Chapter Text
There was so much that Skye missed, floating through deep space in a rebel rust bucket.
She missed drinking fresh water that wasn’t recycled from old ship’s coolant and piss; missed food that wasn’t gritty, flavorless synthcubes that barely met nutritional standards; missed a real sun against her skin; missed the prick of her vitamin shots; missed the casual fleeting encounters with off-duty Navy girls and guys; and, perhaps most of all, missed the liquid fire of a good illicit substance in her veins.
All of these sacrifices were worth it, in the end. The Terran Accord had crumbled, and as had always happened with the fall of corporations, the C-Suite guys left all of the consequences to everybody under them. Skye assumed they were still out there living in high rises, helpful collaborators to the xeno menace that was now taking Terrans as nothing more than pets.
She’d seen some of the propaganda they were putting out now: seen Elvira Nele’s broadcast where the pilot had begged for others to see the light, with glassy pupils and cutely-slurred words, a skimpy companion dress showing off skin and shoulders and the collar around her neck.
Nearly every hero the rebels had was now a drooling toy – with one prime exception.
The only reason that Skye hadn’t surrendered herself to the cold grasp of deep space was the presence of Ophelia Oros.
She was the type of woman that belonged on every Accord propaganda poster: sleek, broad muscles, a sharp face that nonetheless carried enough softness to make those green eyes the slightest bit vulnerable. Ophelia could command any room she entered, with little more than a rasped word. Her scars did much of the talking for her. If a caliber of bullet was survivable, she’d taken it at least once. Her left arm had been blown off by a fifty caliber round and somehow she’d simply been too pissed off to die.
Everything below the shoulder was rusted metal, a prosthetic she kept functional with nothing more than recycled oil and spite, even though the fingers refused to cooperate.
Beyond the muscle, though, she was among the smartest people that Skye had ever met. She still denied working for the OCNI, but to Skye it felt like an open secret. She was a commander, a killer, and a philosopher all at once. If anyone had a chance at winning back humanity’s freedom, it was her.
“Hey.” Skye walked into her quarters, and nearly kicked over the towering stack of books she’d smuggled from a depository in the hours before the Accord announced it’s surrender – like the redhead had known it was coming before anyone else. “What’s the situation?”
“The usual. We’re all fucked and they’re still looking for us.” Ophelia deadpanned. “Frankly, I’m flattered, but the weeds should learn to take a hint.” She tilted her head just enough to share a grin with Skye – but her eyes quickly narrowed with concern. “You alright?”
“Just anxious.” That wasn’t quite it. The craving for a shot of Perihelidol waxed and waned, but the oblivion of the drug was at its most tempting when things seemed their most fragile. Skye had kept the will to live slaving away on Mars only with regular shots of addictive, chemical peace. By the end she hadn’t spent a day at work sober in months. Fingers scratched lightly at the maze of track marks up and down her arms.
“You’re better than that stuff, Vailis. I promise.”
“I know! I know, but…”
“The body keeps the score.” Ophelia nodded. No one else in the crew knew about her history of addiction. She could lie to the rest of them but not a hero like Oros. “Come stretch with me. Idle hands and all.”
“Stars, this fucking sucks.”
“Always darkest before the dawn, isn’t it?” Ophelia’s gruff tone seemed to naturally imbue confidence in her people. What she said seemed to matter. “It’s a good thing that we haven’t given up, then.”
Lightly guiding the smaller girl through the routine, Ophelia started to break down their next plan.
“I’ve got a Free Terran contact on Vanguard in this system – he’s been writing off some supplies, enough to get us towards Bacchus-3. There’s an arms depot there, abandoned about fifty years ago. Some of the warheads should be viable, still.”
“Shit… That…”
“We’re not going to win anything in one fight. I figure we get those warheads, start passing them out to other free ships… Ain’t the first time people have gone guerrilla to win a rigged fight. Now, bring your left leg forward. Hand to the side.”
Leaving Ophelia’s quarters always left her a bit more invigorated for the long road ahead, even though her arms still itched with that chemical hunger. She fucked her hand just for a hit of dopamine but it was never enough.
Two years clean and the craving never died. She doubted it ever would.
Her terminal pinged with an encrypted message – Gala-724 always gave her a headache while decrypting. The system couldn’t handle the characters. It had to be broken down by hand, first written and then flipped and only then made comprehensible. According to Oros’ connections in the remnants of the Accord, it was the only system that hadn’t been cracked within six months.
What she’d been sent was a list of supplies, and an open space for further requests. It was all pretty standard: seventy pounds of synthcubes, six recycled uniforms, a year’s worth of salt tablets and electrolyte pills, and three extra crank-chargers. Ophelia had asked her to add a few things that had emerged as needs. She penciled them down and began the act of encrypting.
First came a Navy-standard first-aid kit, and then a book on the affini language written for the ‘independent’ humans yet-to-succumb to mind control. Slowly, the old pen Skye used smeared characters onto the piece of thrice-recycled paper. It was barely legible enough to transcribe.
Looking it over, though, that pang in her stomach surged again, and the stress of what was to come eclipsed her sense of reason. There were so many ways that the Bacchus-3 plan could go awry – and somehow capture by the Compact seemed amongst the least terrible. What was one last ride on the P-Train?
In a thinner, more jagged script, she added one more request: a syringe of special-P.
She actually cackled into her hands when their supplier sent back a sign that meant confirmation without any questions or hesitation. He didn’t demand that Oros sign off on the request, nor was there any haggling over price. In part Skye liked the drug because it was so cheap, regardless of its side effects. Some things never changed.
“Oros.” Skye spoke up during their meeting. “I want to handle the supply pickup. Sir.”
That made the redhead smirk. “And here I thought I was going to have to draw straws for it. That’s a lot of risk, Vaillis. You sure you want to take it?”
“I’m smaller than Ramirez or Tracono.” She justified. “I know how to walk like a civilian.”
“Fuck you too, skinny.”
“Says you, wireframe!”
Skye couldn’t stop herself from tugging on her fingers under their desk while the rest of the group chattered. She knew that her lip was twitching like a fiending addict’s. Never before had she been so very excited to land within enemy territory.
Even at the very edges of space there were untenable markers of the weeds.
She hadn’t yet seen one, on the very edges of the small city built into an old mining town, but their architecture was unavoidable: tall, sleek glass towers and bronze arches and pervasive blooms, flowers larger and brighter than anything that could have grown without extraterrestrial help. A few humans were milling about in the so-called Independent-district – but they all had that same slight airiness to them. Their clothes were pristine. Flower print seemed unavoidable even for those who were still ‘free’.
There was some jealousy to be had, stumbling upon this tiny harbor of civilization. People laughed and sipped steaming tea on a balcony that never would have been cost-effective to build under the accord. Someone was painting the stars in the sky, easel covered in paints more vibrant than they should have been. And they were definitely tasting the paint in between focused brush-strokes.
Skye knew how not to march but to amble, and she waved warmly at strange faces that looked at her like a friend, in spite of the way that the abstract kindness made her hackles raise. It was hard to smother the feeling that they all knew what she was, and that they were just playing along.
She didn’t have to say a word, though – simply turned a corner into a still-Utopian alleyway, the lime-washed bricks draped with graffitied flowers, real blooms, and sloppy “Floret” signatures that made Skye’s stomach churn with sympathy for the implanted, killed selves that played at grand communist fantasy.
Skye had laughed when the news first came out about what the Affini glibly called Domestication, because it seemed so obscenely fake. It was an open secret that the Accord’s journalists were propagandists who found the best light to shine upon the oiliest men and the worst shade to cast over small embers of hope. Surely, she’d thought, it was a gross mistranslation of some peacemaking term, that “coalition building” or “client state” had been warped and perverted to imbue fear in what remained of the civilian populace. Then, the public videos had been uploaded, and she’d seen with her own eyes people visiting old friends to find them transformed into Florets, giddy things with glassy eyes and broad smiles and a thin scar along the very back of their necks.
They were, insofar as Skye knew, only nominally human at that point. The plants put in pieces of themselves into their victims, which grew into the spines and brains and eliminated all revolutionary thought. It wasn’t Elvira Nele or her ilk that starred in those faux-warm videos, but a puppet of the plant that know owned her. A cutting of the parent plant grown into human skin.
Turning another corner, Skye finally found her contact. The sight of them made her stomach turn. The contact didn’t look anywhere skeevy enough to be doing a black-market deal with active rebels. They were androgynous – a shoulder-length bob and dazzle-camouflage makeup on their face. Their form was full and healthy. They had a natural glow that, prior to the end of the Accord, was only permitted to the ultra-wealthy.
There was a slight smile on their face, too.
“Hey. What’s your favorite flower?” Skye spoke up, trying to keep her tone as light as she could. “Mine’s a carnation.”
“Ah. I like red, red roses.”
“Good.”
That put her nerves down a bit. They’d gotten the code phrase perfect.
“I’ve got your stuff ready. How are we..?”
“I’m taking it back.”
“You’re carrying it? That’s not…” There was a flicker of uncertainty. “You were supposed to…” They stared beyond her into the alleyway, and she watched their eyes go glassy in real time. “Miss, what should I-”
The flowers growing into the bricks behind them peeled right off the wall.
Skye panicked, but all she could do was tackle the supplier-traitor before her. She wrapped them in a headlock, and pulled back. Sure enough, there was a scar on the back of their neck, hidden behind their thick hair. They were implanted. Just the sight of a little streak of green beneath the skin made her throw them to the ground into the grasp of waiting vines.
It had sold her out. There was no way to tell when the supplier had become infested. It wasn’t human any longer.
“Well, aren’t you a feisty petal?” The towering plant-thing purred in several voices all at once – they seemed to come from different spots in its body. The wooden mask that became a prosthetic face was eerily still, but it was locked on her. Large antenna bloomed calla lilies at their tips. Something on it reminded Skye of an angler-fish. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you got nervous. I can take it from here.”
Instantly, the supplier was a simpering, weak thing. “T-Thank you, Miss!”
“Fuck you, weed. The Terran spirit will never…” Skye tried to growl out before the fear choked her. This was it. She was going to be pulled away and implanted until she ceased to be a person.
“Such an attitude… But, I suppose, even ferals deserve love, don’t you think?” The creature’s voice carried with it a low warble that seemed to burrow into Skye’s skin. It made the itch for special-P all the worse. “Of course they do… That’s why Micah here wanted to help you all… Even misguided terrans deserve food and water and a safe place to sleep. And, what else was it that you requested? Perihelidol?”
Skye’s mouth was horribly dry, such that she had to smack her lips and wait to keep from coughing too loudly.
“Aw… Don’t tell me that you’re a stray with a bit of a substance problem..?”
The weed made it sound so patronizing, so pathetic, as though she should be ashamed for finding comfort in the chemical.
“That’s okay. We can treat that for you, if you’d be so well-behaved as to-” The Affini paused, though… “No, Micah asked me to be nice to you. Didn’t you, Micah?”
“Y-Yes, ma’am…”
“Even if it means being punished later in her place?”
The traitor looked at her, then back at the towering, vaguely-humanoid plant. They were grinning. Skye knew the look of drugged bliss, adoration nearing the divine. “Yes, Miss!”
“Good toy. Such a very good toy.” A vine crept out to ruffle their hair, and the way they leaned into the touch made Skye nearly vomit on the spot.
“Perihelidol, was it? Yes, I have something similar, if you’d like…” A vine extended and Skye winced, but it did not snatch her. Instead, one of the flowers on the tendril bloomed, and within the tulip-like flower was a needle, dripping with a pinkish nectar. She was close enough to it that the human could smell something almost like the burnt-rubber tang of her drug of choice. “Just to take the edge off. That’s the Terran turn of phrase, isn’t it?”
“Y-Yes, it…”
“Good, then I am learning!” The affini sounded too warm for this moment. Here she was offering the terrified human its drug of choice, when Skye was all but aware that she was signing herself up for an instant brain-frying.
Her hands were shaking harder than they ever had. Her eyes would not leave the wooden-looking needle.
“P-Please, I-” Before she could second guess the impulse, she opened her arm, and showed it to the creature.
She didn’t even yelp when it jabbed into her lower arm.
There was instant relief. A vague, phantom cool in her arm crept up towards her heart. Then came the chemical relief, the afterglow of an orgasm without the exhaustion. Her eyelids drooped. The tension and fear in her muscles abated. There was no space for those feelings to hide. Her pupils must have expanded. A dull smile hit her face. Everything was so bright, the flowers smelled so good, the light wind felt so good on her skin.
This must have been a hit of the soul-frying Class-Js that the horror stories talked about. Skye had seen oblivion and she was desperate for more of it.
Unfocused eyes tried to still look suspiciously at the xeno, but her look was more reverent than it should have been. She wasn’t quite sure how to fix that.
“S-So…” Cottonmouth was setting in. “What… What now..?”
“Well… Now, you take your supplies to your cute friends! Run along!”
“Oh…” Skye felt like her heart should have been pounding. “Are you..?”
“I’m quite busy with my blooming little Micah…” The weed purred, pulling the human into itself for closer, more consumptive cuddles. “Perhaps I’ll take another floret once they’re nice and settled…”
Before the clemency could be doubted again, Skye grabbed the heavy crate of items, turned around, and took off the way that she came.
The only thing that kept her stable was that she knew how to manage functioning while high as a kite. Her mind locked on her breathing, though it was a constant struggle to pull her mind back from the warmth and giddiness all around. One step at a time. Then, she could slump over in her room, and enjoy the rush until at last it tapered.
She just couldn’t let Oros or anyone on the crew see her eyes. There was no explanation beyond the obvious.
The Free Terran looked over her shoulder every hundred steps, doubled back on herself just to see if she could find a pursuer, but the paranoia that she knew she should have been feeling wasn’t quite up to the plate. Instead, there was a sort of silly, giggly idea that of course she should have been paranoid, but there was no way that she could indulge such a feeling while so wonderfully floaty.
She was going to regret this when she sobered up, but that was a problem for Future Skye.
It took nothing to blend in amongst the smiling husks now.
A few hours later, with the ship still grounded and the supplies packed away and distributed, Skye lay slumped against the wall of her meagre quarters. She was splayed out: her head lolled to one side while her legs spread and her arms draped limply into her lap. A dull smile was on her face.
The high was already starting to fade, though.
The comedown was at least similar enough to Perihelidol: a sudden recognition that she was either colder or hotter than she’d felt while buzzed, and a pinhole that allowed some light into the shelled orb of dark thoughts that were temporarily sealed away behind the eyes, Little flecks of paranoia and panic crept into her otherwise-slowed thoughts, little whispers that she’d have done anything to get out of her.
The only things missing were the tremors and the intense pins and needles in her hands and feet, and the heart palpitations. The withdrawal for this stuff was all mental.
That didn’t mean that, once it tapered off so much that she could think herself sober, she wasn’t desperate for more. Skye was pacing in her area, three steps before turning on her heel to walk three more, a hand running through her unkempt hair over and over, until she was certain she’d leave a mark on her scalp. She’d fucked up, she knew it. There was no way that she could go weeks more without another hit of that wonderful stuff. That was what she’d been missing in her life, wasn’t it?
Oros had insisted that they take off in the morning alongside some other shuttles to keep up appearances. That meant she had a bit of time.
Once everyone else was sleeping in their quarters, Skye snuck off of the ship. She rubbed her wrists and jumped at every little sound on her way back towards that blooming, flowery alleyway. There had to be a chance there was more. She needed another hit, whatever it took. The consequences she could handle later, once she was high enough to think clearly. That’s what she always did, and it always worked out!”
“H-Hey!” She sputtered out, still looking over her shoulder in spite of herself, afraid that some strike-team of weeds would be ready to snatch her and pull her into the darkness. She found only silence, and whined. Perhaps she collapsed onto the floor in a dejected huff, hands still shaking.
But there was hope – there was a little bracelet on the ground. It flickered with a golden light. Picking it up made it ring against her palm.
“Hi, cutie pie..? Did you find something..?”
“H-Hi, I, um… I need more, please…”
“Oh, well…” The towering weed had the gall to sound both amused and like it pitied her. “If that’s what you need, little petal, we can make a deal. Give me a moment to make sure that Micah’s ready for bed, okay? I’ll be right there.”
Skye paced up and down the alley, scratching over her arms. This was definitely a relapse, and she hated it, hated herself for needing it. That didn’t mean she second-guessed the impulse. There was so much stress out there… could anyone blame her for needing to take the edge off? It was a miracle she’d gone as long as she had without a crack in the facade of sobriety.
The dark-haired girl squeaked at the sight of the towering humanoid Green now before her. Tight vines knotted together into a facsimile of muscles, bark within to provide a more tangible skeletal frame. Its face was a wooden mask, somehow able to emote beyond the expected stiffness. Four glowing gold eyes locked onto her like a ravenous predator. She could see thorn-teeth quivering behind the mask.
“Aren’t you just the cutest little thing..? So needy… We’ll definitely have to work on your addictive tendencies, of course, but…”
“I can’t…” Skye had a moment of doubt. “I don’t want a plant inside of me, please, just… I’ll do anything else..!”
The towering affini’s grin got even wider. “Well, certainly… Can you answer a question for me?” The moonlight caught the glint of a new injector, the flower full of the addictive xenodrug just for her. “You’re a little feralist, but… what’s the name of your cutie-pie captain?”
“I can’t… I won’t…”
Skye gasped in abject horror as the needle was concealed within the flower, pulled away from view. She needed the next hit more than anything.
“Ophelia Oros, just…”
“Oh?” And now the plant was laughing in its half-dozen voices, the sound warbling all the way down to Skye’s core. The needle slipped back out and right into her upper arm, releasing its payload before Skye even had time to fully regret the admission. “What a good name for a floret-to-be. If I recall correctly… she’s quite the Feralist symbol… Tell me…” The red roses up and down the affini’s shoulders quivered and bloomed just as wide as they could. “Would you do me just one favor? And I’ll make sure you can have more of this substance you so love..?”
“I won’t sell her out…” But Skye was already not thinking clearly. Her head was lolling to one side. The grin was too wide for self-doubt.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m not asking you to. All I’m asking of you is to leave a door unlocked for me. Can you do that?”
“I…”
“When the time comes for you to be Domesticated, I’ll make sure that it reflects well on you…” The affini purred, brought a vine up to run through the feralist’s hair. Skye was too buzzed to resist it. It did feel kind of nice… The vine was soft but with just enough little fibers to scratch an itch she didn’t know she had. “And no one else will know.”
“H-How much… How much Special-P are we talking..?”
“Is that what you call it? How so very cute…” The affini’s mask shuddered, pulled apart such that she could the thornage behind it. “Hm… How about an autoinjector with… fifteen doses?”
“Deal. Deal, deal deal deal.”
“Well. Then, I’ll leave it in your quarters tonight. Don’t make me regret this deal, sweet toy.”
Skye shuddered, but nodded, and turned to walk back to the ship in a daze. All she had to do was leave the door unlocked. One door, unlocked. Just a momentary lapse of judgment. It could happen to any one of them, all tired and spent and sapped of energy, fighting only on fumes. She just had to leave one door unlocked, and she’d get herself through the next few weeks. She had to. There was no other option. No one would know, and she’d get what she needed.
It was just one door.