Work Text:
Countless amounts of simple cylinders floated around in what was, functionally, nothing more than a waiting room. At first, there had only been one, but then it had split into two, and then those two split into four, and those four split into eight, and those eight split into twenty, so on and so forth. Yet, despite their growing numbers that began to circle the edge of the dish, they did not dare touch nor go near the single cell that stayed firmly in the middle. Its appearance masqueraded that of an immunocyte, though, the cell itself should’ve looked more like that you would find makes up one’s skin. The cylinders dance around it, not quite running from it but continuously rotating around it, a whirlpool in the making.
It feels that as Lucrecia keeps her eyes on each individual bacteria and the single cell, the less movement they made, like her watchful observing gaze was terrifying them, or perhaps, it was the Jenova cell she had placed in the center.
The bacteria suddenly dart away when the cell drifts out of place, lingering too close to their personal comfort, the cell then begins to morph when part of it latches onto the bacteria, pulling it into its own personal gravity before consuming it completely.
Curiously, the Jenova cell then splits itself into two, much like the bacteria, and still maintaining the appearance of an immunocyte. One part has an empty, dull bacteria inside it, the other moves to the opposite side of the dish, at first slow, but cutting through the crowd of them and causing them to scatter, some attempting to run from it while it pursues. It reminds her of a dog herding sheep, just their simple presence can make the sheep move, while others that are more behind get a nip—the R(ightside) Jenova cell mirrors this by consuming some of the slower ones, the L(eftside) Jenova cell in the meantime corrals more toward R.
Some of the bacteria camouflages itself, blending in and seeming to make both the L and R Jenova cells lose interest. Not all of the bacteria learns this fast enough, and soon there is more in the dish than just L and R, whom Lucrecia decides to name R2, R3, and R4 after they split off from R.
There’s a knock from the entrance of the lab, but she can’t find it in herself to pry her eyes off of the Jenova cells as they almost patrol around, looking for the hiding bacteria, turning this into some kind of game. Like hide and seek.
“Crescent, it’s lunch time.” A colleague’s voice. Or, more accurately, a colleague from the next lab over, she doesn’t work with him personally that often. Most times she holes herself up in her own lab for privacy, it’s only when she frequents another lab that she really sees him, even then, it’s just polite chit-chat. She doesn’t even know his name.
“Mhm,” she responds absentmindedly; R4 does what she can only describe as ‘pulse’, L moving over to it as if that was their way of communication. R4 circles around the loose lines of the bacteria, which makes her raise an eyebrow. Typically, if the Jenova cells were like others, they’d leave the bacteria be and then it would reveal itself after they were gone. However, somehow, the Jenova cells have managed to find the location of these hidden bacterias, so what would typically work against antibiotics does not work against Jenova.
She hears the colleague sigh and go, “Skipping again?” and when he doesn’t receive an answer, he goes down the hall toward the cafeteria.
R and R2 go towards another group, seeking out the bacterias and almost circling around them like they had to the Jenova cells only, really, moments prior. R3 and R4 remain afloat, with no specific target or place. L morphs itself into hiding too, and soon, the Rs follow suit. This tricks the bacteria into believing they have ‘left’, and soon they reappear. Once they do, L shifts back into its existence and lunges for them.
Lucrecia chooses to not interfere, watching L split L2, L3, L3 split L4, L5, and L2 split L7 and L8, R3 split R6 and R7, R4 split R9, a massacre unfolding until the petri dish is wiped of all bacteria, like it had perfectly been wiped clean, and all that was left behind were the Jenova cells. She doesn’t bother keeping the numbering and L and Rs any further, after a certain point, they all become carbon copies of one another when there is nothing left to mimic.
She’s found that, in her own little experiments she conducts with these cells; they are ever changing and evolving. At the same time, they’ll attack harmful things like bacteria, but other times will attack immunocytes, and interestingly, sometimes even absorb, which leads to them seeming to mimic a part of it in some way, functionally replacing them. Sometimes, the cells injected into her own even have reacted to these experiments, but currently, she hasn’t felt a twitch or a spasm in her body.
That is when she leans her head back from the microscope, and she feels it.
An insatiable hunger that settles within her stomach, and it makes her throat tighten, parched like the desert.
She swallows it down and shakes her head, placing one hand under the dish and one over it to perfectly keep it still. She then rises from her chair—with a creak from one of its legs—over to the autoclave, she clears her throat a bit to get the attention of one of her lingering colleagues, who turns their chair slightly to look over, coming over and unlocking it for her. She places the dish inside, and they close it behind her while she takes her gloves off and throws them into a bin.
“I’ll take it from here,” she says, and they seem to move to question, yet instead just nod a bit, returning to the computer and looking at the file pulled up onto it. She turns the steam valve on the bottom, stepping over to the other side of it and turning the steam jacket valve.
The autoclave has always reminded Lucrecia of a furnace, for some strange reason. Sometimes it rattles, and she finds herself in a home that is not hers but she sees countless times in dreams and hears a ‘ding’ soon after, signalling that food is done.
She returns to her own station, cleaning up any signs that the Jenova cells had ever been there. Apron folded and surfaces wiped up and down and thoroughly, traces of them disappear just like the bacteria.
The typing of a keyboard fills the room, and clicks of a mouse trail after, the buzzing of the lights only accentuating the vacancy that’s stirring within her stomach.
“I’m going to go get lunch,” she comments after a quiet moment. “If you don’t mind turning the autoclave off for me.”
Her colleague pauses, gives her a weird look. “Since when the hell did you eat lunch?”
Lucrecia provides a relatively polite strained smile, stepping out and into the hall when she hears no protest, easily merging with a line of fellow scientists also on their way to the cafeteria.
Through the fluorescent-lit hall, it reminds her of how sterile the building feels. Signs of dust blend in with the monochromatic color scheme, any and all color seems to pop under the bright, white lights, her clothes under her labcoat seeming irregular compared to the work she did. The rhythmic buzzing and sometimes flickering of the lights stretching on above could be hypnotizing if it were not so mundane.
Naturally, everyone would fall into a line or two while they made their way to the cafeteria, making the hollow halls fill with loud footsteps almost all in-sync, sounding less like parading scientists and more like a practiced choir.
Not much different from ants, she’d find herself thinking. Would that make their labs the anthills?
Some other scientists look surprised to see her joining the march this time, and she only gives them another mannerful smile. She will admit, she usually isn’t one to take a break from her work. In fact, her body long trained itself to ignore the feeling of ‘hunger’ until she had finished what she was currently working on. You would either see her in the lab, or you wouldn’t see her at all.
But, ever since she had been injected with the Jenova cells alongside her pregnancy; she found this growing hunger inside of her she could never quite settle. Most of the time, it was manageable, she could treat it like anything else in her work; brush to the side until it is an active danger or hindrance. The only problem was her body physically feeling as though it was starvation, when she had eaten consistently three meals to do away with this, it only felt as if the hunger grew, like it desired more. Plenty of times she had heard of pregnancy doing strange things to one’s body, cravings or otherwise, but hers always felt different.
Routinely, she would crave one thing and one thing only, and it was not only craving this primary thing that was odd; it was what it was.
They all go down the staircase step by step, the concentrated line finally separating into their own individual streams and filing between tables, some taking seats, some already eating, some merging back into one line in front of a counter with endless options to pick from. Lucrecia lingers near the edge of the crowd, waiting for them to disperse more before she moves over to the food and picks up a tray from the designated stack, alongside plastic utensils. Her eyes naturally draw themselves to the options of meat first, all the way at the end.
She shakes her head and first starts with grabbing some vegetables, but her legs draw her to the end sooner than she expects. She sighs, looking over the meat. None of it specifically appeals to her, but her stomach gnaws through her skin and claws for something at least akin to it—she chooses a variety of them this time, as whenever she chooses just one, it never seems to be enough.
The meat takes up about half of the tray before she manages to grab some more diversity, and she feels eyes on her the longer she takes. When she turns around, many of her colleagues are sputtered about focusing on choosing their own food, but some seem to eye the amount of meat she has on her tray.
Despite the silent judgement, she ignores it and moves to one of the long rectangular tables, setting the tray down first before sitting. She notices her saliva production has significantly increased ever since she picked up the meat, and she breathes, cutting some of the chunks of meat in half before placing a piece of beef in her mouth.
It’s chewy, rough around the edges with the way it was cooked as if it had begun to get too crispy but was taken off before it burned. The flavor of it stays on her tongue but not for long, as whatever taste was there is swept away by it returning only for a moment before she can really only taste her own saliva.
Perhaps it’s meant to be more seasoned, perhaps this was the only amount whoever cooked it cared to give, the bare minimum so she is not just chewing continuously on the flesh. She picks up more of it, putting more in her mouth to settle her unsettled stomach, yet, it does not work, the more she chews and the more beef is placed within her mouth, the more her teeth begin to find bones that had been taken out, bones that crunch down hard and make the entire meat feel strange, like specks of it have been scattered throughout it.
She feels like she is only chewing on bone after a certain point.
This does not satisfy the hunger that has taken root, if anything she finds her stomach asking for more, whatever ‘more’ is, she isn’t sure.
She moves on to the chicken which has been chopped up into pieces for convenience, its skin also crispy but somehow nowhere near being burnt like the beef. She bites into it and pulls it apart within her mouth and off of the fork. It’s stringy, reminding her of the tendons of her muscles when they tense, and the way she chews it and eats it brings the comparison to her mind only further. The seasoning is not too strong on this one either, and her mind likens the taste of it to sweat and salt, to blood, to the skin her teeth graze and chew on alongside her nails, and the more she tries to eat, the more she feels less like she’s eating an animal and more like she’s eating a human.
It makes her place the plastic fork down, stabbed into another piece of chicken, its color, while cooked, more like human skin than anything else. The worst part is, the more her mouth and mind convinces her she is eating the flesh of a human, her stomach seems pleased by the thought. Soon each time she swallows the chicken down her throat, her gag reflex almost activates, as if it’s telling her no, no we cannot eat this; we’re not meant to.
And it brings her to an odd question.
Why not?
If humans eat animals all the time, and humanity themselves are inherently animals, what is the difference between the flesh of a chicken and the flesh of a human? Ethics, she supposes, the morals of it all are complicated and layered in so many more questions beyond just that. Humans are sentient, yet so are animals, their sentience is considered to be different on some kind of level, but for some reason if they are things of lower sentience, if a human were not to show the same sentience as the average human, would they be considered worthy enough to eat? What about things that were sentient, but did not have flesh? For example, the Jenova cells are sentient, if Lucrecia were to indigest them—
The thought makes her suddenly disgusted. She uses the pad of her thumb and index finger to rub her temples, shaking her head side to side and pushing the chicken away from the rest of the meat. Her stomach curls at this rejection of it, as if saying that’s what I wanted like a child who just got told they couldn’t have dessert.
This isn’t her field of research, if she truly were that curious, she could ask a colleague, but the question itself would sound strange out of her mouth. She decides to leave that train of thought behind at the station, looking at the other meat.
She feels sick now. Unbelievably so. Still her stomach is not bothered by this, her stomach only begs for more meat, more things to sustain itself off of; because whatever it is processing now is not enough. It seeks for more than this.
Still, she tries the pork, placing it in her mouth and chewing in slow motions. Her eyebrows furrow at whatever protects Jenova seems to be throwing at her. The taste itself is fine, but it is not pleased with the texture of it, all it craves is the flesh—no, chicken—flesh—chicken. This one is too firm, but soon it too begins to taste like how her skin does, and she can’t help but pick up the paper napkin placed on it and spit it out discreetly.
She looks around, nobody’s looking at her, and she sighs to herself. Placing the rolled up napkin to the side, she presses her fork into some of the leaves of lettuce accompanied by slices of tomato, and she places it in her mouth and chews. Her eyes skim over the cafeteria, some of her colleagues line the edges of the table, talking about their experiments or about life outside of work. Others are scientists from far different fields compared to her, ones closer or further from her branch, seeming to either just be focused on eating or being preoccupied with other things. She already sees a line filing their way back up the stairs and into the hall.
She opens her mouth for another bite of greenery, only to have the feeling of flesh in her mouth again, she jerks her head back—it seems Jenova decided to take its own initiative, opting to stab into the chicken again and shoving it into her mouth instead.
She tries to spit it out, but she doubles over the table, one hand pressing into it uncomfortably at an awkward angle while the other jams the fork in, in, in. She almost chokes, and some people look her way, and she just needs to swallow, it won’t let her get it out, so she has to swallow. Swallow. She swallows. Her shoulders relax themselves (had they even been tensing before?) and she releases a breath of relief (when did it become so hard to breathe?).
Lucrecia coughs a little bit into her hand, clearing her throat and swallowing again to make sure all of it went down.
“Are you alright?” One of her colleagues spoke up. She just supplies a nod in reply and they take that as good enough, resuming their conversation.
She presses two of her fingers against her lips, rubbing them clean of both droplets of saliva trying to escape and also to see if they’re as dry as her throat feels. When they’re not dry at all, she furrows her eyebrows, standing up and moving over to the cafeteria’s water filter, picking up one of the bland white plastic cups and putting it under it before pressing the button and watching it fill up almost to the top before bringing it to her lips and drinking it.
When she pulls it away, she finds she drank about half of it and swallows to test—throat still dry—she just refills back the amount she drank and returns to her tray, sitting down and staring at it.
Her hunger swells to a heightened degree and it makes her wince, lurching forward unwillingly, she hides it with a sip of water and clicks her tongue at both herself and Jenova. Staring down at the tray of food, she knows she has to eat, or else her stomach will eat at her for the rest of the day, making everything hard; making mistakes more susceptible; making everything more likely to fail.
She brings the back of her numb to her mouth, teeth enveloping the fingernail and starting to gnaw on it like a saw through a tree’s torso.
The more she chews on it, the more of the nail she chews on, and soon the sides of her skin are being nipped at too, and soon she’s back to feeling like flesh is in her mouth, because it is, it’s her own flesh; terrifyingly, this makes her stomach satisfied.
She pauses when she feels it is almost relaxed (is that even possible?) at this sensation while her skin is pinched between her teeth, and she pulls her thumb right out of her mouth with wide eyes.
She shakes her hand off, wiping it off on the napkin and standing right up, turning right on her heel and heading towards the staircase. Eyes are on the back of her head, but she could not care as she almost stumbles while she climbs up the stairs one by one, before arriving back in that hallway.
And it’s empty.
It is nothing but a tunnel, stretching on and on, no exit nor end in sight, just a tunnel with more tunnels that branch off of it, like some tree that just keeps growing, mimicking each other and seeming all the same.
Lucrecia forces herself to keep walking, she marches past the lab she had been in prior—hearing a faint “The autoclave is—” before the voice fades out.
She continues walking, pace getting quicker and quicker the quieter it is, but the echo of the onstretching hall makes it sound like someone is behind her, keeping pace perfectly, and it makes her look over her shoulder, or her eyes dart to see if there is a shadow behind her, and there is absolutely nothing each time, there is not a chance of there being anything; because nobody is here.
She sees the door to her own lab, she shoves herself inside and slams the door shut behind her, the slam echoing down, (down, down, down, down, down,) throughout all of the hall.
She sucks a breath in, and collapses against it to the floor, arms wrapped around her legs while her stomach only growls in frustration at the lack of food, at the lack of sustenance, despite the fact she just ate, so it should be somewhat satisfied, but it throws a tantrum. It makes her stomach feel as though it were a hole, a hole that existed beyond everything, one that would consume anything but it would never be enough, because nothing could satisfy it, because all that could satisfy it was something she could not give it.
Her eyes adjust, that is when she remembers she has submerged herself in complete darkness. She moves around, feeling around the floor to find the wall and then moving to try and find the lightswitch. She fumbles around trying to find it, before she feels what she believes is it, and she flicks it on with the back of her hand. The blue light illuminates the room, making her blink rapidly at the sudden change in lighting for her eyes, and her arms and legs lose all feeling in them, leaving her to fall right onto the floor, her arm hitting the floor first.
And it hurts, it should hurt, at least, until she finds it doesn’t at all, and that the thing hurting is only her stomach. She lays there, staring up at the ceiling blankly; for a moment she thinks she sees the night sky, before it’s nothing but the same mundane ceiling she always sees.
She pushes herself up, slowly, and leans against the chair in the room, running a hand through her hair, and taking a deep breath, in, out, in out. She uses the chair to move herself up onto it, rubbing her eyes and lingering on the circles under them before she reaches over and taps the computer to turn it on.
Lucrecia stares at it while it comes to life, a buzzing beginning to emit from it and she looks to the rest of the room, swimming in the blue light and the white light that comes from the screen behind her. She wipes some drool from her mouth, leaning forward against the back of the chair and scanning over the room. Organized the same way, remnants from the experiments of the day prior still scattered about, papers and folders and various drawers opened, completely and utterly scattered.
She turns her head to look at the computer, typing in the password and clicking enter before brushing off the dust on her knees from when she fell. When was the last time she cleaned? She isn’t sure, now that she thinks about it. She’s felt her memories have been quite displaced as of recently, which she’s sure hasn’t been helping the irregularities popping up with herself.
The screen’s light flickers, fading to a familiar display, and she opens the folder on it. She then clicks on one of the files, and skims over some information within it, fully turning to face the computer now and staring at the screen. All together, she sees the record she has compiled together over the last few months, she cannot bring herself to really find emotion in it aside from merely just feeling empty, vacant, and hungry.
Then, abruptly, the screen turns off, leaving it nothing but the void, and Lucrecia staring at herself.
There is a pain in her chest—no, it’s lower, it’s her stomach. Concern immediately flashes in her face, and then she hears it rumble. It’s toying with her now, she’s sure of it. She sighs and taps the computer again, to see if it’ll turn back on; no such luck.
And so all her mind is left with is this distinct feeling of hunger.
This neverending sensation that aches and cries out like her child who isn’t even born yet, and she wants to eat, but she does not want to eat flesh. But these cells seem to be trying to convince her to, which she will not let them do so, if these were just intrusive thoughts, perhaps they would be easier to deal with, but physically she can feel something in her change that makes her feel as though the chicken in the cafeteria is muscles of a human being and the beef is bone and the pork is their flesh too, the more she tries to eat meat the more it feels less like animals you find on the plains and more like the animals that have continued to only evolve further and beyond what the blueprint was compared to their fellow other animals, the ones that are considered better and most fascinating, and part of her craves that specific, unique evolution for herself, but is it truly her craving that, or is it the Jenova cells, seeking out something akin to the bacteria, wanting to mimic, wanting to replicate, wanting to replace?
The stomach’s displeasure reverberates throughout the rest of her body, it’s hungry, it’s so hungry.
I should get food to eat.
We should get food to eat.
And Lucrecia gives a strange look to no one in particular.