Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #19 – Before the Storm

Kryzalid felt a foreign pressure on her head, the pressure of five oversized fingers playing with her hair. She groaned, muttered something barely intelligible, as the fingers started twisting her braids too. That was mildly annoying, to say the least, but not the worst way to wake up. She opened her eyes, for what little it helped her, tried to focus on the formless blob of color standing close to the sofa. A massive gray patch, with a smaller red patch high up where a head should have been. She smirked, grinned at the mysterious silhouette – one that wasn’t so mysterious, after all. A sleepy whisper escaped her lips, her voice raspier than usual.

“Happy to see that you ain’t become fertilizer, Dobrio.”

“Oh, you’ve recognized me?”

“Nobody else has your same dumb blocky structure.”

She couldn’t discern his reaction, of course, but in her heart she knew that Dobrio was smiling – or doing the closest equivalent his expressionless face allowed him to. She let her head lay on the armrest, her left arm falling on the side of the sofa, touching the floor, drawing shapes in the dust. Dobrio patted her head again, somewhat more vigorously.

“You know, it’s refreshing to see you this relaxed.”

“Huh-uh. It’s… nice, for once. Shame for the circumstances.”

Her right hand slid over the back of the rhizome lying at her side, who was still dozing in her soft embrace. Kryzalid caressed those small ridges of bark growing on the other girl’s spine, ridges that were covering her skin in an intricate – if small – network of short tendrils. It started from around her shoulder blades and developed down to her hips, shrinking in size till it disappeared right above her tailbone. Usually, those structures were hidden by that girl’s dark garments, but, this time, there was nothing preventing Dobrio to see them, to admire their irregular and yet somehow symmetric shape. That mass of vines that made her left arm was now scattered all over Kryzalid’s body too, bending to the will of gravity and Morpheus. Kryzalid rubbed her forehead against hers, without saying a word. She would have paid her own weight in solid gold to be able to see, to be able to contemplate that vision, to catch a glimpse of Lacrima in the peaceful sleep that followed their intimate dance together. Her eye rose was shining in the soft lights of the room, to the point where even Kryzalid could identify it, despite her sight issues. And bite it, delicately, without damaging the petals, without leaving a tooth mark on them. There was still some residual lymph scattered around the corolla, but not a lot – just faint traces.

Dobrio sat on the ground, in front of the sofa, his red eye darted around the two tangled bodies, seeing nothing but skin, hair and plant matter from their heads down to their toes – broken by an occasional plaster or roll of gauze. He patted back Kryzalid’s head, pushing with slightly more strength than before, just to annoy her.

“How did you two… you know, end up like this? Seriously, it wasn’t on my bingo.”

“She needed an emergency draining of her excess lymph. I… just complied. And let her suck my water too.”

“That’s the coward answer, innit?”

“…maybe.”

Kryzalid kissed Lacrima’s forehead, bringing it to her chest. Her scream. Her pain. She couldn’t bear it. They were harrowing. Just after they left the collapsed metro station, Lacrima limped, breathed heavily, stumbled, fell twice, three times. Lymph was overflowing from her flower, her mouth, her eye too. She gasped for air, threw up, one more time, one more time. Robin and Kryzalid helped her stand up, helped her move, through the maze of tunnels under the fallen city, but it was clear that she was at her limit. Every step a torture, as her mind went hazier and hazier every moment longer. When they reached the shelter, she was already raving about water, about urgently needing water, yet still hanging to her sanity, lucid enough to see what was happening around her. And that’s when it happened. Her vines. Started to eat the skin of her left shoulder. Her spine ridges. Expanding, trouncing their way to her sides. Her rose. Letting out tendrils, anchoring to her cheeks. Lymph overflow. Overfeeding her plant matter, killing her human side. Not going to stop. She vomited a couple times more, expelling as much lymph as she could, slowing down the expansion, but not stopping it. Before Kryzalid volunteered to help her with the release. And Lacrima accepted it, begging her to go through that one method that caused the least pain, but left her numb afterwards. That time, she wanted to go numb, to go limp, not to feel her body taken over by her plant self, not to witness it turning into a monster. So that, even if the emergency maneuver failed, her last precious memories would have been safe.

“Drink my lymph. Drink all of it. Drain me dry. P… please!”

An offer that sounded too good to be rue.

One Mimi couldn’t refuse.

Which led to that strange situation Dobrio walked into, catching them after the act, softly hugging each other in a way that he would have defined ‘tender’. A side of Mimi that he had seldom seen, and only when she was deep in her depressive phases. He crossed his arms, still sitting close to her.

“Robin gave me a short summary – the whole caboodle about the ‘zomes, the Corps and the show you set up in the Eye. Guess that worked – she kept repeating stuff like ‘that plant, what in Lagash was that plant?’. Good job, no notes. But how’s our house plant feeling, right now?”

Kryzalid’s fingers played with Lacrima’s hair, spreading the strands all around her back.

“…better She’s sleeping soundly and she’s not sweating lymph anymore. We got her… just in time.”

“Plant gal saved by having sex with a horny junkie. That’s a title for The Babylon’s Ark, if I’ve ever read one.”

Kryzalid smirked, her left hand moved on the floor, till it met a tin can. She grabbed it, lifted it up.

“This is for you, Dobrio. I kept one aside.”

“…Kryz, that’s not plant piss, I hope.”

“Nope, it comes from Laccy’s rose. I packed it at the beginning of her overflow crisis. It was too good to let it go wasted.”

Dobrio grabbed the can from Kryzalid’s hand, stared at it for a couple of seconds, brought it close to his eye, examined the content.

“And, what’s the verdict, maitre gourmet?”

“She tastes wonderfully. I can’t… get enough of her. The sweetest… purest… lymph I’ve ever tasted in my life. I just… I want more, Dobrio. I… I have to…”

“You have to have dinner and then get checked, right now, or your aunt will kill me dead. Heck, I’m sure she’s hidden a bomb somewhere inside my neck and is only waiting for the right time to detonate it. So, better do what she says, yes? Here, I brought you something. Freshly roasted chicken, right from our neighbor.”

“…the one who raised that massive two-headed rooster for that betting ring?”

“That one, yes.”

Kryzalid reluctantly freed herself from Lacrima’s grasp, sat on the sofa. Her hand browsed the bag Dobrio opened in front of her, her fingers examined the poultry wrapped in aluminum foil, going through its shapes.

“…why does this chicken have two necks too?”

“Because it’s exactly that rooster. Look, it lost an important cockfight and – huh – his owner didn’t take it well. But, hey, it was cheap.”

“…figures.”

Kryzalid grabbed a drumstick, ripped it off from the roasted chicken, bit it with gusto. It was tasty. Not as much as Lacrima’s lymph, but it felt good. Her teeth stripped the meat away from the bone, chewed it faster and faster, as her stomach started complaining for the excessive waste of energies and lack of nutrients. Dobrio stared at her in silence, contemplating that bizarre scene. Kryzalid, in her birthday suit, eating roasted chicken while cuddling a sleeping rhizome, also in her birthday suit, after they went at it like wild animals for what he hoped to be hours (mostly because it made the picture funnier, not because it made biological sense). That was, if possible, the weirdest vignette involving Kryzalid that he ever witnessed in the time they worked together. He grabbed the lymph can again, stared at it shortly. Then, shoved it down his neck exhaust, slowly, drop by drop. His eye widened all of a sudden, as his nerves experienced pure bliss, one that neither synth stuff nor plant piss could trigger. Heavenly. Simply heavenly. Dobrio burst into laughter, as he flushed the whole can of lymph down his duct.

“HA! HA HA! Lagash take me, this is gooooood. You weren’t joking! Woooowie!”

That was on a whole other level than the one he tasted the day before. For whatever reason, the lymph that leaked from Lacrima’s wounds felt like a poor imitation of whatever triggered the mystic experience he was subjected to right now. He tried to keep his exhilaration under control, though, as having an excited druggie going around singing and dancing in an abandoned emergency shelter wasn’t the best of the ideas. Still, it felt properly inebriating, as if he downed five times the amount of synth. Top quality, something he never managed to pour into his system ever. He sat down again, while his brain went places, while his senses expanded into a deeper understanding of the universe. Till he heard a new noise. A rustling one. Vines moving, right close to him. A groan, a slow movement of the legs. It was Lacrima, waking up, still in a daze, her eye half closed.

“…huh. Mimi…?”

Kryzalid turned around, what was left of the drumstick filling her mouth. She patted Lacrima’s hair, caressed it.

“It’s all fine, it’s all fine. You’re safe, Laccy – safe and dry.”

Lacrima nodded, slowly rose up, sitting close to Kryzalid on the sofa. She shook her head a couple times, stretching a little too, before letting out a yawn. And, in that moment, Dobrio pushed a chicken drumstick into her open mouth.

“You need to eat too! See? It’s good! Eat, Lacrima! It’s all protein!”

Lacrima almost chocked, her teeth sunk into the roasted meat as an automatic reflex. She pulled it out in a rush, coughed two, three times. Then, she observed that unwanted meal that almost blocked her vestigial digestive system, blinked once. Twice.

“…Dobrio… this is…”

Her voice died in her throat. She watched in horror as Kryzalid’s teeth closed around a similar drumstick, gulping down bites of white meat. That bone conformation. That general body shape. She shivered in shock, her whole body traversed by rage, anger, inability to comprehend, causing her teeth to clash against each other. Till Kryzalid connected the dots. And almost spat her chicken on the floor, before hugging Lacrima and rubbing her own forehead on her cheek.

“Oh fuck! Laccy, no, no, no! We didn’t do it on purpose!”

Dobrio stared at the chicken, stared at them, stared at the chicken again.

“Do… what on purpose?”

“You absolute blockheaded blockhead! You gave her a cooked dead bird!”

“Huh, and where is the…”

Dobrio’s brain cells finally returned to a workable state, the temporary inebriation almost over. Almost. But enough to understand what had just happened.

“Oh. Oooooh. Oh. Huh.”

His eye met Lacrima’s, an eye still incapable of processing the events of the last few minutes. Almost in a panic, Dobrio browsed his brain, before reaching what he held as a satisfying excuse.

“Well, huh… it had two heads, you know. We just – huh – stopped its suffering.”

Only for Kryzalid to want to smash a chair on his head, burn him to a crisp, and hold Lacrima even tighter in her arms.

“Laccy, he’s an idiot! A real idiot! He didn’t want to…”

Yet, something didn’t add up. Lacrima’s expression. Was weird. Discomfort. Definitely discomfort. But not anger. Her hand reached for Mimi’s grabbed it, squeezed it in her fingers.

“Mimi? Please, stop rubbing your skin against mine like that, otherwise my body will start producing excess lymph again. And yours will start dripping water too.”

A massive veil of awkwardness fell among the trio, accompanied by silence. Thick, heavy silence. Till Mimi started laughing, laughing to her heart’s content, hugging Lacrima way stronger than before, bringing the rhizome’s head to her chest.

“Sorry, I don’t… I don’t know what got into me, I just can’t…”

She kept laughing and laughing, under the gaze of Dobrio and Lacrima, who both seemed to have no idea about what her deal was. The sheer absurdity of this situation was the trigger, but neither of them could seem to get it. Slowly, the laughter died out, as Mimi’s eyes went wet with tears. Tears that Lacrima licked away almost immediately, tasting them like a wine sommelier, slowly removing the imprint of the dead bird’s thigh from her tongue. Mimi’s water felt strange. It wasn’t the purest water and was filled with every sort of weird substance, but, in a way, it felt familiar. There was something in her water that made her want more of it, which caused her to get into a frenzy when they lay together. Lacrima drank Mimi’s water, her sweat, her saliva, drank all what she could from her, much like Mimi drank every drop of her excess lymph. An equivalent exchange, one that saved her from full phytomorphosis. And, now, Mimi was laughing. After eating what Lacrima supposed to be a rooster of an unidentified subspecies. After Dobrio almost forced her to do the same. She decided to let that one slide. If she started complaining about the significance of chicken and what eating one entailed, she would have probably caused both of those two to fall asleep. There were more pressing matters than mourning a bird that couldn’t realistically come back to life. So, she heaved a sigh, before looking again at Dobrio, while still lying in Mimi’s arms. That… wasn’t unpleasant, after all, despite her body’s undesirable heightened production of extra lymph associated with the increase of oxytocin and – possibly – of serotonin in her circulation. Yet, enough was enough. She slowly, delicately slid out of Mimi’s grasp, stood in front of the sofa. Without her platform shoes on, she felt like a dwarf, especially compared to the titanic size of Dobriovchka. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, looked around the barren room, then back to the cyclops staring at her in turn.

“…I need some new clothes. Mine were seriously damaged in the fight against the red-haired rhizome and they are beyond repair. They were hanging together by a thread, and I must have ruined them for good during my crisis. Any chance to get anything else to wear? Preferably black. And with feathers.”

Dobrio put his large hand on her head, his other thumb raised up.

“I’ve already brought you something. Unfortunately, not exactly the same fit, but I did what I could. There, you’ll find everything in that blue bag with the cartoon shark mascot. Your shoes survived well enough, though. I just needed to dust them, they’re fine and sturdy!”

At those words, Lacrima’s heart felt lighter, till she remembered what else she lost. Her whistling swan necklace. The feathers… burned by that acid mist. She bit her lip, crunched her fist. She hoped that the red-haired rhizome went through all the pain in the world, and then some. Dobrio waved his hand, stealing her attention one more time.

“Hey, before I forget: Ms. Frankberg asked me to give you this, after hearing you lost yours.”

In his hand stood a choker with countless, beautiful swan feathers hanging from it. Whistling swan. The same as her lost one. Her fingers reached out for it, almost failing to believe her eye. It was beautiful. And it was a gift? She retracted her hand, turned her eye to Dobrio.

“What’s the catch? Nobody gifts anything for nothing, not to a rhizome.”

“There’s no catch, really. Carola just asked me to try to convince you or Robin – or both – to marry her niece. That’s all there’s to it. You don’t need to accept or anything. I just needed to try.”

“Marry? Like, an official contract? If that were in place, would that mean that I could drink Mimi’s water whenever I wanted and she could drink my lymph whenever I needed it… legally? Without the Corps looking for us?”

“It’s… more complicated than that, but…”

Mimi growled, cursed under her breath, grabbed Dobrio’s head, pulled it down to look deep into his eye, knowing full well she could only recognize what amounted to a red patch. But he could see hers, he could see the storm approaching from behind her blue irises.

“That old hag can shove her marriage plans up her ass. I’m not. Bringing. Anyone. To the altar. And she’ll not. Bring me. To any altar. Whatsoever. Got it?”

She followed the profile of Dobrio’s arm, reached his hand, grabbed the necklace, examined it with her fingers till she found the lock. She pulled it open, turned in the general direction of where Lacrima was the last time she hugged her, moved her hand around till she reached her chest. Then, moved it up, finding her neck. And slowly, carefully, closed the trinket around it, with a satisfying click.

“Aaaand done. If that caryatid says anything, tell her to go lick Lagash’s butt.”

She turned around to face Dobrio one more time, grabbing his biceps, rubbing her cheek on it.

“Now, tell me: How did you escape the Corps? I was dead worried you and that silver-hand-bitch were going to be executed, when all them Keepers stormed the Eye in war formation.”

“Well, finding you lot wasn’t that hard. The only safe place you could have moved to was this shelter. Bald Mustacho down there filled us in on the basics via encrypted comms before we arrived. As for not getting caught… huh, it’s hard to be arrested when someone – you know – murdered all of the Peacekeepers, yes?”

Kryzalid froze, her hands gripping Dobrio’s arm, her voice turning colder.

“…murdered all of them? What the heck are you saying?”

“Thirty-six human corpses scattered around the Eye. Congrats for reaching the high nineties in casualties. Just three more to the double oughts.”

“Wait, wait. Thirty-six what?! I just killed four of them! I’m pretty sure the others ran away after we started fighting the ‘zomes!”

“Huh.”

He massaged his chin, stared at Lacrima, then back to Kryzalid.

“If you didn’t do that… who made short work of the others… and why?”