Fruit Of The Poison Tree

Link to article: Fruit Of The Poison Tree.

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**Fruit Of The Poison Tree** by [[*user SocksesForFoxes]]
⚠️ **Content warning:** Toxic Relationships, Reference to Child Abuse, Death
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|text=When we grow from toxic ground, we rot starting from the root.]]
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##RebeccaPurple|**Fruit of the Poison Tree**##
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When I came down to breakfast this morning, I saw Giovianni holding a rose and knew then that our relationship was doomed. The petals Giovanni held so carefully in his bare hands were lush and cabernet red, full of life, not wilting at his touch.

Both of us knew what it meant -- that the antidote we were cultivating inside his body was working, and he would inevitably have to leave. Only toxic things can live here.

As I stared at him, filled with foreboding, Giovanni looked up at me with sleepy eyes and a distracted smile. He didn't even touch me, I only had to //remember// him running his fingers across the back of my neck, the fine hairs there like the warning bristles on a thistle's stem, and my dread faded into soft focus. “Good morning, Beatrice. Coffee?”

“Good morning, Giovanni. Just a little, thanks.” It’s our morning ritual, and it’s always been enough for me. It's killing me that it’s not enough for him.

Maybe I cling too tightly to Giovanni, but I have every reason. I used to be so terribly alone. My father was the only person I’d met for half my life, and even Papa never hugged me, never held my hand. My main memory of him acting paternal was bringing me soup when I felt too weak to get out of bed. I didn't know then that the soup was poisonous; it was making me so toxic that physical contact would have killed him. No wonder I was sick so often.

After Papa's death I had only my flowers for company, until Giovanni started working here and became as toxic as me. A happy accident, I'd call it, if I hadn't arranged the conditions for it to happen. I would feel guiltier about dragging Giovanni into this walled enclave, except that he did fall in love with me, a human version of a cockatrice. Whether by nature or nurture, can you really blame me for turning out this way? The life's work of my father, the great Dr. Rappaccini, was to make his daughter a monster. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Since we grew up so differently, Giovanni doesn't always understand my feelings about things. I once heard about a plant so dangerous, it’s kept in a glass case so even its gardeners never touch it: its spines, once brushed against, stay in the skin forever and cause maddening agony. I was fascinated that such a thing exists outside my garden, so I told him about it one morning.

//##RebeccaPurple|His brown eyes grew as large as the coffee saucers, and he exclaimed, "Oh no, Beatrice, that's terrible! All alone in there!", stroking my hair until his expression cleared.##//

//##RebeccaPurple|I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn't laugh at him. He honestly seemed upset.##//

I do feel a kinship with the untouchable, prickly little thing, but I don’t have any sympathy for it. What’s dangerous should be kept behind glass whenever possible. It’s not like it's suffering in there; that's the container it's adapted to survive inside. If it were taken out, could it even endure the wind? Giovanni is a fellow parabotanist, a good one, but still assumes whatever he's fond of thinks like he does. I keep having to dissuade him from tossing sticks for the //Cadaveris// vines to fetch, under the assumption that they'll get bored without sport.

God, Giovanni. Giovanni… His name is like a sigh. He has pretty curls and when he frowns it wrinkles his forehead and makes me want to forgive him everything. I love him, but that's not enough to change what I am. He thought if he said the right words, loved me hard enough, my heart would fly free like a bird not killed by my fingers. Everything about him is more romantic than me.

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When I wake up next to Giovanni, he gives me all the hugs I can stand. So tight I feel half-smothered. Plants have their own kind of chemical signals, but nothing prepared me for this intimacy. To plants, to approach is to threaten, to embrace is to strangle. Beneath the soil where the ignorant are unaware of their struggle, roots lock together not in companionship but territorial battle. So much of plant communication is aggression.

I've gotten used to reaching over and finding his hand, lacing his fingers with mine, feeling the warmth of his palm. I used to find his closeness vaguely unsettling, but have finally started pushing past the suspicious instincts borne of long isolation.

When I met Giovanni, I know my social graces were not well developed. After I'd discovered the toxin had kicked in, when I realized that Giovanni was the first human I could touch – after all those years of frustrated pleasure cradled by vines that could not know my needs, seeking some semblance of affection… He was so patient, so kind, so accommodating. I was not. Lips are not petals. I was hungry for texture.

//##RebeccaPurple|He looked at me, and I felt warm under his eyes, like they were spotlights. His voice was a little hoarse when he asked, "May I kiss you?"##//

//##RebeccaPurple|Mine sounded like a snarl. "Shut up and do it."##//

//##RebeccaPurple|I've been told I'm intimidating, but he didn't seem to mind. I pushed him against the wall of the laboratory with his coat around his shoulders and kissed him again and again, too greedy to undress him. He made the softest sound when my mouth touched his throat, like a question. I wanted him to be sure of the answer, so I bit him.##//

//##RebeccaPurple|"Take me," I said, and it came out as a whisper, so I said it again and sounded like a demand, so I added, "...Do you want to?" But my voice was angry, like I hated him, and I didn't, I hated everything that made it so strange for so long that he was my only choice for my first, so we couldn't have met like other people, I couldn't have met him having any kind of experience.##//

//##RebeccaPurple|He didn't say a word, he nodded and held me so tight my ribs hurt, and when my body started to feel liquid and lights flashed in front of my eyes I started to cry, and he kissed my cheeks and didn't stop. After he finished he held me for a very long time.##//

Giovanni endlessly tells me how lovable I am -- how beautiful, how alluring, and so on -- but I did nothing to become this way. This is just how I grew. He is the fertile ground, the space that waited for me. He is more unbelievable to me than any of the panaceas I concoct in our facilities, those nostrums created from the toxic plants I've known since childhood. Paradigitalis, which can restart a corpse's heart. Spectral anesthetics, made from the bloody leaves of Grizzly's Bane. Cordolium to ease the pain of loneliness. I used to eat Cordolium by the handful, until my breath smelled like herbs and my teeth were green with it.

But our lives have become so hopelessly entwined now. I can't remember the last time I spent an hour alone. Sometimes when we work in the garden together, late into the evening, I see his shape looming in the violet darkness like a ghost. Moving two rows over, silently deadheading flowers while I clip baskets full of leaves shadowed with brown spots. Strange, how these plants can be blighted when nothing could possibly live on them. They have turned on themselves, their toxins seeping inward.

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I had a sense of foreboding about the antidote while we were working on it. Plants have senses that people don't, senses for water, for chemicals, dozens of hidden intuitions. Maybe my dread is like that, a sense of the future looming behind my eyes where I can't quite see it, but can feel it pressing in on me.

//##RebeccaPurple|Giovanni said it was nerves. "This is your legacy, Bea," he said, stroking my arm like I was a frightened child. "You can't be intimidated by success. Isn't the important thing to make sure that no one else suffers like you did?"##//

//##RebeccaPurple|"Yes," I said, "Of course you're right." Because there was only one answer to that. What kind of monster would want someone else to live like this? A different kind of monster than me -- I love Giovanni, so I had to set him free. The antidote was the only way to give him his life back, so I had to devote my life to figuring it out. Of course.##//

Between us, Giovanni and I had what was required to craft the cure for the poison inside of us. I'd studied a lifetime's worth of parabotany. Giovanni is a world traveler, educated and confident. Both of us are brilliant and dedicated to our craft. Is that bragging to say? It's too late for that to matter.

We finished the cure, as we could not help but do. I tried to drag my feet, but once we got close to the end I got excited by the pieces coming together. We spent so much time in the lab, we neglected the garden, and the rot kept spreading. The dying foliage smelled like musty old tea leaves, and I started keeping the windows closed.

If some magic herb could rewind time, could I do things differently, or could he? I don't think so -- we all follow our nature. So there's no use in being sad, and I ought not to cry about it, and I don't think I am. This room is damp and I've been sweating, the moisture rolling down my skin like I'm in a jungle. It gets like that around here sometimes.

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Giovanni wouldn't let go of the rose in his bare hand this morning, and he couldn't stop staring at it. "My hand is starting to burn when I hold yours," he told me.

"Good," I said, finally plucking the rose away from him. It died as soon as I grabbed it, the petals turning brown and dropping off. "Soon you won't need gloves when you go out." I like seeing him in the gloves, he looks dashing, but I know how much he misses touching other people. He has a little nephew he's never picked up. The frown lines in Giovanni’s forehead get so deep when he reads his brother's letters, it almost looks like my lover has aged, despite the toxin that keeps us held in time like the wax rind on a manchineel fruit.

Giovanni grabbed my hand, ignoring that his fingers were starting to redden. "Beatrice, Beatrice," he moaned. "Why are you being so stubborn? Just take the antidote. We could finally get away from here. You could meet the folks. They'll love you, Bea."

What could I say to that, that I haven't tried to tell him before? That a cure that works on someone like him couldn’t possibly work on me, that it's laughable to think so? He was tainted by association. I've breathed poison, consumed poison, sweat poison from my pores for so long, I'm made of it completely. But he would only argue, when I made peace with it long ago. So I just said, "This is where I live, Giovanni."

He smiled sadly and busied himself at the stove, pouring me more coffee. It was so bitter it made my lips pucker, and I wondered why toxic berries from the garden seemed sweet enough, but coffee from my lover made me long for sugar. That was when the faint tingling of my lips and tongue spread across my face, intensified, and became unmistakable as anaphylaxis.

I'm an intelligent person, I like to think. But I didn't see it coming, his love turning on me as suddenly and secretly as a measure of antidote poured into a cup of coffee. My father had always taught me that poisons and cures were two sides of the same coin. Together Giovanni and I had made the poison into a cure, and with the cure he poisoned me. I had tried to tell him, and he believed too late, that an antidote to the poison inside me is an antidote to me.

The paralysis has spread through my entire body by now. My eyes were last, free to stare at Giovanni in what I hope is an accusatory manner. While I think these final thoughts, gathering an impression of how this happened to the last of the Rappaccinis.

I've realized that I hate him as much as I love him, of course – I don't think all this red in my vision is from my capillaries bursting. He wasn't supposed to do this; this wasn't supposed to happen again. I am fucking soaked in How dare he. But even while I try to work up a thorough spite for his hubris, for his damn meddling, can I entirely blame his role in cosmic irony? We all of us poison what we touch. I would laugh if my breath weren’t choked by it.

That isn't what I meant to think. My neurons are firing in front of my eyes like stars burning out. No, what I mean is Giovanni is not the real villain here. He always knew we couldn’t have children of our own. He never expected a picket fence. But God, fuck, these stone walls, these moats of acid, this endless Gothic isolation… who would want this who had ever known normal?

I didn’t think it existed until Giovanni, you see. The kind of family where people laugh when they see each other and run around in fields with dogs. Where they genuinely have happy memories to get back to.

We misunderstood each other. He thought he could cure me, and I thought he could get used to this. Both of us were too cruel.

When we grow from toxic ground, we rot starting from the root.

Papa! Is this what you call a successful experiment?

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||||~ More in this Series||
||~ Part One||[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/her-future-in-bloom Her Future in Bloom] by [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/panik-s-perfection-in-progress Mr Panik]||
||~ Part Two||[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7493## SCP-7493] by Socksesforfoxes||
||~ Part Three||[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/secure-facility-dossier-site-101 Secure Facility Dossier: Site-101] by [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/thechunk TheChunk]||
||~ Part Four||[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/in-small-doses In Small Doses] by [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/thechunk TheChunk]||
||~ Part Five||[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/fruit-of-the-poison-tree Fruit of the Poison Tree] by Socksesforfoxes||
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All images on this page were created by [[*user SocksesForFoxes]] and are released under CC BY-SA 3.0
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