THE FLOWER IS MINE! THE FLOWER IS MINE!
Nicholas turned. I watched through the red haze as his eyes moved between me and Hawthorne, taking in my trajectory and the set of my body and the expression I was wearing. I pressed my palms against my eyes with every ounce of force I could manufacture, trying to make him see past the vine's face to the person behind it.
His brows furrowed. The instruments in his hand clattered to the tray.
He moved quickly, but it was not enough, because the vine was not moving my legs at a natural speed. The moment his hand reached for my arm, the rage surged with renewed force that obliterated the vine's remaining restraint, and my hands drove into his chest with a strength I had never possessed.
Nicholas stumbled back and collided with the table, instruments scattering across the floor in a cascade of metal that rang against the stone like a struck bell. Agnes cried out, the sound sharp and involuntary, and I screamed at her in the silence of my own mind to run, to get out, to put walls between herself and my hands.
My feet slowed for one half-second.
My fingers closed around a scalpel from the floor.
I felt the handle settle into my grip, and from somewhere very deep and very small inside myself I understood what was about to happen and began to sob without tears, without sound, the grief of it pressing against my prison in long silent waves.
Behind me, Nicholas was already scrambling upright, calling my name over and over, his voice the only real sound in a room that had otherwise gone terribly silent.
My companion refused to hear him.
It continued repeating its single thought and I repeated mine, begging it to stop. Hawthorne turned to face me, his large, dark eyes finding mine with an expression I had not allowed myself to see before.
Recognition. Adoration. Love.
He unfurled his hand, holding a single red rose cradled in his palm, offering it to me.
I stared out, tears already choking me from within. He watched me back, as though waiting—hoping—I would remember him.
The vine inside me snarled at the offering, swatting it away before my hand brought the blade across his throat in one swift, clean motion.
The sound embedded itself into my brain, a wet gurgling tear that sliced through something that was neither entirely flesh nor entirely plant but the terrible seam between both. Green-gold sap welled up immediately, luminous and warm, pouring through the incision and running down Hawthorne's neck, soaking the collar of his shirt in spreading concentric stains that glowed in the lamplight.
The vine inside him emerged slowly, the tendrils that made up his circulatory system pressing through the incision as the pressure of the cut opened the seam between his constructed throat and the botanical matter beneath. They were thick and pale and luminescent, threaded through with the dark tracery of sap channels, writhing slightly as air touched their severed roots.
Hawthorne stood very still for a moment, his dark eyes still on mine, widening with confusion and hurt as his hand came up to touch the wound with those long, gentle fingers, feeling the strange protrusion of his own interior.
Then his legs went.
He collapsed sideways with the slow, terrible patience of a tree finally giving way after a long felling.
From behind the glass, I came apart.
I had built him. We had built him—Nicholas and I, night after long night in the greenhouse with our lamps and our journals and our reckless, magnificent certainty that we could do something unprecedented. I had named him. I had argued for his consciousness when Nicholas doubted it, had watered him and watched him tend his plants and felt something I had no clinical language for whenever he brought roses to me.
He was mine and I had loved him.
I pressed myself flat against the back of my own skull and shook as sobs wracked my internal body.
Nicholas's arms wrapped around me, dragging me backward from where I stood over Hawthorne's crumpled form, and my body wheeled in his grip. My arm swung before I could brace for another blow to my broken heart, the scalpel still clutched in my hand, the blade sliding across his flesh.
He went very still.
His face filled my vision—eyes gone wide, fixed on me with an expression that contained everything at once, shock, fear, grief, and love. His lips parted, a strangled gurgle rising up from his chest as his mouth formed my name. Blood trickled onto his white linen shirt, soaking, then spreading through. His hands came up to his neck, fingers squeezing around the wound, desperately trying to stop the bleeding.
I stared from inside my mind, unable to scream or cry or do anything except watch his life slip between his fingers drip by drip.
The monster watched too, uncaring that I could not breathe or even feel my heart beating anymore. My body was shutting down, refusing to live without the pieces of me that kept me alive.
My feet turned away, the vine orienting my body toward the flower, reaching with my free hand to cradle the pot to my chest.
