanished. Instincts screamed at Katie to flee. Take her chances escaping from a dangerous being she had no hope of being able to handle on her own. Perhaps in a pack she could have had a chance, but alone? No. Her only hope was escape.

Katie ran. Dirt scattered as hands and knees dug in and kicked off. If she could make it into the depths of the cave she could hide and wait this creature out. Even she was only barely small enough to fit into its depths. The larger creature would have no chance.

Katie’s skin burned with the fading heat of gentle touch. As it left her she chilled, returning to her natural form. That was good. That was how things were meant to be. She’d always been okay with it. Her bones seemed almost to freeze.

Katie was returning to a prior state. The lonely existence of an ambush predator. She’d been okay with it before. She could be okay with it again. Every step she took away was a victory. Every inch was resistance. Every millimetre worth celebrating. She was free. She was free! She was…

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Every step further away stole away the joy from her soul. Every inch was failure. Every millimeter unwanted. Katie didn’t even make it to the mouth of the cave before she slowed to a stop and turned. She looked back to see if she was being followed.

She wasn’t. The greater threat sat against a tree, watching with clear interest. Thatch raised an eyebrow as Katie padded back over and pressed her cheek into the plant’s waiting hand. She let out a happy little sigh and began to lick it clean with long slow licks.

“Tame already? Hmn. Disappointing. I suspect this is more bleedover. You really do struggle to fear me, don’t you, kitty? Worry you not, I shall teach you how.”

Katie still couldn’t understand a word. She smiled upwards and rubbed herself against her person’s hand, happily defeated. The briefest touch just felt so right that she couldn’t tear herself away. Wouldn’t. If this thing was predator, then let her be prey. Katie let her eyes slide shut and yawned, deliberately lowering her defences. She was safe here.

“Well, quite.” The words were meaningless, but the tone brought a smile to Katie’s lips. “I am happy to know that you are feline good, kitty.”

The girl pushed her forehead against soft floral fingers and pawed at Thatch’s other hand until she relented and began to stroke.

“No, nothing? Not even a pity laugh? Goodness, sometimes you make me feel like I am speaking with a—” Thatch casually reached around to the back of Katie’s head and grasped her hair, then forced the girl to kneel and gaze up into her eyes— “thoughtless, uncomprehending animal.”

The predator grinned, baring a thousand sharpened teeth. “But I think that is quite enough for this iteration.”

Thatch snapped her fingers. Katie may not have understood speech, but some sounds went deeper than mere speech. She jumped to attention, blurting out a garbled sequence of syllables and blinking rapidly. Why had she done that? That didn’t—

Katie let out a little gasp as a needle slipped into her neck and squirted hot liquid fire into her veins. She wasn’t sure if there were really nerves in there to feel pain but she felt it regardless, spreading through her body with every rapid pump of her racing heart. It burned away the need, the lust, the heat. It burned away her thoughts and her feelings and everything besides. For a moment, Katie was nothing, blankness hung within a schism of one. Past, future, potential, lost to oblivion. Conjecture broke upon absence of reason and for an eternity there was no Katie. Her mind had ground to a halt and she had nothing with which to restart it.

“Stay with me, katie.”

A lifeline cast into the void. The frozen mechanisms of Katie’s mind groaned, as if they had not turned for long enough they had begun to seize. She grasped for Thatch’s words and found herself hooked, drawn in and up. Half-conscious metaphor melded back into reality as Katie’s chin was lifted to meet Thatch’s gaze, and her thoughts spluttered back into life.

Katie took a long, sharp breath, refilling lungs that had fallen idle, blinking dry eyes until her vision cleared. She looked up to find Thatch’s smiling face. The affini was sitting on the ground with her legs partially crossed and partially simply dissolved. Katie knelt at her side but was quickly ushered up into her lap.

“He- Ughhh,” Katie groaned and coughed. “Do you have a glass of— Mmph!” Katie spluttered as Thatch slowly poured liquid into her mouth. She gulped it down, grateful, as the water washed away the dry from her mouth and her throat. Vines came in from the sides to catch anything Katie spilled, keeping her surprisingly clean despite her sloppiness.

When the glass was done Thatch tapped beneath Katie’s chin and she closed her mouth. A pair of vines wiped across her lips and chin, cleaning up the last of the spillage, and then slipped between Katie’s lips to deliver the last few drops to her waiting tongue. “So, tell me how you feel.”

“Of course, Miss Aquae!” Katie chirped, sitting up. She cast her mind back to what seemed like it could have been two minutes prior or a whole lifetime ago. Judging by the lighting level in the room it was closer to the former, but the hab unit’s lighting was almost as deeply under Thatch’s control as she herself was. Her memories were sharp, but familiar. A little incongruence around the edges, but even knowing she had supposedly been changed Katie didn’t think she could enumerate the difference between her now and her then.

“I feel… hungry?” Katie licked her lips. Memories of sweet fruits flashed before her eyes, unbidden yet appreciated. “That was meant to be dinner, not just dessert.”

The affini shrugged. “Perhaps hunger will keep you sharp for next time. Did you know that in the old Terran wilds some animals ate only once for every several days?”

Katie tried to reach forward to chew on a vine, but a finger against her forehead kept her back. She grumped. “Did you know that you signed a legally binding document promising to feed me?”

“Only insofar as it is necessary for your continued well-being, care, and quality of life, silly thing. If I believe that you have not earned your meal it would be a dereliction of duty for me to provide it.” Thatch smiled, softly drumming fingers down Katie’s arm. Her other hand stroked down Katie’s hair, and innumerable vines set about the task of brushing dirt and debris from her body. “Do not forget which of us has actually read all the way through your little treaty.”

Katie’s stomach rumbled. The stakes were real. “Okay, but! Half of it is written in Affini, I have no idea what it says! I’m, um. I only signed it, I didn’t read it! You said it was a fair compromise!”

Thatch’s smile twisted into a grin, and she spoke for long seconds in the Affini tongue. Katie couldn’t even tell where one word ended and the next began but it was beautiful. Soothing. Musical in all the right ways. Katie flopped forward, curling against Thatch’s chest while she spoke, feeling Thatch’s hand rise to stroke through her hair.

Animal, Thatch had called her. It was true, wasn’t it? Katie had been told all her life that humans and animals were different groups. There was some essential difference that elevated humanity above the other creatures of the universe, though of course nobody could ever quite tell her what it was. Now she was freed from that and Katie found to her surprise that it had been no lie. There was a difference. Humans pretended to be driven by more than instinct and incentive, while animals had no such restriction.

Katie curled up against her plant, seeking comfort and warmth and safety. A human would have lied. Called it companionship or love or written a poem to justify why it was deeper than it seemed. Pretention. Katie could accept the simple animal delights instead. She curled up atop a living being, hearing the way her voice resonated, feeling the heat rise and fall with each word and with the endless biological patterns of Thatch’s organic body. She savoured the wooden, earthy scent of her guardian, not as a shaky metaphor for the human condition, but because it was warm and safe and kind and Katie’s brain had a pack bonding instinct that told her she would be happiest under a firm hand.

Katie did love Thatch, of course, but not like a human. Hers was the uncritical, unconditional love of a pet who knew she would love her owner no matter what, and so had no room left over for insecurity, doubt, or concern. That love was simply axiomatic, and perhaps the most central part of her left. The one thing that Thatch would never change.

Finally the affini came to the end of her recital. She glanced down at Katie and chuckled, taking a moment to draw her attention back out and up with a few swift taps and swipes, abusing Katie’s training to puppet her. As if she couldn’t have done that directly, had she chosen to.

“We enjoyed that, did we, katie? I shall read the rest of it to you later then. For now, a larger meal is necessary for your continued wellbeing. You have a big day tomorrow.” Thatch spoke another word in Affini, but Katie did know this one. Some instinct took over as she leaped down to the ground so that Thatch could stand and walk over to the kitchen with her pet at her heel.

Katie’s head tilted, curious. “Do I? I’d kind of just assumed we’d stay in, maybe watch another episode of By the Stars in their Eyes? I have no idea how the floret cut is gonna handle that cliffhanger; surely they can’t just let Ezzy get shot?”

Thatch took her over to the hab’s kitchen area, then pointed at a position a few feet away from the fireplace. Katie hurried over, trotted in a quick circle around it, and then sat facing the affini.

Their stasis unit was getting packed. Thatch had seemingly acquired a taste for cooking during their stay on Dirt, and was now constantly tweaking and improving her recipes. Every meal got a proper portion size given to Katie and the leftovers put on pause. The next day Thatch would invariably decide she could do better and so while they had weeks of leftovers held still, it was rare for Katie to actually eat any of it.

Today was one of those rare days. Katie felt secretly thankful that she didn’t have to wait. Thatch plucked a bowl from the unit and it immediately began to steam. The affini always made sure to pause the leftovers promptly so it was effectively a freshly cooked meal. Nothing but the best for Katie. Thatch set the bowl down on the floor in one corner of the room and motioned for Katie to move on over to it.

Katie did, but kept her attention on her person. Katie was curious; it wasn’t like Thatch to do things by surprise. She was hungry, yes, but more hungry still for knowledge.

Thatch gestured towards the bowl. “Eat.”

The order reframed things. Katie had her mouth in the bowl a second later, snapping up a little ball of some nebulous vegetable from another galaxy. It was delicious. Intellectually, Katie recognised that having an entire universe of ingredients to pull from gave Thatch an unfair edge over anybody else that’d ever cooked her a meal, but rationality didn’t really enter into the feelings she had for her beloved blossom. “Ohmystars,” Katie breathed, “you are the best cook.”

Firm fingers danced across Katie’s scalp while she ate, sampling the delights of the universe as filtered down to one small set of ingredients, spices, and homebrew xenodrugs by a cook who treated Katie’s tastes like a problem to be solved. After a few more bites Thatch emitted a quiet hum and sent a vine away to grab one of the many tools she kept in the project room. This particular tool was a hairbrush, one custom built by their own hands from Dirtwood, with bristles sampled from the firm hairs of their prior home’s hog-beasts.

A set of vines carefully drew Katie’s hair into partitions and held all but one aside. With one hand, Thatch took hold of a thin strip of hair, and with the other she began to brush, starting near the bottom and rising only when the hair beneath was perfect. “I have organised a xenoveterinary appointment for tomorrow,” she admitted. “It is beyond time to get you implanted, floret.”

Katie’s chewing slowed to a stop. She swallowed, then sat up. Thatch’s hands and vines followed smoothly and continued brushing. Implanted. A shiver danced across her spine. Thatch had described the process to her once before, back on Dirt, but back then she had listened with the detached composition of somebody seeking to understand how the affini’s wards were treated.

Things were a little different now.

Katie bit her lip. “What does… that mean, Miss Aquae?”

Without pausing her brushstrokes, Thatch stroked a single vine down Katie’s back, starting at her neck and moving down to about the tailbone. It left a tingle in its wake and Katie squirmed beneath it. Thatch tutted and held her head in place with another vine so she could brush uninterrupted. “I have given your vet a sample from my core and they have merged it with a biotechnological template to create a seedling. Tomorrow afternoon, I shall take you to his office and he shall make a small incision right here—” Thatch tapped another vine against the back of Katie’s neck. As she continued to speak, she lay down vines to demonstrate the growth. Katie couldn’t help but shiver yet again— “to insert the seed. Over the next several days it will grow, extending a haustorium—a kind of root structure—through your body. Primarily it will track your central nervous system, but ultimately it will grow through most of your body. The bulk of the fully grown implant will rest entangled with your spine, while smaller roots will extend throughout your torso, your limbs, and up into your brain.” Thatch’s instructive vines had formed a complicated pattern across Katie’s body, slowly ‘growing’ out to cover her in a complicated weave.

Thatch paused, ran the brush through the section of hair she’d been working on one last time to check it was all smooth, and moved on to the next.

“When I told you back on Lily’s little rocket that I would need more complicated equipment to read your thoughts, this is of what I spoke. The Haustoric Implant is our crowning achievement as a species. With it, I shall be able to precisely calibrate your body and influence your mind. Roots will curl around your organs and guarantee they are given the support they need. Should any fail, the implant will attempt to compensate as much as is possible. Your mental and biochemical states will be maintained as I see fit, and it will monitor and adjust everything from your nutritional needs to your hormone balance to your neurochemistry. You will become, in effect, programmable.”

“And if I don’t want one?” Katie asked, looking up at her owner with uncertainty in her eyes.

A pair of vines tapped the base of her skull. “You will after it has been done. Of all the tricks we Affini use to subjugate the universe, the Haustoric Implant is the most blatant and the most capable. Standard programming renders it nearly impossible for a sophont to desire their implant’s removal, which is convenient as they are equally impossible to remove once the root system is sufficiently embedded.” Thatch finished another section of hair and moved on. “Besides, you want this. It will place you even more deeply under my control and ensure you are safe, healthy, and happy no matter what.”

You want this. ‘Yes, Miss Aquae,’ bubbled up through Katie’s throat and threatened to spill out into the world as an irrevocable promise. Katie forced it back down. “No thank you,” she replied, shaking her head. “I’m good.”

Katie winced as the brush met a knot that Thatch failed to notice. The quiet snap of broken hairs bifurcated the moment’s silence. “That is a surprising response. If you are acting out because you wish me to be more forceful, then I would have to ask that you give me some warning beforehand. Glochi is expecting a well behaved floret and while I am comfortable playing with such matters, you know I ultimately require your enthusiastic consent while I permit you to think clearly.”

“No!” Katie shook her head. “Um, no, Miss. I just don’t think you want this, do you?”

Katie could feel a subtle uncertainty playing across the edges of her mind. Her sixth sense was growing more precise as she educated herself on the many nuances of Thatch Aquae, though weaker emotions blended into a barely conscious background noise if Katie wasn’t specifically focussing on them.

Thatch rustled. She shrugged, mouth pulling into an uncertain smile. “I would, I admit, like to be more hands on, but the Haustoric Implant is the peak of affini bioengineering, katie. I cannot reproduce it.” She tickled beneath Katie’s chin with a finger. “I know, I know, pet, you imagine me capable of anything, but even I have limits. I have inspected the Records, additionally, and I would be working alone here. There are none aboard with a shared speciality. We have mechanical engineers, xenobotanists, bioarchitects, and a very good veterinarian, but no bioengineers specialising in this kind of detailed integration work. The last time I attempted such a development I was part of a full cotyledon program with all the support and expertise that could be provided. To attempt to do so now with no support at all would be hubris of the highest order. You cannot ask me to take that risk.”

Katie softly bashed her forehead into Thatch’s knee. “All I said was that you didn’t want to do it the normal way. The rest of that came from you, yeah? I’m not asking you, I’m telling you that I’m not going to be happy unless we’re doing what you want.”

“I lack the expertise,” Thatch claimed. The affini never lied to Katie, but Katie knew she could lie to herself. She was even starting to recognise how that felt in her sixth sense. Metallic, kinda tangy.

“I believe in you. Besides, don’t tell me you can’t look up notes from the human cotyledon program, you lot are hoarders when it comes to that kind of thing.”

The leaves on Thatch’s arms were all starting to stand on end. “Even with notes, I could not produce something as perfect as they. The Terran invocation of the Implant is an unparalleled work of art. The expected failure rate is under fifty. Not fifty per-million or even per-billion, but under fifty total. Across all of time. Katie, I cannot compete with those who have been working on these technologies for tens of thousands of years and refined the implants of ten thousand species. If one such as they had been within a year’s travel of Caeca’s home she would still be here with us today.”

Katie shook her head. “I don’t think you’re being fair to yourself. I think you’re idolising people who can’t possibly be as good as you think because you’re the best Affini. Failure is how we learn, Thatch. We figure out why it went wrong and do better.”