Chapter 35 – Vows in the Violet Hour
The garden shimmered in twilight.
The red poppies leaned gently toward the wind, jasmine winding up the old iron archway where they had hung their first lanterns. Lavender curled through the beds like veins of memory. The city hummed around them, but inside the garden—it was only the two of them.
Nova didn't need a ring to say yes.
She said it with her entire body—with the way her fingers trembled around Bea's face, with the way her lips lingered when they kissed again and again, as if tasting forever.
"Yes," she whispered into Bea's mouth, between breath and starlight. "Yes to you. Always to you."
Bea was crying again, but she laughed through the tears. "We're really doing this."
Nova tucked a flower behind her ear. "We've been doing this since the first moment I said your name."
They didn't plan the wedding the way others might. There were no formal invitations, no caterers, no ballroom chandeliers.
There was only truth. And roots.
They chose the garden, of course. And they chose sunrise.
Because they knew what it meant to survive the dark.
---
The Morning of the Vows
Bea stood before a cracked mirror in the small studio they'd turned into a home. Her dress wasn't white. It was ash grey, flowing, embroidered with soft green vines and wildflowers that danced along the hem.
She touched her scars. The one across her collarbone. The tiny burn on her wrist from their first stove-top dinner. The scratch Nova had left the night they had loved each other too hard to be careful.
Each one a keepsake. A story.
Nova waited in the garden.
She wore a suit—not black, but midnight blue, like the sky before the light. A vine of tiny white blooms curled across her lapel. She couldn't stop pacing.
When Bea finally walked down the small stone path, the world softened. The wind held its breath. The birds paused mid-song.
Nova's lips parted, but no words came.
Bea was the poem.
---
The ceremony was quiet. Intimate. Just the survivors and misfits who had become family. The children who played in the garden each afternoon, the elder who brought fresh seeds, the friend who once stitched Bea's torn coat in the middle of winter.
And a single photographer, to capture the moment the world rewrote their story.
They didn't need a priest.
They were the altar.
They stood beneath the old archway, the one they had built together from scrap metal and driftwood.
Nova took Bea's hands. The garden listened.
"I have no perfect words, Bea. No rehearsed lines. Just this—I love you in a way that breaks language. You are the storm and the soft. The reason I stayed alive. I vow to never silence you. Never cage you. Only walk beside you, always, through the dark and into the morning."
Bea's lips quivered. Her fingers curled tighter around Nova's.
"I used to dream of escape," she whispered. "Now I dream of you. You're my freedom. My fire. I vow to fight with you, write with you, and hold space for you even when the world doesn't. You are the garden. You are the reason I bloom."
They kissed before the words were done.
The garden erupted into applause.
Not because it was a ceremony. But because it was true.
---
That Night
Nova and Bea danced under lantern light, barefoot in the dirt, wrapped in each other.
There was no music—just laughter, wind, the creak of old wood and the soft hum of living.
Nova whispered, "Did we really do this?"
Bea kissed her neck. "Yes. And we're not done."
They slipped away while the others laughed by the fire. Back to the small studio. Back to the night that always awaited them.
Clothes came off slowly. Carefully.
They weren't in a rush. They had forever now.
Nova kissed each scar, each hollow of Bea's body. Bea traced poems into Nova's skin with her fingers. They spoke no words—but their bodies told every story.
It was not just sex. It was sanctuary.
And when they finally lay tangled in sweat and satin sheets, Bea turned to her and asked softly—
"What now, my wife?"
Nova smiled, slow and sure. "Now we build the next chapter. One word at a time."