And So They Grew Better

Falling Is Just Like Flying

A new wave of fear seizing her, the sap drew almost all the way down to her main roots. Not having the energy to start trembling, she simply awaited what would come next.

"Well," he cocked his eyebrow and drawled: "Congratulations then. You are now fallen, dear Four-four-four."

The words didn't register, though. All No.444's senses were now focused on the sudden wave of cold air hitting her roots as He pulled her out of her pot. In a second, there was a sound of fingers snapping and before her roots' ends could curl and die from the shock, a new one wrapped itself around her soil. Most importantly, though, she was finally placed down again. Even His silent groan and muttered words of something along "rubbing off on me alright, isn't he?" couldn't suppress the soothing sensation of having a solid ground underneath her again. There was only so many times a houseplant could be lifted into thin air without lifelong consequences, she reasoned.

Lifting her withered leaves one by one, He tutted: "We'll need to do something about those." His fingers combed through the disarranged wigs, picking the dead ones and carefully separating them from her stem. "Can't have you scaring off the invalids, can we." His voice grew so soft that it made No.444 recover from her slightly-stunned state and wonder whether He was speaking to her at all.

Then His hands left her leaves and she sensed Him retreat, carrying the old plant pot and her dead body parts away. The air around her calmed as His presence grew distant once again. If she were a different type of being, she would probably sigh with exhaustion and relief. This way, though, only her remaining leaves shifted a bit as the sap flow in her vessels returned to normal.

__________

Any regular oxygen-producing being would expect things to return to normal after that. No.444 took pride in being unusual, though, so it came as no surprise to her when everything changed.

She got her own stand, for one.

It was a small table perched in the very corner of a room He referred to as "the study" - a space close to the Room (the place where her sisters were. After a while, No.444 began to sense the body of them through the nearest wall and also witnessed Him carrying the plant mister there several times already, even though it's been only one Day and Night since her Replacement.)

(There was a deep certainty in her roots that now that she came through the feared Replacement, she would freely admit to giving it a capital R, even to the annoying No.314. No.444 felt proud of that fact.)

Another noticeable change was the increased proximity she now shared with Him. From being in His close presence once or twice a Week, she now experienced almost constant exposure to His nervous and aggravated energy. (Not that there was any lack of it to begin with - He was everpresent, after all - the energy only flowed a bit less intensely back then.)

For the past few hours, though, said energy has been reduced to a low hum at the edge of No.444's awareness, waiting to be awoken once He came back again. She had sensed Him leave shortly after talking to that strange Thing in the middle of the study again.

It was near the middle of the previous Day when the Thing came to life and started talking in His voice for the first time. A spider had been making its way up her stem and into her upper leafage when a sudden change in the sounds made her twigs perk up. "Hey, this is Anthony Crowley," the strange thing had said and then continued with something about a thing called "style". No.444 would have probably spent more time on sensing through the new word when another voice spoke. As soon as she tried to place it in her roots' memory, though, He came and silenced it.

It was all so new to No.444 that when He said "what" two times in a row with an increased sense of incredulity and then simply ran out of the room, she'd still been processing the familiarity of the other voice and trying to draw some memory of it from her unresponsive radix. It was hard to concentrate, though, and the spider that had in the meantime climbed onto her top to start working on his web wasn't helping matters, either.