Rating: Explicit (gore, body horror, torture)
Content warnings: body horror, manipulation, coercion, captivity
***
“Tell me what you think about the garden,” he says. And I stare.
I’ve told him before. What it was like. Only I didn’t, really, I told him as little as I could get away with. I tell him again.
I tell him how the roots burned as they ate their way through me. How they twined their fragile hairlike little filaments around my nerves and my tendons and my bones until I began to lose track of where I ended and they began. How they showed me how it felt—to be a plant. The soft brush of air currents across their leaves, too light for my skin to feel. The kiss of humidity, even where it fell from my own breath. The taste of a thousand different minerals and particles in the air, things that even now I couldn’t tell you a human name for—but the plants knew them. Knew what was good and what was bad, what directions they drifted in from and how those patterns painted an entire world for them in senses we don’t have and I couldn’t begin to describe. I’m no poet.
I tell him how I lived in those plants. The way they were my body and the world they knew was my world, when I didn’t have access to my own senses. Because he took them away, I don’t say. I let that hang in the air like those particles the plants tasted.
I wonder if he can taste it.
I tell him how they shared that world with me in thanks for feeding on me. I could feel them feeding on me. I could feel them eating me, an inch at a time, burrowing deeper day by day and minute by minute. I could feel it through the slow spreading burning agony in my own flesh and I could feel it through their delight and gratitude and their awareness of their own growth, their own increase.
The way I hadn’t been able to sense anything else, because he’d taken my eyes and ears and tongue. They were almost all I had left. Yeah, and as time went on, my skin—the only sense I had left—it got more like them. More sensitive, in the absence of almost everything, or I got more aware, till sometimes I could feel those faint currents along with them, the tickle of humidity and the feather-light caress of changing temperatures. So fucking little changed down there. Even the smallest thing became like a roar in the silence.
He listens to me tell him all this. Nodding, eyelids half-closed. Savoring. Savoring what he’d done to me.
It twists in me still, what he did to me. That he did this to me. I tell myself it’s not worse than other things I’ve been through. And that’s true, but sometimes that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. It’s a barbed pill and it’ll catch at you all the way down.
And then he says, that bare voice of his soft and even in the quiet room, “But that isn’t what you think about it.”
His fucking voice. Have you ever heard him speak? It’s not…clean. Not smooth, or rusty either. Bare metal is the best I can describe it. A flat, unpolished plane, hard but flexible, and it can catch and cut you on edges you can feel but not see.
“Tell me what you think, Ira,” he repeats, and my name in his mouth sounds alien. It sounds like a leash.
I take liberties here, with the Spirit. I know I do. He knows I know. I’m something not quite fully his and in order to get away with that, in order to pay for it, I give him power over me voluntarily. I hoped at one point that’d be enough for him. But it isn’t. He isn’t satisfied with
any power someone else gives him because that means they can take it away.
But he lives with it. And if I know what’s good for me, I’ll abide by that unspoken agreement.
And so he orders me to speak, and I—oh boy I fucking hate it—I obey.
He can see that I hate it. He likes that. It means he found a real good spot to dig this time.
I run my hands through my hair. I run them down my face. I tug at my eyebrows and my ears but there’s no handhold I’m going to find that’ll haul me out of range of him, so in the end, “I was fucking terrified,” I snap. “How do you think I felt?”
He waits. Fucker almost never rises to the bait. I can get him, sometimes, if I try hard enough, but with Wheels, everything has a price. Especially getting a rise from him.
“In my dreams,” I finally say, looking away from him as I surrender, “I’m the flower.”
The words feel dragged out of me with meat hooks. I’m being dissected like one of the slabs of meat hanging in the Stockyard’s slaughterhouses.
There’s a creak and rustle as Wheels leans forward. This is the show he came here for. “What happens in them?”
“I smile in the light.” There’s a small stack of newspapers on the side table next to my chair. They’re a week or two out of date and folded weirdly, to put the stories he was interested in on top. “I grow. I love the beast I’m eating.” That’d be me. “I love the air, and the water, and the thing that shines on me in this place where there’s no sun. And you. I taste you in the air when you come, the breath you breathe out and your sweat and…and I think it’s your soap.” I glance at his eyes and away again. The green of them catches the low light in here. They practically glow, like a cat. I shrug in their direction. “That’s it. Plants are pretty simple.”
“But you dream you’re the flower.”
“I was the flower,” I snarl at him. My hands are suddenly fists, and I’m leaning forward, a thread of control away from lunging forward and smacking him one. “This is your fault. You made me into something I don’t understand. I can’t let it go. It won’t let me go.” My voice is shaking. I inhale and it wobbles like a busted tire. “It’s out there—” I slash a hand toward the living room, where the plant still grows, happy in a pot on an east-facing windowsill. “ —and I—I still feel it. Sometimes I think it’s still inside me? It liked it down there in that godforsaken place and it was grateful to be there with me and what do I do—” My voice cracks, begging, and I float somewhere a few inches behind my own head, taking stock of my own suddenly out of control self. “—What am I supposed do, when the cleanest love I’ve ever known in my life was from a mutant plant that was eating me?”
Mentally I apologize to it. It’s just doing its best. It doesn’t deserve me throwing insults about it like that.
I hear the low scrape of Wheels’ nails across the upholstery of his chair. “Ira.” God. Fuck. His tone is so level. Lethally calm. I don’t want to hear what he’s saying. “Do you want to go back?”
“No.”
He can hear the yes buried inside it like a moth inside a chrysalis. The begging for him to believe it, to let it become true.
I don’t. I don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t but there’s some horrible treasonous corner in my head that I would carve out with a spoon if I thought that’d actually get rid of it. “No,” I tell him again desperately.
His eyes shine with luminous adoration in the lamp’s dim light. He leans toward me like a man in love and the shadows catch at his face with sharp claws and he looks like a monster of bone and sinew and hunger with his human mask torn off.
When I throw myself at his feet and into his lap, sobbing, he holds me.