Divaricated

The Terran Catastrophe-class Battlecruiser, Indomitable, cracked. For one brief, horrifying moment, Drive Engineer Third class, Katie Sahas felt all the oxygen in the room rushing away, yanking her from her workbench at perilous speeds.

In an instant she went from engrossed in her work to flailing, reaching desperately for one of the many handholds around the mighty heart of the warship: their pride and joy, the Jump Drive. She managed to grab hold of one—barely!—and clung to it for all her life was worth, holding her deep breath inside as if it were her last. Only after several moments did she realise the blast doors had sealed, and she wasn't about to die.

“What the hell just happened?” she asked, raising her voice so that it could be picked up by the ship's internal communication microphones. Her voice, deep and gravelly and painfully human as it felt to her, seemed to echo, unanswered. Comms were down? She pushed off of her handhold and sailed through the air, back towards her work area where she had a proper hardline terminal.

Let's see, let's see... every system reported catastrophic failure, like the ship had been torn in half and the two sides couldn't talk to one other. That, however, was impossible. This ship was the pride of the Martian shipyard, with a hull meters thick of some advanced composite. It was meant to be, well... Indomitable. They didn't give names like that to ships that couldn't walk the walk.

What systems could Katie get to work? From her position in the Drive room, she was meant to be able to see almost everything. It was the best protected, most hardened area in an already hardened ship. The blast doors alone were a meter thick, and even the vents got sealed in an emergency, which... this was.

Katie had frozen. She'd managed to get a visual from one of the exterior cameras. Some kind of bio-mechanical tube was moving through the ship. There was a hole. With growing panic, she figured out how to rotate the viewpoint and despaired.

No. No, this couldn't be happening. They'd done so well! They'd spent a week drifting on a pre-programmed course, no engine plume to give them away! No jumps to detect, just clean physics bending them around planets! They'd been doing fine! Since they'd lost that last away team, onboard hydroponics had been breaking even! They had enough fuel for weeks! How could they possibly have been found, and how could they possibly not have noticed the gigantic Affini cruiser approaching?

Katie took deep breaths, knuckles going white as she clung to the workstation forcefully enough that the screen started to distort under her fingertips. It didn't matter any more. People didn't come back from this. The Ochre Skies had been in contact for months, ever since the fucking weeds had taken Earth, but one little run-in with an Affini ship and you never heard from anybody ever again. Didn't matter if they were friends, if they were family, if they were loved ones. Maybe the fuckers killed everyone, maybe they used them for fertilizer, maybe they used them as batteries, for all Katie knew. All that she could be certain of was that no matter how important you were to somebody, you never heard from them again once they were captured.

She knew that no human vessel had ever escaped a direct confrontation, and that nobody would ever know what happened to her. She hardly had friends any more, but she'd still wanted her name to matter. She was just going to disappear. A slave, stripped of who she was and forced to... she didn't know, water plants all day? Work in a mine? Nobody knew. There was propaganda, but it was obviously faked.

She heard a bang, from beyond the blast doors, and screamed.

“You'll never take me alive, you fucking weeds!” she screamed, and dived back for the console. No, she wasn't going out like this. She was going to make an impact. People were going to know her name. She'd practiced this a dozen times. She'd practiced this in her sleep, or at least her nightmares, knowing that she'd fought too hard to be who she really was, and to figure out what she wanted out of life, to spend the rest of it as an identical drone in an Affini water mine.

Her hands were a blur, snapping out to grab levers and twist dials, turning everything she could directly into the red zones on all the little readouts. On her first day, back at university, learning about the most advanced spacial science humankind thought to exist, they had opened the lecture with a long list of things that they should never, under any circumstances, do.

Well, she was doing them.

The mix of exotic matter they used as fuel was usually carefully balanced to avoid runaway effects. Water was a temperature moderator, and she didn't want that just now, so coolant flow was all the way down. She knocked everything out of balance and dialed in a destination at random. It wouldn't matter, the drive would tear space apart long before it actually tried to go anywhere. Nobody would be making it to the destination. In a handful of moments, she turned the Jump Drive at the heart of what had once been a symbol of hope into the biggest bomb she'd ever dared imagine.

The last stage was on a timer. Not a digital or mechanical one, but a physical process. The core was already unbalanced; the jump already locked in. The sphere in the center of the room thrummed with energy even at idle, but she could hear the nightmarish groan of straining bolts and struggling metal, now. It was already critical, and the only way to stop it before it blew would be to release the energy some other way, which would probably also work for her purposes.

Those fucking plants might have the most advanced ships in the galaxy, but they weren't gods. They still had to obey the laws of physics. Soldiers had guns and knives, but Katie had subatomic chaos on scales hitherto unimagined.

Once the Drive got hot enough, the coolant would flow back in, but things would be far too hot for it to work. It would boil in an instant, and the expanding steam would push back down the pipes. There'd be a few moments where all the slack in the criss-crossed network of vents and plumbing across the ship could hold the extra volume... and then something would break, the steam would rush out, oxygen would rush in, and the Affini would get one hell of a surprise when their 'helpless', ensnared ship suddenly blew a hole in their hull. Even if it didn't, it would blow a hole in the drive, which would then tear local spacetime in half and scatter their atoms across the universe.

All Katie had to do was survive it, which... was easier said than done. She was sealed inside the room by blast doors that simply couldn't be opened until the emergency was resolved, which was unlikely to happen any time soon.

A moment later, the doors all opened of their own accord, as the ship computer gleefully declared the emergency over. Katie lost valuable seconds freezing in terror as what looked like vines shot into the room, latching onto handholds with a terrible grip. Some inhuman mass of unknowable, eldritch being hauled itself into the room, just a... mess of tentacles, leaves, vines, and thorns, a whirlwind of colour and shape. It was impossible to tell what it was truly looking at, but the hairs on the back of Katie's neck stood on end. It was looking at her. Sizing her up for the mines. She knew it.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Katie turned and ran, yanking herself around handholds at irresponsible speeds, not daring to look back until she'd already left the room. The nightmare of leaf and wood was taking a more bipedal shape, inspecting the readouts against the device that dominated the room, the Drive. Did they... understand human technology that well?

Well, it'd do them no good. Katie figured they could probably override the computers, or any of the safeties, but at this point the conclusion was up to physics. She never thought she'd be thanking the corners cut in that particular Drive design, that traded off safety for a few extra percentage points of peak distance. It couldn't be stopped now.

The plant seemed to understand, too, whole body seeming to unfurl in surprise. Vines stretched far and wide as it shot towards her at an alarming speed, flinging itself through microgravity like earth's best zero-g gymnasts never could.

So began a chase. Katie knew the ship better, but she felt helplessly clumsy, grabbing onto individual handholds and hauling herself along, faster and faster, while the beast behind her simply attached to everything near it and moved itself with incredible speed.

The chase was over in seconds. She'd been so close to the escape pod. How could it end like this?

A vine had snapped out and grabbed Katie by the leg, and moments later the rest of the beast was curling together, taking a human-like shape around Katie's body, cradling her in strong, powerful arms. A few pieces of wood and a pile of leaves came together with a sharp click and a rustle, forming something that looked very much like a face, with contouring done through shapes and shades of leaf or curved wood.

It looked like an surrealist's painting of a human being. The eyes were little buds with a bright blue glow, set under half a centimeter of dark wood in an inaccurate impression of eyebrows. The teeth were thorns, with a tongue that seemed to be made of tightly wrapped leaves. The foliage surrounded it, leaves arranged in a soft fade from the deep green of a healthy leaf around the face all around to a mottled mix of dying browns and growing lighter greens. The coat of leaves was joined by a dazzling array of flowers in as many colours as Katie could name, and then twice that number again in ones she could not, decorating the creature's head while its body was still pulling into position.

That was simpler. Still incomprehensibly complicated. Vines met and entwined, meshing together in a complex weave and pulling tight, leaving the limbs themselves looking almost as if they they were a single whole growth, not a collection of hundreds of independent tentacles.

The whole process took a terrifyingly short amount of time. There were hardly seconds between Katie being grabbed and the face suddenly lighting up. It looked worried. Panicked, even.

“Little one, do you know what you have done? Can you shut that machine down?” The words, even spoken with clear haste, seemed to be set to a rhythm, almost sung, rather than spoken. It was like music. The accent was... implacable, certainly unlike anything a human would, or perhaps even could, have spoken.

Katie stared up, eyes wide, drinking the creature in, brain utterly failing to process thought. They had her. It was all over. She wished her training had been more... anything, but she'd been drafted at the start of the war and nobody had had time for anything then. They'd run and they'd kept running and by the time they thought they'd put enough distance between them and Earth... this happened. She'd only been a civilian Drive engineer then, but the only real thing they had taught her was, ironically, protocol for surrender.

“D- Draft Officer Jack Sahas,” she rambled at a panic. Why did her last words have to be a denial of who she was? “Technician, Third Class, Indomitable. Serial number eight-five-thr— three, I, please, no, I don't want to die, I—”

A mighty clang sounded throughout the ship. Something had just broken. The creature made some kind of short, sharp sound. Unmistakably a swear, despite the vast cultural differences, but like one in a foreign language, sung to her despite the hurried breath. It continued for a moment, speaking rapidly in some alien tongue while Katie tried and failed to slip out of its iron grip. It didn't take long for the noises to grow, rapidly reaching a crescendo.

Katie squeezed shut her eyes as everything seemed to break into motion around her. She felt her back hitting metal, hard, and then heard an almighty roar, felt the heat of fire and flame along with a low grinding wall of noise that would have haunted her nightmares, if she was going to get any.

She didn't dare open her eyes. She heard a cry, and then the slam of a bulkhead. She felt something slam against her, soft in some places, hard in others. She felt a rapid acceleration, the kind that any spacer knew would kill them if they weren't strapped in, which she was not. Something held her in place anyway.

Silence.

Stillness.

Death.

---

Why had she done this? Katie's mind swam in half-conscious fits and spurts. She'd had a good life, before. An okay life. A— A life. An existence. There was always work for a civilian Drive Engineer. It was the everpresent Jump Drive that had made human civilization even possible, once the need to exploit the stars became obvious, and they were complicated. Like, really complicated. Katie had studied for years before she'd been allowed to orchestrate her first Jump. She'd never wanted anything to do with the military. She'd never wanted to be drafted. She'd never wanted to be forced to rebel. Humanity had never shown her an ounce of kindness, and yet it had made her fight for it all the same.

Why had the Affini made her do this? Why were they so cruel, so evil, that they would sweep over the galaxy and destroy everything that they found?

Katie had only just started to learn how to have hope for the future again. Getting HRT in interstellar space wasn't easy, but she'd managed it. Getting work as a pre-transition trans girl wasn't easy, but everyone needed to Jump, and she was demonstratably good at what she did. She had a name, she'd just started to understand who she really was, and then news of alien warships had hit. Everything since had been chaos, and the one thread that had kept her going was the warm, fuzzy feeling in her gut of knowing her body was finally self-repairing, finally turning her into something closer to what she was meant to be. If slowly. If imperfectly. If still in a broken human shell.

Then she'd died in an Affini raid, and it had all been for nothing. She hoped she'd taken a few of them with her, at least. They weren't people, they were just monsters. Even that one who'd talked to her in such melodious English, with the barest hint of panic in her otherwise confident voice, giving the appearance of a rich inner life. Probably as a defence mechanism. They weren't people.

They weren't people.

She hadn't just killed people.

---

Katie opened her eyes wide, taking a deep, ragged breath as she woke from high-G-induced unconciousness. She tried to sit up, but something was pressing her down, despite the microgravity, and she was still desperately gasping for breath. How was she alive?

She was... in an escape pod. How? She'd been captured, she was...

Katie screamed, eyes going wide, heart accelerating to a frantic pace, as she spotted the Affini weed's face lying to one side of the pod. She scrambled back, rapidly pushing vines and leaves off of herself, throwing them to the floor and then kicking them to one side, just to be sure. She couldn't fight. She couldn't do anything. She'd escaped, only to still end up trapped with one of them!

Except... it wasn't moving. The face was static, dead. Some of the vines seemed like they'd been sheared clean in half by something, and a good half of the beast was burned or speared by little pieces of metal. It had taken the brunt of the chaos, and died in the process.

Died to save her.

Why? The creature was much faster than her, it could have reached the pod in half the time. Katie crept forward, hearing the crinkle of leaves as she hooked her foot into a handhold. She moved to kneel by the pieces that once made a face, lifting them easily with one hand. They were connected to some of the vines, but... no breath, no movement, nothing.

It wasn't a person. It hadn't sacrificed itself for her, it couldn't make choices, it was just a hungry beast. A— a hungry beast that could talk to her. A hungry beast that had understood what was going on. A hungry beast that had definitely sacrificed itself for her. Fuck. It... wasn't a person. She was misunderstanding.

She was safe, at least. She let out a breath that she hadn't realised she'd been holding, and looked around.

The inside of a Terran escape pod wasn't a luxurious affair. There were some seats, with straps that would hopefully keep you alive during launch. Enough for half a dozen per pod. Katie knew from some half-remembered snippets of training that the pods usually had enough fuel to make it to the nearest station, and enough oxygen to last a few hours. Long enough that if you were going to get picked up, you would have been... but what would pick her up, with the Indomitable gone? Nobody else would come close to an Affini warship.

They also had a small window on the bulkhead door. The one that was the only thing separating Katie from a quick death in the void of space. It was small enough that she had to lean in close to peer through it.

She screamed, jumping back. Vine, vine! There was... no, it wasn't moving. It was... one of this creature's, she figured, almost sliced clean off, but not quite. She forced herself back to the window. She had to know. There was a debris field, but... not big enough to be a whole ship, not at all, and no sign of anything else. No battlecruiser. No Affini ship. Just scraps of metal and plantlife and stars.

The radio seemed dead. Whatever had taken comms down on the ship must have done the same here. Thrusters... everything reported okay, but they couldn't get a lock on anything to thrust towards. She could fly them manually, but it was best to know where she was going first. She didn't.

Air. A little dial that would tick down for a few short hours, and then she would die. It began to dawn on her that she hadn't achieved anything, not really. She was going to die out here instead of down a mine. At least she'd die as herself?

She found one of the chairs, brushed off the leaves, and pulled herself in to sit.

“Fuck,” she breathed, lowering her head to her hands.

A vine lifted it back up.

Katie screamed, batting it away and scrambling back... back where? There was nowhere to go! Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. She had nothing to fight with.

“Get away from me, you— you fucking monster! You killed my friends! You made me— you made me kill... You made me!” she screamed, her voice a dull roar that made even her shy back. Why couldn't she have lived long enough to feel comfortable in her own skin, at least? Was that so much to ask?

The plantlife around her slowly groaned, pulling in towards a central point in halting, hesitant bursts. It didn't look scary like this. If anything, the weak, careful movements reminded her of a wounded animal. The pieces that formed its face slowly moved to a position vaguely atop of the pile, as other vines and flowers lazily flopped their way into position around it, curling around one another to form a single solid form. After a few moments, the face started to move, slowly and carefully, with dull blue eyes behind the sockets.

“Oh, dirt,” it groaned, voice soft and slow, letting the rest of its body slump out in a tangled mess. Only the head looked like it was fitting together right. It let out a long breath, before continuing with a voice that sounded hollow, like it was coming down a tunnel. “You didn't kill anyone, child. Most of the crew had already been rescued, and I got confirmation that everyone else had escaped just before your little bomb went off. But—” the bundle said, with a gentle, grating laugh— “you are the most effective little rebel I've ever seen.”

It had an accent, of sorts. It didn't seem like a huge leap to assume that English wasn't its first language, though it seemed to get the pronunciations about right. No doubt tortured out of earlier prisoners. The way it spoke, though, had an almost musical quality, like it was matching its words to a beat that Katie couldn't hear, or like they were the words to a very unusual song. It stuck in her head.

Katie joined the plant in its slumping, letting out a deep breath. She'd failed, then, but... at least nobody was dead. “I've never killed anyone, I— I've never even held a gun. I... I just wanted to live. I won't let you put me in the mines, I'm...”

The vine that had touched her before reached up once again, just to make contact with Katie's hand. She jumped, but it didn't seem scary. The creature was clearly dying.

“Jack,” it said, and Katie twitched.

“No!” she snapped, throwing the vine back and rising from the chair in anger. She kicked a little too hard and ended up needing to brace herself against the ceiling, but she needed to get away from that thing. “You can't take my identity away from me, you utter fucks. Do you have any idea how hard I've worked to get— to get here? I won't let you turn me into one of your drones, I won't let you force me to be something I'm not, I won't—”

The vine gave her hand a light squeeze, slowly pulling her back towards a handhold, and Katie looked back towards the face. It was just a few pieces of wood and plantlife, but it looked... almost human, the way it moved. She could sense the pity in it.

“Oh, sapling, I'm sorry. I should have realised,” it said, voice gentle. It was a bundle of scorched leaves on the floor, and it was apologising to her for not being perceptive? “Nobody wants to take anything good away from you. We want to help you be who you really are. We know that humans need a little help with that, sometimes. We're here.”

She paused, gathering strength. She didn't sound out of breath, but then, did plants breathe? The voice was more... out of sync. Like it was being made by a thousand little sounds, and they weren't quite lined up right.

“Do you have a better name for me, flower?”

Katie glared, immediately suspicious. What could they do with a name? Bind her, force her to do their bidding? No, this creature couldn't even stand.

“Katie,” she offered.

“Good girl. Mine's Thatch.”

Katie's cheeks started to burn immediately, as she was left speechless, mouth half-parted. Gender-affirming praise was not a thing she was used to and not even slightly something she'd been expecting from a plant. It took all her willpower to stop herself from babbling incomprehensibly, and so she found herself staring blankly at the alien's pretty hair.

Thatch was, now that Katie could see her without the threat of immediate hyperspacial fire, almost a work of art. The plates of her face were just bits of bark, the vines were just... vines, dotted with leaves. The flowers were pretty on their own, but any flower looked better arranged in a garden, and that was exactly what Thatch was. A garden. What could have been trivial points of colour instead formed something reminiscent of hair, with a rainbow of shades cascading across it in a gradient that Katie had to admit was masterfully done.

Her face, despite being made of nothing but vines, leaves, and wood, was expressive and piercing. It was clearly taking effort to maintain, if the rest of her body simply lying unwound was any indication. She was obviously very, very injured, and yet they were talking about Katie, instead.

“Are you okay, Thatch?” the girl asked. She didn't want to care, but it was hard not to feel a sort of kinship with another sapient creature. It could be like her, forced to fight for those who had never lifted a finger in aid. She wasn't a person, Katie reminded herself, but... she sure acted like one. This clearly wasn't the monster she'd had nightmares about, but it was still one of them. She should want her dead. Want it dead.

Her question garnered a laugh, at first, and a few moments of struggle as the Affini tried to pull herself back together. Katie stiffened, pulling back, but she needn't have bothered. Thatch only managed to get most of an arm done before one of the vines that tried to wind around another came up short, ending in a scorched tear, and the whole assembly fell apart.

“I... have seen better days, but the Elattarium, the ship out there collecting you cuties, will be here to pick us up any moment, and Affini medical technology is the best there is. I shall be fine, and we will get you some better medication too.”

Katie blinked. She felt like every sentence it spoke left her with a million more questions. “What do you mean?” she asked, shrinking into herself. Why would she accept anything from these freaks of nature? “I don't want any of your drugs in me! I bet that's how you... how you enslave people, before you send them into the mines!”

Thatch giggled, tilting her head to one side with a bemused expression. It was a musical sound, high and tinkling, and despite the rigidity of her face, it still reached her expression and especially her eyes. “Mining for what, floret?” Thatch frowned, tilting her head a few degrees to the right as she considered. “I suppose you aren't that, yet, actually. Regardless, we have machines to do the dirty things. Why would we ask you to do that, if you didn't want to?”

Katie's eyebrows came together in a frown. The monster was talking as if they weren't using their tremendous military might to force humanity to do anything, which was absurd just on the face of it. Why else do this?

“Well, what... do you want with me? Why are you chasing us through the galaxy?”

“Because we can keep you safe,” Thatch declared, seemingly without a sense of irony. Katie gestured around at their rather dire location. “Our situation here is your doing, dear, but we will fix it. You... I shall be honest, because you deserve that much. You will be processed for domestication, as per the terms of the Human Domestication Treaty, as soon as we get back. You could have hurt a lot of people, and you almost got yourself killed, never mind injuring an affini. We cannot let that happen again. We just want to help, and one thing your culture gets wrong is not realising that if you give everybody choices, some of them will make very bad ones.

“On the bright side, once you get back there'll be Affini queuing up to take somebody as cute as you in, and I think you'll find our kind of HRT a lot more potent than yours.”

Katie fell silent, looking away.

Cute. Thatch thought she was cute? And... they wouldn't take her off of her medication? On the other hand, human domestication was not a very attractive phrase. It brought to mind images of torture, to break her until she just did as they said. Was that what they were doing to the human race? Breaking it? Did she care, save for that it forced an identity onto her that left her skin feeling like it didn't fit?

It didn't seem worth asking that question. They'd be picked up any moment. She'd soon be finding out first hand. She fell silent, her millions of questions suddenly feeling rather academic.

A moment passed. Then another. Eventually, Katie got up and moved back to the window, peering out. Nothing looked any different to how it had before. Still just stars, scrap, and seeds.

“I... don't see anybody coming, Thatch,” she whispered. “I don't see anything out there. Can you... do you know how to fix the radio?”

Thatch's beautifully rendered face slowly shifted into a frown, as weakened vines trailed out to grab handholds, so she could lift herself to the window. Her voice had been, even if weak, still chipper up until this point, but that seemed to falter.

“They... wouldn't leave us. Maybe they've just... lost sight of us, in the explosion. The radio should still work just fine, we didn't break them, we were just intercepting all the signals. Could you... I don't think I can reach the switch from here, could you turn it on for me, pet?”

Katie wrinkled. “My name is Katie,” she insisted, but did reach over to flick the switch on the radio panel to a full-spectrum broadcast, all in the clear. This was an escape pod, priority one was meant to be the safety of its occupants, so the radio should be something anyone could pick up.

“Elettarium,” Thatch spoke, as loud as they could manage in their current state. “Come in. This is Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, with the human Katie Sahas, independent, in a human escape pod. She is unharmed and currently compliant. I, however, require immediate medical attention. Please respond.”

Moments passed, with the two of them staring at the receive light on the radio panel, willing it to blink. It refused.

“Elettarium, please respond. Immediate medical attention requested. Emergency code—” The creature rattled off some sounds that Katie was certain she could never have replicated, more like music than speech— “, say again, immediate medical attention requested.”

Nothing. The radio panel sat there with an unblinking red light. No incoming signals. Nothing.

Thatch slowly slumped back down, lowering herself into one of the seats. “Emergency codes aren't even answered by people. They get picked up and acknowledged by the machines, even if everyone else is busy. Even if the ship were somehow disabled, it's a separate network. I... don't understand,” she said, losing some of that confident edge.

The two of them sat, staring up at the small porthole, hoping for any kind of movement, staring out at static stars twinkling down at them, and trying not to look at the life support panel and its many dials, each slowly winding down to their death.

“They're not coming, are they?” Katie asked.

“I think that they perhaps are not.” The affini shuddered, face twisting in pain, as they faced oblivion together.

Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, was not having a very good day. She hadn't even really wanted to be there in the first place. Don't get her roots in a tangle, she was as enthusiastic about keeping cuties like Katie safe as the next Affini, but she preferred to be in more of a supporting role. It was one thing to actually venture into a ship and save all the needy sapients within, but a 0.1% improvement in efficiency for the Haustoric Implant would make a much bigger difference overall, and there were a hundred thousand others who liked to get more hands on.

Not that Thatch had succeeded at either. At the sproutly young age of a hundred and three, Thatch spent a lot of time feeling like she was surrounded by wise old geniuses, each and every one of them a font of stories and wonders. She'd only travelled to the front of the human expedition because there was simply no room to grow closer in to the core. When she'd heard that they'd identified a new species that needed caring for, that had seemed like her time to make a name for herself.

She really wasn't built for this. She knew that humans responded well to a firm hand and confidence, and she'd played with a fair few aboard the Elettarium, but this was her first meeting with a feral one. Further, that had just never been her. It was fun to pet-sit for an afternoon or a weekend, to play with some cutie's head until they couldn't remember their own name, but doing it full time? Training one from the start? It was... a lot of responsibility. It demanded a lot of time.

Easier to work with machines. Safer. Except, that's exactly why she was in this mess to begin with. All she'd wanted to do was get a good look at a nice, big, human-built Superlight Drive. Figure out which design they were using and see if it had any weaknesses. If she could shut them down, or better yet, figure out how to ping them at faster-than-lightspeed, then they'd be able to reach every rebel ship in hours. She'd make a real difference. They didn't know why they were fighting. All they needed was a hug and some reassurances and they'd come around, but for that they needed to be found.

It had been a calculated risk, Thatch maintained, but... clod, she wasn't great at maths.

Everything hurt. The parts that didn't hurt were the ones that weren't there any more. She'd lost most of her left arm. A heartbreaking collection of flowers she'd gathered from all across this galaxy, on her journey here. The legs didn't seem to be doing great, either. She could feel the toxic shock in her leaves already, and the tips were starting to wilt. She was dying. As irreversible as whatever poor deluded Katie had done to that beautiful drive; it was just down to biology now.

She didn't have to die, of course. Affini physiology was ninety nine percent throwaway. All her vines could be grown again. Most of the flowers had been transplants anyway. Leaves were meant to curl up and fall off sometimes, and her coat of leaves did so more often than most. It was just easier to shed her outer layer than to put on a radiation suit every time she needed to tinker with a reactor.

Thatch was no stranger to regrowth, but this wasn't that. She'd lost too much at once and her body was shutting down. She couldn't rescue any of it, the toxicity was much too high already. A good doctor could, but she didn't have a good doctor. She just had her.

That left one option. Abandon everything but her central core and start fresh. It was a scary idea. She liked her body. She'd been working on it and improving it for a century, and starting again was... intimidating. She had no idea what else she would lose, either. Would she even be the same person on the other side?

Even that wouldn't be easy. She had no water and no nutrients. She could rig the radio to broadcast continuously, and have her core go into hibernation, but Katie would die within hours, and...

Dirt. Thatch really didn't have time to sit here feeling sorry for herself, did she?

“Okay,” she said, forcing her eyes to open and trailing a vine over to poor Katie's face. It touched against her chin, gentle enough to draw attention, but little enough to not scare the poor thing, before slowly pulling her head around. “Tell me about yourself, flowe—”

“Katie. My name is Katie,” the girl insisted, giving the vine a good squeeze. Thatch couldn't have overpowered her if she'd tried, but she really wasn't the dominant sort to begin with.

“Katie, sorry. No pet names, even though they really are the most efficient way to avoid having to pause just to gush about how cute you are,” Thatch said, with a smile. The girl's face went through a dozen emotions at once, before finally settling on staring towards the wall with a rising blush.

“No, come on, look at me. Katie, I need your help, okay? You're the big, strong, human rebel who knows how to work one of your little space warping machines, right?”

“It's called a Jump Drive,” she said, still refusing to look.

Thatch frowned at that, though. “But it doesn't... jump. You use an exotic matter mix to punch a hole through into subspace, right? Push the hull through a transal funnel before it collapses and get squeezed out the other side? It's cute, I haven't seen another species figure out how to do it without an external stabliser.”

That got Katie's attention. Atta girl, Thatch didn't need drugs to catch a cutie's eye.

“We call it a quantum arch,” Katie admitted. “Going up instead of down, but... those terms don't really mean anything in hyperspace, I don't think, it's just how we do the diagrams. And, um, that's what the hull is for, it's laced with a... we call it a Quantum Faraday Cage, but it's a mesh of magnetic tubing that insulates us.”

Thatch grinned, eyes sparkling. Oh, this was much better than getting to inspect it first hand. Not just the technology, but the cultural context, too! Their understanding was fraught with oversimplifications and errors, but there were still ships in the Affini fleet that operated on similar principles, albeit with vastly improved performance and safety. Admittedly those ships were antiques, maintained by history buffs who thought it was a reasonable idea to fly to war in something a sufficiently determined human battleship might actually be able to scratch, but still, it was something to bond over. This would be easier if she hadn't just lost most of her good drugs in a temporospatial claudication, but if she couldn't convince a hostile enemy combatant to save her life in the next three hours armed with nothing but her wits and charm then... well, she'd feel awful about failing poor Katie, for one thing.

“There's a good girl,” she quipped, then abused the way Katie's brain ground to a halt to steamroll on. “So I think I can guess what happened, and the good news is that we aren't going to wait for the Elettarium to come get us, because they're probably also very confused as to how they ended up randomly halfway across the galaxy and they can't be that far away from us. They're never gonna find us, though, we're going to have to do that ourselves.

“So, Katie Sahas, capable human rebel and mistress of subatomic forces. You got us here, do you want me to teach you how to get us back?”

Katie stared at the plant, barely comprehending its offer. It wanted to teach her something, in the next— she checked the life support readout— two hours and fifty minutes, that would lead to them not dying in space in an escape pod which had, to Katie's knowledge, no faster than light communications, no drive more advanced than a chemical rocket, literally zero atoms of anything more exotic than carbon, and almost no fuel?

“Uh, I guess?” she asked, raising her arms in a shrug. “It's something to do while we both die? Why are you pretending to be... real? You're meant to be a monster, you're not meant to... I never thanked you for saving my life, but I don't know why you did it. You say everyone else left, why didn't you?”

“Because then you'd be dead, Katie,” Thatch said, voice soft and yet filling the interior of the pod. “I'm not about to let my mistake get somebody killed. Your 'jump drive' wasn't suppressed because I wanted to get a good look at it. It's my fault you're here, if I hadn't have asked to take a look then you'd be safely in processing right now. I have a moral duty to get you where you belong.”

Fuck. Fuck. It had an internally consistent worldview. Fuck! It had reasons behind its actions. Fuck!! It could hold a conversation about subatomic physics. Fuck. It was a person.

“Fuck,” she breathed.

“I'm guessing that's a curse of some kind,” Thatch asked. “There are options, if you don't want that. It's... unlikely that you'll be allowed to go free, after scuttling a ship to try to hurt us, but as far as I know I'm the only casualty, and if I say you'll behave and you will, then you'll get to pick some things. We have forms for this, you fill out what you like, what you need, what you don't want, and they'll find you somebody nice who wants the same things for you. There are some pets that're basically the same as free range humans, except they always have a home to go back to and a friend who cares deeply for them. You... probably need to be on a shorter leash right now, but if you want to be free, I can guarantee you that there are Affini out there who want to help you get there. That's literally all we want.”

Katie only stared, forehead only getting more creased as the barrage of confusion continued. What did 'domesticate' even mean, if it could mean anything? Did she have any other choice? Thatch might be lying, but what if she wasn't? Katie didn't want to be... property. She'd worked too hard to be her own person to give that up now, but maybe she could just... promise not to do it again? No, that was ridiculous. Maybe they'd give her a reduced sentence for good behaviour? Three years domestication and then she was free to go?

“Would I... could I ever go free? Would I be let go, if I wasn't a threat and I didn't want to be there any more?”

“That's... up to your owner, little Katie, and whether you still wanted it at the time. I wouldn't hesitate to let you go, if it were me, though. Why would I want to keep something that wasn't happy there?”

Katie just bit her lip and looked away. It was lying. They'd say anything to get her down one of their mines. Wouldn't they?

“Okay, teach me,” Katie begrudgingly accepted. Staying in this pod was certain death. At least passage on the Ettle... The Affini Warship left her with a chance. More, if she could get this affini to explain parts of their technology.

The creature rose up, gentle nudges from vines pushing the densest nest of leaves and petals into about the center of the pod. She didn't look like she'd be able to move if they weren't in microgravity, but as it was, it took very little force to manouver. Thatch spent a moment clearing away a cloud of browned, curled up leaves to create a clear view of the pod wall, which was mostly bare, and then she... licked one of the leaves?

It stuck to the wall pretty easily after that, and the creature seemed content to repeat the process, vines slowly stretching out to grab leaves and place them on the wall in a pattern that only slowly started to take shape. It looked like their two ships, hanging above a line. Was that meant to be spacetime?

“So, normally, when you cuties build your little arches, you point where you want to go, make a hole, and fly. What we do is... why we have our diagrams the other way around. You haven't figured out the fifth fundamental force yet, have you?”

A vine shot out to ruffle Katie's hair. She cried out in complaint, trying to dislodge it and failing. If Katie didn't know better she could have sworn the overgrown houseplant was trying to flirt with her, but that was ridiculous. They were either a ravenous monster that wouldn't understand flirting in the first place, or a hyper-advanced precursor race that would know better than to waste time while their air ran out.

Either way, Katie might have found them less annoying when she thought they were going to eat her.

“So, what you did was pop spacetime! Don't do that! It's really bad! Spacetime is a shared resource and we all have to be pretty careful with it.” Thatch took a moment to tap Katie on the nose, vines coming in from all directions in a complex array of feints and teases to make it harder to dodge. “Thankfully, most of the time little holes like that close up of their own accord, but not before it sucks you in.” She placed a vine on one of the bigger leaves, that seemed to represent their ship, and on the biggest leaf, which was probably the El... Ettelium? The Affini ship. The cursed monster mimed screams and “oh nos!” as the two were sucked into the hole, grinning the whole while.

Oh god. It was flirting, wasn't it?

“Then the hole closes behind us and both of us just drift for a million timeless years through subatomic foam until utterly random currents deliver us back up to the surface, with only a real-time second or two having passed. The Elettarium will have done better because its drive still works down there and it's shielded against the temporal effects, but they'll still be out here somewhere too, except they can get home.”

Thatch shrugged. “A long time ago we used this stuff to build warships, but it's just so much hassle.”

“But you still can't defend against it? The mighty Affini war fleet still has weaknesses?” Katie teased, though... if it were true and she could get that information to the rebellion, maybe it would make a difference.

Thatch, however, paused, and tilted her head with a wonderful facsimile of a frown. Her— No! The alien's false face was just wood and leaves and thorns, there was no beauty to be found! “The... war fleet?” the affini asked, mouth twisting into an amused smirk. “Honey, the Elettarium is a scouting vessel. It doesn't even have any guns, never mind dimensional anchors.”

“You... captured the Indomitable with a scout?” Katie asked, feeling her heart sinking down to her feet. That was one of their best ships. It had some of their latest technologies. They had railguns! They had a Jump Drive that could spool up in half the time of an older ship! A hull meters thick!

“We captured you cuties with our cargo chutes. Came straight out of subspace right on top of you, as soon as we got a ping off of your drive. A warship would've been much cleaner. You'd just have been floating unhappily along and then bam—”

Thatch grinned, and gave Katie an instant to prepare before vines came at her from every direction, and even though she was was ready for it, Katie still ended up with her hair ruffled. Thatch laughed with an honest glee as Katie managed to grab hold of two of the vines and pull them away.

Katie was going to die because this plant literally couldn't stop flirting. This was worse than her nightmares. Could she go down the mines?

“Thatch!” she snapped. “We're going to die in two and a half hours, please can you keep on topic?”

The plant paused, pouted, and rolled her eyes. “We came out at a random position in spacetime, sproutling. Spacetime gets all squeezed up by planets and stars and stuff, and it's really very sparse out in the open, and so...?”

Thatch raised an eyebrow, smiling an infuriatingly patient smile. Was the creature somehow incapable of feeling the pressure of its own mortality? Or, for that matter, hers?

“Is this physics lesson going to help us? Thatch, we have nothing. We're in a fucking stranded escape pod, we don't even have oxygen. We can't... do anything. We don't have a jump drive. I know your fancy Affini ships probably all do, but this is just a tube we filled with air before we launched it. We're practically ballistic, the rockets won't get us between planets, never mind stars. We're fucked.”

“I still don't know that word,” Thatch admitted, “but that's the wrong answer, I'm afraid, dear. We came out at a random position in spacetime. Spacetime gets squished by everything around it. It's probably very likely that we're near a gravity well. It may well be a planet. Probably several. All we need to do is find one that looks livable, and land.”

“Uhh,” Katie interjected. “This is an escape pod, we can't de-orbit in this. We'd crash! Even if we didn't, we'd just be stuck!”

Thatch's face, which had managed to stay fairly somber for almost a minute, broke out into a wide grin. “You let me worry about that, flower—”

“Katie.”

—”Katieflower, I just need you to be a good girl and put this 'tube' into a spin and watch for planets. Can you do that for me?”

Katie froze up in embarrassment for a moment, and then emitted a long frustrated groan, but after a moment of internal debate, she acquiesced. This was literally her only hope; she may as well die trying something. “Fine!”

The manual thruster controls were archaic. A pair of joysticks, one for rotation and one for directional thrust. A quick tap on the former sent the ship into a slow, lazy spin. Thatch winced as one of the walls came out to meet her, pinning her against it and scattering the carefully arranged leaf-art, and it became immediately obvious why she needed Katie to be the one doing the looking here. She wasn't getting any stronger.

Katie crawled to the back end of the ship along handholds, to where the porthole was. She stared, not really expecting to see anything but a rapidly rotating starscape, except...

“There! That's... no, no atmosphere. Oh, but... ugh, no, that looks like a gas giant. Oh! What about that one, it's blue! And... it's a bit far away, though. I'll... hang on, I can put the nav computer into manual, too,” she claimed, then clambered over to it. The timing was a bit precise, because she had to hit the target lock button when the ship happened to be pointing towards the planet anyway, but after a few attempts it seemed to get a lock.

It claimed to need about a thousand meters per second more delta-v than they had to make a rendevous. Fuck.

“It's too far away to reach orbit,” Katie said, feeling the fragile hope that Thatch had been building start to crumble. They might be two capable engineers, but they didn't even have a space suit between them, never mind spare fuel. The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation struck again.

“I told you, leave that to me,” Thatch reminded her. “All we need is a little attitude adjustment.”

“Fucking excuse me?”

“I still don't know that word, Katieflower. Attitude. Height above a planet.” A vine came out of nowhere to tap her on the nose.

“That's altitude!” Katie complained, grabbing at the vine and holding it at arm's length.

Thatch paused, looking momentarily baffled. “Huh. Your cute little language has a lot of words that sound very similar, doesn't it? I suppose I should have expected a few mistakes, given I learned from a booklet written by one of our beloved cotyledons.”

“What's a cotyledon?” Katie asked. It was pronounced like an English word, but not one familiar to her.

Thatch paused again, this time for longer, and carefully extracted her vine from Katie's grasp, while using another to sneak up behind her and ruffle her hair. “Uh, they're some of our happiest subjects. Don't worry about that, we have more important concerns right now.”

This was getting infuriating. Katie batted the vine away, but the creature carried on talking regardless. “One of my legs had a biomechanical filter we could use, it should boost your fuel efficiency a few times. I think it's outside, though. I certainly can't feel it.”

“That's a problem, then,” Katie admitted.

“Not at all, actually. If you can vent all the oxygen in here first, so we don't get flung out into space, we'll be fine,” Thatch claimed. Katie opened her mouth to make the obvious protest, only to find it had been a trap. The first two vines going for her hair had been feints. She'd felt good about fighting off the third, that had wanted to pinch her cheek. She completely missed the fourth, which came to rest around her mouth and nose, looping around the back of her head so it could squeeze tight enough to form a seal.

With a cry, Katie's eyes went wide, as she involuntarily breathed in, and... ohhh. Her mouth felt sparkly. Her brain felt sparkly. The whole world was sparkles. This was weird. This was, oh. Katie giggled, shaking her head. Nuh-uh, this was how they sent her to the mines, she didn't waaaant to go to the mines. Except, that thought wasn't scary any more, it was funny. What would she be mining, Thatch had asked.

Well, scary plant monster, Katie had you figured out now. It was the bloody flirting mines, wasn't it? Toiling day in day out to dig their insufferable attitude out of the dirt. She grinned over at the pretty flower like she'd just shared a joke and was awaiting a laugh, except she'd forgotten to actually say it.

Thatch, to her credit, slowly deflated. “Aw, dirt,” she swore, “You are... not gonna be thinking very hard for a while, are you, precious? That's too bad. We have some pretty complicated engineering to do and I'd rather been counting on you having a clear head. My bad, I forgot how much of an effect our phytotoxin has on you cuties. Uh, well, okay! Think you can follow some simple instructions still?”

Man, Katie was gonna die! Her only hope had spent so much effort flirting she'd forgotten not to brainwash her. Katie found herself laughing, again. It was hilarious, even though she knew it shouldn't be, but that just made it funnier. The look on Thatch's face was one she'd remember for the rest of her life, which was just over two hours!

Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, was a blooming idiot. On the one band, she'd gotten the human to help in under an hour, which was pretty good going, and then on the other band she'd forgotten that the stuff she needed to make pure, breathable oxygen had been in her other arm, and now her human assistant was so high on phytotoxins she was borderline useless.

Borderline.

“Katie,” Thatch snapped. “Eyes on me.”

Short, simple orders worked, at least for a little while. She'd start drifting after a few moments, but she was still a useful tool. The girl stopped giggling and looked towards Thatch's face, expression a distant sort of quizzical, even if she was wordless for a multitude of reasons.

“Air vents. The button on that panel. Can you find it for me?”

Katie stared for another few moments, and then smiled lazily. Thatch sighed. This was going to be difficult.

Not because what they were doing was hard, but because Katie was incredibly distracting. How was she meant to save all their lives in these conditions? The girl was already playing with a vine, and did Thatch Aquae, confident, in-charge Affini engineer have the heart to take it away from her? No, she did not. She was just down a vine now. One of precious few.

Katie would be very mad at her when she woke up, but... this way, she would wake up.

“Katie! Be a good girl and find the button that vents the oxygen.” Thatch put on her firmest face. The response was... god, she was so cute. The poor thing was so starved for praise that what was given seemed to hit her like a trunk, if Thatch was getting the saying right. She did manage to make her way over to the right panel, but after that she slowed down.

“The one that vents the oxygen, pet.”

A long moment of thought followed, before a careful, yet sloppy, tap of one of the buttons. A yellow one marked with... oh, it was meant to be a gust of wind. Thatch had been seeing it as a sideways tree, no wonder she hadn't found the button herself. The pod filled with the sound of hissing, that gradually decreased to nothing as Katie happily watched all the air in the room vanish into space.

That put them on a very different kind of timer. Keeping a whole human breathing, just by herself, was not exactly a small ask for Thatch. Doing it while actively dying and without half of her tools was... well, there wasn't much time for flirting right now.

“Oh, good girl! Such a clever Katie you are!”

There was always time for some flirting. The noise would vibrate along her little air hose, and vibrate around Katie's skull, so it'd be fuzzy, but she'd hear. It wasn't like she'd have many other thoughts in that poor head.

Oh, twigs and clods, humans couldn't survive in a vacuum, could they? Thatch hoped she still had enough plantmass to make all this work. She shot forward, wrapping Katie tight in a cocoon of leaves and vines, tight enough to be nearly airtight. That 'nearly' was going to make things a lot harder, though. Thanks to her floral origin, Thatch naturally produced oxygen, and thanks to her hailing from a society that loved emphasising its strong points, she was capable of producing a pretty decent amount of it. Not enough to keep Katie alive for long.

“Now, I need you to be very careful and make sure you keep those vines tight against your face, and I'm just going to go look outside.”

Thatch carefully manouvered herself to the door, and struck the obvious “Open” button. The pod lights turned off. She turned them back on, and tried the second most obvious button, and that one did the trick. It was strangely morose, looking out at a collection of stuff that used to be her, but wasn't any more. That had been an arm. That was one of her favourite flowers, now squashed beyond survival. That had been a treasured momento of her visit to Sigma Theta station, where they specialised in biomechanical augmentation.

aannnd that was a leg, slowly drifting away. Thatch grabbed for it, missed, and grabbed again. She caught it by the tip of her vine, but it slipped free, sent out of reach. She swore, and strained forward, but it was simply too far. The ship was still slowly spinning, and it'd taken some of that momentum with it. She just needed another foot to reach it, and...

Thatch Aquae, First Bloom, utter moron, let go of the shuttle so she could reach out that extra foot, and put her life in the hands of a human being who, right now, was not capable of stringing together a coherent sentence.

“Okay, pull me back in!” she called, hoping that her voice would reach all the way down her vine, through a deeply empty head, and somehow spur an action. “Katie, precious, I need you to pull!” She could pull herself, but then it was almost certain she'd yank the mask off of the girl's face, and Thatch was not willing to risk her life here.

Root damnit. Thatch knew exactly what was happening, here. She was getting trained into giving this human exactly what she wanted, but this wasn't her! She didn't want a dependent. She didn't want to be slowed down and she certainly didn't feel ready. She was only a hundred and three years old, she couldn't be in charge of something this precious and fragile! She swore to the stars above and the roots below, if Katie ended up bonding and she was saddled with a pet, she'd... She'd... take good care of her and set her free once she was ready?
Thatch groaned. That could take years. Katie was cute, don't get her wrong, but she had things to do! She couldn't spend all her time doting on one particular human. Early domestication was the most exciting phase, where you got to learn all about how to keep some new species happy, and where there was a flurry of innovations to be made in figuring out how to better coexist. Wasting time on just one was... unthinkable. Yet, she could feel herself getting tied up in this one's affairs, and light knew what effect all this would be having when Katie finally woke up.

“Katieflower! If you pull me in, I'll give you headpats!”

That did the trick. Thatch felt herself being slowly reeled in, and soon she could grab onto the spinning pod herself and move the rest of the way. As soon as she was back inside, she hit the button that closed the outer door and hoped that her oxygen production would create enough pressure quickly enough for them to survive beyond the next ten minutes.

“Good girl!” she cooed, collapsing into Katie's lap, feeling exhausted. She knew that wasn't a good sign, but she was surprisingly comfortable, and it took all of Thatch's willpower to not simply melt into a frenzy of cuddles and not-strictly-medicinally-necessary dosing. Which didn't mean that she didn't waste a good five minutes stroking the girl's head, while carefully balancing the oxygen/toxin mix she got to breathe. There was something incredibly calming about stealing away all that nervous energy and all those worries and letting her experience a moment of tranquility.

Except that they had things to do. Pressure in the room had been steadily rising over those minutes, as Thatch's lost air gathered in the room. It didn't feel thick enough for Katie to survive in it, but maybe she could have the cocoon relaxed, so she could make herself useful. Or, at least, so Thatch could make her useful.

“Katieflower, precious? I need you to do something for me, okay? I'll... let you keep playing with my vines if you can be a good girl and do this one little thing for me. I need you to open up that maintenance panel, unhook the fuel pipe, and stick this thing in between the pipe and the tank.” Thatch raised the biomechanical fuel filter, which via a complicated process that Katie certainly would not understand right now, should give them a boost. It had been used to purify some of her favourite drugs, once, but this was an emergency.

It would have been nice to explain it. The look on the girl's face as she'd started to understand their earlier discussion, even if it was simplified, had been a delight. The expression that Thatch got this time was still delightful, but she found herself missing the girl's thoughts. One reason among many she'd make a terrible caretaker, she supposed.

The girl seemed to be getting the hang of following instructions, which did not mean that she was really understanding what she was doing. Thatch didn't have the strength or dexterity to install anything herself, but she could offer a guiding vine, gently pressing one side of her wrist or the other to steer her into place, and between the two of them they managed to get everything secured.

This was exhausting. Thatch was already starting to feel light-headed from the strain, never mind the stint in hard vacuum, and they had so much left to do. This really was the perfect example of why she didn't want to get too close to a human. The efficient thing to do would be to pull the straps around Katie, then do the same for herself, and here she was tickling under the girl's chin just to watch the way she squirmed. How was she meant to get any work done like this?

Assuming that she got out of this, Thatch could expect to live about as long as she wanted to stick around. There would be time for pets later, after she'd made a name for herself. After she'd contributed.

Thatch's frustrated growl was apparently loud enough to draw the girl's attention, because she had to spend a few moments soothing her afterwards, wasting yet more time.

The Affini 'Compact' had a thousand thousand thousand worlds across a dozen galaxies. They encompassed more species and sub-species than Thatch could ever hope to count. They had saved more cuties than an individual could imagine, and at this point in their existence, there was nothing to do any more. Poor Katie was worried about working in a mine, but the truth was that Thatch would gladly spend some time digging out raw materials if it meant she got to feel like she'd earned her place here. Instead, she flitted from ship to ship, always a little too late to make any real contributions. Always being told that there wasn't really any need for her, and she should find a hobby, get a pet, and relax for a few hundred years.

Even on the Elettarium! Surely, she had thought, a small vessel on the forefront of Affini space would have need of an educated engineer. Surely they would face some new problem that she could solve. Yet half the population of that 'small' scouting ship was there recreationally. The Elettarium had ice cream bars, five separate kilometer-wide recreational parks, and every single Affini on board spent as much time fussing over their new pets as they did anything else, except for Thatch and a couple of others who claimed to simply not have found the right match yet.

There was absolutely nothing that needed doing. Thatch had finally convinced the others to let her take a look at a human drive design in-situ, but she suspected that they'd been humouring her. It wasn't like they didn't have hundreds of Terran ships just lying around in their shipbreaking yards.

Look where that had gotten her.

Thatch finished fiddling with the straps, to make sure Katie was comfortable, and took a moment to prepare herself. Her leaves curled inwards. She was a little worried that this next stage would get them killed, but she could at least be useful in one way here, and give the human some confidence.

“Katieflower, petal? I'm going to turn the engine on, now. Everything will get very heavy for a little while, but I'm here, and I'll keep you safe, okay?”

Thatch couldn't fight off a towel right now. How was she meant to keep this thing safe? She'd just have to figure it out on the way, she supposed, and hit the ignition switch.

The pod's thrusters roared into life, a tank full of chemicals being fed into a biomechanical engine, enriched, and then trickle-fed into the Terran design for optimal efficiency. Both of its passengers found themselves flattened against their seats, straining against a moderately high-G burn. Thatch kept her eyes on the nav computer's readout, silently begging it to not show any divergence from the route. Katie was squeezing—tightly, mind—the end of a vine and receiving all the comforting strokes that were available.

The whole journey took about an hour, slowly crawling towards a planet at painfully sub-light speeds. Thatch kept finding herself almost dropping off, having to force herself to stay awake, or, alarmingly, fighting the urge to give in and fall unconcious. It was only Katie's wellbeing that kept her focussed, but the oxygen mix was getting dangerously thin.

As the minutes crawled on, Thatch was terrified she'd miscalculated, and that they were simply going to slingshot around the planet and go back the other way. When she finally felt the telltale shaking of atmosphere, she laughed in joy. They weren't going to die. All she had to figure out now was which button switched this craft to atmospheric mode, and they'd be fine.

Except.

Thatch started hitting buttons at random. One of them had to be it. She was just misunderstanding the symbols. Nobody would build an escape pod that couldn't enter an atmosphere, that would be incredibly unsafe. The Terrans were kinda dumb, but...

Oh rot and ruin, Katie had tried to warn her about this, hadn't she?

Both of them yelped at the same time, as something broke off of the pod and sent it into a wild spin. They were crashing. They were crashing! This was... exciting, actually! If Thatch didn't do something, they were both going to die! The next minute and a half would, quite literally, have the most impact of anything she'd ever done.

Thatch cackled, unbuckling her straps and pulling herself over to give Katie a quick kiss on the forehead, then undid her straps too, and pulled the poor girl into the center of the ship. Thatch used her vines to stablise the two in the center of the pod as it span around them, insulating Katie from the chaos to give her a few blissful moments of silence, so that they could talk.

“Okay, love, we're going to do something very exciting in a moment, but I want you to know that you're going to be okay. I'll take care of everything, alright? You don't need to worry about any of it. Once we land, though, I'm going to need you to plant me, alright? Just... take the round bit and stick it into the dirt. Add some water, if you can? Can you do that for me?”

What was she saying? Katie was barely capable of forming memories at all, right now. For all Thatch knew, her core would end up lying hibernating in some barren corner of this nowhere planet forever, but at least Katie would survive. She had to, Thatch had promised. All she had to do now was figure out how to keep that promise, which certainly had a clarifying effect on her thinking.

The ship was breaking apart. It wouldn't even reach the ground at this rate. In fact, it seemed likely that—

A panel broke off, and the air suddenly rushing in broke Thatch's grip and flung the two of them out of the ship, sending them flailing in freefall. Thatch screamed, eyes wide, but... No, Katie seemed serene. She wasn't worried, and why wasn't she worried? Thatch Aquae, capable Affini rescuer, was here, and so no harm would come to her.

Thatch took a deep breath of thin, cold atmosphere. All she had to do was live up to that image in her human's head.

The. The human's head. She was not bonding!

Thatch let her head unwind, reclaiming all the vines she could, giving herself a little more to work with. She wrapped the girl in a thicker protective cocoon and positioned herself beneath, so she'd take the force of landing. She spread her vines out wide, trying to catch as much air as possible, and it burned. They were in freefall. They were de-orbiting without a ship. This was insane. A healthy Affini, on their own, could absolutely survive this. Her? With a human?

Thatch cackled again, which set Katie off in turn. This was absurd. She was going to die. She was... no, focus. She was going to save the life of this innocent flower, and if that was the sum total of her existence, then let that be worth it.

They plummeted, human and Affini both, through a rapidly thickening atmosphere. The pod was just rubble before long, but they persevered. In the final moments before they hit the ground, Thatch pulled in all the vines that weren't keeping Katie tightly secured and wound them into the biggest spring she could make, hoping to absorb the last of their kinetic energy and give Katie the soft landing she deserved.

They hit hard. Thatch blacked out.

Felicia Hautere, Fourth Floret, leaned closer to her affini's side. She didn't usually want to draw attention while Rosaceae was working, but the floor also wasn't usually shaking beneath her feet. Her mistress curled a protective vine over her shoulders almost subconciously, holding her close, but resting the end on her shoulder to softly press Felicia down to her knees.

Rosaceae Hautere, Sixth Bloom, had one of the hardest jobs aboard the Elettarium, Felicia thought. She was the captain, at least at the moment. The last election had chosen her, and though the outside world would never know how uncertain her affini had been after hearing the news, Felicia was far too invested at this point to allow her caretaker to be anything but magnificent.

At a slight gesture from the plant, Felicia felt her thoughts start to return, the hazy curtain of mindlessness quickly retreating. It was a disorienting process, being suddenly pulled from being almost no more than an animal, acting on instinct, to suddenly being a person again. She blinked a few times, then looked up, soft and lazy smile sharpening into something more devious.

The bridge crew hung in nervous tension. They'd just landed back in real-space, it seemed, with a human battleship clear in their sights. The metallic tentacles of their cargo chutes were already reaching out, ready to strike.

Rosaceae had been around for almost a millenium and a half, but she'd been captain of a starship for only two short years. Felicia technically had seniority here, and all the sharpness her mind had ever possessed. More, even, with a delicate web of biotechnology laced through her body regulating everything from her hormonal balance to her mood. Delicate plantlife twisted around her bones, making her more than she had ever been. Stronger, faster, quicker on the draw. More accurate with a knife or a gun. Fast enough to evade Rosa's vines and smart enough to make that count.

She rose to her feet, raising a hand to gently rest against her affini's cheek. Though the creature was sitting, she still had a few inches on Felicia, but that hardly mattered, and the look in her soft blue eyes was beautiful enough that Felicia risked being seen to tilt her caretaker's head towards herself, two fingers beneath her chin.

“You've got this, Rosa,” she whispered, planting a kiss on their forehead. She carefully tilted the Affini's head back towards the rest of the bridge, letting a finger linger for just a moment too long. Felicia had been a terror, once. Twenty years spent flying freighters, ten as the queen of a pirate armada. Her name had been spoken in hushed tones or not at all. When she'd eventually tried to hijack a small Affini cargo vessel, Rosaceae had been aboard, and had brought her in.

It shouldn't have surprised her that Rosaceae had wanted to keep her little Thorn sharp. Three decades of learning how human ships were run was valuable, and despite her own thorny exterior, Miss Rosa was a softie to the core. She'd let herself get shot five times rather than hurt Felicia in the disarming. Her domestication had been... unusual, to say the least. Felicia smiled happily, reliving the memory and leaning in closer.

The bridge of the Elettarium hung from the bottom of the ship, about half way along the vessel's magnificent length. It gave them a spectacular view of its current occupation. Tremendous metallic tentacles jutted out of the large, flower-like structure on the bow, spearing the human vessel six different ways. All around the bridge were dotted Affini and their pets, watching smaller panels or chattering away as the various teams made their way in to rescue everyone inside.

Humans hadn't always been allowed on the bridge, of course, but Felicia had practically been born to be on the command deck of a starship and Rosaceae's domestication hadn't softened her. The opposite. Some people kept dangerous pets, ones that demanded respect and careful treatment.

Pet and handler both looked up with a frown at the same time, as a klaxon went off and an emergency broadcast echoed through the room.

“Elettarium, emergency channel! Dirt and roots, can we still smother this engine? The human set it to overload, looks like this room didn't get hit by the gas. Looks like we've got thirty seconds before spacetime gets shredded, can you do something about that?”

Felicia could feel the tension in her owner's core as she listened, and for a moment afterwards it seemed like she was freezing up. The one Affini vessel lost to date had been caused by something very similar, and they were meant to be taking steps to avert it happening again. That was why Rosaceae had been picked, after all. She was an actress, a mistress of drama and tension, and so far had been extremely successful at storytelling. Her stage was the infinite cosmos, her actor a multi-kilometer vessel with thousands of occupants, and her audience the misguided human rebellion. All she had to do was keep them feeling like they had a chance, so there weren't any more of these self-destructive attacks.

Rosa was an artist, and like many artists, she was no stranger to trauma herself. Just as Felicia had been saved, she liked to think that she'd saved Rosa in turn. Her caretaker's comforting vines curled around Felicia's central nervous system, but Felicia had left her own permanent marks in exchange. Neither of them were as good without the other. Felicia subtly nudged her captain's side.

“Elettarium here,” Rosaceae called, spurred into action, motioning for the science officer to stop playing with her human's hair and do something, while playing with her own human's hair in a flagrant display of hypocricy. “Smothering in progress. We may still have a bumpy ride, apparently, recommend evacuation!”

“Negative, the human's running, they won't survive this. I'll try to get us into a pod, please be ready to pick us up,” the voice called. Who was that? They were a little hard to understand, even if Felicia's affini was generally excellent—at least the dialect they used around here, anyway. It was an unusual accent, but she recognised it. Rosaceae surely knew who it was, she was fantastic with voices. One of the perks of being an actress, Felicia supposed.

A tense fifteen seconds went by and every moment they didn't get a check-in made the tension grow yet thicker. Felicia was supposed to be here to support and comfort, but even she found herself holding her breath.

Felicia felt a tearing in the back of her mind as reality broke. They crossed the border of the known, the event horizon of logic, where sense was best left be. Half-reflected stars met unending void, objective untruth meeting wild conjecture as the world she knew cracked and they all fell through, down, down, down into fragmented dimensions, their ship merely a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and the elegant malevolence of pan-dimensional irrelevance and—

Felicia closed her eyes, and whimpered, suddenly remembering why the games she and her Mistress played were games and games alone. She had flown chemical rockets encased in steel and glass. Rosaceae and the rest of the crew broke reality over their knee and forced their will onto the world. It was impossible to tell what was happening outside, and the bridge was a whirlwind of action, every pet staying politely out of the way. It was a daunting sight, when a room full of Affini actually managed to all focus at once on something that wasn't cute.

The space outside stablised over long moments, but the human ship was gone, the great metallic tentacles were gone; familiar stars were gone. The voice from before came back to her, finally with a name. The cute newcomer who kept poking around the engineering department looking for something to do, the one who hadn't found a companion yet. Thatch something? She'd been lovely when Felicia had had occasion to talk. She hoped that the alien was okay. Felicia's head found Rosaceae's lap, arms squeezing around a leg, and the captain looked down and began to stroke, for both their comforts.

Felicia was the lucky one, here, finally freed from the burden of command. Being in charge wasn't a luxury, it was a curse, and she, for one, was very happy to only play pretend.

“Report,” Rosacaea demanded, all playfulness gone from her voice. A chilling comfort. Scary, but safe. When all was chaos, the games were discarded, and Felicia got a brief reminder of why it was okay that she got to pretend at importance, still. Rosa set the stage, and Felicia was but her actress, pretending at still holding her former ferocity while it was useful and gladly abandoning it when she could.

“All but one got back in safely,” spoke one of the crew, reading off of a panel, “Thatch Aquae, First Bloom still missing, as well as one human unaccounted for. Scanners aren't locating them, they aren't here. The hypermetric rupture must have knocked them elsewhere.”

Rosacaea sighed, nodding. “We'll be out here a while, then. Inform the ship that we're going to be taking an extended break from the front and send a messenger back to fleet command, we can't leave until we've found them. Somebody tell me how to search for two creatures somewhere in this galaxy, please? Answers on a postbox?”

Felicia giggled. Sometimes she thought her owner got human phrases wrong just to torment her. Why else would she say them in affini? All she got for her bratting, though, was a gentle stroke and the comforting sensation of her thoughts sinking away, stealing the intelligent sparkle in her eyes and the deviousness in her grin, the speed of her limbs and the fire in her eyes, and leaving her simple and happy. She'd stay this way forever if she could, but Miss Rosa could make use of her wit and edge, sometimes, and so she was glad to keep it.

Rosa had seen right through her futile attempts at independence. It wasn't what she'd ever wanted, and the last eighteen months in her Mistress's care had been the happiest of her life.

Ships breaking around her. Falling. Wind in her ears. The horrifying sensation of feeling like she was in microgravity, while the ground beneath rushed up to dissuade her of that. The nightmarish instant of collision. Silence.

Katie woke with a sudden start, scrambling to her feet before she'd even realised she was no longer dreaming, heart beating in her chest so hard she felt like the staccato thumps would knock her down. She was alive. She was alive. She was—

“Thatch!” she cried out, rushing over to a tangle of vines and plantlife. Half of it seemed to have already dried out, browned, or begun to rot. She wanted this creature dead, didn't she? It was the enemy. It was a slaver, a conqueror. It wanted to take her and hers, just to have it, when they already had so much.

It had also saved her life. It had almost convinced her that it wasn't a fucking eldritch nightmare beast from beyond the stars, and then it had guided a broken escape pod across a star system and protected her as they fell from the skies. It was terrifying. Almost dead and it had done all this? How were they meant to fight these creatures, when killing them took scuttling a ship and falling out of orbit?

Katie found Thatch's face. Flies buzzed away as she reached for it, but as she tried to lift it, it simply crumbled in her hands, plant matter broken and dead.

She was gone. The... dorky alien who had saved her life. Who seemed more interested in talking about science than she had in actually conquering anything. Who had made Katie feel safe when she had been certain she would die, and had then proven that that feeling of safety was earned. It wasn't fair. This was a creature that was awesome in the biblical sense of the word. Larger than life, and... yet still dead?

The face had been a fake, Katie had understood that much. A mask, put on to make it easier for them to communicate, but it had been alive. Even interesting. It was difficult not to relate to the first non-human sapient creature she'd ever sat down and talked to.

Katie looked around. They were in a clearing in the middle of what seemed like thick forest. All around them was a deep blanket of blacks, purples, reds, leaves and flowers in shapes Katie had simply never seen. Petals that seemed almost hexagonal, flowers that glistened with semi-transparent bulbs. Trees that towered far above them with golden trunks and purple leaves. The clearing was dirt and flattened plantlife, and it took Katie a moment to realise that it was an impact crater.

It wasn't fair. She was alive, but she was stuck here, now, on this alien rock, with no ship, no radio, no supplies. Nothing but the clothes on her back, and even those had taken damage back on the Indomitable. She had to— to what? Survive here? Impossible.

As impossible as surviving the journey here had been. The competent nightmare that had gotten her here may no longer be with her, but it seemed almost sacrilegious to waste its gift. They may have been enemies, but the loss of a creature like that seemed like something that should have the universe crying out in mourning, no matter Katie's feelings.

She spent a moment digging through the dying leaves and flowers, searching for one that had survived the trip. There weren't many, but she found something in vibrant pink that hadn't gotten too scorched, and tucked it behind her ear.

“I'll remember your name, Thatch. I'll... tell your people what you did, when I get back.”

She paused a moment. The first time she'd thought Thatch dead, it had been her words that had woken them up and gotten their attention.

Wind rustled through the area. The carpet of plantlife outside of their clearing swayed gently, while the mighty trees surrounding them stood: diligent protectors in wood and leaf, golden bark almost glittering while the purple leaves far above kept the local star out of reach. Katie looked up, towards the canopy high above, the thick layer of foliage that protected the smaller plants. It had a hole in it, high above them, where a pillar of shattered branches drew out a column from the skies above.

The forces involved boggled the mind. Katie's meager hope that Thatch would have somehow survived fizzled. It didn't matter how much larger than life the creature had seemed, it couldn't fight physics any more than she could.

Katie picked a direction. She neither knew where she was, nor did she have any tools, so it seemed overwhelmingly likely she'd be dead within the day anyway if she didn't do something about it. Priority one was water, and then shortly after that, food. The planet they'd landed on was, by some miracle, teeming with life.

Either a miracle, or life in this universe was cheaper than she'd thought.

The flies implied animal life, but none of it seemed willing to come and say hello. Likely that was for the best, as if anything took issue with her presence here Katie had little with which to convince them to leave her be.

Instead, she walked. She couldn't even find the direction of the sun with the thick canopy above. She was probably just walking in a giant circle for all she knew, but without any way of correcting, it was the best she could do.

She mentally amended her todo list: Water; food; a compass or something like it. How was she meant to build that? She stumbled over a branch, laughing, and rolled her eyes at herself. She could fling a hundred thousand tonnes of stuff across the known universe, but building a compass from scratch? It was magnetics, right? Free-turning metal aligning with the planet's magnetic field. How hard could that be?

It was priority three for a reason.

Eventually, the ground seemed to get swampier. Katie found a stick, something nice and long, abandoned by some helpful tree, and jabbed it into the ground, trying to estimate whether the water table was close to the surface. When she brought it back up, the bottom of the stick was damp. Katie nodded to herself, and kept going, trying to gauge whether any of the directions available to her went down.

After an hour or so of wandering, and several more sticks used, Katie struck gold.

Metaphorically, anyway. The dirty water pooling on the ground before her was worth far more than mere gold. She dropped to her knees and began scooping it up in cupped hands, hastily drinking it down. It tasted foul, but it was water. She'd need a container to bring some with her, and...

A deep growling from behind captured Katie's attention in a heartbeat. She cursed her own stupidity. Where was she more likely to find animal life than at a watering hole? She slowly looked behind her towards the... thing. Like a hog, but a sextruped, with scales instead of fur, and jagged horns jutting from an open, salivating maw with rows of sharpened teeth. Its four eyes were piercing black dots, focussed on her.

Oh, and it was taller than she was. Looked hungry, too.

Katie broke out into a run, splashing through the water as she scrambled to her feet and darted for the trees. It was huge; maybe it wasn't nimble. She heard the thunderous drumbeat of six cloven hooves loud enough that it felt like it was mere inches behind her.

Katie was a spacer. She was lucky that she had any experience in real gravity at all, but she did not have experience with running on such uneven ground, where every step threatened to trip her with unseen roots or have her slip on dampened leaves. She did not have experience with predators. She did not have experience fleeing for her life.

She was nimble, though. She darted left, around a thick trunk, forcing the animal to slow to go around. She darted through a small gap between the trees, where it couldn't follow, and had to take the long way to chase her. She kept ahead of it for what felt like minutes... but gradually, her body began to slow, running out of even the desperate adrenaline-fueled strength that had kept her alive this long.

When she tripped, she knew it was over. Her ankle twisted and she could have sworn she heard a pop. The creature's jagged horn caught her along the arm, sending her spinning, landing in agony facing down what must have been a hundred teeth in a mouth large enough to eat her whole.

Branches cracked underneath its feet as it stalked towards her, realising its victory and no longer feeling the need to run. It lowered its head towards Katie's torso and she squeezed shut her eyes, knowing this was it. Goodbye, world.

The beast screeched, an overwhelming sound that forced Katie to cringe, but also one that was enough of a surprise that she opened her eyes. A blindingly red vine was wrapped around one of the horns, pulling it back with enough force to set the creature off balance.

What now? Katie despaired. Was she to simply be a snack for the bigger fish?

More vines speared out of the darkness, from behind the trees, wrapping around the beast until it couldn't move an inch. They were vibrant, a mix of deep reds and purples, much like the plant life around her.

The beast was dragged away, loudly protesting... until those protests fell silent, and the whole forest was deathly still. What the fuck could do that? Katie struggled to her feet, but her ankle was at very least twisted. Putting weight on it didn't seem like it would work, and her adrenaline was all burned through.

Something walked out of the shadows. Bipedal, tall. Hues of black and red and purple dominated its surface, seeming to draw Katie's eyes upwards, towards the face, with its bright blue eyes.

“Greetings,” it spoke, voice a melody. “My name is Thatch Aquae, Second Bloom, and you really are coming with me this time.”

Vines that could tie up megafauna snaked out, slowly wrapping themselves around Katie's form and lifting her, gently, into Thatch's awaiting arms. Katie let out a soft whimper as the movement jolted her foot, and a moment later there were new vines keeping it steady and fixed in place. The Affini's face looked down at her, and Katie could tell it was her, though the colouration was completely different now.

She lifted a hand to touch the chin, felt the edges of leaves and how the wood beneath was used to create structure and firmness, that was then wrapped in soft foliage.

“How?” was the only question that seemed to matter.

Thatch looked down with a caring smile and held Katie more tightly. “It's a process called reblooming. The old me dies and is thrown away, and the new me... lives. I didn't have long to do it, since you wandered off, so I had to incorporate a lot of the local life into me this time.”

She raised a hand for her own inspection, replacing it with a set of vines without disrupting Katie's position. It was similar to a human hand, but Katie knew it was no such thing. The colours mixed together in a mottled texture of black and purple, with reds only starting to seep in closer to the core, and the face, giving the creature the appearance of almost being clothed.

Across her back lay a curtain of plantlife, almost like a cape, seeming to be the same stuff that was beneath their feet, but repurposed. Snatches of the old green could still be seen closer in to what was apparently the creature's core, but it seemed less like she'd regrown, so much as she'd harvested half her body from the local environment.

Thatch stopped paying attention to her hand and looked back towards Katie. Her vines stiffened for a moment, though whatever her thoughts, they didn't show on her face.

“Let's get you back on your feet,” she said, lowering Katie to the ground. Vines wrapped tightly around her leg in the form of a cast, albeit one that trailed back to the creature creating it. Though Katie knew that that vine was strong enough to lift her into the air, it offered no impedance to her movements. She looked back towards the Affini, who glanced away.

“How did you find me?” she asked, stumbling as she tried to walk on her own.

“I knew you couldn't have been gone for more than a few hours, and that puts a pretty small cap on how far you could have gone, little human—”

“I'm serious. My name is Katie,” she interjected, stumbling back over to Thatch and jabbing her finger into the middle of their chest. It sunk in for half a centimeter before meeting something solid. The creature leaned back as if pushed, though both of them surely knew that that was a choice they'd made. “You say that you don't want to take away my identity, but you keep ignoring what I want. I— Thank you for saving me, but I'm not going with you. Fuck off, Thatch.”

The smattering of deep red leaves that made up Thatch's eyebrows rose in shock, the rest of her face following a moment later.

“The Human Domestication Trea—”

“I don't care about the treaty, Thatch! I didn't sign that. Nobody asked me whether I was okay with it, just like nobody asked me if I wanted to be human in the first place. All my fucking life it's been people telling me that somebody else made choices for me and now I'm stuck with them, and no, fuck off with that, and fuck off with all the implications of that. You say you care? Prove it.”

Katie's finger was embedded an inch into Thatch's chest at this point, each vine in its makeup gradually giving way as Thatch had the arrogance beaten out of her. Not that it would matter, she wouldn't apologise. These creatures were so certain of their own superiority that they'd decided that they got to make decisions for the entire human race.

“I'm sorry, Katie,” Thatch spoke, softly, raising a hand to gently extract the girl's finger from her chest. “You're right. I got carried away, and I don't really know what I'm doing. You're the first feral huma... the first feral around here that I've dealt with, and you aren't like the florets back on the ship. You are a lot more interesting, but I think not that much better at taking care of yourself. Please come with me, I'll keep you safe.”

Katie's next breath was deep, and a little uneven. Safe. She didn't remember much about the descent, or how they'd gotten to the planet, but she remembered feeling like her head was floating on a soft ocean. She'd felt safe then, in Thatch's vines, and now Thatch was... so much more than she'd been before. Knowing what this creature could do, it was hard not to take its promise at face value.

“No,” Katie answered, anyway, voice as firm as she could make it, knowing that refusal likely meant her own death somewhere on this rock. She didn't know what a floret was, but from context, she could guess it was what happened to their other captures, and she had no desire to find out more. “You'll take me somewhere I don't want to go because of a treaty I never signed between two peoples that I have nothing to say to. No. I refuse, and if you want to make me, then I know you can, but I'll know that you're a liar.”

One of the thorns that made up Thatch's teeth pierced one of the leaves that made up the lips of her mouth. She seemed frozen for a moment, the hues of her face swirling slowly, more red finding its way to the surface, before she figured out how to smile.

“Okay! I understand. I don't think you'll be okay, though, and I have nothing better to do, so can I come with you? We never finished our conversation earlier, I was hoping to teach you how to get us home. I might not be able to do it on my own, and I'd rather not live here for the rest of my life.”

Her smile was disarming, and as she'd spoken, her demenour had shifted, losing the sharp edge and speaking more casually, all vines but the one keeping Katie able to walk retracted safely within herself. Coming to her with an offer, not a demand, and admitting fallibility.

“No screwing with my head?” Katie insisted.

“Not unless you ask.”

“No pet names?”

“Not unless you want, Katie.”

“Then... okay. Equals, or not at all,” Katie said, glaring up at the creature's twinkling blue eyes. Why did she get the sense that it was enjoying this exchange? She didn't sense dishonesty in the expression, but at the same time she felt as if there was more going on behind those eyes than she was privy to... but she really did need the help, and the alliance of something that had already pulled her out of the fire once wasn't a small boon.

“Equals,” it said, mouth flowing into a grin that, for a snatched moment, seemed all-too-reminiscent of the hog-beast's toothy maw, before softening into something more polite.

“You drank from this?” Thatch asked, looking vaguely horrified as she dipped a root into the dirty water Katie had been so proud to find. The dirt suspended within was sent swirling, while the thin layer of grime atop it all started gravitating towards her, pulled in by surface tension.

“I did!” Katie replied, both of them being fully aware that the girl's polite smile was a challenge as much as an answer. Was Thatch actually capable of treating her as an equal, or would she immediately revert to a casual dismissal of Katie's capabilities? Given the options Katie had available to her, finding water at all seemed like an achievement.

The Affini hesitated, seeming almost frozen in place with a look of disbelief for a moment, before it met Katie's smile with an equally polite one of her own. “That's very resourceful, Katie. Dirty water is an improvement over nothing, but I think we can do better than this. We'll want to find a river if we can, but for the moment, this—” She glanced down, smile wavering for a moment before she forced it back into place— “will have to do. Now, you can't drink this straight, it's filthy, but if we can filter it, and preferably boil it, it should be safe enough.”

Katie's smile grew a little more genuine for a moment, as she considered showing Thatch her trick with the sticks. When she started looking for a prop, however, she was quickly distracted by the other suggestion. Finding some way to filter the liquid made a lot of sense, now that Katie considered it. At the time she'd been rather too excited about finding water at all to consider that it might not actually be safe for her. 'Bad' water wasn't really a thing aboard a starship. If it was water, it was drinkable, because otherwise it would be waste, or coolant, or lubricant. All H₂O as a base, but if it wasn't safe they put it in different places and gave it different names.

“You come from a society even more advanced than mine, how do you know any better than me?” Katie asked, starting to think about how she could actually filter or boil any of this. She'd need a container of some sort first, she supposed? Heat could come from a fireplace, but everything around here was damp and they'd need to make a clearing. Maybe filtering alone would suffice for now?

“Partially, I suppose I've just been around for longer than you,” Thatch admitted. “You can't be more than a decibloom and I'm not one of your short Terran years younger than a hundred and three.”

Katie had started rummaging around under the carpet of plantlife while Thatch had been talking, looking for rocks or branches or anything that might start being useful as a tool, but at the mention of an age, she looked up. “That's old,” she admitted. “Were you, like... a leader or something? Is that why you came after the Jump Drive?”

Thatch's vine was inches away from ruffling the girl's hair, but a sharp glare convinced her to back off. “Hardly, Katie. I'm young among my people, and my exact role in our society is... a topic for another time, perhaps. The real reason I know this and you don't, I suspect, is likely a simple difference of cultural priorities. Taking care of cuties,” she continued, noting the sudden glare from below, “and Katies is, I suppose, somewhat of a hobby of ours. Humans may have outgrown the need to forage for containers in the forest, but other wards of ours have not, and so to be Affini is to get a well rounded education in the needs of the universe.”

While she spoke, she held out a hand to the side to take something a set of her finer vines had been fiddling with. A nest of supple twigs and leaves wound together tight in the shape of a bowl. She held it out towards whatever it was that Katie chose to be. “A gift, freely given, between friends. I'll use my skills to keep us safe, and you'll use yours in return.”

Katie took the item, carefully flexing it between her hands. The twigs were well located and expertly weaved, all positioned such that while the outer shell of the bowl had a few gaps or spaces, the inner part seemed to have a smooth, leafy surface. The craftswork was surprisingly artistic, for something made of whatever could be found at a moment's notice. It looked like it should work.

Katie pulled off the top half of her jumpsuit. It was scuffed and charred anyway, and the planet seemed to have the kind of warm humidity that suggested that she should be just fine with only the thin tee underneath. It took a moment to find a sufficiently large area of clean material to cover over the bowl, but after that she sunk it into the water and waited a moment to pull it back.

She was rewarded with a bowl full of clean, clear liquid that she eagerly gulped down. It still wasn't a great taste, but it was far better than drinking something that had as much dirt and detritus as water. One bowl wasn't enough, though two was too much, so she was quickly left with half a bowl spare. She held it out towards Thatch, in offering, who politely dipped a root within.

“Very resourceful,” Thatch praised, with a smile that made Katie wonder if she too were rooted to the ground, unable to move. “I suspect we'll be off-planet in mere weeks, at this rate.”

Mere weeks. Katie's face fell. She'd been running on inertia until now, simply due to not having stopped since the fall of the Indomitable, but a guess at a timescale was all it took to bring her back down to earth, or... whatever this place was called.

“Heck,” she breathed. “We're gonna be here for a while. I... I don't have any of my stuff, I don't have any medication, I don't—”

The world, as grand as it was, seemed to want to close in on her. The only thing that had kept her going the last year or so had been the knowledge that she was at least finally wrestling control of her body back from the uncomfortable human-male-normal shape she'd been created with, but without medication to maintain that, without tools to stop things from sliding back, what state would she be in in three weeks' time?

At least if she'd surrendered at the start, Thatch had said she'd still get medications. Instead, she'd fucked all of this up, and fought for her own identity only to be the thing that made it fall apart. The changes in her body weren't as significant as she'd wanted them to be, but she couldn't go back. She just couldn't. It would destroy her.

She was staring down at her hands, but she hardly noticed, breathing hard as the pressure of her situation started to bear down on her. She couldn't do this. This was insane. What kind of person would she have to become to get through this alive? It wouldn't be the person she wanted to be, but the person she wanted to be would die here.

She didn't want to die here and suddenly it seemed inevitable. Death by revocation of identity, or death by biological failure. Both were oblivion. She was panicking, she realised, as breaths grew ragged, world shrinking until it was just her and despair... and then Thatch was there, kneeling beside her in the muck with powerful arms wrapped around her torso, hand stroking down the back of her hair, speaking words that were like a lullaby.

Katie couldn't focus. She didn't know what Thatch was saying, it was hard to feel like it could possibly matter. The world wasn't getting any bigger, but Thatch was in here with her now, keeping the void at bay. She didn't know how long the two of them knelt there, but to her credit, the Affini never complained, nor did Katie suddenly find herself unable to think again, at least not because of brain-melting plant trickery.

“Shhh,” Thatch was saying, when Katie finally managed to marshal her focus towards vocal processing. “It's okay, it's okay. We're gonna get through this, you and I, and we'll be okay.”

Seeming to sense the slow increase in lucidity, Thatch paused, lifting Katie's chin with a finger. “Are you back with me, precious Katie?” she asked, and received a wide-eyed, hesitant nod. “Do you think you could tell me what just happened there?”

Another nod, but more hesitant still.

“Don't wanna... I want to be me, when we get out of here, and I can't be me without things I don't have. Pills, razors, stuff for my hair and the rest of me. I can't leave as... him,” she said, hissing the last word. The world seemed to shrink further, and Katie could have sworn that Thatch physically struggled against the contracting void that surrounded them, but with vines sent outwards to stablise, the void couldn't muster the strength to overcome her. Katie struggled to imagine anything that could.

Thatch sighed something that sounded almost like relief, expression softening in an instant, and she stopped holding Katie's chin up and let it fall to nestle against her chest, shifting a hand to hold it carefully in place. Katie caught a whiff of a sweet, floral scent that seemed to stick slightly in her nose. The creature had a low rumbling sound within it, a hint at the ferocity within, but on the outside all was still and serene. Leaves rustled quietly in the wind, but there was a deep warmth to the creature, warmer the closer in to the center Katie got.

“You won't. Let me take care of that, hmn? I need my equal partner in this, and if I can't figure out how to synthesise a few simple hormones then I don't think I'd be allowed back aboard the Elettarium without a few booster classes in Terran biology.”

Katie struggled against the hand holding her head down for a moment, until Thatch noticed and removed it, so that Katie could look up. “You can do that? It won't... mess with my head, or anything?”

“Ah, human psychology is easy enough, I think I can make sure it'll leave you clear headed and no different to how it would be if I simply had a stash of your regular drugs. How long do we have before you're meant to take your next dose?”

Thatch was really tall. Easily twice Katie's size, but in that moment, it felt like three or even four times, as her cheeks flushed. “I... forgot to take it this morning,” she admitted. “I'm already late.”

“Hmn,” the creature emitted, more than spoke. The sound just buzzed out from somewhere deep within, a deep rumble that Katie could have sworn she could feel. She might not have noticed, but she was practically nestled against Thatch, to hide from the void. “I don't mind a deadline. I'll get you some by the end of the day, then.”

Just like that, the void began to push back, world expanding again as the panic started to filter out of Katie's existence. No longer just her and Thatch, the world once more had trees, and water, and plants, and a family of the great hog-beasts that had been chasing her. Was one of these her assailant from earlier? It was hard to tell, but one of them was clearly larger, leading a charge with two smaller examples of the species.

Wait. Katie's head snapped back towards the beasts.

Katie yelped in alarm, jumping to her feet. “Thatch, look out!” she yelled, moments before noticing the deep red streaks that crossed the space between the Affini and each hog. Vines, held out to hold the beasts still, a vivid colour that stood out against the darker shades around them like a laser beam cutting through the depths of space.

Thatch hadn't been struggling to hold back the void, she'd been struggling to hold back these. Six vines stretched a dozen meters to wrap around horn and jaw, hold legs still and prevent movement. Each seemed to be sleeping, now, but they were still held tight. Three more vines stretched behind her leafy friend, wrapped around the great trunks surrounding them, presumably for stability's sake.

Heartrate slowly slowing, Katie reached out to feel one of the stretched-out vines. It was like steel, no give at all. She could put her whole weight against it and Thatch had no reaction beyond a vaguely amused smile.

Katie stopped playing with the vine, looking away sharply. “I— Okay. Thank you, I appreciate that.” She paused to take a deep breath, telling herself to focus, and then knelt by the watering hole to busy herself filling another bowl. “A river next seems like a good idea, and we're going to need something to eat. What... do you need?” Katie asked, voice starting shaken but growing more confident over the sentence. Katie glanced over at the Affini, who looked very much like there was nothing at all she could ever need from anybody.

Thatch stood, vines shifting around her as she maintained control over the beasts surrounding them. Katie knew how firm those grips were, and yet Thatch still walked as if she were unburdened, trading off vines around the local trees to ensure she didn't lose her control. How many of Thatch's mannerisms were simply acting, for Katie's sake, she wondered, if the Affini appeared to walk normally even while under pressures that surely dwarfed the motive force that feet against dirt could provide.

“Water would be good, but I can likely get what I need wherever we find food for you. Life seems quite endemic here, but there's room for another set of roots.”

Thatch paused, glancing between the restrained monsters surrounding them. “Do you eat meat, Katie?” she asked, gesturing to the beasts held helplessly before them. They couldn't fight an Affini any more than Katie could, and it was discomforting to realise how comparable their situations were. Katie didn't have immovable vines wrapped around her neck, but even ignoring the one tied tightly around her leg, the easy confidence with which Thatch suggested slaughter was chilling.

“I— No, but... Desperate times?” she asked, trying to swallow her disgust at the idea of surviving only by killing her surroundings. That was the Terran way, though, right? Finding new planets to strip mine and new species to exploit in an ever-expanding shell of endless consumption. Katie supposed, with disgust, that the Affini were doing the same thing, just better.

Thatch seemed relieved, however, vines going slack as she released the beasts. “Oh, good. I was not looking forward to needing to deal with that,” she admitted, seeming almost to slump for a moment. It wasn't a very human expression, and Katie was fairly sure she couldn't have her body emulate it if she tried. It was more like Thatch's whole intricate weave had loosened for a moment. “We'll find you something non-sentient to eat, then. We're more likely to find that closer to a river anyway. Let's both drink up, and then set off. Ah, if you think that's a good idea, partner?”

Katie nodded absent mindedly, then paused, and nodded again more confidently. If she wasn't careful, equals or no, it seemed that Thatch's natural confidence would have her effectively in charge regardless, and that would be a dangerous precedent to have set by the time they got back to Terran space.

Well, Affini space, now.

If Katie was going to get out of 'domestication', she had a lot to learn and a lot to plan, and she suspected that turning up on an Affini cruiser as a rescued captive would be much less positive for her than if she were the rescuer, returning a lost soldier.

“Yeah. We need a river, we need to eat. You need to make me drugs, so tell me what you need for that and I'll make sure you get a chance. I'll look for... river signs...”

“Animal tracks, insects, thicker vegetation, that kind of thing. Life will collect around the needs for life, so we can follow it and do the same,” Thatch filled in.

“I'll look for those, and we'll get out here,” Katie said, as much a promise to herself as to the other. She looked away from the slumbering animals surrounding them, back to Thatch, only to catch the alien looking at her, too. Thatch turned away, focusing on something out of Katie's line of sight.

Katie took a deep breath. She needed this to work. “I don't think either of us could do this alone, but I'll keep you safe, too, Thatch.”

Thatch Aquae—Second Bloom—felt different. Like a new plant. As far as she understood everyone experienced the Reblooming process differently; she hadn't expected to have to find out how hers went quite so early into her lifespan.

Leaving her old self behind and continuing with the new felt like it should have been a more emotional experience, but as soon as Thatch had recovered enough to regain consciousness Katie had taken precedence. The... Thatch wasn't quite sure how to refer to Katie, currently, but finding her missing had been quite alarming.

Alarming, but exciting, too. The florets aboard the Elettarium were almost all completely useless at anything but being cute—though in their defence, they were very good at that. Whatever it was that Katie was, she had something that they didn't. The kind of fire and drive that would lead somebody to run off to dirt knew where on some new and dangerous planet.

Most of the humans Thatch knew couldn't be relied on to dress themselves, and yet here Katie was, charging off towards adventure.

Thatch refused to admit to herself that part of her haste in rebuilding a body was simple excitement at seeing what the girl would be getting up to. It was purely practical, as far as she was concerned, to forgo all reasonable approaches at regrowth in favour of rapidly transplanting every plant she could get her vines on into herself, and growing with whatever nutrients she could absorb, rather than being selective about it and rebuilding herself properly like any normal Affini would do in her situation.

She was going to pay for this, she knew. Transplanting individual flowers was one thing, but half her form was foreign; her vines were stained with local anthocyanins; and nothing sat quite right. That could just be the process of getting used to a new body, but it could also be her natural material rejecting the transplanted material, and in that case things could get ugly. She'd reach Third Bloom by the end of the week, in that case, and that would be embarrassing.

Thatch was roused from her thought by Katie yanking on a vine. She shook her head, dispelling the malaise that had been settling over her, and put her focus on her traveling companion.

Katie was walking a little ahead, ostensibly leading, though she kept glancing back. Thatch walked after, pace languid, leaving plenty of time and opportunity to get lost in thought.

“Yes, Katie?” she asked. The two were walking through the dense forest, in a direction Katie had picked seemingly at random. Thatch was trying to gently guide her into at least not walking in circles, but the curious creature beside her seemed deeply resistant to guidance, and Thatch desperately needed to be subtle. She'd already almost lost control of that particular situation once before, and the last thing she wanted was to drug the poor girl out of her mind until they got home. Katie was the most interesting thing she'd stumbled across in decades.

“I'm not completely sure where we're going,” she admitted. Finally. “Do you have any ideas?”

Equality was exhausting, forcing Thatch to carefully lead her ward to solutions rather than simply outright telling her what to do. Surprisingly, it had also been quite fulfilling so far.

“Hmn, well, you had said that finding a river or lake would be most helpful, but we're not quite sure where we might find one. Perhaps if we were to find higher ground or get a better perspective on matters we could look for landmarks, or perhaps there are animal tracks which are being hidden by the undergrowth.”

If Thatch was being entirely honest, she was not meaningfully less lost, and it was starting to worry her. As much as Katie needed to find her own way, they did need to find water before nightfall if Katie were to have a good meal before bed.

“Do you have any plant powers that could help here? Can you... talk to the trees, or whatever?” the girl asked.

“I would hardly refer to them as 'plant powers', Katieflower,” Thatch deadpanned, “but I believe I can assist, certainly. Would you like to take a look at our location from high above, like a satellite? Alternatively, we could move more quickly if I scouted ahead alone, so that I could lead you to safety.”

Had Thatch her usual array of chemicals to hand, she might have been tempted to simply give the poor thing a few choice options. Something to take the edge off of her fears, certainly, not just about herself, but about the danger she seemed to still perceive herself to be in. Any one of a dozen concoctions could build on their growing trust and streamline the process of teaching her that she would be happier if she gave up that independent streak and just let herself be taken care of. Failing even that, it would hardly be challenging to simply instill the chemicals that humans used to form trust bonds manually.

“I don't want you to run off on your own, Thatch, I think we should stick together. How do I see us from above? Is that some kind of technology?” Katie asked, softly shaking her head, but looking up at Thatch like she expected the affini to be able to work magic. If only Thatch felt so confident in herself.

Had Thatch her usual array of chemicals to hand, she would be missing out on the most fun she'd ever had with any of the Affini companion species. Without needing to constantly worry about directly managing the girl's emotional state, Thatch could simply enjoy it. It was almost enough to make one wonder whether they were destroying something, by domesticating so many of the humans, but Katie's actions hardly dissuaded Thatch from her cultural imperative. She would have died a dozen times over by herself already and needed help with everything from eating and drinking to dealing with pests. Not only that, her time in the ex-Terran Accord had clearly been traumatic, and she needed guidance through that, as well. A soft chemical blanket would have been for her own good and Thatch had no doubts she would be able to convince Katie of that if she tried, but selfishly, she was still grateful that that option was unavailable and glad that she didn't have to be the one to shoulder that burden.

Not that she was entirely opposed to seeing Katie given an appropriate set of chemicals—by somebody qualified and worthy. Though the florets Thatch had dealt with before had been ultimately unfulfilling—if cute!—the thought of seeing Katie act the same way, knowing what more she was underneath, and how much more still she could become under a careful hand in an accepting home? It was enough to send Thatch's vines squirming. Katie would make a wonderful pet for somebody who could handle that kind of thing, and perhaps Thatch would visit sometimes, if Katie still remembered her.

“I'm afraid I have about as much access to technology as you do right now, Katie, but we can get a good view the old fashioned way.”

As they'd been talking, Thatch's vines had been spreading out around them, snaking beneath the undergrowth, blanketing the area so she was ready to strike. No sooner had her sentence ended than her vines were in motion, curling around Katie, wrapping her tight enough she'd struggle to move and lifting her a little off the ground.

At the same time, others wrapped around the trees surrounding them, and Thatch gave a testing pull, lifting the both of them off of the ground. Perfect. She broke into a storm of motion, bipedal form scattering into a twisted nest of deep purples and blood reds, lashing itself between the trees, heading up, up, up. Faster, faster, faster. Vines lashing to trunks, wrapping around, gripping, and flinging. The wind rushed through her leaves and in mere moments they were reaching the top. When was the last time Thatch had really gotten to cut loose, in the safe utopia of the Affini Compact?

They broke through the canopy in a burst of torn leaves and shattered twigs, Thatch laughing in delight as her longest few vines grabbed onto the tallest trunks and threw her upwards with as much force as they could muster. All the while, she spoke soft reassurances to Katie, regulating her grip to make sure the girl felt the security of being held without feeling too constrained, keeping protective vines curled around her to make sure she was safe from branches and growths.

They sailed through the sky for a long moment, protector and protégé glittering together in the sunlight, clothing and foliage both whipping in the wind, before gravity turned on them and started forcing them back down. Escaping the atmosphere would take a lot more work than this.

Thatch's three best vines shot out, creating for them a rough tripod, nestled against the very tops of the tallest trees she'd been able to spot on their ascent, while she reformed her bipedal body around Katie's.

The human's cheeks were stained almost as red as the vines surrounding her, and as fun as it would have been to engage in a few trust exercises, Thatch didn't want to risk their emerging partnership.

“Getting a good view?” Thatch asked, smiling as innocent a smile as she could manage. It took the girl a few seconds to find her calm, and despite the strength of Thatch's grip it wasn't until she offered another vine for Katie to cling to herself that she started to behave like she wasn't expecting to fall out of the sky at any moment.

“A—Ask before you do that, next time!” Katie complained, hands squeezing around the vine hard enough for Thatch to feel, “but... woah, this is useful, yeah. Do you see, um—” Katie spent a moment shuffling, making sure she had a solid grip with one arm before daring to let go with the other, so she could point— “over there, the trees seem taller!”

Thatch looked, peering into the distance. Surprisingly, while humans were outclassed in most respects by their Affini caretakers, visual acuity was somewhere where they were on a fairly even playing field. It took a moment to spot what she was looking at, but afterwards, Thatch hummed in assent.

“They do. It may also be the... altitude, you said, of the terrain.”

Katie tried to twist around to look Thatch in the face, a task with which Thatch was entirely willing to assist. “The ground doesn't have an altitude, it's... altitude is how high above the ground you are. Also, you avoided my question before, about how you learned those words, I noticed, and I still want an answer. If I'm going to go back to your society I want to know more about it, first.”

Thatch hummed again, feigning thought, before twisting Katie back outwards and pointing towards a space they could only barely see, where it looked like there might be a gap in the canopy. “That's more likely to be a river than higher ground, I think.”

“Thatch.”

Katie was prodding at questions Thatch would really rather not answer. There were much better places to start if you wanted an education into the Affini Compact's societal structure. Ones which Thatch was more comfortable speaking on. She gestured over to the gap with a mottled hand. “Perhaps we should head in that direction, Katie? We have much distance to cover if we're to reach there before nightfall. Of course, if you'd allow me to carry you we could make much better time.”

“Thatch.“

Thatch's center squirmed softly. She could have Katie effectively unconscious—or at least not able to ask difficult questions—in seconds, but then Katie probably wouldn't talk to her again. Wasn't she meant to be the one in charge here? Thatch tried to still the churning mess of plantlife within herself. “I... We could discuss the details of domestication protocol over dinner, tonight? I'll make something nice and hopefully we can create a fireplace. You humans love fireplaces, right?”

Katie was wrinkled by the last sentence, and Thatch felt a stab of guilt. There was a conversation there that needed having, but Katie's sense of self seemed built on such a soft foundation that now really didn't seem to be the time.

“We'll talk now,” Katie said, grabbing onto her support vine with two hands and holding tight. “Unless you're going to drop me, you're stuck up here until we decide which direction to go. You haven't been evasive about anything else, and if this is a dirty little secret then I want to know about it before I figure out what I'm going to do once we get back.”

The trees surrounding them shook slowly in a light breeze, giving the pair a subtle wavering motion as they hung several meters above the canopy. Thatch's leaves were rustling and squirming, and if she tried to lie to herself she could almost say it was only due to the wind. Almost. Of all the things to learn about the domestication program first, the cotyledons were perhaps the most complicated, ethically speaking. Certainly the last thing that Thatch wanted to discuss. Katie was giving her nowhere to hide, and the Affini cultural norm of drugging the poor thing out of her mind wasn't an option.

“Okay, you win,” Thatch sighed. “We'll talk about it, I promise. Can we do so while we're travelling? It may be a long discussion, and I don't want you going to bed tonight hungry.”

Katie squirmed energetically enough that Thatch was forced to relent, and let the girl turn to look towards her again. She didn't say anything, she only stared, the implication was clear, and more than a little painful.

“Katie,” Thatch said, face falling. “I have not lied to you. I will not lie to you. We will talk about it as soon as you wish, and that can be now, but I would rather prefer us to be traveling again as soon as possible. I know how often you need to eat, and I need some time to gather ingredients of my own.”

Her ward's expression softened, and Katie nodded a few times, seeming to relent. “Yeah, okay. That gap over there seems like our best bet. I think it's best if we walk, so take us back down to the surface—slowly!—and then let's talk.”

Thatch nodded quietly, mostly to herself. Katie's active hostility seemed to be slipping away, which was surely a good thing. Surely this couldn't lead to heartbreak for the poor thing.

For all her foresight, Thatch hadn't particularly considered how to get down. She supposed it would be like a lesser species raising a foot to walk and then needing to pause before they could set it back again. Moving around simply became second nature, and though this environment wasn't quite what she was used to, it still sported plenty of places to tightly wrap a vine.

Gravity made moving down easy. She had planned to simply let go and catch them at the bottom, but that wasn't slow by any measure. Instead, she had to carefully lower herself beneath the canopy by her three points of stability, so that she could see another set of points to whip vines out towards, and then repeat that process, lowering them a few meters at a time until finally they touched down on solid ground.

Thatch gently leaned down to place Katie's feet against the surface, and the girl took a moment to regain her balance, and seemingly a moment more simply lingering. Building trust was good, but Thatch couldn't help but feel a growing guilt. Humans bonded at an alarming rate, and she had to spend weeks alone with this one. The last thing Thatch wanted was to get Katie's hopes up that she'd be kept. It wasn't that she wasn't interesting, Thatch just wasn't into that kind of thing.

Her guilt wasn't soothed at all by the nature of the conversation they were about to have.

Thatch gave Katie a gentle push in the direction of their travel, and then set off next to her. Walking at human pace felt painfully slow to Thatch, who could move at twice the speed if she were to walk at her natural pace, or ten times if she abandoned the need to be relatable and hauled herself across the forest vine by vine. She could hardly leave the poor thing behind, though.

“So,” Thatch started. After a few moments, Katie glanced up at her, motioning for her to go on. “We do our very best to make all of our wards happy, and that means... everything to us, really. We learn all about you. How your bodies work, how your minds work. What you need and what you don't. We eagerly collect information on all the different ways that different ones of you work, so that we can provide individual love and care for every single one of you cuties.”

“Uh-huh,” Katie said, sounding unconvinced. “Last I checked, you people were ignoring our firm declarations of independence and got both of us into this mess by breaking into the ship I was crew on. That's one hell of an arrogant streak you have going on if you think that's 'caring'.”

While they walked, Thatch had a few other tasks to attend to. She was watching out for plants, mostly, hoping to find raw materials that she could synthesise something useful out of. As Katie's sentence reached its end, Thatch focused very hard on these other tasks. She leaned down, plucking a small collection of flowers from the area around, before opening up her left arm to reveal the dense collection of vines and buds within.

With a twist of two fingers, she plucked a few of her 'natural' buds and carefully placed the new flowers in their stead, waiting a few moments while willing her body to try growing into the new matter. She couldn't be sure they'd produce anything of value, but without better analytical tools, grafting them onto herself and giving them the nutrients they needed to try was about her best option.

Thatch glanced back towards Katie. Yes, she was still looking. Thatch turned her head back and busied herself with another set of flowers. She'd graft one of every species she could find if she had to. The botanical gardens back on the Elettarium stored a vast collection of some of the most useful things they'd discovered across a dozen galaxies, so Thatch was unlikely to reach more than a fraction of her prior potential until they got back, but she'd always enjoyed biochemistry and turning herself into a workbench with a lot of different chemicals to combine sounded like a way to pass the time.

Thatch looked back again. Katie was still looking, and looking less than impressed at that. Any other human she'd met would already have gotten distracted by something by now. This was much harder to deal with.

“Yes, it is,” she agreed, finally, having exhausted the unique species in their immediate area and thus every available distraction. “But we have a lot of experience doing this and we're right about it. You aren't the first species we've domesticated, we know what we're doing.”

Katie, unsurprisingly, didn't seem convinced by that answer. Most of the humans had come quietly, especially once they'd seen how much more capable the Affini were than their previous leadership, but some small number, like Katie, continued to rebel.

It was a problem of information, as far as Thatch was concerned. The truth traveled more slowly than the lies, and on relativistic scales that mattered. No matter how efficiently they distributed correct information about their arrival, it was always preceded by a shell of rumours and mistruths, and by the time the facts arrived some of the most vulnerable had already been taken in by the falsities and twisted against those who only wanted the best for them.

Hence, Katie. She didn't even know why she was fighting, she just was.

It took the girl a few minutes before she figured out a response. Though their forward progress was slow, it did give Thatch plenty of time to really rummage around for new species. She was already starting to find them less regularly, but all across the natural universe's forests, she'd never known any without wonderful biodiversity.

“Don't we get a say, though? Maybe you do know better, but I don't want that. I just want to be left alone until I know what I want, and you won't leave me alone. I don't want you to make me happy, or anything else, I want to figure out who I am. That's all I've ever wanted.”

Thatch could feel her core melting, vines squirming in sympathy. Katie wanted exactly what the Affini wanted to give her, and how long had she spent fighting simply due to lack of good information? How much of this could have been avoided? Thatch laid one of her few deep purple vines over the girl's shoulder. “C'mon, come here, you need a hug.”

“I don't— Don't domesticate me!” she complained, trying to disentangle herself, unsuccessfully. She needed a hug; Thatch was giving her one. That was the only reason. Everything was fine.

“To my knowledge, there isn't a domicile for light years. I'm not going to domesticate you, Katie, I just want to give you a hug. I think you've had a hard life and I don't want to make it any harder. I'm afraid we can't leave you entirely alone, but we only force anything on anyone if they're a danger to themselves or others. Or, admittedly, if we're certain that it's what they want and they're just playing coy, but if it turns out they really didn't want it we'd stop. I don't think I've ever heard of that actually happening, though. We're the good guys, Katie,” she said, with as kind a smile as she could manage, forcing Katie into a hug. Humans were almost uncomfortably easy, just the act of feeling something warm squeezing them released chemicals in their brain that made them happier.

“Mmmngh.” Katie squirmed enough to make it clear she was protesting, but not enough for Thatch to feel like she actually wanted out, and that was enough for her. “You're not the good guys. You're... space imperialists.”

“Wasn't the Terran Accord a space empire?” Thatch asked, noting that their forward velocity had been cut in half, like this. It was awkward enough that Katie was hardly able to find a stride, but it seemed important to comfort her.

“They weren't the good guys either. I dunno. I don't think I believe in good guys or bad guys? It's reductive, reality doesn't work like that. The Terrans forced their rules on me, and so are you. Everyone has their skeletons.”

Thatch blinked, expression shifting to one of gentle concern, lifting Katie's chin with a finger and giving her full attention. “Darling, I don't know what you've heard, but we're descended from something much closer to plants on your worlds. Our limbs are a choice. No skeletons.” she said, extending an arm and waggling it, letting it bend in places a bone never could.

She'd expected relief, or possibly discomfort at watching a humanoid shape behave so inhuman, but instead Katie began to convulse. Thatch's expression twisted into a concerned frown in an instant, as she brought up one of her natural flowers to the girl's face, ready to calm her down and settle her body at a moment's notice, but... no, this wasn't a panic attack. What was—

The convulsions finally spilled out into a few moments of bright, clear giggling as Katie fought for breath. “It's a saying, hon. It's not... literal skeletons! It means, uh... to have skeletons in your closet is to be hiding something bad, I guess? Some secret that they don't want you to know about.”

Katie's face grew more serious, and she shot Thatch a pointed glare. “Like your cotyledons.”

Ah. That.

Thatch looked away. How quickly could she get this part over with? Surely a good, succinct explanation would convince Katie to stop pushing? “We don't... broadcast it, but they're not in our... closets, Katie. The cotyledons are... the first of you.” Thatch could feel the stiffness in her limbs, the hesitance in her expression and the flat affect to her voice that suggested she was struggling to maintain her form. She wasn't sure why. Everything was fine. “Our first attempts at figuring you out, figuring out how to work with your bodies. Figuring out how to help you, and we don't always get it right straight away. There are so many of you in so many different shapes and sizes, and...”

Thatch looked away. Not saving everyone wasn't a personal failing, she knew. That hadn't mattered for the last fifty years, why would it matter now?

Katie's look could be predicted, at this point. Thatch didn't need to actually see it. “So why are you so hesitant to talk about this?” the girl asked. “If you're gonna tell me that you all know what you're doing and I should be happy to surrender, then you have to back that up with some evidence, Thatch. What is a cotyledon?” Katie asked, voice seeming to hammer into Thatch's very center.

“We don't always... get it right st—straight away. I know that must hurt to hear, but there are some within the Compact who will likely never think another thought in their lives. They're happy! All of them! But... they're not the best versions of themselves, and—”

Thatch's attention was attracted by a sharp pull on one of the many vines making up her torso. Katie was looking up with a concerned frown of her own. Why wasn't she more horrified? Thatch could feel her core slowing down as a familiar blanket of aimless frustration began to bubble up. She didn't want to be having this conversation. She didn't want to be here. She had better things to do. She had more important things to do. She had... apologies she could never make.

“And...” she tried to continue. “There's just so many things that can go wrong,” she breathed. “So many ways a body and mind can break. So many mistakes that can be made, before we know how it all works, that you can't take back.”

Thatch tried to focus on the forest that was really around her, not the sterile walls of an Affini medical unit. Not the machine beeping in one corner. Not the figure lying on the bed in the room's center. Not the— Was Katie saying something?

Ah, they'd stopped moving altogether now, Thatch realised. She had no memory of dropping to her knees, but that was exactly where she was. No wonder Katie seemed concerned. Thatch was fine, though. Everything was okay. She just had to get up and keep on going.

“Hey,” Katie said, struggling her way out of the Affini's grasp. That was absolutely something one of their wards should be able to do. Nothing was wrong. “Thatch, eyes on me.” Everything was fine. Everything was fine. Everything was—

Thatch recoiled, more in surprise than any kind of actual pain, as Katie slapped her, forcing her attention back to reality as the girl cried out in pain, with a bloody gash across her palm. Oh, dirt and roots, she shouldn't leave thorns pointing outwards like that, but this body was so new she didn't know where they all were yet. All of a sudden, Thatch was dragged back into reality, where it was just her and Katie deep within a dark forest.

“Oh, clod, I'm sorry, Katie, let me get that for y—”

The girl recoiled, pulling backwards with her face twisted in pain, cradling her now-bleeding hand in the other, teeth gritted. “Nope, nope, this was my bad, I don't know why I thought that was a good idea, by the goddess you're sharp. This isn't going to drug me, is it? I think I can feel my thoughts going already.”

“That's probably just shock, you wouldn't be talking otherwise. Please, let me at least clean it,” Thatch said, reaching within her chest to grab the tall weave of twigs and leaves they'd filled with water before leaving the source Katie had found. She held out a hand towards Katie. If she kept her focus on the moment, it was almost like the previous conversation hadn't happened. “Please?” she asked, using a supporting vine to keep her own hand from shaking.

Katie acquiesced, allowing her Affini guardian to tend to the wound. Thatch's thorns were new, and very sharp, and so while the wound was alarmingly deep it was at very least a clean cut. It should be stitched together, but they lacked the materials for that. Wrapping it in leaves and tying them tightly on with the stems of some local plants was about the best they could do on short notice.

As they began to travel again, the silence that stretched between them was sharper than any thorn. Katie seemed to move to speak several times, but never quite managed. They had a long way to go before the end of the day and the journey was only just beginning.

They'd been walking for what felt like hours. Katie's attempts to restart the conversation had been met with a few words in response at best. More often, a grunt or simple silence. It was hard to tell how long it had truly been, as she couldn't even see the sun's trail through the sky. It must have been a while, though. Katie's feet almost stung with the pain of it, and her legs had wanted to give out long ago.

All this, to crawl along the surface of a single rock. How far had they really gone? Would it even have taken the Indomitable a whole second to travel what was taking them a day?

Katie tripped over something hiding beneath the undergrowth and stumbled to her knees. She reached out to catch herself with a hand but the stabbing pain that shot through it reminded her why she was supposed to be keeping that hand safe.

Thatch was on her in a moment, the long silence between them finally broken by an exclamation of concern.

“Oh! I'm sorry, Katie, I was lost in thought. Let's get you back on your feet,” Thatch said, carefully wrapping a pair of vines around Katie's body so she could be lifted and held upright. With one vine still curled tightly around her pained foot and two more holding her up, Katie felt like she was being puppeted... but that was a price worth paying for getting her conversational partner talking again.

“It's okay, Thatch. You're not responsible for every bad thing that happens to me,” Katie insisted, gently poking the leaves wrapping her injured hand and wincing. Two more, smaller, vines wrapped around her wrists to hold them apart, and though Katie's struggles couldn't get her free of them, a pointed glare could.

The affini replied to that with a wry smile and something broadly approximating a shrug. It was more like a rippling motion through her upper body, but it got the point across. “Perhaps not, but I am responsible for missing the debris that tripped you,” she admitted, gesturing to the forest around them as a dozen minor vines poked up from beneath the undergrowth, before returning to the shadows beneath.

Katie followed one of them, intentionally going down to one knee, so she could lift the leaves of one of the plants keeping the ground beneath out of view. From this angle it was easier to spot what was going on. Hidden beneath Thatch's thick cape of foliage were many vines, ranging from a centimeter in thickness to perhaps an inch and a half, spiking down against the ground, where they scattered in every direction. Thatch continued walking for another few steps, so Katie could see the way the vines trailed behind her, not even disturbing the plants around them, before eventually getting pulled back in and replaced when they were too far behind.

“Is this what you've been focussed on?” Katie asked, glancing up at the center of all this hidden activity. Katie had thought the affini was moping, though in all honesty she lacked the knowledge to assume that they were even capable of such a thing. Their bodies weren't truly comparable to anything even remotely human, why would their minds be?

In a second of rapid motion every vine retracted. Maybe two seconds. It was fast. Several held small clumps of what looked like flowers or leaves, others were empty. The plantlife was delivered to one of Thatch's hands, and after that the long, powerful vines seemed to just join with the rest of her body, somehow finding room.

“Are you hollow in there, Thatch?” Katie asked. “Where do those go?”

Thatch had seemed to like explaining things, at least so long as Katie stayed away from sensitive subjects. Despite everything, Katie found herself sympathising. She apparently wasn't the only one on this planet with baggage.

Why wasn't Thatch answering her questions? She was busying herself with something. Pressing flowers into her arm? She was stood at her full height, easily twice Katie's size, and whatever she was paying attention to was out of Katie's line of sight.

Katie set her jaw. “Thatch!” she snapped. “Will you pay attention to me?”

Nothing. After a moment, the creature began walking onwards. The vines around Katie began to grow taut, and she was forced to follow or be pulled along besides. Was this the same creature as had come from beyond the stars to so effortlessly destroy her ship, and then save their lives from certain death? Katie needed that helping her if she was going to survive here, not the aloof thing currently walking away from her.

Thatch was acting exactly like the propaganda said they acted. Uncaring, other than appropriating the aesthetic of loving support in order to trick people into willing surrender. Katie had believed in that propaganda a night ago, but that was before Thatch had at least convinced her that it was a real, sapient, individual. If Thatch had been human, Katie would have thought she'd seen this before. What struggling person on the outskirts of humanity wasn't familiar with getting stuck inside of their own head?

Katie grumbled as she hurried to catch up. If she pushed herself, her foot still hurt, and her hand was still pained from the fall. All in all, not a terrible set of injuries given their situation, but certainly not convenient. She caught up with Thatch in just a few moments, and then reached out to grab onto the curtain of leaves at her back.

At closer inspection, it was a mix of several things. It wasn't actually wholly undergrowth, though the hexagonal leaves of the plants around them did feature heavily. There was also a tight latticework of smaller vines, some of which bore sharp thorns facing in towards Thatch's main body, binding the whole thing into a single cohesive sheet. There quite a few leaves with jagged edges, like the ones closer in to Thatch's center, mixed in with the straighter blades of this planet's flora. Most of them were stained with the same small set of colours, matching the plantlife around them, but it was easy to tell where natural Thatch ended and harvested material began. She seemed to have an awful lot of harvested material.

The criss-cross of vines made it easy for Katie to work her fingers in and pull. Getting a foothold was a bit harder, as the vines were too close and tight to pull that far apart, but if she tried a few times she could find a place where leaves gave her some purchase. The next handhold was harder, given that she needed to use her injured hand to get it, but so long as she didn't hold on too tight with that it worked.

Over several moments, she alternated between hand and foot, climbing steadily until she could get a hand onto Thatch's shoulder and haul herself up. Her footing faltered and she almost fell, but a vine shot out from beneath the curtain to give her the purchase she needed to finish her climb.

Thatch's arm was half open. It was hollow inside right now, but mostly because the vines that looked like they would usually be nestled within were instead poking out, arrayed before them. These weren't the thick, powerful kind of Thatch's outer shell, but instead dozens, maybe even hundreds of fine strands of green and greenish-yellow, each tipped with something. A flower only just starting to bloom, with what looked like a sharp needle spiking up from the middle of the rounded leaves. Buds in reds and purples. A few that switched abruptly from green along the vine to the darker shade of the hexagonal flower attached. As Katie watched, another bud was twisted off and discarded, replaced by one of the flowers harvested.

Huh. That was kinda cool, and utterly irrelevant. Katie reached around to grab Thatch's face and forcibly twist her head around, so she could be looked in the eyes. Katie didn't imagine she could have done it if Thatch had been willing to resist, but she was hardly responsive, never mind resisting.

“Do you know what a trigger is, Thatch?” Katie asked, looking Thatch straight in the eye and refusing to let her glance away.

“Yes,” the affini eventually, begrudgingly, responded. “A trigger is something several of our companion species sometimes experience. Some event, word, or stimulus that causes intense recall of trauma. If you have any, I assure you that any caretaker you choose or are assigned would become intimately aware of them and help you avoid experiencing that.”

Katie rolled her eyes. She was fine. “Your companion species, huh?” she asked, struggling to climb a little further upwards. “Put a vine here, would you?” she asked, reaching out to a space that would be a very helpful handhold if it was anything other than empty air. By the time her hand was there, so was a vine. They repeated that dance a couple times, until Katie managed to get herself settled, sitting around Thatch's neck, supported by a handful of vines to the back and resting her crossed arms atop the creature's head.

She pointed forward. “C'mon, we have a long way to go today. Mush.”

Katie took a deep breath, then continued. “Thatch, you basically shut down when we started talking abou— Before. You've been ignoring me for hours and the only times you've paid me any attention were if I was getting hurt. Does that sound like you're behaving normally?”

“I... have had a lot on my mind,” the creature admitted. From her position up here, Katie could feel the rumbling voice through her whole body. It was a loud, low drawl that was almost, but not entirely unlike any accent she'd heard a human speak. Perfectly intelligible, even musical, but clearly not from around here.

“Tell me about it,” Katie insisted. “What have you been thinking about for the last however long it's been?”

“I... I've been collecting a lot of these plants,” Thatch explained, still busying herself with their installation. “I think I have about enough that I can probably start to synthesise something useful for you. I'll need a few attempts, I expect, and it won't be as good as what I'm used to, though I suspect still better than whatever primitive medications you have subsisted on so far.”

“Okay, and? It's been a while and you're very clever, right? I've seen you moving around, I know that walking this slowly must be agonising for you. You orchestrate all these vines like it's nothing, it obviously doesn't take your full concentration. What else have you been thinking about?”

“I— I've been watching for things you might trip on?”

“Poorly.”

From her position perched atop, Katie could quite easily feel the ripple running through Thatch's body in response. She dropped an inch or two in height, vine lattice pulling together more tightly. Katie almost felt bad for her.

“I don't know what I've been thinking about,” Thatch finally admitted. “I don't want to talk about—”

Katie cut her off, hands moving to cover Thatch's mouth. “Hey, shush. We don't have to talk about anything you're not ready to. What was it you said, any potential caretaker would get to know your triggers intimately? Let me take care of you here too. Equals, remember?”

They were moving forward through the forest at a much faster pace this way than they had before. Even distracted, Thatch's legs were simply twice the size of Katie's, her stride was naturally longer. If Katie risked twisting around to look behind, she could see the vines below still spiking down into the undergrowth, presumably still sweeping the surface for raw materials, though likely no longer looking for things that would trip Katie. That job had switched, she noted, as a vine snapped out to break off a twig that would otherwise have scratched Katie's face as they walked.

“That is not usually how that works, Katie. Affini do not have caretakers,” Thatch replied, voice a little closer to her prior effortless arrogance. That was probably a good sign in some ways, though not very useful right now.

“Oh, well I'm glad to hear that the human race was conquered by another species that refuses to admit that they need therapy. That'll really help.”

Thatch's greenery squirmed uncomfortably. It felt like all of her vines were pulling in different directions at once, and Katie felt momentarily nauseous, sitting meters above the ground atop something that squirmed. Thankfully, it wasn't something she had to experience for long.

“Please do not judge my entire people based upon my sole example,” Thatch said, voice once more quiet, almost strained.

“Then don't judge me based on my people, Thatch. Think we can both treat each other like individuals, here? I'll admit that your problems don't reflect on the Affini if you admit that humanity's needs don't reflect on me.”

The predatory plant from beyond the stars let out a long, slow sigh, shoulders slipping. “I— Okay. You're probably right, I don't like talking about—”

Katie cut her off again. “We're not talking about it. It's okay. You're going to tell me about things you are comfortable with. Try to sell me on your deal. Don't say the decision's already made, don't say that I signed a treaty. Tell me what I get out of this; tell me what you get out of this. Ideally. Ignore the hard parts.”

Thatch's vines suddenly curled around Katie's torso, then pulled her around up front, so Thatch could look at her with a bemused expression. Katie shrugged back. “I doubt I'm gonna take you up on it, yeah? But... I've had some friends who were struggling and getting them to talk about things they're enthusiastic about helps, sometimes. Put me back on your shoulders and look where you're going, though, if you trip I have a long fall down.”

Katie was settling back in to her prior position when Thatch began to speak again. “Our 'deal', as you put it, is extremely straightforward, but I suspect that you'll need a longer retelling if you're to believe me. We are a very old species. We were exploring hypermetric theory while humanity, adorable menace that they were, were figuring out how to bang rocks together to make a spark. We figured out how to make ourselves nearly immortal long, long before there was meaningful human civilisation.”

Thatch threw her hands forward, twin vines sent hurtling into the distance to spike into two distant trees. The pair was pulled forward at twice the speed they'd been going before, more vines sent searching for more handholds to maintain their new pace.

“And at that point, Katie, a spacefaring civilisation must stop and ask why they are still doing this. We were siphoning power from our galaxy's central black hole, skimming matter from a thousand stars. Our society had already moved beyond the kind of barbarism yours portrays in ages past, but with near unlimited resources and power we were forced to answer the question of what it was that we actually wanted to do, with all our limits removed.

“At the same time, those around us were not so fortunate. They suffered and hurt, while lacking the wisdom to use any gifts of technology we could have granted them. Think what would have happened had we granted the Terran Accord even a single warship? You would have had tyranny.”

Katie could feel the wind in her hair. She clung tight to the two vines Thatch had set at her sides, holding on. If she pushed the left vine left, Thatch didn't seem to mind shifting her path, and so while her steed talked, Katie tried to keep them moving in the right direction.

“Katie, we are a precursor race that is far older than yours, and you cannot take care of yourselves. We have literally nothing better to do than to bring happiness to the universe.”

Katie pulled back on the vines, slowing their travel. It was still fast. “Happiness at your heel?”

Thatch slipped, and they veered dangerously off to one side, almost crashing into one of the gigantic trunks they were travelling past so quickly. It didn't take long for her to recover, but Katie could hardly fail to miss that her own suggestions were utterly ignored when they were actually in any danger.

“Not at my heel, but in principle, yes. We have more experience at making you happy than you do. We have more resources to make you happy than you do. We will do a better job, and this is the best way. If maintaining independence actually made any of our companion species happier, then they would be independent. Of the quadrillions of life forms we take care of, the number who resisted at any point is a rounding error, mostly focused around the new species that don't understand what we are offering.”

They were speeding back up now, and Thatch let Katie guide. She tried to steer them straight into the biggest tree she could spot, and, of course, was not allowed.

“Now, see, Katie, this is what I mean. Independence is a self-destructive, futile urge that you will be happier without. If you can manage those urges yourself then you will not be forcibly domesticated. Please behave, I don't want to have to do that any more than you want it done.”

Katie recoiled, as if stung, feeling her heart start to beat faster and louder until it threatened to drown out the wind. Her grip on Thatch's vines grew tighter and tighter until her knuckles were stained white. The sensation of rapid deceleration had her crying out in alarm, suddenly back aboard the Indomitable, hearing the crack of a dying engine and the roar of fire burning up all the oxygen onboard. She felt the heat of combustion against her skin and chill metal against her back. She was going to die. Nobody survived a situation like that.

In a moment, she realised all that she had thought had happened had been nothing more than broken fragments of dreams, caught in the instant the collision had knocked her unconscious. She was going to die. She was—

She felt a pinprick on the side of her neck. A rushing warmth spread out from the point, leaving her skin tingling. Her panic didn't vanish, not really, but like the escape pod had burst free of its dying mothership, Katie burst free of the visions she'd been trapped within. She gulped down a desperate breath, feeling the now-familiar hot and wet air that, at least in that moment, was like a salve. She felt Thatch's arms around her chest, squeezing just a little tighter than was comfortable. She smelled Thatch's gentle aroma, something sweet and tangy, but too subtle to detect outside of the shortest of ranges.

“Did you... drug me again?” Katie asked, feeling a spike of fear that faded away in an instant. She should be more afraid of that. This was literally how she was going to end up down their mines, and she couldn't be afraid of it? Katie focused, stoking her fears, and her breathing sped back up, heartrate rising, eyes going wider.

Thatch raised one of those flowers she'd seen earlier. The ones with the thin and sharp needle nestled between the petals. Threatening, if that was the word for somebody poised to calm you down whether you wanted it or not. Katie shook her head. “Just— Just making sure I can still be scared,” she admitted, letting her efforts lapse. The fear slipped away. “We said no messing with my head, Thatch, what the hell.”

Man, she should have been angrier. She couldn't get mad. That was inconvenient. Thatch kept saying that she didn't want to domesticate Katie, but wasn't this the first step? Katie grabbed at the threatening flower and turned it away. Whatever this was, it wasn't the concoction she'd been under the first time, that was for sure. She could still think.

Thatch nodded. “Yes, we did. I apologise unreservedly. Firstly, for a mistimed... let's call it a joke, on my part, and secondly for dosing you without your permission. I'd like to promise to do better on the first, and I hope you agree that the second was necessary. You were having a panic attack, Katie. I don't think that anything I can synthesise here will be nearly as effective or as targeted as what we have available on the Elettarium, but I'm hoping you'll tell me that this is as effective as I had hoped, and that you agree that it was necessary.”

Katie considered that. Her thinking was remarkably clear. Her mind was quiet in a way that made her realise how unquiet it usually was, filled with anxieties and doubts. She could still fear or panic if she tried, but... why would she try? This was technically a violation of the promise she'd had Thatch make, but something like this was hardly what Katie'd been thinking of when they'd made it. On the other hand, she could feel the terror bubbling underneath that thought, that she was okay with this having been done to her because this had been done to her.

“I... don't know that I can make that decision like this, Thatch, I'm... altered. I'm not me. That's terrifying, or it should be terrifying. I can't tell you this was okay.”

One of Thatch's needles came back up to rest against Katie's neck. She stiffened, face twisting in concern.

Thatch's hand stroked through her hair, with a few moments of soothing noises, before continuing in soft tones. “I have a counteragent right here. I'll apply it now, if that's okay, and then you can decide whether I have violated your trust.”

“No!” Katie exclaimed, hand moving to pull the vine away before it could penetrate her. “N—No, I— Can I keep this a little longer?”

Thatch's face wasn't visible, as Katie was being held too close to the being's chest, but she could feel Thatch's body freezing up for a moment, vines going stiff. What had been a comforting hug felt, for a brief instant, like a prison. Katie couldn't manage to be afraid of that either. After a moment, Thatch spoke. “You can,” she replied, taking a moment longer to run her faux fingers through Katie's hair. “Only for a little while, though. It's a little toxic. Not in a bad way, but I'll want it out of your system within a few hours and then you'll need plenty of rest.”

Thatch paused, warm hand resting atop Katie's warm head. “I... don't think it would be fair of me to continue our talk about domestication while you're like this.”

Katie shook her head as best she could, between the hand in one direction and the chest in another. “I'm not scared of you. You're just like me; broken and... people. Or... I don't like that word. 'People'. You're whatever I am.”

Thatch's vines wriggled, a brief callback to the uncomfortable moment before. She pulled back, lifting Katie's chin with a vine to make sure she was paying attention. “Katie, you are in an altered state of consciousness and I'm already worried you're going to be mad at me when you stop. Please don't say anything that you'll reg—”

Katie cut her off again. “Shuuuuuuuuuuuut it, plant,” she droned back, reaching out to try to cover Thatch's mouth. “Get me back on your shoulders and keep going. Can I drive?”

“Absolutely not. Your self-preservation instinct is likely somewhat impaired right now, and—”

“I said shut it, plant!” Katie replied, glaring up. She didn't feel aggressive, but she wasn't scared, either. She couldn't really think of any negative consequences of being forceful here.

Thatch groaned, muttering something under her breath before uncurling from around Katie so she could stand, and then lifting the girl to her back. “Didn't we agree no pet names?”

“You agreed no pet names; I made no such promise.” Katie insisted, grabbing two vines and pushing them both as far forward as she could reach. “Be more careful what you agree to next time.”

Thatch sighed, and began to move, picking up speed fairly rapidly, though not quite to the degree that Katie was demanding. “I shall bear this in mind next time I attempt to compromise with you, human,” she replied. Her natural drawl was already quite dry, but Katie thought she was starting to understand her mannerisms enough to read the sarcasm.

Katie fell silent. She could feel the fear and loathing bubbling underneath her mind, but it felt distant. It let her know how she should feel about things without forcing her to actually experience it. It was... convenient. She could get more introspection done in five seconds like this than she could in months without. Katie slowly pulled back on the control vines. She wasn't really sure why, Thatch seemed perfectly capable of conversing at high speeds, but the trees rushing past were distracting and her focus did seem easier to lose track of like this.

“I don't think I like that word very much,” Katie pondered. “It's weird, that idea is scary, but I don't really get why? I don't want to be human. I know I have to be, but I never asked to be, and it hasn't really brought me anything good. Are humans... good, Thatch? You've met other species. What are we like, relative to them?”

The creature that she was riding wasn't just a non-human life form, the way it spoke suggested that it knew many. Surely humanity was uniquely fucked?

“You are unique in a lot of interesting ways. You are pack animals, and so I suspect that as time goes by, humanity will spread throughout the Compact less than some other species, preferring to stick near other humans. You make some very cute noises when you're confused,—”

“No, no,” Katie interrupted. “The— The politics, the societal problems! The fascism! The way we, we, we just find things and strip-mine them, or how our best minds waste their time finding new ways to lock citizens into traps of debt or circumstance! How we— We destroy everything, in an ever-increasing sphere of exploitation until something breaks! Like it did when we ran into you!” Katie half-shouted, feeling her heart beat harder. Her emotions were harder to make stick, but apparently she was still capable of it if she tried.

“Oh, that's distressingly normal,” Thatch replied, without breaking stride. “I'd say... sixty percent? Some are better, some are worse. Humanity is pretty average.”

Katie pulled a face, pouting into the wind. That didn't make the subtle sensation of fear unfelt any calmer. She'd spent her life resenting humanity for what it had done to her, and then to hear that most of the universe was like that? It was... heartbreaking on a scale she'd never before imagined. With the fear not distracting her, it was so sad she could have cried... except that that was a strong emotion too, and she seemed incapable of it without great effort.

“Are there any that were good?” she asked, voice quiet. Was the universe really as cruel as she feared?

“Oh, yes, many. The species before yours, for example. They were wonderful negotiators who seemed to truly believe they could find common ground with any sapient life,” Thatch explained, while letting Katie steer her around a tangled group of fallen trunks.

Katie noted the past tense. Did they make good miners?

“What happened to them?” she asked.

Thatch emitted a questioning “hm?”, before realising what Katie was really asking. “Oh, we negotiated. Once we figured out their language, which was a bit of a tricky one, we met up, came to an agreement, and offered them a place with us. They accepted. Many of them came with us, some stayed behind with our unconditional support and access to our resources. One of the clerks aboard the Elettarium is one.”

“What are they called?” Katie asked, gently pushing the vines forward again. She couldn't see the sun, but it did feel like it was getting darker, and a little colder. Maybe evening was coming for them faster than they'd hoped.

Thatch let out a short laugh. “Oh, I couldn't even begin to pronounce it. I have never been close with the one aboard, but if you wish, I'm certain you could organise a conversation with her once we get back.”

Thatch's vines were a blur at this point, launching out four or five at a time to find strong places to anchor against. It was difficult to tell whether they were always suspended by enough vines to be stable, or whether they were being flung through the thick woods one tree at a time. Strangely, Katie didn't feel the fear beneath her waking mind that she might expect, even if she went looking, despite the inherent danger to her situation. They were moving so fast that she certainly wouldn't survive a crash, shouldn't she be afraid under her comforting chemical blanket? Why wouldn't she be?

“Okay,” Katie replied. The idea of getting back to the Affini ship was still terrifying, as it should be, but a distant fear. It could be dealt with later. “Hey, Thatch, I don't want the last things I got to choose on my own to be something that was forced on me because I'm human. I know that your treaty probably uses human as... biological, or a political construct, or something, but... does it have to apply to me?”

Thatch was silent for long moments, or as silent as she could be while moving at speeds that should have felt reckless. The bright red streaks that blurred around her cut through the air with an audible crack, and even the ones coming back landed with a thump. Eventually, though, she did find an answer.

“If it were up to me, I would suggest that it does not, but I think that is a matter that would need to be decided by a larger group. It could have... consequences. I would be willing to advocate on your behalf to the Elettarium board of domestication, however. I would reiterate, though, that that would be primarily an academic distinction, the Human Domestication Treaty primarily exists to define the rights and protections humanity receives. No sapient creature would be turned away simply because its government had not yet signed a document.”

Thatch gently slowed to a stop over the course of several seconds, before lifting Katie from her back and placing her on the ground to one side. Katie frowned, looking up at the face high above.

Thatch continued regardless. “However, the local governmental board for this system is, I suspect, me and me alone, and so I'll grant you a reprieve in this space. If you would like, I can also organise your official retreat from the human race, politically speaking, at least for the meantime.”

Katie looked away, focusing on anything else. She could feel her fear broiling, and though it was a distant emotion, it threatened to break through if it got any worse. “Why... did we stop? Is something wrong?”

“Oh, no, we've arrived,” Thatch announced, brushing a leaf against Katie's hand as she set into motion. Katie stood, confused, until the cast around her leg threatened to pull her along, and she was forced to follow. In moments, they came to exactly what they'd been looking for. A river, what must have been ten meters wide of fast flowing water.

Katie gasped, pointing as what looked much like a school of fish leaped from the surface. Bright blue, with an angular shape and no clear fins, they spiked out of the glimmering water to hang in the air for a long second, before crashing down.

The water sparkled with the dying embers of the day. The canopy high above broke when it reached the water, with no trees to sustain it, letting the system's star shine down upon them. Evening was here. That said, Katie had no idea how long the days on this planet were. For all she knew, they had hours yet before the dark took them. Alternatively, they could have minutes.

Katie turned to Thatch, nodding mostly to herself. She took a moment to try to remember their plan. She needed to be confident and caring, if she was to have anybody believe that she'd contributed to their rescue. “Okay, looks like we're here. We need food and shelter. How about I go gather some firewood and see if there's anything we can build with, and you see if you can find any food, and then we regroup?” Katie suggested, taking a moment to experimentally wiggle her foot, finding it usable enough on her own.

Thatch seemed to struggle for a moment. Every time it happened, Katie got a better understanding of her mannerisms. Where a human might have looked conflicted, here Thatch simply froze in place, if you were looking at anything a human might express themselves through. What Katie should be looking at, however, was the way that the floral latticework of Thatch's body softly quivered, or the way that the dense mass of plantlife at her center seemed to gently buzz. A moment of indecision, internal conflict that stole enough attention away that she stopped consciously reflecting her emotions onto her body, and fell back to the expressions she wasn't putting on for Katie's benefit.

The affini nodded, retrieving the vine that had formed Katie's cast, smiling down. “Be good, Katie. If you meet anything, call for me. I don't care if it looks harmless, you aren't a good judge of that right now. Don't go far, either. Stay where I can hear you if you call and I'll be there in a moment if you do.”

As the sun sank the shadows grew braver, blanketing the land inch by inch. Though the canopy high above had always seemed dark it was only through contrast that Katie could start to learn what the night would bring. The leaves high above were losing their colour, shifting from a detailed web of plums, purples, and violets—with perhaps the odd flash of mauve—to a sheet of black.

As the light above died the forest below seemed to grow more confident. Insects that had been hiding beforehand began to buzz, crawling out of nests nestled in burls of golden bark or from under the rot of fallen logs. Katie let out a short gasp of surprise as a school of softly glowing creatures took to the air, streaming out from behind a tree to swirl around one of the many flowers surrounding them.

Those too had come to life. Semi-transparent bulbs nestled between hexagonal leaves had been ever-present on their journey, but now the day had reached its end their purpose was revealing itself. Each was a tiny pinprick, either only visible now that the sun was acquiescing to night, or that the forest only truly came to life when it no longer needed to fear the light.

Katie knelt, running her hand along the undergrowth while watching the way the glowing plants shifted at her touch. It was beautiful. The forest had seemed almost static before, as if the only life around were her and Thatch, but it was proving quite the opposite.

The plants reacted to her presence, like this. Perhaps they always had, but it was simply more noticeable now. The glowing ones seemed to subtly lean in towards her from further away than she would have thought possible. As Katie moved between the trees the plants around her turned to look, though on closer inspection they had no more reaction than that. The insects too responded to her presence, albeit by scattering.

Katie made her way back towards the river, only to pause in amazement as she came upon it. The flow was fast and undulating, with regular sprays sent crashing away from rocks set throughout or against the banks to each side. It left a mist in the air and through that mist shone the lights of the forest, a thousand thousand twinkling points.

She had been walking for too long. Her foot was starting to hurt again, so she shuffled closer to the river and sat at its side, letting her legs dangle out above the water. She risked the occasional few droplets of spray, but she couldn't complain about the view. The strange cylindrical fish she'd noticed before still played, leaping from the water in large arcs, but now their purpose was made more clear as they snatched some of the glowing bugs out of the air into their large, open mouths. For a moment the glow could still be seen within, giving the fish an otherworldly look.

Appropriate, Katie supposed. She was certainly the first member of her civilisation to set foot here. Likely, her and Thatch were the first sapient life to ever get to appreciate the beauty around them. It was almost enough to make her feel lucky to be here.

Almost. The panic settled deep in Katie's stomach was trying quite hard to get her attention. It was distant and easy to ignore thanks to the soft chemical blanket that had been wrapped around her, but the knowledge of how she should be feeling still tainted the surrounding beauty.

The sound of a branch's crack from behind roused Katie's curiosity. She leaned backwards, lying on the floral carpet behind her so that she could crane her neck upwards to look behind. Something was walking up behind her, covered in little glowing points and moving with the easy grace of a predator. The way the tiny flashes of light danced in front of Katie's eyes was really pretty, but made it hard to tell what the thing was beside as her eyes adapted to the brightness and left the rest in shadow.

Wasn't she meant to do something if she saw something unusual? Thatch had... Oh! She should be calling for help, she remembered. Katie was, for a moment, fascinated by the experience of having something stalking towards her and not being afraid for her life, though if she felt around in the depths of her stomach she could still sense the fear that should have been there.

“Thatch? There's a thing,” she called, and the creature of light and shadow stopped coming. It shifted, a top piece seeming to tilt to one side. Questioning? Uncertainty? Katie couldn't quite tell.

“Are you quite alright, Katie?” the creature asked, as Katie followed the pretty lights on their bouncing journey closer. It spoke with pretty words, in a soft rhythm that matched the gentle path of the glowing points, sounding every bit like Thatch herself, down to the melodic lilt of each and every word.

Katie nodded, then squeaked quietly as something squirmed beneath her to lift her back to a sitting position. By the time she'd looked back around for the creature, Thatch was sitting next to her, covered in the little glowing plants. Oh. Katie reached out to touch one, wiggling it back and forth with a finger while she leaned closer to her partner, for the warmth. With the sun down it was getting chilly.

“Use your words, please,” Thatch insisted, gently taking Katie's hand in hers and guiding it back down. “Did you get the firewood?”

“Oh.” The firewood, right. That was what she'd been looking for before... she'd gotten distracted. “I... No, I'm sorry. Have you seen the forest? It's beautiful. Have you seen you? You're—”

Thatch pressed a soft finger to Katie's mouth, shushing her, and then used her other hand to stop the girl from nuzzling into the first. “Oh, dear. I think now might be the right time for you to take the counteragent for your earlier dose, Katie.”

Katie shook her head. “Mmmhh, no it's not. I'll panic again,” she admitted, testing the broiling mess in her stomach. “Can't I stay like this?”

Thatch's vines grew stiff for a moment. Katie was starting to recognise that expression. Thatch was surprised or uncertain or something like it. The plant eventually shook her head. “Not right now, no. I need you to be able to focus, okay? I think the chemicals in you are degenerating and I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we got them out.”

Katie firmly refused, shaking her head emphatically. She tried to lean back in to Thatch's side, feeling the rising heat and naturally gravitating towards it, but she was held away.

“Katie, please. I need you to trust me here, you wouldn't be making this decision without your current dosage,” Thatch insisted as if it wasn't obvious, tilting Katie's head up to look at her. She did look very serious, but wouldn't it be hard to tell?

Katie giggled, nodding. “That's the point, I wouldn't! But I am, and... Oh. Hmn.” The girl's giggles died out, as she took on a more pensive expression. “I don't want to start panicking again,” she admitted, trying to gather up all the different ways her mind wanted to split her focus and point them all in the same direction. It was unusually difficult.

Thatch let out a soft sigh and nodded. “I know. I'm sorry. I'll be here for you.”

Katie spent a moment considering that. It didn't seem like a very good trade, but the more she considered her behaviour, the more incongruent it seemed. Was this the choice she had to make? She could either not panic or have a self-preservation instinct? What a dumb choice.

Katie reluctantly nodded and Thatch slowly raised a small collection of vines, topped with flowers, to rest between them. It was a mix of species from this planet, it seemed, with a few of Thatch's natural growths mixed in.

“While most of my species prefers safe injections that can still be done in a struggle,” Thatch began, raising one of her flowers with the pointed needle into Katie's line of sight for a moment. “I find that when experimenting it can be much easier to control the mix of ingredients when aerosolised. When you're ready, I want you to lift that collection of flowers up to your face and take a deep breath. Can you do that for me, Katie? One big, deep breath?” Thatch asked, speaking slowly and clearly, as if she expected Katie to not understand.

Katie did understand, though, she thought. She leaned over, bumping into Thatch's warm side and slowly sliding downwards until her face was practically nestled within Thatch's curated garden. It had a potent set of scents. Mostly it was just Thatch, but stronger. The walking flora smelled kind of sweet, with a little bit of tang around the edges. It was usually very subtle, but Katie had spent more than a few minutes with her nose pressed up right against Thatch at this point, and she was getting good at recognising it.

“That's it,” Thatch whispered, one hand carefully pulling Katie's hair out of her face, the other moving to the back of her head, either to comfort or to hold her down. It wasn't clear. “Deep breaths for me now, Katie.”

Katie breathed in. Once, twice, and—

“Holy shit what,” she gasped, trying to pull the same expression as Thatch so often used where her whole body seemed to pull in and shrink. Katie couldn't do that, but she could try to curl up into a ball small enough that the universe might take pity on her and let her slip into hyperspace. “No, I— This is awful, I want to go back,” she whimpered, breathing growing uneven and uncertain.

Thatch's hands were around her a moment later, holding her close and still, head pointing outwards so she could watch the raging river beside them. It didn't seem to help. What had been tranquil and beautiful now seemed overwhelming. “I— Why would you do this to me?” Katie hissed, trying to force her way out of Thatch's iron grip, unsuccessfully.

The arms surrounding Katie didn't budge. “I know, I'm sorry,” Thatch whispered, fingers drawing lines in Katie's hair. “This is a lot and it shouldn't have to be. I didn't know what else to do, and then I made the mistake of letting you wander off without supervision, and I'm sorry. I should never have done this to you and I hope you can find a way to forgive me. I wasn't sure how else to stop you from panicki—”

“Not that!” Katie said, voice still a whisper, as she shook her head. The lights were so bright. The sky was so dark. The insects buzzing around them were endless and she felt so fragile and cold. Worse, her thousand minor anxieties were all rushing back, forcing her to meet each one by one in an uncomfortable greeting. She'd lived with them for so long that everything had melted into one dull haze in the back of her mind, and coming back to it after some time away was torture.

“You— Thank you for calming me down before,” Katie managed to force between uneven breaths. “You should have stopped it straight away but that's my bad not yours, I asked you not to and I didn't know. N— Not again, okay? Don't let me do that again. Don't let me make that decision without knowing what I'm doing, okay?”

Thatch's calming motions faltered for a moment, and she was silent for several more beyond, before finally coming to speak again. “I understand. I— won't do this without asking again,” she whispered, voice quiet and a little halting.

“Not what I mean,” Katie insisted, reaching up to pull one of the plant's arms down over her face, so she didn't have to look at the outside world. “Calm was good. If I can't have a conversation about it and I need to be calmed down, then do it, but don't let me stop you from un-doing it unless I have a clear head. It was... really nice but this is awful, and it isn't worth it,” Katie whimpered, holding Thatch's arm close. It was good that the creature hadn't bones, because she was pretty sure that a human arm couldn't have bent like she was demanding this one did.

Thatch didn't respond in words. The slow, firm soothing motions continued, making certain that Katie had no room to feel alone while she processed her every anxiety over from scratch. It took a while. By the time she was feeling calm enough to consider moving again, the sun was but a distant memory and the forest had finished coming to life. Even Thatch was a light show, covered in a dense pattern of glowing bulbs.

Eventually, things seemed still enough that Katie dared take a peek outside again. She still felt a spike of alarm at the life teeming around them, but no longer was it something that made her want to vanish into subatomic dust. Slowly, she pushed herself up. Thatch's arms, leaves, and vines parted around her as she did, only reforming once she was through.

“Sorry,” Katie started, before getting cut off by a gentle shake of the head.

“Let's keep our focus, hmn?” Thatch asked, raising herself to her feet in the entirely unfair manner of somebody who didn't really have to worry about leverage or balance. Katie spent a moment figuring out how to stand up herself, from her seated position, and then awkwardly rose in a several-stage operation that left her palms dirty and her knee a little scuffed. Thatch had offered a helping hand, obviously, but hadn't Katie been supported enough?

“Focus, right. Dinner?” Katie raised a hand to her mouth to cover a yawn. “...and bed?”

“Dinner and bed. We'll worry about the fire tomorrow, hm? I think we haven't time to cook anything tonight regardless, if you're already yawning.”

Katie began to protest. Thatch raised a hand to her own mouth, while opening it, and Katie's words were stifled by another yawn and then crushed beneath a raised eyebrow.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Katie said, raising her hands in defeat. “Did you find anything that looked edible?” Katie asked, cautiously skeptical. To her surprise, Thatch reached inside of one of her arms and did actually retrieve a small bundle of brightly coloured, triangular items.

“I found several other species around here which I believe should be edible, but I don't think they would have a very pleasant taste uncooked. These are a kind of fruit, I believe, with high sugar content and I don't feel any meaningful toxins. I don't think they'll be very healthy, so we'll try to prevent these from being a staple of your diet, but for tonight I think you deserve some comfort food, don't you?”

Thatch twisted the fruits out of their resting places. Had she taken the fruiting plants into herself too? Katie considered thinking about the implications of that, but as soon as Thatch handed one of the fruits over her body stopped pretending it wasn't hungry and admitted that she hadn't eaten for an entire day.

This one was bright red, a little hairy, and with an odd squish to it. Like a triangle, but with rounded points, and then extruded a centimeter or so into three dimensions, and about half the size of Katie's hand otherwise. Katie made a face, carefully biting the tip, and winced as red juices began to drip.

She wrapped her lips around the damaged piece and tried to suck the juices out, and...

“Mmh!” she exclaimed, raising her eyebrows and giving Thatch a thumbs up. 'Mostly sugar' sounded about right. It was like a hairy chocolate bar, but one of the good ones, not the mass produced shit she'd usually gotten in deep space. It took thirty seconds or so before she'd drunk most of it, and unfortunately that was the good bit. The actual fruit was stringy, with a slightly bitter aftertaste and an uncomfortable partition between the outer skin and the flesh within that made it difficult to cut through with teeth alone. All the same, Katie chewed it down and held out her hand for another.

Thatch had several. A whole plant's worth, by the look of it, but when Katie finished the second and held out her hand for a third, she got a gentle refusal instead.

“Katie, we need to ration these. We'll make you something healthier tomorrow,” Thatch declared. Why was it her decision? Just because she'd been the one to find them?

Katie frowned up at her partner. “Aren't we meant to be equals? You aren't in charge of me. Give me the fruit, Thatch,” she insisted, holding out her hand for a long moment in a quiet standoff.

The noises of the forest continued to swirl around them. The quiet hum of a million insects, each individually so quiet as to be silent, but together forming an unavoidable presence. The twinkling lights surrounding them mostly held still but some whirled around on unseen currents, moving with unknown goals.

Thatch looked far more of this world than not, joining in on the celebration of night surrounding them. Most of the planet barely reacted to Katie's presence, but that one small part that did was very focused. After a few moments more, Thatch handed a third fruit over.

“Thank you, Thatch,” Katie said, taking its weird hairy surface and giving it a gentle squeeze. She could feel the slippage within where the skin and the meat slid over each other.

“You're welcome, Katie. Are you sure you're still hungry? I imagine you don't want to ruin your sleep, either, and too much sugar will keep you awake. I think I could synthesise something to calm you down, but that seems like a very heavy-handed solution, no?”

Katie glanced down at the fruit. She didn't even want it any more. She bit into the side anyway, but after a moment of drinking she'd more than had enough. She pulled a face and held it away, watching the rest of the sweet nectar within dribble onto the undergrowth with a stomach full of regret.

Thatch reached out to take it back. “We'll save the rest for later, then,” she said, slipping it back inside her body with a patient smile. “What's next on your agenda?”

Katie glanced towards the sky. With the sun stolen away, the skies too were ablaze with a million million stars. An alien sky. As a Jump engineer Katie had crossed the length and breadth of Terran space and there was a difference in the skies between one side and the other, but it was subtle.

This sky, though, was unrecognisable. How far out had they gone? Just how far away had they gotten thrown?

“It's getting late,” Katie admitted. “Time for bed?”

Thatch nodded to herself. “Aren't you forgetting something, little Katie?” she asked, raising her eyebrows and staring down at the girl. Katie squirmed on her feet. Was she? What was there to forget here on an alien rock hanging below an alien sky?

Katie tilted her head to one side, uncomprehending, until Thatch continued. “Your medication, Katie, remember?” she asked, and Katie winced. She was usually pretty okay at remembering it, but it was a routine. As soon as the routine was interrupted her mind just never went there, and what was more of a routine interruption than this?

“Oh, right, that,” she said, feeling the blush rising on her cheeks. Given that it was the one thing in this universe keeping her sane she really should keep better track of it. She looked back up at Thatch, suddenly realising the implication. “Wait, you've made some? It's ready?”

The affini nodded, opening an arm to retrieve another twisted collection of vines and flowers that looked surprisingly intricate for flora. “Now, I'll need to be sure you understand the consequences, as per our earlier agreement, before we do this.”

Katie nodded quickly. “Yeah yeah, I got the whole informed consent thing out of the way a while back, gimme.”

Thatch deftly avoided Katie's attempt to grab the bundle of leaves, shifting away with preternatural ease. Katie again cursed the creature's ability to seemingly ignore inertia and balance by simply faking the whole body to begin with. “This is likely to be a little different. I wasn't able to perfectly reproduce human-level medication, so this is likely to be a lot more impactful, and you might notice some changes—”

“That's the point, Thatch! I want changes! I promise I understand,” Katie protested. Thatch continued to avoid her for a moment more, before finally wrapping a vine around Katie's torso and forcing her to calm down.

“You promised, Katie. We'd talk about anything that might 'mess with your head', and these might. If you wish to let me dose you with anything so long as I think you'd want it, then don't you think that rather leaves a gap in your defenses? If you'd rather I simply go ahead and do what I think would make you happy, however...”

Katie shook her head rapidly. “Ah, no, okay, yes, let's talk!” She remembered the last thing Thatch had given her quite clearly. When she thought about it now it terrified her, but at the time? Her head had been quiet and accepting, and she hadn't really minded at all. Was Katie one bad decision away from getting dosed with something that would stop her from ever wanting to be truly clear-headed again? She had to be careful here, if she was to get out of this with her sanity intact.

“My last hormone prescription did mess with my head a little,” she admitted, “but it was all good. I stopped feeling so dead inside all the time and started actually having emotions. Is this going to be more of that?”

Thatch nodded. “I believe so. Unless I made some big mistakes somewhere, it should be just like that. I've watered it down as much as I can so it's closer to your old dosage, but we can make it stronger over time if your body gets on with it. Until then, it'll still have to be a daily thing, but that should make it easier for you to remember. You know what to do here, right?”

Katie nodded. “Deep breaths,” she said, as Thatch brought the bundle of plantlife up to her face, and raised a hand to rest against the top of Katie's hair.

“That's right,” Thatch replied, voice soft and quiet. “Deep breath for me, now, Katie. Breath in. Hold,” Thatch guided, voice soft but firm. This was medicine, after all, you couldn't mess around with it. Katie breathed, smelling a potent floral scent. A mix of Thatch's usual aroma and a few other, more subtle smells, thick in the air.

Wherever the scent touched seemed to tingle, and as she took it into her body, Katie briefly thought she could feel the shape of her own lungs, before the soft sensation diffused throughout her entire form. Her skin felt lighter, her mind a little softer, but she was sure that was just her imagination. Just excited to be back on her medication.

Katie held her breath, only starting to worry towards the end, when it started to burn. Thankfully, Thatch continued. “And out. You did very well, Katie. One more time?”

Katie nodded. Was the lightheadedness because she'd been holding her breath or an effect of the new medication? Either way, she breathed it in again. Thatch didn't count with words this time, instead using a hand to indicate when Katie should breathe. True to her question, the second was the last, and while Katie was still holding her breath Thatch was busying herself folding the grouping back inside of herself.

Thatch's hand dropped; Katie breathed back out. It took a few moments for her breathing to steady afterwards, and several more for the scent to leave her nostrils, but Katie felt good. She wasn't going to be stranded here without her medication and that made everything seem a little bit easier. There were still going to be challenges, but... the challenge seemed more surmountable if she had a more stable foundation to begin from.

Thatch smiled down at her, one hand still resting lightly on the back of Katie's head. She pulled it away quickly, once she noticed. “Feeling okay, Katie?”

The girl nodded rapidly. “I—Yeah, thank you. This helps, a lot. I owe you one.”

Thatch raised a hand, shaking her head. “Debts are not a concept my people are comfortable with. Consider it a gift. Now, time for bed, perhaps?” she asked, stretching her false face with a false yawn that brought a real one to Katie's lips.

There was hardly much to prepare for bedtime. Without any meaningful camp to speak of, it was mostly a matter of finding a chunk of undergrowth that looked well sheltered and lying down in it. Katie picked one just out of sight of the river, hoping that come morning the sunlight would still wake her up. Thatch spent a few minutes poking and prodding at an area a few meters away, before eventually unceremoniously collapsing, bipedal form slumping apart in a display that probably should have been more discomforting than it was. Katie watched the way that her travelling companion went from being a person to something closer to a small hedge with interest.

If she looked for the person, Thatch was all gone. No face, no body, nothing. If she looked for Thatch, though, she was hard to miss. The same curiously hesitant way of moving. The same subtle aura of quiet surrounding her, something that Katie had only started noticing as they'd gotten deeper into the day. The same sweet scent. Katie had never really lost the sense that she was being watched, either, though she still couldn't prove it any better than she'd been able to when they'd first met.

Katie rolled over, pointing her head away from the glowing pile of leaves that was her... what? Companion, certainly. Partner, ostensibly. Friend? Hardly, but perhaps growing in that direction.

It was time to sleep.

Katie wondered if any part of their escape pod had made it to the ground. The last she'd seen it it had been disintegrating, so probably not, right? That was kind of a metaphor, right? The works of the Terran Accord burning up, leaving only her, right?

Ugh. Sleep! Katie rolled over in the other direction, maybe hoping that her thoughts would get lost in rotation.

How were they going to get off of this planet? Katie was a talented engineer and Thatch certainly seemed to have some smarts of her own, but what use was hypermetric theory if you didn't even have a campfire? Breaking the spacetime barrier required exotic forms of matter that they just didn't have access to. What were they gonna do, build a particle accelerator out of twigs?

Mrngf. Katie tried sleeping on her stomach but that was just painful, so she lay on her back instead.

It was cold.

The twinkling lights wanted to stab through her eyelids.

Her brain didn't want to let go. She was tired, but... hell, she hoped this wasn't having had too much sugar. Dumb stupid plant being right all the time.

With a sigh, Katie sat up and shuffled over to the only clump of plant matter around that she knew the name of, and took a moment to identify the sheet of leaves and vines that usually adorned Thatch's back.

“Not a word,” she whispered, as she tugged the sheet over to her chosen sleeping position. By the time she'd gotten there, there was a little bed of vines in place too, and at this point in the night Katie wasn't going to complain. It took a few more moments to figure out where she wanted everything, and then she took her place lying down and pulled the foliage over her. It was slightly warm and much more comfortable, and the only real problem was—

“Thatch, could you get the lights?” Katie whispered, and a few moments later, all the plants in the sheet began to dim, before going entirely dark. Katie tucked her head underneath, breathed deep of a familiar scent, and was asleep within moments.