He dreamed.
It wasn't the forest anymore. It was a busy street, sunlit and crowded. He was smaller, smiling, holding his mother's hand as they passed stalls of fruit, cloth, and warm bread.
Then came the blast.
An explosion so loud it swallowed the sky.
When the smoke cleared, he was still standing.
Still holding her hand.
But only her hand.
Just the hand.
Bloodied and torn at the wrist.
Her body or what was left of it lay beneath a collapsed stone wall. Guts painted the ground. Her face was gone. Her warmth was gone.
He didn't scream. He was just there standing, his eyes empty.
People ran. Pushed. Screamed.
He stayed.
Then a corpse crashed into him and darkness pulled him under again.
Light.
Gentle warmth bathed his skin. His eyes blinked open.
The boy gasped, sitting up halfway dizzy, disoriented.
He wasn't lying on the cold dirt anymore. His head… had been resting on something soft.
Her.
The golden-haired girl was asleep, leaning against a tree, and his head had been cradled in her lap, her slender thigh wrapped in a torn piece of fabric that she must've used to bandage his bleeding forehead.
She hadn't run.
She hadn't left.
She had… treated him?
The boy stared at her face peaceful now in sleep, but still unreadable, like a mask stretched over silence.
He tried to rise.
His body refused.
So he slid beside her instead, back pressed to bark, head tilted toward the sky above and let sleep take him once more, not from fear this time, but from the first fragile flicker of comfort.
They didn't speak.
They didn't need to.
Not yet.
The boy woke first.
His body still ached, but the fever had broken. Pale sunlight filtered through the forest canopy, casting shadows like prison bars across the ground. The girl was no longer asleep. She sat by the stream a few paces away, dipping her fingers into the cold water without making a sound.
He watched her.
She moved as if afraid to disturb the silence — like a ghost too polite to haunt the living.
When he tried to speak, nothing came. His throat was dry. Words had become strangers to his tongue.
So he simply rose, walked to the water, and knelt beside her.
They didn't look at each other.
They didn't need to.
The stream whispered over stones, gentle and endless. Around them, ash still clung to the air like snow that had forgotten how to melt. But the trees were greener here, thicker. Wildflowers grew from the earth in defiance of whatever storm had once passed through.
He cupped his hands and drank.
She followed.