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My memories. My trauma.

I had tried to fix a lot of it, hadn’t I? Even before I knew I could weave. Therapy, medication, sometimes just sobbing in the dark, I’d thought I’d put a cap on the pain. But the true weight of it had been stolen.

How could I fix any of this with so much missing? The handful I’d gotten back were little more than fragments, and while I could soothe them back into the many frayed repairs, what was the point? Would it change who I was? Maybe all the trauma would have turned me into a monster too.

Zhenjun had instructed me to get my body back. He never said anything about the memories.

I stared at the holes, the dark voids where pieces of me used to live. I felt like I needed them to somehow face what had been done to me, to understand it, to make peace with it. But did I? If it was all bad, or even partially bad, I’d been existing for over thirty years without all of that. I’d built a life. I’d found Angel. I’d made a family.

The gold thread pulsed in my grip, warm and insistent. It was thin and frayed from the strain of shielding the team, and barely holding me together when everything else had fallen apart. But it still had power.

And nestled around it, braided through it like a lifeline woven into a rope, was the red strand.

Angel’s love.

It was tangled in the gold, wrapped around the strand so tightly I almost hadn’t noticed it at first. The threads curled until they glowed orange, almost like Angel’s variant mark had, still pulsing even now, across whatever distance lay between us, holding us together.

I didn’t need my memories to be whole. I didn’t need to conquer my past to reach for my future. I just needed Angel. My family. The team. And apparently, I needed to fix the grayed-out strands of my body. I could reweave the gold, strengthen it by adding other strands necessary to fulfill my life.

I lifted my hands and began to stitch.

Fast at first, fear driving my fingers, as time was ticking away beyond this strange other space, and Angel was bleeding, while Ivan was walking into danger, but instinct took over. The threads moved like they remembered what to do, like I’d been doing this my whole life without knowing it, and maybe I had.

A healing of sorts, like I had with Angel once when I’d repaired his burned hand. Not physical so much as soul-deep.

The trauma would remain. I couldn’t erase the holes or pretend the changeling hadn’t taken pieces of me. But I could thread the braid around the scars, strengthen them, stitch myself back together into something that could fight.

The grey strands began to warm beneath my fingers, pulsing with faint light as I worked. One by one, the holes stopped looking like voids and knitted to scars. And scars were proof that you’d survived.

I worked faster, weaving the braid of gold and red through every frayed edge, every torn thread, every place I’d been broken and left to heal wrong. The room around me shimmered, the larder’s stolen threads beginning to unravel as I pulled my own back into shape, stealing strands from the surrounding room to strengthen my weave.

The threads of the jar unraveled, dissolving into motes of grey light that drifted away and vanished. The glass shimmered, cracked, and then shattered. Murky liquid spilled across the floor in a wave, and my body hit the floor face-first with a wet, heavy thud.

I winced.

“Graceful,” I muttered, staring at the limp heap that used to be me. “Really nailed the landing. One out of ten for the dismount.”

The body just lay there, grey and still, a puddle of preservative spreading beneath it. I’d wound the braid around the worst of the scars, strengthened the frayed edges, but the color hadn’t returned. And the red-wrapped gold still curled around my fingers, as if unwilling to leave me.

Oh. Ha. Me. It needed me.

“Can’t puppet the meat suit without a soul, dumbass,” I lectured myself. That was literally what Nat and I had been doing since my death. Ferrying souls from place to place after they’d left their corpse behind.

The gold thread in my grip pulsed, warm and insistent, and I willed myself to follow it. Color began to spread through the strands, and I felt a suction of energy that wasn’t magic so much as self. Like I was being folded back into a shape I’d almost forgotten.

I blinked.

One heartbeat I was standing over my fallen body, a ghost watching from the outside. The next, I opened my eyes to stare at the floor I’d fallen onto, disoriented and feeling...

Physical.

Cold stone, slimy with unknown liquid. My face ached where I’d landed, though thankfully my nose wasn’t broken. I sucked in a breath—a real breath—my lungs burning with the effort of it, my chest rising and falling with a rhythm that felt both foreign and achingly familiar. I rolled over with a groan, room spinning for a second as the motes around me pinged with awakening color as if they too were filled with new life.

The ceiling was cracked and low, and I was staring at it from the floor. My arms were splayed out beneath me, weak and trembling, but they were mine. My fingers curled against the stone. My legs twitched. My heart hammered against my ribs like it was trying to escape.

I was back. Maybe? Mostly?

I pushed myself up, my arms shaking, my body screaming in protest, and I managed to get to my knees. The larder swam around me, the shelves and jars blurring at the edges, but I was solid, and alive.