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There was this lovely girl I used to train with since I was five or so. She had always liked those trees with light pink petals and dark brown trunks.
On our training, I had to learn how to use poisonous, strong plants and she had to learn how to make ice deadly, how to make other people choke on water, how to make them drown. Our names? We didn't have them, we were numbers. According to our power and how many of us survived until we're five. She was 72, there weren't many of them. Even less of people like me, I was 32. So many of us died from our own thorns and poison, just a little more than the many of hers that drowned in their sleep,
When we were just ten they introduced us to our new training partners, hers could make and control fire in any form and mine, metal. I didn't like him, both of them, but we needed them. We needed different abilities to train against, after all, we wouldn't be able to choose who to fight in a real battlefield. Her guy kept talking to her over me, in and out of training. She liked to make little sakura flowers out of ice and every time they talked he would melt them and laugh afterwards like that was a really funny thing to do. The more flowers he melted the more I would make for her, but then he started burning those too. 72 didn't say anything at first and by the time she started laughing too, we were almost eleven.
I started getting more and more cuts and bruises on fights, my attention wandered around and I ended up with my arms covered in scars because of it. At this point, I couldn’t hide the plants in my sleeves, as they had grown past them. In every scar, I had little sprouts and in the fresh cuts, those had to be carefully removed as to not leave them bloody and gross. Those efforts were useless, the next day they grew back stronger.
I couldn’t pay enough attention to my training so I kept failing. She didn’t notice. I kept looking over to them, to her smiling even when she lost, to him looking proud when she won. My flowers started appearing in between the thorns I had to make, they were everywhere, growing intertwined with my hair, from the palms of my hands, inside me even. And yet, somehow, she never noticed. Or cared. I couldn't stop them anymore, I still had to use poisonous plants and thorns, but I couldn't so I simply started using the flowers themselves, their trunks were as strong as their petals were pretty.
My emotions got over me and I realized I couldn't breathe properly, my rage, my love, they took over any control I had over those plants. They were no longer only on the outside but on inside too.
They were in my lungs.
And I couldn't breathe.
She didn't talk to me anymore, so 72 didn't notice her best friend was dying, she didn't notice there were flowers in my stomach growling up. She was too busy melting for a fire to notice that I was drowning in flowers.