Just like every other mainland male. Started off with a compliment and when she didn't soak her panties, it was all bitch this and murder that. Zea had expected more time to consider how pedestrian his attitude was for a man who wasn't using his feet, but he wasn't going to give it to her. Zea had tried to be good, she'd really tried, but he wasn't going to let her. She'd tried. She'd done her job.
He came close, very close, and she shifted one of her feet slightly. He was very close. She wondered if he could taste her yet. She wondered if she tasted different, if he could tell. He hadn't touched her yet, but he was fast. He was so fast that if she'd thought about it she'd have been glad she let him come to her. Zea wasn't, though. There wasn't room to congratulate herself for anything, to think about herself, to even remember herself.
Even knowing beforehand that it was coming from outside, there was too much of it. She hadn't been this scared, not even then, not even when she was a girl. Even when nobody else could see or hear or touch what was coming, even when nobody even knew they were leaving her unprotected, even then. Zea had not even been this terrified of him.
Until the flood came and smashed her thoughts apart, Zea had had plans. Now she just had fear and she hated it and there wasn't enough of her left to stop herself. When this stranger's touch blasted everything away but those old childish impulses, the flesh sculptor lunged upward with her hands out for whatever face was inside that raggedy cloak.
The plan had been to pull out one of his vertebrae, maybe, make a little gap in his spine. The plan had been humane enough, even restrained. Now Zea couldn't even feel how fast she was breathing, how hard her lungs were working to go faster than any human lungs could. She couldn't feel how hard she was clenching her teeth, how her jaw ached. She couldn't feel little swishes and pops in that space around her which wasn't air, which wasn't the world. She couldn't hear the whispers.
All she could think about was how soft organs were, wet and weak and slopping around protected only by bones. Soft and brittle, like pudding in a cage made of chalk, running through the bars, running through her fingers. Zea didn't have any witty banter anymore, didn't have any thoughts in her at all. All she knew was that she was afraid, and all her body understood was digging down through pliable skin and muscle, past eyes swollen with their thick juices, down to a brain she could squeeze in her fist. She needed it. She needed to smear that warm red and white pulp into the dirt, paint it down her face and chest and arms, and maybe then she could scream. But not yet.
First bleeding. First pain. First clawing and twisting and mauling and pieces and wet until nothing was moving. Then... well, Zea didn't know about then. She couldn't even imagine a then. and maybe there was none. Maybe there was just this moment, stretched out forever as she lost herself in terror and shredded meat, surrounded by a mist of spirits even she was no longer seeing or hearing. She wasn't afraid of them. She was afraid of this so now it was all there was.
Zea had never dealt particularly well with her emotions. On some level she'd assumed she must have grown out of them, but nobody could be right all the time. Here they all were. It had been an honest mistake.