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After his bus was hijacked, Larry had a lot of homeless plants on his hands. Jane had been nice enough to line them up on the back porch, but the back porch got too much sun- his orchids needed indirect light, and the one aloe vera he had was starting to sunburn. He could move some to his room, but the bus had held too many plants to fit in his room with the minimal shelving he had.
Larry ended up moving as many of the shade-seeking plants to his room as he could, leaving the rest scattered around the mansion and the full sun plants on the back porch. He was worried about the plants in his room the most- he took his bandages off to sleep, and the radiation might kill them. He took that risk, though, because they needed extra attention and he could give it best in his room. If it was also because they were plants that Rita got him every spring as a celebration of his arrival to the mansion, he wasn't going to let anyone know. Every time he looked at them he got the distinct and sinking feeling that he was killing a tangible symbol of his humanity. He ignored the thought that that was why he put them there.
Rita still gave him a knowing smile when he got her to help bring them in.
After the initial shuffling and reshuffling of plants, Larry got to work keeping up with his regular plant care schedule, now elongated by more than an hour. He fell into a routine, only noticing a month in that while some of the plants in his room died (he was particularly sad to see '97 go), most were thriving. Larry didn't want to think too hard about it, so he just cleared out the dead plants and kept on taking care of the survivors. Buying some grow lights seemed to help, and he spent a good few weeks figuring out the best setup and light combination.
He had to devise a new schedule, realizing he couldn't attend to all of them every day, especially if new plants kept showing up mysteriously every time Jane came back from doing who-knows-what. He pretended not to see her when she painted skulls and dongs on his outdoor pots, and she kept secretly gifting him flowers that looked like vaginas.
It was a symbiotic relationship. He had a lot of butterfly pea flowers.
The new schedule was fairly loose, he watered and tended to different families of plants on different days, and left Saturdays open to inspect all of them without having to carry around a watering can or bags of fertilizer. It kept him busy. Too busy to dwell on the past while on his rounds, and tired enough after to sleep hard at night. It was the one thing the Negative Spirit didn't bug him about these days, so he cherished it.
He caught Vic watering his gerber daisies on a Wednesday. Vic heard him approach, turned slightly to acknowledge him. "Sorry, I know you water these on Thursdays, but the soil's dry."
Larry leaned against the porch table the daisies were on, hands in his pockets. He smiled, even though Vic wouldn't be able to see it. Vic finished up, tilting the watering can back and placing it on the table. He boosted himself up to sit on the table next to Larry. They sat for a while, silent.
The midday sun beat down on Larry, who was becoming very aware of the slightly scratchy, rather thick fabric covering his entire body. Maybe he should get a sunhat, or some short sleeved shirts so he didn't sweat to death in his turtleneck.
"It's hard to keep track of time here," Vic said. "I mean, there's nothing to do, no deadlines. It's cool that you found something to keep you busy."
Larry was quiet for a while. He didn't intend it, but his silence stretched on a little further than socially acceptable. "We all have things. If you haven't seen Cliff's racetrack recently, you should. He's added to it."
Vic nodded, thinking. "I don't have a thing."
"You have Cyborg."
"Yeah, but-" Vic paused, "I don't have, like, a hobby."
Larry hummed. He didn't know Vic very well, but it seemed like the kid had spent all of his free time in Detroit being Cyborg. Now that he was living in the Manor, there was a ton of time on his hands and he was feeling antsy. Maybe he should get Vic some video games. Kids liked those, right? Anything would be better than the nervous flitting between housekeeping tasks he did like Niles was going to die if he didn't scrub the oven clean right now. It wouldn't kill the old man if Vic spent a few hours on an xbox. Niles had survived being kidnapped this long. Probably. Larry felt vaguely guilty for thinking that.
"How'd you pick horticulture?"
"Rita got me a peace lily as a welcome present."
Vic nodded. "Do you still…"
Larry shook his head. "I killed it in a month."
It surprised a short laugh out of Vic, who looked vaguely guilty afterwards. Larry pushed himself off the table and gave the gerber daisy pot a quarter turn, to help it grow evenly.
He went back inside, waving halfheartedly.
Finding the others studying his plants became a regular occurance. He found Cliff out front staring at one of his hanging baskets. "It's a spider plant."
Cliff jumped at both the sudden noise and the name. "Spiders? Dude, is that thing gonna attract fucking spiders into our house?"
"There's no spiders," Larry said, reaching up with his watering can to wet the soil. "It's named after the way the leaves look."
Cliff nodded. "Spidery."
He forgot about the exchange in the following week, only remembering it had happened because he found a hand painted tag on his spider plant, proudly declaring that its name was George. The tag was messy and the r was backwards, so he was fairly confident he knew who named his plant.
Then, the tags kept appearing. They were always hand painted, and always placed carefully enough to avoid covering Jane's explicit doodles.
For a while, they only served to make him laugh quietly at the appearance of each new one, but one Tuesday afternoon, Rita strode up to him with his ivy in hand, chastising him about "Fresh Linen" not getting enough sunlight.
After that, the names on the tags became signifiers that everyone in the mansion used. At breakfast, Hammerhead sat down next to him and asked how Sappho was doing after the repotting. Vic passed him in the hallway and told him it was supposed to rain, so he should bring The Flying Purple People Eater in. He caught Cliff cooing at Little Dude after dinner.
On a Wednesday, Larry found himself outside. This wasn't unusual, but the fact that he was standing in front of the dilapidated greenhouse on the west lawn was. It had been on his mind for a while- when Jane had emptied his bus it was the first place he thought of as a place to store the plants. Even before then, when Rita first gave him the peace lily, he thought of the greenhouse. But half of the windows were shattered and it was full of vines that had overgrown the place and died and the sprinkler system was nonfunctional. He didn't think he'd ever even seen it in a state of repair. Every time he thought of it, he told himself that fixing it up was on the to do list. And then he never did it.
But it was Wednesday, and Niles was still missing, and Larry was running out of patio space for his plants. Jane had realized that she could buy strawberry plants and had made it his problem. He had been thinking of more food-minded gardening for a while, and he guessed that this was his opportunity to fix up the greenhouse.
The glass panels that were shattered could stay shattered, but he'd need Vic's help getting the sprinklers in working order. Before that, though, he'd need to get rid of the dead vines. And the shattered glass. The vines could go in the compost bins, but the glass needed to be carefully dealt with. He couldn't risk cutting his bandages. He felt a little silly putting on gardening gloves for something like picking up glass, but if they were good for thorns they were probably good for glass.
Larry figured he might be overthinking and set about picking up glass and vines.
In the end, it took him about two weeks of on and off work, lessened by Cliff noticing him a few days in and deciding to help. He had refused to work without music, though, so the two of them had listened to the mansion's collection of CDs twice over. Cliff apparently wasn't the kind of guy to listen to whole albums normally, being kind of picky about which songs from an artist he enjoyed.
Rita joined as well, though not to do any actual labor. The first time she visited, she came with a giant pitcher of what was probably Mint Julep and a platter of cucumber sandwiches. She finished both off in ten minutes and spent the rest of the time lounging on a lawn chair, keeping them company. It became routine. It was hot out, as she often complained, and occasionally she would walk over, place a hand on Cliff's head, and tell him that his brain would fry if he didn't get out of the sun for a while. When Cliff went to take a break, she'd link arms with Larry and drag him to the kitchen to help her make snacks.
It was exhausting work that left him sweaty (the greenhouse cleaning, not the snack making), which usually meant he retreated immediately after the day's work to get his bandages off, but it was rewarding to see the greenhouse so clean after two weeks of work.
Vic was kind enough to fix up the sprinkler system without Larry even asking. He found the kid tinkering with it one morning, a week into the cleanup process. It was clearly a challenge he enjoyed, but he seemed to enjoy it more when he was done with it, no longer having to fuss around with electronics more than he usually did.
With the sprinklers fixed and the mess cleared away, Larry started moving the strawberry plants into their permanent places in the greenhouse.
A few days after the strawberries were repotted, Jane herded him onto the bus, refusing to tell him why. Larry figured it was something plant related, and his suspicions were confirmed when she pulled into Cloverton's plant nursery. She parked and leapt out, turning around and gesturing for him to follow.
After the initial worry about being recognized as one of the freaks that trashed the town and the following realization that he didn't much care as long as he got some vegetable plants, he followed.
He ended up with a school bus full of several different vegetable plants, as well as a few pepper plants and some herbs. Babydoll seemed excited about the cherry tomatoes they had gotten. Larry was the most excited about the Lavender.
When he finally got all of the plants situated, Larry stood back and admired his family's work. The greenhouse had gone from a dilapidated mess to a full and vibrant area, and he knew the plants would thrive.
That spring, Rita proudly handed him a pot with three dwarf sunflowers. She told him that Vic had done some research at her behest, and that sunflowers had been used near Chernobyl to bring down the radiation in the soil. Larry shuffled the plants in his room around to put the sunflowers closest to the grow light.