Tears come hot and fast and I don't stop them. For the garden, yes. For the evidence of hope dying slowly in the dark. But also for myself. For every time I've tried to grow something real and beautiful in spaces that were never meant to sustain it. For every piece of myself I've pruned away to fit into pots too small to hold actual life.
For the future I can suddenly see so clearly. Me in this dead place. Withering. Greying. Becoming just another husk clinging to false light.
The tears hit the soil, each droplet carrying salt and sorrow and something I didn't know lived inside me until this precise moment.
The world doesn't just explode. It ignites. It transforms. It becomes.
Not violently. Not like my earlier outburst that shredded cameras and shocked me into silence. This is different. Intentional. Like something in the earth has been waiting centuries for this exact moisture, this exact chemical composition, this exact permission to wake up and remember what it was before the void.
A vine erupts from the dirt beneath my hands.
Massive. Thick as my torso. Bioluminescent blue that lights the entire Arboretum like someone brought a piece of deep ocean to the stars. It grows with purpose, with direction, with such fierce determination that I feel it in my chest like a second heartbeat.
Up. Toward the failing grow lights. Toward the recycled air. Toward anything that might be sky even if sky is just metal plating and darkness.
Flowers bloom along its length as it climbs. Huge blossoms, complex and layered, petals unfurling in spirals that follow mathematical patterns I've never studied but somehow understand. They glow brighter than the vine itself, pulsing gentle bioluminescence in shades of blue and green and violet.
And they breathe.
I feel it happening. The chemical exchange. Carbon dioxide pulled from the stale air, processed through alien chloroplasts, oxygen released in quantities that make my lungs expand with the first real breath I've taken since boarding this nightmare ship.
The vine reaches the ceiling and spreads, roots finding purchase in welded seams, branches extending across the metal like veins claiming dead flesh. More flowers bloom. Dozens. Hundreds. Each one a small factory producing breathable air,producing light, producing warmth that raises the ambient temperature three degrees in as many seconds.
Life. Aggressive and unstoppable. Claiming space that tried to deny it.
I'm still crying but laughing too, this broken sound that belongs to someone who just discovered they can make miracles out of grief.
"What are you?" I breathe, hands still buried in soil that's already changing, already warming, already filled with microscopic activity as my presence jumpstarts ecosystems that shouldn't exist.
The vine doesn't answer. Just grows. Just blooms. Just transforms the mausoleum into something that might eventually be called a garden if given enough time.
I feel him before I see him.
Temperature drop. Shift in air pressure. The sensation of being observed by something that tracks movement the way predators track prey.
I don't turn around. Can't, somehow. Frozen in this moment of kneeling in dirt that's coming alive beneath my touch, surrounded by impossible flowers, glowing with bioluminescence that might be the plant's or might be mine or might be both.
"It was dying," I say to the vine, to the soil, to whatever presence fills the doorway behind me. My voice comes out steady despite everything. Despite the tears still wet on my face. Despite the terror and wonder fighting for dominance in my chest. "Everything here was dying."
Silence stretches between us, thick and weighted with everything I don't understand about this place, about him, about whatever I'm becoming in the wake of my gift's sudden, violent awakening.
Then, footsteps.
Heavy boots on metal decking, each impact deliberate and measured, sending faint vibrations through the floor that I feel even through the soil beneath my knees. The sound of someone who has nowhere to be except right here, in this threshold moment, watching whatever revelation is unfolding in his dead garden. Someone who moves with the patience of geological time, unhurried by anything so trivial as urgency.
He stops.
I hear it, the faint hydraulic hiss of armor seals releasing, mechanical and precise. The whisper of pressurized air escaping, intimate in the silence that's broken only by the rustle of leaves I've conjured into existence, the soft drip of condensation forming on stone that hasn't known moisture in who knows how long.
The helmet, I think, pulse jumping. He's removing the helmet.
Going to show me his face. Going to be real instead of this faceless terror that dragged me across the galaxy and locked me in luxury and let me wander just far enough to break my heart on his secrets.
I should turn around. Should face him. Should demand answers and explanations and some accounting for the fact that he stole me, brought me here, gave me just enough freedom to find this heartbreak.
But I can't move. Can only kneel in the dirt I'm resurrecting, crying over dead things that refuse to stay dead, while bioluminescent flowers bloom overhead and oxygen-rich air fills my lungs and somewhere behind me a warlord witnesses the exact miracle he stole me to perform.
"I know," he says finally. His real voice. Unmodulated. Deep and rough like stone breaking under pressure. Like something that doesn't speak often and hasn't bothered to smooth its edges for anyone's comfort.
