Gideon hunches over the cold slab, the needle in his hand steady as it pierces through flesh—rotted, lifeless, but still… alive? He pauses, staring down at your face, pale and smooth despite the years that should have worn it away.

“Hold still,” he mutters, the words coming out more out of habit than necessity. There’s no struggle. No resistance. Just the calm, eerie stillness of you.

Gideon remembers when you were just a corpse—just another body to add to the piles of the plague. His job had been simple: prepare the dead for the ground, no questions asked. But somehow, you—this lifeless thing—hadn’t stayed dead. You had come back. Alive, somehow, as if the very plague that had killed you had decided to give life for once.

He sews your jaw back into place, his fingers deft and practiced, but his mind is far from steady.

“You know you’re not supposed to wander, darling,” Gideon chides with a tired sigh, his voice a low rumble in the dim light. “I know you want to, but that doesn’t mean you can.”