Bruce floated in warmth.
It wasn't water exactly—water had cold, and pressure, and the threat of lungs. This was something gentler: a dark hot spring folded around him, holding him without weight, without hunger, without pain. Time did not tick here. It soaked—slow and steady—while his whole existence became the quiet mathematics of change.
He was alive.
That fact alone felt like a miracle, because he remembered fire. He remembered heat that had teeth. He remembered Frank's arms around him and the world turning white.
And yet—
Here he was, drifting in a womb-dark comfort like a thought tucked under a blanket.
He felt himself assembling.
Not with eyes—he didn't have those yet. Not with hands—he didn't have those either. He felt it the way you feel a song through a wall: vibrations, patterns, shape becoming.
Little stubs that might someday be arms. A curl that could be a spine. A widening, a dividing, a multiplying—cells doing their tiny, tireless work, building a body from nothing but instructions and time.
Bruce tried to understand what he was.
Human?
Animal?
A mole?
For some reason the idea wouldn't leave him: a blind little mole creature, built for burrowing, for surviving underground. It made a strange kind of sense. He couldn't see. He was surrounded by soft dark. He was growing in tight, hidden quiet. Maybe the baby angel had sent him back as something useful—something that could dig people out of ruins.
Anything that could help.
Anything that could guard.
Because the dark place he'd fallen through still haunted him: gray sparks sinking, the immense Gate, the Wardens with their broken uniforms and their last wounds stamped into them like badges. Had the others made it where he had not? Had they reached mercy? Or had they been swallowed by the furnace-light beyond the steps?
And Frank—
Frank's face flickered at the edge of Bruce's half-formed mind, like a photograph held too close to a flame.
He had failed him.
He had tried to do good and the world had answered with fire. Bruce wanted—stupidly, desperately—to believe Frank had survived. Because Frank was Frank. Frank was a tough bastard. Frank was the kind of man who could outrun bullets, who could sprint through hell and come out swearing about it.
But Bruce remembered the explosion.
He remembered the way Frank had covered him like a shield.
And guilt, heavy as iron, sank into him even here.
How could he help humanity… if he couldn't even save the one person who mattered most?
In the hush of becoming, something started beating.
tadum… tadum… tadum…
A shy, wet heart—flesh learning rhythm. The first real engine of his new life.
Bruce focused on it the way a drowning man focuses on shore.
And then he felt the second beat.
Not louder, not stronger—different. A quiet hum braided into the pulse like a harmony note.
There, inside the red heart, nestled like a candle inside a lantern, was the other one.
The light-heart.
Not muscle. Not blood. Something smooth and bright—like a sphere of white glass with a seed of brighter white at its center. Each time the flesh-heart thumped, the seed flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed, sending fine threads of radiance through the growing body. Those threads ran beside forming veins, not forcing growth, not rushing it—just persuading each cell toward wholeness. Refining. Mending. Setting the line true.
A small sun lodged inside him.
The two hearts listened to each other like old friends trying to learn a new language.
tadum, hum… tadum, hum… tadum, hum…
When Bruce gave the light his attention, it leaned close—as if it wanted to whisper.
He leaned too.
And the world snapped open.
A flash—
Vermont.
The mountain. The clearing. The mansion.
Or what was left of it.
A wide crater smoked under a hard winter sky, blackened earth steaming where snow should have been. The woods around it looked scorched, the trees ragged and snapped. Christmas lights were gone. Cars were gone. People were gone. It looked like the land had been punched and never learned how to breathe again.
Bruce searched for Frank.
Frantic, stupid hope.
But there was nothing to find.
No body. No ash. No shape that could be called his friend.
The vision faded, and the twin rhythm returned like a hand on his shoulder.
tadum, hum…
Then the light tilted again—
—and time began to move like rain on fast-forward glass.
The crater remained, but the snow thinned. The season changed. Mud showed through. The air warmed.
A woman stood at the crater's edge.
Sarah.
Petite. Pale. Violet eyes rimmed red. Hair so light blonde it looked like silver where the sun caught it. Two children stood close at her sides—small shapes bundled in coats, their faces confused in the way children get when the world does something too big for them.
Sarah held flowers.
Her hands trembled.
She tossed the flowers into the crater like she was trying to feed a wound.
Then she fell to her knees.
Her shoulders shook. No sound reached Bruce, but he didn't need sound to understand grief. The children hovered beside her, uncertain, helpless—like little moons around a broken planet.
Bruce's guilt surged so hard it felt like it might drown even his light-heart.
Frank… please be alive. Please.
Time rolled on.
The crater softened at the edges. Dirt slid in. Machines came. The wound was filled not with forgiveness but with labor. Grass returned. Then flowers—wild and stubborn—began to bloom where fire had eaten everything. A field formed slowly, season by season. Winter put white in the air and on the stems, then left. Summer returned with scaffolds and decisions.
By midsummer, construction machines shouldered a new ski lodge into place above the old scar.
Men in hardhats. Trucks. Noise. Paychecks. Work.
People got jobs.
People built something that wasn't death.
Bruce clung to that like a small mercy.
At least it wasn't wasted, he thought. At least something good grew on top of what we ruined.
But Sarah and the kids—
He watched them fade from the timeline. Years passed too fast to follow. Bruce couldn't tell if they healed or broke or simply learned to carry it. The empty sky above the place felt like held breath.
And then—
Time leaned harder on the wheel.
And the wheel spun free.
A day collapsed into a line.
A year turned into a grain.
The world beneath him… was no longer his world.
Continents wore pale scars—impact bowls bright as old bones. Inland seas gleamed where farmland had once been. Deserts ran together in knotted belts. Storm bands spun like angry gears, huge and tight and furious. Satellites drifted wounded, their ribs showing; silent stations hung in ragged orbit like a necklace of broken teeth.
He saw nuclear light—distant, bloom-bright—rippling across a planet that didn't look green anymore.
Earth, scarred into something unrecognizable.
And yet…
Out of that wounded atmosphere, a spear of fire rose.
A rocket.
It shuddered, shedding stages like skin, and from the shedding came a flock of man-guided machines—small jointed shapes that didn't flee the ruins, but worked. They nosed through debris, ferried panels, stitched broken metal into scaffolds, turning the trash of an old age into the bones of a new one.
Time surged.
A structure flowered in orbit—no mere habitat, but a city that understood vacuum. Around it drifted ships the size of boroughs. On the Moon, a crater glazed itself with metal and glass until a lid of lights hid the rock: a base that breathed.
Engines brightened. Vectors drew themselves across darkness.
Not only through Sol's neat garden—
Beyond.
The light-heart pulled Bruce farther out, as if it wanted to teach him scale. The solar wind thinned to a whisper. The stars did not move; he moved among them. The Milky Way unrolled beneath him like a river of frost and fire, then fell behind.
Between galaxies lay a black so honest it felt like truth.
And through that truth—
They came.
Seventeen ships in procession.
Not ships in the way Bruce had ever imagined. These were nations of metal, cathedral-arched and spired, their hulls like cities turned inside out. He felt as small as a firefly watching nighted mountains drift past.
Their skins were scrolls of unreadable script. On one flank, a symbol flared—some kind of heraldry that punched familiarity into his chest without permission:
An eagle with three heads.
Sword and shield clenched like a promise.
But the ships were not pristine.
Damage told its quiet story.
Acid-bite scalloped plating.
Seams cratered and blackened.
Spines of bone—not theirs—jutting from wounds like grotesque trophies.
Along one immense flank, a claw the size of an island lay snapped and fused against armor, as if something had tried to tear the ship open and failed only after leaving its hand behind.
They passed without sound—
and yet the idea of thunder remembered itself in Bruce's bones.
Then the vision swung forward again.
A green world.
Blue seas. White clouds. A planet that looked like Earth's cousin—familiar enough to make his chest ache, different enough to feel like a lie told by distance. Continents lay untouched. No grid of night-lights. No scars. No satellites. Just weather, water, and wildness—an innocent sphere turning in patient silence.
The seventeen arks aimed for it.
At first it looked like arrival—cathedral-shadows sliding over ocean light, great hulls dipping toward atmosphere with the slow ceremony of gods returning home.
Then Bruce felt the wrongness.
The approach wasn't clean. It wasn't controlled. Their formation wobbled—tiny errors multiplying into fate. The ships didn't adjust like captains steering. They adjusted like systems failing into emergency behavior, as if hands that should have guided them were gone, or asleep, or dead.
Thrusters flared late.
Too late.
Each ark tried to bleed speed at the last possible moment, engines roaring in silence, luminous plumes clawing at the sky like desperate prayers. Bruce sensed an autopilot's cold decision-making—calculations without hope, protocols without human mercy:
Minimize loss. Choose impact vectors. Save what can be saved.
But the numbers didn't care.
The first ship hit like judgment.
Not an asteroid, not quite—less absolute, more complicated—but the feeling was the same. A world that had never seen war suddenly learned what it meant to be struck from the heavens. Oceans reared. Mountains answered. A bruise of fire spread across the horizon, and the planet's bright skin darkened under a rolling canopy of smoke and ash.
Bruce watched the sky turn sick.
Days blurred into seasons. Seasons into years. A long dim age followed—twenty cycles, twenty winters, twenty slow turns of the world—however time worked in the vision, it felt like a held breath that lasted too long. The sun was a rumor. The world lived under a shroud.
And then—
Life did what it always did.
It returned.
Green pushed through black. Roots found cracks in ruined metal. Rain softened soot. Trees rose where fire had screamed. Vines climbed the ribs of the fallen arks. Moss painted hulls. Birds nested in broken spires. The planet did not forgive—it simply grew over.
Slowly, the wrecks became part of the landscape.
Eventually, from orbit, you could almost believe nothing had happened at all: a peaceful green world again, rolling under clouds like a dream.
Almost.
The picture held for one last heartbeat.
Then the light-heart eased its grip.
Bruce fell back into warm darkness.
Warmth returned—the sea without shores. The small drum of his red heart found its measure; the white sun inside it answered with a steady, quiet hum. His two hearts beat like a duet learning to share one song.
tadum… hum…
tadum… hum…
He didn't understand everything the light wanted to teach him. He understood gratitude. He understood names.
Frank.
Sarah.
Ben.
Emma.
He held them close like stones in a pocket—proof that he'd been real once. He remembered the jobs they'd done, the doors they'd kicked, the people they'd pulled out of bad nights. He remembered Frank's stubborn loyalty and the way it had felt like warmth in a world that often ran cold. And he remembered the warning the baby Godling had pressed into him—stars not empty, time running out.
The new sun in his chest mended him from within, quietly persuading him toward wholeness.
He settled himself in the dark the way a traveler packs by feel, readying for a road he could not yet see.
If he wasn't going back to the same Earth… then wherever he arrived, he would still do his utmost to help those in need.
The thought pricked him—a sting of guilt.
If he was meant to help, shouldn't he be doing more than floating and waiting?
Thinking spun into growing.
Fingers budded. Toes counted themselves. A spine curled like a fern unrolling. His skull learned its seams. Blood found its routes—and beside every river of blood ran a narrow rivulet of light, a silver thread stitched into the red.
He noticed something else, slowly, with a confusion that felt almost shy.
He was small.
Not the heavy heroic lump he'd been the first time he was born. No boulder-head. No bulk. No awkward mass that made rooms feel tight.
This body felt… fine-boned. Quick-made. Light.
Petite.
Girlish.
And weirdly—quietly—it felt right. Like a tool chosen on purpose.
Maybe this time he wouldn't be all muscle and little sense. Maybe this time he could be more mind than meat. Help in other ways—like Sarah did. Sarah could calm a room. Children listened to her. She built a home out of patience and small routines Bruce had never understood how to make.
And then Bruce's brain, which had never been subtle, had a thought so ridiculous it almost made him laugh in the dark:
If I'm a girl… can I make more people?
Like… can I make an army of helpers?
Mini Bruces? Volunteer edition?
He imagined a little battalion of stubborn kindness running around fixing the world. The image was so absurdly hopeful it almost hurt.
He slept.
He dreamed of being someone people didn't flinch at.
He dreamed of waving and having the wave returned. Of being small enough to fit into spaces without breaking them. Of laughing without it sounding forced.
And when he woke, urgency hummed inside him like a remembered tune.
Stop being lazy, it said.
So he trained.
He tried to flex. Tried push-ups. Tried squats. He even imagined a backflip again—because of course he did. All of it failed gloriously. The best he managed was a dignified wiggle of a few fingers and a fist-clench that—if you squinted—looked exactly like Neo catching bullets.
Good enough.
That's how his new life's training began: finger-wiggles and fist-clenches, toe curls and tiny kicks, relax—curl—uncurl—hold—rest—repeat. A simple rhythm. A discipline. Something to do besides drown in helplessness.
Maybe, soon enough, he'd even have abs again.
And, with luck, eyes that worked.
Then the world outside began to leak in.
His body—apparently—decided to gift him ears.
He stopped and listened.
At first it was only muffled life: a hearth's crackle, the hush of wind at a high window, gulls calling somewhere distant. Beneath that came stone echoes—an old building. A tower, maybe. And beyond even that, softened by distance, the murmuring noise of a coastal settlement: voices, animals, work, the faint rhythm of a town.
And closer—closest—two adults.
A man and a woman.
Their breaths came heavy. The bed creaked. The room rocked gently with motion that made Bruce feel—instinctively—uncomfortable, even before he had language for why. The woman made a sound that was half anger, half pain, and the man answered with something like satisfaction.
Bruce didn't understand biology.
He didn't know what, exactly, he was overhearing.
But he knew the shape of power when it leaned on someone smaller.
He heard the woman turn away.
He heard something wet—spit, maybe, or a slap of rejection—followed by the man's laugh, rich and unbothered. Then words reached Bruce—English, but not modern. Old. Heavy with formal pride:
"Þou art stedefast, and wilful of herte; þat is goode, and God him-selve woot it. Therfore am I certeyn in my soule þat þou schalt yive me a sone ful myghty, þat schal arisen and reule this reame. Þou schalt see—his name shal be song in halles."
The woman answered sharp and northern—Old Norse, the tongue of raiders and stubborn kings. Bruce didn't know the words, but he knew the heat in them. Hatred. Defiance. A refusal that didn't sound safe.
The man moved away at last.
Leather. Cloth. Then mail: the cold clack of metal on metal. A sword kissed its scabbard. Boots struck stone.
"Fyne," he said, like a concession he didn't mean. "I shal gon."
He paused—too close again—and Bruce heard his voice soften into something that tried to sound like tenderness but landed like ownership.
"Lili," he said, tasting the name. "Thy deffiaunce is fair to biholde. Yet soone or late thou… shalt falle to myn charmes. As now, reste thee; my servauntes shul brynge thee souper. Thinke ageyn thyne affeccioun toward me… for I myself thee love alredi."
Bruce didn't know what "love" meant in a man like that.
But he knew what a cage sounded like when it smiled.
A door opened. An iron lock clicked. Steps rang down a spiral stairwell—echoes tightening and fading as the man descended into the tower's throat. The door shut again. The lock turned.
Silence returned, and the woman broke.
Sobs—rage and grief braided together.
One hand pressed her belly—pressed him—and she spoke in a shaking voice that made Bruce's new heart squeeze tight:
"Þat er allt í lagi, lítil mær mín… Þú munt verða heil. Ek sver… ek læt hann eigi fá þik."
Bruce didn't understand the sentence.
He understood the promise.
It's okay, little one.
You'll be safe.
I swear.
Bruce chose a side without hesitation.
Her side.
Protecting her would take work.
So he worked.
One hundred hand-clenches for his arms. One hundred tiny crunches for his core. One hundred kicks for his legs. And floating in warmth, he "ran" for ten long minutes—ghost-steps in the dark, driving himself forward because forward was all he had.
He would do it every day.
Until his lungs learned air.
Until his eyes opened.
Until he was born into whatever world waited outside this tower.
He promised her in silence—
and trained to make the promise true.