Morning came slowly into the basement.
The blue and violet light that had filled the room the night before was gone. Without the Mother, the dead vines hanging from the ceiling looked ordinary and ugly, gray-green ropes sagging against the cracked concrete walls, brittle and hollow. Dried petals and brittle leaves covered the floor in a dull carpet that crackled softly whenever the air stirred. The thick, sweet rot of overripe fruit had faded into something flatter and more ordinary: damp concrete, old blood, and the faint metallic tang of iron that never quite left the air. Sunlight found its way through a narrow basement window near the ceiling and fell across the room in one pale rectangle, dust motes drifting lazily inside it like they had all the time in the world.
Melody woke beside Leo.
For a long while she didn’t move.
She just lay there with one arm still resting across his chest, listening. His breathing was quiet. Slow. Steady. The soft rise and fall under her palm was the only sound that mattered. She closed her eyes again for a few seconds and let that single fact settle into her bones: he was still here.
Eventually she pushed herself upright.
Every part of her hurt. Her back complained first, a deep, bruised ache that ran from her shoulders to the base of her spine. Then her head, a dull throb behind her eyes. Then several other places she had absolutely no interest in cataloguing before the sun had fully risen. Dried blood tightened against her skin when she moved, pulling in thin, cracking sheets. Some of it was hers. Most of it wasn’t. The golden fleece that had covered Leo through the night no longer glowed; it looked completely ordinary again, soft yellow wool resting over his chest like nothing impossible had ever happened. If she hadn’t remembered the hole through his body, the blood that had covered half the basement floor, the way his eyes had gone empty, she might have thought he was only sleeping.
Melody stood quietly.
Her clothes were where she remembered leaving them, tossed in a careless heap near the collapsed remains of the Mother. She walked over, bare feet whispering across the petal-strewn concrete, and picked up the oversized gray shirt first. She pulled it on without checking whether it was clean. It wasn’t. The fabric still held the faint sticky residue of plant fluid and the darker stains of dried blood. The sweatpants came next. One leg was stiff with dried sap; the other was stiff with blood. She stepped into them anyway. They covered her. That was all she cared about right now.
She found one sock.
Not the other.
Melody stared at the single sock in her hand for several long seconds, the ordinary absurdity of it sitting strangely in her chest, before she simply dropped it. Barefoot was fine.
The snake sword lay near the withered husk of the Mother, its blade dull in the morning light. She looked at it but didn’t pick it up. Not yet. Her fingers curled once at her sides and then relaxed. She wasn’t ready to hold it.
Instead she walked back to Leo.
The room felt too large with only the sound of his breathing inside it. Every soft inhale seemed to echo off the concrete. Melody sat beside him and slipped one arm carefully underneath his shoulders, the other beneath his knees. She lifted him. He was heavier than she expected, heavier than anyone who had survived what he had survived should have been. The thought settled uncomfortably under her ribs. She pulled him against her chest and adjusted his head until it rested beneath her chin. The golden fleece was warm against her arms. His messy brown hair still had dried blood matted near one temple; she brushed it away with her fingers, then kept brushing even after there was nothing left to fix, the repetitive motion steadying something inside her that still felt like it might shatter.
She stayed like that.
Minutes passed. Maybe longer. The pale rectangle of sunlight on the floor shifted by slow degrees. Somewhere upstairs something collapsed with a distant, muffled crash, probably another section of dead vine giving way under its own weight. Melody barely lifted her eyes.
Leo breathed against her chest.
She counted without meaning to.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Every breath felt like permission to keep sitting there.
Eventually his fingers twitched.
Melody froze.
Leo’s brow tightened. His head shifted slightly against her. A small, confused sound escaped him.
“Leo?”
His eyes opened.
For a moment they didn’t focus on anything. Then they found her face. Melody watched the emotions move across him in slow, painful sequence, confusion first, then recognition, then a sharp, raw fear that made his whole body stiffen against her.
She felt it immediately.
“Hey,” she said, voice low and careful.
Leo stared at her. Whatever expression she wore must have looked nothing like the last face he had seen on her, the blank, glowing-eyed hunger that had driven a hand through his stomach.
“Hey,” she said again, softer. “It’s me.”
His breathing changed. A sharp inhale. Then the memories hit him all at once. She saw it happen in real time: his eyes widening, his face crumpling, one hand flying to his stomach beneath the fleece as if searching for the hole that was no longer there, the other fist closing hard in the front of her shirt.
“You…” His voice broke before he could finish the sentence.
Melody’s throat tightened until it hurt.
Leo stared up at her, eyes already glassy. “You killed me.”
The words were so small, so quiet, that they landed heavier than any scream could have.
Melody closed her eyes for a second. “I know.”
That was all it took.
Leo started crying, not quietly, not with any attempt to hold it back. It came out of him in a sudden, helpless rush, the kind of crying that stole the air from his lungs and left him gasping. He curled into her, both hands fisting in her shirt, shoulders shaking hard against her chest. Melody held him tighter, one hand cradling the back of his head, the other locked around his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He tried to speak. Whatever words he managed dissolved into another broken sob.
“I’m so sorry.”
She kept saying it because there was nothing else. The words felt too small for what she had done, but they were all she had.
Leo pressed his face into the front of her shirt, voice muffled and wrecked. “I thought you were gone. I woke up and you weren’t there and I looked everywhere and I kept thinking maybe you left because of the axe or because I was annoying or because you didn’t want me anymore, and then I found you being assaulted by a plant, I saved you and you looked at me like you didn’t even know who I was.”
Something inside Melody cracked cleanly open.
“No,” she said, the word rough. “No.”
His grip on her shirt tightened until his knuckles went white. “You didn’t know me.”
“I know.”
“You just…” His voice disappeared again.
Melody’s own tears came before she realized they had started. They spilled hot and silent down her face as she pulled him closer, erasing every possible inch of space between them, and pressed her cheek hard against the top of his head. His hair smelled of blood and dust and the faint residual sweetness of the plant that had almost taken them both.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, the words breaking.
Leo cried harder. Melody did too. There was no clean way through it. No explanation about the fruit or the mind control or the way the Mother had hollowed her out and used her hands like they belonged to someone else.
So they simply sat there in the quiet basement, surrounded by dead vines and the pale morning light, and let the grief move through them.
Leo cried until the front of Melody’s shirt was soaked through. Melody cried until the dull ache behind her eyes sharpened into something that made her vision swim. Eventually her tears slowed first. She kept holding him while his sobs gradually softened into smaller, uneven breaths. Every so often he sniffed hard and tightened his arms around her again, as if he needed to prove to himself that she was still solid, still real, still here.
Melody rested her chin on top of his head and stared at the far wall.
“I’m never leaving you alone again,” she said quietly.
Leo sniffed. “You better not, jerkface.”
A tiny, broken laugh slipped out of her even though her face was still wet. “Yeah. I deserved that one.”
Another sniff. His voice was small and fierce at the same time. “I mean it.”
“I know.”
He stayed curled against her, one fist still loosely wrapped in a fold of her shirt near her ribs. Melody didn’t try to move him. The sunlight continued its slow crawl across the petal-strewn floor. Somewhere far above them the building settled with another soft, distant groan.
After a long while Leo’s breathing finally evened out. Melody looked down at the top of his head.
“You okay?”
He didn’t answer right away. Then he gave the smallest shrug she had ever felt against her body.
“No.”
Melody nodded once, the motion slow. “Me neither.”
That seemed to be enough.
Leo rested his head more fully against her. Melody held him while the morning light kept moving, while the dead vines hung silent, while the basement remained still and empty of anything that wanted to hurt them.
For now, neither of them went anywhere.