Chapter 2: The First Taste of Power
The silence after the crash was profound. It was the silence of a vacuum, of a breath held too long. Ana stood in the doorway, her shoulders filling the frame, and listened to it. It was better than the printer. Better than Mark’s voice. It was a silence she owned.
She took a step into the hallway. The cheap commercial carpet compressed under her bare green foot. The feeling was incredible—textured, real. Every nerve ending was alive. The sterile beige of the walls seemed pathetic now, a cardboard set meant to contain paper-pushing ghosts. She was no ghost. She was solid, a seismic event in heels.
From around the corner came the quick, familiar tap-tap of sensible pumps. Ana went still, a predator noting prey. A woman appeared, phone in hand, eyes down on the screen. It was Lia from Marketing. Curly brown hair, a floral wrap dress. She was humming.
Lia looked up, her path taking her directly toward the bathroom doorway, directly toward Ana. Her eyes traveled up, and up, and up. The phone slipped from her fingers, clattering on the carpet. The hum died in her throat.
Her mouth worked. “Yuna…?” The name was a squeak of disbelief. “Uh… wrong bathroom? The big conference room is down—“
Ana moved. It wasn’t the shuffle Yuna would have managed. It was a surge of liquid muscle. She closed the distance in one stride, her large hand snapping out to grip Lia’s upper arm. The feel of the woman’s fragile bones under her fingers sent a jolt through Ana’s core, a hot, dark ripple of pure power.
“No Yuna,” Ana growled, the sound low and final. She leaned down, her wild hair a curtain that brushed Lia’s horrified face. “Yuna’s dead. Ana now.”
Lia’s breath hitched, a sharp little intake of panic. “Stop. Let go, you’re hurting—“
Ana kissed her. It wasn’t an offer. It was a claim. Her lips were firm, demanding, swallowing Lia’s attempted scream. She tasted of mint gum and fear. Ana’s other hand came up, tangling in Lia’s curls, holding her still. A deep, rolling shudder of pleasure moved through Ana’s green frame. This. This was feeling. Not anxiety. Dominion.
She broke the kiss. Lia gasped, sputtering. “Yuna, please, stop, what are you—“
“Ana,” she corrected, her voice a husky whisper. She applied pressure to the hand in Lia’s hair, guiding her downward. Lia resisted, her hands fluttering against Ana’s immense thighs, pushes that were weaker than a sigh.
“No, don’t, I’ll scream—”
“Scream.” Ana’s grin was all teeth. “Who comes? Mark? Let him see.”
The fight left Lia in a trembling rush, replaced by a frozen, tearful compliance. Ana’s torn clothing, the overwhelming scent of ozone and raw power, the impossible green skin—it was a nightmare she couldn’t wake from. Ana guided her the rest of the way down.
The experience was a wave of sensory triumph for Ana. The warmth, the softness, the absolute vulnerability. It was the antithesis of the gray spreadsheet, the hollow click of the mouse. This was vivid, wet, and real. She watched the top of Lia’s head, her own hands now gripping the doorframe, the steel groaning under her grasp. Lia’s fingers, initially pressed against Ana’s stockings in protest, slowly curled, gripping the firm green flesh of her thighs as if clinging to a cliff edge.
The climax, when it crashed over Ana, was a convulsion of pure, roaring life. It was the static in her head finally resolving into a single, perfect, shattering note. A guttural sound tore from her throat, part roar, part sigh.
In the aftermath, she slumped slightly against the doorframe, a low hum of satisfaction in her chest. The fluorescent lights in the hallway buzzed back to full brightness, the mundane world reasserting itself with a cruel fluorescence.
She looked down.
Lia was crying silently, her makeup smeared, her dress rumpled. She wiped her mouth with the back of a trembling hand, her eyes wide and blank with shock.
The sight was a bucket of cold water. Not on Ana, but on something beneath her.
The humming satisfaction curdled. The solid, glorious feeling of her own body began to waver. A familiar, slender voice, muffled and horrified, echoed from somewhere deep inside the architecture of her mind.
What did you do?
Ana’s breath caught. Not Ana’s breath. Yuna’s.
A tingling, inverse of the earlier electric bloom, began at her extremities. A leaching-away. A retreat. She watched, detached, as the vibrant green of her hand began to pale, fading to a sickly mint, then to the familiar beige of her own skin. The incredible girth of her wrist narrowed, the powerful tendons receding like tide.
“No,” Ana whispered, but the voice was higher now, fraying at the edges.
It was a collapse, not an expansion. Her height dropped, a dizzying sensation of the world rushing up to meet her. The torn green fabric of her makeshift leotard shimmered, seemed to melt and re-knit itself in reverse—threads flying back into place, stains vanishing, the dark green receding into the bland ivory of her original button-up blouse. The blouse was whole again, pristine, every button fastened. The ripped black stockings smoothed into sheer, unblemished nylon. The carpet, which had felt textured and real under her bare foot, now felt coarse and cheap against the sole of her restored high heel.
She was standing. Lia was crouched on the floor before her, sobbing.
Yuna’s hand—small, pale, trembling—flew to her mouth. The taste was there. Metallic, foreign, thick on her own tongue. Her stomach lurched.
“Lia,” she choked out. The word was a pitiful mouse-squeak after Ana’s roar.
Lia looked up. The confusion in her eyes was worse than the fear. She saw Yuna. The Yuna she knew. Neat, petite, contained in her pencil skirt and blouse. The wrecked bathroom door gaped open beside them, a silent testament to impossible physics.
“What… what was that?” Lia whispered, her voice raw. “What did you… make me do?”
Yuna could only shake her head, a frantic denial. The memory was in her body, a series of sensations—power, hunger, utter control—that were incompatible with the person staring back from Lia’s terrified eyes. The ghost of Ana’ pleasure still thrummed under her skin, a vile, addictive echo.
She turned and ran.
Her heels, perfectly intact, click-clacked a frantic, ordinary rhythm down the beige hallway. She pushed through the stairwell door, not daring to wait for the elevator. The concrete steps echoed with her panic. She hit the lobby, burst through the glass doors into the damp evening air, and didn’t stop.
Three blocks away, leaning against a brick wall in an alley, she finally vomited. Her small body convulsed, expelling nothing but bile and horror. She spat, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She stared at the hand. Normal. Pale. Useless.
But as she breathed in the smell of garbage and wet pavement, another scent, faint and intimate, clung to her upper lip. She could still taste it.
She slid down the wall until she sat on the cold ground, her head in her hands. The static was gone. In its place was a clean, deafening silence, and a single, glowing ember of memory that burned with a shameful, green fire.