Bruce didn't know how—or why—the baby god had helped him, only that he had a head, two stubby arm-buds, and not much else. Toes and fingers felt as if they were still… loading. His grasp of baby-making had always been vague, so this phase of life made no sense. Was he a chick in an egg? A science project?
Egg or not, he floated in a warm, red balloon of a world, and everything outside it was either very quiet or he didn't have ears yet. He couldn't open eyes he wasn't sure he owned. Maybe he was becoming a blind mole and would soon be digging for worms. His imagination ran laps; time here had no corners, just smooth, boring middle. He couldn't flex, lift, sing, or game. He hoped his level-79 gnome warrior, Happyman, wouldn't hold the absence against him.
Then sound arrived—as if the "ears update" finally downloaded.
At first it was only his heartbeat: a small, earnest knock. Inside that knock another answered—the white kernel at his center, keeping time as though it had taught the first drum how. He knew that light was him, the truest version—the beam from which the rest of him grew, his once-grey soul now bright at the heart of the light. As the flesh-heart pushed blood down tiny, new rivers, the light-heart sent its own current. White threads ran beside red ones, a bright river shadowing a warm one, pulsing in step, sketching the map of a body becoming.
He grew a little. With growth came more sound.
Beyond the soft wall of this… egg-place, a woman hummed. She was close—so close it felt like he was in her, which was a frightening thought to have and keep. The tune was simple and unafraid, the kind of song nurses make when there are more duties than hands—like that film where a grandmother hums to a fox cub. When words came, they wore an old winter tongue—northern and clean, vowels shaped for soothing. He didn't understand, the way he didn't understand French songs online, and loved them anyway. Her voice slipped through the flesh like light through leaves. If she had swallowed him, she was at least marinating him in kindness.
Farther off, the world joined the refrain. Bushes whispered their small agreement with wind. Trees moved their slow shoulders. A lake made patient mouth-sounds; reeds ticked; frogs kept careful count. Birds rehearsed joy, then remembered joy didn't need rehearsal. Her humming braided all of it into one living thing. In that peace he didn't feel devoured so much as… arranging himself—like that pink Buu stitching a new body together in Dragon Ball.
Sleep came. With sleep, wondering—because dreams hadn't died in the stairwell.
Darkness, then fire. Where am I? What's going on? The light at his center flashed—intent, not spectacle—and a clean thread climbed into the soft place that would soon be brain. It set up a screen the way Frank did on movie nights.
The cold night of the tower returned. The wrong orange—the color for hearths, not windows—licked at the sky. He saw himself as a small core of light rising out of the body on the asphalt while the firefighters worked. He hovered above his own shape at the tower's doors. London, 2017. After.
Firefighters knelt with careful urgency, counting what could still be counted. Hands pressed. A mask gleamed. Numbers were spoken in a voice that would not permit panic. They tried. He loved them for trying. It didn't matter. He was already the lamp over the scene.
The ring of yellow hesitated. A head shook once. A gap opened.
Frank came through everything meant to slow him—tape, courtesy, other men's hands—and fell to his knees. He pulled Bruce into a fierce hug, the kind you save for the moment you're finally brave enough to give it—and give it too late. He shook him once, shouted words that could no longer cross to where Bruce hung. Then the shaking stopped. Frank pressed his forehead to Bruce's temple and stayed.
Frank cried.
Bruce had never seen him cry. Not once. Now the tears fell, beading and breaking on cooling skin, while the firefighters looked down and let time be gentle. Blue lights stitched rain onto tarmac. Steam ghosted off masks. No one spoke the kind of sentence that makes grief smaller. Something in Bruce cracked that the flames hadn't reached.
Sorry, brother, he thought, and though there was no air to carry it, the thought landed. Sorry, Frank. I didn't make it. You'll have to explore the UK without me now.
The picture drew back like frost leaving glass. Street and tower fled to a distance. Warm red returned to the hand. Three beats braided tight—her heart, his new one, and the light between—until the rope held.
The lamp that was Bruce rose from London and slipped, unseen, into the first light of dawn.
Cloud became surf. He broke through to the hard cold where the world lay round and heartbreakingly whole. Then the dark beyond—the star-sown road. He slipped toward the solar system's edge, and time, unobserved, ran wild.
Planets turned like prayer wheels. The Sun breathed and narrowed. Winters and summers wrote and rewrote the oceans. Twice the Earth flared—hard white, then ash-gray—and when the light dimmed she was changed. Coastlines bit inward; islands failed; blue drowned names. He didn't know two centuries had blown past; he only knew the ache of distance.
Movement stirred near the blue bruise of home. A ship climbed out of cloud—large enough to see from where he drifted—and took a lane around the planet. Materials rose to meet it. Ribs of a ring joined; spokes locked; corridors knitted; lights bled on. More ships arrived until thirty-two kept guard around the newborn station. On an invisible count they broke: one arrowed for the Moon, one for the red world, others for the swollen giants; most pointed their noses beyond the cold fence of the Oort. One came straight toward him, a bright thought moving through the dark.
It slid under him—silent, certain—and was gone.
Speed gathered around his little lamp. Stars stopped being points and drew white lines; the lines collapsed into bright rain. He fell through the shining wheel of the Milky Way and out past its rim into black so deep it pressed. Far ahead a dusting of light became a single grain—another galaxy, small only because distance makes everything shy.
He was not alone in the dark. They came up from behind—ships by the score, nearly twenty abreast—wearing damage like medals: dented hulls, plates patched fast and then patched proud, scorched flanks, old honest scars. They were not one kind. Some were long and whale-gentle. Some were flying cathedrals with ribs like cloisters. Some were blunt as hammers, triangular and shameless. Some had the museum menace of battleships. Eagles took possession of their sides—one-headed, double, mostly triple—sometimes with a sword, sometimes a shield, crowns where crowns still mattered. Beside such mass, Bruce's light was a firefly next to a skyscraper. He watched, awed, as the fleet reached for the distant grain and dwindled into purpose.
When they were gone, the dark felt bigger for having been crossed.
The dot swelled. Dust became arms; arms became a hundred million fires. He slid into the swirl and through it, past winter-suns and their little families, until one system made the kind of sense a body can hear.
A blue world rode there, heavier than Earth, edged in cloud and promise. Continents sprawled like sleeping animals, unfamiliar and right. From high above the night held no necklaces of city-fire, no sodium crowns—only weather moving its patient weight.
He went down.
Coastlines answered a memory: Europe, almost. He drifted to an island he would have called Britain if Britain had been mostly trees. England lay like a quiet thought. Kent was a green quilt under winter. No motorways. No glare. Here and there, small towns of wood and stone tucked themselves into the folds, stubborn and few. A lake held a sky the color of steel. Trees ringed it as if guarding a secret. On the bank, a single cottage—logs, straw roof, a door mended more than once—leaned its back against the woods. A woman sat on a rock by the reeds, sleeve pushed to the elbow, face turned to water. She hummed to no one in particular and to everything at once.
He went to her like a promised thing, and the vision closed.
Red warmth again. The soft cave that was not a cave. Heartbeats took their places—three drums learning one rhythm.
Not Earth? The idea rolled through him and found every wall. Then where? Weren't there people I was meant to help? A hinge I was meant to catch before the door swung to fire? He floated in confusion and let the warmth carry him. The little god had said hurry. He was hurrying as someone else this time. Maybe that was the point.
He grew.
Fingers budded; toes counted themselves; a spine curled like a fern. His skull learned its seams. Blood ran its routes, the white light always a shadow beside it. He noticed he was small—not the heavy, heroic lump he'd been the first time. No big egg of a head, no bulk that would cost a mother too much. Quick-made, fine-boned. A girlish body—and it felt right, like a tool chosen on purpose.
He thought of a gymnast he'd watched once on a TV in a gym lobby—how she seemed to find straight lines in air. People loved her for existing. He had never had that gift. He had trained himself into a warning sign and wondered why strangers crossed the street. Sunglasses hadn't helped. Jokes hadn't helped. Muscle made doors close. Maybe this time the door would open when he smiled. Maybe a wave would be answered, not avoided. Maybe there would be friends and long, stupid nights and games until morning, and laughter that didn't need apology.
He slept and dreamed in the small safety of his new home. Sometimes the woman sang. Sometimes the lake took the verse and the frogs kept the beat.
One day other voices entered the room of his world. Boards spoke under a firm step—an older woman. A man answered, careful in the way men are when a room holds something fragile. Their English was bright in the middle, soft at the edges—familiar and far. He understood one word in twenty and recognized none. It didn't matter. The song had shifted key. Something was coming.
Urgency woke like a remembered tune. Stop being lazy, he told himself, because the order felt like him. He tried a flex. A push-up. A backflip. All three failed gloriously. He managed a wiggle and a fist-clench which—if you squinted—looked exactly like Neo catching bullets.
Good enough.
He settled and listened as the three drums braided tighter. Outside, wind worked the trees and the lake counted the seconds. Inside, red veins and white kept time with one another. The light-core flashed once—promise, not spectacle—and went on pumping its quiet brightness through the roads of the life that was coming.