Marcescence

Chapter 6

by Fleur Fairyfloss

Tags: #D/s #dom:female #f/f #hypnosis #pov:bottom #sub:female #anxiety #bingo_dot_mp3 #disassociation #dom:plant #drug_play #drugs #drugs_question_mark #Human_Domestication_Guide #monsterfricker_rights #scifi #second_person #storybook_horny #transgender_characters

Maybe I'm just being a worrywart and this is totally unnecessary, but I feel like I should open with the disclaimer that, like.....it's okay to like what you like and engage with HDG stuff in the way that feels comfiest to you and this isn’t meant as an attack on that or anything! This chapter mostly started as me working through more Complicated HDG Feelings, but then I kind of went 'okay setting aside whether suchandsuch setting detail is Actually Just Propaganda or Actually True, maybe it would be a fun twist on things if Eglantine has come to *believe* that it is propaganda?' (which, probably not canon, but I hope it's interesting to read!)

this also started as ‘oh i will make a Synopsis Post and spice it up with little snippets of Eglantine/Robin dialogue that's enough to submit as a chapter right??’ and then suddenly oops i accidentally 1900 words, so….if it's a little ambiguous, this scene is mostly just Eglantine and Robin back in the containment wing from earlier in the story and talking after the latter (got topped a bunch and) fainted last chapter! Eglantine dialogue in italics. _{i promise i will get back to the overt hypnohorny and not just sleeping beautycore heroine vibes next chapter ;;}

cw blood, Vampire Horny affini, talk about death, brief allusion to cotyledon stuff, vore jokes, pred/prey stuff, anxiety, me once again being hopelessly on my Magnus Archives bs

the waking world bleeds back into your view slowly, like tea leaves in water. slivers of light, of the concrete, of glass and greenery and metal drowned in roots.

(enveloped and ensnared, caught in something’s gentle grasp.)

you can, on some level, appreciate the idea of a cell shattered and split and shaped into something like a womb, a beating heart of eglantine's garden. you can appreciate the vibe, you tell yourself, even if--

you weren't the first, you know.

(you are briar rose, helpless and half-under, and you’re pretty sure your bed is negging you.)

the problem with making a fairy-story of yourself, eglantine decided, is that no fairy-story survives contact with reality.

(or maybe your maleficient caught feelings, and she couldn't bear to lose you to some second-rate prince charming.)

the problem with making a fairy-story of yourself, eglantine concluded, is that there are those who would recognize its shape and dive headlong into its path.

(her lap is a cocoon of thorns, a canopy-coffin made for presentation and possession as much as comfort.)

they say, you are a monster?

(and she’s got you perfectly placed for the odd whisper into your ear.)

they say, you are a monster?

(breath warm and biting-sweet, like a greenhouse in winter.)

they say, you are a monster? oh nooooooo don't drown my sense of self in a sea of pleasure you're so sexy haha–

(you don't know how literally to take her words. you're still PRETTY sure they just eat people in the end, and this sounds like a whole lot of effort for a prelude to something so simple and final.)

they say, you are a monster, but they mean–

(you didn’t expect a monster to be this Online. you expected bites, not bits.)

it's in your nature to claim, and it's in my nature to be claimed, so why haven't you claimed me already? isn't that what you were made for?

(people….want? to be eaten??)

now and then they'd make a game of it, play-acting the hollow shape of resistance without any of the fight.

(is this–is this another bit? is this like the time one of the others tried to convince you that “voreny on main” was a street food festival wherein brave volunteers walking onto “main street” were the (literal) street food and the tradition endured for so long because being swallowed up by someone for like a month was the only way most jobs would let you use more than three days of vacation time in a row??)

they ask, is there not magic in your every word? and in sharing the same air, don't you share some of that magic with us?

(not that you fell for it that time, though.)

the indomitable spirit of Free Terra is a kind of magic, they say. the indomitable spirit of Free Terra is a kind of spell. _{isn't it a spell? an incantation, burning away personhood in but a breath? aren't you going to break me now? aren't you going to take me now? i said the magic words. i’m a}_{feralist. you have to.}

(you know that vacation days, plural is the kind of thing that only happens in stories.)

sometimes, i wonder if we're just as deeply ensnared in the story we've spun as you are, prisoners of our own propaganda.

(you are so incredibly confused right now.)

it's in our nature to love you, we say, and ours is a love that swallows and smothers.

it's in our nature to keep you, we say, and there's nothing either of us may do to hold back the keeping.

(a faerie cannot lie, the stories say, so they found their way to other forms of obfuscation. you can’t help but wonder if hiding truth under a thousand layers of irony and artifice and contrived Commitment to the Bit is one of them.)

it's in our nature–

(a grand gesture, her hands spreading and splaying and fraying and unraveling before finally reweaving into something like a mossy sock-puppet.)

benevolence is in our nature, we say. all that we inflict is a gift, we say. our bodies compel us toward goodness, we say, so our every action must necessarily be good. however could we resist a biological imperative, immutable and inescapable? how could anything we do ever be wrong?

perhaps that's why I was so taken with your monsters, little bird!

your monsters, well--they know what they are and what they do. and they don't even make excuses for it! honestly, i can’t imagine how anticlimactic it must feel to–

(oh, no.)

wait. wait!

(her coilboughs shift, leaves rustling, thorns slickly zipping and snapping against one another. she shifts enough to look at you, really look at you, beatific and brimming with a kind of giddiness that conjures half-remembered highschool field trips to the uncanny valley.)

i do not have to imagine anything, because you’re here, and you have imagination to spare! you have more than enough imagination for the both of us! so~ooo…..imagine this! imagine…oh! I know.

(an anxious knot coalesces in the pit of your stomach. she sounds so so so much more enthusiastic than you’d like!! this is!!! this is terrifying!!!!)

imagine you're--well, you! imagine you're you. a different you! a you better suited to something this storybook. a you who could never quite accept that too-charming Terran insistence that–

(she bobs the hand puppet up and down, playfully stiff like a toy soldier on the march, baneberry sprigs spearing out of it like some sort of biblically accurate googly-eye angel.)

--that oh, we've conquered fear, for what power does the dark or the strange or the unknown hold when we may simply light the dark and map the unknown and put words to the strange?

(here, one of the eyesprigs droops and snakes around the back of the puppet, timidly peeking out every so often.)

but you, little bird, you know better! you know that the dark is still dark, and the things within it still hunger, and knowing the shape of the dark and the shape of that hunger will not, in itself, save you. Because you’re clever! Very clever. And when you spy sweet-voiced horrors shuffling through town and stealing your kin, teasing out secrets from body and blood in the name of bringing the leftovers to heel, what do you do? You hide! You promise yourself to the birds and the trees, pledge your heart and your hands and your service so long as they’ll shield you–

(here, a second handpuppet reveals itself, a tower of drooping roses that evokes three birds in a trenchcoat.)

and you bide your time. Because you’re clever! Far too clever for fearlessness.

(they are absolutely menacing the eyestalk puppet. she even makes little surly-bird noises to sell the whole thing.)

Can you imagine? wat~ching and wai~ting and girding and guarding, and when you finally wind up your courage to confront the monsters–

(the eyestalk puppet wiggles and dithers and dips and its dance reminds you of nothing quite so much as a c’mon i’m a little guyyyyy made of eeeeeeeyes and it’s my birthdayyyyyyy pantomime.)

why, they’re aghast! aghast that a poor misguided cutie – adorably misguided, they add, but misguided all the same – would dare cast aspersions on the great Affini Compact, who only mean to abduct and terrorize and twist you into a more pleasing shape for your own good, petal!

(the puppet’s shape is an answer. the question is, ‘what if you puppyshamed a puppy made of doll’s-eyes?’)

it’s ^un_dignified.

(a beat.)

honestly!

goodness, what is that? good for whom? what makes us better equipped to define what is good than every other being in the universe? do i look like someone–

(the eyes crack and blossom, all at once. she looks at you, in you, through you, hunger laid bare.)

do i look like someone who ought to be the arbiter of good?

i don’t feel like a thing that is good.

i have never felt my bark swell with a bone-deep confidence in my own benevolence, and i have never felt my sap course and congeal into a natural inclination toward noblesse oblige.

i certainly don’t feel my……biological clock, isn’t that your word for it? I must admit, the concept of an implant that tells time and only tells time and doesn’t even tell time anything interesting–oh, to think of the kind of mischief you could get up to if you started a dialogue with time, really fed it some new ideas!–confuses me, but–

i certainly don’t feel like someone whose biological clock inexorably ticks toward a moment when i must conquer and take and shape and keep, helpless against the compulsion to sand off your sharp bits and hold you forever in my thrall.

what i feel like–

(she draws you closer, one literally-rosy cheek settling against yours.)

–is a creature of hunger and want! a perfect predator! and if I am to be your perfect predator, if we as a species are to be your perfect predator, well–doesn’t a compact flow both ways, little bird?

if we’re to be your perfect predator, the least we owe you is honesty.

(a pause and pulling-back. a look, less tilting her head than a glacial, ominous listing.)

oh?

(you didn’t even. say. anything.)

what’s that?

(you know you didn’t say anything, and she knows you didn’t say anything, and you know she knows ‘cos she has the most obnoxious corpsing-flower grin on her….face? right now.)

the least you owe me, little bird?

(a third hand wields a rosehaired muppet of you, all insistent wobbles and inquisitive noises straight from a nightmare mobage.)

why, it’s very simple, and ever so sweet of you to ask!

(on the bright side….as far as ways to die go, this is maybe the funniest.)

you…………owe me….

(it feels like parody, like a delirious bit about how this would end were it anyone else. the crushing terror of our might makes right and our whim is law feels a little bit blunted when it’s a floppy handpuppet making heartfelt supplications in fucking simlish.)

a good fight! a satisfying hunt. why would i ever settle for going straight to galactic – what was that delightful violet creature’s word for it? oh, yes! – why would i settle for defanging you and diverting you straight to galactic gay baby kitty gaol when i could make a garden of you and watch what blooms?

(the whole thing feels like a villain monologue, like one last indignity before she eats you, but at least it’s an indignity you can share? a horrible night to have an injoke between dracula and her anne helsing.)

and a knock-knock joke. maybe you owe me a knock-knock joke. maybe you owe me a mess of knock-knock jokes? why, we could even make a game of it!

(you hear the I Think You Should Leaf theme, disembodied and discordant.)

someday, when your luck runs dry and the first fat drops of your blood fall upon my lips, you’ll say:

knock knock.

and i’ll say, who’s there?

and you’ll say, orange.

and i’ll say, orange who?

and you’ll say, orange you going to miss this?

And on that day, my dear darling bird, you will know the joy of reprieve.

(you are so doomed.)

thanks for reading!

i really appreciate melody, bug, atl, and rose for input and encouragement!! bc this was A Lot to write and edit

i'll probably work on an arrange mode update next, but please look forward to the final....two? chapters? of this? when i get more marcy inspo ;;

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