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Flora was in the kitchen first, as always. The rising sun just did that to her - even on the days she wanted to sleep in, which were admittedly rare. Jack often said she was morning person - this was not entirely true, though. Flora was a sunshine person and her early-morning energy became more late-morning during winter, forever sticking close to the rising of the sun.
It wasn’t her fault, of course. The sunshine nourished her and helped her feel complete, at least in one specific way. There were other ways something so simple could not help: some of which she had tried long and hard to content herself with, with a middling amount of success in most cases - at least, until yesterday.
Now it felt like she was going to have to start over on everything.
She let the raw beef fall onto her plate with a slap that seemed deafening compared to the silence of her footsteps against the tiled floor. She cringed slightly at the sound.
The meat was not as satisfying as usual. It tasted - and felt - closer to what it actually was, cold chunks of raw meat falling into her stomach and laying heavily there - she couldn’t bring herself to finish it and instead stared down into it, tracing the lined patterns in it with her eyes.
“You still in here?” Jack’s voice was a surprise. Flora looked up, startled. “Not like you to be so slow.”
“S-sorry,” Flora replied softly, hastily forking another slice of meat into her mouth and swallowing heavily. “I - I’m distracted.”
“Oh?”
Flora didn’t answer for a moment. When she did speak again, she’d instead ignored the question entirely and asked something else. “What do you think about... them?”
She didn’t specify the them , but there was no need to, of course. There was no question who she was referring to. There had not been new faces on the island in as long as Flora could remember - and those that were there were scientists, hiding behind shrouded lab coats and living in the settlement town on the coast - the town where none but the scientists were permitted to enter, and none but the scientists ever left.
It was not a strictly unpleasant life. She had her cats, she had her sister, and that was all she really needed - but aside from that, it was very quiet, and very unchanging. The scientists didn’t really do many checkups or experiments with her or Jack anymore - the last one had been last year now, and even before then, they had declined dramatically from when they’d been kids together, living out of one room in a laboratory.
Flora had watched a lot of movies about other people but she had never imagined that she might see any of them. Until yesterday. Now there were three new people here - new faces not seen before, people who were not scientists, who were...
... well, Flora was quite sure they were not like her , but the newcomers were expected to live and work near them - not near the scientists - and that in itself was a change. What did it mean?
“Pah,” Jack said. “People think they can just show up here like that? That’s not how that works.”
Flora needled her plate with her fork. “Do you think they came here willingly? They seemed a little frightened of everything yesterday.”
“Does it matter?” Jack shrugged, opening the fridge and rummaging through it. She pulled out a box of unfinished pizza from an indeterminate number of nights ago. “Is anyone here willingly?”
Flora contemplated that. Perhaps the scientists were? She’d never heard them express one way or another. Flora’d seen many movies and TV shows about the mainland, certainly. But... well, she hesitated to say that she would want to go there either. There were a lot of people there.
“Do you think they’re fully human?” she asked.
Jack stared at her. “Pretty sure they are. Only way chumps like us get made is right here.”
“Yeah.” Flora stared at the ground. Jack was right, of course. “I just... I don’t know. I’ve never really spoken to another person. An actual, like, a human person.”
“Well,” Jack snorted. “Certainly talked to those scientists before, haven’t you? I reckon they’d count.”
“True,” Flora agreed, even if her mind rejected the idea. It felt different , somehow, that and this. It probably wasn’t, but... it was , wasn’t it? The way new scientists arrived was… well, she barely noticed, actually, because the scientists landed at the dock in the settlement. That was not where this boat had landed - the large supply ship had stopped off-shore, and a small motor-powered boat had been lowered into the sea.
It had docked at the tiny wooden dock that Flora held so many childhood memories of, built on the south side of the island’s shore.
Jack sat down at the table across from her, her ears twitching. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I-”
“No, no, it’s not you,” Flora replied hastily. “I just… well, now there’s five of us.”
“So there is.” Jack crossed her arms. “I’m going to have to make sure they know who the boss around here is. I don’t want any trouble just because someone think they’re being funny. Those three, they look pretty uppity to me.”
“Yeah,” Flora smiled softly.
To tell the truth, that wasn’t really what she was worried about - she’d always had full confidence in her sister, and that continued unshakably, even when everything else felt like it was falling apart.
Among them was Flora’s carefully constructed inward notion of - of herself.
It was easy to try and forget how different you were when the only other person who you saw regularly was like you.
Now she remembered. And it was already evident that movies were no approximation of how it felt to see one of these people in action. That was an entirely different beast. That was something that made Flora’s stomach churn inside her.
“It’ll be fine,” Jack assured her. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Flora smiled at her. “I believe you.”
It wasn’t that. It had never been that. It was just…
… it was new. And on an island where nothing ever changed, that in itself was reason to fear.