fruit of life

Warm, humid air enfolded Herbert as soon as he dragged the lab door open. Gone was the autumn chill outside; Herbert might as well have walked directly back into the warmest and wettest of Peru’s jungles.

Plants hung from all the mortuary’s old brick walls, broad-leafed and larger than life, making the place feel more like a subterranean greenhouse than a lab. Herbert approached the nearest of them. Flowers of life: flores de la vida, as they’d been called by the superstitious locals, whose obstruction had nearly prevented Herbert and Dan from finding the plants at all. This one had been the first to bloom, and so far its blossom was the largest, with a trumpet ten inches long with blood-red petals and long, black pistils twisting out from its center. Herbert peered past them into the depths of the blossom. It was too deep and shadowed to see all the way into unaided, but he squinted for a moment anyway, imagining he saw what he knew to be there.

It was the smell that finally drove him away. He’d had his fair share of experiences with dead bodies—some might say more than his fair share—but the rotting odor the flores gave off was somehow worse. Not just a dead body but one that had lain decomposing on a rain forest floor for a week, growing ever more fragrant. Even the actual decaying body parts embedded in the flores’ soil were less noxious than the blooms.

The laboratory domor scraped open. “Herbert?” Dan said. His voice was muffled by the sweater sleeve he was pressing over his nose and mouth. While Herbert didn’t enjoy the flores’ odor, Dan couldn’t seem to tolerate it at all. After the first few times he’d fled the lab to retch into the garbage can outside, they’d both quietly given up on the idea of him helping with the flores.

Well, there were other ways to involve Dan in the work.

“Well?” Herbert said. He headed to the worktable for the flashlight.

“When you get a minute, I need to talk to you.”

Herbert turned to look at Dan properly, but there wasn’t much to see with the sweater covering most of his face. He looked a bit pale, maybe. “Now?”

“When you get a minute,” Dan repeated.

Herbert sighed. An immediate problem would require Herbert’s attention immediately, and a non-immediate one could have waited until he made his way upstairs on his own, which meant this was worse than either: it was the kind of problem Dan was going to be emotional about.

“I’m just going to take the daily measurements,” Herbert said.

“Okay,” Dan said. He took a moment to peer around the lab, the cuttings along the wall each in its own time unfurling its red blossoms, its curling viney tendrils and smooth, broad leaves. Each bearing its own secret fruit.

“Impressive, aren’t they?” Herbert said. Generally he cared a great deal more about function than form. Still, they were striking.

“Yeah,” Dan said, sounding a little choked. “I’ll, uh, I’ll just be upstairs.”

“Mm,” Herbert said, attention already turning back to his work. He picked up the yardstick from the work bench. Notebook in hand, he made a slow circuit of the room, taking the daily figures for every plant: number of leaves, number and width of blossoms, shade of petals. Lacking a more scientific apparatus to record color values, he had a full collection of red-hued paint cards from Arkham Hardware, and he tested them against each blossom until he identified one that matched.

Finally he arrived where he’d begun, at the biggest blossom of all. Dan had named it Lucy. It was unclear to Herbert whether that referred to the entire plant or just the blossom.

“Well, Lucy, it’s time to look at your progress,” Herbert said. He’d found himself prone to talking to it once it had a name. Just as well Dan wasn’t around to see; he’d get that smile like he had a secret he declined to share.

Never mind Dan. Herbert took the flashlight from his shirt pocket, switched it on, and peered inside, down, down into Lucy’s heart. Here the stench was even stronger, and Herbert breathed as shallowly as possible. Even with the flashlight it took some careful maneuvering to find the pink round nub he’d discovered three weeks ago. There it was, about as big around as a pencil with soft pink skin.

Only it was not alone, Herbert saw. Next to it, pushing up out of Lucy’s fleshy red center, was another one just like it.

Lucy had begun to grow a second toe.

Upstairs, Herbert found Dan slumped on the huge old sofa that had come with the place. That had been a big part of Herbert's sales pitch to Dan before they signed the lease: that it came furnished, even if some of the furnishings were somewhat the worse for wear.

Dan looked up as Herbert walked in. Now that Herbert could see his whole face, it was obvious he was upset. Probably he wouldn’t be interested in the news about Lucy just now, which was one more reason to resolve the unidentified problem as soon as possible.

“Well?” Herbert said.

Dan sighed gustily and looked down at his hands. “You’re, uh. You’re gonna need a new roommate.”

“What? Don’t be absurd.”

“I’m serious,” Dan said, in that soft, disappointed way of his.

“So am I,” Herbert scoffed. Giving in to the inevitable, he sat down across from Dan on the coffee table, an ancient lumber structure that must have weighed a hundred pounds. Whoever had furnished the mortuary originally had believed in durability above all else. “Now, what’s this all about?”

It took Dan a couple of moments to spit it out, a couple of soundless movements of his mouth before he finally ducked away from Herbert’s gaze and said, “I’m pregnant.”

Herbert stared at him. Of all the things that he’d imagined—not that he’d tried very hard, because he’d learned it was pointless to try to guess Dan’s foibles—Herbert had certainly not imagined that. “I see,” he said at last, not seeing at all.

A pink flush rose on Dan’s cheeks. “Yeah.”

“When did this happen?”

“There was that night in Peru when we headed back to Lima and I wanted to go check out that bar, do you remember that? And you didn’t go?”

“You were recovering from a stab wound!” Herbert said, appalled. He vaguely remembered that evening in some non-descript town a couple of day’s travel from the city. Herbert had been busy tending to the plant cuttings and had let Dan go alone, with a warning not to re-open the stitches.

He didn’t think Dan had even been gone very long. Long enough, apparently.

“Yeah, well,” Dan said, not meeting Herbert’s eye. “That’s—I figure that has to be when it happened. So that puts me at seventeen weeks. I’m due in March.”

“You’re going to keep it.”

Dan nodded.

It seemed pointless to ask why. “And you want to leave.”

“I didn’t say that,” Dan said, in that soft, disappointed voice. “But pregnant and unmarried? There’s no way the hospital will let me stay.”

“Oh,” Herbert said.

“Yeah.”

“Puritanical backwards morons.” Comically lax about some things—students transferring in under suspicious circumstances, plagiarized research—and criminally rigid about others. Miskatonic University in a nutshell, and its university hospital, too.

“Yeah, looks like I’m getting kicked out on moral grounds after all.” At Herbert’s blank look, Dan added, “You tried to blackmail me, remember? You said you were going to tell Dean Halsey about me and Meg.”

‘Try’ nothing; Herbert had blackmailed him. Still, it was not a welcome comparison. “It was necessary,” Herbert said stiffly. “Anyway, if I’d really wanted to get you kicked out, I wouldn’t have bothered with threats. And that’s not the point. Dan, I need you for my work. Surely you don’t think I would throw you out.”

“If I don’t have a job, I can’t pay rent. There’s a hospital back home that will hire me. My dad will make sure of it, even if—” Dan’s mouth twisted unhappily. “—even if he’s disappointed about the circumstances. And once I’ve got my feet under me, I can figure something else out. Hopefully.”

“But I need you,” Herbert said, bringing the conversation back around to the main point. “The work needs you. We’re close to a new breakthrough. Lucy—”

“—will be fine without me,” Dan said, smiling gently. “And so will you. You invented your reagent before you even met me, and come on, we both know I’m not really a researcher. I’m just your glorified lab assistant, and lately I haven’t even been that.”

“Dan,” Herbert said, but he didn’t know how to continue. If Dan didn’t understand that Herbert needed him, then how to even begin?

“Anyway, I can’t just—I have a baby to think about now. So I’m just saying, you need to put up a notice for a new roommate. Okay?” There was a plea in Dan’s eyes that Herbert didn’t like looking at. It was his be reasonable expression, but there was nothing about this that was reasonable.

“Marry me,” Herbert said, almost before the idea came to him.

“What?”

It was the perfect solution, Herbert realized. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You’re pregnant and unmarried. If you’re determined to go on being pregnant, then we’ll have to address the other half of the problem. A marriage license and a couple of rings, and suddenly you’re respectable again. It’s practically magic.”

“We can’t get married,” Dan said blankly.

“Why not? People do it all the time. We already live together, work together. Nothing would have to change. Except your name, possibly. Under the circumstances I think that little nod to propriety would be helpful.” And Daniel West had a nice sound to it, now that Herbert thought about it.

Dan was still staring uselessly at him. Herbert assumed there would be protests, and he marshalled his rebuttals, but no protests came. After another long moment, Dan pushed to his feet. “Look, I appreciate the offer, but I’m not going to marry you. I’m not going to marry anyone. I’m just going to go home, okay?” He searched Herbert’s face, and then he gave his shoulder a squeeze and walked away.

“At least think about it,” Herbert called to Dan’s back. “Don’t do anything rash while you’re feeling—” Hormonal. “—emotional.”

Dan paused in the doorway. After a moment, without turning around, he said, “Yeah, okay.”

Herbert returned to the lab. His mind raced with alarmed, half-formed thoughts, and his hands itched for something to do. Luckily there was always plenty of that in the lab.

He checked each plant’s basket full of soil and loose half-decayed plant matter, his mind only half on the work. His newest cuttings in the back corner were all unfurling their first broad, glossy green leaves and their long, slim vines, which were strictly decorative as far as Herbert could tell. Upon inspection, he decided it was time to add the most important ingredient to their diet.

When he went to the fridge to get it, he found he was running low on supplies. He and Dan would need to restock—assuming, of course, that Dan could be persuaded to stay. But Herbert had to assume that; the alternative was unthinkable.

He took the dismembered hand and the jar with the two staring eyeballs floating in viscous solution. It was easy to push the eyeballs down into the loam of one basket. The hand was for the next plant, but he had to be more careful, as he didn’t want to damage the roots. However, it too eventually was buried beneath the soil, ready for the plant to digest and learn from.

They really were extraordinary plants. If Herbert had been a botanist—if his ambitions had been smaller, more easily satisfied—then he could have made his name simply by reporting their existence. Thousands of years they’d grown in the Peruvian jungle, waiting to be stumbled upon by him, Herbert West.

Well, technically it had been Dan who’d tripped over the vine of one and landed face-down on the floor of that isolated glen. Herbert usually felt it kinder not to mention that, though.

Still, who knew how long it would have taken Herbert to find that first plant, growing its blood-rich blooms deep in the wilderness if Dan had not been there. Who knew if Herbert would have ever found the glen in the first place, if he’d not had Dan to sweet-talk the guide into taking them.

Dan was necessary for the work. That was all there was to it.

“He can’t leave,” Herbert told the final cutting. It didn’t even have a name yet—Dan hadn’t ventured inside the lab since Herbert had started growing it—and yet here he was, talking to it. He thought he’d spent a lot more time working in silence before Dan.

When Herbert knocked on Dan’s bedroom door, which stood slightly ajar, he had his new arguments all prepared. They were irrefutable; Dan didn’t stand a chance. Then the door swung open to Dan standing in front of the full-length mirror, naked to the waist, and all of Herbert’s arguments dried up.

“What are you doing?” he said.

Dan glanced over and flushed. “Just looking, I guess.” He palmed his belly. It still looked basically flat. “At least now I know why my pants are getting tight. I thought I just needed to lay off the cafeteria lunches.”

“You’d be better off,” Herbert said distantly. He was a scientist, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be the subject of other people’s experiments. Tuna surprise, indeed.

Only, he had trouble working up his usual ire about cafeteria food, looking at Dan just then. He hadn’t seen him unclothed since they’d returned to civilization. Time and determined forgetfulness had made the Dan of his memory seem practically ordinary, with ordinary shape and musculature. Seeing him again put the lie to all that.

He’d make a beautiful cadaver, Herbert thought.

“Did you want something?” Dan asked. He was looking at Herbert strangely.

Herbert sniffed. “Have you reconsidered?” he asked, forcing his thoughts back on track.

“Herbert,” Dan said, looking pained.

“It’s a perfect plan. Just what is it you are objecting to? I know we’ve had our differences at times, but surely your ethics can’t be feeling squeamish about marriage.”

“Well, kind of,” Dan said slowly. He turned away and pulled a shirt on, covering up those swathes of fragile skin. Turned away, his fingers at the buttons and his head bowed, he said, “I just thought when I got married it’d be for love, you know?”

“I see,” Herbert said, stung for no reason he could name. “Well, if you have a better offer, by all means take that one instead.”

Dan didn’t even seem to hear. “Me and Meg were going to get married,” he said sadly. Him sounding like that—looking like that, his shoulders rounded with defeat— was half the reason Herbert had dragged him down to South America. And once there, it was true that trudging through the Peruvian highlands had perked Dan up a bit.

They’d had to come back sometime, though.

“We were going to have kids,” Dan said. He laughed softly to himself. “A whole bunch of them. Five or six. I guess that’s why…” He trailed off, closing his hand over the front of his shirt. Herbert had the disquieting feeling that there was far more separating the two of them than just six feet of well-worn wooden floor.

He approached. “You wanted a marriage and children,” he said cautiously. It wasn’t a desire he’d ever felt even the least inkling of, though he had to admit the prospect had recently acquired a strange appeal. “Well, now you have the child, or you will have. And you can have the marriage, too, if you want.”

“Herbert,” Dan said. He met Herbert’s gaze, looking lost.

“You won’t have to go home to your parents—to your moronic father who will expect you to feel grateful for any little favor. You’ll stay at the hospital, helping patients.” Better him than Herbert. “And there’s still the work. Lucy needs you,” he said. If pressed, he wouldn’t have been able to say exactly how Lucy needed Dan, but Herbert knew she did.

“I need you,” he finished uselessly. It was the truest reason Herbert had, even though Dan had already shown himself to be unmoved by it.

Dan was silent for a long moment. At least he said, “Really? You’re not just saying that.”

“You know better than that,” Herbert scoffed. “I don’t ‘just say’ things.”

“You really don’t,” Dan said. Slowly the corners of his mouth turned up, and Herbert felt nearly weak with relief. That was it, the turning point. Dan would marry him. Dan would stay.

Dan wore a suit to the courthouse. Herbert hadn’t realized he even owned one. It was a sober gray color and made Dan seem taller, which he hardly needed. Herbert wore black, of course.

Dan had applied for the license a few days prior, so when the time came they had only to go before the justice of the peace. They arrived early and waited on a wooden bench. Herbert occupied himself thinking about what body parts he wanted to procure for the next round of plant cuttings. Next to him, Dan folded and unfolded the license often enough that Herbert started to think he might tear it. “I’ll just take this,” he said, lifting it from Dan’s fingers.

“Herbert,” Dan whispered. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Herbert turned to consider Dan fully for the first time since they’d arrived. Oh. Dan was nervous. “You’re not getting second thoughts, are you?” Herbert asked. “Now?”

“No. No.”

Herbert lifted his eyebrows. In his experience, the second no cancelled out the first no and turned it into a yes.

“Just, I’m having a baby, Herbert. You don’t really want a baby, do you?”

“Not particularly, but I’m not having one. Besides, you clearly want one enough for the both of us.”

Dan seemed less satisfied by this than Herbert would have liked, but before he could protest further, the clerk called out his name. They both got to their feet. Herbert gripped Dan’s sleeve, leaned up to his ear, and said, “If you hate being married, we can always get it annulled later.”

Dan stared silently at the floor for a moment, and then he nodded.

“Good man,” Herbert said.

There was no time for more discussion; the clerk was waiting for them. She brought them before the justice of the peace, an older woman with heavy-framed bifocals and voluminous, curly red hair. She peered at the license, rather the worse for wear after Dan’s fidgeting. “Getting married today, are we?”

“That’s right,” Herbert said, giving her his best smile.

“Yeah,” Dan said.

She hummed thoughtfully, had them sign a document, signed it herself, stamped it—all the tedious human bureaucracy Herbert generally tried to avoid at all costs. “And it says here you don’t want any kind of ceremony,” she said.

“Correct,” Herbert said.

“Have you brought rings?”

Herbert fished them out of his pocket. They weren’t legally required, but the goal was to make Dan look respectable, after all. They’d picked out the simple bands a couple of days prior. “Your hand?” he said to Dan. He slid the ring on Dan’s finger, and then Dan did the same for him.

“Well, then, congratulations, Mr. Herbert and Daniel West, you are now husband and husband. Feel free to seal it with a kiss if you like. I find people usually do.” She winked vulgarly.

Alarmed, Herbert glanced at Dan, expecting him to agree that they would do no such thing. Dan looked similarly alarmed, but to Herbert’s shock, he leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to Herbert’s lips. He’d retreated again long before Herbert had time to react. Herbert stared at him, watching a flush rise on Dan’s cheeks.

The justice of the peace beamed at them. “I do always enjoy a wedding,” she said.

Dan drove them home on wet streets past desolate trees clinging to their last few leaves. On the way, Herbert gave him the latest updates with the flores. There’d been a number of exciting developments as well as the ongoing difficulties in food supply, and in describing all this in detail, it took Herbert a while to notice that Dan was less appreciative than usual. Upon inspection, he seemed withdrawn, possibly even unhappy.

That wouldn’t do. “What is it?” Herbert said.

“What?” It took Dan long enough to respond that Herbert suspected he hadn’t even been listening, which wasn’t like him either.

“Something’s on your mind,” Herbert said.

“No,” Dan said, which was obviously a lie. Herbert waited him out, and finally Dan said, “It’s just not how I thought it’d be, getting married. Or being married, I guess.”

“We said nothing would change. That was part of the agreement.”

“I know, Herbert.” Dan smiled weakly. “Never mind. It’s fine.”

But it wasn’t. Herbert needed Dan to be happy with this arrangement. For the first time, he wondered if perhaps the marriage idea had been a mistake. He’d thought he knew how to manage Dan’s various sentimental tangles, but perhaps marriage had opened him up to new ones.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Dan said, glancing over. “I really appreciate you doing this for me. Not a lot of people would marry a guy just so he could keep his job. You’re a good friend.”

“Of course,” Herbert said, though Dan’s access to hospital labs and resources had only ranked fourth on Herbert’s list of reasons. If that was how Dan preferred to see it, Herbert had no complaints.

Daniel turned down the long drive leading to the mortuary. Gravel crunched under the wheels, a sound that Herbert had come to find comforting. The drive separated them from the outside world, its judgment and idiocy. At the far end was their own sanctuary, his and Dan’s. Now it was theirs in a new way, he supposed: the West residence, home of their married life. Even though they’d agreed that would look more or less like their unmarried life, perhaps he could understand some glimmer of the emotion wracking Dan today.

When they got out, Herbert made sure to arrive at the door first. He unlocked it, and with a flourish he threw it open for Dan. “Mr. West,” Herbert said.

Dan looked startled, but then his expression warmed to a smile. “Mr. West,” he replied, inclining his head. He crossed the threshold, and Herbert followed.

On impulse, Herbert said, “Come down to the lab. I have things to show you.” After a short hesitation, Dan followed, and Herbert found him a heavy rag from the kitchen. Together they descended into the basement, and once Dan had the rag firmly in place over his nose and mouth, Herbert swung open the door.

The stench of rot was even stronger when he’d been away from it for a few hours, but the flowers’ green foliage and crimson blooms appeared brighter, too. “Wow,” Dan said, looking around the room with wide eyes, though he’d last been down only a week prior. Maybe he’d been even more upset that day than Herbert had realized. Now Dan seemed to be taking it all in.

Herbert took him on a tour. When they came to the oldest unnamed plants, Herbert said, “I thought perhaps you could name them, if you wanted.”

“Yeah?” Dan said, his eyes lighting. “Okay.”

Herbert showed Dan the basket where he’d put the detached hand a few days ago; now he swept loose soil away and showed how little of the hand was left. “The blossom has grown four inches in length since I planted the hand and two inches in circumference at the base. Based on the timeline of the other plants, I expect we’ll start seeing fingers growing from it within a couple of weeks.”

“Wow,” Dan repeated, wide-eyed. “And then what?”

“Well, when it’s grown, we’ll try transplanting it.” Herbert cracked a smile. “In both senses of the word, of course, because—”

“No, I get it, I get it. Very funny,” Dan said, in that tone that meant he thought the opposite, but that was because Dan demonstrably had no sense of humor.

“Probably one of the other samples will be ready for transplant first,” Herbert said. “Come look at Lucy.”

“Aw, Lucy,” Dan said, a smile in his voice. Herbert gave him the flashlight and let him peer down into Lucy’s center. Two-thirds of the foot was now visible, and Herbert expected the heel to emerge any day. Dan looked properly impressed by the progress. “I thought you were going to start by transplanting limbs onto animals, though.”

“Yes, yes, I have some paws and tails growing over there.” Herbert gestured to the far wall. Dan had made the argument months ago that it would be easier to find living animal subjects to transplant onto than it would be people. Herbert had grudgingly agreed.

Finally Dan stood in the center of the room, looking all around, and said, “It looks really good.”

“There are natural marvels in this laboratory,” Herbert said. “The scientific community has never seen anything like it. We’ll be famous.”

“And we’ll be able to give new limbs to people who need them,” Dan reminded him.

“Of course,” Herbert said. “You see? If you hadn’t come to Peru with me, none of this would have been possible. You helped make it happen. You’re necessary to the work, and you are not just a glorified lab assistant.” That had been bothering Herbert ever since Dan had said it. “You’re my research partner.”

“And your husband,” Dan added.

“Yes,” Herbert said, surprised anew. In the excitement of showing Dan around, that little fact had escaped him for a while. “And my husband.”

Dan silently scanned the room. At last he turned to Herbert again, fixing him with that familiar earnest gaze. Softly, Dan said, “Thanks, Herbert. This does make me feel better.”

Was that what Herbert had been trying to do? After a moment’s startled consideration, he supposed it was. “You’re welcome,” he said.

“Hey,” Dan said, in a different tone. “I’ve been down here for twenty minutes.” He let the rag drop away from his face, took a cautious sniff, and grimaced dramatically. Herbert braced himself, waiting for Dan to turn a white-green color and dive for the nearest trash can, but after perhaps sixty seconds of shallow breathing, he looked none the worse for wear.

Dan’s face slowly lit. “Maybe it was a first-trimester thing. I was feeling kind of queasy even when I wasn’t down here, but that cleared up a few weeks ago.”

“You mean you can work in the lab again?”

“Yeah,” Dan said, turning to Herbert with a grin that was practically incandescent. “I think so.”

“Well,” Herbert said, “I’d say this marriage is off to an excellent start.”

Unfortunately they had rent to pay, as Dan had pointed out, so they couldn’t stay in the lab all the time. The next day they drove in to the hospital as usual, arriving early so that Dan could go deal with paperwork related to the marriage. He promised to bring Herbert anything that needed to be signed.

Not two hours later, while Herbert was in the middle of his rounds, one of the first-year medical students came up to him all in a fluster. She’d somehow gotten the mistaken impression some time ago that Herbert liked her hanging around or, indeed, existing at all, and nothing he’d said thus far had managed to dissuade her. What was worse, Dan seemed to have a soft spot for her.

“Did you know about that Doctor Cain you work with?” she asked, her eyes bright with gossip. She was holding onto her clipboard like a flotation device that was keeping her from drowning.

“What about him?” Herbert asked warily.

“He’s having a baby,” she whispered, loud enough to broadcast to the entire floor.

Herbert stared at her. She grinned back, clearly proud to have brought him this morsel of news. “I should hope I knew,” Herbert said. “He is my husband.”

All the important features of her face turned round with surprise. Herbert smiled to himself as he turned away. Perhaps this arrangement had some additional social benefits he hadn’t considered. At the very least, perhaps Rhonda the first year would keep her big bright eyes to herself from now on.

After that, the news of Dan’s marriage seemed to catch up to the news of his pregnancy, because people started congratulating Herbert in the hallway. Most of them seemed rather surprised to be saying the words. Well, that was hardly Herbert’s problem.

He also overheard one of the doctors congratulating Dan, though with some skepticism. “Herbert West? Are you sure?”

“Hey,” Dan said sharply. “That’s my husband you’re talking about.”

Herbert smirked about that, too. Additional benefits, indeed.

Still, all in all, he was grateful to get in the car at the end of the shift. “And how was your day?” he asked Dan.

“Good,” Dan said, smiling a small, private smile. “People were happy for me, I think. A little scandalized when I mentioned the baby, but happy.”

And it was clear that made Dan happy, so Herbert swallowed his complaints about other people having feelings about his marriage. “As they should be,” he said instead. “Your future is bright.”

“Yeah,” Dan said, casting that smile Herbert’s way—sharing it with him.

And Dan had been right: he could tolerate the smell of the flores now. Herbert procured a respirator in case of need, but after testing it out, Dan declared he was fine without it. It ended discarded in a corner, keeping company with old junk left by previous owners: a manual lawnmower, coils of rusting wire, several gallons of weed killer, and who knew what else.

It was a great help to have him back and able. He took daily measurements and kept the flores sufficiently hydrated, which was a constant battle. He grimaced over the process of feeding them, but that was all right; Herbert enjoyed doing it, and it didn’t need to be done that often anyway.

The one wrinkle Herbert hadn’t expected was that Dan dressed down to work in the lab. Quite far down.

“It’s really hot down here,” Dan explained the first time he appeared in the lab in nothing but jeans and a sleeveless white undershirt. “Anyway, I don’t want to stink up all my regular clothes.”

“I see,” Herbert said faintly.

The reasons were sound but didn’t account for how distracting it was to have Dan wandering around the lab bare-shouldered and bare-armed, his jeans hugging his hips. The lab had always felt spacious—though perhaps slightly less so as the population of flores increased—but Dan seemed to take up an inordinate amount of room in it. Herbert found himself having to navigate around Dan constantly, putting a hand on his shoulder or his arm just to keep from colliding with him. Wherever Herbert looked, there Dan was, squinting into the trumpet of a blossom while sweat glistened on his neck and trickled along his collarbone.

Herbert had barely noticed the temperature until Dan mentioned it, beyond checking the thermostat every so often for the sake of the flores. Now he felt overheated almost anytime Dan was in the room.

But they were making progress, and that was the important thing. Lucy’s entire foot emerged, heel and all. Even more exciting, the toes had begun to twitch, which was crucial to Herbert and Dan’s hopes of ever transplanting one of the fruits to a human. The toes responded to stimuli, too, namely Herbert prodding them with the tip of a pencil.

The foot kept on growing until one morning Herbert came into the lab and found that the blossom had wilted away overnight, leaving behind only the foot itself, still attached and covered in a residue the color of old blood. The foot joined the stem just above the ankle, which Herbert judged was just about where the original, human foot had been amputated.

He brought Dan down immediately. “Wow,” Dan said, running his fingers through his uncombed hair. He had only been partially awake when Herbert fetched him. “But we have no one to attach it to.”

“I thought perhaps a revived subject for our first try. Much easier to acquire.”

“You mean with the reagent?” Dan asked dubiously. “We haven’t done one of those in a while. And I don’t know if you remember, but they didn’t usually go so hot.”

“Never mind that. We’ll restrain the specimen adequately this time.”

“Will that even tell us anything about transplanting a limb to a living person?”

“Well, it can hardly tell us less than we know now,” Herbert said reasonably.

But it was a moot point, it turned out. Before they could acquire a specimen for testing, Herbert came down to the lab to find the foot had dropped off the stem. It lay bruised and discolored on the floor, a fruit past its prime.

He cautiously tipped it over so he could see the place above the ankle where it grown from the plant. In the center of the ragged, bleeding, fleshy plane were two yellowing circumferences of bone: the tibia and the fibula. It answered the most fundamental of all his questions about the flores. Lucy’s fruit didn’t just appear to be a human foot. It was a foot.

He put the foot in the fridge for later dissection and went upstairs to tell Dan the news. They’d just have to be careful to harvest the next limb as soon as it was ripe, before it fell off.

In the meantime, there was the question of what to do with Lucy. Ideally Herbert would feed her another left foot, but he was fresh out. All he had left in the fridge was a pair of eyeballs. He and Dan would raid the morgue again in a day or two. In the meantime, he decided, there was no point in letting the eyeballs go to waste.

That evening, Dan came in while Herbert was dissecting the foot. Dan went around with a bottle, misting all the flores’ leaves. When he got near Herbert, he asked, “How’s the dissection?”

“Informative,” Herbert said. He noticed that Dan was careful to avoid actually looking at the foot. Sometimes he wondered how Dan had ever gotten through medical school.

He squinted at Dan. Something was different. Herbert wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t already been uncomfortably aware of Dan every time he came into the lab, but he had been, and he did. Dan was slightly flushed in the lab’s heat, his hair more or less the same length as the day before. His undershirt clung damply to his skin.

At last Herbert realized what the difference was. “You’re wearing new jeans.”

Dan looked unaccountably pleased by this observation. “I grew out of the others. I’m, uh, starting to show. You’ll probably be able to tell soon.” He smiled down at his belly, flattening his hand against it. Now that Herbert was looking, he could see how it had grown since that day weeks ago when he’d last seen Dan without a shirt.

“It’s a girl,” Dan said. “Did I tell you that? Sandy down in obstetrics showed me on the ultrasound today.”

“A girl,” Herbert repeated. He hoped Dan didn’t expect him to have an opinion on the matter. “I suppose you’ll name it Megan.”

Dan looked up with a startled, wounded expression. “I don’t—I hadn’t really thought about it.”

He fell quiet for a little while, brooding. Herbert left him to it. Eventually, Dan said, “I don’t know how Meg would feel about that. I kind of got her dad killed and ruined her life. And then I let her die right in front of me.”

“No, you didn’t.” Herbert had never gotten a complete picture of the events in the elevator, because Dan always became upset when Herbert asked. Still, he knew Dan quite well enough to be confident he hadn’t ‘let’ anything.

Dan shrugged. “I couldn’t stop it. It’s the same thing.”

The conversation had taken much too morose a turn. “You know,” Herbert said, “you’re remarkably complacent about a parasite appropriating your body.”

“A what?” Dan said, blinking at Herbert in shock. After a moment he laughed. “Oh. Yeah, I guess.” He got that warm, soppy smile again as his thoughts and gaze turned back to the child.

Satisfied, Herbert returned to excavating the foot’s bones from the surrounding tissue. A part of his attention remained on Dan as he continued around the room with the spray bottle: the scuff of his shoes on the stone floor, his motion at the corner of Herbert’s vision. His presence should have been distracting, but instead Herbert often found his focus sharpened when Dan was around, as if he clarified Herbert’s thought processes just by being there.

Herbert peeled away layers of tissue one by one, alternating between wielding the scalpel and taking notes. Soon enough everything beyond the worktable faded away, even Dan.

“Herbert,” Dan said one night as they got in from work.

Herbert closed the front door behind him, his mind already in the lab. “Hmm?”

“Listen, do you want to have sex?”

It took Herbert several astonished moments for him to be quite sure of what he’d heard. “I beg your pardon?”

Dan grimaced, looking hardly more enthused about this conversation than Herbert. “I’m asking if you want to have sex. With me,” he added, as if that might be the point of confusion. “It’s just, we’re married, so it doesn’t feel like I should be picking up, and you keep touching me in the lab. And sometimes you look at me like—I don’t know. I thought maybe you were interested. And we are married,” he repeated.

“We said nothing would change,” Herbert said. It wasn’t an answer; it was just the only thing he was sure of.

“I’m pretty sure you said that,” Dan muttered. “So is that a no?”

“I hadn’t considered it,” Herbert said slowly. Sex was usually disappointing, in his experience. Why bother?

“Right. Okay. It was just an idea. Just—just forget I said anything.” Dan turned away, heading for the staircase that led to the upper floor.

Herbert felt obscurely that if he let Dan leave, the chance would be lost forever. Surely that wasn’t true. It felt true, though. That was an effect of being around Dan: feeling things, rather than evaluating them from a scientific perspective.

He caught Dan’s wrist. “What did you have in mind?”

Dan turned slowly back to him. His face was flushed. With embarrassment, Herbert thought. He’d embarrassed Dan, or perhaps Dan had embarrassed himself. He had taken a risk, bringing the topic up at all, and Herbert felt something about that, too, something unidentifiable.

“I don’t know,” Dan said. “What do you like?”

“I asked you first.”

Dan looked silently at Herbert for longer than seemed necessary. At last he said, “I could suck you off, if you want? And then you could give me a hand or, you know, whatever you wanted to do.” He summoned up the ghost of a smile. “I’m pretty easy to please, honestly.”

Perhaps sex with Dan would not be disappointing. Dan was, after all, full of surprises. “Very well,” Herbert said.

“Really?” Dan said, though surely he must have thought there was some chance Herbert would say yes or else he wouldn’t have brought it up. “Uh, when do you want to…?”

“Tonight?” Herbert said. “Unless you have some reason for waiting.”

“Uh, no.” Dan nodded to himself. “Okay. I’m going to take a shower and then eat something, because I’m starving. Again,” he said, rolling his eyes. His second-trimester appetite had become something of a joke around the hospital. “So after that?”

“I’ll do the same. After checking the lab,” Herbert added. The flores came first.

The flores all seemed to be doing well. Lucy’s latest fruit was another foot, now with an eye on either side of the heel and a nose growing from the second metatarsal. Even better, the portion of leg above the ankle was already longer than the previous fruits, as if Lucy was slowly reconstructing a whole body. Herbert made a note to find a heart for her next.

For the moment, she seemed to be making good progress on absorbing his little gift from the morning: the rag Dan had dabbed on his chin after he cut himself shaving. Perhaps she couldn’t get anything new or interesting from blood alone, but perhaps she could. Anyway, Herbert thought she might be his greatest discovery yet; it seemed fitting that Dan contribute.

The cat leg growing from another plant looked nearly ripe, which meant it was time to find a subject to attach it to. Briefly he resented that he couldn’t go hunting for one immediately, but then Dan’s voice echoed in his head, declaring how easy he was to please.

Science could take a night off, Herbert decided. Besides, he could always go hunting for cats after the sex. If it went the way his previous sexual encounters usually had, there’d be plenty of time.

He took a shower, washing off the hospital funk and the much stronger lab funk, and he dressed in clean clothes. When he arrived in the kitchen, Dan was already there. He’d put on jeans and a heavy sweater, and he was eating one of the burritos he kept in the freezer. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said.

“No hurry,” Herbert said. He sat down across the table from Dan. He’d been somewhat hungry when they’d arrived home, but he wasn’t anymore. A new project always crowded out all interest in food.

Dan had toweled his hair dry and combed it, but it was still damp, and Herbert wanted to thread his fingers through it. Perhaps it would be dry by the time they finished with their activities, and Herbert could stroke it. Dan’s skin, too, was freshly clean and slightly pink from the heat of the shower. If Herbert pressed his fingers to it, he’d leave behind temporary fingerprints, white against red, that would disappear as the blood returned.

Dan coughed around his burrito. “You know, I wasn’t sure you even did this, and now you look like you’re planning to eat me alive.”

“‘This’?”

“You know. Sex.”

“Not often,” Herbert admitted. “I’ve rarely found it worth the effort.” But the longer he looked at Dan in this interesting new light, the more he wondered if perhaps he’d simply been trying it with the wrong people.

“Well, I’ll try to make sure it’s worth it this time,” Dan said.

Even if he didn’t succeed, Herbert was becoming more and more intrigued by the prospect of seeing him try.

Soon enough Dan finished and put his dish in the sink. “I guess—come up to my room? Is that okay?”

“If you like,” Herbert said. It was probably just as well. Herbert’s room had specimens in it, and he’d learned that Dan had opinions about the appropriate storage of specimens.

Dan looked back a couple of times along the way, as if he might have lost Herbert on the journey. Even with those reassurances, when they arrived in Dan’s bedroom, he seemed somehow surprised to find Herbert in it.

“Wow,” Dan said. “You, um, you look really good, you know? You always look good, though. Even when you’re digging up a grave. Can I kiss you?”

Herbert blinked at this stream of information. “If you like,” he said again. Kissing had not been part of the agreement, and he’d never really seen the point in it, but he intended to get the full Dan experience.

Dan approached carefully, his gaze sharp and focused. His attention was always flattering, but Herbert had never before felt the force of it quite so strongly, and his pulse picked up in response. Dan cupped Herbert’s jaw and leaned in. His breath was warm and smelled faintly of thawed burrito. And then he closed that last small distance, and he was kissing Herbert.

Kissing Dan was different than kissing other people. Herbert couldn’t have said what the difference was, only that he much preferred Dan’s mouth to that of any other person he’d kissed. Dan mouthed at Herbert’s lips with intent, with purpose, and Herbert tried to mimic him. He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about Dan nibbling on his lower lip, but he set his teeth carefully in Dan’s lip in return.

Dan moaned, and Herbert pulled back in surprise.

Dan flushed a deep red. “Sorry. I get kind of into it.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Dan said, but he didn’t seem to know how to continue.

Dan had far more experience than Herbert; that much was obvious. If the only sex he’d ever had in his life was what Herbert had had the misfortune of overhearing in that short time they’d shared the house on Darkmore Street, he’d still have had more experience than Herbert. It had never occurred to Herbert that Dan could be shy about sex.

Yet it was clear from his flush that at least tonight, with Herbert, he was a little uncertain, his sexual confidence less than entirely robust. And abruptly Herbert realized that regardless of whether or not he enjoyed the sex, he wanted Dan to. He had the impression Dan enjoyed it quite a lot, generally speaking. He would prefer Dan didn’t regret having it with him.

“Shall we continue?” Herbert asked. “Or would you rather move on to something else?”

“Uh, we can keep going. If that’s okay.”

Herbert had a better idea of what he was doing the second time. He confirmed he had no great interest in having his lip bitten, but he was very interested indeed in the sounds Dan made when Herbert bit his. After some time, as an experiment, Herbert slipped his hand between Dan’s thighs and palmed his cock through his jeans.

Dan shuddered against him. “Oh, shit.”

It was a very satisfying reaction. Herbert squeezed Dan carefully, and Dan shivered again. He was already a little stiff. At the rate they were going, he’d be fully erect in no time.

Herbert lifted his mouth to Dan’s again. Dan’s free hand fell to Herbert’s hip—an unfamiliar weight, but not, Herbert found, an unwelcome one. In the spirit of inquiry, he gently bit Dan again at the same time as he gave him another squeeze. He was rewarded with a groan and a tightening of Dan’s grip on his waist.

“Hang on,” Dan protested, pulling away. “I was going to suck you off first.”

“Later,” Herbert said. His objective was in sight, and he wasn’t going to let Dan distract him from it.

“Sure, okay.” Dan looked a little dazed, his mouth a little swollen from the kissing. Doubtless he looked like that after kissing anyone, but still, he had not been kissing anyone. He had been kissing Herbert.

“Just, uh, let me take these off,” Dan said. He shifted away from Herbert and reached for the waist of his jeans.

He was going to get undressed. He was going to stand or lie or sit there, bare-skinned, and Herbert would be able to look at him as much as he wanted.

“Allow me,” Herbert said. He shifted Dan’s hands out of the way, ignoring his murmurs of surprise.

The waist of Dan’s new jeans was elastic, Herbert found, a wide band that extended well above his hips. Instead of dealing with a buckle, he had only to slide the waistband down over Dan’s hips, exposing his boxers. They were plaid.

That was enough, probably. Certainly Herbert had ready access to Dan’s cock, and wasn’t that the point? Nonetheless, Herbert reached for the hem of Dan’s sweater. “I want to look at you,” he said.

“Yeah, okay,” Dan said, a little breathless. He obligingly raised his arms and helped Herbert lift the sweater over his head, and then his short-sleeved undershirt after it. “I knew you were looking,” he mumbled.

Herbert’s breath caught, looking at him: the broad shoulders, the well-formed biceps and forearms, the faintly flushed skin that was surely warm to the touch. Fine curly hairs grew sparsely on his chest. His pregnancy was evident, a rounded swelling between his hips that would soon be apparent even when he was clothed. And of course the outline of his cock, half-erect in those hideous boxers.

“Like what you see?” Dan said. He’d lost that uncertain look; now he was grinning, openly pleased with himself and Herbert’s attention on him.

“You’ll do,” Herbert said, which only made Dan grin wider. Herbert stepped in closer, slipped his fingers inside the waistband of the boxers, and slid them slowly down over Dan’s hips and the bulge of his cock. It was pink, of course. The foreskin had already begun to recede, and the head was shiny and wet-looking. Herbert gripped the shaft lightly, running his fingers along it, enjoying Dan’s quiet gasps.

There was work to do here, Herbert realized. Months of it, perhaps years. Dozens of experiments to be made, results to be recorded, techniques to be refined. Discovering Dan’s body could occupy him almost indefinitely.

“Herbert?”

Herbert put his revelation aside and began to work Dan’s cock in earnest. He navigated by instinct, the sharp intake of Dan’s breath, and the tightening and loosening of Dan’s grip on his shoulder. At last Dan went utterly still, not even breathing, and in the next moment he gasped hotly against Herbert’s neck and shuddered in his hand, ejaculating in white, wet strings.

“Shit,” he said.

There was come on Herbert’s hand and Dan’s belly. “Sit down,” he said, leading Dan to the bed. Then he got a tissue and wiped them both off.

Afterwards, Dan bent over his knees, still recovering. When he’d caught his breath, he turned to Herbert. “Now you?”

“Oh,” Herbert said. He’d forgotten the story had a second act. He’d ignored his own arousal as he ignored most other bodily functions when he was in the grip of science, but now that he turned his attention to it, he realized Dan wouldn’t have all that much work to do. “Very well.”

Dan got a pillow from the bed and knelt on it at Herbert’s feet. He flashed Herbert a smile, his eyes bright with—anticipation? As though he were looking forward to putting a part of Herbert into his mouth; as though he were as interested in Herbert’s body as Herbert was in his. Herbert hadn’t expected that.

He pushed Herbert’s knees apart and began working on his belt buckle. Dan’s bare skin had started to goosebump in the open air, and Herbert reflected that he hadn’t really had to take his sweater off. Then again, if he hadn’t, Herbert wouldn’t have been able to look at his shoulders.

Dan drew Herbert’s cock out of his underwear and into the open air. He regarded it soberly for a moment, as if finalizing his strategy. He said, “I don’t mind if you touch my head, or my hair. Just don’t pull too hard. And tell me if you want me to stop, okay?”

“All right,” Herbert said. His pulse had picked up somewhere along the way. It beat in his throat.

Satisfied, Dan bent his head and licked across Herbert’s slit. Herbert curled his hands over the edge of the bed, trying to hold still. It was more difficult a few moments later when Dan closed his lips around the head. Herbert’s stomach tightened with the effort.

Arousal tugged at him as Dan worked. It rooted deep in his gut and bloomed all the way up his cock. A sharp gasp escaped him, and he flushed hot at the sound. Dan squeezed his knee approvingly. Then he brushed his fingers lightly against Herbert’s cock. Teasing. Out of some obscure sense of retaliation, Herbert palmed the back of Dan’s skull. A little dampness remained at the roots of his hair, but the ends were dry and soft. He stroked it in fascination, first with the growth pattern and then against it, so that the hair stood nearly straight up.

And then all at once the arousal Dan had been stoking burned high, and Herbert could pay no attention to anything but the wet heat of Dan’s mouth on him and the orgasm building in his belly and his balls. It was all he could do not to thrust into Dan’s mouth.

“Dan,” he said abruptly, catching hold of Dan’s hair.

Dan didn’t pull off. Five seconds more, ten, and then hot pleasure crested and broke over Herbert.

Dimly he was aware of Dan getting up and sitting next to him on the bed. After a bit, Dan shrugged a companionable shoulder against Herbert and said, “So was that worth the effort?”

“Acceptable.”

Dan’s grin was extremely smug, but Herbert decided he was allowed, this once. Dan relaxed into Herbert’s side.

“Do you not like oral sex?” Herbert asked.

“Hm?”

“You offered it to me, but you didn’t ask for it. Why not?”

“Oh. Um.” Dan shrugged against Herbert’s shoulder. “Honestly, I just really wanted you to say yes, so I didn’t want to ask for too much. But sure, I like it. Who doesn’t love a blow job?”

“Indeed,” Herbert said, filing this important tidbit away for later. He hadn’t particularly liked them before, but Dan had gone a long way towards persuading him.

“Shit,” Dan said, “that wiped me out. I think I’m going to lie down for a while.”

“All right,” Herbert said. That meant he’d have to get up. Any moment now.

“You could stay.”

“What?”

“You know, take a nap with me, maybe take off your clothes? But you probably have work to do. Never mind. Um, thanks for this. It was—I needed something like this. It was great. So thank you.” He patted Herbert’s knee.

“The work can wait,” Herbert said.

“Oh,” Dan said, brightening. “Okay.”

As requested, Herbert stripped down to his underwear and put his folded clothes on a chair. Dan was already under the covers. He watched as Herbert crawled in next to him, and then he shifted close and smiled, his eyes already falling shut. “Thanks, Herbert,” he said. Within five seconds he was asleep.

Drowsiness tugged at Herbert, but he resisted it. Instead he turned onto his side so he could look at Dan properly. The lines of Dan’s face had relaxed. His mouth fell slack, and after a little while, a glistening string of drool fell from his mouth and pooled on the pillow. Herbert reached across the short distance between them and smoothed Dan’s eyebrow with the pad of his thumb. After a moment, Dan stirred just enough to roll over onto his back.

Herbert felt as if he were on the verge of some monumental discovery. The moment a year prior when he had stared at his notes on nerve death for the dozenth time and felt an epiphany approaching—that was how he felt then, looking at Dan.

The epiphany didn’t come. It loomed there at the edge of his awareness, a storm cloud that brought no storm. Herbert grew impatient, as he ever had. Scientific progress did not come to those who waited.

Watching Dan’s face for signs of wakefulness, Herbert drew the comforter down, baring Dan’s chest. He looked carefully, storing the details away for later: the lines of Dan’s collarbone, the gradual swell of his pecs, the brown-pink of his nipples. Those were especially intriguing.

Perhaps an hour after Dan fell asleep, the temptation became too great. Herbert reached across and thumbed a careful circuit around the nearest nipple, noting the soft, warm texture. Dan slept on, undisturbed, so Herbert continued. The contact began to draw the flesh erect, and it pebbled under his fingers.

“Herbert,” Dan said sleepily, “what are you doing?”

“Looking,” Herbert said.

Dan made no protest to this, so Herbert continued with his inspection. Dan propped his head up on his elbow to watch. Every so often he twitched a little when Herbert touched a particularly sensitive nerve. Eventually, Dan said, “You know, if you keep doing that I’m going to want to go again.”

Herbert reflected on the many Dan-related experiments he wanted to do. “Well,” he said, “we might as well get it out of your system.”

After all, they were married.

On their way home the next day, Dan abruptly pulled over to the shoulder of the road.

“What is it?” Herbert asked, but Dan was already out of the car. Herbert got out and hurried after him. Dan was striding towards a lump by the road forty feet back, and as Herbert got closer, the lump resolved into something with fur.

It was a cat. It was gray with white markings, one of its paws was a bloody pulp, and it was alive. When Dan prodded it gently with the toe of his shoe, it yowled pitifully, but it was too weak to move.

“Our first test case,” Herbert said. He took off his jacket and began to consider the problem of how to transport the creature to the car without it dying of shock. Not that death was an unsolvable problem, but Dan had been right that a live specimen would tell them more than a re-animated one.

Dan grabbed his arm. “You’re not going to kill it later.”

“What?” Herbert said, pre-occupied.

“Like you did with Rufus. We’re trying to help it, not kill it.”

Dan’s jaw was set; Herbert saw at once there was no point in protesting his innocence in Rufus’s death, nor in noting all the mice and rats and monkeys that had died for the good of mankind. Even Rufus had served a purpose, after all. “Very well,” Herbert said instead.

He crouched and began to wrap the cat up in the jacket. When he jostled the destroyed leg, the cat hissed and swiped at him, drawing blood. “Oh, you’ve still got enough spirit for that, have you?” Herbert said.

Dan shouldered him out of the way. “Hey, it’s okay,” he told the cat, though Herbert was quite sure it was beyond the comfort of words. Still, he could admit Dan wrapped it up very neatly, avoiding further injury or damage. The bundle of jacket and cat shifted and wriggled, and more pitiful yowling arose from it, but it didn’t escape. Dan shushed it all the way back to the car. He insisted on holding it in the car, too, which left Herbert to drive them home.

Still, the cat’s faint, miserable yowl was weakening by the time they arrived. “Get it on a workbench,” Herbert said. “I’ll get the anesthesia.”

Once the cat was still, they first had to remove the bad limb. Herbert handled the scalpel, and Dan assisted. Once most of the leg was gone, leaving an undamaged stump, Herbert retrieved the fresh-grown hind leg from the fridge. He’d harvested it only the day before, and it was even for the correct side. He just had to attach it.

“Scissors,” Herbert said at last. He snipped away the long ends of suturing thread. It was done. Fluids leaked from between the stitches, but that already appeared to be slowing. The cat was still asleep, but its vitals seemed, if not strong, at least no worse than before. “And now we wait,” Herbert said.

Dan excused himself to finally get something to eat. That was just as well; he wouldn’t be around to object when Herbert armed himself with a fire axe, just in case. He still had scars on his back from the Rufus incident.

An hour and twenty-nine minutes after Herbert administered the anesthesia, the cat began to stir. A few minutes more, and it opened its eyes.

As soon as it saw Herbert, all the fur on its back stood up. It hissed savagely.

“I just saved your life,” Herbert said, affronted.

The cat yowled.

“You ungrateful creature.” Herbert stood up, putting some distance between him and the cat. He should have taken its vitals again, but he decided he’d rather wait for Dan.

The cat eyed him menacingly, and then it turned and inspected the wound where the new leg had been attached. After a few moments of sniffing, it licked at the sutures. Then it turned back to Herbert and growled.

The cat didn’t seem likely to be going anywhere; surely even if it could stand up, it would know better than to jump from the workbench to the floor on that foot. It would come to no immediate harm on its own.

Herbert made his retreat.

The cat liked Dan. Of course it did. So Dan was the one who checked the sutures and the attachment site, and Dan who took notes. The obvious concern was tissue rejection, but the cat’s physiology seemed to tolerate the new botanically-sourced limb far better than it would have a leg cut directly from another cat. Truly, the flores were remarkable plants.

Of course the cat looked a bit strange, since it was naturally gray, and the new leg had been grown from the remains of an orange tabby, but that hardly mattered for scientific purposes. The cat also preferred half-rotten fingers pilfered from the flores’ baskets to any store-bought cat food, but Herbert argued there was every chance that preference predated the transplant.

Dan named it Rufus Junior, with a look in his eye that that dared Herbert to make something of it. Herbert declined. Dan and the cat deserved each other, he decided.

A couple of nights later, Herbert came up from the lab to an unusual smell. He found Dan in the kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove. The odor rising from it was rich and savory, and Herbert abruptly remembered he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked. Dan rarely deviated from sandwiches and frozen burritos.

“Oh, well,” Dan hedged. “Do you want some? It’ll be a few minutes. You’ve got time to shower,” he added, a bit pointedly.

Intriguing. Usually one could learn practically anything from Dan just by asking direct questions.

Curiosity and hunger both piqued, Herbert went and cleaned the stench of rotting bodies off himself. When he returned downstairs, he found Dan had set the table. Herbert hadn’t realized they even owned napkins. Upon further inspection, he wondered if Dan hadn’t found them buried in a drawer somewhere.

“Are we celebrating something?” he asked, as Dan brought over bowls of soup for them both. “Our first successful transplant, perhaps?”

“Oh, sure,” Dan said, far too readily. “That’s a good reason.”

Herbert waited with a spirit of polite inquiry until Dan crumbled.

“It’s just, I like to cook for people I sleep with. Although usually the cooking happens before the sex. Ask them over, nice dinner, you know. Um.” Dan paused, visibly recalibrating what exactly he thought Herbert knew. “But instead this one’s a thank you, I guess.”

Herbert considered the soup in light of this new knowledge. There were beans and sausage and some kind of green all together in a clear broth. Under Dan’s anxious eye, Herbert tasted it. He ate another spoonful, to be sure. Then he said, “If it’s traditional to have sex after dinner, that could still be arranged.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dan said, eyes lighting up. “Yeah, okay.”

The sex was just as enjoyable the second time.

Herbert had definitely been having sex with the wrong people.

Dan’s pregnancy became obvious. Immediately he began to draw three times as much attention from all their colleagues at the hospital and some of the patients, too. A few of the nurses took entirely too much interest, in Herbert’s opinion. And why hadn’t they been taking that interest earlier? Why hadn’t they considered Dan worth bothering with until he came with a child visibly attached?

When Herbert fumed about this on the drive home one evening, Dan just laughed. “Women have a thing about guys and babies. Don’t worry about it. Once she’s born they’ll get bored.”

Herbert had his doubts. For one thing, several of the problem nurses were male. For another, surely the problem would be magnified once the child actually arrived. In the meantime, Herbert made a point of putting a proprietary arm around Dan’s waist if a nurse hung around too long. Dan pretended he didn’t like it and muttered about professionalism, but the nurse always seemed to get the message, which Herbert considered a fair trade off.

Herbert didn’t intend the side effect of Dan dragging him into empty patient rooms and kissing him against walls, but he wasn’t complaining. If they occasionally got caught by a colleague or a wide-eyed first-year, so much the better.

One day, Herbert overheard a fellow doctor who’d surprised them in the corridor behind the decontamination unit. “I kind of thought your whole marriage thing was a scam,” he said.

“You did?” Dan sounded mildly alarmed.

“Yeah, but I take it back. Maybe less dry humping Herbert West on hospital time, though, huh? I think I’m scarred for life.”

“Hey,” Dan protested.

On balance, Herbert considered it a positive conversation.

Rufus Junior continued to steal food from the flores. Herbert started locking the animal out of the lab, but somehow it kept getting back in anyway, and in the morning Herbert would find more half-empty baskets, the soil strewn on the floor and the body parts gone, the cat nowhere in sight. Usually Herbert found it hiding under the wardrobe in Dan’s bedroom, feigning innocence.

“It’s interfering with the experiments,” he complained to Dan.

Dan had neither a solution nor sympathy. “I thought Rufus Junior was one of the experiments,” he said.

Herbert was forced to put some of the flores on a vegetarian diet. Not all of them thrived on it. Previously green leaves and vines yellowed and fell; whole flores shriveled, and nothing Herbert tried revived them. Some of the leaves even seemed damaged, though the wounds didn’t seem likely to have come from a cat. Herbert chalked those up to diet, too.

Lucy seemed fine, at least, and Herbert made sure to give her an extra oddment from the morgue now and again. Her fruits were ever more varied and ripening at an increasing rate, so she needed the nourishment. Besides, Herbert was very interested to see what she grew next.

Dan had no sympathy for that, either. “We can’t transplant that onto anyone, Herbert, come on.”

He was warily eyeing the latest fruit, which had teeth for toenails and ears growing from the thighs—thighs, plural, because not only had the leg grown longer with each iteration, but now a whole second leg was growing as a branch from the first. Lucy never forgot, and she never wasted anything. Good girl.

“And why is it looking at me?”

“What?” Herbert said.

But it was. The eyeballs growing from the sides of the calf regarded Dan with an unblinking stare. Better yet, when he shifted behind Herbert, they followed his movements.

“Dan, this is extraordinary. I never fed Lucy a skull. She developed the eye sockets all on her own!”

Dan was staring at Herbert in what a less secure man might have called disbelief. “How is this helpful, Herbert?”

“What do you mean, how is it helpful? Not everything has an immediate practical application. What do you think pure research is?”

Dan grimaced. “Most pure research doesn’t watch me from its—from its calf muscles.”

The eyes really did seem to be watching Dan specifically. Herbert waved a hand over them, and they didn’t respond at all. “I wonder if it’s because of your blood,” Herbert said, almost to himself.

“My what?”

“Oh, I fed her a little of your blood. Just a few drops. You cut yourself shaving. I’d almost forgotten about it.” Certainly it hadn’t seemed to have any other effect on what Lucy grew, at least not that Herbert had noticed, and he’d been paying quite close attention.

“Herbert!”

“Hm?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Herbert finally turned around to find Dan glaring at him. Herbert hadn’t seen that in a while. He’d rather missed it. “About what?”

“About giving my blood to the—the transplants.”

“It was just the one plant.”

“Herbert.”

Herbert liked having Dan’s attention for almost any reason; Dan being grimly irritated with him was apparently no exception. He closed his hands over Dan’s hips and gave him a winning smile.

It took Dan a few beats to notice the change in topic. His scowl deepened, but there was nonetheless a promising glint of interest in his eye. “I’m not fucking in front of the plants, Herbert.”

“Then perhaps we should take this elsewhere,” Herbert said.

For a moment he wasn’t sure Dan would go for it, but then he rolled his eyes and nodded towards the door. He even let Herbert steal a kiss before they got there.

Afterwards, lying in Dan’s bed, Herbert said, “I’ll tell you next time, since you insist.”

“How about asking me instead,” Dan grumbled, but he was clearly far too relaxed to be really put out. Applied research did have its time and place, Herbert reflected.

“Oh,” Dan said softly. He took Herbert’s hand and shifted it down his belly, heavy and growing rounder all the time, the skin stretching taut. That was all Herbert had time to notice before he felt something within nudge his palm. He exhaled in sudden understanding.

“I’ve been feeling her for a few weeks,” Dan said. “I figured maybe she was strong enough now that you could, too.”

The sensation came again. It wasn’t much of a kick, as one might use the term, but then Dan’s fetus was still very small. Dan’s daughter. It seemed an ill-fitting word, and further consideration did not improve it. Yet Dan with a child was easy to imagine. He’d immediately become attached to it, just as he had to the ever-troublesome cat. He’d love it, whatever that meant.

“What about Marie?” Dan said.

“Hm?”

“I was thinking about naming her Marie. It was Meg’s middle name. What do you think?”

“I think we’ve established that naming things is your area of expertise.”

Dan huffed softly. “As far as everyone else is concerned, she’s your kid. I’m not going to name her something you hate.”

Herbert digested that. People at the hospital had occasionally referred to the baby as his, and for Dan’s sake he hadn’t corrected them. He hadn’t given it much thought beyond that.

Probably Dan had been onto something when he’d said Herbert didn’t want a child around. At the very least, there would be a period of considerable and likely difficult adjustment. Herbert might as well resign himself to that as soon as possible. Yet whatever change a baby made in their lives couldn’t possibly be greater than the one she’d already made. Before she came along, Herbert had been perfectly satisfied with his life as it was, but he would not have been satisfied to return to it now. He wouldn’t have gone back to it for anything.

For that alone, he couldn’t help feeling some fondness for her, however unfinished she was at the moment and however inconvenient she proved to be later. And he supposed he owed Megan Halsey some small degree of gratitude as well, since it was clear Dan had chosen to keep the pregnancy in her memory.

Herbert spread his fingers wider, feeling for those elusive movements. “Marie is fine,” he said.

Even afterwards, Herbert hardly understood what had happened. He was sitting at the workbench dissecting a promising but conventional-looking tongue, first fruit from one of the newer cuttings, when he heard Dan yell. Herbert looked up, fully expecting to find Dan had tripped on the cat.

Instead, he saw almost nothing but green. Broad green leaves, obscuring his view; green vines, previously limp and apparently purposeless, now snapping in the air and winding around tools and table legs and each other even as he watched.

And at the center of it all, fondled by the vines and half-hidden by the leaves, was what Herbert first took to be a man. But no, it was something else: quadrupedal, upright, its head in roughly the right place, but all the features were wrong, the mouth at a sharp slant, the eye sockets empty. It was a man molded from modeling clay, badly.

It was, Herbert realized, what a plant grew when you never got around to feeding it a skull.

“Herbert!” Dan called from somewhere within the mass of greenery. Then again, choked and higher-pitched. “Herbert.”

The axe was still leaning against the workbench, where Herbert had left it. He snatched it up and ran towards the mass. He got in one good swing, splitting a three-ply rope of vines in half, before another vine lifted it right out of his grip. The next moment it was gone, buried in the foliage.

“Herbert,” Dan called, but weaker now. What was Lucy doing to him? What could she possibly want with him?

The answer came almost before he could ask the question: she wanted to eat him.

“Just a minute!” Herbert yelled.. He cast about the room. There, in the corner of the room by the door, piled with junk. On top of the rusted manhole covers sat the discarded respirator, and next to them, on the floor, were three gallons of undoubtedly very expired weed killer.

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even think, not until later. He grabbed the water hose from the wall—of course a mortuary would need to hose down its basement floor—and screwed it into the nozzle of the weed killer. He fitted the respirator onto his head. He called, “Shut your eyes. Cover your nose and don’t breathe, do you understand? Don’t breathe. Tell me you understand.”

The answer that came back was weaker than before. “Okay.”

Good enough. Herbert slid the respirator down over his face, spun the handle of the spigot, and turned—

And fell flat on his ass. The modeling-clay man loomed above him. Eyes peered at Herbert from just above the man’s knees, and hands growing from the man’s shins reached for Herbert.

Herbert didn’t have time for this. He squeezed the trigger and loosed the toxic spray right in the creature’s eyes, one and a half feet off the ground. It moaned, stumbling backward. Herbert scrambled to his feet, shoved the creature aside, and went for the plants.

The effect was instantaneous. The first vines lashed violently at the first contact and died within seconds. Leaves drew back from him, but that couldn’t save them from the spray. They yellowed and wilted before his eyes. “I’m coming!” he called, though God only knew whether Dan understood that through the respirator.

Herbert marched into the mass of greenery, spraying at every plant that approached and watching all the while for any glimpse of Dan. There. Herbert saw a hint of blue denim. Five seconds later, and dying flores were peeling back from Dan, who was lying on the concrete floor of the mortuary, eyes still squeezed shut.

Herbert abandoned the weed killer and grabbed for Dan. Dan struck him in the shoulder, one-handed.

“It’s me!” Herbert yelled.

That came through clearly enough. Dan grabbed onto him, Herbert hoisted him up, and together they stumbled towards the door through a war zone of dying flores. Herbert dragged it open and pushed Dan through. He slammed the door shut behind them.

Dan had slumped on the bottom step, gasping and coughing. His eyes were watering, and even Herbert’s stung, despite the respirator. They were both wearing toxic chemicals on their clothes. The emergency was not over.

“Up, up,” Herbert said, dragging Dan to his feet again and up the stairs. By the time they reached the second floor, Herbert was starting to feel lightheaded from the fumes alone. He undressed Dan in record time, shoved him under the shower spray, and joined him thirty seconds later.

Slowly the light-headedness receded. The burning sensation on his skin remained. “How do you feel?” he asked Dan. “Are you all right?”

“Bruised,” Dan said, gingerly touching his neck. That was when Herbert noticed the livid marks rising there: narrow and long, like vines. “And God, I can still taste that stuff in the back of my throat. But I think—I think I’m okay.”

With those words, at last, Herbert’s pulse began to slow.

They finished their shower in silence, except for grunts when Dan stepped on Herbert’s foot, or when Herbert elbowed Dan in the process of scrubbing shampoo into his hair. Herbert did have an entire guest bathroom of his own, but he didn’t want to go there. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to track water on the carpet.

At last there was no more washing to do. They’d taken all the usual precautions after chemical exposure. Somewhat reluctantly, Herbert left the cramped, wet confines of the shower and stepped back into the world. He went to his own room and put on a clean shirt and slacks. Now that he and Dan were taken care of, there was one more thing he had to do.

He found the respirator where he’d left it, lying at the bottom of the basement steps. He put it on. Dreading what he’d find, he opened the door.

The lab was a wasteland. Flores hung from every corner, limp and yellow and very dead. To one side of the doorway lay Lucy’s attempt at a man. Equally dead, Herbert discovered after cautiously checking for vitals. Shaped like a man, killed like a plant.

Equipment lay shattered or turned on its side. Many of his notes were damp with weed killer and blurred to illegibility.

At the center of it all were Lucy’s remains, a huge, yellowing organic mass, already decaying.

I brought you here, Herbert thought. I fed you. But whether because of the respirator or some other, more obscure reason, he felt no desire to say the words aloud. He couldn’t remember why he’d ever spoken to the plant in the first place.

He took a circuit around the room, half-hoping to find that some scrap of flor de la vida remained. Perhaps one did, buried under dead plant matter, but he did not discover it. At last he picked his way back across the destruction. He closed the door behind him, set the respirator aside, and slumped onto the stair, opposite the wreckage of all his research.

He sat there for a long time, staring blankly at a closed door. At some point, without warning, a long-awaited epiphany arrived. The promised storm broke over him at last.

He wished it hadn’t.

Awhile after Herbert had lost all sense of time, Dan joined him. “What’s it look like in there?”

“About what you’d imagine,” Herbert said. He kept his gaze fixed on the concrete floor. He was irrationally sure Dan would see his new, unwanted knowledge in his eyes.

Dan squeezed Herbert’s arm. Herbert shrugged away from his touch. “I’m contaminated again,” he said.

After a pause, Dan took Herbert’s hand and tugged him to his feet. Herbert let Dan lead him up the stairs, undress him—with a few flirtatious nudges that died unacknowledged—and put him back in the shower. Herbert gave up avoiding Dan’s gaze; instead he sought it hungrily.

When he was clean, Dan brought him out of the shower again and put Herbert in a bathrobe he’d conjured from somewhere. Then, as if he’d gone through the whole process solely for the purpose, he took Herbert by the shoulders and kissed him, long and deep.

When Dan had apparently gotten his fill, he leaned his forehead against Herbert’s and said, “I’m pretty sure you saved my life today.”

“Yes,” Herbert said. Yes, he was fairly confident that was true.

“I’m sorry about the lab. All our research—”

“Mine,” Herbert interrupted. “My research. You were never really all that interested, were you? Not until I talked you into it.”

“What?”

Herbert couldn’t keep it from Dan any longer, as much as he wanted to. But wanting was what had brought them there in the first place. It had dragged Dan to Peru and back, to a courthouse—arguably it had gotten Megan Halsey killed, which Dan would care a lot about, whether or not Herbert did.

Herbert sat heavily on the edge of Dan’s bed. “I married you under false pretenses.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

It was difficult to say the words. Herbert had never guessed that excess emotion was a transferable condition; perhaps if he had, things might have gone very differently. “I said—I said I needed you for the work, but I’ve come to realize that wasn’t the case.”

“Is this—are you pissed at me? For the lab?”

“It’s not about the lab,” Herbert snapped. “It’s about the work, Dan. You married me because I told you I needed you for the work, and then I destroyed all of it for you. I didn’t even think twice.” Abruptly Herbert turned away, to avoid seeing Dan’s eyes cloud with understanding.

There was a long pause: fifteen or twenty seconds. An eternity. Dan sank onto the bed next to Herbert. His voice rough, he said, “Do you wish you hadn’t?”

“What?”

“Do you wish you’d let me die? Me and the baby? If you got a second chance, would you—would you let me get strangled by that thing?”

“No,” Herbert said quietly. Perhaps he should have, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.

“Then—”

“The lab is gone, Dan. We’d be starting from scratch, and you’d have no reason to trust that I wouldn’t throw it all away again if I thought you were at risk. I understand if this means you want to leave. You wanted to go home to your family before. Perhaps—perhaps now is a good time.”

“You want me to leave?” Dan asked, his voice pitching sharply upwards.

Herbert turned at last and then wished he hadn’t. Dan looked stricken, horrified. It didn’t even matter anymore whether Dan was unhappy; there could be no possible benefit to Herbert either way, but he’d gotten used to caring about Dan’s feelings and wellbeing, and he couldn’t stop.

That was the problem, in fact.

“I’m saying you can go home, Dan. Or you can stay here in Arkham. You can do whatever you want, whatever will—“ and there it was, that hard-won epiphany about what, exactly, Herbert West cared most about in life. “—whatever will make you happy. I won’t try to dissuade you this time.”

Herbert looked at his reddened hands. The chemical burns weren’t too bad; they’d clear up soon. In a few days there’d be no sign that he’d ever had them.

“Herbert,” Dan said slowly. “Do you want me to leave? Really?”

“That hardly seems relevant.”

“Humor me.”

Herbert dared a glance at Dan’s face, the brown eyes that turned round with wonder at the slightest provocation, the mouth Herbert had learned to kiss, the places that dimpled every time Dan smiled. He’d grown so used to it the past year and a half, and most especially in the past two months. He couldn’t imagine no longer being able to look at it, no matter how hard he’d tried while sitting at the bottom of the basement stairs.

“No,” Herbert admitted. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“But you don’t want me as your research partner anymore.”

Herbert gave Dan a harder look. He was clearly still upset, and somehow that freed Herbert to say, “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I do. Wanting was never the problem.” Or it was the entire problem. One of the two.

“Um. So what’s the problem, then?”

“I promised you scientific achievement. That’s why you stayed here in Arkham, why you agreed to get married, even though—” Herbert cleared his throat. “—even though you didn’t really want to marry me. You wanted to marry for love.” Even now, with effort, he couldn’t quite say the words seriously, the way Dan had.

“Herbert,” Dan said, softly reproving. Then he did something unexpected: he pressed a kiss to Herbert’s hair, near his temple. “I stayed because you needed me.”

“Yes, as I said—”

“Not for the work. I always knew you could do your research without me. You needed me. And I needed you, too, okay? I still do. But not for whatever we discover. Not for fame—you know I’ve never cared about that. Not for anything. I just need… you.”

Herbert stared at Dan. The words were painfully familiar: echoes of things he’d mistakenly told himself months ago. “What are you saying?”

Dan smiled gently. “I’m saying I did marry for love. It just took me a little while to notice. Herbert, I’m saying I love you, too.”

While Herbert was still gaping at this, Dan ducked in close and kissed him.

Herbert breathed shakily against Dan’s mouth. He’d contemplated a future where Dan would never want to do this again, save perhaps a goodbye kiss. It’d been a bleak future indeed. He pressed in closer, as near as he could, as if by proximity alone he could keep Dan from leaving him. Dan’s arms closed around him as if he were thinking exactly the same thing.

But Herbert couldn’t hide there forever. Eventually he pulled back. “Do you mean you’re going to stay here, with me? Is that what you want?”

“Do you want me to?”

Herbert took Dan’s hand in his. He ran his finger along the silver-colored wedding band, warm with Dan’s body heat. He took a deep breath. “Very much,” he admitted.

“Well, me, too. So I guess that works out.”

Herbert couldn’t help searching Dan’s face, waiting for the joke—not that he would. Still, it seemed too easy a resolution, and Herbert couldn’t trust it.

He leaned in and kissed Dan again, as if he might find certainty there. It wasn’t enough. He shifted to straddle Dan’s thighs and kissed him some more, running his fingers through Dan’s hair, and when that still didn’t suffice, he began tugging at Dan’s clothes.

Dan helped, following Herbert’s lead. Eventually Herbert had Dan naked on the bed, breathing heavily. Herbert started at Dan’s jaw and worked his way down, kissing all Dan’s most interesting places, brushing over them with his fingers: all the parts of Dan he’d have sorely missed if he couldn’t touch them anymore.

But he could, because Dan was staying. Dan was his.

Before he could make it all the way to Dan’s cock, while he was still appreciating his hip creases, Dan sat up. “I know you aren’t going to believe this, but I’m hungry. Do you mind if we come back to this later?”

Herbert took a moment longer to thumb along the trough between pelvis and femur, just because he could, and then he sat up, too. “No, that’s fine.” It was fine; it was, in fact, no problem at all. They could continue later. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?

“Do you want something, too? We could fix something for dinner, and then maybe check the lab afterwards. Do you think the weed killer got into the supplies in the fridge?”

“I doubt it,” Herbert said. “Why?”

“Well, Rufus Junior’s gotta eat, too. And by the way, I don’t think you’ve been quite fair to him. I’m pretty sure it was Lucy who kept raiding the food from the other plants.”

“Rufus Junior,” Herbert repeated slowly. He got up, walked around the bed, and peered under the wardrobe. The cat’s bright green eyes blinked sleepily open. It caught sight of Herbert and hissed. “It’s not all destroyed,” Herbert said. “Dan, we still have part of the experiment. We can still—”

“—not dissect Rufus Junior?” Dan said pointedly.

“Yes, very well. But we still have work to do, and some of my notes may have survived. I suppose we’ll have to clean the lab.” Normally after a failure as catastrophic as the one he’d just had, Herbert simply abandoned the site and moved on to new space elsewhere, sometimes on the other side of an international border. For once that wasn’t an option. Both he and Dan were staying right where they were.

He found it easier to believe that, faced with the prospect of moving and disposing of a lot of toxic organic waste.

“But after dinner,” Dan said, coming up behind him. He dropped his arm around Herbert’s shoulders. After a moment’s hesitation, Herbert slid his arm around Dan’s waist, as he’d often done at the hospital: staking his claim, as Dan had teased him once. But there was no obnoxious nurse to ward off now, no one to perform for. There was only him and Dan.

Herbert shifted a little closer, leaning into Dan’s side. “After dinner,” he agreed.