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Jan. 6th, 2017 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonflower77for dreaming_brooke. written until the moment of re-assimilation as it was originally intended for the resonance collaborative writing site. i'll post the altered final version later on.
Hawa Najjar used to be a botanist and belonged to a caste of warrior-scholars. When she was 28, she lost touch with her colleagues during a field trip to a remote arid region and disappeared. Her uniform, bag, notebook and insignia were discovered among the rocks two months later. This much is known about the woman who used to go by that name.
Hawa was found and assimilated by an entity known as the ath-Thaym (self-designation T'elχ), which had a gestalt-type collective consciousness where each member contributed to the whole. The T'elχ were, or was, indifferent toward humans and their affairs, as long as they were left alone, although occasional conflicts were known to arise on the outskirts of their territory because they were unable to communicate with humans other than through assimilation. The situation was made worse by the inhabitants of the neighboring villages harvesting their edible substrate materials as a nutritional supplement. Cases of human assimilation were not unheard of, but rare; most of those who were sighted as part of the T'elχ had been loners or outcasts and were assumed to have sought the collective species on their own and asked for assimilation. No-one could be certain what the T'elχ motives had been in taking Hawa. She may have been about to die of thirst and exposure, in which case they had saved her life, or she might have agreed to the assimilation – or, at least, her actions were interpreted as consent. Either way, unlike the subsequent de-assimilation, which still gives her terrifying flashbacks, the process wasn’t painful.
Hawa’s state of being with the T'elχ can hardly be described in our terms, least of all by herself, but one thing is certain: she was happy. To this day, she remains devastated at the loss of the primordial unity and harmony she had been part of, and thinks of her current self as “broken”, a shadow or husk of who she used to be.
About 15 years later, another human-T'elχ conflict occurred where the colony bordered on a more densely populated area. As usual, neither species could comprehend the other and didn't want to so much as try. The T'elχ were (was) neither aggressive nor expansive and made no attempt to assimilate anyone against their will, but humans saw them as a threat due to their sheer incomprehensibility; there was no telling what was going through their mind(s) or what they could do at any given moment. The T'elχ, on the other hand, were (was) wary of humans, whose reasoning they found just as suspect and strange. The conflict escalated into a fight where several of the T'elχ were killed and Hawa, who tried to protect them, was wounded and lost consciousness. The shepherds were reluctant to kill her, as she had obviously been like them once, but didn’t want to leave her where she was because they weren’t sure what she could communicate to the collective consciousness when she came round. She was brought to a xenobiology institute in a neighboring town, given treatment for the wounds and subjected to neurological surgery to sever the connection to the rest of the superorganism. At that point, with every inch of her skin, down to her lips and eyelids, covered in hard scaly integument, a mass of what looked more like thin tentacles or tendrils for hair and formidable claws on her fingers and toes she scarcely resembled the woman she used to be.
Like any other T'elχ creatures, assimilated humans were not known to survive the separation, and the general expectation was that “it” was going to die, but "it” proved to be more resilient than anticipated. Hawa survived. At first, her body attempted to revert to its original condition, rejecting the scales on part of her arms, legs and face, which were then removed, and shedding the “hair”, which shriveled and dried up. New, somewhat more tame-looking hair began to grow from her scalp instead. Then the process of reverse assimilation stopped. The greatest harm was done to Hawa’s mind; she suffered extensive neurological damage, and, most crucially, her entire sense of “self” collapsed once she was severed from the main collective core. She spent the first several weeks almost without moving, lying down or sitting in a corner and staring off into the distance, or wandering around like a specter. She refused any food and drink and had to be force-fed. Unfamiliar sounds or sights caused violent meltdowns where she became agitated and attempted to attack anything within range. However, as the time passed, it became more apparent that she had retained some self-awareness and there was hope of reintegrating her into human society.
After a while, a xenolinguist named Initran was assigned to decipher the alien language she spoke. He had recently lost his wife, the only person he could genuinely relate to, and latched onto the task - first in an attempt to distract himself from the grief, then because he began to feel a growing empathy for Hawa, whose world seemed to have crumbled just like his own. Her facial features made him think of his late wife, Sunim, as did her strong curious streak; like Sunim, who was killed by a stray bullet during a street shootout, Hawa was one out of many pointless casualties about whom no-one else appeared to care. At the same time, the greater part of Hawa’s personality was much like his own. Besides, unlike the other researchers, he seemed to have an instinctive sense of how her mind worked. Her responses were familiar and gave him a sense of painful déjà vu, as they reminded him of his own behavior as a young child (he was autistic, but, as the disorder wasn’t recognized in his society, he was never diagnosed and was merely thought of as “weird” and difficult). Eventually, Initran took Hawa home to continue to observe and look after her in a more secluded and comfortable environment.
Over the following months, the two of them developed a strong connection, as people sometimes do when they are forced into an unbearable situation and have no-one but each other for support. With Hawa at his side, Initran drank less and took fewer senseless risks; with Initran’s guidance, Hawa was re-acquainted with the local culture and customs, developed better communication skills and learned to speak more coherently. Still, it was clear that she would never adjust well enough. Further neurological testing revealed that her nervous system could be restored to a human state by about one-third. Her knowledge of her own native language was at the lower-intermediate level, she spoke in infinitives and imperatives and failed to master the pronoun system even after a series of extended lessons. She continued to identify as T'elχ and wouldn’t answer to her birth name, because she could no longer connect it to herself and saw Hawa Najjar as gone forever.
Initran couldn't help noticing the heavy toll his world was taking on Hawa. She may not have been killed at once by the initial shock, but the strain, isolation and homesickness were continuing to kill her a little every day, slowly, but surely. One evening, after a hair-raising meltdown, Initran told her that she should return where she belonged and drove her to the edge of the T'elχ colony. They said farewell to each other and Initran went home, relieved for Hawa, but uncertain what to do with his own life now that she was gone. In the morning she returned. She couldn’t explain why she had chosen to stay, but any attempts to convince her to rejoin the T'elχ were met with a resolute “no!”. At that point it dawned on Initran that she saw he needed her, and wouldn’t leave him. This was why she was trying, often without success, to learn to exist in a horrifying and incomprehensible world, in a state she saw as damaged. The insight left him shaken and he resolved not to give in to the grief-induced depression and try to be there for her.
The decision helped Hawa regain, or retain, a measure of control over her life. The fact that she had stayed behind for Initran's sake, on her own accord, and wasn't being held against her will gave her a motive to adjust and was one of the reasons why she managed not to grow resentful or give in to despair.
Repeated attempts were made to return Hawa to her social stratum. Her professional knowledge was intact; even as an alien drone, she could be a competent researcher if she wasn't pressured into regular informal interaction and was provided with a stable, quiet environment. She was offered a job as an assistant at a botanical garden and laboratory at a local institute, and then, after a gradual process of re-examination, promoted to a more responsible position. She was glad to accept the offer and proved to be a diligent and capable scientist. However, she failed to connect to her former self and did not embrace the lifestyle of her caste, as her superiors had hoped. She remembered being called Hawa Najjar and acknowledged that the woman was her, once upon a time and in some other, strange life, but wouldn't identify with her. Others had to address her as "of the Thayyis", "the Thayyis one", or as "third"/"number three", to which she was accidentally discovered to respond as well. Most importantly, she refused to be associated with a group trained for war, even if they didn't have to serve any actual combat duty and only tutored those who did. She was to watch and help living things grow, not to kill them.
In the meantime, Initran came to share every aspect of his life with Hawa, except for one: the fact that he was part of a group, headed by Ibrahim Tanko, that helped locate and rescue those forced to fight in the civil war against their will. Initran wanted to keep Hawa safe and free of additional stress, and felt she was too ill-adjusted to the realities of his society to be able to participate. Hawa, on the other hand, was puzzled about his regular absences and his uncharacteristic evasive behavior whenever she would press the topic. She started to follow him quietly around the house and to eavesdrop on his telephone conversations, having no concept of privacy and no idea that such actions might be questionable. The next time Initran prepared to set out on a daytime mission, Hawa hid under the canvas tent in the back of the truck, driven by curiosity and concern.
When the group reached the destination, Hawa followed them at a close distance. At first, the mission appeared to go as planned, but after a while things began to go wrong. Initran and the rest of the group were trapped in the corner of a ruined courtyard by a sniper. Hawa, who was in a slightly different position, realized that Initran was in grave danger. She climbed the half-ruined building where the sniper seemed to be, using her sense of smell to track him down, located the little room where he was hiding and engaged him. She intended only to disarm or disable him but broke his neck in the struggle.
Initran was as grateful as he was furious. The thought that Hawa might have died made him realize just how much he cared for her. That she, for her part, cared just as much about him was obvious. In the evening, after she and Initran returned home, she became delirious, was plagued by vivid, almost hallucinatory images of the man she had killed and vomited all night long. Nevertheless, she was adamant that Initran was to go on these missions, she would go with him; how she felt, she said, was of no consequence - if she had to, she would get used to this too. She was trained as a soldier once and she would go through the same again.
After this incident, Initran had no choice but to introduce her to the rest of the group as the one who, in all likelihood, had saved his life. Ibrahim, who already knew her as the "thing" that was staying at Initran's house and had one or two minor clashes with Initran and herself, hated her even more for interfering in the group's affairs. He did grudgingly acknowledge her courage and agreed to accept her after a prolonged and heated argument with Initran, but his dislike for her continued to grow for the same reasons that could have triggered empathy in a more sensitive person. He regarded her as a doppelganger or distorted mirror image of himself and treated her as a rival of sorts, because their personalities were incompatible. In addition, she was another loose cannon, along with Initran, who had never been stable to begin with and had been growing more unhinged since Sunim's death. She and Ibrahim had loud, less-than-coherent shouting matches which routinely drove him to frenzy. However, Hawa connected to the nurse Mbuta, who was just as averse to violence, and the warrior Seshaewin, who wasn't, but had had more than one lifetime's share of fighting and understood what it was like to be fed up. Both were of the same subspecies as Ibrahim and knew what it meant to be neither - nor, part human and part other, just like Hawa herself.
Up to this point, she had been almost nameless. One night, when the question of a potential new name came up again and Mbuta suggested Azila, she responded as if already addressed. The superorganism used to know her, and she knew herself, as the Joiner Guardian, for which Azila was the best available equivalent. Initran was uneasy about her taking a function-based name, which he felt was no better than a number, but, faced with her fierce insistence, he accepted her choice, and he did have to admit that the name met the requirements raised by his traditional culture - it was meaningful and encapsulated the core or essence of her personality. Hawa Najjar became Azila ath-Thaym.
At the institute, Azila didn't get along with, well, anybody. Her poor social skills and forbidding demeanor drove her co-workers up the wall in all but the literal sense; that she also was on the verge of climbing up the walls wasn't readily visible. The other assistant at the laboratory, also of Ibrahim's subspecies, frenzied during the first half hour she spent around Azila, despite belonging to the clan considered to be the second calmest, and tried to cope by running outside and then acting as if nothing had happened. She frenzied again on the same night, after which she tried to hand in her notice and demanded that either she or Azila be transferred, else she wasn't to be held accountable for her actions. Afterward Azila approached her in the hallway and asked, in a characteristic blunt and ungrammatical way, why she was the last to learn about these outbursts, and whether the woman could describe her actual triggers so the two of them were able to work around the issue together. The woman was floored and didn't know what to make of Azila as a person. Most of the misunderstandings between Azila and those who hadn't gone through assimilation and back were of a similar nature.
The general attitude toward Azila was less than kind. Interaction with her could be an ordeal even for the most patient and the frustration was more than understandable, but some of her co-workers' behavior was obnoxious and demeaning. She became the focus of their xenophobia and a scapegoat for their own complexes or difficulties in communication - the one who could be blamed for any problem or assigned tasks the others were reluctant to do, because she would readily shoulder the responsibility (more or less "go back to where you came from - oh wait, with you it's "serve the hive" anyway and you don't mind giving and helping without any further questions, so you might as well do something for us first"). For some, testing the scope of her social blindness turned into a daily game; they liked to see how many insults, teasing, sarcasm or talking over her head and/or behind her back she could take, or how direct the bully had to get before she noticed. Azila, for her part, was largely oblivious and refused to take any long-term offense when she did notice, despite the short outbursts of anger when she did notice, but the exhaustion and despondency continued to grow.
With Ibrahim Tanko's group, Azila became very close. She came to see them as her new collective entity, though one with flawed links, and became more and more preoccupied with their safety and with the possibility that one or more of them might die as the time passed. This included even Ibrahim Tanko, despite their mutual antagonism; her sense of shared responsibility extended to him and she felt an obligation to protect him along with the others. Ibrahim, for the greater part, didn't reciprocate. The first and last time they connected in a deep and genuine sense was after Mbuta's death, which was a major blow to both. That evening, they sat in front of the fireplace for hours without speaking or looking at each other, glad to have each other's company and silent support.
When their seaside town was occupied by human and not-so-human insurgents, the group found themselves defending a building that had just been vacated by over a hundred civilians, and stayed behind to engage and detain the enemy as long as possible to give them time to escape.
Before they became trapped inside, Initran requested, then started to demand that Azila go with the civilians and help them cross the river to safety, but she responded with her flat, categorical "no". She was going to stay for him, for all of them, really, and wasn't going to leave no matter what the risk. By then, Initran had come to know her too well and no choice but to relent.
The battle lasted throughout the night. During a clash with a group of insurgents on the second floor, Initran received a wound that was bound to be fatal. To a considerable extent, this was due to his lack of caution; in effect, the untreated depression had the upper hand and he committed unintentional, indirect suicide. Azila provided him with basic medical aid but both of them knew he would die in a matter of hours.
Despite her severe aversion to violence, Azila had to fight again to protect him. At first, she was forced to draw the insurgents' fire and distracted them while Initran found a more defensible position. The smoke bombs allowed her to reduce with just a minor wound to her forearm, which she disregarded at first, and to return just in time to save Initran from an insurgent who was standing over him with a rifle, preparing to shoot him. As Initran grew weaker, she defended him against the insurgents about to break into the room. The protective feeling welled over into a blinding rage, and, when she came to her senses, she was standing over two dead bodies and there were more further away.
When she came back, she found Initran unconscious. A handwritten note was lying on the floor nearby. He sensed that he would be dead or in a coma by the time Azila was back and they wouldn't have the chance to have that last conversation, and tried to be concise and direct. As he was drifting in and out of consciousness in a semi-delirious state, he had re-evaluated his priorities and revisited his life with a newfound clarity. He realized that those who called Azila his pet project and said that his main motive was to stroke his own ego - or told him that he was the one assimilating her right there and then - weren't entirely wrong. The thought had bothered him and he would stop to question his motivation more than once, which was why he hadn't made any worse mistakes, but, nevertheless, he had tried to mold her into something she could never be; even as he supported her, a part of him had fought against letting her be herself and grow beyond what he wanted and thought best for her. Now he felt remorse.
In the note, he said he was sorry - she probably knew for what, or would come to understand in a while; that he was grateful for her being there. If she wanted to go home once the grief subsided and she finished mourning him in her present state, and he knew she had wanted to do so all along, then she had to. The bottom line was, he wanted her to be happy and whole, in what had become her natural state of mind, and while he was more than thankful for the self-sacrifice, it'd been more than anyone should be forced to give.
Azila had had an epiphany of her own: as Initran was letting her go, so she, too, had to learn to let herself go. She realized it wasn't always wrong to admit that she was weak, worn out, disoriented, that she wasn't in the right place and would never be able to adjust to certain phenomena because they went against her nature. All her post-deassimilation life had consisted of her stepping on her own throat, forcing herself to endure with clenched fists and gritted teeth, pushing herself beyond the limits of her capacities, but she couldn't continue to do so - sooner or later, she was going to cave in under the pressure.
Initran's note added clarity to that insight. She told him, although she wasn't sure whether he could still hear her, that she would survive the night and respect his wish, and that he would not be forgotten - if she was fully reassimilated, her memories of him would be distributed throughout the collective consciousness and passed on, even if they were no longer "hers", so in a sense he would survive as long as the T'elχ did. Shortly after, he died without regaining consciousness.
Azila's memories of the next few hours were vague. She was devastated by the loss, all the more so that the night's events had required a tremendous effort on her part and sapped all of her physical and emotional resources. Now that the battle was over, the exhaustion caught up with her, and so did the wounds and the realization that she had taken lives. During the next six or seven hours she ran a high fever, shook from head to toe, broke out in a cold sweat and hallucinated.
Some way or other, in the morning she found herself tending to the one human survivor and to Seshaewin, whose wounds were severe and life-threatening even for his subspecies. She could barely stand, her weak sense of self had been shattered and she was operating more on autopilot than otherwise - holding on because she still had promises to keep. The three of them were able to find shelter and Azila stayed until she was sure that both the human and the non-human were restored to full health. By that time, she too had begun to recover somewhat.
When the resonance struck, she was about to choose what to do next. She knew she would go home, but wanted to wait a little longer because she didn't want to bring in the acute sense of bereavement. While full integration was more beneficial, in that the healing would be complete and she would return to a familiar and welcome state, she did not want to forget - as in lose her private awareness, rather than the actual memory - of the past three years: being broken, struggling, gaining a loved one and mourning his loss. She wanted to retain her newly acquired human perspective and use it to help resolve some of the T'elχ-human disagreements. She had sufficient knowledge of human interaction to understand both sides of the conflict and act as a mediator, and would be able to use the two respective modes of communication. For that, she had to undergo a process of partial assimilation where she would be submerged and healed, but a segment of her new personality would be left intact; this was possible, but hadn't been practiced for centuries.
However, the resonance didn't affect Azila quite as much as one might expect. After she had first lost her home and her community, and, in a sense, herself, and then the one person for whom she would stay behind, there wasn't much left to lose. Not a lot has changed; the new dimension wasn't that different; she was surrounded by the same individuals who were just as broken as herself, but, unlike her, knew no other mode of being and took their fragmentation for granted; as before, she found herself persevering against the odds, except that going home was no longer an option even for the distant future. That last part is the hardest. She misses the colony more than ever; in comparison to the past, the present looks increasingly dismal, and the future, more so. If she encountered a similar collective-sapient species with a capacity to assimilate, she would join them. Of course, this would never be the same as those fifteen years, and not "home", though close enough, but she would be able to keep her promise and fulfill Initran's last wish - perhaps even be useful as she was planning. The other difficult aspect is the fact that she is more lost than ever before. She has no group to identify with, no people for whose sake she would want to survive and adapt. Still, as in the past, she continues to do what she does best - persevere.
dreaming_brooke. written until the moment of re-assimilation as it was originally intended for the resonance collaborative writing site. i'll post the altered final version later on. Hawa Najjar used to be a botanist and belonged to a caste of warrior-scholars. When she was 28, she lost touch with her colleagues during a field trip to a remote arid region and disappeared. Her uniform, bag, notebook and insignia were discovered among the rocks two months later. This much is known about the woman who used to go by that name.
Hawa was found and assimilated by an entity known as the ath-Thaym (self-designation T'elχ), which had a gestalt-type collective consciousness where each member contributed to the whole. The T'elχ were, or was, indifferent toward humans and their affairs, as long as they were left alone, although occasional conflicts were known to arise on the outskirts of their territory because they were unable to communicate with humans other than through assimilation. The situation was made worse by the inhabitants of the neighboring villages harvesting their edible substrate materials as a nutritional supplement. Cases of human assimilation were not unheard of, but rare; most of those who were sighted as part of the T'elχ had been loners or outcasts and were assumed to have sought the collective species on their own and asked for assimilation. No-one could be certain what the T'elχ motives had been in taking Hawa. She may have been about to die of thirst and exposure, in which case they had saved her life, or she might have agreed to the assimilation – or, at least, her actions were interpreted as consent. Either way, unlike the subsequent de-assimilation, which still gives her terrifying flashbacks, the process wasn’t painful.
Hawa’s state of being with the T'elχ can hardly be described in our terms, least of all by herself, but one thing is certain: she was happy. To this day, she remains devastated at the loss of the primordial unity and harmony she had been part of, and thinks of her current self as “broken”, a shadow or husk of who she used to be.
About 15 years later, another human-T'elχ conflict occurred where the colony bordered on a more densely populated area. As usual, neither species could comprehend the other and didn't want to so much as try. The T'elχ were (was) neither aggressive nor expansive and made no attempt to assimilate anyone against their will, but humans saw them as a threat due to their sheer incomprehensibility; there was no telling what was going through their mind(s) or what they could do at any given moment. The T'elχ, on the other hand, were (was) wary of humans, whose reasoning they found just as suspect and strange. The conflict escalated into a fight where several of the T'elχ were killed and Hawa, who tried to protect them, was wounded and lost consciousness. The shepherds were reluctant to kill her, as she had obviously been like them once, but didn’t want to leave her where she was because they weren’t sure what she could communicate to the collective consciousness when she came round. She was brought to a xenobiology institute in a neighboring town, given treatment for the wounds and subjected to neurological surgery to sever the connection to the rest of the superorganism. At that point, with every inch of her skin, down to her lips and eyelids, covered in hard scaly integument, a mass of what looked more like thin tentacles or tendrils for hair and formidable claws on her fingers and toes she scarcely resembled the woman she used to be.
Like any other T'elχ creatures, assimilated humans were not known to survive the separation, and the general expectation was that “it” was going to die, but "it” proved to be more resilient than anticipated. Hawa survived. At first, her body attempted to revert to its original condition, rejecting the scales on part of her arms, legs and face, which were then removed, and shedding the “hair”, which shriveled and dried up. New, somewhat more tame-looking hair began to grow from her scalp instead. Then the process of reverse assimilation stopped. The greatest harm was done to Hawa’s mind; she suffered extensive neurological damage, and, most crucially, her entire sense of “self” collapsed once she was severed from the main collective core. She spent the first several weeks almost without moving, lying down or sitting in a corner and staring off into the distance, or wandering around like a specter. She refused any food and drink and had to be force-fed. Unfamiliar sounds or sights caused violent meltdowns where she became agitated and attempted to attack anything within range. However, as the time passed, it became more apparent that she had retained some self-awareness and there was hope of reintegrating her into human society.
After a while, a xenolinguist named Initran was assigned to decipher the alien language she spoke. He had recently lost his wife, the only person he could genuinely relate to, and latched onto the task - first in an attempt to distract himself from the grief, then because he began to feel a growing empathy for Hawa, whose world seemed to have crumbled just like his own. Her facial features made him think of his late wife, Sunim, as did her strong curious streak; like Sunim, who was killed by a stray bullet during a street shootout, Hawa was one out of many pointless casualties about whom no-one else appeared to care. At the same time, the greater part of Hawa’s personality was much like his own. Besides, unlike the other researchers, he seemed to have an instinctive sense of how her mind worked. Her responses were familiar and gave him a sense of painful déjà vu, as they reminded him of his own behavior as a young child (he was autistic, but, as the disorder wasn’t recognized in his society, he was never diagnosed and was merely thought of as “weird” and difficult). Eventually, Initran took Hawa home to continue to observe and look after her in a more secluded and comfortable environment.
Over the following months, the two of them developed a strong connection, as people sometimes do when they are forced into an unbearable situation and have no-one but each other for support. With Hawa at his side, Initran drank less and took fewer senseless risks; with Initran’s guidance, Hawa was re-acquainted with the local culture and customs, developed better communication skills and learned to speak more coherently. Still, it was clear that she would never adjust well enough. Further neurological testing revealed that her nervous system could be restored to a human state by about one-third. Her knowledge of her own native language was at the lower-intermediate level, she spoke in infinitives and imperatives and failed to master the pronoun system even after a series of extended lessons. She continued to identify as T'elχ and wouldn’t answer to her birth name, because she could no longer connect it to herself and saw Hawa Najjar as gone forever.
Initran couldn't help noticing the heavy toll his world was taking on Hawa. She may not have been killed at once by the initial shock, but the strain, isolation and homesickness were continuing to kill her a little every day, slowly, but surely. One evening, after a hair-raising meltdown, Initran told her that she should return where she belonged and drove her to the edge of the T'elχ colony. They said farewell to each other and Initran went home, relieved for Hawa, but uncertain what to do with his own life now that she was gone. In the morning she returned. She couldn’t explain why she had chosen to stay, but any attempts to convince her to rejoin the T'elχ were met with a resolute “no!”. At that point it dawned on Initran that she saw he needed her, and wouldn’t leave him. This was why she was trying, often without success, to learn to exist in a horrifying and incomprehensible world, in a state she saw as damaged. The insight left him shaken and he resolved not to give in to the grief-induced depression and try to be there for her.
The decision helped Hawa regain, or retain, a measure of control over her life. The fact that she had stayed behind for Initran's sake, on her own accord, and wasn't being held against her will gave her a motive to adjust and was one of the reasons why she managed not to grow resentful or give in to despair.
Repeated attempts were made to return Hawa to her social stratum. Her professional knowledge was intact; even as an alien drone, she could be a competent researcher if she wasn't pressured into regular informal interaction and was provided with a stable, quiet environment. She was offered a job as an assistant at a botanical garden and laboratory at a local institute, and then, after a gradual process of re-examination, promoted to a more responsible position. She was glad to accept the offer and proved to be a diligent and capable scientist. However, she failed to connect to her former self and did not embrace the lifestyle of her caste, as her superiors had hoped. She remembered being called Hawa Najjar and acknowledged that the woman was her, once upon a time and in some other, strange life, but wouldn't identify with her. Others had to address her as "of the Thayyis", "the Thayyis one", or as "third"/"number three", to which she was accidentally discovered to respond as well. Most importantly, she refused to be associated with a group trained for war, even if they didn't have to serve any actual combat duty and only tutored those who did. She was to watch and help living things grow, not to kill them.
In the meantime, Initran came to share every aspect of his life with Hawa, except for one: the fact that he was part of a group, headed by Ibrahim Tanko, that helped locate and rescue those forced to fight in the civil war against their will. Initran wanted to keep Hawa safe and free of additional stress, and felt she was too ill-adjusted to the realities of his society to be able to participate. Hawa, on the other hand, was puzzled about his regular absences and his uncharacteristic evasive behavior whenever she would press the topic. She started to follow him quietly around the house and to eavesdrop on his telephone conversations, having no concept of privacy and no idea that such actions might be questionable. The next time Initran prepared to set out on a daytime mission, Hawa hid under the canvas tent in the back of the truck, driven by curiosity and concern.
When the group reached the destination, Hawa followed them at a close distance. At first, the mission appeared to go as planned, but after a while things began to go wrong. Initran and the rest of the group were trapped in the corner of a ruined courtyard by a sniper. Hawa, who was in a slightly different position, realized that Initran was in grave danger. She climbed the half-ruined building where the sniper seemed to be, using her sense of smell to track him down, located the little room where he was hiding and engaged him. She intended only to disarm or disable him but broke his neck in the struggle.
Initran was as grateful as he was furious. The thought that Hawa might have died made him realize just how much he cared for her. That she, for her part, cared just as much about him was obvious. In the evening, after she and Initran returned home, she became delirious, was plagued by vivid, almost hallucinatory images of the man she had killed and vomited all night long. Nevertheless, she was adamant that Initran was to go on these missions, she would go with him; how she felt, she said, was of no consequence - if she had to, she would get used to this too. She was trained as a soldier once and she would go through the same again.
After this incident, Initran had no choice but to introduce her to the rest of the group as the one who, in all likelihood, had saved his life. Ibrahim, who already knew her as the "thing" that was staying at Initran's house and had one or two minor clashes with Initran and herself, hated her even more for interfering in the group's affairs. He did grudgingly acknowledge her courage and agreed to accept her after a prolonged and heated argument with Initran, but his dislike for her continued to grow for the same reasons that could have triggered empathy in a more sensitive person. He regarded her as a doppelganger or distorted mirror image of himself and treated her as a rival of sorts, because their personalities were incompatible. In addition, she was another loose cannon, along with Initran, who had never been stable to begin with and had been growing more unhinged since Sunim's death. She and Ibrahim had loud, less-than-coherent shouting matches which routinely drove him to frenzy. However, Hawa connected to the nurse Mbuta, who was just as averse to violence, and the warrior Seshaewin, who wasn't, but had had more than one lifetime's share of fighting and understood what it was like to be fed up. Both were of the same subspecies as Ibrahim and knew what it meant to be neither - nor, part human and part other, just like Hawa herself.
Up to this point, she had been almost nameless. One night, when the question of a potential new name came up again and Mbuta suggested Azila, she responded as if already addressed. The superorganism used to know her, and she knew herself, as the Joiner Guardian, for which Azila was the best available equivalent. Initran was uneasy about her taking a function-based name, which he felt was no better than a number, but, faced with her fierce insistence, he accepted her choice, and he did have to admit that the name met the requirements raised by his traditional culture - it was meaningful and encapsulated the core or essence of her personality. Hawa Najjar became Azila ath-Thaym.
At the institute, Azila didn't get along with, well, anybody. Her poor social skills and forbidding demeanor drove her co-workers up the wall in all but the literal sense; that she also was on the verge of climbing up the walls wasn't readily visible. The other assistant at the laboratory, also of Ibrahim's subspecies, frenzied during the first half hour she spent around Azila, despite belonging to the clan considered to be the second calmest, and tried to cope by running outside and then acting as if nothing had happened. She frenzied again on the same night, after which she tried to hand in her notice and demanded that either she or Azila be transferred, else she wasn't to be held accountable for her actions. Afterward Azila approached her in the hallway and asked, in a characteristic blunt and ungrammatical way, why she was the last to learn about these outbursts, and whether the woman could describe her actual triggers so the two of them were able to work around the issue together. The woman was floored and didn't know what to make of Azila as a person. Most of the misunderstandings between Azila and those who hadn't gone through assimilation and back were of a similar nature.
The general attitude toward Azila was less than kind. Interaction with her could be an ordeal even for the most patient and the frustration was more than understandable, but some of her co-workers' behavior was obnoxious and demeaning. She became the focus of their xenophobia and a scapegoat for their own complexes or difficulties in communication - the one who could be blamed for any problem or assigned tasks the others were reluctant to do, because she would readily shoulder the responsibility (more or less "go back to where you came from - oh wait, with you it's "serve the hive" anyway and you don't mind giving and helping without any further questions, so you might as well do something for us first"). For some, testing the scope of her social blindness turned into a daily game; they liked to see how many insults, teasing, sarcasm or talking over her head and/or behind her back she could take, or how direct the bully had to get before she noticed. Azila, for her part, was largely oblivious and refused to take any long-term offense when she did notice, despite the short outbursts of anger when she did notice, but the exhaustion and despondency continued to grow.
With Ibrahim Tanko's group, Azila became very close. She came to see them as her new collective entity, though one with flawed links, and became more and more preoccupied with their safety and with the possibility that one or more of them might die as the time passed. This included even Ibrahim Tanko, despite their mutual antagonism; her sense of shared responsibility extended to him and she felt an obligation to protect him along with the others. Ibrahim, for the greater part, didn't reciprocate. The first and last time they connected in a deep and genuine sense was after Mbuta's death, which was a major blow to both. That evening, they sat in front of the fireplace for hours without speaking or looking at each other, glad to have each other's company and silent support.
When their seaside town was occupied by human and not-so-human insurgents, the group found themselves defending a building that had just been vacated by over a hundred civilians, and stayed behind to engage and detain the enemy as long as possible to give them time to escape.
Before they became trapped inside, Initran requested, then started to demand that Azila go with the civilians and help them cross the river to safety, but she responded with her flat, categorical "no". She was going to stay for him, for all of them, really, and wasn't going to leave no matter what the risk. By then, Initran had come to know her too well and no choice but to relent.
The battle lasted throughout the night. During a clash with a group of insurgents on the second floor, Initran received a wound that was bound to be fatal. To a considerable extent, this was due to his lack of caution; in effect, the untreated depression had the upper hand and he committed unintentional, indirect suicide. Azila provided him with basic medical aid but both of them knew he would die in a matter of hours.
Despite her severe aversion to violence, Azila had to fight again to protect him. At first, she was forced to draw the insurgents' fire and distracted them while Initran found a more defensible position. The smoke bombs allowed her to reduce with just a minor wound to her forearm, which she disregarded at first, and to return just in time to save Initran from an insurgent who was standing over him with a rifle, preparing to shoot him. As Initran grew weaker, she defended him against the insurgents about to break into the room. The protective feeling welled over into a blinding rage, and, when she came to her senses, she was standing over two dead bodies and there were more further away.
When she came back, she found Initran unconscious. A handwritten note was lying on the floor nearby. He sensed that he would be dead or in a coma by the time Azila was back and they wouldn't have the chance to have that last conversation, and tried to be concise and direct. As he was drifting in and out of consciousness in a semi-delirious state, he had re-evaluated his priorities and revisited his life with a newfound clarity. He realized that those who called Azila his pet project and said that his main motive was to stroke his own ego - or told him that he was the one assimilating her right there and then - weren't entirely wrong. The thought had bothered him and he would stop to question his motivation more than once, which was why he hadn't made any worse mistakes, but, nevertheless, he had tried to mold her into something she could never be; even as he supported her, a part of him had fought against letting her be herself and grow beyond what he wanted and thought best for her. Now he felt remorse.
In the note, he said he was sorry - she probably knew for what, or would come to understand in a while; that he was grateful for her being there. If she wanted to go home once the grief subsided and she finished mourning him in her present state, and he knew she had wanted to do so all along, then she had to. The bottom line was, he wanted her to be happy and whole, in what had become her natural state of mind, and while he was more than thankful for the self-sacrifice, it'd been more than anyone should be forced to give.
Azila had had an epiphany of her own: as Initran was letting her go, so she, too, had to learn to let herself go. She realized it wasn't always wrong to admit that she was weak, worn out, disoriented, that she wasn't in the right place and would never be able to adjust to certain phenomena because they went against her nature. All her post-deassimilation life had consisted of her stepping on her own throat, forcing herself to endure with clenched fists and gritted teeth, pushing herself beyond the limits of her capacities, but she couldn't continue to do so - sooner or later, she was going to cave in under the pressure.
Initran's note added clarity to that insight. She told him, although she wasn't sure whether he could still hear her, that she would survive the night and respect his wish, and that he would not be forgotten - if she was fully reassimilated, her memories of him would be distributed throughout the collective consciousness and passed on, even if they were no longer "hers", so in a sense he would survive as long as the T'elχ did. Shortly after, he died without regaining consciousness.
Azila's memories of the next few hours were vague. She was devastated by the loss, all the more so that the night's events had required a tremendous effort on her part and sapped all of her physical and emotional resources. Now that the battle was over, the exhaustion caught up with her, and so did the wounds and the realization that she had taken lives. During the next six or seven hours she ran a high fever, shook from head to toe, broke out in a cold sweat and hallucinated.
Some way or other, in the morning she found herself tending to the one human survivor and to Seshaewin, whose wounds were severe and life-threatening even for his subspecies. She could barely stand, her weak sense of self had been shattered and she was operating more on autopilot than otherwise - holding on because she still had promises to keep. The three of them were able to find shelter and Azila stayed until she was sure that both the human and the non-human were restored to full health. By that time, she too had begun to recover somewhat.
When the resonance struck, she was about to choose what to do next. She knew she would go home, but wanted to wait a little longer because she didn't want to bring in the acute sense of bereavement. While full integration was more beneficial, in that the healing would be complete and she would return to a familiar and welcome state, she did not want to forget - as in lose her private awareness, rather than the actual memory - of the past three years: being broken, struggling, gaining a loved one and mourning his loss. She wanted to retain her newly acquired human perspective and use it to help resolve some of the T'elχ-human disagreements. She had sufficient knowledge of human interaction to understand both sides of the conflict and act as a mediator, and would be able to use the two respective modes of communication. For that, she had to undergo a process of partial assimilation where she would be submerged and healed, but a segment of her new personality would be left intact; this was possible, but hadn't been practiced for centuries.
However, the resonance didn't affect Azila quite as much as one might expect. After she had first lost her home and her community, and, in a sense, herself, and then the one person for whom she would stay behind, there wasn't much left to lose. Not a lot has changed; the new dimension wasn't that different; she was surrounded by the same individuals who were just as broken as herself, but, unlike her, knew no other mode of being and took their fragmentation for granted; as before, she found herself persevering against the odds, except that going home was no longer an option even for the distant future. That last part is the hardest. She misses the colony more than ever; in comparison to the past, the present looks increasingly dismal, and the future, more so. If she encountered a similar collective-sapient species with a capacity to assimilate, she would join them. Of course, this would never be the same as those fifteen years, and not "home", though close enough, but she would be able to keep her promise and fulfill Initran's last wish - perhaps even be useful as she was planning. The other difficult aspect is the fact that she is more lost than ever before. She has no group to identify with, no people for whose sake she would want to survive and adapt. Still, as in the past, she continues to do what she does best - persevere.