Hormone Resnakement Therapy

by MsJuniper

 

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No changes yet, Flora says, with a huff none of her friends can hear.

Sounds about right :/ it takes a while for it to show.

It is both a good and bad thing that the changes haven’t begun. The bad part is fairly obvious; she wants to be whatever she is becoming already! The process of becoming is awkward and painful and embarassing and she wants to skip to the part where she’s confident and the all too human past is put behind her.

On the other hand, it also means she doesn’t have to worry about Jen finding out her secret yet.

Okay, Jen knows she’s a furry in the online sense. There’s no way she doesn’t. Flora reblogs, retweets, and co-posts all kinds of safe for work furry art on her main accounts, and Jen follows those accounts.

Tolerating someone posting cute art with snakegirls in sundresses is a whole world apart from accepting someone transforming into an inhuman creature. Sure, the most inhuman people get lands them squarely in anthro territory, but that’s still enough to cause a fuss. When even the furry community itself is divided over the topic, how can anyone expect the rest of the world to go along with it?

Whatever. Flora follows the rhythm and lets it carry her through.

“You never answered my question,” Jen says one day, over lunch.

“Hmm?”
“About that promise I asked from you last week.”

Flora finds a fascinating spot on the dining table to examine. She really ought to scrub this down more often! Oh, wait, no, that’s a knot in the wood it was built from.

“Flora…”

“Jen.”

“I’m serious. Can you promise me?”

Flora says, “I don’t know. Probably not. I mean, we’re all aging right? Isn’t that inherently change? And every time I go out and have a new experience, taste a new food, form a new opinion, isn’t change? How could I ever keep my promise?”

Jen sighs, like she is being put upon unjustly.

“Flora. Flor. I don’t mean it like that.”

“Then, how?”

It takes a second of silence for anyone to say anything.

“I mean like… I guess you can have a new favorite food, but like. I mean. There’s little changes, and there’s big changes. You know, changing your name, your personality, your style. That’s big stuff. Moving out, that’s another,” Jen says.

“I have no intention of moving out.”

“Well, yeah, but. You were looking at whatsherface funny. Like you wanted her and wanted what she had.”

Flora raises an eyebrow.

“Whatsherface?”
“The crocodile woman with the pickup truck. Dad’s, I guess, former neighbor.”

Oh. That whatsherface.

“Mallory’s an alligator.”

“Whatever! My point stands.”

“Well, she seemed alright to me. I don’t see the problem?”

This earns Flora a shake of the head from Jen. Why she’s shaking her head is beyond Flora, though. Mallory was so nice and also really pretty? What’s the problem?

“Flora.”

“Jen?”

“Flora. Come on.”

After a second, Jen relents. Flora is not responsive to implications and ‘well, you know’s. If someone is trying to say something, she needs to hear it spelled out.

“The problem is that, like, trying to stop being human is delusional. Human is the only thing we can be. Growing scales and a tail is just avoiding the problem.”

“I mean… it’s not really delusional? Morphic HRT really works. I mean, what, were Mallory’s scales fake? Did you not also see her tail move?”

“But she’s still a human being. How else would she be living in an apartment? Talking? What could she possibly do now that she couldn’t do before taking experimental drugs, hm?”

“What do you mean?”

One more, Jen sighs.

“I mean, if a person hates being human so much, that they should seek mental health help, not fuck with their DNA.”

Flora’s heart is heavy to hear that. She knows that she is weird and probably wrong for being how she is, but what else is she supposed to do? Would Jen be saying all this if she knew about Flora?

“I guess I don’t see why you’re so passionate about it,” Flora says, “Mal’s not hurting anyone.”
“She’s hurting herself. I know one day she’ll wake and go, ‘shit. I’m a monster for the rest of my life’. And then she’ll have to come in to my department at the hospital when she could have avoided it by staying human in the first place.”

“I thought she was still human?”
“You are so goddamn annoying, Flora. You know what I mean.”

* * *

No matter how often Flora takes a shower in the winter, her skin is dry and scaly. This has been a fact for most of her life; moving to the city desert from the Pacific Northwest will do that to a girl. But today is different. The skin around her right wrist is irritated and red, as it often is, but there’s something… underneath it.

She first notices it as she’s practicing on the electric bass. It’s a steady stream of quarter notes up and down; F major, F natural minor, F major blues, F minor blues, F lydian, dorian, locrian…

It’s when she stops for a second and rubs at the dry skin she feels the texture of it; it’s not just dry, it’s a little raised up, with a geometric pattern of little diamonds beneath. It’s so small that she never would have noticed it by sight, but it’s there.

There’s conflicting emotions. One is euphoria: it’s been nearly a month and it’s already working! Two is concern: is this actually a tumor or something, and she just thinks it’s MHRT at work? Three is euphoria again. It cycles like this for several minutes, until she remembers the strap of her bass is still around her neck and shoulder, and she really ought to get back to practicing.

She starts at F sharp major.

* * *

Noneagator says, sounds like scales to me :)

Classic scaly moment, Sqrlgrl puts in, congrats!

Congrats. Caninehowl adds.

And you’re all sure this isn’t a tumor or something?

Everyone takes a turn reassuring Flora that the diamond pattern beneath the skin of her wrist is indeed scales coming in, and not some sort of rare tumor that will kill her in three days. It’s embarrassing to admit, but she does need that reassuring.

Okay, okay, not a tumor, got it. How come it’s not growing on top of my skin, though?
As the resident scaly expert, Noneagator says, well, Flora, do you know how skin works?

I thought I did.

Well, short version: in humans, dead skin cells fall off and reveal layers of skin beneath, right? Kinda gross, but what are you gonna do. Your skin cells are just now getting instructions to start making scales, so it’s gonna take a while for them to come in properly.

Flora takes some comfort in that. They’ll come in in due time… but also, she wants them now. Let her be whatever creature she is on the path to being right now instead of later. Every moment of life as a human is weighed down and she is oh so tired of that weight.

Noneagator adds, after a moment, one thing though is they don’t all come in at once. I’m five years MHRT and I have a patch of human skin on one of my boobs still.

Scalies keep their boobs?
Yeah it’s neat :)

The world is truly a wonderful place, Flora says, peace and love on planet earth.

* * *

The wait is what kills Flora, more than the itching. The shape of the scales is marching underneath her right arm, buried beneath human skin. She traces her nail across that arm; it’s not quite real, not in the sense that she can touch it, but it’s real, in the sense that she can feel it. Flora is reaching for herself, for the being she will be, but she cannot grasp onto that being yet.

But she does itch. The process of changing can never be a comfortable one.

She ignores it best she can, though, because she’s having dinner with her mom tonight. Now of all times is to be the most human; who else does she owe humanity to more than her parents? It’s not the stranger on the street’s judgment she fears so much as the condemnation of those closest to her.

Flora can be human for a dinner. She plays human for Jen, the people in line at the post office, for whoever lays eyes upon her.

Just in case, she wears a pair of gloves over her hand. They go with her dress, so she can play it off as a fashion choice. The irritated skin on the right hand makes a fuss over this. Of course it does, but Flora has to hide. Her motto for this; hide, wait, hide some more.

She knocks at the door. Even through layers of clothes, a dress, a sweater, a jacket, a puffy jacket over that jacket. Sure, she’s been chilly before… but this feels different.

No matter. There’s a rush of warm air when her mom answers the door, and it feels like an elixir of life all its own. The warmth seeps into her in a way that is entirely new.

“Hey mom,” she says.

“Think you’re wearing enough layers there, Flora?”

“Ha ha. Let me in?”

Her mom nods, “Sure thing. Come on in.”

Flora spent her teenage years in this house, but it never quite became home. It always felt like an intermediary point, the point ‘b’ on the line between ‘a’ and ‘c’. It’s a decent house, the décor is acceptable, the furniture does its job just fine, but it was never hers. Thankfully, it seems to suit her parents plenty.

“I ordered something for us, it’ll be here soon. Hope you still like fried chicken.”

“Sounds good to me,” Flora says.

At the closet, she sheds the outermost jacket and keeps the rest of her layers on. The chill from outside has followed her in, even though the house itself is warm.

“So, how’ve you been?” Flora asks.

“Up, down, all around. How about you? How’s the life of a freelance electronic musician treating you?”

Flora can never quite pick out earnesty from sarcasm with her mom; honestly, it explains a lot about the way she turned out. She smiles, and allows herself to settle into the usual dynamic.

“I’m not a millionaire yet, sorry. I’ll buy you that house in Malibu someday.”

“I’m the luckiest mother in the world!”

* * *

They’re settled into the couch, munching on fried chicken as greasy as it is delicious. There’s some trash television playing in front of them, and Flora is completely ignoring its content for the sound and light show that it is.

“You know what,” her mom says, “this kind of sucks.”

“But you love trash tv?”

“Maybe not as much as I thought. Eh. Ah well. Rewatch The Good Place again?

Flora nods. She messes with the remote, as she is resident family tech expert.

“You know, I stopped liking that cereal,” Flora says, “people change all the time, in small ways, huh?”

“Which cereal?”

All Flora can manage is a shrug, “It was pretty important to me for a long time, but… I dunno. Doesn’t taste as good now.”

“Welcome to your thirties, Flora.”

“I’m not there yet. Give it a few years, mom.”

* * *

They’re about six episodes into a Good Place rewatch when Flora’s mom hits the pause button. She gets up and says, “Getting popcorn. Want some?”

“Sure.”

Flora follows her out to the kitchen, a tight little hallway connecting the back of the house to the dining room. They watch the popcorn bag rotate in a focused silence, neither willing to break the concentration that comes with watching the bag expand from all the miniature implosions.

“Hey,” her mom says, when the popcorn is done.

“Hey mom, what’s up?”

“You seem like you’ve got something on your mind.”

The music of kernels falling into the bowl is its own kind of rhythm, the groove of an avalanche, the active snare of a marching beat.

“Yeah, I guess. I’m trying something… new. Something big. And it’s scary.”

“Sounds familiar,” her mom says, “is this gonna be as scary as watching you go in to…”
She pauses, watching the last of the popcorn land in the bowl. A few stray bits have hit the floor instead.

“Well, you know?” her mom says.

“Less risks, probably, than bottom surgery, but just as worth it.”

“Well, good. Seeing you laid out like that was no fun.”

Flora laughs, “Trust me, it was even less fun being the one laid out for weeks. Still worth it though.”

They don’t really talk about that time. Flora was ecstatic to have it finally done, but both her mother and Jen fretted ceaselessly. Some of that fretting seems to be left over, still, if her mom’s expression is anything to go by.

“So what is this change, anyhow?”

“I’m… I’m taking that MHRT stuff,” Flora says.

Flora works hard to read the expression on her mother’s face; she fails to draw meaning from it. It’s the face she makes on poker nights, the kind that nets her big wins by being so vague that everyone just folds rather than risk seeing what her cards are.

Finally, her mom asks, “What animal is it making you?”

“Something with scales. I think.”

“Is that why you’re wearing four layers of clothes in a house blasting full heat?”

Wait a minute.

Is Flora no longer endothermic? Is she becoming cold-blooded? Woah. That is a strange thing to consider. Why does that make her feel so… warm inside?

Well, she knows. That’s the euphoria hitting, a kind of feeling she felt when she first grew tits, when her voice training got her to where she wanted to sound, and now, because she’s no longer able to heat herself with her own blood.

“Yeah, I guess it is. Huh. Cool.”

“As long as you’re happy, honey. I don’t get it it, but if you’re happy, I’m glad. Just stay warm, alright?”

* * *

The scales beneath her skin are spreading this week.

Not uniformly, or predictably, or particularly fast. She wishes that were the case. Alas, they seem to have a mind of their own. There’s a patch on her should blades, a set of them around her inner thigh…

And today, she can feel them underneath the skin of her neck. The diamond pattern is growing, however slowly. Sadly, this also means the skin above it is irritated and red, and it’s going to be hard to hide it from Jen.

She’s rooting around the horizontal closet that is her floor, because she could swear she had a turtleneck someplace, when Jen appears in the door.

“Ah! Ever heard of this invention called ‘knocking?’”

Flora freezes with her back to the door, and to Jen. If she stays in this pose, maybe Jen won’t see what is happening with her neck.

“Don’t be such a baby. What are you doing?”

“Laundry,” Flora says, “what are you doing?”

Jen moves around the room, to try and get a look at Flora’s face, and Flora moves in kind to keep her neck hidden.

“I’m… what are you doing?”

“We already established this, I thought. Laundry.”
“No, I know that, I mean, why are you hiding your face.”

Flora sighs. What’s a nice, attention-grabbing deflection? Oh, she knows!

“I have a hickie. It’s highly embarassing.”

“You? A hickie? I gotta see this,” Jen laughs, and once more shifts around to get a look.

“I’d rather you didn’t, actually!”

As is usual with Jen, she goes ahead and tries peek anyways. It takes a quick move on Flora’s part to keep the ‘hickie’ hidden.

“No, just let me see!”

Flora slaps her hand over the irritated zone of her neck, just as Jen is about to see it. Problem solved! Or, is it? Jen’s eyes are wide at the sight of… Flora’s hand? Wait. Flora’s not wearing gloves, is she? Fuck. She has to think fast to explain this.

“Flor… your hand is so dry and red, what’s going on there? Looks like it’s inflamed.”

She’s going into Nurse Mode now. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.

“It’s fine, I just need to moisturize it more.”

“I… I really think you should see a dermatologist if it’s this bad. I have a friend who works reception at dermatology, maybe—”

“That won’t be necessary.”

It’s too late. Jen’s gaze is that of a concerned friend, the kind of look that scrutinizes and judges because it cares. The fact that Flora would prefer no scrutiny and no judgment is immaterial; both of those things are more about how Jen feels than Flora.

“Also, when’s the last time you clipped your nails?”

“What?”

“You’ve got some serious claws there.”

Flora examines her left hand; seems normal to her.

“Your right hand, dummy. Look. I don’t give a shit about the hickie, just—”

“Don’t touch me, Jen. I don’t need you to play doctor with me.”

That gets a sigh from Jen, the kind of sigh that says, ‘why are you being such a bitch right now?’

“I’m worried for you. Come on. Work with me.”

“I’m your friend, not your patient.”

Jen rolls her eyes.

“Ugh, you are such a child. Whatever. Would you be happy if someone else looked at it?”

“No.”

“Well, too bad. This needs medical attention. Take a shower, and we’re going to dermatology. I’ll get you an appoitment.”

“But—”

Jen holds up a finger and stands as tall and authoritatively as she is able. That is enough to shut Flora up and make her agree to just about anything. Even if, especially if, it’s something she doesn’t want to do.

“No buts. Do it.”

Shit.

* * *

A shower, Flora can do, at least. She sheds her clothes in the bathroom and locks the bathroom door. Jen probably wouldn’t walk into the bathroom when someone else was showering, but it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.

It’s freezing in the bathroom. The tiled floor sucks up heat like nobody’s business, even for the warm blooded of the world, and it’s even worse for Flora. Whatever. She gets the hot water in the shower going, and takes the opportunity to examine herself.

She looks so human.

Well, okay. It’s more complicated than that, obviously, but right now the external impression of her appearance is ‘human woman with some rashes’. The scales underneath her right hand are much closer to the surface, though, which is a good start.

Speaking of that hand, she investigates the nails on the right. They really do resemble claws. Her heart flutters at the thought. Flora takes those nails, those claws, and brings them to her chest. They draw a faint line where she drags them, and the scratching feels…

It feels good. She watches herself do it in the mirror, and lets out a hiss. Huh. That hiss sounded… Well, it didn’t sound human.

A human could make that sound, of course, but something about the sibilant sound –

The shower is putting out steam, now. The mirror fogs up, and Flora loses sight of herself. The human or whatever in the mirror vanishes behind a layer of condensation, leaving her wondering. What was that? What is she?

She steps into the shower, expecting to feel scalded as she reaches for the cold water knob, but she doesn’t. Flora feels the hot water, and it’s kissing her. It does hurt, and she does turn the cold water on, but there was something euphoric about the bodily sensation of hot against her right arm.

She looks at it. Surely the whole thing should look burned and--

“Oh my god.”

The skin of her arm isn’t skin anymore. Bands of orange and gold scales run the length of it, bright as a wildfire at dusk. Tan scales cover the underside and inner edge of her arm. They make a tik noise when she taps her finger against it.

“Oh my god!”

Memory comes to her; someone’s birthday party, many many years ago. A gaggle of children packed into three cars, brought to a reptile store. There was an exhibition of different critters, a tarantula, a jumping spider enclosure, a 90-year old tortoise. But there was one creature that stood out in particular.

She looks at the scales on her arm, and she knows that pattern, that color. That’s a corn snake’s scales she has.

Flora Baker does not need a mirror to tell her what she is.