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There's something like fear to having a body that's no longer human.
Even when Bruno had been a corpse his descent into deterioration had been a gradual one; the loss of feeling, the fading heartbeat, the blurring shadows of his sight. All had been accepted because of the acclimation of it.
What was it his Dad had once said? Like a frog in water brought to boil. A price he didn't mind paying when it was giving him everything he wanted; time to see his fight to its bitter end. There were to be no consequences, just victory, then death. What else could there be but death?
Had he known Giorno Giovanna longer perhaps he would have placed his bets on an alternative option.
Living on was not gradual. One moment he was a corpse inhabited by a fading soul, and the next he was--
He didn't know what the fuck he was. No one did, no one could. Bruno had questions that no one could answer and that he could only bare to direct at the teenager who, for all his calm demeanor and love of botany, was the one who put him into this situation, and who never quite managed to hide his own panic at not knowing.
To burden Giorno, and by some lesser extent Fugo, seemed the only tired course of action. Bruno knows there are plenty of academic books he could fill his time with reading to gain his own understanding from, but his braille is still a shaky work in progress, and it was soon very apparent that finding any books in braille at all was a bit of a chore.
Signing was all he had when his questions became too urgent, though it was rare. A persistent burning along one of Bruno's arms turned out to have been a mold that had settled, festering, into his new body. His new skin is porous, held onto water a bit too long, and he hadn't thought it could be a danger.
Complete uncharted territory. The kind he had dreamed of as a boy when he was out on his Dad's boat, fancying himself a pirate explorer while his Dad smiled on, the sun leathered skin around his eyes crinkling.
One of a kind, his Dad used to say to him. The old man could have been wrong, from time to time.
When Giorno learned of the strange shadow-shaped Bruno perceives in the sunlight he quietly replaces every lightbulb in the villa with fluorescents. It's not quite the same, but it's appreciated. Even though Bruno privately thinks it produces something of a lifeless perversion to the real Sun.
It's a worn down track by this point. Bruno isn't a learned man. He's certainly not of the college mind, and it has left him far from any kind of poet. He lacks the vocabulary that would allow for any kind of proper eloquence, or metaphor, or simile to make anyone understand.
Because, as it is now, Bruno can't even begin to describe what he is, and, if he can't do that, how does he come by answers?
Maybe it won't matter in the end. All the words at humanity's disposal probably couldn't begin to touch upon the life of something that lives without hearing them. He certainly doesn't have the words to describe half of what he feels anymore.
There's an eerie, alien omnipotence over his body now (or, as he and Giorno agreed on, his ecosystem). As a human things that kept him alive he knew about, but had no real sense of. His heart beat on its own, he couldn't really tell you what half his organs were even for, and what they did, specifically, to keep him alive, but he didn't need to know.
Now he is aware of things in his body in a strange, almost intrusive manner. Things there aren't words for. He leans his temple against a mother oak and feels the churning of slow energy inside of her. How her roots stretch out farther than he ever would have guessed with sight alone. He feels how-- as Spring wakes her-- she pushed out nourishment all around to other plant life in the area.
Like him, she is aware of things moving inside, where to send it to. How to keep life going in a form distinctly lacking in blood or beating flesh.
More than the braille of his calendar Bruno knows Spring is nearly here because of the tilt of the Sun. Like he's some great mathematician to calculate its angles and say, smug and certain, that he needs nothing else. The closer the season crawls the more restless he becomes. Something is happening inside him. Something new.
For two days solid Bruno is wholly distracted from humanity as he tries, earnestly, to understand what that means.
Clearly he hadn't experienced the dormancy of a tree during winter. Because he isn't a tree. He's not sure what kind of plant he could most closely be related to if any, and Giorno had hedged, uncomfortably, that an answer to that question might only come from a strange organization Bruno had never heard of called the Speedwagon Foundation.
Bruno finds he is not in the mood to be studied. At least not yet.
He knows he's covered in varying types of leaves and other greenery-- even fungus, which wasn't supposed to be confused with the invasive mold he'd been sick with before. What this new mystery he's being subjected to could be eludes him, he just wishes he had the words, because what his mind attempts now would be a cause of concern if he voiced them.
If his new body was a field he thinks it would be bombs planted in haphazard rows across his shoulders and chest. They deny further description that would make sense, just. Nebulous pockets of trembling…eventuality, points of interest that are--
Growing? Swelling? Becoming 'brighter', or, to stick to the metaphor he supposes, closing in on detonation.
Confused and fascinated Bruno keeps these observations to himself, unwilling to bare them to others and choosing instead to become isolated and wrapped up in the sensations of it all. He concludes he doesn't feel sick, or. Or diseased. It's just his body making him a sweet promise. Begging him to discard his shawl and any other decency human clothes provide and just lay in the sunlight within the privacy of his room. To lay in the dirt and just do what plants do, for once.
So he does.
Once he had sat against the embrace of a tree and time had streaked by without him noticing, and he finds it has happened again. A blessed blur that brings him to his reckoning. His return to consciousness-- less of waking from sleep and more a rise from dormancy-- fills him with a strange burst of pride. Bruno reaches to his shoulder to carefully touch what's grown out of him.
For all the sensitivity to subtle textures that he's lost he knows what he touches is the velvet soft of petals.
Of course. Of course it would be flowers. He's bloomed.
The feeling had lacked the shivering itch of new leaves, or the swelling, electric spread of root and vine systems. Why had it felt nothing like the flowers he'd sported before? His hands roam careful and giddy over his body, counting the flowers one by one. They feel different than the others Abbacchio and the rest had commented on over the weeks. Not by touch, but how they root differently inside of him.
Like they are more integral to something. More connected. Less a stray seed that had lodged into whatever passed as his skin nowadays, or a transplanted sickly bloom, and more like…his.
A progeny.
Bruno lingers there as the Sun grows stronger, fingertips touching the downy petals again and again until he can't stand not knowing their color. He stands with haste to find someone who would answer that question for him, at least.