Chapter 2 of 'Feral Yield'
Part of The 'Eyes of Lilith' collaboration
Nikto x Afab!Reader || 2.8k
CW: This chapter contains depictions of captivity, coercive power dynamics, confinement, references to breeding programs and reproductive control, discussion of past torture and physical abuse, emotional manipulation, dehumanization, trauma-related themes, and developing obsessive attachment between characters. There is also a small mention of animal testing.
The Chamber of Petitions smelled faintly of pressed flowers and old paper. Both scents were equally important. The Verdant Mothers cultivated softness the way other factions cultivated fear: vines climbed stone pillars, sunlight filtered through panes of salvaged glass and dried lavender hung from rafters darkened by years of smoke. The effect was meant to soothe, but you’d always found it exhausting.
Across from you, The High Mother turned another page of the specimen dossier without looking up. The sound of it was dry in the quiet room.
"Transferred from Iron Daughter custody." A page turned. "Thirty-two confirmed combat engagements." Another. "Five escape attempts."
You resisted the urge to correct the record. Five documented escape attempts. The file contained gaps large enough to drive a convoy through, and she was just reading the cover.
The High Mother looked up. Her eyes were the color of river clay, and they did not move from yours. "And you are requesting exclusive assessment rights." Not a question, but a statement. The kind of statement designed to make you hear yourself say it aloud.
The dried lavender stirred faintly in the draft from the door. You can't say 'Because I can't stop thinking about him.'
"His behavioral profile is-" you search for the word, "anomalous."
"Anomalous males are not rare."
"-He himself isn't anomalous." The correction came out before you'd finished deciding to make it, and you watched her set down the dossier. "He is controlled."
"Most captives respond to confinement. Lash out. Spit." The words landed flat and you heard how thin they were. "He does not."
"Are you recommending breeder classification?"
You hesitated. The answer was ready, you had rehearsed it. And still, for the length of one shallow breath, it did not come.
The High Mother's eyes did not move from yours and her chin lifted almost imperceptibly.
A mistake.
The High Mother leaned back, the chair's legs creaking with the memory of dozens of similar interrogations. She was not a woman built for softness, no. She wouldn't be High Mother if she were. Her arms folded, fingers pressing the tailored sleeves of her jacket into crisp seams, and her gaze raked its way up and down the length of you as though you were another dossier in need of annotation.
"Explain, then," she said. "What makes you imagine you could achieve with direct assessment what the Iron Daughters could not with intimidation and isolation?"
You considered, briefly, what answer would satisfy her and what answer would be true. She would sniff out the difference either way. "Respect, Ma'am."
She arched an eyebrow, not out of surprise but as if nudging you toward the precipice of your own reasoning.
"He operates on a system of terms. Parameters. The Iron Daughters relied on fear to shape compliance, but he doesn't respond to fear- not the way they do. He responds to respect. He needs rules. Predictability. A closed circuit." You exhaled, saw the High Mother's eyes flick to the slight tremor of your hands. "If I can map those boundaries, I believe I can predict…or guide…his behavior. Productively."
"Productively," she repeated, syllables rolling across her tongue as though tasting them for toxins. "What, precisely, do you intend to produce?"
You swallowed, then let the truth climb up your throat. "He could be useful. Not in the typical way. His mind is-" you searched for the word, "-modular. Besides, if my evaluations are correct, and I am able to scour military records, I'm lead to believe fear and intimidation had been used on him in the past, pre-collapse." You shifted your weight and cleared your throat, your tongue suddenly feeling dry. "Scars found across his body suggest torture, Ma'am."
An odd smile breaks the plane of the High Mother's face, slow as thaw. "Your predecessor also enjoyed the challenge direct assessments." She taps a finger to the cover of the dossier, a small, deliberate gesture. "We permitted her to proceed. She is now with the maggots in the soil, as you know."
You nod.
The High Mother is not cruel, not exactly. She is worse: a gardener with an eye for soft rot, and in this moment you are a suspicious cluster of leaves beneath her thumb. "Do you regard yourself as immune, then?" she asks mildly. "There is often an assumption, among the younger of you, that selection denotes invincibility."
"Yet you request direct access."
You feel the compulsion to touch your hair, fix your collar - anything to banish the sense of being ten again, summoned for a scold. Instead, you force stillness. "I understand the dangers-"
"-Do you?" The High Mother's gaze is unbroken, her mouth softening almost to disappointment. "We are not Iron Daughters, to rely on threat and brutality. Nor are we The Guilded Enclave, to melt the mind with drugs and dream work. We cultivate trust and harvest it. When trust withers, so does the subject." She draws a line down the dossier's margin with her index finger. "This one will not simply wither. He will tug at the verdant chains of control until they break."
There is nothing to say, so you study the line she draws. The chamber is silent except for the wind and the distant drone of hydroponic pumps, and you’re just glad for the excuse to look anywhere but her eyes.
She sighs, a sound that immediately calls your attention back to her face, and for a moment, her gaze drops, the mask thinning; she traces the rim of her teacup with a thumbnail, gathering herself, before meeting her interlocutor's eyes again. The movement is brief, almost maternal, and its disapproving affection is the closest thing to permission anyone could expect.
"It is always daughters asking for their own knives," the High Mother says, her voice low and measured. "We grant you direct assessment. You will document every interaction. Failure, as you know, is not a private matter among us." Her hands fold on the dossier. "You will conduct all evaluations within your wing," the High Mother said, voice now freed from ritual and heavy with implication. "No observation glass, no static and certainly no Tether guards. I want nothing but your direct impression on record - and," here, a tap of her weathered nails on the thick manila folder, "a recommendation on whether he can be repurposed for breeding."
The word hung - no, it clung, resinous and sticky, refusing to fall to the floor like the others. Some found the breeding program distasteful, an unfortunate concession to the slow extinction of post-collapse fertility; others viewed it as a sacred duty. The High Mother, in her infinite pragmatism, treated it as a necessary strain to cultivate, a thing needed to ensure survival. Yet you imagined him inside your sanctum, somewhere between the rows of sweet basil and fingerling succulents, removing dirt from his nails with a hunter's patience. Would he even know why they'd transferred him, or would the purpose simply unfold, petal by petal, as you subjected him to rounds of surveys and psych evals and - when it came to it - physical inspection?
Behind the High Mother, a lattice of star jasmine carried the sharp musk of wet rope, and she set her teacup down with a click. "You will wear no weapons," she added, as if discussing dress code for a ceremony. "He is not to be shackled, restrained, or deprived of sleep. Our way is to offer trust until it is spent."
"Yes Ma'am, as always." You understood the risks, but the thought of having not a single weapon was daunting. Especially if he was to remain entirely free and unbound. But this was what you wanted, wasn't it? You wanted this male specimen to yourself, whether to be kept for pure observation and study or other things, it didn’t matter, right?
"He will be moved from central holding to your sanctum immediately; should you judge him unsuited for breeding, I expect you to recommend reclassification at once." The High Mother's decision flicks through the room like a fletched dart. Outside the chamber doors, the Tether guards don't hesitate: they move down the corridor and head towards the main holding cells. The message is clear - go, or be carried. You never need both feet to carry you from her presence, but today, you take care to move with an economy so measured, it’s almost provocative. But as you gathered the dossier and rose from your seat, the High Mother said one last thing, hitching you by the shoulders and pitched so low only you would hear: "Sometimes the knife is not for the other."
You pause, your back still facing her mid-turn as she speaks once more, "Do not disappoint me, Daughter. You will complete his transcript in total." Her tone is warm and expectant - her benediction always sounds like a threat. "No matter what occurs."
The doors to the Chamber of Petitions part, and you are expelled into the cool corridor where the scent of old leaves eclipses everything. The walk to your sanctum is brisk, a funnel of glass and green walls tunneling you toward your private ward, and you realize the sanctum is further than it needs to be, an architectural joke played on the uninitiated - how many steps to walk off self-doubt, exhaustion, or second thoughts before you can lock a patient in with yourself and call it therapy?
The walk across the open spaces between buildings, sky swollen with the promise of rain but not the release, did nothing to persuade the tremor from your hands. Beyond the reinforced glass, the east quad’s beds of oregano and marigolds lay unravaged by the morning’s predictions. Pale wet light gathered in the corners of the corridor where it met your sanctum, and you waited until the last possible moment to finally unlatch the heavy metal door to your own private sanctum. A place you’d hoped to catch your breath, to recalibrate and recenter after a live wire conversation with The High Mother.
Yet, inside the room was not as you’d left it. The floriculture assistants had, as instructed, removed all loose instruments and any glass vessels large enough to break and re-form as shivs. Still, the air buzzed with a second presence: that sensorial pull like a finger pressed to your sternum, and you stepped in.
He was standing - no, not standing, bracing - just in front of the fenestration, barefoot on the poured-concrete slab, wrists bound with cordage but chained to a floor ring. Head tipped all the way back, he let the sun melt his features into nothing but jaw and throat. Even from the doorway, you saw his scars: the wretched kind, the kind no one gets by accident.
He opened his eyes and his gaze flicked to you like a predator catching sight of dinner, each of you within line of sight.
You caught yourself mid-flinch, settling into the clinical calm you'd practiced since becoming a Seedwarden. His gaze was flat and chemical. At the intake, someone had compared it to "seeing the light switch flip in a laboratory animal when the voltage gets dialed higher." You'd found the analogy tasteless and, now, also apt.
"I see they brought you in quicker than I'd expected." You set his dossier down on the side table, close the latch behind you with a slow click, and let the transition settle on your skin like humidity. He is just as you remember (not just, never just; the sight triggers a firefly tremor at your collarbone, small and bright), taller than you'd recall from the intake file, all tendon and blunt threat. Someone has given him a threadbare tee from the waste-wardrobe and shorts, which do nothing to hide the newest contusions rising in tight halos around knees and elbows. Barefoot, of course, as if even shoes would present a risk.
"I've been given explicit permission to keep you for direct assessment, do you understand what that means?" His head rolls fractionally, to let his gaze drag from head to toe. Nothing else. He doesn't answer and you don't expect him to. His breathing changes; quickens, then hardens into long, deliberate draws. You see the way the banding of his chest and shoulders pulls the filaments of the old tee he was put in go taut, a negotiation between muscle and fabric, will and wall.
"There's been a change in your status," you say, stepping forward so the bright afternoon light pools around your feet, and then his. "You're to remain here, in this room, unbound. That is a direct order. Unchained, unguarded. I am to observe you, live with you, document everything." You pause to listen for mockery, for anything. There’s nothing but the click and whirr of the humidity gauge over your head, and the tiny ticking of the clock on the wall.
He inhales, slow and regular, and you realize he's reading you the same way you read him: by scent, by posture, by the microscopic betrayals of a face that wants to be unreadable.
You move close enough that the petrichor tang you carry - soap and rain and the residue of basil - drifts into his orbit. He closes his eyes, once, and a muscle jumps at the corner of his jaw. When he looks back at you, something has changed. You think: animal, but not a dog. Dogs hope. This one takes the measure of every pleasure and punishment with the same cold calculus.
"Your wrists," you say, gesturing. "You'll let me unbind you?" He shifts his weight, spine straightening, head angled so suspicion and calculation are both visible, both deliberate. This is a test - the first, or one of thousands and he waits, as if expecting you to get closer. On his wrists, the rope bites into healed-over scars from other bindings, some healed so neatly you wonder if they had been self-inflicted. He lifts his hands, not as acquiescence but as an exhibit, holding the woundless side up.
For a full measure of breaths, more than a normal person would abide, he simply exists, ears pricked for some hidden clause or as if listening once more to someone who isn’t there. And then at last he speaks. His voice so dry and hollow that you barely hear it.
"Da." The Russian syllable floats up as ragged as moth wings against your tongue and for a moment you wonder if you'd simply imagined it. You blink, cock your head. The syllable seems to hang in the moist air, gathering a faint undercurrent of memory: childhood lessons with the multilingual tutor, odd phrases pronounced around the communal table, the cadence of a tongue from another collapsing empire. 'Da,' he'd said. Yes. You nod, lips twitching at the corners – half-smile, half signal, as if confirming for him that neither of them are as alone in this room as protocol insists.
Your hands reach forward with the practiced caution of someone who has bandaged both wildcats and grieving children. The cordage at his wrists is thermal-seared, woven from a plastic melted down from the ruins of some pre-collapse city. You pick at the knot, and for a suspended moment they inhabit a shared stillness, your breath and his now synced by task and adrenaline. On the surface tension of this moment swim two unvoiced questions: will he move, and will you let herself flinch if he does.
His breathing is conspicuously heavy. You note (with clinical detachment) the flare of his nostrils and the way his body seems ready to coil, not for violence but for bolt. So you speak in the steadied tone one uses for animals brought too suddenly into a bright room: "If I take these off, you don't run." A statement, not a query.
And once more he offers a single syllable, "Da."
The sound is small in the room, almost unimpressive on its own, but it settles into everything anyway. Not agreement, not permission. Something closer to acknowledgment, as if your question had simply confirmed a condition already understood.
Your fingers tighten around the knot and the fibers give easily beneath your hands, too easily, and the cord slips free in a slow, reluctant fall. It lands against the concrete with a soft weight that feels louder than it should. His wrists are pale where the cord pressed, two bands of bloodless skin standing out against dirt and bruising like negative space, and the freed restraint lies coiled between you, its frayed end catching what little light reaches this corner of the room. His hands do not move at first. They rest on his thighs, palms down, as if the absence of restraint has to be confirmed visually before his body will accept it. As if stillness is the only proof he trusts.
The sight tightens something low in your chest, subtle enough that you almost mistake it for tension. Your mouth goes dry anyway, tongue heavy against your teeth in the way it does when a decision stops being theoretical and becomes irreversible.
Only when his hands begin to move do you realize he was never waiting for permission.
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
izzy806
dededos
origamiaround
snowghoul
