Chapter Text
There’s something deeply wrong with that new body of hers, Justitia realizes as wakes up for the first time in the stead of Kang Bit Na.
She doesn’t take notice right away. Opening her eyes as a mortal is, to say the least, an experience – the snow and frost biting at her skin, the blood gargling from her stomach, the distant sounds of car horns and motors all made an intense, nearly-overwhelming combination of new sensations she takes a long second getting used to.
And then, as she takes her very first breath, she feels it.
It’s not about that harmless stab wound she’s talking about, nor the rather impressive pool of blood gathered around her, tainting the snow around her crimson. Reviving then possessing a human body had given her a short-lived immunity – a way for her to acclimate to her newfound mortality and the many physical limits that came along with it.
Plenty of time, then, to wait for the ambulance a lady had called for when she’d found her, after letting out a scream so shrill it had almost deafened her. The woman’s now trying to talk to her and keep her conscious, pressing her shaky hands onto her wound with obvious panic.
Justitia tries to answer her, to tell her that, while well-intentioned, her actions are pointless, that she will not die in a body she’d just revived. It might be her first time in her human body, but she’s several centuries old, and she’s certainly not that unskilled as to mess up such a task.
But, well – she doesn’t quite manage to convey that. She does have a gaping hole in her stomach, in her defense, and it’s the first time she’s experiencing the weakness of a human body and just how easily it is receptive to pain. That, and this thing.
A persistent, burning itch at the back of her throat, something soft and light stuck in her airways, and the metallic aftertaste of her own blood. While she was no expert in human medicine, the latter she could explain, once again, with her sliced-up body – the other two, however?
It was, for now, an absolute mystery.
The body of Kang Bit Na had seemed fine, when she’d examined her, only moments prior to now – the last of her memories had been a short flash that preceded her attack, but the rest had looked perfectly appropriate for her to use – a pretty face that she definitely wasn’t against wearing, and a position that would suit her perfectly.
It meant, then, that she'd have to wait for some explanations from those human healers.
Had she been able to, at this given instant, Justitia would have rolled her new eyes.
Her time on Earth was off to a good start.
The next time she wakes up, the sun is bright and high-risen above the skyscrapers, and there’s a stranger asleep in her room.
It takes her a few seconds to regain her bearings along with her memories. She’d gotten sedated and operated on as soon as she’d been admitted into the hospital; no wonder her limbs felt so heavy, the flesh of her stomach so tender.
Justitia tries to move, but her attempt only serves to send a sharp jolt of pain to her spine which, in turns, makes her cough for a long, painful moment in between wheezing breaths. She feels a few things rise in her throat with each cough, until they reach her mouth and stumble down onto her open palm along with specks of blood. They’re crumpled purple things, covered in mucus and blood, and yet soft to the touch.
Those are flowers, she realizes with astonishment once she finally manages to steady her breathing again. Those are damn flowers, vibrant and fully stemmed, fallen down from her mouth.
Is that just something humans do and consider normal, coughing blood and vomiting flowers?
The man, seated at the opposite end of her room, is jostled awake from the sudden cacophony, and sends her a wide-eyed look as he approaches her with caution. She looks away from those flowers – again, what the fuck – and glares at him.
“Oh, you’re finally–”
She cuts him off.
“You have ten seconds to identify yourself, or I’m throwing you out of this window,” she growls harshly with blood and bile in between her teeth, hoping she sounds more threatening than she feels as she conjures her beloved blade between her fingers to add weight to her words.
It’s not entirely ineffective, at least, as the intruder starts spouting some nonsensical stories which she couldn’t care less about; but then he shows her his wrist, which is immediately of a much bigger interest.
“Valak,” she interrupts him again, trying not to sound too satisfied. For such a young demon, he hadn’t managed too badly, managing to find her so fast without her having to seek him out ostensibly.
“It’s, uh, Koo Man Do, now,” he stammers, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I found him working in your office, so I assumed he’d make a great choice.”
“Not bad,” she admits, willing the blade away with a flick of her wrist and laying back against her pillow, more exhausted than she’d like to admit. “How long have you–”
The sounds of the door opening cuts her off, and she clamps her mouth shut, hand latching on the flower buds to hide them under her blanket.
“Oh, good afternoon, Miss Kang,” a young woman clad in bright blue scrubs chirps at her, entering her room. “Glad to see you woke up! How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” Justitia says, slightly taken aback by the sheer mirth of the nurse. “I think.”
“That’s not what I usually hear from patients waking up from surgery,” she answers with a light laugh. “But that’s excellent news. Let me check your vitals, at least.”
“So,” Justitia continues after a minute, tilting her head to look beyond the nurse checking her pressure, to where Valak has sat down again. “How long have you been there?”
“He’s been here since this morning,” the human at her bedside answers in his stead, with a playful tilt to her voice. “Waiting for you to wake up. Is he your boyfriend?”
“Servant,” she corrects immediately, acidic disdain tainting her tone. The thought alone of him having this kind of relation with her is enough to make her retch. “He’s my servant.”
The nurse blinks at her, and sends Man Do an almost concerned glance.
“I… see,” she tells her, clearly not seeing it. “I’ll just ask some basic questions to make sure there’s nothing anormal, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Sure,” she sighs, throwing her head back and closing her eyes. “Let’s get over this, please. The sooner I’m able to get out of there, the better.”
“Can you tell me what you think today’s date is?”
“No,” she answers with immediate ease. She’d never followed the human calendars, and had never cared about those.
Time mattered little, in death.
“That’s alright. Between your accident and the surgery, it’s no surprise you’re feeling confused. The month, then?”
“No,” Justitia repeats, feeling an irritation grow at the back of her throat – not entirely unlike what she’d felt, moments before she’d retched those blossoms. “I don’t know.”
Alarm grows in the lines of her newfound caregiver’s face. “...What about the year?”
“I don’t know!” She snaps. “Nor do I care, so how many times are you going to –”
Another coughing fit cuts her off – it shakes her body whole, this time, much more vicious than the previous one, where her vision blurs, and her ears whistle from the violence of it. She feels a small hand rub her back and, when she finally succeeds in calming down, her palm is sticky with blood, and covered in more of those purple blooms.
“I’m sorry,” The woman says quietly. “I shouldn’t have agitated you, knowing your condition. Can you at least tell me your name?”
“Kang…” she trails off, ignoring the peculiar wording of her first sentence, and bites her lip. Shit. She hadn’t bothered to remember her name, back in Hell, and she’d only skimmed over the tag her corpse had been wearing. She looks once more past the nurse, who’s visibly getting more and more worried with each second passing, to Man Do trying to mouth something to her. “Kang Beanie?”
The silence that follows is heavy with meaning.
“I’ll go call the doctor,” the nurse says, suddenly very awkward in her movements, and then she dashes out of the room without another word.
“...Well,” Man Do breathes out, looking as uncomfortable as she is. “It could have gone worse, I think?”
She ignores the urge to pinch her nose, and merely sends him a glare.
“Just shut up.”
“Sorry.”
After hours of unnecessary, boring tests from her doctor, she’s diagnosed with amnesia.
When she attempts to explain that no, the memories were never hers to begin with, and that she’s just a demon inhabiting a dead human’s body, she’s also diagnosed with a delusional disorder.
More strangely, though, is the doctor’s reaction – or lack thereof – when Justitia finally mentions coughing flowers and blood the next time she visits her room.
“Do you…” Doctor Yoon starts saying, trailing off nearly immediately as realization finally seems to hit her. “Well, it makes sense you’ve forgotten about this, too.”
Justitia ignores the mention of her supposed amnesia – it seems like it’s an endless fight to convince anyone that she’s never even had those memories – and tilts her head. “So you do know what it is, then?”
“Yes, I do,” the other woman confirms, her expression growing rather grim. “It’s Hanahaki. You were diagnosed with it nine months ago.”
“Hanahaki,” Justitia echoes, the word rolling strangely on her tongue, hanging in the air like she should know the implications of it.
She remembers hearing that word one of twice, on the rare occasions the humans she’d judged hadn’t attempted the usual pleas for mercy and forgiveness. They’d used that word, as a motive for their acts – as an excuse.
It’d annoyed her so much she’d never bothered to ask what the word meant.
And now, ironically enough, she’s stuck in a body that has developed quite an advanced case of it.
Just her luck.
She looks up at the doctor again. “So, what does it do?”
The human’s mouth presses into a thin line, her forehead creased with hesitation – like she’s trying to figure out how to break it to her in the most gentle way possible.
“I think it’s best you follow me to my office, for this,” she says eventually, motioning for her to follow. “I’ll explain it and show you the charts.”
With a scoff, Justitia trails along.
She knows delaying when she sees it.
Doctor Yoon places her elbows on her desk and lays her head on joined knuckles, looking at Justitia intensely.
“Hanahaki, simply put, is what we call a disease that comes from the soul and infects the body,” she starts. “We know little about its origins, but it has become a rather common illness in our times.”
“That’s pointlessly poetic,” Justitia remarks half-interestedly, crossing her arms and laying back in her seat.
“And unfortunately tragic in its origins,” the doctor adds with a small, tense smile, looking to the plastic, time-yellowed orchid plant decorating her desk. “It happens when someone suppresses intense feelings in the long term. It takes a great toll on their soul – and the body, as a way to cope, manifests those feelings into flower seeds.”
Justitia lets out a small laugh. “And I’m guessing they eventually grow and bloom like an actual plant. Do I really need to be worried about flowers and petals, out of all the things a human can die from?”
The woman shakes her head. “They’re only a symptom. The true risk for your health is the root growth that occurs as the illness spreads. The roots often develop around the lungs and heart, and end up piercing them. By the time that happens, it’s often too late to intervene and plan a surgery to remove the core of the plant.”
She straightens in her seat. “Surgery? Well, that solves the issue. Let’s do it as soon as you can. I’ve got places to be.”
And sinners to judge, she adds mentally, gritting her teeth. It’s been a week already that she’s been stuck in that hospital, and she’s yet to see even just a glimpse of a murderer.
The sooner she’d get out of here, the better.
The grimace that stretches on the woman’s face, however, puts an end to her hopes.
“As I said– well, I’ll show you the charts in a minute. Just let me find and load the files on the screen, and I'll explain.”
She watches the tension slowly increasing in the hollow of the human’s shoulders, and taps her own heels impatiently against the pristine white tiles.
The sudden silence irks her, so she asks, “Can any feeling cause the disease?”
The doctor throws her a quick glance, not even pausing in her typing. “In theory, if intense and lasting enough, yes. It could be hatred, or even fear, if repressed for a long time. Realistically, though, the most common cause of it is love.”
The word alone almost makes Justitia recoil. “How foolish of humans, to allow themselves to get so lovesick it ends up killing them.”
“Well,” Yoon smiles, a gentle and pitiful curl of her lips that riles her up even further, “ don’t forget that you do suffer from this, too – you might have lost your memories, for now, but you must have loved someone a great amount before that.”
She then pivots the biggest of her two screens, showing her an x-ray photograph of what Justitia guesses to be Kang Bit Na’s upper body.
“See, there?” she says, dragging the end of the pen across the screen, following the dark lines around her lungs and heart. “Those are the roots.”
What Justitia discovers, then, is an absolute and glorious mess embedded in the body she’s borrowing. It’s hard to imagine such a plant thriving in her – and yet it clearly does, with roots swirling like brambles around both her lungs and her heart, piercing and burrowing into those from multiple places to give way to fully-fleshed stems, each bearing a dozen of distinct butterfly-shaped blooms and tall enough that they’d reached the very base of her throat.
No wonder there was always this itch she couldn’t seem to clear.
“They’ve spread a lot, already,” the doctor continues, oblivious to her sudden, morbid curiosity and appreciation. “The flower buds are also fully grown, which happens in the later stages of the disease, and have started to reach your trachea around two weeks ago. It… seems to have stayed stable since that time, at least.”
She sends Justitia a small smile, like it’s a sort of mercy that should be appreciated.
Her appreciation, however, rather goes to this gorgeous mess.
“How interesting,” she breathes out, fascination coloring her voice. “What are they? what do they feed on?”
Yoon gives a short, awkward cough. “From the samples of flower buds you’ve sent us before, they seem to be aconite flowers. They thrive on mostly two things – the feelings you’ve contained, and your blood. The plant has ingrained itself into your venous system to be irrigated the same way your organs are”
“These feelings were then actually eating her from the inside,” she smiles. “Humans have such innovative and interesting ways to die.”
Another cough. “Medical research has progressed immensely these past few years. The science of hanahaki used to be … quite obscure, for a long time – but now we’re able to develop medicine that slows down the progression of the disease and reduces its symptoms, and we’ve invented a method of surgery that has a nearly-perfect success rate. It’s not necessarily a fatality anymore.”
Justitia leans forwards. “Which brings us back to this surgery that’s been mentioned twice already. Why can’t we do it?”
“As I’ve shown you, the disease has spread too much – the roots are already entirely coiled around both your lungs as well as your heart, and have pierced through in several places too deeply to be able to remove them. If we were to try and go along with the surgery in spite of this, pulling the roots or trying to move them around would likely result in your lungs and heart being torn to shreds.”
She pauses, maybe to let her patient assimilate the news – and, before her lack of reaction, she adds, with a sort of gentle hesitation: “And cutting the roots simply won’t be enough either. If we leave them as it is, they’ll regrow and fuse together again in a matter of days.”
So much for a nearly-perfect solution, Justitia muses, miffed.
She sighs. “What are my options, then?”
“Keep taking the prescribed medicine three times a day, for starters. They weaken the roots and slow their growth,” the doctor says, once again, gently.
Ah – so that’s what those pills had been for, given to her at every meal. She’d thrown them into the toilets, instead, when no one else had been looking.
“We’re not sure how your amnesia is going to impact the progress of your hanahaki. Usually, the only solution you have at this point is to confess your feelings to whoever you had been keeping them from – but, in your case…”
“I’d have to retrieve my memories first,” Justitia concludes.
“Exactly.”
Which will never happen. “What if they never come back? I can’t exactly confess feelings I do not have anymore.”
Doctor Yoon’s gaze grows heavy with meaning and pity. “We’ll monitor you closely.”
But there’s nothing more that we can do, she doesn’t dare say – the demon, however, easily understands the implications of it.
She’ll probably die.
This complicates things. She cannot afford to reduce what little time she already has.
“I know this is a lot to take in,” the doctor says, apologetically, mistaking her silence for shock at the prospect of her incoming death. “It must have felt like you’ve had a second chance at life.”
“It’s fine,” Justitia says, waving her off. If anything, she’s mostly annoyed that her time has been shortened. “How long do I still have?”
The other woman blinks, staring at her in surprise at yet another downplayed reception of the news. “Eight to ten months. Maybe a year – and that is if your condition stabilizes, and if you take your medicine properly.”
“Two months lost, then”, she mutters under her breath, aggravated. “But thanks. I appreciate the explanations. Can I get discharged, now?”
“You don’t seem to be taking this very seriously, Mrs Kang –”
“Oh, I am.” It doesn’t change much whether or not she’s sick, though – the only difference it creates is the time she has left to find the right amount of sinners and be allowed back to her rightful place, and she tells her as such.
After a long silence and a soft sigh, Doctor Yoon says, in quiet reluctance, “Right. You can’t get discharged just yet, though. You still have to follow psychological counseling and physical therapy. We’ll make another appointment for next week, to see whether your hanahaki progresses in any way.”
“Alright, sure,” Justitia shrugs easily, already standing at the door. She stops there, her fingers hovering over the handle, and turns back to the doctor, staring her in the eye. “I have a last question.”
“Sure.”
“Why did Kang Bit Na not have the surgery, back when it was still time to go for it?
She receives yet another of those tight smiles. “You’ve always refused to get the surgery. You’ve never disclosed the specific reason for it, though. Some people… are just like this. They would rather risk death than lose the memories or the feelings they hold of their loved ones.”
Justitia slams the door on her way out.
Just. her. damn. luck.
She’s ordered to stay at the hospital for three more weeks – officially, it’s to monitor the healing of her stab wound and to check on her weed problem.
Unofficially, it’s because everyone thinks she’s completely lost her mind.
She might not pay much attention to every member of the medical staff, but it doesn’t mean she’s oblivious to their shared glances and grimaces, though. They balk when she mentions anything about demons and sinners, and wince even when she mentions Kang Bit Na in the third person instead of the first.
There’s no doubt that, by now, the words “delusional disorder” on her file have been underlined several times.
It’s irritating – especially the fact that she’ll have lost an entire month by the time she’s allowed to step out of the hospital, but she’ll live with it.
(And that one psychiatrist that sneaks soda cans into her room makes the entire process much more bearable, at least.)
Valak comes to visit her the next day, bringing her new clothes and cosmetics.
“You look upset, Justi– Judge Kang,” he greets her nervously. “Did yesterday’s checkup go well?”
She furrows her brows, watching him fret with the many bags he’d brought her. “Do you really have to call me like that?”
He flinches. “Call you what?”
“Judge Kang.”
“We need to blend in,” he answers carefully as he looks down to his feet. “If you keep claiming to all these humans that you’re truly a demon, they’ll never let you out of here – worse even, they could remove you from your position as a judge.”
She thinks about those two words – delusional disorder – and sighs. “You may have a point,” she concedes, only to glare at him when he immediately perks up. “Maybe. Call me Justitia when it’s just the two of us. I’ll make an effort to call you by your human – what was its name, again?”
“Koo Man Do,” he tells her, sounding pleased.
She feels her own lips curl in distaste. “Right. And to answer your first question, no, it didn’t.”
“Did something happen?”
As if to make a point, a cough rises in her throat, and she feels yet another bundle of flowers block her airways before she finally manages to spit them out. There’s no blood, this time, but the buds are still covered in that pesky human slime.
“This,” she hisses. “This happened. I’ve been made to possess a sick body, whose previous host was a complete idiot who chose to let herself die rather than choose an easy and life-saving solution.”
“Are you– are you in pain?” Valak stammers, hovering annoyingly close to her and only retreating when she swats at him. “Are you dying?”
“Don’t sound so hopeful,” she snarls half-heartedly. Each of these coughing fits exhausts her to no end, even the short ones, and she’s done with it already. “It’s Hanahaki. This body has grown flowers in its lungs and heart, and it’s dying from it.”
He stares at her, mouth agape. “Flowers?! Don’t they have medicine for it, or ways to heal it?”
“Palliative only,” she hums. “And surgery is out of the question.”
“What… what do you plan on doing, then?”
She sends him a grin, pleased when he recoils with instinctive fear. Her mouth isn’t filled with blood, for once, but it sure is thirsty for it.
“We carry on with the mission, and go back to Hell before this body of mine starts rotting from the inside.”
Unfortunately, they don’t make any progress in the span of the next two weeks. There’s nothing much she can do here, except eavesdropping on patients and visitors’ conversations, hoping in vain one of them would just happen to confess to a murder in public. She’d tried asking some of them directly, but the cowards had apparently snitched to her psychiatrist who, at her next appointment, had conveyed a very clear message: quit that now, or I’ll be keeping you there longer.
It’s not like she can just run away either, if she wants to keep practicing as a judge for an easy access to murders, and Valak – Man Do, now – is unable to get new cases for her before she’s officially cleared to come back.
All in all, she’s getting antsy.
Despite this, the third week is the harbinger of great news.
While the previous week’s checkup hadn’t shown much (if any) change in her illness’s progress, this week’s results seem to completely astound Doctor Yoon. She’s been staring at her screen for at least five whole minutes, by now, practically ignoring Justitia’s presence to instead type onto her keyboard with a fury she hadn’t thought the doctor capable of.
Still, being so intensely ignored is starting to get on her nerves.
“What is it?” she demands, tone sharp and annoyed, pausing to cough a bloom onto her palm. “You’ve been gaping at your screen for a while now. What’s happening?”
It takes a long second for the woman to answer. “I just can’t believe it. Your condition is improving. Your hanahaki – it’s…. receding”, the doctor confesses breathlessly, something her voice tainted raw fascination.
She throws Justitia a glance – the first time she’s even looked at her since she’d entered the room – and starts pummeling her with questions. “Could it be because of your amnesia? Or the physical trauma that caused the disease to pause its progress? Have you felt any improvement, lately? Did you–”
“Can we go with one question at once?” She cuts her off, equally feeling hopeful and confused by the doctor’s sudden enthusiasm. “I’ve been coughing less blood and less often, yes. Does that mean that Kang– I mean, is my body’s healing on its own?”
“It’s too soon to say whether it will heal entirely,” Doctor Yoon explains, her gaze wandering to her screen once more. “Still, it’s unlike anything I’ve been before. Some of the aconite buds have gotten smaller since last time, and a few roots have withered and retracted slowly from your lungs while leaving no damage or puncture points. It’s wonderful.”
“Wonderful,” she repeats sardonically. “Does that mean I can get discharged earlier?”
“The wound on your stomach has healed exceptionally well, too, so that could be considered, if your appointed psychiatrist accepts it,” comes the answer, along with a meaningful glance. “I’m keeping the weekly appointments, however. We need to monitor it closely to confirm whether it keeps receding or not.”
“Fine,” Justitia relents, much too happy at the idea of being released earlier.
“Keep taking your medicine, too, and take notes of your symptoms – how often you have coughing fits and whether you notice blood or fully-fledged flower blossoms. If it keeps improving like this – we could eventually start considering the surgery again, if you still wish to by then.”
Of course she’ll still want it. “When can we consider it?”
“It’s hard to give you an accurate estimation – it’s the first time in my career such a thing has happened, and we need to establish a pattern through proper and continuous monitoring first. However, if it keeps progressing without setbacks, and as quickly as it did in the past week – we might have a chance to talk about it again in three months.”
Justitia clicks her tongue. Four months will have passed before they’ll be able to dig that flower out of her chest – a third of her allotted time. It could and should have gone better than this, but she’d take what she could get. “I see.”
“There’s an important factor in this, though. Your feelings must not come back.”
She pauses. “Come again?”
“Whatever feelings you had, before your memory loss – be it love or something else,” Doctor Yoon explains gravely. “If you start having those again, if you start repressing those again, not only will the disease start spreading back, but it will be twice as fast and painful.”
Justitia blinks at her, before she feels something rise from within her chest. This time, it’s not a petal at the back of her throat, but a laugh.
“Don’t worry,” she says, lips curling into a sharp grin, the ghost of a flower dancing on her tongue. “I’ll be careful. See you next time, then.”
She’s immunized against those nettlesome human feelings.
Three months?
Those will go by in a breeze.
To her credit and to Justitia’s greatest joy, Doctor Yoon holds her promise and successfully advocates for an early release.
Her psychiatrist congratulates her for her recovery – and for somewhat managing to pass off as a human, even though she knows her patient hasn’t ceased in the least to believe she’s a demon. For this, and for the colas she’d brought to her in spite of her temporary dietary restrictions, Justitia accepts to participate in the few next sessions of the hospital’s resident training program.
By now, her coughing fits have reduced in frequency and intensity, as long as she doesn’t try to hold them in for too long. The blood has gotten scarcer, too, replaced most of the time by clear phlegm, and entire blossoms falling from her mouth were rarer occurrences, giving way instead to smaller petals.
Which is more than fine with her: if, on the few days that follow her returns, she’d kept getting comments about just how much Kang Bit Na has changed – be it her personality, her brand new clothes or her red-dyed hair – people had yet to mention her hanahaki or anything in relation to it.
It meant that, in spite of how advanced her illness had been, human Kang Bit Na had managed to conceal it from everyone. A rather impressive feat, she knew, now that she herself had experienced how hard it was to hold in a coughing fit, and she would rather avoid ruining both this hard work and her own reputation by throwing up petals in front of an audience.
Until now, she had dealt with it just fine; she’d mostly been hiding in her office where she could more or less cough in peace, studying her newly appointed cases. The first of those, with a hearing on that very day, is about a strong-armed arrest by a policeman resulting in an injured hand. It’s both terribly boring and ridiculous, if you ask her: it takes her a grand total of two minutes to find out the peculiar ties between the prosecutor’s and victim’s families.
The second one, however? A man arrested and sued for brutal domestic violence to his girlfriend, to the point he had almost killed her? Now that was interesting.
Finally, she thinks excitedly. Finally.
If she plays her cards right, with one little push, she’d finally have her first sinner to send to Hell.
Which is why she’s had Man Do stalk – or well, inform her – about the recovering girlfriend’s whereabouts, and give her a window where she’d be able to talk to her alone.
The first catch is that said window is supposedly very, very shortly after the officer’s trial. She’ll have no time to lose, so she can only hope that both sides of the court will behave and let her give a quick ruling.
The second catch is that she feels a cough rising up her throat the very moment she enters the courtroom. She allows it, masking it behind her sleeve and the ambient rustle of the people rising to greet her, and tries to clear her throat as discreetly as she can as she sits down – but it’s not enough, and she feels petals on her tongue begging to be let out.
It’s disgusting, but she swallows those back, and wash off the aftertaste with a swing of the soda she’d had the great mind to take with her for the trial. Its taste is as great as ever, but the fizz of it does little to appease the irritation of the blooms constantly tickling at the trachea and the coughs threatening to burst out of her mouth, with an itch that grows thicker with each passing second.
Which is, once again, why she shouldn’t even be wasting her time with this stupid trial. Were they really hoping she’d consider punishing an officer for doing his job?
This entire lawsuit is absurd, and she doesn’t hold back from voicing as such, nor does she stop herself from airing out the prosecutor’s dirty little secrets when he, out of all people, attempts to lecture her about respect. She would have laughed ostensibly, had breathing not started to hurt so viciously, the roots within her narrowing around her lungs and prickling at her heart, punishing her for refusing to give in in front of her audience.
It’s upon a look at her wristwatch and the feeling of blood at the back of her mouth that she knows it’s time to put an end to the joke and go after her first ticket towards her return to Hell; she asks for the defendant to deliver his final statement, half-ready to zone out and focus on keeping the blood and petals in.
The final statement, however, actually catches her attention. The start of it is stale at best, as expected of an officer supposed to apologize. But then –
“I should have twisted his arm harder,” the man says with the kind of calm that announces a storm, and the hint of a cheeky smile pulling at the corner of his lips.
Justitia looks at him properly for the first time since the start of the trial, and, in the face of the unexpected amusement that spreads throughout her chest, momentarily forgets about the fire in her lungs. “So you’re not remorseful?”
“There’s no need to be,” he confirms, looking her straight in the eye, almost daring her to contradict him. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
A chuckle escapes her – a petal catches between her teeth, and she barely even remember to swallow it back.
She smiles at the assembly. “I’ve made my decision.”
It’s practically running that she leaves the court, swearing under her breath when she realizes she won’t have the time to drop her court belongings at her desk if she wants to catch Cha Min Jeong alone – she only stops by briefly to entertain these kids and teach their about the lack of proper justice in their world, swallowing back the bile and the petals to the best of her ability as she speaks and chants – and then she’s back to running to her car.
She’s just about to jump in when the man from earlier – that cheeky defendant with the name of a softener – catches her.
Perfect.
She cuts him off in whatever he was saying, and dumps her clothes and badge onto him while spouting the directions to her division and Man Do – only pausing slightly when he asks her about the reason for acquitting him.
“Not happy with it?” she scoffs, only for it to morph into a cough halfway through. She grabs her seat belt and pretends to look for the slot, letting her long hair drop like a curtain between them so she can lick her lips clean of the blood specks that had burst on them. “Should I have handed you a death sentence instead?”
He then, sadly, spouts something stupid about her having been moved by his frustration – she almost laughs, and shatters his delusions while asking him whether he knows why she loves her position as a criminal court judge so much.
Not that he’s able to guess, seemingly rendered speechless by her attitude.
“That’s because I get to meet a lot of bad guys,” she answers on his behalf, leaning towards him, with a grin that definitely feels too wet and metallic; it’s immediately followed by a rattling and ominous-sounding cough, as her hand goes to grip at her throat with a white-knuckled hold, her vision turning dark at the edges.
And then she proceeds to vomit blood and aconite blossoms onto his shoes.