Work Text:
Flora's wounds from the Scrapers' attack do not heal properly and start to rot.
Every morning Flora wakes up earlier than Aisha and locks herself in the bathroom. Every morning, she pulls the dressing from her wound. Every morning, she hopes. But it gets worse.
At first, Flora tries cleaning the wound with water. It removes the grey liquid oozing from her wound for some time and the cool brings a short relief. When she pulls off the dressing the next morning, the wound looks worse than the day before.
She cleans the wound with rubbing alcohol. It stings and burns so much she wants to scream and dig her fingernails into her skin and rip out whole chunks of skin.
But she doesn’t because the girls are sleeping and the walls are thin. Instead, she sinks to the ground, tries to crawl out of her skin and melt into the cool tiles of their bathroom.
But the stench.
The stench is the worst.
If you smell something for long enough, you get used to it and the sensation fades. But not her. Flora can still smell her wound. She can’t describe it and can’t compare it to anything else, because she’s too scared of what pictures might appear in her brain at the sensation. As a scientist, she knows she should use her senses to identify something. Every morning she examines the wound, searching for changes. It’s not spreading, she thinks, she hopes. Her muscles, tendrils and bones aren’t affected in any way, no fever, no dizziness - she feels fine. Except that she isn’t.
The wound just doesn’t go away.
Flora makes an effort to breathe through her mouth. She wants to stay strong but every morning, she can’t do anything but fail to pretend not to smell anything. The only thing she can say for sure is that it’s so much worse than anything else.
The grey liquid, the dark crust and the rotting flesh underneath. The stench follows her everywhere, even in her dreams. It reeks of death. She can’t block it out. It was overwhelming at first but now it’s subtle, like a steady trickle that hollows her out from the inside.
Every day, Flora tries to flood her olfactory senses with other scents. Every day, she fails.
The other girls have already commented on her excessive use of perfume. They think it’s nothing but a new habit of hers. She doesn’t correct them, mumbles something of experimenting with different flowers. Terra immediately offers her help with extracting essential oils, growing plants, or anything else. But no pressure, she adds, realising her cousin may need the time for herself in the laboratory. Flora makes a mental note to keep her expression neutral next time, and to be nicer to her cousin.
Underneath her perfumes and the scented body lotions and oils she can still smell the stench of rotten flesh on herself.
She keeps even more plants in her room than Terra, turning it into a smaller version of the greenhouse with its earthy, warm, and sweet scent. None of the girls notes the three different aroma diffusers around her desk, bed, and their common space. Her room looks and feels like a fucking yoga retreat. It’s a phase, she says.
The crust crunches under the force of her sharp blade as she cuts through it. She doesn’t want to think about what exactly produces the crackling sound that seems to pierce through the silence.
Flora unceremoniously throws the slimy pieces of whatever into the rubbish, covering the smell with one of these scented trees people have in their cars. She wears gloves and disinfects everything before and afterwards. No one suspects anything and her workspace in the greenhouse has never looked better.
When Ben comments on the tidy state of her space, she makes sure to scatter some materials next time.
Sometimes she cuts too deep or slips with the scalpel but she can’t find it in herself to care too much. She barely feels anything anyway. Only when the grey wound liquid is stained red with her blood does she realise that she messed up again.
Flora tries to cauterise the wound. She does it at night when no one can hear her pained cries. It shouldn’t hurt. Flora has used enough Zanbaq to numb her upper body for two days. It still hurts.
The smell of burned flesh is nauseating but she is used to that sensation already.
Memories of a family barbecue flash in front of her eyes, they will forever be tainted by tonight. She will never be able to inhale the smokey scent of burned wood mixing with the slightly charred steaks her uncle produces without remembering the agony that grows from the wound.
She doesn’t know whether it’s the excruciating pain or her own misery that causes her eyes to tear when she throws up. Maybe both.
Next time, she will use more Zanbaq which means she will have to steal some of Ben’s emergency supply. Or she could make some herself. She will find a way to get more.
But she needs to increase the dose again. Her body has adjusted to the tincture earlier than she’d hoped. She knows about its addictive effects but nothing else helps her to endure the searing pain that she has been living with and that gets worse with each of her tries to get rid of the wound.
She wouldn’t mind the scars, would welcome them even. They would be a sign that her wounds are healing, that she could be okay. But nothing ever heals.
Flora feels herself getting weaker every day.