Someone Fucking Loved Me

SOMEONE FUCKING LOVED ME AND I FUCKING LOVED THEM TOO

I'm something like six hundred kilometers outside of Lomonosov Station, the atmosphere outside my craft is over 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and Dee is dead.

I don't bother with opening any viewpanels. The craft's autopilot has this part of the approach under control, and the sulfuric haze is thick enough here that I wouldn't see anything anyway. So I just recline the plush leather pilot's seat, quadruple-check my sidearm, and I think about what's to come.

I haven't been here in nine years. Not since the day I met Dee.

I violently strangleshove that thought away. No space for mawkish maudlin mopey-thinking right now. There's a mission to accomplish and I'm going to accomplish it. Vital Tenet Number Three, baby. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, calling up the HUD visual overlay, and run a scan on my neurochem baselines. Basically every compound is a little elevated, which is to be expected. Just a little is fine. I'll spike a few of those through the roof soon enough.

Ahead of me, there's going to be a squadron of guards. They will be well-armed and decently coordinated. They'll use lethal force without hesitation. And still, they'll all be dead or surrendered in about an hour, because I have two advantages.

First: they won't expect to be attacked, especially like this. There's really no reason anyone would assault Lomonosov Station. It's a research facility that's doing effectively nothing these days in terms of valuable science. Combine that with the location - buried in the upper Venusian troposphere - and there's just no cause for anybody to bother. And if they did, they wouldn't do it the way I'm about to: in the front door, guns blazing, no finesse and all force. Station Defense will be wrongfooted the whole way, scrambling to get things together.

Of course, they're still pros. They're equipped to hold off attackers. It's not like it's going to be trivial. At least a few of them are probably ex-military, and one or two might even have a quarter the active combat zone experience I do. They've got numbers on their side, by far. And anybody in any firefight can score a lucky shot.

But I'm going to walk out of here successful today. I know that because of advantage number two: motivation.

This place holds the key to me getting Dee back.

***

The fluid is placental and thick. I'm choking on it. I ride waves of dreamlike panic as I realize I can't move my arms to push through it. Black tubes, segmented and snakelike, descend from above me and have burrowed into my forearms. One on each side of my torso. Into the soft space behind each clavicle. And one, particularly vile in its thickness and tension, is fully down my throat.

I am in a tank. A vertical glass tube, where I'm floating in a translucent slurry of fuck-knows-what. My consciousness picks up a little steam and runs headfirst into a sensation that's been waiting for me:

pain

. Pain like the atom splitting. Pain like water in my veins freezing and expanding. Pain like every cell of my eyes lysing simultaneously.

I've been wounded a lot. I've never fucking hurt like this. Why the fuck am I alive?

There's a hole in my stomach, I see now. A real nasty pieceofshit of a wound. Ragged. Must've bled like a firehose. I don't remember it happening. I have a vague recollection of being hit there, being spun around by the sheer kinetic freight train of it.

High caliber

, I remember thinking, and even as I was spinning down into the dirt I was scanning the horizon for the shooter, trying to get my body in between them and-

-ohfuckohnowhereisDeeohfuck-

-Dee. Where is she? Is she okay? If someone hurt her, some ratfuck sonofabitch, I'll kill them. I'll use my

teeth

to do it. I'll just, just, I'll fucking

end

them, I can't even express how bad it'll be. It's beyond language. I'm a rabid cornered animal, snapping and snarling at the specter of a world without her.

The rage and fear make the pain dim into nothing. Physical pain like that is meaningless, truly, compared to the thought of losing her. Dee is my whole world. Literally. I don't know what planet I'm even on right now but I'll burn it to its fucking core if Dee is hurt.

I'm about to start thrashing these tubes out of me when I see her walk up to the glass. Thank *fuck*. She's okay. She's fine. Bubbles come out of my nose, flow through the viscous gunk I'm floating in, as a pitiful sob of relief wracks it way through me. She's alive. She's okay.

She smiles at me through the glass. Her mouth moves. I can't hear her. It doesn't matter, really. Right now I only care about the fact that she's alright. The relief is so potent it makes my joints ache. I sag in the tank, floating in goo. Dee gives a little smirk. Probably said something cutting about how much I dropped the ball. I'm a fucking failure, obviously. Vital Tenet Number Four is clear - keeping Dee safe is my main job. Hard to do that when I'm bleeding out on the fucking ground like a moron. She'll have some things to say about my performance today, I'm sure. Worthlessness and shame burrow thin trails into my guts.

Dee, in case it's not clear, is not a kind and loving woman. She is not warm. She is not good and decent. She's a monster. And I love her more than you've ever loved anything in your life.

***

It's about eight months before I got shot like a fucking idiot. About a month after I met Dee initially. About eight years before she dies because I'm too goddamn shitsuck worthless to stop it. And I'm biting my tongue hard enough to draw blood, attempting to focus on anything but the blistering chemical assault she's pumping into my head.

If you were to sit in the room and watch us you wouldn't realize how much I was fighting for my life and how raggedly I was hanging on. I'm just sitting in a chair, after all. Granted, I am strapped in, restraints on my ankles and wrists and waist and neck. An IV runs into my upper arm, delivering its horrific payload. A thin fluid whose clear gleam hides how much toxic nightmare garbage it carries. It's the product of a decade's worth of Dee's work. She's killed people in this chair. Dee is not careful. And why should she be? Lab rats are disposable, after all.

But years of practice yields results, and - fuck my luck - I'm tough enough to take it. The real issue, perhaps, has been that she's never experimented on somebody like me. Somebody with specialist training from the Callisto Marine Corps. Somebody with half a billion dollars' worth of tech enhancing their body and brain. Somebody born & bred to kick ass, to eat iron and shit bullets. I'm six-foot-one of lean muscle and weapons expertise. I've got fast-twitch electrodes that make my reflexes triple that of the world's best athletes. I have a brain honed on experimental nootropics and implanted with an overclocked supercomputer, giving me every mental edge known to man. I can kill you with one hand while I calculate Fourier transforms with the other. I'm a one-woman wrecking crew. I'm the human equivalent of a tactical nuke.

And this gangly, stringy-haired cunt is smirking at me while she poisons my brain. I can't figure out how to tell my legs to stand up and stop her.

Dee isn't beautiful. She's striking, for sure - she's got a jaw that's a little too long and angular for her face, and her eyes are large and deep-set. Her nose doesn't protrude much, but it's thin and sharp. Just like most of her - she's all angles and points, places to get sliced or impaled. Her eyebrows are dark and severe, and her skin is milky. She's not ugly, but neither is she pretty. She's the most perfect creature god ever created, though obviously there's no god. If there was, why would he keep this pointless, vomitous excuse for a universe spinning along without her in it?

I hate myself for the way I'm resisting Dee's work in this memory. It's a memory, I know that, even though the damaged implant in my brain makes it feel like it's happening right now. All of this, it's all right now. All moments are the present and Dee's always with me and I'm always fighting her and I'm always worshipping her and she's always, always, always so fucking dead.

I hate myself for resisting. I could've given in immediately. I could've gotten a few more hours of the horrible watery bliss of being

hers

. Her thing, her lackey, her broken acolyte, her dog. But no, I had to grit my teeth and push back, had to force her to swamp my system with chemicals that pulped my neurons until I could see what was inevitable.

I don't remember the change, but it must've been fast. I'd been strapped to that chair for a couple of hours, sweating and yanking against the restraints. When I could slur out some speech, I spat every foul curse I could think of at Dee. I told her what a disgusting vile sack of sewage she was, voice rasping and raw from the screams I'd let out. I meant it, too, every bit of invective I hurled at her. I loathed her so much. And then after those outbursts there'd be a chunk of time where the drugs got the best of me, and I'd slump back and drool and struggle to focus my eyes.

And one of those times, once I came back to myself, I realized I was in love with her.

Just like that. Like remembering I had an errand to run or something. A perfunctory fact that just plopped itself in my lap, wet and disgusting and warm and undeniable. It made no fucking sense, but... there it was. Love. Adoration. I still knew what she was - fugitive, serial killer, mad scientist, scourge of four different planets. I knew I was here because I'd been dispatched to capture or kill her. And I knew that every part of my brain that felt emotion was in love with her.

I still hated her, obviously. I still do now. I know what she is and what she did to me. It just doesn't matter. I love her even though I hate her. That's what unconditional love

means

.

I'm not talking about a crush, to be clear. I don't mean something sexual, even. I mean the shit that the old poets wrote about. The stuff that wars are fought over. The cloying garbage that chicks like me rolled our eyes at. I didn't believe it was actually possible to feel that deeply. And yet here I was, looking at an assassination target and realizing every muscle in my body was tensing itself in anticipation of touching her.

She laughed at me. A cruel, mocking laugh. I yearned to gnaw on her bottom lip.

"I can see it in your face already," she said. Her voice was thin and unpleasant. I'd give up listening to all music for the rest of my life for the chance to hear a single word in that voice. "You're feeling it. I thought a lunk like you might be too bloody stupid to even understand what I'm programming into you, but apparently not. That brute physique of yours is coming in handy, maybe. Dumb as an ox but durable enough to take it, hm?"

A disgustingly pathetic wriggle of pride made itself known. I'd done something right in surviving this treatment, in holding up to her attacks on my psyche. She was pleased. And that made me happy. Because I loved her.

I was still going to kill her if I got out of these restraints, of course. It'd break my heart. But I'd do it. She couldn't fuck my head up enough to change that.

Of course, I still had another four days in the chair to come. Things change.

***

I'm naked, my muscles glistening with sweat from my workout. I need to keep in perfect shape. Working as Dee's underling is demanding. Threats can come from anywhere and laxity is unacceptable. I need to be at the top of my game at all times, because anything less is imperfect, and imperfection insults Dee. If I'm imperfect, I'm trash. I'm trash anyway, but I'm less than that if I'm not the absolute ideal at all times.

I also need to keep in perfect shape because Dee likes that. She enjoys my body most at its physical peak. So that's where I keep it. Dee gets what Dee wants. If she wanted me flabby and out of shape I'd never run another lap. If she wanted me with one arm, fuck it - I know where the saws are kept.

I'm naked and I'm kneeling at the foot of her bed. Dee's reclined, a digital reader in her hands. She's naked as well. She's not in perfect shape. Dee is all length and angles and hard rigid points - elbow and ribs and hipbones, gaunt and acute. I need to perfect my body to have worth, though, where Dee is the source of worth no matter what she does. She's perfection, and anybody who suggests otherwise eats a bullet before they finish their sentence.

My face is between her legs. I'm as close as I can get myself while still following the rule - not one square nanometer of my skin gets to touch hers without her say-so. But I can get close, bury my awareness in every little mottled drop of her pigmentation. I can see the way her labia tremors when my slow, steady breath grazes across it. Every religion has their totems and fetishes that they pour their attention into while praying. That's what I'm doing right now.

"What's Vital Tenet Number One, Iris?"

I don't pull away at all. The words are automatic and easy. Dee wrote them onto the surface of my mind. Neurochemically etching them into Broca's area until thinking before reciting literally wasn't an option for me anymore. "Dee is the most important person in the universe," I feel myself say, "in absolutely every sense."

I can see her satisfaction. I don't see her face, not from this angle. But her cunt gives a wonderful slow pulse and her legs shift just so slightly, and I know she's pleased.

"Vital Tenet Number Two?"

"I love Dee more than life itself. That is literal."

Where other people have things like 'fight or flight' or 'decision-making' or 'self-preservation', I have the Vital Tenets.

"Vital Tenet Number Three?"

"There's nothing I wouldn't do for Dee. Failure is never an option."

She's squirming just a little now, slow sinusoidal waves of her thighs. This is the kind of thing that gets Dee off more than anything else. She can literally feel my words on her folds right now, I'm sure of it. My lips are so achingly, tantalizingly fucking close. But it's not the physical side that's making her warm right now. It's the brutal leash she's got on my mind. She loves hearing me recite, barking like the brainburned bitch I am.

"Vital Tenet Number Four."

"Preventing harm to Dee is my primary assignment at all times. Preventing harm to myself is my secondary assignment."

We've had long talks about the meaning of things like 'harm'. Harm, wrong, bad, hurtful, undesirable - all of these words mean 'Dee wouldn't like it'. My morality has been kinked into a new direction. The magnetic pole of rightness points unerringly towards Dee.

When I say 'long talks', by the way, I of course don't mean philosophical back-and-forth. I mean Dee lacing hot electrodes into my brain and lecturing me until the synapses fall in line how they're supposed to.

I fucking love her so much. I cannot believe she's dead.

"And Vital Tenet Number Five?"

"When in doubt, I do what would please Dee most. If Dee doesn't give a shit, I figure it out."

Such a helpful one. As it turns out, having your brain snapped like a sunbleached femur makes a lot of things difficult. Decision-making, for example. The first few weeks after becoming Dee's victim-cum-bodyguard-cum-lover-cum-slave-cum-cultist, I struggled getting anything done. I needed her guidance on everything. VT5 used to be just that first sentence, but grappling with what would please her led to me squeezing out frustrated tears about which flavor coffee she'd want me to have. Now, so long as it's something beneath Dee's notice, I have little bits of autonomy.

Part of me hates that. Part of me thinks the only way to truly love Dee the way she deserves is to crush autonomy altogether. Control is love, after all. Dee deciding what I do and say and think and am is how she shows me I'm precious to her. You wouldn't bother taking such time to thoroughly break and shatter something you didn't care about, would you?

***

I'm nearing Lomonosov Station and Dee's fucking dead and I should be too.

***

Carson checks his ammo packs one last time as we wait for the go signal. Carson & Boggs & I on this side, Dwyer in the dropship, Everett on the mics back at command. A lot of firepower for a job like this, but the target's got a reputation.

It's less than half an hour before I meet Dee for the first time.

The station's quiet. It took a lot of coordination to evacuate the upper levels all slow and quiet, so the target holed up in the substation lab wouldn't get wind of us coming. This is the end of a two-year-long pursuit, spanning across two moons and three low-planetary-orbit stations. This bitch is slippery, vicious, and has a good instinct on when we're closing in. But that all ends today.

I'm big enough of a fucking idiot that I actually believe that at the time. Three dipshits with guns were going to capture Dee? Imbecile. We deserve what's coming.

When Everett gives the go sign, we move up the corridors with perfect precision. Our squad is the best of the best, hand-selected from military wetworks teams across the solar system. We don't get rattled, we don't get tired, and we don't get beaten by fucking anyone. Which really just means the failure we were about traipse into would've really embarrassed us, if anyone but me survived to be embarrassed by it. Lucky them, I guess.

Carson's on point. I'm covering over his shoulder. Boggs is working backwards behind us, just in case anything slipped in under Dwyer's scans. The corridors are narrow, which helps for keeping visual cover over the entire area we're advancing.

Down a set of stairs. Another. Into the belly of the station. Heavy clanks of machinery reverberate through the walls. It takes a lot of equipment to keep seventeen hundred researchers and support staff alive and working in a place like Venus, and we're navigating our way through all of that gear now. The walls groan with noise that we feel in our chests and teeth. Seismic sounds.

Down further.

It's only a few minutes before I meet Dee.

Something pops, quietly, and there's a little phosphorous-white flash. Carson and I hit the deck. I'm reaching back to yank Boggs down as well. Chemical flame erupts across the space where our faces just were, searing at several thousand degrees for a split second before consuming itself entirely.

Well. Confirmation that we're in the right place, at least.

***

Dee is in the little makeshift lab we've been living out of on Deimos, and I'm clenching and unclenching my fists. It's hard talking to her like this. Trying to tell her she's wrong. She doesn't like to hear it and I really don't like to say it.

"You're being paranoid, Iris. I want you to keep watch and protect our perimeter, not void your bowels into your pants every time a cruiser passes by."

"I'm trying to keep you safe."

"Obviously. And you're doing it in a way that means I'll never get any work done. We can't move the lab every time you get anxious about something. Figure out a way to keep us safe without packing up and moving. End of discussion."

My teeth click together as my mouth snaps shut. That's it. I don't like this spot, low in the crater, with too many sightlines on us for me to track. Deimos is too small, too uninhabited. The isolation is good but it also makes us stand out. We'll pop on even the most perfunctory, disinterested scan of the region. I want to move elsewhere.

But Dee says end of discussion, so that's it. I'll figure out a way to make this work. For her.

It's three months before Dee dies.

When it happens, it's so needless. So infuriatingly

stupid

that it makes me shudder with rage. What a calamitous piss stain of a universe. A waste of energy and matter from top to bottom.