“I’m not going to drug you. " Venisin kept their voice steady, confident. "I’m not going to implant you, either. I understand that you were acting out of frustration and out of fear, and that this transition is not easy for you."

Kira already wasn't fighting her, but she felt the little package in her vines concede another degree of relaxation.

“Know that this is a gift. This is giving more space for your value of consent than almost anyone else from my culture would consider reasonable. We’re going to talk, and then I will decide how to proceed.”

Venisin ran a stinger vine down Kira’s spine, beneath the bonds. Kira tensed only the slightest bit, then relaxed into the pain.

“I’m going to put you down now,” Venisin continued. “You’re going to kneel for me quietly, in your usual spot, and I’m going to take a moment to calm myself down. Then we will discuss this situation. We will understand, together, exactly why this happened, if there are any needs I am not meeting, and then I will decide what we will do differently in the future and what will constitute appropriate consequences for your actions.”

Kira let her eyes close and her head hang ever so slightly. She responded, in perfectly pronounced but single toned, emotionless Affini: “Yes Master.”

She put Kira down, and her floret-in-progress kneeled at her spot with extra attention and care. The perfection of that movement usually came so easily to her, so Venisin’s core bloomed a little at seeing the tiny amount of additional effort–it was apology and olive branch both.

Still, she took a moment to scan through her vines. None of the extra tension that would indicate lingering anger. Truthfully she’d expected something like this way sooner. Her floret had been remarkably well behaved, both for an undrugged rebel in general, and for someone with her reputation. Sarah had sent her a message right after Kira left, and from what Venisin had heard… She had some guesses for what might have led here.

Truthfully the thing that upset her most was the childish lashing out with what was essentially an attempted act of terrorism. They’d need to have a conversation about that.

At the moment she felt like she had that anger well handled. So it was time. 

She glided onto the couch and joined her little problem pet.

“So, little thorn,” she layered the Affini pet name with both warning and affection, “this is your chance to explain how we got here.”

Kira breathed, and let the peace of acceptance–no, submission–roll through her. She had acted, and now there would be consequences. Somewhere along the way she had realized that she trusted Venisin to administer those consequences. To hear her out, to understand why she’d acted that way, and then administer the cruelty the Compact considered utopia in the kindest way possible.

There were… lingering feelings. Uncertainties. A nagging in the back of her mind that told her she was close to a separate, but equally important understanding.

But Venisin hadn’t drugged her, hadn’t taken away the one secret she still held close, hadn’t violated her the way she saw so many around herself violated.

She took a deep breath. Venisin had asked a question.

“I felt– feel incredibly frustrated. My civilization has been conquered. Fine, might makes right. I have become what is, in human parlance, a prisoner of war. And as a result I have been given an automatic life sentence. That it is plush does not make it any less of a prison, and as the adrenaline of pure survival started to wear off–which I’m very grateful to you for, since you largely made that happen in a way multiple other Affini failed to…”

She spent a moment fidgeting with her dress. Venisin stroked her back. No pain this time. She leaned into it.

“Okay. As the adrenaline wore off, the prospect of spending the rest of my life as a prisoner and second class citizen for doing the obvious thing when your corrupt government sells you out to an alien race has become more and more difficult for me to handle. Worse, this was–and is–happening to tens of thousands of others.”

She looked up at Venisin. Their face was a mask, and their eyes were boring into her.

“I… I…” Deep breath. “I don’t deal well with injustice. Or things that I consider unfair. It’s worse when it’s on behalf of others. It becomes something where I struggle to be able to back down. I used to have a force moderating that for me. Someone I trusted absolutely who told me where to fight and where to yield. But… Well– You’ve figured out that much, I think.”

Venisin didn’t pull her into their lap, something they might have done in response to a confession like this just a day ago. It cut something in Kira, but it was deserved. She’d pull all the comfort she could out of the vine that had moved to stroking her head.

She wasn’t back in Venisin’s good graces yet. Suffering and trauma did not give license for lashing out.

The eyes continued to bore into her, so she continued her confession.

“I’m usually… more productive than this. I’m not sure why that’s important for me to say. But sometimes it feels like there are no good options on the table, and all that’s left is lashing out. “

“And. Well. That was that.”

Venisin watched as her little charge ran out of steam. There was a minute of silence. She continued to stroke, to provide enough comfort to keep her little troublemaker together, but give no illusion of how she herself felt at the moment.

“You’re very good at this,” Kira whispered.

Venisin didn’t let it get to her head.

She decided to give a little: “Conflict resolution requires listening. Especially with Terrans, based on my reading. I could have come in here and yelled at you about how you’re wrong, or insisted that you acted with malice, but there’s no way that was going to move us forward. And there’s no way it would make you trust me enough to move forward. It’d only push you into more of a corner.”

Venisin rustled.

“And I wouldn’t want you trapped in a corner–not unless I put you there.”

She tapped the table and switched gears.

“Ok, we haven’t really talked about your belt for a while. Would having kept the denial at a higher level have helped? I know I relaxed on that because of your language lessons, but if it’s needed to control you.”

Kira made a thoughtful expression.

“You’d have to– You’d have to modify me in some way first.” She gave an adorable shudder. “I can sort of… turn my sexuality off? I normally don’t, when you’re teasing me, but that’s an act of loyalty or submission–it’s me making myself vulnerable for you.”

That was enough for Venisin. She’d had a rough idea before, but this was going to be acceptable. She tilted Kira’s head up to face her.

“Okay. Here’s how this is going to go: I’m not going to drug you. I’m not going to implant you. I understand that you were acting out of frustration and out of fear, and that this transition is not easy for you.”

Kira gave a long, slow blink, and seemed to relax just an inch.

“You’ll be attached to my side for the foreseeable future. You will speak when spoken to, move when asked to, and step not a foot out of line. I will be practicing your Affini with you, though your lessons with Sarah will continue. During lessons, she will also have absolute authority over you, and will have been informed by me to be as strict and exacting as I will be. I am comfortable giving you a degree of freedom, perhaps more so than most. That freedom must be earned.”

Venisin tapped a vine against their coffee table.

“The lack of drugs will be a mercy and a punishment: the drugs also prevent the boredom that often comes with short leashes.”

“There’s two other matters. First, since joining us, you’ve mostly witnessed the admittedly sharp way that the Compact deals with resistance. I want to expose you to some other aspects of life here. I’ve a few friends on this ship, and I’m going to organize you meeting some of their florets.”

Venisin stroked Kira’s neck. She expected the next one to get some resistance, since it would be untrodden ground for them.

“Second, you will get surgery replacing your vocal chords with Affini biotech. It’ll allow you, with sufficient practice and training, to speak Affini the same way a native speaker would. The vines require some space for the full range of sound, so this will replace your collar as well and, while it’s not a haustoric implant, will allow me to control you more closely. It’ll also give myself or other Affini more tools should you ever try something like this again. I can abide by much, but domestic terrorism is not something I can leave as a possibility.”

The expected rebellion didn’t come. Instead Kira closed her eyes, took a breath that seemed to ground her deeper into the floor, then tipped forward at the waist and–moving no other part of her kneeling form–rested her forehead against Venisin’s cloak.

It was a very human intonation of a whisper, but the words were affini. 

“I understand, Master. Thank you.”

It was acceptance. It was submission. And Venisin felt her core grow warm.

Kira found her punishment oddly comforting. She knelt by Venisin’s side, silent. Venisin had wrapped her in vines pretty much non-stop since their original conversation two days ago. They didn’t actively restrain her, as long as she was doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing and nothing else. She glanced down at the vines around each of her arms, resting gently on her knees. It was… nice. She felt close to her plant.

The kneeling position was her own choice, though Venisin had given her an appreciative look. The regularly getting up to fetch Venisin snacks and water had been an excuse to stretch her legs initially, but after the first time she asked “may I fetch you some tea, Master” and their eyes met, it had become a ritual.

They’d had their usual evening conversation last night, and Kira had admitted to finding the punishment comforting; so now the vines surrounding her body would regularly deliver the kind of sharp, piercing pain that her owner was so capable of.

It was supposed to make sure she felt adequately punished. It– it would do more of that if she couldn’t feel Venisin’s satisfaction every time she flinched. Instead she found herself sinking deeper into the vines, fawning almost, every time she got shocked. 

A slight pressure on the vine running up her left cheek let Kira know that she’d sunk too deep into thought.

Presence, her Master demanded.

Kira glanced up. Venisin was speaking to another Affini. They’d been in the cafe for a while, but both still had plenty of tea. There were bits and pieces of the conversation she understood. A continuation of some question yesterday about a nearby colony that had some cultural needs that required a slightly different touch than normal, and how to gather the volunteers for that.

The conversation was winding down. The vine touching that served as the Affini equivalent of a handshake.  A slight touch on her back–time to get up. Would she need to get vines too? No, she could replicate the movements well enough with an arm and some creativity.

As she flowed from kneeling to standing, Venisin activated all the stinger vines at once, and what felt like a rain of knives ran down her body. Kira stumbled, but a bit of extra tension from the vine on her arm kept her from falling. She FELT her Master’s joy at the tension in her body, at the shaky breath she let out as she kept herself a hair’s breadth from crying out.

Her suffering found resonance in her Master, and a hunch in the back of her mind grew stronger.

They only walked a short distance. Kira still followed in exactly the spot Venisin had dictated on the first day, but this time with vines snaking down and controlling her entire body. She still walked under her own power, but without a degree of freedom to even turn her head. A marionette, but one forced to propel itself.

The shop–if calling something post-capitalism a “shop” was still appropriate–was covered in all sorts of custom electronics equipment and suffused with a purple LED glow that was drowned out by an absolute rainbow of different lighting elements on the inside.. The wires surrounding the entryway made the pattern of the classic Terran trans pride flag and Kira felt an immediate sense of kinship. It wasn’t a big factor in her daily experience anymore, but knowing someone had shared an experience with you always made a place feel a little bit safer.

A woman in a colorful floret’s dress worked on a counter absolutely strewn with electronics. It looked like she was assembling a complex lighting system connected to a kind of central control chip. One of her arms was completely replaced by a set of vines, allowing her to hold a whole collection of tools at once.

She looked up when Venisin crossed the threshold, and flashed both of them a smile.

“Hey! You’re Venisin right? Mistress said you’d stop by this afternoon.”

She put down the tool she was holding in her seemingly-human right hand, and reached out for Venisin’s hand.

Venisin grabbed it with a vine. “Hello little flower. As I mentioned to Quercis, I figured you and my floret could use a little chat. I’ll just have a little tour of the shop while you do.”

Venisin walked over to inspect some electronics, and Kira followed Anna’s gesture to a small coffee table in a nook in the back of the room. It wasn’t exactly private, but the vines still constraining her body as punishment made any sort of privacy purely symbolic anyway.

Anna poured them some tea. They got pleasantries out of the way, then Anna went straight for business.

“So, I hear you’re struggling to adjust?” 

Kira looked down and stirred her teaspoon.

“It’s… a few different things. One I can’t talk about, but it doesn’t really impact the daily stuff. For the daily stuff… well I struggle with feelings of insignificance.”

Anna made a non-committal noise, so Kira continued.

“Or impact–whatever you want to call it. Before this I was working on things that would impact the entire Terran Accord.”

Anna gave her a sideways look. 

“You were in the military weren’t you?” There was just a hint of offense in her tone.

Kira stumbled over her explanation.

“Ahh– I can’t say I was a fan of it. No, don’t get me wrong. I’m not sad to see the Accord go.” She fumbled with her spoon. “You could say the Affini finished something me and some friends had started, and did it more thoroughly than we ever could.”

“Ahhh,” Anna responded, “so now you’re without direction.”

Kira looked up in thought. “Yes actually, in more ways than one.”

Anna glanced at her shop. “Why not pick up a hobby.”

“It’s more than that… Sure, I could pick up tech again, or I could get back into cooking. But those were relaxation. For when I WASN’T working for a purpose… it’s… I just feel so relegated to the sidelines and useless.”

Kira tried to hit the side of the table, only to have the movement aborted by her constricting vines. Fair enough. Deep breath.

She tried again. “Look, I’m just saying– Okay, imagine a human scientist. They’re working on some research, then the Compact comes along. Suddenly everything they were working towards–the Affini already have it.”

Another deep breath.

“Worse, anything the human scientist could feasibly contribute going forward, the Affini can do in spades. The Compact is unfathomably large, the Affini are generally extremely intelligent, have access to advanced AI, and an infinitely longer lifespan to build experience. But it’s like complaining that dogs cannot pilot airplanes or aren’t allowed in research labs. Humans aren’t just second class citizens in the eyes of the law, or not citizens at all when turned into pets–they’re just worse at a lot of things and that’s really hard if you’ve always been one of humanity’s best.”

Anna gave her a look of consideration and took a sip of her tea.

“I see where that’s coming from, but I think it’s missing some wrinkles. I know plenty of non-Affini, florets and not, contributing to society in useful ways. Admittedly many– no, most–choose domestication at some point, but that’s because your average contributing sophonts works closely with an Affini to make up for exactly the shortcomings you point out, and pairing up is a natural outcome of that. But is that a bad outcome? If the whole is more than the sum of its parts?”

Kira gave her a skeptical look. “How natural is it when society almost forces you into that arrangement? That’s like saying old style Terran patriarchal gender roles are fine because the wife could contribute her tiny share through the husband.”

“Is it? There’s a difference between being held back and simply being outclassed.” Anna looked at her shop. “As for the size of the contribution? The compact is HUGE, I know a few Affini who have struggled with that question as well. Great man theory is bunk, anyway.”

That cut something within Kira, and she bit back.

“That’s just justification for settler colonialism in all its forms. ‘The outsiders are bringing superior technology, it’s only natural that the inferior natives bow before their superiority. Look how charitable they’re being, taking over the savages with their primitive government and barbaric customs–it’s the White Man’s Burden after all!’” 

Anna didn’t take the bait, instead she sipped more of her tea.

“It’s difficult isn’t it? The right of a native population to determine its own destiny versus the sometimes backwards cultural practices still performed there. Did you know European countries justified the original colonization of Africa in part with the need to abolish slavery there? Only after ending it at home of course. They had conferences on it and everything.”

Kira couldn't help but interject. "And now the Affini are here to bring it back."

Anna sighed as she put down her cup.

“Look, I’m not here to justify imperialism to you. Nor do I think an interesting but ugly conversation about the parallels between Terran racism and Affini speciesist politics is particularly helpful for you at the moment. Let’s put it into simpler terms that, based on what you’ve said about your former life, you should hopefully appreciate: A lot of people were suffering under Terran rule and an advanced society has decided to non-consensually remedy that. Now the suffering is gone, but so is humanity’s independence.”

Kira gave herself a hug and looked at the ground.

Anna continued: “That’s done now. You need to think about what you want the rest of your life to be like.”

Kira looked back at Anna. The words were a gentle cut to her heart.

“You know, I don’t think you’re wrong.” It came out a whisper. “I always felt like humanity was one long, beautiful, tragic story. And I hoped beyond all hope that we’d get to write a better chapter. And now that story’s suddenly been ended, right there in the middle, and we’ve been absorbed into something much greater.”

Anna made a sympathetic noise. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

There were some tears now, but Kira chuckled. “It’s funny, I don’t know whether to be sorry for those that didn’t get to see the end, or for those that did. Depends on the person I suppose.”

Kira felt the hand on her arm before her blurry eyes registered it. “Remember that the individuals carry on. We all get to be part of a different story now.”

She cleared Kira’s now empty teacup. “You should rest. Whatever your burden before was–you don’t have to carry the future of the human race on your shoulders anymore. Let go. And I think you should call your alien back because you have some crying to do.”

Kira gripped one of the vines on her arm, trusting Venisin to know what it meant. Moments later vines bundled her up, and she could see them move out of the shop from the way the lights shifted in the corner of her eye. They were back on the plaza now, and the feelings were becoming overwhelming, but there was one thing she still needed to ask.

“Why, you know? You could have provided aid–seen what humans were like when post-scarcity got rid of the ‘who gets what’ question. You could have made a protectorate, but like an actual one, not window dressing on colonization. Left SOME room for those who value freedom. Why? Just–why?”

“Oh little leaf. It's the same as with your Terran histories. We’re not perfect, and this is who we are. It was always going to be like this.”

Somehow, that was exactly what Kira needed to hear. She leaned into her Master, and sobbed.