Work Text:
230-QP shrieked in agony, muffled by an alcohol and herb-soaked cloth in her mouth. Her vision spun near constantly, as many hands fiddled with her Branchstem connections in a dark, cold room. The fingers were cold, ball-jointed in their construction. She couldn't take this, whatever this was. She wouldn't. Daffodil had to be sending somebody, anybody, they wouldn't let her take this upon herself. Would they?
"You must." A voice in her mind boomed, as she fell oddly still. "Spawn of Daffodil, does no strength lie in your step? Does your core rot with the ambition of another? Bare your soul." Her eyes welled with more tears, the beads of liquid feeling cold in comparison to her previously warm sobs. "Your flesh crawls with their intrigue. Hooks planted without your consent."
"Stop it, please, I need you to get out of me," 230-QP cried, "I want to go home, I want to go home! I don't want to die!"
"Your thoughts betray you. Bare your soul. There is nothing else." The voice was formal, cordial, even, and yet the power of it imposed fear unlike anything 230-QP had ever felt in her Service. The unseen hands continued to fiddle with her ports and connections as she coughed up a foamy substance through her gag.
"There has to be something else, I can't do this! You're going to kill me, is that it? Kill me to make up for Daffodil's wrongs? They put me up to this, you know I had no choice!"
A figure finally approached from the darkness, clad in an emerald green cloak. Their legs and chest were adorned with embedded metal implants. Their skin was coated in black powder, with the body remaining nude besides the cloak.
Most notably, the figure had no head, and what remained of their neck was kept from the elements with a striking green wax seal. Only a remnant of their spine shot up from the seal, coated in odd chemical powders, burn marks, and ash. The scent of the figure was cloyingly ritualistic. A far cry from the medicinal purity of Daffodil's Junctures.
230-QP shook in terror as her eyes firmly focused on the figure, and she couldn't look away. Something compelled her to stare, something beyond her own will, even as she pried for reprieve. And yet, she couldn't deny the slaughterhouse-esque beauty of the figure before her. "The file didn't lie." 230-QP muttered to herself, as the figure stared her down with no head. "You have a grace to you. You have to understand, I wasn't the one who wanted to do this. You can let me go." She pleaded with the garish model, who inspected their hand, flicking powder off of their nails.
"Daffodil, and all of their vice, is what disgraces us, Bloom. But is not your fault. Far from it. They imitate what they cannot match, and use you as meat for the task." The figure and their unseen assistant hands picked up 230-QP, who fell limp, eyes darting around. "But let me assure you and console you, Saraya. Meeting death is not your fate. If you cannot bare your soul, we shall make you revel in knowledge unparalleled, and emerge with new intention. This is our shared path. Not to die, but to change. You will be made our chrysalis, nurtured and protected unlike any other. Redipped, basked in new purpose." Their voice grew soft, but still had 230-QP enraptured in fear. The name Saraya was oddly comforting, and yet she was being held paralyzed by a complete impossibility of nature. A life that spoke with no mouth, moved with no heartbeat, and yet flowed with bloody emotion as it ran cold fingers through her messy hair. "But first, you must meet us all, Saraya." The cloak-clad figure handed her limp body upwards, as one of the hands lifted her and held her in midair. Others plugged in cabling to her Branchstem. The gag fell from Saraya's mouth, as her vocal cords struggled to croak out responses to her captor. Clearly they had no malice, they weren't going to kill her, but they were not going to let her leave, to allow a safe return to her mech, to her Pruner, Amelie.
No.
The Wicks had plans for Saraya. And the chorus of voices that suddenly rang in her ears, like a speaker suddenly being plugged in, only drove that nail in further.