It Takes Time <To Be Properly Taken Apart> - Chapter 23
Chapter 23
Chapter Length: 4,300~ wordsThe Sickness: Part II
Even an affini couldn't avoid getting hurt by you.
A monster more powerful than even real monsters.
How is it even possible?
To take others' love, and use it to maim them.
Conceptually speaking, *could* you even be worse?
This must be the most immoral that it's possible to get.
When everyone told you that you were bad, this is what they meant.
but in truth, we've been lying to ourselves.
The anger that we felt towards other people...
Because they couldn't - wouldn't care for us.
They deserved punishment, for hurting us so deeply.
No matter how disproportionate.
With trembling arms and legs, she slowly shifted out of her sitting posture. Sliding further down the bed, she rolled onto her side, reaching out for the duvet to try and grab the edge of it. It was just out of arm's reach, though, and she found that her body would not obey her commands to bend to get it. Her hand flailed uselessly, fingers nipping at the edge of the fabric, unable to get a good grip. Each time she thought she had taken a hold of it, it slipped out, and a surge of panic shot through her at the futility of her actions. Once, twice, then thrice; and she let out a raw scream and lunged towards it, grabbing it and throwing it over herself with all of her force.
The movement was so strong that the cover was sent flying half-way up her body. The sensation of being improperly covered was unbearable. Her legs started lashing out, kicking at the cover both as quickly and hard as they could while her hands gripped the other half. In a frenzy, she tried to reposition it as fast as she could, every moment that it did not cover her a sensory nightmare. It took seconds longer than she would have wanted, but finally, she was able to pull it up over her head. The light cut out, but not enough; she buried her face in her pillow, shutting her eyes as tightly as she could, and praying that darkness would take her.
One second passed in silence. Then another. Then a third, and it was then that she realised something was wrong. Her eyes shot open and one hand lurched out from underneath the cover, accompanied by a desperate twitching forward of her torso, and she stretched once again to reach something. This time it was not her cover, but the tail of her plush toy, Indrani. This time she was able to reach it, and the moment her fingers wrapped around his tail, she pulled him forward with all of her might and dragged him under the covers, wrapping her arms around him in a vice grip and crushing him.
Finally, she squeezed her eyes shut once more. Her vision cut out immediately, and she was left only with the terrible shaking sensation that coursed all throughout her body. She was hyper-aware of the beating of her heart; the way her breathing was coming and going in uneven gasps; the sense of pressure that felt like it was trying to crush her head; and the throbbing pain in her stomach. It felt like her entire body was breaking apart. She tried to think, but found that she couldn't. She could barely even locate the portion of her mind where thoughts originated. The ringing inside of her skull seemed to have swallowed her entire awareness, rendering her completely incapacitated.
Inos, you really are like this, aren't you? It's unbelievable. That something like you can actually be real... For such an atrocious being to exist? Does something worse than you actually exist? Surely, it's not actually possible, right? There cannot be anything more cruel than this. We tried to convince ourselves that they were wrong, We've always known that the things we do are bad. The way we've dehumanized them, thought of them as lesser... We told ourselves that, because of that, they deserved it. For the crime of leaving us out in the cold, any retaliation was acceptable. Whether or not what they did was intentional.
A little over a year ago, Raqi had first heard about the Affini Compact. The way she had been introduced to the universe's mightiest civilisation was not what one might have expected. It had come not from some fleet-wide broadcast, warning of an impending threat come to strip away their personhood; nor as part of some experiment gone wrong, or secret intelligence leaked from a fleetsec blacksite. Actually, it had come from reading fanfiction. One of her partners - Marya - had one day introduced her to something that the other girl had called the 'Landamaeri Domestication Guide.' It had been a strange occurrence: Marya was not the reading type, and much less so the sort of person to read what this piece of fiction turned out to be- which was drug kink plantkin pet play smut with an awful lot of hypnosis and non-con elements baked in. The landamaeri version of the setting was actually not original; it was derived from various pieces of imported xenofiction that had made their way into the Mobile Fleet over the years. The vast majority of the xenofiction originals had remained untranslated for decades after their importation, and even after some were eventually translated, they unsurprisingly found only a very small audience; given their subject matter. It was only when a group of yuyayni trans femmes had stumbled across the material that it had gained a small, cult audience; of whom Raqi's partner had rather shockingly turned out to be one member. At first, Raqi had found the entire thing decidedly off-putting. The affini, at least as depicted in the original Landamaeri Domestication Guide, were horrifying. Seemingly some sort of parody of qhispik political ideology mixed with imperialism and hardcore non-consent kink, her initial reading had seen her dismiss it as plebeian garbage only able to be enjoyed by people significantly more mentally ill than her. This had been a rather ironic response, however, given that she was probably the most mentally ill person she had ever met; and upon realising this, she had decided to give the setting a second look. Upon a more thorough investigation, the concept of the affini had begun to fascinate her. At a surface level, they seemed almost indefensibly evil; for all their claims of benevolence, most stories depicted them as utterly uncaring for concepts like 'consent' and 'autonomy', and they were commonly written with a superiority complex that seemed designed to make them hateable. Eventually, though, she immersed herself enough in the stories written in the setting to develop a deeper understanding of the philosophical underpinnings at play. The affini were unquestionably evil by landamaeri moral standards, but not by their own. Through their own frame of reference, the act of overriding the autonomy of sophonts who they knew better than, and whom they were objectively better at taking care of than said sophonts were themselves, was not just unproblematic; it was in fact a moral imperative. These dilemmas were not the way most people engaged with the setting, however. Eventually she was able to put her obsessive kuruki desire for internal consistency aside and start actually participating in the parts of it that everyone else was there for; namely, the part where giant alien plant women kidnapped you and forcibly fixed all of your mental health issues while also providing you with unconditional love and affection. This was, Raqi had ultimately been unable to deny, a fairly appealing premise. Even then, though, it hadn't actually been that which had ended up catching her interest: In truth, she didn't really want to have someone else fix all of her problems. Tackling them herself had been her life's work, and having someone else just swoop in and succeed where she had failed would not only invalidate all of that effort, it would outright destroy her identity. Instead, what she found herself drawn to was the way that Compact society functioned, as well as the way that intimacy was perceived among the affini. To at least some extent - as in, ignoring the fact that their society was divided into affini, florets, and independents as the only three classes, and everyone in them was expected to behave in certain consistent ways, which basically made their society uncomfortably authoritarian on a number of levels - the affini were hyper-individualistic. As she'd read more stories in the setting, she had come to realise that someone with the kind of quirks and unusual ways of interfacing with social interactions as she had would in fact not be all that strange at all in Compact society. Certainly, the plants wouldn't have understood her at first had she found her way to the Compact, but they also weren't predisposed to reject her the way almost all landamaeris were. Beyond simply being less likely to reject her outright, Raqi also found she had a number of interests in common with those of the affini. While she had found the subject of drugs rather offputting prior to discovering domestication literature, that had very quickly changed once she had done so; and she had quickly started to find the idea of chemically-altered mindsets almost as interesting as hypnotically-altered ones. Even more clearly attractive to her was the way that the majority of affini also seemed to adore hypnosis; making extensive use of conditioning and post-hypnotic suggestions in day-to-day life with their florets. This, in particular, had been what had snagged her: The way that entrancement and mesmerism were so deeply-rooted in affini romance sung to her. It had been as if she had found a civilisation comprised entirely of people that thought and loved the exact same way she did. Raqi couldn't conceptualise romantic affection towards someone without hypnosis being involved; either her doing it to them, or much more usually, them doing it to her. Without the ability to be put into trance, it didn't seem possible to her to form a genuine connection with another person. In order to truly and earnestly love someone, she needed to be able to be vulnerable around them in a way that only being hypnotised could allow her. Such connections were rare and difficult to find within the Mobile Fleet, and when they were found, it was almost exclusively in the form of long-distance relationships; never in-person. It was already tremendously hard to find a partner who was okay with her being transgender, yuyayni, disabled, and unable to work; finding one who was all of those things and also into hypnosis felt like it was just not going to happen. Maybe if she had lived in one of the major metropolises back on the Gliese, it might have been a possibility, but in the suburbs of her home there was no chance whatsoever. It was natural, then, that she - as had so many others - eventually began to dream of a world in which the Affini Compact was real. She had longed for a place where she could be accepted as herself; somewhere the default modes of connection were more similar - even if still not perfectly identical - to the ones she found natural. There were parts about the affini and the Compact that horrified her, certainly; their callous disregard for both autonomy and identity were arguably more dangerous to her than the inept and soulless discrimination of Mobile Fleet governance, which she had lived her entire life up until now learning to sidestep and stay out of sight of. But the rewards that such a world posed, were she willing to brave those dangers, were enough that she knew she would doubtlessly have taken the chance had the affini actually been real. Of course, the affini were not actually real. They were a fictional creation; one presumably the construct of other minority groups like the yuyayni that lived among other races. Much as one might yearn for the plants' intervention, they did not exist; and would therefore never come to liberate one from currency or the need to work. With this assumption taken as largely ironclad, few would have found surprising the level of shock that Raqi had experienced when she had become aware that the affini did actually exist.
They shouldn't have been real, she thought. Things like this aren't *supposed* to be real! It's like magic: you spend your entire life wishing that it existed and yearning for it, but no matter what you do, it isn't! It's not real, and so you can't find it! You don't just- look under your fucking bed one day and find a portal to some other world! And yet, that had been more or less exactly what had happened to her. She had dialed in the coordinates for the Rending Talon's first series of jumps after departing the LMF, fully expecting to find nothing at the end of her journey. But instead of nothing, she had found a civilisation almost exactly like the one she had heard spoken of in stories; with garden ships the size of moons, technology that was at first beyond her ability to conceive of, and at the helm of all of it, an impossibly powerful race of aliens that held within their grasp the capability to fulfill every single one of her dreams. And somehow, in spite of all their immense power, she had still found a way to hurt one of them. "How...?" She breathed, her voice interrupted mid-syllable by a small hiccup. "It... it shouldn't have even been possible. I'm just a person, I-I don't have any strength at all. So- so how... how is it that I still somehow managed to hurt one of you?" Her jaw began quavering once again, tears threatening to start streaming once more down the sides of her face. "Aren't you supposed to be invincible? Aren't you the strongest race in the entire universe? Why, then, did you let yourself get hurt by someone as small and pathetic as me?"
It's because she cares about you.
Raqi's breathing halted.
It never even occurred to you that she might feel that way about you;
that the affini might actually love their pets, not as pets,
but in the way that one landamaeri loves another.
The world seemed to crawl to a stop as Raqi processed the words, the weight of what she was hearing more than sufficient to bury her alive.
that the affini might actually love their pets, not as pets,
but in the way that one landamaeri loves another.
It's impossible to hold such feelings without also opening oneself up
to the possibility of being hurt.
You are correct in that, had she regarded you as an adversary,
then there is nothing you could possibly have done to stand against her.
But she didn't.
Instead, she opened herself up, and tried to welcome you in.
And you took the opportunity to impale her.
. . .
The universe became still. Every ambient thought and feeling faded away into nothing, until the only sensory input Raqi was left with was that of her eyes, as she stared at a spot on the wall.
to the possibility of being hurt.
You are correct in that, had she regarded you as an adversary,
then there is nothing you could possibly have done to stand against her.
But she didn't.
Instead, she opened herself up, and tried to welcome you in.
And you took the opportunity to impale her.
finality
A L E R T : : t h o u g h t f o r m s_d e t e c t e d
I D : : N/ATerraTranslate :: Raqi Marr :: Punica Granatum :: The Affini Compact :: Landamar Mobile Fleet :: Hormone Replacement Therapy :: The Chimera Module :: Affini :: Intersidera :: Posters :: Magnesium :: Wonderland :: The Hundredth Time: Part I :: Communication :: aftermath :: Physical Confrontation :: Garments :: Interspecies Comparisons :: Touch :: Equality :: Hypnokink :: Speaking :: ahftrojn,lpijmnhfkg :: Pretheya :: Magic :: scared :: Materas Marr ::