If it wasn't for her Mistress's absence, Petal could probably stay cuddled up with Millie forever. Millie would probably get restless eventually, but still. Cuddling her is nice. And Petal is probably going to get the chance to cuddle her every day for the rest of her life. Maybe they'll fall asleep together each night, sharing one of the giant beds that Petal had somehow grown accustomed to over the last, what, month or so? Or maybe they’d be sharing the bed with their Mistress, it would have to be even bigger, to fit her.

But stars, that was a strange thought. A month ago, she was on the Horizons. She didn't even have a name, she didn't know who she was supposed to be, she didn't even know if she'd still be alive the next day, let alone the next month. A month ago, she was a "free terran", trapped on a tiny ship, forced to devote her everything to keeping it from falling apart. She was more a slave then than any floret ever was. Even florets that hadn't wanted to be florets were never made to work, or anything. They were never threatened with death, never put in danger, never made to do anything other than be the best version of themselves that they could be.

Ten years ago, nobody had even heard of the Affini. Five years ago, nobody had ever believed that the Affini would win. And now, Petal wasn't even sure that the Horizons hadn't been the last holdout of the Cosmic Navy. She kinda hoped it was, so that the whole thing could finally be over. Nobody should ever have had to live like that. 

A lot has changed for Petal in the last month. She's fallen in love, twice. She's been fallen in love with, twice, even more surprisingly. She's tasted the closest thing humanity has had to freedom in centuries, if not ever, and decided to throw it away.

Even in just the last day, a lot has changed for her. She's not exactly sure about the timing, but if she had to guess, at about this time yesterday she was waking up in Delphinium's vines. Since then, she let herself be collared, or rather, she begged to be collared. She'd signed away her humanity, or, well, had it signed away for her. All she had left was the implant, and she would be complete in a way she couldn't have imagined even yesterday, let alone a month ago, back on the Horizons, or years ago, back doing… whatever shitty job kept her vaguely alive.

Millie brushes a few stray hairs from Petal's forehead, clearing space for her to plant a kiss. "You look thinky."

"I guess, yeah. I was just thinking about how… quickly everything has changed. For the better, of course. Like, the Affini, and the end of fucking capitalism. Like meeting you, and Mistress, and…" Petal brings her hand up to rest on her collar. "Stars, I've known the two of you for, like, a month, and now…"

"And now you're mine~. Forever." The door opens, and Delphinium sweeps in with a broad smile. Petal can already feel herself smiling back at her. Had she been waiting for just the right moment to burst in? Petal wouldn’t put it past her.

For now, though, she was just overjoyed to have her Mistress back. "Mistress! You're back!"

"I was only gone for a few minutes, my love." Delphinium sounds amused at Petal’s eagerness. Well, there was plenty more where that came from.

"I, yes, Mistress, but-"

"Yes, yes, you’re at a stage where even a minute away from me can be… difficult. So we'll just have to make sure that you're never away from me again. Or perhaps more accurately, that I'm never away from you, again~."

"You, you mean?" How lucky could Petal get? Independent terran to implanted floret in less than a day!

"Yes, my dearest~. You'll be getting your implant. The next big step on your road to inhumanity." Delphinium picks Petal up with a few careful vines, gently depositing her on the floor. "But before that, my dearest, darling Petal, there's something I want you to do for me~."

“Yes, Mistress? What can I do for you?”

Petal feels a sharp pinch on her neck, and a wave of fizzy energy spreads through her body. A moment later, she can hear a click from her collar, and she sees Delphinium pull it away with a flowery vine. Oh, right. Delphinium is going to need access to her neck, to cut it open and implant her with Her haustoric implant. To lay a final biotechnological claim on Her fourth floret. It feels somehow… wrong, to have her neck bare, even though it’s how she lived for almost the entirety of her life. 

Shouldn’t she have sedated Petal, though, or at least, not filled her with so much energy? Petal feels more awake than she has in… years? Decades? More awake than she can ever remember feeling in her life. Her muscles are practically thrumming with energy, begging to move, to be doing something, anything.

Delphinium brings her head down, almost to Petal’s level, but not quite, still looming over her. Her face shifts. It’s still her, but there’s a predatory glint to her eyes, to her smile. To Her. For a moment, Petal sees Her as the feralists must. An unstoppable monster. Fuck, that’s hot. 

Her Mistress leans her terrifying visage in to whisper in Petal’s ear. “Run, my love~.”

Petal’s mind is still enraptured with her Mistress, screaming at her body to let herself be taken, but Petal’s body obeys, turning on her heel to start running from the monster behind her. But while her foot is still in the air to take her first step, she feels a sharp stab in the calf of her trailing leg, followed a moment later by a warmth that quickly spreads down to her toes and up to her knee, which grows to a burning heat as she loses complete control of her lower leg. She stumbles to the ground on her hands and knees, her still working leg not quite enough to keep her upright.

Her Mistress hasn’t told her to stop, and so she keeps trying to flee, desperately struggling to crawl towards the door, only to feel another stab in the back of her other leg, this time in the thigh. The warmth, the burning, and the weakness all follow, and it’s even still slowly spreading from her first injection. Her legs are useless, but she still can’t give up! She doesn’t have permission to give up!

Petal reaches an arm out ahead, and just as she starts to shift her weight to it, she feels another jab, this time in her forearm. A moment later, she thinks to look, and sees a beautiful pink and white flower she’s sure she’d never seen before pressed against her slowly pull out a needle from her arm just before the burning weakness spreads far enough that she collapses forwards onto her now useless arm. But she still has one arm left, even if the warmth is starting to spread up through her torso now, she can still thrust her arm out ahead of her, and try to grab at something, anything!

Just as she starts to pull herself forwards with a strength she’d never known she was capable of, there’s a pinching feeling in her shoulder, so gently, compared to the jabs that her Mistress had given her, but still more than enough to spread the warmth. To render Petal completely defenceless. Not that she wasn’t already, but before, she could have pretended. Pretended that all of this was only happening because she wanted it, because she’d asked for it, begged for it, but the truth of the matter was that she was completely powerless before her Mistress, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Good girl~. You obeyed so well~. You ran as hard as you could, it just wasn’t enough~. It couldn’t ever be, could it?” Petal tries to nod, but the warmth has spread to her neck, and so Delphinium helps by nodding her head for her. “That’s right. Good girl~. Now, let’s get you to the theatre. Come along, Millie”

“I, um, yes, Mistress!” Millie sounded almost distracted, or maybe more like she was imagining what it would have been like to be the one chased by Delphinium, not that Petal made it very far. Most of the distance she’d travelled came from falling forwards.

Petal can feel her Mistress’s vines wrap around her, a tingling coolness on her otherwise burning flesh. She’s lifted into the air, and carried out of the room, and through the clinic, her eyes feel like they’re about to slide shut, but a pair of what might just be her Mistress’s tiniest, most delicate vines slide out to hold her eyelids open, even blinking her eyes for her every few seconds, she still can’t really make anything out, instead just perceiving the white and green blurs that she assume would focus to something, if her eyes were capable of that right now.

“I know you want to experience all of this, my love, so I made sure to choose a xenodrug to incapacitate you that wouldn’t impede your ability to feel. And the xenodrug I gave you before, that filled you with all that vim and vigour, should also enhance memory formation and retention.”

Petal just barely manages to let out a moan. She’d meant to say, “Thank you Mistress.”

“You’re very welcome, my Petal.” Apparently her intent was obvious. A soothing vine strokes down along her back. Down her spine, where a part of her Mistress would soon be joining her. Forever.

For an Affini building, the clinic isn’t very large, and before long, Petal feels herself being gently but quickly stripped, before being placed and positioned onto some sort of bed, which conforms to her body and holds it firmly in exactly the position Delphinium needs. It’s soft, and comfortable, and if she wasn’t so excited by what was going to happen next, not to mention hopped up on whatever it was that her Mistress had given her, she could see herself falling asleep right here.

“Do you want to see it, before it becomes a part of you, my love?” Rather than waiting for an answer, a blurry shape enters Petal’s field of view. “Ah, hm, yes. I suppose that would be a potential side effect. Let me just…” Petal feels something cool press against her temples, and a moment later, her eyes start to focus themselves, her focus shifting back and forth, until eventually settling on some sort of canister that her Mistress is holding in front of her. 

Inside is what could only be the haustoric implant. Her haustoric implant. The part of her Mistress that was going to be inside her for the rest of her life. And there was nothing she could do to change that. Even if her body was working, she couldn’t run, she couldn’t fight, she couldn’t do anything to stop her Mistress from claiming her forever. And she couldn’t want to. Even without the implant telling her how to think, she couldn’t want anything but to be Hers.

For something that was going to be going down her spine and up into her brain, it was tiny. Sure, it just about matched the sizes of the scars she’d seen, but still. The canister pulls away, to be replaced by the face of Millie, smiling up at her, and slightly out of focus.

“Now, close your eyes, my dear.” Petals eyes close, although certainly not of her own volition. “I want you to focus on how it feels. But I’ll record the procedure, in case you want to watch it later~. Millie, dearest, could you take Petal’s hand?” Petal feels Millie’s fingers intertwining with her own, gently squeezing. If she could, she’d return the gesture, but even that would require an agency over her own body that she just didn’t have.

Petal feels something cold on her neck, and then something else. Of course it’s more complicated than just cutting her open and shoving it in there. Every new touch she thinks that maybe this is it, maybe this is when her Mistress will see a part of her that she never expected anyone to see. 

She feels a sharp pinch on the back of her neck. Is this finally it? Her whole body would be tense, if she had any control over her own muscles. “There we go, my love~. You’ve been ever so wonderfully behaved, and now we’re ready to begin~.”

For another moment, there’s nothing, and then she feels something. A cool pressure, that quickly turns into burning warmth, hotter even than whatever xenodrug her Mistress was controlling her with. It doesn’t feel like she expected. It doesn’t even hurt, at first. But then the throbbing starts, growing quickly until it’s the only thing she can feel, the only thing she can think about. It feels like somebody took a fucking knife and stabbed her in the fucking neck!

She can’t move, she can’t scream, and she finds that she can’t even control her breathing. She can’t even open her eyes. All she can do is feel. For a moment, she feels a comforting squeeze. Millie, holding her hand, and a moment later, she feels her other hand being held. Wrapped up in a cocoon of vines, that squeeze her hand in sync with her breathing. In sync with Her breathing, Petal realises.

She is safe, and loved, and nothing can go wrong and OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK! She can feel herself being pulled open, yet more tiny vines of her Mistress must be opening her up to accept-

She feels something new. Not hot, not cold, not pain, not pleasure, but a presence, some thing pressed against her spine. Against her mind. Against her soul. She feels it like a hypermetric shockwave, not really there, but still hitting harder than a punch to the gut. She feels it like fire burning out her nervous system, to leave room for the new growth her Mistress will give her. She feels it like pure, unadulterated love, and the knowledge that no matter what happens, she is where she belongs.

And then the feeling shrinks, and fades until it’s almost completely gone, but not quite. It’s still there. And she knows that it will never leave.

Petal really had been taking to this surprisingly well. Her body was obviously completely under Delphinium’s control, but according to the readouts, even her mind seemed to be behaving itself. Obviously she was in significant pain, Delphinium had already needed to deactivate a number of otherwise perfectly reasonable safeties to allow her Petal to experience this. Petal’s state as the implant made initial contact with her central nervous system was less clear. From what Delphinium could tell, it would have been intense and overwhelming. If it weren’t for the class-Cs keeping her alert and aware, she’d quite possibly have been rendered unconscious. But she was also quite confident that this was exactly what her dearest Petal had been begging so eloquently for. Well, eloquently for a desperately needy floret, anyway.

Petal’s readings returned to something closer to normal, although now with the very faint harmonic readings from her new implant. Delphinium was slightly concerned though. Petal’s body was definitely experiencing less pain than before, but she could see that Petal’s mental state had become erratic. Perhaps the intensity before was too much, perhaps she’s simply exhausted her mental reserves, perhaps without the anticipation of the implantation to come she couldn’t muster up the resolve to face the pain.

Whatever it was, her precious Petal had seen herself through the most intense, and important part of the procedure, and it was time for her mind and body to rest. No matter how much she wanted to experience every moment of this, her body still had a lot of recovering to do, and this degree of discomfort certainly wasn’t going to help with that.

“You’ve done very well, my dearest, but now it’s time for you to rest.” Delphinium gently squeezed her Petal’s tiny hand in her vines. Her darling’s readouts suggested that she was relieved, although there could be a certain inaccuracy in directly measuring a floret’s emotional states without a fully grown implant, or at least a more extensive external sensor suite. “Sweet dreams, my love~.” 

Delphinium pauses for a moment. This probably will be her only chance to do this, and she doesn’t want to let her implant have all the fun. She shifts her core within herself, until it’s almost exposed, and sends out her most delicate vine. Only a few micrometres across, and kept inimitably sterile, she snakes it into the opening in her precious floret’s neck, and slowly but surely, and ever so gently, up alongside Petal’s spine, up through the foramen magnum, before finally passing into her and into the mind of her most precious Petal. It’s so small that there’s no way she could really feel it, unless Delphinium were to make a mistake.

Fortunately, affini medical scanners are more than advanced enough to show her what she’s doing in minute detail, even this deep inside her floret’s brain. She knows that this level of precision is entirely unnecessary, completely impractical, but she’s inside her floret in a way that even most affini never could be. And she can’t wait to see how Petal reacts to finding out just how deep her Mistress’s vines can truly go.

Her vine reaches its destination, and releases just the tiniest amount of xenodrug. Precisely enough to have her Petal fast asleep by the time she’s brought her vine out of her floret’s pretty little head. Even more carefully than she brought her vine in, she slides it ever so gently back out, keeping a close eye on the readouts to make sure that absolutely nothing goes wrong.

It doesn’t, of course, and before long she’s back out of Petal. Millie is looking at her with a somewhat confused expression. From her perspective, Delphinium probably seemed to go incredibly still for almost a minute. Petal, on the other hand, has faded into unconsciousness, exactly when Delphinium predicted. Now all that was left was closing her up, an incomparably easy task compared to what she’d just done. After that, a simple brace, to hold her neck steady while it recovered, and her Petal was ready to come home. 

She’d planned to carry her new floret across the threshold, before giving her the tour. She’d heard it was an ancient terran tradition, and thought it one of the few that actually seemed like it might be worth hanging on to. She’d planned to tease her new pet about it, even, but that, and the tour, would just have to wait.