Chapter Text
This is it, Chloë Sulla thought to herself, as she saw the ship come into view. It's all over.
She kept this to herself, of course. Life under the Accord, or what remained of the Accord, at the best of times was the kind of thing you had a lot more success in surviving if you learned how to avoid drawing attention to yourself with those kinds of statements, and she was not in the best of times. It showed weakness, it harmed morale, but most pressingly, it got you yelled at and written up, or worse. In her situation, it would definitely be worse.
Of course, she was 'one of those—' she wasn't going to call herself a slur she felt no love for, even in exposition. They didn't even get the right slur. She was effeminate and somewhat pale, especially with her iron pills running out, and on the short side, with sandy blonde hair that was, depending on who you asked (and several people had Opinions), either too short for the ponytail she was wearing or too long to be kept loose. She had the misfortune to have been born in a system that required a byzantine labyrinth of bureaucracy to get so much as a name change, so double-binds were part of the background radiation of her universe. She was perfectly stuck between "not a real man" and "not a real woman", and expecting them to even be aware of the fact that she didn't care to be either was another thing you kept to yourself.
Instead of relaying this and twenty other things she was constantly holding herself back from blurting out just to relieve some internal pressure, she patched into Engineering on the Captain's command and checked what she had to work with. Not much; they had been on the run for a while, and their fuel was running low. They were especially low on the exotic matter they'd need to get the fuck out of there. Their next jump, if they got that far, would have to be short and sweet.
That was later, though. Right now they had to get to the point where they could safely jump, and that was very difficult given the sheer size of the thing in front of them. The rest of the bridge was a riot of activity and calls and responses. Weapons were reporting direct hits and no apparent damage. Those rumours were true, she guessed; they were invincible, and impossible to destroy in a direct engagement. Then the whole ship heard a sound like a giant drum being struck, and reports started to come in about some kind of leech pod magnetically attached to the hull, then a hull breach, then boarders. She didn't catch how many. She was getting orders to manoeuver into a clear jumping lane, which she complied with; maybe they could deal with the small number of weeds that had made it onto the ship if they didn't also have the mothership to deal with.
She still knew it was all over, of course. This was the point of contact past which only ghosts made it back to the Accord. But she played it out, just in case she was wrong. It's not like it would—
What?
"Sir, say again?" she called out over the klaxon.
"13 lyes, heading 235-308." No, she had that right. The captain was ordering her to commit suicide.
"Sir, we don't have the exotics for that!"
"I don't care, lieutenant, we need to get out of Dodge, now."
She looked at her Captain— well. "Captain". There had been a mutiny. She didn't get caught up in it, thankfully; she was the only one who could pilot this thing worth a damn on the entire ship, and she didn't lose a ton of sleep about the last guy being spaced. The new boss was strikingly similar to the old boss: white, male, cisgender, buzzcut, grizzled, doesn't play nice with others. Adams or Roosevelt or something, something sufficiently reminiscent of the American Empire those guys always worshipped as the pinnacle of civilization. Whatever they kept saying humanity had to ~retvrn~ to, whatever that meant. She didn't even know why the V, and neither did they. The current mess they were in was, according to them, the direct result of not emulating that violent shitshow. Good times make soft men, or something.
She heard screaming —not as much as she thought, actually —and what sounded like singing. And it was getting closer.
Her insides turned to water. And something broke in her.
She knew what these things were going to do to her. She'd heard those rumours, too. All manner of horrible, terrible things. Slavery. Experimentation. Exploitation. Brainwashing. The whole nine. They said that when you became a captive they had a machine to suck out your soul and you became a hollow shell of your former self. That they were weaponizing stockholm syndrome. That they would turn you against your former allies.
That felt infinitely preferable to the spaghettification she was being ordered to put dozens of people through. She didn't know what it would feel like, and she didn't care to find out. It was two horror stories pitted against one another, and she chose the one she preferred.
"Sir, no sir, I'm not making a jump that'll kill everyone!"
Whether it was the shock of the rejection or the fact that everyone happened to take a breath at the same time, nobody spoke for a moment. The klaxon blared. She could feel her ears tense up every time it sounded.
"What did you say, Lieutenant?" the Captain said, barely audible in the din.
"I said I'm not making a jump that'll kill everyone, sir!"
The Captain was out of his seat and on her in a second, and hauled her to her feet by her lapels. "You fucking—" She expected the word 'coward'. It wasn't the one he used. "If we make this jump, we can beat the weeds we've got. If we don't, we kill them. Do you know how many fucking weeds we've killed so far? Zero confirmed. If we can't save ourselves, we'll take them down with us. We will take them down with us." It was a promise. "Do I make myself clear, lieutenant."
She was looking down. She never liked eye contact at the best of times, and she wasn't about to start now. At least she knew the name of her superior officer, now, as her eyes alighted on his name tag: It was Adams. "You can't do it without me. And I'm not doing it." She was calm for the first time in what felt like weeks. It was over. She could stop running. Finally. She didn't care that the end of everything she knew awaited her no matter what she did. She just wanted to stop. "Fuck your martyrdom. I want to survive."
Rage boiled over in Adams' face. He threw her to the ground, pulled his sidearm, and fired.
"Now, that was unnecessary, wasn't it?" came a voice that seemed to dance in the air with music.
It took both Chloë and Adams a second to catch up to what happened. Neither of them had caught that the plant had managed to breach the bridge. A vine ran between Adams and herself ending in a thin net, which contained the bullet. It was connected to a hulking beast of a weed —two weeds, apparently, or they could subdivide, as another mass of plant life split off and began to subdue the rest of the crew. Vines shot out, and heads fell out of view. It looked like they'd been invaded by a sentient boreal forest.
Adams screamed and began firing wildly into the first mass of plant, which had no apparent effect. The alien approached him. He turned his sidearm on himself— but another vine did something to the back of his hand, and before it could even point at him it spasmed and dropped the gun into a third vine, which yanked inside the alien somewhere.
This was all happening between Chloë and the rest of the crew. She couldn't see what was happening to them. All she knew was that they weren't screaming or fighting back any more.
The plant jabbed him in the neck with something, and he crumpled, right into its waiting arms.
It was gentle. That was what her brain focused on: How gentle it was. It was an enemy combatant, an alien conqueror, and yet it protected her, protected him, and seemingly painlessly rendered him unconscious, and didn't even let his head hit the console. It was far more forgiving than she was at that moment.
It looked like an act of love.
"Cuties pacified," came more singing from behind the first alien. It was beautiful.
"Almost," responded the first alien, turning its attention onto her.
She expected her blood to freeze, or her heart to pound, or for her to piss herself, anything other than what actually happened, which was that a wave of relief washed over her. Whatever they were going to do with her, it would be gentle. That wasn't so bad.
"Hello there," it said, kneeling down. "Would you like to come willingly or do you also need a nap?"
She looked down at Captain Adams, sleeping peacefully four feet away from her.
"…Can I have the nap anyway?" she asked.
The alien gave her what she interpreted as a knowing look, like she'd just said something very amusing to it.
"Of course you can. Nighty-night."
The vine shot out towards her.