Work Text:
She grew up under the city, as so many children did: the richer parents bought their children sun-lamps and fed them fish oil, and the poorer parents watched their children's legs buckle and bend as they grew. She was a tall young thing, and her new mother didn't have to worry too much about vitamins and fresh air; she was an outdoor child, and slum-dirt became green and verdant under her feet.
The church was her own private place for so many years that she sometimes caught herself thinking of it as home. Sly men in suits would flit in and out of shadows as she grew older, but she paid them no mind. When she knelt on broken stone and sang to the Planet, she'd feel a great and furious tide reaching out past the city above and around through dead earth and poison to find a single growing thing. Beside this, humans were tiny and insignificant and sometimes failed to catch her attention.
The mother of her babyhood would have swaddled her in blankets and fled to green fields, but the mother of her childhood took her out train-watching, fed her soup made from the vegetables that her strange daughter had coaxed into life, watched and worried from afar.
She was a child held under glass, wrapped around and about in cables and copper wires and concrete pillars, and yet still, somehow, she grew without ever seeing the sky.