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Reality only seems to seep in several blocks away. Moea drags—drags not walks—herself into the recesses of an alleyway. Roots and bloody fingers claw at asphalt, a single foot propelling her forward. And when that sinks in—when she reaches for the roots in her left leg and finds emptiness—she lets out a horrid choking sound.
There is nothing when Moea looks down, when she presses her shoulder against bricks and blinks away blurry vision. She holds the leg up to see flesh flapping in the wind around muscles and bones and roots that hang down. Blood slips off of dangling roots, slides off of the femur. Crimson smears in a path behind her, a pungent, saccharine smell.
She lowers the limb with a cry, a panicked sound that comes out of a bloody throat raked raw by thorns. It hurts—the thorns, the warmth of blood dripping down her throat and making her cough with every breath. But everything hurts as the adrenaline wears off. This fleshy casing aching in a million, horrible ways.
When Moea blinks she sees teeth glistening in the moonlight, she hears a gunshot echoing into the star-filled sky. Blood drips down her cheek as petals fall like raindrops, razor like bones tearing through skin as acid sears her roots.
Her human body curls in a mimicry of her flower. Wilted, wounded edges coiling to protect itself. A single white bloom that hangs low because that woman had torn the other off once more.
She runs fingers along irritated skin, tracing the edge of her eye. Pain lights up, echoing around her skull, reverberating through her roots. When she blinks, tears collect in her sockets, mixing with the thick stream of blood.
"Hello?" There is a sudden call from a gentle voice that startles her.
Her roots tense from both inside and out of her body as her eyes snap towards the silhouette. Her head begins to spin with a sudden rush of forced adrenaline, fingers digging into the ground as she pushes herself away from the voice. She notes they they sound distinctly feminine, though she doesn't hear that villains accent.
It takes a few second for the alleyway to be washed in gentle illumination of a cellphone, irritating eyes that have grown used to darkness.
"Holy shit!" The girl exclaims as she rushes forward a few steps, stopping with a hand clasped over her mouth, "Are you ok?"
"I'm fine," She struggles around the words, a sentence that comes out against her will.
"Clearly not!" The girl fidgets, voice high pitched with fear.
Moea's singular eye tracks her movements, looking her up and down. She picks the girl apart with each second ticking by. She looks like her. Not closely but she can pick out similarities. The height, the skin tone, they may be around the same age as well. The length of the legs are a bit long, but she could make it work.
Moea shakes her head, at the implication of her racing thoughts, to the girl's worried rambling, "It's ok."
Roots poke out of a body shaken with bullet wounds, slipping from her torn apart arm and her bitten off leg. She needs a leg, the thought hammers into Moea's head with each breath, with each forced thump of a human heart.
She knows she can't do this without a leg. She can't fight or protect herself or run, not in this human body. She needs a leg. She needs a leg and this girl can give her one.
Moea has not aimed to kill in what feels like a long time. And yet it feels very natural.
Her roots cut through the air as a phone clatters against the asphalt. The single light in the alley is covered, tinted red by drops of blood. Moea spears the girl through the chest in a swift, familiar, motion. In the same moment she coils around the needed leg, pulling her down onto the ground.
"I'm sorry." She wheezes the words out around rivulets of blood that dribble down her chin.
The girl's scream is silenced by roots closing around lungs, squeezing until no air can make it out. she thrashes anyway, kicking and clawing, lungs fighting to expand.
Moea feels every second of it, her roots digging inside of her. It would be foreign—it should be—if not for the earlier events. She remembers the villains organs held inside of her roots, a kidney popped, bones snapped. She can feel the pain of mouths eating away at her still, acid burning through her. The brief, wonderfully gorey, closeness she'd had with a villain that she can't seem to fear enough.
Fingers tighten in her cloak and the roots around the leg do the same. She twists with a slow, torturous motion as the girl's thrashing comes to a stop. She feels it bend unnaturally under her before she begins pulling, not letting up against the resistance until bones disconnect and muscles tear. The leg snaps off with a crunch, blood spraying against the alley's walls.
The limb flops against the ground and she drags it to her, crimson smearing a path from the girl's torso. It hurts to lift her arm, to move her fingers to run across the still warm flesh. Her grip strength is weak so she uses her roots to hold it up to her left leg.
There's too much of it left, she realizes as she begins fumbling for her knife, she has to get rid of some.
In the quiet of the alleyway she gets to work, pulling out her knife and hacking away. She slices through layers of skin and cuts away muscle, tearing at the leg messily. She stains her skirt with crimson, pushing her cloak to the side. Some of what she cuts off she discards, some she bites through and swallows down.
The bones are the hardest to cut through. She raises her knife over and over again, bringing it down with a metal clang until she drops it. Roots raise and a tibia cuts her palm as she uses her strength to crack the bones, messily tearing through.
Moea holds the leg still when she's done, staring at the foreign object chiseled to perfection. She holds it to her own leg, positioning it carefully with her roots. It fits now.
The roots in her left upper leg coil back before stabbing forward, plunging into the muscles of the new leg, coiling around bone. She stretches what she has thin, reaching into the bottom of the soles. Her roots have been thinned out by the cat, she'll have to grow more.
She pulls bone flush against bone until the leg is touching her knee. And then she slumps back, a sort of strange relief filling her. The leg will stick after awhile, when she learns it and the nerves align. She'll force her brain to recognize it as part of her body and the bones with connect as the skin heals together in a patchwork.
Her head falls forward with her eyes shutting, with an inhale of breath. Tangy iron fills her lungs, the scent sparking her heartbeat to quicken and she stiffens. Moea tastes death on her tongue, feels it coiling in her stomach like a roses thorns dragged deep.
She killed someone. The realization isn't a new one but the feelings that come with are, the consequences she knows that will come. Disappointment hits her hard, guilt a horrible feeling in her gut.
She hasn't been a hero for long, just some months since she waltzed into the HQ and stood in front of the front desk. Just a few months and Moea killed someone. Not a villain, not during a fight, not in a desperate attempt to save an innocent life. But a civilian. An innocent girl who had asked her if she was alright.
"I'm sorry," She mumbles the best she can, the leg heavy in her roots.
Murder. The one thing Hohyun had told her not to do, "I'm sorry."
What she had promised her Goddess she would never do again, an action to defy her will, "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry," Citrus is a faint scent when she turns her head into her hood, reminding her of rainy days and thunder.
Her vision is blurry when she opens her eyes, face stained with blood and tears.
"I-"
Blurry vision clears to a girl, eight years of age, four months away from being any older. Pale moonlight phases through her body, reflecting in the crimson splatter that pools at her feet.
She's a ghastly sight and Moea's mouth closes slowly. Her eyes track the gnarled roots that rip through the girls skull, white petals that are stuck to her hair. White bones are a stark contrast through the matted brown strands, though she can see the cracks. Blood drips down the girls face in thick clumps, fading away into nothingness as it falls.
She studies her visage—her ghostly, young visage—and lets the night drone on. Blood dripping, roots cracking, distant cars whizzing past. The cities silence permeating the air even when she opens her mouth and closes it again.
Moea looks to the girl who's body she mutilated and can't bring herself to apologize, not to the one who really deserves it.
Moea laughs, the motion sharp and painful. It expands her lungs, rattles her ribcage, makes her roots tighten. It happens again, and then again, and again. Until a steady stream of horrible laughter is pouring out of her mouth and filling the night with shrieks.
She doubles over, brown curls of hair that isn't quite hers falling over a face she stole. A tear falls from eyes glossed over and hollow, salty water that washes away streaks of blood. Another is quick to follow and they fall like rain, her laughter the thunder rolling above as her mind becomes a storm.
And she can't apologize, not because the words are difficult but because they aren't true. She is not sorry for stealing the girl's body, for living and surviving, for trying to enjoy this miserable existence as much as she can.
She remembers words spoken what feels like eons ago. The truth said between desperate pleas. Moea is a violent creature, something born in a haze of blood and death. Incomparably different from the humans, achingly from the flora.
She's an alien to it's truest form, an odd, foreign creature with even stranger morals. A thing with no sense of justice, with carefully picked emotions she has to force-feed into a stolen brain she doesn't quite understand.
Guilt is easily fabricated with the unfamiliar regret, disappointment somewhat real but what could a humans opinion ever truly mean to her? Tear ducts are dried just as fast, the cry she'd had releasing pleasant feeling endorphins and she revels in them.
She does not feel sorry, she finds the realization easy now that she lets her mind calm. She doesn't regret it, not any of it. The murder and the violence, ripping apart sinews and bones. It is what made her, she can't regret that.
When Moea looks up the girl is walking forward, tears bubbling in her eyes, chest heaving silently. Moea has spent years studying her own expressions that she by now recognizes the anguish and grief on her face, the anger deep in her eyes. When she nears, Moea smiles wide, tilting her head in question.
There is a sort of acceptance in the girls eyes as well, an emotion that only comes after years of grief. It's a look too mature on the child's face.
A cold warmth settles by her side as the girl steps over her leg and sits, a strange sensation that shocks Moea. Her head snaps around to look at the girl but her ghost looks away, knees drawn up to her chest, shoulders shaking up and down.
And very slowly Moea reaches out a hand though she knows she cannot touch her. She hovers her palm above the girl's head in a mimicry of affection from a creature that cannot love.
She can't help but stare at the girl for a long time as cold sears into her side, chilling the bottom of her hand. This odd girl who she stole a life from. She is not sorry for living, for killing her. The girl knows that, the two are intertwined after all. In such a sense that lets Moea know that she'll never truly be forgiven. And the fact makes Moea's singular bloom perk up, because there are too many oddities on Earth but that makes sense. As she will never feel sorry, this girl should never forgive her.