Venisin carried her pet–and she was truly, undeniably her pet now–to the temporary hab they’d requisitioned on the Mycellin. She lowered the hab temperature a few degress, adjusted the blankets on the bed to the way her Kira found most comforting, and wrapped her little human in blankets and vines.

She was sleeping surprisingly soundly for a sophont who had just gone through something so difficult. Venisin had had stronger Class E’s lined up, but they hadn’t even been necessary.

It reminded her how much of Kira’s xenodrug resistance has been psychological, not physical resistance. That Zanya had handed Venisin all of Kira’s hypnotic triggers and resistances probably helped too–she wasn’t sure Kira could resist her in the same way now, even if she’d wanted to.

Kira would be up again soon, and then they’d have things to do. Venisin busied herself preparing food and rearranging the rest of the hab.

Kira woke up in her Owner’s bed, in the comforting embrace of her Owner, her OWNER’s vines. The rightness of that settled deep in her stomach, even as her heart pulsed with lingering pain of yesterday’s loss.

She touched the bark collar wrapped forever around her neck, and shivered. It meant so much more now. She wondered how the addition of a hausteric implant would change it. It was already integrated with her nervous system, it had already replaced her vocal chords. Soon it, or something connected to it, would replace so much more. 

She shivered again.

It wasn’t the first time she’d woken since yesterday, but the first few times the weight of everything that had happened was still too much, and she’d went back to sleep. But it was time to get up now.

V– huh? _____… She spent a moment trying to think of her Mistress’s name. Then she connected the dots.

Well, she knew of at least one thing that had happened yesterday, when Zanya put her into trance one last time.

She tugged the vines. “Mis––, I’m stuck using Zanya’s title for you!”

Her Owner flowed into the room like a green tide. They made eye contact. Then they both broke down laughing.

It was just too absurd.

“Here, let me fix that, little one,” her Mistress said. She snapped a vine in front of her face.

Kira felt herself drop. She tried for a moment to resist it–not out of a desire to defy, but just to feel the change. To feel the mental chains again, now safely in the hands of someone new. She sank into trance with the inevitability of a sinking ship. But it was a comforting kind of doom: a warm bath, the hug from an old friend.

The next few minutes were a vague haze. She floated inside her head, even as Venisin’s words passed as a deep rumble into her subconscious. She didn’t need to hear them, it wasn’t her place to. 

OPEN. Just OPEN.

She felt Venisin pause once in a while, maybe thinking, maybe consulting a datapad of notes. She saw but she didn’t, she knew but she didn’t, all at once.

She was OPEN. Just OPEN.

The rumble continued for a few minutes, until Kira felt herself slowly pulled out of her deep lake.

“…3” she heard in the distance, “2” tasted like sunlight shining in through clear blue water, “1” came from right next to her ear.

“Welcome back, little pet,” Venisin said. Her Master and Owner. 

“Phew, thank you Master,” she tested the words.

Venisin pet her for a moment, then silently directed Kira to fall in behind her. They walked to the kitchen where Venison fed her lunch.

Venisin flashed a stinger vine, and suddenly she couldn’t think straight anymore. What was she doing? Her eyes followed the vine, entire head turning. Her Owner said something in the background, but it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the vine. Distantly she noticed her eyelids, trying to blink. They didn’t matter, all that mattered was the vine.

The vine flashed and suddenly Kira could think again. Venisin grinned at her. “Just trying out some of the new toys Zanya gifted me.”

She picked up more of the food she’d been feeding Kira. 

“I had to change the trigger since I don’t have hands–you really take to hypnosis like a horse to water.”

“I always have, Master.” Kira blushed at the compliment.

They went back to eating, though Venisin used a pair of vines to casually keep Kira’s hands behind her back, in a box tie position, instead of where they’d usually be in her lap.

The food finished, Venisin broke the silence. Her Owner broke the silence. “Are you ready, little one?” 

“Yes, Master–did you find a spot?”

The trip from their temporary hab to the park was short, but the walk through the park took almost an hour. Eventually they reached an area distant from any light pollution. The Mycellin had been designed with some distinctly non-human sophonts in mind, and if it hadn’t been for her military training Kira might have found the trek exhausting.

Instead it felt like a vigil, like a fitting ritual for what they were about to do.

They walked up a large hill. When they reached the top, Venisin pulled out a picnic blanket and stretched it across the ground. A single Affini playing with its floret in the distance, way down in a nearby valley–the floret Kira of an ant, and seemed to really enjoy fetch. Otherwise, they were alone.

Just them and the stars. Perfect.

They sat down. Vines wrapped her in vines and kept her steady. Thorns dug into her skin, welcome barbs holding her in place, keeping her grounded. Venisin’s core pulsed behind her, a comforting warmth, an anchor.

She watched the stars, off in the distance. She was ready.

“I originally met her at the military academy. I was mid transition and needed to escape a horrible home situation. She’d decided to launch a palace coup.”

Kira felt Venisin’s nod, even though the Affini didn’t move at all. “I remember,” her Master said non-judgementally.

“Mhm,” Kira continued, “I’m usually skeptical of the attempt–even when it works there tends to be a lot of suffering in the instability afterwards.”

“They don’t have the greatest success record,” Venisin acknowledged.

“Exactly.” Kira took a deep breath. “But she was who she was, some days it felt like she could call the stars themselves down on her enemies. And I haven’t ever seen her go up against odds she couldn’t bea– well, until now I guess.”

She wasn’t ready to cry yet, she needed to keep going.

“Since you’re not saying it, I’m also fully aware of the number of dictatorships that turn out well. I’m submissive, not stupid. But… well, I wish you could have met her in her prime. I know you all don’t think much of humans, but…” Kira switched into Affini for the newly popular anecdote “she was the one-eyed horse in the land of the blind (amusement).” 

Kira took another breath. “Anyway, the point is that she saw, in ways that no one around her did, and she saw me.”

Venisin pet her head and Kira continued.

“You have to understand… I wasn’t–” Kira gestured down her body “–this back then.”

“And I guess you maybe don’t get what I mean,” Kira continued, “since Affini seem to see all humans as simultaneously special and exactly the same, but I’m somewhat a rarity among humans, and I couldn’t have reached that potential without her.”

One of Venisin’s vines made a thoughtful twitch. “For what it’s worth, I think I understand, a little. It’s strange to me, but the historical reports are pretty consistent.”

Her gender wasn’t all Kira meant, but they could get to the other stuff later.

“We originally met in one of the war gaming classes. That’s a Terran form of training where we simulate a conflict and participate playing different sides. I noticed her the very first day, there was just something about how she carried herself. Then she won the mid year simulation with this brilliant maneuver–she lured a much larger force into a gas giant, ionized the atmosphere, and used the volatility to blow up their fleet with a single strike.” 

Venisin gave her arm a squeeze, and Kira felt her plant take everything in.

“She found me later and complimented the way I’d run my logistics, and I’d intrigued her as well.”

She looked up at her Owner’s blank mask.

“You two would have gotten along.” Kira gave Venisin a pained smile.

They sat in silence for a minute or two, watching the slow, invisible drift of the stars. Venisin’s vines seemed to pulse, and Kira realized her plant was subtly regulating her breathing and her heartbeat. It was better support than words ever could have been.

“It didn’t take long before we were dating,” Kira finally continued. “We spent the rest of the academy as two peas in a pod–though that implies equality, which is not something we ever had.”

She stared at a constellation that reminded her vaguely of the phoenix–though a few stars were missing. They’d used it for orientation back at the academy. 

“She was the most headstrong person I knew. I couldn’t help but bend to her. She just had this energy about her, like she had already decided what the future was going to be, and now was just waiting for it to comply.”

She squeezed a thorny vine, felt a trickle of blood from her palm. 

“I mean, you saw me on xenodrugs. I can be… pretty stubborn. But she was in a league of her own. We once had a jar of pickles–it’s a fermented earth dish–and we couldn’t get the jar open. She refused to ask for help and instead started doing pushups. Mind you, she was already fit. It was just a difficult jar. It took a month and a half, but she got the jar open in the end.”

She shifted slightly, and Venisin’s vines subtly shifted with her. “I didn’t love the military. But I loved her. I would have walked over broken glass for her–actually, one time she made me prove it, so I did walk over broken glass for her.”

She let the warmth of that memory drive away the grief, just for a moment.

“By the time we left the academy, I had sworn myself to her.”

Venisin waited in the pause. “She sounds extremely interesting.”

“She would have been a human worth studying,” Kira said.

Another moment of companionable silence. The stars seemed to burn in the sky, the almost-phoenix shining bright.

“I haven’t talked about the others as much,” Kira eventually said, “but by then we’d started gathering them too. I’ll tell you about them someday–maybe we could find some of them and say hello?” She looked pleadingly up at her Master. “I’m not ready now, but I will be someday.”

“Of course, my little thorn,” was all Venisin said in response.

Kira nodded and continued. “She used my transition to make me disappear from any sort of official paperwork, and I became her invisible right hand. “

She chuckled, and squirmed a little. “It was so fucking hot–I was nameless, I didn’t even exist to the world, I was just an extension of her. But through her, as a tool for her will, I shook worlds.”

She sat up, pulled herself just for a moment out of Venisin’s vines.

Venisin accepted the break of solemnity. 

“That’s also where the bomb making came from, too. The mental training. And a lot of the trauma. I have no illusions about what I did, and I don’t for the tiniest moment think that me being someone else’s hand absolves me of responsibility. We were a team. I chose her. And I know she loved me too much for that perspective to be some kind of hypnotic personality rewrite.”

Her plant looked at her, tilted her head a few degrees. For the first time in the conversation they made eye contact.  “Mmmm, do you regret the violence? The number of sophonts you had to harm in trying to make this a reality?”

Kira shook her head. “Do you regret the class Os? The people who couldn’t adjust? The possible futures you’ve had to destroy?”

“I wish sometimes that there had been better possibilities, yes.”

Kira nodded. “Neither of us believed in letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we’d known the plants were coming… well, different problems.”

Another moment of silence. Venisin dug around in her vines and produced a picnic basket. She took out a smoothie for each of them, and they sat for a while. They weren’t curled up the same way as before, but Kira’s legs and Venisin’s vines still touched.

Proximity, but with an appropriate moment of personal space.

Kira could adjust, would adjust to Venisin’s wishes, but that they naturally, or almost naturally, had such an easy rapport–it still filled her with gratitude.

She finished the smoothie as the stars in the distance seemed to move a little faster. The Mycellin, accelerating.

“I learned at a young age that things worth doing required sacrifice. It’s an old writer’s adage–magic has to cost something, or it’s just wish fulfillment. ‘You can’t change the world without getting your hands dirty.’”

Venisin tilted her head at that. “It might not surprise you that our childhood stories are very different.”

“It doesn’t,” Kira laughed, “but I’m getting distracted–this is about her. I sacrificed for her as well. My name, my will, my independence. More hypnotic programming than your average floret. She gave me the human equivalent of class c’s. We’d do it together, sometimes. Sometimes with some of the others.”

There it was, the pain. She started weeping. “I miss those days. I miss them so fucking much.” She crawled back to Venisin and curled back into her vines. Venisin held her tight, vines around her chest controlling her breathing, controlling her. Holding her. Giving her strength.

“We’d do it almost like this,” Kira whispered. “We’d sneak onto the same shuttle during a shore leave, find a quiet place, play some music. Francie had this ancient inflatable mattress and the rest of us would bring blank–“ she sobbed and gave up. There was no rush. Not anymore.

When she looked out of her Owner’s safe embrace, the stars had moved. Further away. The almost-phoenix was becoming harder to see, off in the distance.

“Not all of us made it to the Independence.” She found her words again, just barely. “We knew the risks of what we were doing. But eventually she– I actually–“ she allowed herself a tiny smile. “–found the right blackmail material. And we had our experimental starship, our launching point.

“The next time we watched the stars it was from the bridge of our own ship.”

Kira stuck a hand out, tracing the shape of the phoenix one more time with her index finger.

“She shone even brighter, and I shone with her. She gave me strength, and I gave her refuge. When the pressures became too much, when the decisions and the risks and the costs became too much, I helped her find her feet again. Sometimes a home cooked meal, sometimes a warm blanket and a foot rub, sometimes a different approach to the problem.”

Kira paused for a moment, and Venisin said nothing. What would there be to say? She felt all of her Owner’s support through her vines, through her touch, through all the things that went deeper than words.

“She never saw me as less for my submission, she always made me more. Except the nights she made me nothing, except the nights I spent groveling at her feet for her cruelest whims. Those nights were our favorite.”

She’d been so lucky.

The half-phoenix was almost gone now.

“I guess I was on mission when the ship got captured. We’d figured EM transmissions were no longer safe, so I was dropping an intelligence package off at an outpost.”

Kira gave a sad laugh. “She was always two steps ahead of everyone. It’s so like her to have planned my own eventual capture.”

She’d been so lucky, and now she was so lucky again.

“Do you think she could have changed?” Venisin asked.

It was a fair question. “It’s not that she wasn’t flexible. But to change the world in the way that she wanted to–you have to become something. Graft the flowers to become the plant. (wisdom-from-others/anecdote).” Kira tried to find the right words. “She was the incarnation of our collective desire to change the Accord, the only part of her that wasn’t constructed to lead, to control, to reject subjucation and climb to the top–was the part of her that was connected to me. And even there, she dominated.”

“In a way, becoming Zanzan was her changing. The thing she was before, it was unbending, unyielding. Freedom or death, those were the stakes we lived under.”

The not-phoenix was gone now. She’d likely never see it again. She took a deep breath, down to her toes, and accepted the loss. Once she'd exhaled, she turned away and pulled closer to her Owner, seeking comfort from the warmth of Venisin’s core.

There was a moment of thoughtful silence before her Owner spoke again. “I’m sorry. (sympathy, not-taking-of-fault)”

Kira shrugged, at a loss for a better gesture to describe the tangle of emotions. “Sometimes an unbreakable wall meets an unstoppable force. And then the one with the bigger spaceships wins.”

There was another moment of silence. Venisin ran an idle thorn down Kira’s back. She shivered, but it didn’t feel like it was going to do anything more. Just idle flirting.

“For what it’s worth, I forgive you, collectively,” Kira said, “the same way I forgive Zanya’s paranoia and occasional political murder. (forgiveness, humor). If you were perfect, you’d be boring. (sincerity)”

Venisin’s thorn dug in just a bit harder at that, a playful admonishment. “You and I both know that the Affini are absolutely perfect, anything less would distress the pets.”

Kira snorted. 

“Even Owners deserve to be seen as human. Or not human, in this case.”

She dug her foot around the vines for a moment, and Venisin allowed her the restlessness.

“I think I’m ready to go, Master.”

They packed up the blanket together and began the walk towards the shuttle port, the opposite direction of the constellations they’d watched drift away. The Mycellin would make a close pass past where the Arboratis was still anchored, and they wanted to catch a shuttle when the transfer would be shortest.

They’d started passing by habs again when Venisin spoke up. “She gave me her title. Not simply in the process of transferring your hypnotic triggers, but individually. She thought you might not want to use it again, out of respect for her, but in her words ‘she’d rather have your respect for her be associated with your respect for me’. She labeled it ‘long term reinforcement attached to something ongoing instead of a memory’.”

Kira laughed, unburdened this time. “Yeah, that sounds like Zanya.”

Then her heart started beating a little faster. It felt right. It was touching, and thoughtful.

But she couldn’t, not without permission.

“May I–“

“You may call me Mistress, little thorn.”

“Thank you. Mistress.”

Something unwound inside. Something kept in separate boxes, turning into one long continuity.

She let out a breath.

Venisin noticed, and Kira felt her satisfaction. “It is good to see your horses aligned, little thorn.”

They reached the shuttle bay.

“When we’re home, you’re going to get implanted,” Venisin said.

Kira shivered, and sank deeper into her submission. “Yes Mistress.”

Venisin’s mask finally moved, into that sharp, menacing grin that Kira adored. “I’m going to drug you until then, just because I can.”

Kira’s eyes half closed. If subspace counted as drugs, she was already there. “Yes… Mistress.”

A mask made of flowers approached her face. She could see the shuttle, just at the end of the hall. She wasn’t going to make it inside.

The mask covered her nose and mouth. Kira took a deep breath, and relaxed.The Class-Es ran through her body like a warm tea and 

she– 

let–

go.