This one is something of a sequel to In the Garden. Ira again, dealing with the aftermath of being put in Wheels’ nightmarish Garden for a stint.
Content warnings for body horror, eldritch horror, torture, body dysmorphia, traumatic mutism.
***
They talk over Ira’s head, two voices he knows. They spread his wounds wide, tear them, dig deeper to take the flowers out, and he doesn’t scream as their roots are torn free, their pain adding to his pain as he feels them ripped apart and withdrawn. He makes strangled awful noises but he doesn’t scream because…he doesn’t know why. He just shouldn’t.
The flowers are okay. Wheels shows him that. He takes soil, and a pot, and settles them in. It’s terrible. Their roots will be so cramped there. They’ll be alone.
He doesn’t want them back. He feels like a monster.
They stitch him up. The needle and thread slide through his abused, angry crying flesh over and over again, pulling the bleeding wounds together. They reset things. Each bit of him they put right somehow hurts more than it did before.
Wheels asked if he would run. As if he’s capable of moving by himself.
What’s the point of having a body anyway? He’d just started getting used to the idea that it was broken, and might never move again. That maybe like a broken…something, he might find a second life repurposed as something else useful. He doesn’t know if fixing this mess is worth it.
He doesn’t want to go back. He can’t imagine being anywhere else. He’s got nothing else waiting for him.
This body feels alien. He feels alien. Being able to move again, to see and talk, being an animal again… He doesn’t want to go back.
Back to the Garden or back to life? Yes.
***
He learned how to just be, down there with the flowers. So now, he is.
For days and days. He knows days pass now because he can see the sun. He nudges the flowers in their cruel little pot into the beams in the window. They didn’t have real sun, down there. They deserve it. He wonders how it feels to them. They had yearned, in their mindless wordless way. He thinks they yearned for this.
He doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t think about it. He wants…water. And an apple. He can get those. He gets them. Moving is still hard. Everything still hurts. He still wonders if it would’ve been a better idea to stay a broken pot.
He understands language, but it’s so easy to hear only the noise of it. Sometimes he lets it simply be.
Warren holds him, warm and caring and worried. Ira tries to pet at him, to let him know he’s there. Wheels holds him, covetous and satisfied and not satisfied. Ira lets him. He doesn’t know what Wheels wants. Maybe he wants Ira to be flowers. He doesn’t know why Wheels took him out of the Garden.
Wheels seems to think he took him out.
***
Days pass, and days pass. Eventually he gets used to being an animal again. His body hurts. It’s healing. He can walk without help now, though it’s still a bit slow. He’s getting used to putting words to his thoughts again.
He isn’t sure how feels about that. Words make a mess. Clutter and confusion. But he talks more.
Wheels keeps watching him. Ira knows that’s a question, doesn’t need words to understand it. But he doesn’t have an answer. Not any at all. Not any he can speak in a way Wheels can understand it. “I’m not a mind reader, Ira,” he’s said many times, and well. Well. Maybe that wouldn’t even work anyway. What would he read?
***
Wheels asking about the garden is like wires twisting under Ira’s skin. Not like roots. They were different. Ira stares at him, mouth opening and closing and twisting, hands empty, failing to say a goddamn word because he can’t even explain why he can’t.
Those venom green eyes bore into him, demanding, seeking, trying their damnedest to crawl into his brain and scoop out what Wheels wants without the annoying requirement of going through Ira to do it.
Ira throws his arms up in frustration. “I’m not trying to keep it from you, Wheels. I want to tell you. I do! I just. I can’t. I don’t know how!”
“Maybe a reminder would help?” Threat turns Wheels’ voice as smooth as it gets, velvety soft with menace.
Ira isn’t sure how seriously to take him—whether he’s just trying to shake things loose or if he’s really thinking about putting him back. Neither possibility is as disturbing as the sheer force of his desire to know. Ira already knows the lengths that can drive this man to. “No,” he snaps anyway, sharp with his own frustration. “It won’t help. I haven’t fucking forgotten a thing, believe me.” Maybe he has. Who the fuck knows? But he remembers more than enough.
He shoves his hands up into his hair and throws himself into a chair, ignoring its protesting creak. “I feel like I haven’t left it.” It’s a sigh of frustrated defeat. His best attempt to offer what little he can to communicate anything at all. Damn pathetic, because he knows all it does is raise questions.
An eager shudder tears through Wheels at that. It’s like Ira can see right down into him for a second, and what’s there is a maw barely restraining itself from ripping into him to take what it wants.
Ira stares at him helplessly because he has no way to give it.
“Plants give,” he says, low. “They just do. They don’t have to…” He flaps his hands in Wheels’ direction. “Deal with all this bullshit, this trying to navigate how one body interacts with another, they just give. I can’t. I can’t.” He says it forcefully, pleadingly, the words heavy with a meaning that no amount of begging Wheels to understand will actually communicate.
“They take, too,” he says after a bit. “They don’t hesitate or apologize for it. They just take what they need, and give what they can give, and they don’t fuck around about it.” He drops his chin onto his fist. “I don’t even know what I mean by that.”
***
Wheels watches him pet the flowers. “Do you wish you could go back?”
Ira doesn’t think about that. He just lets it sit in his mind. Maybe for too long. It’s easier to lose track of time than it used to be.
“This helps them grow strong stems,” he says, when he realizes the silence has congealed into a solid lump.
“Do you miss them?” Wheels tries again. Wheels wants to know. He asks and he asks, but Ira doesn’t have the language.
Ira looks down at the little guys, in their little pot. “I hate seeing them in this,” he confides. “It seems so cruel. Their roots will be so cramped in this.” Is that an answer? He doesn’t know.
Wheels seems to think it is. Or maybe he’s just as confused as Ira is. “I could give them back to you,” he offers, in a suggestive voice. It’s not like the threat before. This one is…
“No, thank you,” Ira answers.
He thinks he can hear Wheels’ teeth grinding. He casts about for something to offer. “They don’t have a language, you know?” he lands on. “They don’t think. Not like you or I mean the word. Have you ever thought about what that might be like? When I was there, I…I didn’t have any use for language either. I got in their habit. Just didn’t think. It was…easier.” His voice goes small on the last word.
It was easier. Easier not to think about where he was, what was happening. About a body whose every muscle screamed in agony. About maybe never seeing the sky again. Or his daughter. Or speaking ever again. Easier to join them.
Wheels had said from the start he would let him out. It hadn’t mattered. What did those words even mean?
“Trying to tell you what it was like,” he says slowly, feeling out each word, “every second I try, it drags me further from it. Thinking like a person, with all this…noise and clutter in my head, all these little…preoccupied with all these little boxes of sound I’m trying to shove meanings into…it goes in the other direction from what you’re asking me to explain. Do you see?”
He glances, for the first time in this conversation, over to meet Wheels’ eyes. He looks…well, stoic, but stoic in a more explosive way than usual. “I don’t like it,” he adds, a little sulky, a little shaky. “It’s so…loud. There’s too much going on.”
Wheels’ eyes roam his face, his body, feasting on every tiny clue he can identify. “Do you want to go back?” he asks again. He sounds hungry, Ira thinks.
Ira picks up the plants in their small cruel pot and cradles them against his chest. He turns to look at Wheels over their leaves. “You said you’d let me out,” he answers, voice small again. “But I don’t think you have yet.”
That shudder rips through Wheels again. “You said that before.”
“I was an animal,” Ira mutters into the leaves of his little frenemy. “I was a human in a body that moved and talked and saw and took care of my needs. And then you put me down there and you changed me. I can’t just go back. I got those things back but it…it’s too late. I can’t just change back. What you made me into down there, I still am, at least partly.”
“I made you into soil.” Wheels’ voice is a rumble. His eyes are eating Ira up.
Ira shakes his head. “That doesn’t say enough. You made me into part of something.”
“Something you liked? Or something you feared?”
Ira frowns down at his plant, and sets it back down in its spot. “They ate me alive. They took care of me as well as they could, but they knew what they were doing.” He looks back over to Wheels. “You want to eat me alive right now.”
Wheels wants to know. He asks and he asks, but Ira doesn’t have the language. There is no language, flowers don’t have a language. How can he describe the experience of having no thoughts? Of being nothing but sensation, and knowing, in a way that has nothing to do with reasoning. The knowing of when it’s time to bloom. The knowing of someone nearby, because they are a shift of air, a vibration of breath, a flavor of salt and sweet and meat and metals, the things a flower eats.
Of knowing who it is because he could taste that particular combination of tastes and know it’s the waterer.
Even that much is extrapolation, Ira’s application of knowledge and words after the fact. They knew who Wheels was, they knew everything that mattered to them. They knew him to be the one who came and cared for them, again and again. Who gave them water and eased discomfort and picked their fruits—they hadn’t fruited, not yet, but the others in the garden shared the flavors of being plucked and so they knew—and Ira had been part of ‘them.’
No. He still can’t explain it, not even to himself.
***
Wheels isn’t sleeping well, what else is new? He’s come to curl up with Ira on the sofa under the duvet again.
It’s dark, and warm, and Ira is nothing, like this. It’s easy to find a cozy non-existence except a soft voice right in Wheels’ ear, trembling with emotion as he finds words. Not trying to make sense of it or repackage it or answer questions. Or summarize, god forbid. No, he invites.
Imagine yourself in that seat, with the little roots winding their tiny delicate knife-like way through you, as you bleed and everything hurts and it’s all darkness and silence and there’s nothing except the breath of other dead like you and the little flowers.
They’d been so small and young and delicate. And yet so fierce in their will to live. He had been afraid of them and afraid for them at the same time, and they had reached out to him, through him, carving their way through his flesh to twine themselves together like the fingers of two lost hands, and they had held him firm in the dark as they had fed on him and he had felt himself only a small fragile part of something greater.
He tells it in a hushed, almost whispering voice that he couldn’t bear to raise if he wanted to: how it took every part of him. It hadn’t been sentient, the plant. It hadn’t thought. It had had a will, though. Wanted. It had wanted him. He had been its home. Its food. Its senses. It knew the world through him. It trusted the delicate, vital roots of itself to his soft flesh and it tore him apart, ever so slowly, ever so carefully, and it had been grateful. It had loved him for it. But it took him, too. There had been nothing else for him. Nothing else he could do. Nothing that it or Wheels would let him be, and he still can’t…he can’t…
There was no sense of time, in that place. Except for Wheels. His only link to humanity. His only memory of the world outside. Wheels would come and human hands would touch him for a little and give him the things they needed and…ease the pain, a bit.
The same hands that put him there. That made him into this. His lifeline.
He feels so small and easily hurt, ever since, like he’s some kind of small helpless edible creature, and he doesn’t understand it.
He burrows into Wheels’ warmth, those same hands, as he tells this story, trying to make himself small maybe. Or seeking for that union with another being. This familiar one that unmade him and remade him, freed him from his own mind through a sacrifice that horrifies him still.
He falls asleep.