For the moment Venisin didn’t worry about intelligence or military plans or any of the many related concerns. There was still a bit of that principle in the back of her mind: Her floret would never hide anything from her. But even that was outweighed by something more fundamental. Her floret was here, and she was hurting, hurting because of something she held on the inside and couldn’t let out for fear of someone she so clearly loved.

Presumably because said person would be forcibly domesticated.

Just as her floret would never hide anything from her, Venisin didn’t believe in hiding things from herself either. She’d grappled with the implications of the Compact many times. Grappled with the inherent violence in forcibly subjugating a species. It had been one of her favorite subjects of conversation with Sarah, and one of the reasons they’d initially grown close. It was easy to say florets were generally domesticated with their own consent. But to ignore the entire system or implicit and sometimes explicit oppression and power imbalance that frequently drove sophonts to make that choice would be to bury one’s horse in the sand. Even in the mildest of terms someone agreeing to pay their freedom in exchange for guidance through a foreign world frequently designed to encourage exactly that choice…

Yes, florets volunteered or needed it. But even in the Affini philosophy of one universal song, it meant something to take another’s instrument away. Even in the cases where you gave them a new one. Even in the rarer cases where the new one was almost as loud as the one before. Here was her little Kira, trying to make the world a better place, hurting others and hurting in turn. An agent of change, crippled by her own humanity and by circumstances. She didn’t doubt she’d made an impact. The heartfelt “yet” and the steel Kira showed every single day made that clear enough. And she also didn’t doubt that whatever efforts and progress Kira and her Mistress/Partner/Superior/Team had made had been cut off and rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Affini Compact.

And so here she was again. Venisin, in another domestication. At the precipice again. She didn’t love the Xenodrugs, but she was a practical plant. All it would take was one sting. She had the correct disinhibition agent on hand, already mixed with something intensely pacifying to cut off Kira’s inevitable resistance. All it would take to heal her floret, to save her from the demons she buried inside, was to violate the one single request she’d made. To take the one thing her little leaf held closest to her heart. The thing she’d been willing to suffer and die for. 

Venisin had made a promise, but she had obligations greater than a single promise. Both to her floret, and to a communal society that relied on each of its members caring for the shared garden above their own individual wishes.

Venisin weighed the choice. The feelings of betrayal versus the ability to heal. The likelihood of further trauma versus the potential sophonts useful information might save. She weighed the choices, and for another day chose to withdraw the singer.

—

Kira woke up gradually. She’d fallen asleep in Venisin’s embrace after her flashback. The memories of the vines were hazy. Comforting, firm, understanding, oh so deeply disturbing for it. Luckily disturbing was a feeling Kira could generally find peace in.

She did an inventory and realized she was, for a change, alone, and curled up in Venisin’s bed. There wasn’t much to do but get up and go about her day. She brushed her teeth, showered, found something that resembled a makeup kit, and instinctively followed a routine that had been both comfort and command for close to a decade now. The longing it created in her felt comfortable for the moment, a reminder of love instead of loss.

The step afterwards was newer. She checked her tablet, confirmed that she’d be happy to meet Sarah later that day to begin her lessons in Affini, then headed to the kitchen to prepare a new slab of lab meat for her Master. She’d started experimenting with longer marinades, different combinations of the spices that her current owner enjoyed. She realized as she was working that she missed Terran music, and wondered if the deep informational penetration and organization the Affini had would allow them to retrieve her Songify account.

A few requests to the hab later and she was dancing through the kitchen listening to her liked songs on shuffle, bathing in the familiarity of years of saved music, all from a time when something like the Affini Compact seemed like an idea out of science fiction.

Then the song her Owner and her had chosen for their collaring ceremony on the beaches of Centauri III came up, and she bowled over in pain.

Sarah’s hab unit wasn’t difficult to find. It was just off one of the arc’s central avenues, surrounded by foliage that was clearly maintained by the street’s residents. It looked personal, communal, and close to the heart of urban life. In short, Kira immediately loved it. She hadn’t seen Venisin before leaving, and wasn’t sure if her plant was just busy or if she was deliberately giving her space. Kira was grateful in either case. Sometimes it was good to just have some time alone to process.

Sarah answered on the first ring, and gave her a big hug.

“It’s so good to see you, Kira!” She cooed.

“You as well, Miss Sarah.” Kira didn’t hide her genuine smile.

The inside of Sarah’s hab unit was as beautifully decorated as the entire street, a delightful balance of plant and technology. Whereas Venisin’s apartment had organic lines and seemed to flow with nature, Sarah’s offered sharp little contrasts–clean, flowing lines, dainty touches, and a more feminine edge. 

The apartment was spotless, except for a low table with two tablets propped on it. The one Sarah had clearly been using had a coffee mug next to it, with the text “It’s not my fault you can’t resist my hypnotic eyes,” written on it. Kira didn’t quite get the reference, but the idea of a novelty mug was oddly human and oddly comforting.

Sarah noticed her attention. “Ahhh, these are from a Terran named Sakuta. He’s been teaching me about irony. Did you know not all Terran cultures had it? Not in the past, nor of the few that managed to survive the cultural fusion of the terran accord. Niponese and Korean both don’t, for example.”

Kira gave the mug a dubious look, though she filed the fact that affini were apparently also capable of hypnosis away for future exploration. For now she had a language to learn.

Speaking affini turned out to be a lot like singing. There was sound, rhythm, and a sentence structure that reminded her of her time learning Korean.

“When we move into a region we don’t just learn the local languages, our own language develops a dialect that’s closer to the linguistics of the species that are native there.” Sarah looked particularly proud. “It’s one of the things I spend a lot of my time on as part of my work in xenolinguistics.”

By the time they finished a few hours later Kira had a basic sense of Affini grammar, and could ask where the nearest bathroom, cafe, and domestication offices were.

Sarah was all smiles “Have you done something like this before, flower? Usually we make a lot less progress on the first day.”

“I’ve learned a few languages before,” Kira demurred.

“Well I’m glad it’s helping you now.”

Venisin spent the time Kira was out catching up on some of her other projects. She was new to the Arboratis but had already been asked to consult on some of the more difficult domestication cases. It seemed the fact that Kira hadn’t set fire to anything in the last two weeks was enough to get some folk’s attention. She didn’t feel like she had quite enough of a background in human psychology to help here–what she had learned made it clear that Kira was some kind of special case and that especially meant that Venisin would have to be careful not to draw overly broad conclusions–but it was a useful thing to slowly work herself into.

She’d been meaning to explore some of the cafes on the Arboratis’s as well–one downside of going straight from deep space transport to a difficult domestication was that she hadn’t had a chance to properly get her bearings.

The Arboratis had the classic multi arc architecture of an Affini deep space vessel. The one she had decided to place her hab on had a day night cycle configured for compatibility with Terran biorhythms. One of the other ones was set up to be mostly nocturnal, while the third was largely designed for water based lifeforms or those who wanted to be in close proximity to them. 

Venisin found the first of three cafes she was planning to read in that afternoon, and took out her tablet.

Venisin was out when Kira came home, and she busied herself by taking the marinade out of the stasis box. The thing had a refrigeration function, but inspecting the results it looked like it actually worked by doing a partial version of the stasis, which was… not what Kira had intended. Certainly worked better for refrigerating, but it meant that the marinade also hadn’t penetrated quite as far as it should have.

Unfortunately “where is the nearest domestication office” did not get you a refrigerator, so for now Kira used her tablet in English mode and filled out the proper requisitioning form. This aspect of Affini culture reminded her oddly of the Terran military, where the right paperwork would get you everything from an air-conditioned tent to an experimental rail cannon.

For now Kira would settle on the partial marinade, and experiment with how Venisin digested a partially seared meat slab. The hab wouldn’t create a blowtorch for her–something Kira found absolutely reasonable given her personal history–but it did provide a gas stove and an excellent looking non-stick pan.

The smell of searing meat was delicious, and reminded Kira of the few times she’d gotten to taste the real thing on her own travels. She decided to make her own favorite meat dish, a dish that fused Rinan spices with old style Latin American cooking and had been taught to her by a chef on Tau Ceti VI.

Venisin walked in just as Kira was putting the cast iron into the stasis chamber. She reached out for the vine she knew would come around the corner, and sighed as it pulled her into a slightly painful embrace.

“Hello my little leaf, how was your day?” Venisin’s voice was gentle.

“It was nice,” Kira sighed, “but it’s nicer now that you’re back.”

Kira felt, rather than saw, Venisin take their dinners out of the stasis chamber and set the table. Venisin placed her next to the chair, which meant today was one of the days she would kneel while Venisin fed her dinner.

There wasn’t much said until they’d both started eating. And even then their smalltalk held the quiet comfort of two people who didn’t need to fill the space with words.

Kira spent the few days before her next lesson with Sarah studying intensely. Venisin had used the opportunity to go back to whatever she usually did–ok that was unfairly dismissive, consulting on xenovetrinary psychology was definitely a real job and not at all a reminder of the “what’s your job in the leftist commune” memes Kira’s inner circle would pass around when they got frustrated by the lack of real progress from the public Terran Accord leftist movement. 

In truth the Affini had managed what her species hadn’t, and while Terrans weren’t nearly at the levels of post-scarcity as the compact, the amount of cartoonish evil that was still happening at the time of the Accord’s surrender definitely said something about her species as a whole.

Nothing to do now but keep digging in and learning the language. 

The walk over for her second day was relatively uneventful, and Kira got a chance to try out a few affini greetings. The tones didn’t quite roll off the tongue, and she wasn’t able to do quite the same multi-tonality that Sarah had demonstrated in their first lesson. But she’d get there.

“Welcome back, little Kira,” Sarah smiled, “How’s your day going?”

Kira didn’t care about her day. “I’ve gotten through a bunch more vocab than I thought I would, but I’m still struggling with intonations!”

“Alright,” Sarah let out a rumbly chuckle, “we can start with that today.”

Sarah took them through the kitchen into the living room, and they sat on opposite couches as Sarah deposited a mug of tea in front of Kira, and placed a vine in her own. It was no less interesting than the last one.

Kira glanced down at her own mug.

“Failing to brush your teeth twice a day is consent for domestication.”

She definitely understood Affini’s feelings (or lack thereof) about consent, but the tooth brushing thing confused her.

She held up her mug. “What does this one mean?”

“Oh, we regularly domesticate sophonts who are otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves.” Sarah made a shooing gesture with her hand. “I’m actually not sure what’s supposed to be ironic about this one, I know of at least one or two cases where lack of tooth brushing was the primary reason for someone becoming a floret.”

Kira decided this was a place to pick her battles. At least she was being domesticated for something real. A reality that she also tried not to think about too much. For now intonations were a good enough distraction.

Venisin spent her time in the cafe furthering her research. Her continued reading on Terrans in general had made clear what she already suspected: That Kira’s psychology was significantly different from the average Terran’s. If anything, standard literature on Terran psychology suggested that relationships like the one she had with Kira were deeply traumatic to most Terrans. This wasn’t that unusual for sophont species–there was a reason the standard Affini approach involved heavy xenodrug usage.

There were exceptions to this of course–her own experience in the Kvėnzrkrom System were one of them. And there were certainly other species that had psychological variations in relationship styles. But the sheer magnitude by which Kira was different from the standard psychological makeup of her species was clearly notable.

Further research into this difference had led to Venisin to Terran literature on a concept called BDSM, and a surprising depth of material that seemed immediately applicable to her little Kira.

Venisin made some notes on the past couple weeks, and started to read and compare.

Kira came home considerably more frustrated than after the first day. They’d worked on some techniques for improving her intonation, but especially now that she was starting to understand Affini speech patterns better it was obvious that there were some aspects of it that were going to be difficult if not impossible for her to replicate.

The daily experiment with marinating meat didn’t hold its usual peace, and Kira found herself rushing through the steps in order to spend more time trying to force her voice box into increasingly difficult shapes.

That was a mistake, and so was trying to reconfigure the new refrigerator to work at temperatures that weren’t intended for chilling drinks. A problem that likely could have been avoided if she’d known how Affini paperwork functioned better. Still, a compiled toolbox and a bit of cabling got her a working solution, though she still needed to use blocks of liquids around her meat to get chilling that acted on non-liquids. It worked in the end, but Kira was just about ready to explode.

It took all of Kira’s considerable mental toolkit to find a place of peace and pleasant welcome when Venisin walked through the hab door. Her current master seemed to pick up that something was wrong anyway, running vines all the way down her body and moving her face this way and that as if to inspect every nook and cranny.

But she chose not to say anything, instead giving Kira the space to feel her feelings.

They cuddled on the couch later, watching a science documentary about the methane oceans of a distant world. Kneeling on one of the lower tiers, wrapped in Venisin’s vines, helped temporarily suppress Kira’s frustrations. But even then, a small part of Kira still itched to be back at her tablet, fighting intonations, fighting to at least gain the agency over her life to have a regular damn conversation with one of the aliens that now dominated her world.

A few days later Kira headed into her third lesson with Sarah with frustration that had boiled, dried, hardened, and become a wall between her and further linguistic progress. They’d worked on intonation, she’d practiced at home, but it was clear that as much as the local dialect had adapted towards terran voice boxes, that adaptation had focused on “ability to communicate” not “ability to communicate well.” Worse, all that frustration about intonation had distracted her from the things she actually needed to work on, like improving her vocabulary and listening comprehension.

She didn’t even bother to ask about Sarah’s mug, which today read 

“It's only enslavement if it's from the Sol region of the Terran accord, otherwise it's just forced subjugation.”

Instead they got right into it.

“I want to be able to express emotions properly.”

Sarah gave a thoughtful look.

“We have words to convey these things, it’s not only through harmony.

“Yes but I’m going to live in the compact for the rest of my life. I want to be able to speak the language.”

Kira avoided raising her life, but directed an angry glare at the far wall of the hab.

“What if I–Venisin and I–travel around the compact? Not every Affini will speak Terran English, and many florets won’t even be able to. How will I communicate if I spend the rest of my life with only half a mouth? Haven’t y’all dealt with this?”

“Well, to be honest… Affini-floret pairings tend to be a little bit insular. Space is also very large, and florets generally do not live as long as affini.” She had the courtesy to look slightly embarrassed. “So while an affini might wander galaxies over their long life, most florets settle into a rather narrow domestic life. It would be dishonest not to admit that the xenodrugs are certainly a factor in this. A species' instinct to wander is frequently tied to its instinct for freedom..”

She made an impressively human balancing gesture with her hand.

“Curtail one and…”

It was years of training in courtesy and a decade of living with other’s comfort as the highest priority that kept Kira from showing her disdain for that notion on her face.

What Sarah said next was the one thing that could have made this worse.

“There are some options, but I’d have to talk to your Owner about them first.”

Kira said something that vaguely resembled politely excusing herself, and stormed out of the hab.

Venisin had some time between meetings and decided to take some time in a cafe and consider Kira’s domestication. They’d settled into a kind of stable home life. Kira was, on the surface, perfectly submissive. But Venisin wanted to implant her at some point, and consider her her floret in spirit rather than just in practice, and it felt like some sort of depth was still missing there. It was one thing to do all the actions of a floret, and another to embody the spirit of a floret or to see yourself as a floret.

She accepted the tea, served by the typical glass eyed floret waiter, and considered whether some socializing would help. Kira didn’t really have any role models. Isolating her had initially prevented any other florets from getting caught up in her behavior, and seeing florets happily under the Affini’s horse would likely have only inflamed her behavior. But she seemed relatively well behaved now. Maybe it was time?

She felt like there was more she needed to know, especially since it now turned out her little rebel was more intimately involved with some of the Accord’s military actions than she’d previously assumed. 

“We weren’t powerful enough yet.”

It definitely implied something.

Venisin waved at a passing acquaintance, then pulled out her tablet. A search of Kira’s name turned out innumerable results, a filter of military records turned out dozens of Kiras, but a face match filtered those down to zero.

Even a DNA search turned up nothing.

Kira didn’t exist in the Accord’s military.

Venisin set up an expanding AI-assisted image search and put her tablet aside. She’d get a ping if something turned up.

Kira’s anger hadn’t abated at all over the long walk home. In fact the cooing pity that seemed to radiate off the Affini around her only made it worse. At least she’d been able to respond in vaguely proper Affini when one of the weeds had asked her if they needed to get her some assistance or some calming xenodrugs. 

It was just… Multiple weeks of single minded studying had improved her vocabulary, it had given her grammar, she was even starting to pick up some of the linguistic customs. But nothing would get around the fact that she wasn’t an Affini, didn’t have their language capacities, and yet lived in a society that was designed to treat anyone besides Affini as second class citizens at best. Nevermind someone on the forcible domestication track like her. As much as she found submitting to Venisin to be natural, comfortable, even spiritually correct, it didn’t change that this was exactly the sort of oppression she used to fight, wrapped up in a lack of scarcity and more emphasis on emotional fulfillment. Did a jail become less of a jail because its inmates were forcibly drugged into forgetting where they were?

Just because she found comfort under a boot didn’t make boots okay. She’d spent her life dedicated to greater causes, she was supposed to be more than this. She was supposed to-

Kira noticed her left hand holding a multi tool from a toolbox, her right hand deep within the guts of their hab’s oven. Years of comfort with electronics meant that Kira didn’t need to think, just do, as her frustration manifested. Reconnect the cabling, remove the safety from the heating coil, improvise a resistor that would overheat into a spark, and cut the limiter on the gas heaters. Open the oven so the entire hab fills with fuel, set a timer, then glance apologetically at the couch she’d spent so many nights kneeling in front of.

The telltale smell of leaking gas began to fill the hab.

Venisin deserved her–and fortunately wasn’t going to be home for a few hours–but this fucked up society did not, and so for lack of better options she was going to scream into the void at least one more time. She let out a mirthless chuckle as she turned the dial that would start the heating coil to its inevitable explosion. It probably wouldn’t penetrate the hull, but it would be messy. Second class citizen her ass.

Before she could even make it out of the hab, a vine snaked from around the corner and turned the dial back off. Venisin glided up to her, and wrapped her in a tight embrace.

“Oh little thorn, you should not have done that.”