The Fables of a Feral
Of dreams so fond they leave you shuddering
by NewTrickyNuisance
Tags:
#f/nb
#pov:bottom
#scifi
#CW:dubious_consent
#D/s
#dom:nb
#Human_Domestication_Guide
#mind_control
#praise
#romance
#sub:female
Tw for surrealist dream sequences, philosophizing, self-hatred, and doubts about love. Also, concerns about identity death. Also also, internal stuff from Monica about florets and youth and such, she has a lot going on there.
Feel free to tell me if there are any warnings I missed on adding!
“Seedling,” they purr, heavy and cloying, sounding about as soft as a stale synthcube, “you’ve been starved of attention.”
Monica, vibrating out of her skin, sighs contentedly. She lunges for them, leaping into their arms, burying her face in the mass of the piled up, amorphous mass of them. Cinnabari smells like wood, iron, and some dizzying mix of lavender and cloves. They smell like their library, dusty and damp, like that old-book smell Monica only recently realized wasn’t a metaphor.
Analog books have a smell. Paper has a smell, particularly when it’s recently been printed or when it’s as ancient as Dracaena’s documents are.
She collapses bonelessly into them. It’s ok. They’re back. She’s ok. A warmth spreads through her, heart still slow but pumping along with a partner in crime. Buried deeply within her soul, something curled up small and fragile is soothed down, molded by steady hands until the arch of her back straightens and the clench to her jaw slackens. She’s comforted and warm, so cozy she could sleep, though she can’t sleep here. Not now.
A prickle. A static tension. A wire drawn tighter and tighter, thicker than a sewer pipe but so terribly breakable when held in their impossible grip.
Touch scrapes away at her remaining worry. Vines graze lightly against the skin of her arm, the back of her palm, the thickened soles of her feet. Monica realizes, dully, that this ghosting touch is a shore belying a nigh unbearable sea of pleasure. Monica realizes, with a twinge of fear-soured arousal, that the feeling of more on the horizon had been right. That this unfair, tantalizing joy could be made so much worse. That they’ve been easy on her and that if they chose to stop being easy…she’s not sure how she could bear it.
Fear twines itself into love into aching into home. Home. This could be a home. This isn’t a home. This is hers but it isn’t a home, not without Monica there with them, not without someone else to make their song full again.
Monica leans closer, letting the rough bark of their face brush against her cheek, and then groans at the mingling agony-pleasure coursing through her. It's so much. It’s bliss so strong that her body can’t help but be hurt by it, over and over, pulsing and throbbing. It’s pain so piercing she can hardly think around the brightness of it, the divinity, the beauty.
She cries out, if only to do something with this assault of sensation. It feels so good, it all feels good, like there’s no way they could touch her without making her like it. Like something’s shifted, deep in the gut of her, a flipped switch or jolted gear that grinds and grinds and grinds away at the parts of her Cinnabari doesn’t need.
She’s hot all over and twitching too violently to be normal.
“Look at you,” Cinnabari coos, “so pathetic. Look at what I’ve done to you. Look at what you’ve done to yourself, straying so far, pretending you could leave. Pretending you could ever not want me. Pretending like some brittle little sprout could ever compare to this,” they sigh, contented in the same way she had been just moments before now. “You spent so much time lying, seedling, but all it’s done is drag you back here. You spat at me, the last time we met. And yet you need me so much, you’re so desperate, that brushing against an imitation of me is enough to send you whimpering. What a good girl you are, Parolles.”
Something…shifts again. Nothing you do matters, they whisper, nothing at all. It’s been pointless. All that matters is what you are to me.
All that matters is that I want you.
But that’s not enough for them, for this strange thing they’re building. Monica remembers pain — not this tender facsimile, this sweetened electricity branding her mind and body and soul — but the deeper kind. The kind she did not get to choose. The kind which burrowed itself into her, chewing her up like a cat with canary, careless and greedy. Monica remembers that pain she never wanted. She remembers it. She knows it. And it is a thorn of clarity driven so deeply into her that even now it cries out like a wounded animal — pleads to be soothed down, to be healed, to be fixed. Hopes to be taken and kept until it melts away like snow in summer.
The war drums rumble like rolling thunder, clamoring a harsh refrain that repeats and rewinds and twists in on itself. A second voice crooning hushed lullabies as the first thuds in her chest, roars in her ears, sings within her veins.
Dracaena looks down at her, eyes alight with so much heat it could swallow them both whole, and Monica realizes that she has been taunting a thing who has no practice in being bullied. A thing that is not helpless, that is never helpless, that has had their little bubble of impassive distance popped and loves her for having the audacity to try almost as much as they love her for daring to succeed. Those are the eyes of a thing that sees her. Those are not the eyes of someone looking at one of a million faces, of someone looking at a novel new pet or object.
“You need me,” she whispers. “Talk all you want but you need me as much as I need you. You’ve been wilting too, Dracaena,” Monica sighs. “We’ve been wilting together.”
Cinnabari shakes, rumbles, purrs out their own horrified delight. With one long, deliberate stroke they run through her. With one soft, phantom touch they set her nerves on fire. With one slow, gentle violation they make her into a worshipful, mewling thing.
She doesn’t know how long she spends there, suspended within bliss so complete she can barely even begin to wonder what she ‘should’ be feeling, cocooned in thick layers of vines and branches. Someone, she thinks, is talking. She likes when they talk. She wants them to do it more.
Monica opens her mouth to beg, only for the world to twist on its axis, mind brightening as the fog clears away.
“Why do horses feature in so many of your human idioms?” Cinnabari asks, roots dipped in a cup of tea Monica made for them. Their face is still as ever, wooden and unmoving, but she can tell they’re delighted from the trilling accents to their voice.
Monica hums contentedly at the taste of good tea, “What you need to know,” she smiles, “is that no human on planet knows what the fuck a horse is. Not even the CEOs here have seen a horse. There are maybe five hundred horses alive and all of them are on the other side of the galaxy.”
“So, the novelty gives this animal a sense of honor? And that increase in honor leads to an increase in idioms.”
“More value,” she corrects. “And no, not quite. It’s more that…well, if you forget what animal belongs to which idiom no one can technically say you’re wrong if you use a horse.”
“Fascinating,” Cinnabari murmurs, gaze like a physical pressure as it trails along her form. “It reminds me of my old little one. He used to worship the ancient prey on his homeworld — but none of them knew what they looked like. Archaeology was a matter of worship rather than simple curiosity.”
Monica hums. “Ah, he was the one with the sail on his back, wasn’t he? Liked to chew on antlers.”
“My darling had the most beautiful teeth.”
“Well,” Monica says, ignoring that comment to continue making her own point. “If you need a swimming thing, who can say the horse doesn’t swim? Who can say early horses don’t get the worm? That they don’t have one trick or that they don’t squirm their way out of things or that they weren't the ones hunting down canaries. Who can say anything about a creature they’ve never seen before?” she sighs, chuckling to herself. “Old idioms drift but nobody ever knows for sure what a horse is. Horses are the grand equalizer, the one constant of the Universe — not even you leafy angels understand them!”
“You laugh but it’s really quite sad,” her Dracaena frowns, lips pulled down in a grimace.
Monica blinks. What’s her affini on about now?
“They’ve been so thoroughly forgotten that not even the ones who made them know what they used to be,” they speak with an almost casual air, though their petals start shrinking in a strange display Monica doesn’t know how to read. “I’ve lived for centuries, dear. I’ve been doing this for centuries. Do you really think I can love you in a way that matters?”
She softens. “Talk like that,” she scolds gently, “will drive you crazy. It feels painful so our brain gives it more weight, winces on instinct before you’ve even really considered what it means, but in the end what matters…doesn’t matter. Meaning never saved anyone. Importance doesn’t fill our bellies or mend our wounded or raise our children up. All it does is send you spiraling down a path you really, really don’t want to go down.”
Cinnabari looks odd, almost smug. “You don’t understand,” they say gently. It’s the tone of a lecturer. The tone of a bored teacher. “I’ve lived for millenia, Monica. You’re going to fade from my memory and I’ll leave you behind like nothing. What we have can’t last and you know it.”
Monica raises a single brow. “Did you come here to build something that lasts forever or did you come here to spend time with me?”
They pause, for a moment. “If you loved someone like this, you would want to keep them,” they lament. “It’s a fact of life, petal, that I’m here for both. I love you, so I want to savor you. Make you last, even if I know there’s…only so long I could stretch your mind before it broke.”
Monica sighs, motioning for them to continue. They want to, she can sense it, even if they’ve started to hesitate.
“It should matter, Monica, just look at you,” Cinnabari groans, one hand coming up to drag its way down their grimacing face. “If anything deserves to matter, it’s this. But all we’ll ever leave behind is paper and ink and that can’t ever be real. It can’t…it can’t replace you.”
“Good,” Monica says. “If I meant that little to you — so little you could replace me with a book — then I’d never forgive you, Cinnabari. Not without you changing me so far I’m unrecognizable.”
“I hate you,” Cinnabari says. “I fucking despise you. I’ll ruin you and leave you dying and I won’t even care in the end. You’ll hate me and you’ll wish I were dead. We shouldn’t even try.”
“I love you,” Monica replies. It isn’t an argument. It isn't a retort. “I think you’re pretty. I think you’re wise, you’re bratty, you’re the scariest goddamn woman I’ve ever seen. And I don’t want to live my life without you in it.”
Cinnabari opens their mouth, a mouth made of flesh, with watery tears tracking down their face. “You will never last as long as I do. You will never see what I have seen. You will never understand me.”
“Loving is knowing and being known. How could you love me, when there’s too much of me to ever possibly learn?”
“Stop that,” she snaps, meeting dark eyes. Two eyes, in a human face, staring out with impossible depths. A pretty human face. A lovely one, a safe one, one that could never possibly belong to her Cinnabari. “I don’t want that, God, get rid of that! This isn’t right. What’s wrong with you?”
“Everything that’s wrong with you,” Cinnabari answers, sneering down at her with flat, white teeth. “So desperate all you can do is pine after an angel. Do you think I’ll love you? Do you think I’ll care? You’re a thing to me, Monica, you're nothing but an object. Then again, you always have been a tool, haven’t you? You never changed.”
“Give them back,” she howls, darting forwards with hands outreached, as if she could claw away this thin veneer of humanity and reach the reality beneath it. “Give them back, give them back, you rotten old wretch, we’ve always been nothing, at least this way we’ll be nothing with someone else!”
“Drag them down with you, then?” the thing pretending to know her jeers, eyes crinkled at the corners with a beaming, childish grin on their face. “You hate yourself, Monica, you see yourself better than anyone else and you fucking hate what you’ve seen — why do you think they would be different? Destroy me, bury me, claw me away, but it’s true. It hurts.”
“I’m living,” she cries, quiet and broken. “Leave me alone, I’m alive, that’s all we can manage sometimes but I’m — I’m alive. That’s all I want to do, is live. Just…just wanna live with them. That’s all I need, just to talk, just give a moment and I’ll find a way—”
“They’re going to dig you up and tear away the core of you. Is that why you want them— so they can destroy the rot in you? People aren’t knives to cut yourself on, Monica. Imagine that: Loving someone for what they could do to you instead of who they are. Mama would hate what you’ve become. You hate what you’ve become.”
“And what,” she grits out, sounding like a wretch, sounding like a kicked dog, “would you have me do instead.”
The thing grins, with teeth that are her teeth, with eyes that are her eyes, with a face that is nothing like what she sees in the mirror but is undeniably Monica Parolles. It’s a young face. It’s a beautiful face. It’s nothing like her, chubby cheeked and smooth skinned, bereft of any wrinkles, with a tiny nose and thin lips and a smile so pleasant it glitters. “Why are you asking me, Monica? I’m just a dream. I’m not even real. Cinnabari left you, Monica, you were so sure they would love you and they don’t. They stayed away because they realized how much of a bitch I am, how little we matter. They don’t need you.”
“I need them,” they say, one broken and another not. One young and another creaking. One desperate to deny it and another so giddy she sounds hideous despite the sing-song cant to her voice.
Please no, she thinks, no, I can’t be that. I can’t — they could — but I don’t want to die, I want to live, I want to be me — that’s all—
The thing grabs her by the throat, chokes her out with slender fingers, soft and untouched by work, no proof of any calluses left behind. The hands of a happy woman. The hands of a young woman. The hands of a good floret girl, of someone unrecognizable, of something that cannot and never has been Monica Parolles.
She opens her mouth and all she can do is gasp, though the dream is not real and she knows it, though the world is fading quickly. She knows, deep in her heart, that she is about to die—
She gasps for air, light streaming through the window, heart skittering in her chest. Off-beat. It’s off-beat to their music.
Never. She won’t be that. She won’t — God, she loves them but she can’t — if they ask her to do that she’ll never forgive them. To be that. To die, in every way that matters, memory buried and all her years left behind. No pain, no history, no guilt. Just nothing. So much would die with her, so many memories and stories with no one left to tell them. Who would remember the boy crying wolf or the prince of lions? Who would remember the kind faces, the nameless faces, the strangers who helped her? Someone was kind once. Someone told a story once. Someone cried out to be remembered, desperate and broken, but Monica only has so much time and the world is spinning so fast nowadays that she isn’t sure how to keep up.
She wants to survive this, in the ways that matter. She wants to be kept and she wants to have power and she wants to give that power over and she wants, God, sometimes it feels like there’s nothing left of her but wanting.
“House robot,” Monica croaks out, “get my morning meds.” Panic isn’t productive. It’s easy to panic, but she’s never liked easy, has she?
What does she need? Cinnabari, please—
What can she get herself? Meds, food, water. That’s the basics. She’ll take care of the basics, then all else will follow.
She takes her meds dry, thanking her lucky stars that the affini managed choke-proof pills.
Then she asks for a bowl filled with cream of wheat, some sugar, and some butter. Simple, really, but familiar and sweet. It tastes like distant memories of childhood, like small hands holding small bowls and parents whose names she may have even remembered, once upon a time. Children get better meals. It’s not one of the rules but it’s common enough sense that everyone has the most real meals when they’re small.
She stretches out carefully, kneading at her own aching legs. God, how did she not immediately see it was a dream? In real life, her body is full of little pains, pangs of an ache in her knees, stings from old scars as she moves, the burn of exhaustion and the sting of bitter tears competing with the foul taste of her own dry mouth.
She feels, though. She feels and she is and it may not feel like enough but God help her, Monica is going to make it enough. It’s a form of joy all its own, even if she needed to be in a terrible place to find it. She is going to convince them to take her, she is going to show them why they need her back, and then she is going to take a knee and risk rejection.
She’s going to place her heart in their hands and hope to God they know her well enough not to crush it.
She looks at the rings she had made. This isn’t anything like a proper wedding — no vows, no oaths, no witnesses — but all Monica actually needs is a partner, two rings, and an answer.
She hopes they’ll want her in a way she can accept.
Thanks for reading! Sorry for the lateness, these last few chapters have not been cooperating with me, but I’ve got enough of a draft finished for the next that I feel ready to post this one.
@Darkfalli This is a late reply but I’ve been in hand-flapping levels of glee over your comments. They’re so well-thought out, it’s been an absolute delight to read your feedback.
Monica is a very much a product of her environment and that environment is hostile. The forgeworlds of the Accord were awful and I wanted to show how thoroughly that awfulness seeped down to its citizens. I’m so, so glad that you liked those parts! And even more glad that the dream sequence bits hit well.
(Also, thanks for the wiki-adding! It was very nice to see my story there.)