Monica wakes up to the smell of pepper and spice, feeling like she just took a breath of crisp air in the breakroom of some manager’s lounge. 

Oh right, she thinks as she spots Cinnabari, there are no more managers. Only plants.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asks dryly.

They grin, looking eerily humanoid, like during the — good, so much good, a torrent of pleasure to drown in — vine stuff, they had figured out how to work a human face. Maybe they read a textbook while she was busy squirming. “Did you?”

“…you know the answer to that,” she says, hefting herself out of bed.

She’s surprised when it doesn’t hurt. Moving doesn’t hurt. More than that, the low-level ache and sting she’d grown accustomed to ignoring is gone. Just…gone. No sign of it left, no sign of her body changing in some irreparable way, no reason to panic. Just the relieving of a pain she didn’t think could be relieved, done overnight. 

That reminds her. “Cinnabari, what time is it?”

“Next morning,” they answer easily, “you were precious, all bundled up. Would’ve snapped at me for half of what I pulled but in the moment you were happy as anything. Cried if I left, like a yashkti baby.” 

“No clue what that word means but I’m going to assume it’s an insult and act accordingly,” Monica sniffs suspiciously, looking for something to toss.

Cinnabari keeps speaking as she searches. “I wouldn’t try that, seedling.”

“Threatening me? Not very angelic of you,” she comments, moving carefully in ways that…she doesn’t need to. It doesn’t hurt, she could afford to love faster. So she does, on hands and knees as she searches the floor for something.

Did she have books? She didn’t. Or toys, obviously. No tablets or devices. 

Monica is sensing a distinct pattern here. 

“Do you want toys? I can see why, your den is devoid of joy and recreation.”

“Home, not den,” she corrects, “and no. I’m not a child, Cinnamon.”

She goes rigid and stiff to the touch. A vine, hovering just above her arm, a threat of such joy. She wants it. She’s felt it and she’s eaten but the starving never ends. She can feel that just as strongly, a kind of hunger she’s never felt before. 

“You really are too precious for your own good,” Cinnabari says breezily. 

“Feeling real precious right about now,” she snaps, shuffling slightly away, eyes still trained on the thing she currently wants more than anything else. Oh God. Oh God, did she ever stand a chance? “Prized, even. Possibly adored. We should go down to the park, wife dearest, love of my heart, light of my life, holder of my weddi—” Wait. Wait, where did she put that?

She checks her ring finger. The ring is missing. 

Before she can panic, Cinnabari gestures at the dresser. 

Monica breathes in, calm washing over her. She holds out her hand expectantly, half-anticipating some kind of barb and half-dreading, half-hoping they’ll brush up against her by accident. Feed the roaring, heated thing in her. Sate the hunger she’s starting to think they put in place somehow. 

“That would be the As you take, actually. Pain relief and increased sensitivity,” Cinnabari drops the ring into Monica’s palms, ruthlessly stomping on all her fearful dreams. “I’ve been looking into putting you on Js. I’d like to see you acting like an old…what did you call them?” they twist to the side, raising one leafy antenna like an eyebrow. “Kah-tsuh.”

“Kah-ts. Cats,” she corrects. “And I asked the doctor, sh — xe said it was nothing but necessary stuff. Sleep, pain, basics. I wasn’t about to take from the rest of the district over something I could handle on my own.”

“They had the dosage wrong, seedling. You never went back, you never reported the pain that lingered,” they click, a sound like the irritated grinding of teeth instead of a chittering thing reminiscent of the rinan’s squeaky language. “I’ve got more than a case for involuntary domestication here — helped by the fact those young little blooms out there tremble at the sight of me.”

“People are scared of you,” Monica says doubtfully, “your own people — who are ten foot tall weed monsters with all the wrath of god channeled into mercy — cower before you. Very believable.”

Cinnabari’s face goes stiff, that same disbelieving stillness where they forget how to emote in the grip of their shock. It’s unbearably endearing. “You were afraid of me.”

“I was afraid of what you’d do to me,” she dismisses, “what I’d feel about it. That doesn’t count, far as I’m concerned. Besides, I’m half your size, a quarter your strength, and an eighth your age at the lowest estimate possible.” 

They seem to recover, hissing playfully as their vines wriggle across the ground and Monica discovers that she may be broken because just the sight of that has her breathless. “Oh, much less than an eighth, little one,” they gloat. Smugly. Terrible. Terrible, smug, condescending plant. Fuck, she wants them to touch her. “The older ones here are an eighth my age, the young ones a twentieth, and most sophonts less than even that. I’m old in ways your language has no words for, seedling.”

“And so humble, too!” she grins, wiggling one hand’s fingers in a silly, stupid gesture that makes her childish and escastic. “No wonder they’re so scared — all that age and not a hint of etiquette to go along with it.”

“Hypocrite.”

“You love my hypocrisy,” she smiles, “what else would you tease me for?”

“Softness. Sweetness,” they pause, considering for a moment. “Blindness.”

She stares at them, unimpressed. “Well, let no one call you a liar. False flattery is certainly outside your wheelhouse.”

“Who said that wasn't praise? It’s incredibly cute,” they purr, both metaphorically and literally, a rumble she can recognize from bleary memories of squeezing perfection and a teasing, husky tone that she’s never heard them use before.

More human, she thinks, everytime I see them, they’ve gotten more human. “So,” she says, “the explanation you agreed to. About all my…misconceptions?”

They brighten visibly. “Yes. Clever girl. My good, clever girl.” 

She has to actively stop that from sinking in because the idea of it is just — good girl, squirmy little thing, don’t worry your silly little head — ridiculous and strange. “Are you human because you just…thought it’d be a nice fad or because you’re forcing yourself for my comfort?”

Cinnabari narrows their eyes, seeing all, and generously decides to let her go. “Neither of those things,” they say. “I’m attempting to look more human because I like learning about my pets. Dissecting what makes them tick, how it makes them tick, why they end up ticking at all. I like to study the cultures and traditions that ended up producing such adorable little sophonts. I learn the basics needed to keep myself safe for each specific sophont but I prefer to learn the rest suu’hvaot — as the currents toss me. To learn as I act as I document.”

“Like a…scientist?” she asks. Her idea of ‘scientist’ is the list of impressive rich people names they were forced to memorize and a vague conception of somebody smart doing smart things. 

She’s sure there are humans who do know what scientists are in detail but…they weren’t at that school to learn. They were there to get the minimum training necessary for them to do their jobs. They were there so that no factory had to deal with toddling babies who were useless for labor. 

“No,” they say amusedly. “I’m not a scientist. Not one part of this is scientific in the least, though I’ve had a few brave scholars ask for a document or two,” eyes sparkling, Cinnabari makes a tingling bell-like sound, “They accepted the copies and got out, though it was always taken alongside a grain of sand. I’m a hobbyist, dlu-seed, I simply happen to be a hobbyist who’s been practicing for millenia.”

She nods, as if she thoroughly understands everything they just said, and decides to move on before she gets anxious about what, exactly, science actually entails. “The human stuff doesn’t hurt you, then?”

“No,” they say softly and fondly, “no, love, it doesn’t hurt.”

Monica has to grit her teeth and clench her hands into fists, marveling at the easy flex of painless muscle, trying incredibly hard not to feel the many things she’s feeling. Then, trying to stop repressing those feelings, because she’s made a commitment to them and by God does she plan on keeping it! “So. Just why would all those affini be ‘terrified’ of you?”

“My standards are high and I do not mind making them known,” Cinnabari says almost pleasantly. Monica notices the tell-tale sign of a mischievous Dracaena; the twitching of small, red flowers like they’re swaying in an invisible breeze. “We are the caretakers of the galaxy at large. We should not be shabby, we should not be settling, we most certainly should not ever be unsure,” Cinnabari clicks, here, the same disdainful teeth-ground noise as before. “We could do better. So many little sophonts hurt — you know, if I had been there at that Pacification Campaign a handful of decades back, they would’ve never had the quinothian genetic troubles, I assure you.”

“Uh huh,” Monica says, nodding along. God, she’s missed this. They’re terrible, she has zero clue what they’re referencing, and it’s so bafflingly delightful that she could sink into it like a warmed up blanket. 

Monica takes a moment to think of living. Living long. The idea that she does have time — decades of it — is foreign by now. She’d assumed she would be dead by 30, then kept surviving past her prime, and loved that survival so much it became worth any amount of suffering. 

She wants to live and keep living. She wants to be remembered, for her children to tell stories of her, for someone in the far-off lands of what-will-be and what-has-not-been to hear her name and think fondly of the sound. 

She looks at them, for a long moment, and realizes that she very much wants to be taken apart then held close, to be studied and annotated, to be so fondly remembered and kept. Cinnabari, she thinks, could remember me. Cinnabari could be my answer to death. Is that immortality — the marks you leave behind?

Is it selfish to want so badly for somebody to mourn her, remember her, hurt in her name long after she’s been gone? Is it selfish to love somebody because they want to keep her, because they’d keep her in a way that makes her want to be kept? 

No. She hopes her children mourn her, because that’s the cost of loving someone. She wants her affini to mourn her, because that’s a sign she was more than just an object to them. 

It…helps. Their visible, unabashed enjoyment of her submission. Their quiet, patient moments where it counts. 

It almost feels ridiculous to question if it's selfish to want this, when Cinnabari wants it too. There’s a foundation here. There’s a relationship to be built, not assigned or convenient, where neither of them have to be here but both of them choose to. She’s tethered to them, not by some law of nature, but by the law of their shared natures, individuals who click so well she can feel her soul turning like an opened lock, like this was the key to something she never could’ve imagined.

All of this swirls in her head, the low buzz of Cinnabari’s voice fading as she gets lost in her own mind. Concepts collide and thoughts trip over themselves and Monica blurts out something truly nonsensical as her affini pauses in their ranting. “Do you think I could write a book?” she asks. “My hands don’t hurt as much, now, with whatever weird angel blessing you put on them. Do you…think I could write more?”

“Little one,” Cinnabari says, low and husky and just a slight bit furious, “when you were writing with me, did it hurt? Did it hurt and you said nothing?”

There’s a moment where she thinks, reflexively, oh shit I’m not getting paid this week. Except that payment doesn't exist anymore. Except that even if it did still exist Cinnabari would probably pay her incredibly well, so long as they got to monologue at and tease her in exchange. “It was fine,” she says, which results in about a dozen uprooted fantasies of punishing her, half of which reference cultural acts she has no context for. “I mean — it didn’t hurt that much. My hands were…I’ve got calluses on calluses, Cinnabari, it isn’t easy to hurt me.”

“The joints are the problem,” they hiss, “you know you’ve done wrong, not telling me all this.”

“It wasn’t your business, at the time,” she argues back.

“You know,” they continue, drawing closer, no steps needed in their languid, slithering approach, “that this was bad of you. That you’ve wronged me. You did not tell me, Parolles, when it is my right to know you — from pain to pleasure, from every flexing muscle to every rigid foundation. I’m disappointed in you.”

It shouldn’t hit her. That’s a small, childish strike at parts of her that barely even exist. This is nothing, really, compared to the criticism she’d get from higher ups before now. Monica thinks this but it doesn’t stop the depths of her very being from shaking and whining and rolling belly-up.

“Tell me sorry,” they say. Or I’ll make you. 

I can’t, she thinks, with a shock of something electric down her spine. “I’m…sorry?” it comes out as a question. The pressure lessens, the leash given slack. “I’m sorry.”

They gnarr out an ugly sound, vines wriggling in a gentle, swaying crawl across the smooth ground. She knows, with a lurching, swooping feeling, that they can see her reluctance and her wanting. She knows they like what they see, and that’s nearly as unbearable as the dread she just tasted. It’s not painful, it’s the opposite of painful, but suddenly it’s all so much and there’s nothing to ground her, nothing left, nothing at all—

“Ow,” Monica hisses through gritted teeth, half-baffled and half-outraged as she feels the thorn go in. A sting, an ache, and she’s back again. Pinned before she could drown, nailed to a lifeboat by the brattiest angel anyone ever did see. 

“Apology accepted,” they say. “Now, when you were pretending like you could survive without me—”

“I was fine,” Monica says, for no reason except…that she wants to. Like pressing at a bruise just to see if it hurts, she wants to see if they’ll do anything. If they’ll punish her in ways she can’t bear or won’t tolerate. If they’ll take the trust she’s given and smash it into the nearest wall or hold it like something of value.

They do neither. Instead, with a soft voice, they reprimand her. “When you were pretending,” they insist, “that you wanted to survive without me.”

She stays silent, because she has no refutation for that. They continue, after a pause full of smug pride. “I made finau leaves for you. Is that fine, nau-nau?”

Will you tell my story? she thinks. Will you remember me when I’m gone? Is God the echoes we leave behind — or are gods just anything that lasts so long, that lives so effortlessly, that it leaves you breathless at a glance?

Monica doesn’t ask them existential questions. Doesn’t ask them ‘what does it mean’ or ‘does it get easier when you’re old’ or ‘why did the world have to hurt me so much if pain isn’t a law of the universe.’ 

Because she knows the answers. She’s told them, in her own ways. And she’s…a little bit sick of asking, in all honesty. A little bit sick of wondering. A little bit excited that she’ll get to wonder about smaller, joyful things. Good things. Truly good things. 

So, instead of asking something, she just nods and listens as Cinnabari starts weaving tales from words alone. 

Ready to offer snide little quips when they pause, to ask questions when part of them longs to change the subject, to follow a melody older than any human has ever been. To be part of that melody, not for the beauty of the song, but for the beauty of the singer.

And she thinks — as she sits down to eat a meal with her spouse, her wife, her affini — that this may just be what safety feels like.