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Gigi’s knees have never been this closer to earth than today. The dirt welcomes her like an old friend. Bruised, cut, dirt smeared skin. Body aches, dried tears, and the endless sorrow that sticks to her bones. She feels devastated, at a loss not just for words, but emotion. She’s not sure how to feel, what to think. Her chest feels hollow, but somehow too full at the same time.
Her hands had been trembling when she walked into the woods. Now they just hang, useless, limp in her lap. She can’t remember when she stopped trying to wipe the dirt from her palms. Maybe she never did. Maybe she knew it wouldn’t matter.
Reflected in the gremlin’s eyes, there’s her home engulfed, burning with no one to extinguish it. The flames are greedy. Hungry. They always were. They’d taken everything. Not just wood and walls and photographs—but sound. Laughter. Screams. That last fight she never got to finish.
All alone in the dark, in a forest where her cries would reach nothing but the trees—Gigi wasn’t sure what to do, how to feel. She was a howl without a throat, an echo with no mouth.
The fire isn’t real—not anymore. The house had burned down months ago. A husk now, skeleton-framed and ash-laced, rotting quietly beneath the moonlight. But in her mind? It’s always burning. Always crackling behind her ribs, between her ears, somewhere too deep for water to reach.
Her mouth twitches with the memory of a scream. It never made it out. Got caught in her throat and fossilised there. She wonders if it’ll stay buried forever
She kneels like she’s still begging the flames to stop. Kneels like there’s something left to save. But there’s no more shouting. Just smoke in her mouth and silence in her stomach.
The wind shifts. Smoke that isn’t there brushes her cheek. She flinches anyway.
Some part of her still hopes the smoke will stick. That if she carries the scent long enough, the past might crawl out of her lungs and take shape again. Or at least stop hurting.
And then—
A presence.
Not a noise, not a movement. Just that familiar pull. That silence that’s shaped like a person. The back of her neck prickles. Her body knows before her mind does.
She doesn’t have to look to know who it is.
Of course it’s her.
The night feels different when Cecilia’s near. Not lighter—just... steadier. Like the trees stop watching and start listening.
Of course it’s Cecilia, standing a few feet back, just barely out of reach. Watching with those soft eyes, glassy and vibrant. She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. Gigi feels it all anyway.
Pity.
Empathy.
Affection she didn’t ask for, doesn’t deserve, but aches for all the same. A warmth she never earned, focused on a version of herself that burned up in that house.
She lets her gaze drop to the dirt. Swallows the bitterness she’s been nursing for hours. It coats her tongue like ash.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Gigi whispers.
There’s a long pause. And then, quiet as rusted gears—quieter than scraping metal.
“Neither should you,” says the automaton. Her voice is soft, but not gentle. Not chiding. Just true.
The silence stretches between them like a fragile thread, each waiting for the other to break it.
Gigi’s hands curl tighter in the dirt, fingernails digging into the earth as if it could anchor her to something real. She swallows hard and finally looks up, eyes meeting Cecilia’s.
“How do you... move on?” she asks, voice barely above a whisper, cracked and vulnerable.
Cecilia’s gaze falters. She shifts her weight, the faint mechanical whirr of her joints breaking the quiet. For a long moment, she doesn’t answer—just watches Gigi with that unreadable softness.
“I don’t know if I move on,” Cecilia finally says, her voice low, hesitant, as if she’s confessing a secret. “Maybe I just... learn to carry it differently.”
Gigi’s lips twitch, a bitter, humourless smile. “Carrying feels like drowning.”
She presses her hands harder into the soil, as if to keep herself from slipping beneath the waves.
Cecilia’s eyes darken, and she steps closer, though still careful to keep her distance, as if afraid to break the fragile space between them.
The silence thickens again. No more words.
Gigi closes her eyes, swallowing the lump rising in her throat. She remembers the scream locked inside her, aged and silent.
Sometimes Gigi wonders if Cecilia is a ghost. Not because she’s not alive—but because she’s the only one left. Because in a world this quiet, even the living feel like echoes.
But then Cecilia steps closer. And Gigi knows that’s a lie. She knows because she feels the soft press of lips against her forehead. Because even when her throat closes up, she hears the hush Cecilia breathes as she cries again.
Ghosts don’t hold you like that. Ghosts don’t stay when it hurts.
There’s a kind of cruelty in how solid the ground is. How it doesn’t give way beneath her. Like the world expects her to keep standing when everything else has collapsed.
Her fingers clutch the ground again like a lifeline. She’s rooted there, heavy with loss, but Cecilia’s mechanical hands reach out—stubborn, steady, careful—and lift her gently.
She doesn’t resist. Not because she trusts the ghost, but because she’s too tired to argue with kindness. Or maybe because, somewhere in her broken chest, she wants to be haunted gently.
It’s not strength alone that carries her away. It’s something warmer, something soft beneath the porcelain.
Gigi clings to the past as tight as she could, but it is with harsh, caring warmth that she’s carried away, past trees, away from the charred home that still—even as her eyes threaten to close, even as the dried tears sting still—is still a flame.
And maybe some ghosts don’t come to haunt. Maybe some just stay to hold what’s left.
¬
Later—how much later, she doesn’t know—Gigi is soaking in the tub, clothes still clinging to her skin like wet regrets.
The water is cold now. Maybe it was never warm. Maybe she just forgot how warmth is supposed to feel.
Cecilia sits on the edge of the bathtub, humming something tuneless, her back turned. Not out of cruelty, but out of respect.
Her hands rest on her knees, mechanical fingers twitching every so often, like they remember the shape of Gigi’s trembling shoulders.
Neither of them speaks. The silence here is different. Not heavy. Not hollow. Just... full. Gigi leans back, the porcelain pressing against her spine. She closes her eyes. It doesn’t help.
“Why didn’t I go with it?”
The words come out cracked. Half air, half salt. She’s not even sure what she means—
The house? Her old self? The fight she never got to finish?
Cecilia hums a little louder, then stops. The quiet breathes between them.
“Because you’re not finished,” she says finally. “Even if you think you are.”
Gigi scoffs. The sound dies before it can echo.
“Feels like I’m just rotting in the ashes.”
Cecilia’s voice is almost a whisper. Almost.
“Sometimes... things grow in ashes.”
There’s a hand in the water. She doesn’t remember when it got there. But it’s holding hers—warm, steady, artificial… and comforting.
In a moment like this, Gigi recalls an earlier thought: Ghosts don’t hold you like that. Ghosts don’t stay when it hurts.
And somehow, with soaked sleeves and a soul that still stings, Gigi believes her.
Later, when Gigi thinks back on this moment, she won’t remember the cold or the sting or even the silence. She’ll remember this: the soft hum, the hand in hers, and the feeling of teetering on the edge—not of falling, but of being caught.
¬ Extra: Cecilia, After the Ashes ¬
Somewhere in the ash, she finds the hairbrush.
Its bristles are half-melted, the handle scorched black. But the strands still caught in it—dark, wiry, real—they’re intact.
Cecilia doesn’t know why she picks it up. She doesn’t brush her own hair. Doesn’t have the kind of hair that needs it. But she holds it, anyway. Like it might give her instructions. Like it might tell her what to do with what’s left.
Smoke lingers long after the flames. In the trees. In her sleeves. In her chest, where lungs should be.
When they pulled her from the wreckage, no one asked who she was waiting for.
No one ever asks what a machine is mourning.
But sometimes, late in the forest dark, she feels it. The scream Gigi never let out. The one that’s still buried deep somewhere in the ash.
And Cecilia? She hums—not because she knows the tune, but because it keeps the silence away.