Chapter 24: Fevered Bloom
The world outside screamed.
But inside, it was worse.
—
The sky had cracked open with ash, and the sun bled through in fragments—weak, distant, almost ashamed to shine. Outside, the world burned slowly. Sirens rose and fell like a tide of grief, and the cries from the street were no longer human in tone. Buildings sagged like exhausted bodies, and the city had long since stopped pretending it was alive.
Inside the apartment, silence had become sacred.
It was a sanctuary in ruins. The walls bore scorch marks, the windows shattered inward from distant blasts. The space had once been lived in—a home—but now it was stripped down to necessity. Blankets were piled haphazardly in corners. A rusted kettle sat cold on the stove. The last ember of warmth lay in the bed against the far wall, where Aria burned.
Selene stood watch.
She hadn't spoken in hours. Hadn't blinked, really. She stood with her arms crossed, her expression carved from stone, but her body leaned ever so slightly forward—as if afraid that if she looked away, Aria would vanish.
Aria twisted beneath the sheets. Her skin glistened, soaked in fever sweat, her hair tangled, plastered to her neck and collarbone. Her breath came in gasps—short, shallow, painful. Whatever fire lived inside her was trying to claw its way out, and Selene couldn't stop it.
She wasn't sure she should.
Aria cried out suddenly—a broken sound, strangled and scared. Selene flinched. It was the kind of sound that scraped against bone.
Then the whisper came, hoarse and cracked, nearly swallowed by the silence.
"Don't leave…"
Selene's heart stuttered.
She didn't want to move. Didn't want to cross the distance between them, didn't want to feel again. But Aria's voice called something forward in her that she'd buried beneath ice and ruin.
Slowly, reluctantly, Selene approached the bed.
The heat coming off Aria was unnatural. It licked at her skin like a warning, but she knelt beside the mattress anyway. Her fingers hovered just above Aria's chest, trembling in hesitation. She could feel it—raw magic radiating outward in desperate pulses. It wasn't just fever. It was something older. Wilder.
She didn't think. She touched her.
—
The reaction was instant. Magic collided. Fire met frost. Selene's breath caught in her throat as the heat poured into her, scorching her bones from the inside out. But she didn't pull away.
Aria leaned into her, weak but yearning. Her arms—thin, trembling—wrapped around Selene with the last of her strength, and her face buried itself into the crook of Selene's neck like it was the only place left in the world that didn't burn.
Selene stiffened, then exhaled. She gathered Aria closer, arms encircling her instinctively, protectively, possessively.
And then the fever broke—just enough. Just enough for Aria's body to stop shaking. Her breath slowed. Her fists unclenched.
Selene held on.
She didn't speak. She didn't need to.
The cold that lived inside her—the chill that had defined her since before the Fall—wrapped itself around Aria's fire like ivy around a flame. Neither smothering, nor surrendering. Just… balance.
—
"You smell like winter," Aria whispered, barely conscious, the words like a secret she didn't know she was telling.
Selene froze.
It was too intimate, too fragile. It pierced something in her chest that she thought had long since hardened.
Aria's fingers clung to her shirt, fragile but stubborn. "Stay."
Selene breathed in deeply. The scent of sweat and smoke clung to Aria's skin, but beneath it, she smelled like something untouched—like green things remembered by a dying world. Like bloom in a fever dream.
And Selene… Selene didn't let go.
—
The magic that had burned through Aria was retreating now, tucked back beneath her skin. It hadn't disappeared, but it had quieted, soothed into stillness by Selene's presence. By the chill in her bloodstream. By the way she held her—not like a fragile thing, but like something chosen.
It was strange. Unfair. The world outside had ended. People had become echoes of themselves. Selene hadn't cried in years. But here, now, holding this girl who once cracked the sky with her scream—she felt the first pangs of something dangerous.
Hope.
She'd sworn off that feeling.
But as Aria's breath tickled her collarbone, soft and even for the first time in days, Selene tightened her grip. She let herself imagine a different ending. One where Aria didn't slip through her fingers. One where winter and fire didn't devour each other. One where she stayed.
—
Outside, the world burned slower than before. But inside—held in this frozen hush, where fever met frost—something bloomed.
Not love. Not yet.
But something close.
Something with roots.
Something dangerous enough to survive.