We Bloomed us in The Dark.

The power cut out on the first night of the siege, sealing the city inside a hush so absolute that we could hear our own heartbeats scraping fear across our ribs. Windows glowed faint ember-orange from candle stubs; the streets outside lay ink-black, littered with echoes of distant shell bursts. That was when the caretaker herded the remaining tenants of Ashgrove Apartments—four families on the brink of unraveling—into the building’s unused basement greenhouse.

“No bombs can burrow this deep,” she said, voice trembling behind forced certainty. “And the soil will keep us sane.”

So we gathered in the subterranean glasshouse, a long-forgotten relic from the building’s more prosperous era. Ivy choked the steel beams. Flowerbeds held only skeletal stems curled like fingers of beggars. Above us, panes of dusty glass met the cracked ceiling, letting in neither moonlight nor threat—only darkness pressed tight as a lid.

There were twelve of us: Mrs. Halim with her newborn; the Morales twins who never stopped arguing; widowed Mr. Liang, fixing his broken radio; my younger brother Milo and me, still tasting the smoke that had chased us down nine flights of stairs; and the caretaker herself—Miss Idris—whose left hand was always bandaged though she never spoke of why.

“Plants know how to wait,” she said. “So will we.”

We lit oil lamps and rationed canned beans. Days bled into nights without horizon or clock. Aboveground, the city thundered. Below, time wilted.

But on the fifth evening, Milo found a packet of seeds sealed in wax, buried beneath a crooked shelf. Night-blooming cereus, the faded label proclaimed, though the ink had run like tears. He cupped the seeds in his palm, his twelve-year-old face illuminated by the lamp’s thin flame.

“Flowers that open only after dusk,” he whispered, as if telling a ghost a secret.

Miss Idris’s eyes flickered. “In folklore,” she murmured, “they bloom once a year—sometimes once a lifetime. But when they do, they perfume the dark so sweetly you forget all war.”

We were skeptical—until hope proved cheaper than doubt.

Milo and the twins prepared a planter box, mixing dusty soil with what little clean water remained. Mr. Liang cannibalized the radio’s copper wiring to rig a feeble grow-lamp from a car battery. We planted the seeds in careful rows, tiny graves for tiny promises, and waited.

We waited through hunger, through newsless nights broken only by sirens that never descended to rescue us. We told stories to the newborn so she would learn laughter before she heard gunfire. We sketched constellations on the glass panes overhead, naming each imaginary star for someone missing: my mother, Mrs. Halim’s husband, the Morales’ dog. And every evening, just after the final rumble faded, Milo whispered to the planter, “Bloom for us. Please.”

Weeks passed. The car battery died; the grow-lamp winked out. Yet when lamplight brushed the soil one dawnless hour, we saw green—frail shoots unfurling like shy tongues tasting air for the first time. Against all reason, they grew faster than any botany book allowed, each stem thickening, twisting, reaching for invisible moonlight.

One night, when the city overhead lay silent as a graveyard and even the rats dared not scurry, the greenhouse filled with a scent—subtle, then sudden, a flood of honey and rain and old lullabies. Lamps weren’t necessary: the blossoms themselves glowed, petals thin as parchment, luminous in the pitch. They opened in synchronized slow motion, unveiling centers gold as sunrise no one above could see.

We stood ringed around them, mouths parted, eyes reflecting starless halos.

“We bloomed us in the dark,” Milo whispered, grammar bending under awe, and none of us corrected him because the sentence felt perfectly wrought by the moment.

The newborn stopped crying. Mr. Liang’s radio crackled to life unassisted, catching a faint broadcast: Cease-fire negotiations underway. Hold on. Dawn is coming. Perhaps interference, perhaps miracle—no one cared. The blossoms’ perfume stitched courage through our lungs like new lining.

We harvested nothing; we needed only to inhale. Each night thereafter, the flowers opened, as if the seeds had rewritten their own biology to soothe us. In their phosphorescent glow we shared buried confessions: Miss Idris revealed the bandage hid a shrapnel scar from the first day of shelling, when she’d dragged strangers out of a burning tram. The Morales twins admitted they argued because silence reminded them of their parents’ absence. I confessed I’d feared I would fail Milo, that I was too small to be anyone’s protector.

But the flowers did not judge. They exhaled forgiveness.

Forty-nine days after we descended, the doors at street level unlocked with a groan like thawing ice. Soldiers escorted us into sunlight so blinding I wept. Ashgrove Apartments was a husk amid rubble, yet pockets of ordinary life glimmered—neighbors boiling water over barrel fires, children drawing chalk rainbows on broken pavement.

The soldiers offered transport to refugee stations. We accepted—but not before Milo, careful as a priest, uprooted one cereus cutting. The stalk pulsed faintly even in daylight, as though remembering its private night logic.

“A reminder,” he said, placing it in a shoe box with holes poked for breath.

Of what? I asked.

“That something beautiful can decide to live where living makes no sense,” he replied, age sliding across his voice like sunlight on wet leaves.

When the convoy rolled away, we looked back. Through a shattered basement window, darkness still pooled—yet I imagined the greenhouse glowing, patient, courageous, seedling-bright. A lantern no bomb could blow out.

And I understood: we had not merely survived the dark.

We had bloomed us there—together, fragrant with the proof that hope, like night-blooming cereus, is rare but real: a flower that chooses the darkness simply because someone, somewhere, still needs its light.