It took a few more minutes for them to wrap up the call with Amagdala, most of which Emika spent in silent shock at the revelations. So, she was going to Heaven, apparently, and from the looks of it, going there was entirely justified. And the most ridiculous part about it was that not a single person present was actually scared for her. Melisande wasn't even nervous, and that girl had just spent her entire day trying to break Emika out of confinement and kill the prison warden. Amagdala wasn't scared, and she was apparently an extremely experienced witch. And Emika… Emika wasn't scared either. What could they meaningfully throw at her if they decided to be hostile? Couldn't any problem they put her through just be solved by exploding into waves of juniper?

So, she'd go there, do some socialising, learn some curse stuff, and then she'd break out. Easy enough, apparently. 

“Who was that?” Emika asked when Melisande finally ended the call with a sigh. 

“The woman who, like… built me. My maker.”

“Your mother?” Emika let out immediately, and earned herself a glare.

“Yeah, nah, that ain’t how I think of her,” Melisande replied curtly.

“Well, I'm glad she helped,” Emika said, carefully. She didn't want to make her angry.

Melisande looked back, eyes unfocused to the extent that it was possible to make that out when someone had buttons instead of eyeballs. It seemed like she was thinking about something. Eventually, she said, “Yeah. Glad I asked her, I guess. Would have loved to never hear her voice again, though.”

For a short moment, silence fell into the forest, with Melisande just slowly caressing Cherry's back. Emika really, really wanted to know about Melisande's past. Now was clearly not the time to ask, though, because she could poof away any moment. And in addition, Emika wasn't even really sure how to inquire about this. Melisande had apparently done something so bad that it warranted her either going to Heaven or being confined for life, and Emika didn't want to give off the impression that she was going to judge her for whatever she may or may not have done back then. Emika wasn't in the position to judge anyone for anything ever, obviously, but Melisande had given her so much leeway and acceptance that it felt really improper to be nosy in return.

Before Emika could even come up with a way to proceed, Melisande got up and smiled. “You really can't go like this,” she said, gesturing at Emika, and it took a moment for her to understand that she meant all the blood and torn clothing. 

“Okay? Why not?”

“Because you look like you just fucking killed someone? It’s gonna be suspect if you arrive like that.”

“Well… It's not like I looked so much different while in confinement… And we don't have water?”

With a prideful soft grin on her face, Melisande put her hand on her hip and towered over Emika. “We got something better!” she exclaimed, and then pressed two of her fingers against Emika's forehead. Immediately, a warm and wet liquid trailed down her face, between her brows, along her nose, and eventually to her lips. The strong smell of blood and burnt skin was hard to displace, and yet, she suddenly scented a note of sweet, fresh grass.

She reached out with her lips and tasted white tea.

“Damn,” Emika let out and smiled. “You can do that?”

“Takes lots of magic. Got a water creation circle in my pelvis. And I can make the leaves transport it! I can’t form too much, but it’s fine since there’s more of your tea leaves at your home. Am just gonna replenish it later.”

“Oh! I see… You can make water… I thought you had no chance against that flame weasel, but maybe you could have won against it after all.”

Melisande shook her head with a huff. “Look, I can definitely get all wet, but it would wear me out like hell and probably knock me out.”

Emika was stunned by that sentence, and she struggled to not imagine it in an entirely different, inappropriate context.

“So yeah, nah, that thing would'a destroyed me. Thanks for taking care of it.”

“No problem,” Emika mumbled, distracted by the feeling of Melisande's wet fingers gently stroking over her face to wash away the blood and soil. That reminded her. “Actually,” she said before she could stop herself, “I'm really thirsty.”

“Oh, yeah, you must be,” Melisande replied, and immediately held her arm out above Emika and pressed on it with her other hand. Like wringing out a sponge, suddenly, liquid threatened to drop out from it. But then, Melisande hesitated. “Actually, you okay with drinking that?”

Emika could barely respond, blushing furiously, stunned beyond words. Was this, like, some kind of dream? What was going on? Ever since the battle, they seemed to be all over each other with some of the most dangerous and daring kinds of intimate gestures imaginable. Emika gulped her dry throat, hard.

Be that all as it may, she ignored the implications for now because actually, she really did need to drink. She could think about all of the rest later when she was alone and completely undisturbed.

So she drank a lot, and then she persevered through Melisande's gentle cleaning touch, like being wiped with a soft wet cloth. Emika held her flesh arm pressed against her chest in embarrassment, until Melisande needed access and gently pulled it off her.

How was Melisande doing this? She didn't seem to mind at all. She was simply focused on the task she had created for herself, not seeming flustered in the slightest. Emika could have never imagined that the truly precarious part of this whole endeavour would only start when the battle was already won.

“By the way,” Emika said at some point, trying to distract herself in any way possible. “I saw Maxime approach you shortly before he died. Did he… do something to you?”

“Nah,” Melisande replied. “He just came over for a lil’ chat.”

“What did he say?”

Melisande hesitated for a moment, biting her lip. “Sure you wanna know? This is all over and done with. If you never wanna speak another word about that guy, we can totally do that.”

“I suppose I’m just curious.”

Melisande sighed. “I guess, if you really wanna hear. Yeah, well, he…” She took in a breath, and gestured with her hands as if looking for words. “Called you dangerous. Wanted me to stop you.”

“To stop me?” Emika boggled in surprised disbelief.

“He kinda was like, ‘she’s super dangerous and needs to be stopped’ and started begging me.”

Now was the time for Emika to feel bad, maybe to feel sympathy or to be scared of herself, but her brain delivered none of these feelings to her. Now was absolutely not the time to become proud and flustered at the fact that she was perceived as so dangerous, and yet, that was exactly what her brain came up with.

A little mischievous smile entered her face, quite unlike her, the power of her pride and the constant overstimulation from Melisande’s touch having whittled down the defences that normally kept her feelings from reaching her face completely. “So, are you going to stop me?” she asked facetiously.

Melisande didn’t join the joke, instead just staring back with a worried expression. “You’re taking this kinda well.”

“And you are taking this surprisingly seriously. What’s the deal? Am I missing something? I’ve never heard him say a single reasonable thing, ever. Why would this be different?”

Melisande shook her head. “Nah, ’s not different. It’s just, he knew he was gonna die. He was done. He could have, I dunno. Become angry and tried to kill you. Or killed me. But he used his last bit of strength to say all that. Cus’ he was worried about something other than himself. I guess that just left a dent on me.”

“And we know what that other thing he worries about is,” Emika said. “Humans. And what he doesn’t care about is monsters.”

“Nah,” Melisande said, waving that statement away as she was cleaning Emika’s arm. “Pointless distinction. He cares about some humans. All other beings he calls monsters. There’s nothing more to it than that. And those ‘some humans’ he cares about, he thinks you’re a danger to them. But it’s nonsense anyway. He wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t gone out of his way to fuck you up. It’s why I didn’t wanna tell you this in the first place. Because it’s silly.”

“Well, I’m glad you did tell me. Screw that guy. It’s not like I am going around killing people for fun.”

“Yeah.”

By now, Emika was absent-mindedly breaking off branches and twigs from herself to feed them to an eager Cherry while Melisande finished up the cleaning process. The atmosphere felt gloomy for a moment, until the cleaning was done and Melisande eventually lit up.

“Hah, there we go, now you can be shown off!” she exclaimed with a proud smile, wringing out her fingers and cleaning them of the rest of blood and dirt by having little bits of liquid seep out. Emika was still only barely able to contain herself, and nodded her head awkwardly as she felt the tea on her skin dry. She wasn’t amazingly clean; Melisande couldn’t produce that much tea. But she now at least looked more akin to several-days-in-confinement and not walked-through-a-sea-of-flesh-and-flames.  

“Oh, right. Before we forget.” She took up Emika’s phone that was still lying on the ground. “You got a place to store that? You wanna take it with you, right?”

Emika didn’t really have any workable pockets left in her torn clothes, so instead, she bulged out a few branches from the cut across her stomach and revealed a small entanglement of deadwood. Then, she took the phone, firmly placed it in the crevice in the wood, and absorbed it all back into herself.

“Damn,” Melisande let out as she watched that.

“Yeah, that’s how I took a book from prison with me too,” Emika noted, making a few movements with her wooden arm as if to regurgitate something, and eventually showing the book about curses firmly placed between two branches, before getting it back inside herself. “I can store stuff within me. Pretty sure I’m… Well. There’s more space inside me, or something.”

Melisande gulped, and stared at Emika’s stomach. She was clearly fighting with herself.

“What’s on your mind?” Emika asked.

“Well. I’m… Considering… Ah… Nah, I can’t. I was thinking if you could… like… take me with you? You know? But someone needs to take care of your trees and clean up Durand’s home and break you out when you’re done in Heaven.” She sighed.

Meanwhile, Emika froze up completely. Oh, god. What an idea. Putting Melisande, who was about the same size as her, inside herself, to make her come to Heaven with her? What an incredible idea. She wondered if it was even possible. She desperately wanted to do it.

But they both knew it was not going to happen.

Emika dared a side-glance at Cherry, biting her own lip.

“I need Cherry to come find you,” Melisande said, as if reading Emika’s thoughts. “Also…”

“Yeah. Putting a Well of Abstraction inside me sounds like it would cause a big, big mess. Total disaster. I don’t think it would work.”

“Yeah…”

“So, I’m all alone again, huh… That sucks.”

Melisande put her arms around Emika and pulled her into a firm hug, her hands, and arms still slightly damp. “We’ll stay in touch,” she said, her face buried in Emika’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Emika responded, hugging back, trying not to cry. As such, they stayed silent for a long while, just cuddling.

“Maybe it’s not gonna happen,” Melisande mumbled eventually.

It was a pointless sentence that yet had to be spoken. They both knew it was going to happen. Still, speaking that hope out loud gave them both a sliver of reprieve, tuned out the anxiety just a bit, let them sink into each other that finger breadth closer.

And eventually, it did happen. Just like back when she’d used the teleportation scroll, Emika turned into flames. Warm and cosy, they obscured her vision in a wall of bright red tongues of fire. She tried to keep Melisande in her gaze for as long as she could, but eventually, her face vanished behind the bright lights, and she stopped feeling the soft embrace. Stopped sensing Melisande’s weight against her shoulder, and her hand on her waist, and their entangled legs. What a terrifying feeling. Emika wanted to cry.

A minute later, the flames let off, and slowly, she could see again.

And found six eyes staring right back at her.