At first there had been a tower. Of that Bruce was certain.
After that—like a mad, or simply a badass, ninja warrior—his new mother climbed down the thing, and he, having poured his little sun through the cord between them, passed out gloriously.
Thus the first lesson branded itself on his tiny bones:
The light in his chest was like a muscle.
But not the friendly kind that only tires an arm.
This one lived at the breaker box of his whole body. Use too much, and the entire house went dark. It was heavy squats for the soul, he decided—only worse, because overdoing it didn't just make him shake for a minute. It shut him down from neck to toe, and not for seconds but hours. Maybe more. He couldn't check a clock. He didn't even have eyes yet. He had vibes and exhaustion.
He woke with the taste of sleep like clean snow and the sound of trees in his ears.
Not the tower anymore.
No echoing stone. No hollow stairwell. No door with a lock that sounded like a threat.
Now there were leaves. Wind. The soft, endless language of a forest moving. His mother was far from the tower, walking a road he could not see, her breath steadying and unsteadying as the ground changed underfoot. He wasn't sure how many days had passed since hearing first came back to him in that room—only that now the world spoke through water and skin, and he could answer with warmth measured in small cups.
He tested his light-heart carefully.
A sip.
A hum.
Enough to feel it circulating—white veins running beside blood veins, doing their quiet work inside his forming body. It healed him automatically, slowly, like a gentle hand that never got tired. But when he pushed—when he tried to send it outward with intent—it drained him like lifting too heavy on an empty stomach.
Good to know.
The forest road kept sliding beneath her steps.
Then hoofbeats found them.
Fast at first, then slowing. A horse snorting, leather creaking, a man's breathing from the cold. A voice called out—Albion-English, but the old kind, the beard version, the one that made Bruce's brain work twice as hard for half the meaning.
The man called himself something like Rob.
Before Bruce could even build an opinion, Rob dismounted and—bold as anything—lifted Lili by the waist and set her up on the saddle as if she weighed nothing.
This offended Bruce on two fronts.
One: his mother was a verified badass and should not be handled like a feather.
Two: the lifting made her heart bang like a drumline for reasons Bruce chose not to think about. His apartment—already small—shook.
Rob swung up behind her, close. Too close. He laid an arm around her middle to steady her and suddenly Bruce's already modest living situation became a studio.
They rode.
And Bruce learned the second lesson of his new life:
Horseback travel was just being shaken inside a wet box while someone else made decisions.
The world turned into a rocking chair being shoved by a lunatic. He had no chair. He had walls. His head tapped them. His little neck filed formal complaints. Occasionally Rob's arm pressed the front wall and Bruce whacked it back like a very small, very polite fist lodging a grievance.
Pain rose.
The light answered.
Not as a blast or a spell. Just a glow—like a hand placed on a hurt spot. The ache eased. Not gone, but manageable. The core inside him did what it was meant to do: mend, steady, soothe.
Good muscle, he thought.
Use in sips.
His mother—attentive even in flight—felt him thumping the ceiling of her body and asked Rob to slow. Bruce didn't catch all the words, but he caught the change: the horse's gait easing, the rocking turning from theological punishment into something merely awful.
Peace restored, Bruce returned to the one useful thing he could do: training.
In the warm dark he worked the only body he had. Solemn, dignified crunches. Finger-open, finger-shut. Toes counting themselves like soldiers on parade. Ten heroic minutes of "running" in mid-water that turned his sea into very small storms. Between sets he listened to the strange world that would not show itself.
They rode.
Lili giggled once—quiet and startled—when Rob leaned close and said something into her ear. Later her head found his chest and slept. Bruce felt the shift in her breathing, the softened rhythm of a woman who had been running on fear too long and had finally let herself borrow a little peace.
Bruce did not like Rob holding Mother so close.
It felt wrong.
So—investigator that he was—he considered the possibilities.
Who was this Rob, anyway?
A womanizer—one of those guys who made girls laugh and then kept doing… whatever it was womanizers did? (Bruce wasn't clear on the curriculum.)
A crook? A bandit planning to steal… what, exactly? Mother owned nothing but courage and a pair of knives.
Rich and helpful? Poor and helpful? Just helpful?
An idiot simping because Mother was extremely cool?
Or—simplest answer—a man doing the good thing because it was good to do good things?
Inventory check:
Mother had nothing to rob.
In the cosmic sense she was not alone (there was him).
And if Rob was some kind of law man, then Mother's only crime was climbing out a tower window at bedtime—parkour violations, jurisdiction unclear.
Bruce tried to think darker thoughts and failed to outpace his own imagination; the worst he managed was that Rob might be a cyborg on a secret mission to eliminate an evil stream-sniper before the timeline's KD ratio collapsed.
He stamped the file for now:
ROB — GOOD SAMARITAN (tentative).
Then he set his jaw, tightened his tiny fists, and went back to training.
After the long and heroic horseback experience—heroic mostly because he survived it—came the village Rob had mentioned.
Bruce couldn't see it, of course, but he could hear it: the hollow thunk of hooves on packed dirt; fields—wheat, maybe—shivering in wind like cloth; a few voices out in the rows; and otherwise… not much. Whatever this road was, it wasn't a highway to a city. It was barely even a neighborhood. A handful of homes, close enough to share a fence and a rumor.
A real medieval village.
At the gate there were men—he knew by the clink of mail, the creak of leather, the weight in their throats. They stopped Rob and Lili for a brief parley. Bruce caught one word clean—Feversham—and the shape of a joke about brides that made Rob sound taller than he felt. Wood groaned; hinges sighed; they went in.
Past the gate, the quiet deepened into a thing with edges.
No hum of electricity.
No bus brakes whispering.
No schoolyard shrieks.
No phones.
Just air and breath and people who knew how to leave silence alone.
Rob took her—by sound and the shape of space—home.
For a moment, Bruce wondered if it might be like that time Frank had first let him into his house.
Back then, Frank's living room had been the kingdom of comfort: TV glowing, popcorn smell in the air, a controller in each hand, and the unholy echo of "Get to the chopper!" bouncing off the walls as they watched Predator together. Frank had laughed every time Bruce flinched at the monster part—teasing, but the good kind. Later they'd played Halo: Combat Evolved, the one with the giant ring world, and Bruce had been terrible at it but happy anyway.
Those were the days—movies, laughter, button clicks, and Frank's family treating him like he'd always belonged there. After his parents died, that house had become home, and Frank's family had become his family. Warm lights, good food, good people.
Good times indeed.
So when Rob said home, Bruce half-hoped for the same kind of warmth—the hum of a TV, maybe, or a bit of Halo music quietly waiting for player two.
But no.
When Mother stepped inside, the world was entirely different.
No buzz of electricity. No television anchors. No video games ready to load.
Instead, she stepped into a room filled with life—ten people, maybe, counting the children—and, by the sound of it, a sheep or two that apparently held joint tenancy. The air smelled of porridge and woodsmoke instead of microwave dinners. There were bowls and clay plates clacking against a table, steam rising from food like the ghost of comfort.
The people were loud in a good way: talking, laughing, moving around the table. Children squealed. Adults corralled them. Someone scolded gently, someone else joked back, and the whole place had that crowded warmth that came from bodies and routine and being used to each other.
Lili said almost nothing.
Though she ate plenty—fast, neat, grateful.
She didn't protest the chaos or the lack of a PC; she simply accepted it, polite as a guest at a feast. Her heartbeat slowed while she swallowed food, and Bruce felt the difference the way you feel heat returning to frozen fingers.
To be fair, she couldn't say much.
Rob seemed to talk for both of them, words spilling fast as if he feared silence might close the door on him. He kept asking questions—soft, careful ones—and she answered in crumbs: "yes," "thank you," sometimes nothing at all, sometimes a sound that meant I understand enough, please don't make me do more.
Bruce listened from his small underwater apartment, amused and weirdly proud.
His mother could scale a storm tower with death itself whistling in her hair, yet a table full of friendly strangers turned her quiet as a mouse. It reminded him of himself—sitting stiff on Frank's couch years ago, trying to figure out what normal people said between movie quotes.
Maybe, he thought, badassery and social anxiety weren't opposites at all.
Maybe the trick to being like the movie heroes was simple: a long black coat, sunglasses, a really cold name—and, failing that, actual superpowers.
After eating well, Rob led her—not to a bed, Bruce discovered—but to a clean corner where hay made the mattress and sheep supplied the blanket. So it was grass for a bed, wool and warm breath for covers, and Lili took a brief rest.
Bruce, meanwhile, kept training.
In the dark he threw one hundred tiny punches with both fists, trying to channel his favorite boxing legends at one inch of reach per strike. It wasn't much, but it was honest work. He did toe curls. Finger clamps. A few careful "runs" through the warm sea. When he felt the light-heart stir, he kept it in check—remembering the tower lesson. No heroic overexertion. Sips only.
Hours later his world tilted; Mother rose, and the journey resumed.
Leaving felt rude.
Even the sheep protested, nibbling her cloak until she laughed—an actual laugh, small and surprised—and brushed them away. Rob sounded most distressed of all—apologies tumbling out, gifts offered, and finally something that clinked like shoes pressed into her hands.
Lili answered with her small vocabulary—"thank you," "good," "goodnight"—and tried to go alone.
Rob refused the idea like a golden retriever refusing not to fetch.
Only this retriever had deltoids.
"Let me help," his tone begged through the old-country words. "Please let me make it right."
Mother sighed the sigh that means fine, and mounted up again.
The road was quiet.
They rode through day and into night, stopping for a small camp. Rob hovered near as if proximity were a talisman—an arm around her even in sleep, as though she might faint or fly away. They didn't say much, couldn't really. Mother's vocabulary was a handful of pebbles: "yes," "no," "hungry," "thank you," "cold," "warm," "go."
Still, Rob did not wilt.
He tried to teach her, pointing at things, sounding out words, turning their ride into a father-and-toddler language lesson. It was oddly sweet—
and, Bruce admitted, kind of funny.
Sometimes a cart rumbled by—wheels squeaking like mice. Sometimes a lone walker's steps passed and faded. Mostly there was only the horse's clean rhythm and the double-breath of two people trying very hard to talk. The world itself stayed old and quiet, as if civilization were an afterthought here and nature the reigning king—everywhere present, while people were not.
Eventually they neared some new place Rob called something that sounded like Aynes Way… or Aynesway… or maybe Einsway Village. Hard to tell when every word reached Bruce half-drowned through flesh. But the point was, it was another settlement.
There were guards here too—no clinking mail this time, just deep voices and barking dogs. Wood groaned, gates swung open, and they entered to the music of daily life: a few hammers, a bucket clatter, children somewhere shouting, all wrapped in that same strange old-English gibberish Bruce was starting to find almost comforting.
Lili's heartbeat told the truth before she did.
Fast and high, the rhythm of being looked at too closely.
Every time a man's voice rose nearby, her pulse kicked. Every time someone stepped too near, she tightened, breath shallowing, shoulders drawing in like she wanted to become smaller than her own skin.
But Rob—good man that he was—turned himself into a moving wall.
Words for her. Laughter for her. A broad-shouldered presence between her and curious eyes. Bruce could feel it in the way Rob adjusted his position again and again—subtle, practiced, protective without saying it out loud.
At some point they even held hands.
Pretending, Bruce guessed, to be husband and wife.
It reminded him, bizarrely, of Frank and Sarah at their wedding—except this version came with less music and more stress. Lili kept blushing, but she let the pretense stand. Her fingers trembled at first, then steadied. Her heart slowed a fraction, as if the lie gave her something to hide behind.
Inside the village, Bruce heard laughter and clinking mugs—the warm noise of an inn. Rob brought them there, probably hoping to give her food and rest. The place breathed beer and smoke; a fire crackled; voices rolled in waves. Rob's own grew louder, friendly but nervous, as though he feared she might vanish again if he didn't fill the silence.
Someone laughed—a woman maybe—and another voice tossed a crude comment into the air, the kind Bruce didn't need to understand to recognize. Rob's answering chuckle sounded tight, forced around irritation. Bruce pictured his mother sitting straight-backed and polite, hands folded, trying to look like she belonged, waiting for the meal to end so she could escape, while Rob tried to be both host and shield.
And escape she did.
Sometime after dark, hoofbeats pounded into the village—heavy, measured, too many. Armour clinked. Voices barked orders. Soldiers, by the sound of them, searching for someone.
For her.
Rob reacted fast. Chairs scraped. Whispers rose. A door opened. Someone muttered something sharp and urgent. By the time boots stormed through the inn, Lili was already gone—hidden behind hay, barrels, maybe fate itself.
Somehow, they slipped away.
When they reached the open fields beyond the walls, Bruce knew by the quick, sharp rhythm of her steps that his mother had decided:
She would go on alone.
Rob followed anyway—his stride matching hers through grass and shadow, the two sets of footsteps parting only when the road dissolved into forest. He said something long and pleading—tone all heartbreak, meaning lost to time. Lili answered softly.
Final.
Then her steps went on alone, quick and sure, into the trees.
Bruce felt the change at once: the air cooler, sound bent by leaves, the hush of roots swallowing light. She carried a pack now—light but loaded with food, a flask, and two knives that clicked faintly together when she walked. He recognized one from the tower, wondered where the other had come from.
Behind them, Rob's voice called out once.
Then again.
Fading.
Lili turned only long enough to throw a "thank you" and a "goodnight" over her shoulder, her voice trembling between gratitude and grief. He must have stood there a long while, Bruce thought, watching her vanish.
Her hand settled over her belly—over him. Warm breath left her in a slow sigh. She didn't look back, though a single tear betrayed her; she whispered Rob's name like an apology and kept walking.
Silence reclaimed the forest—true silence. Just birds, wind, and her feet on dirt. No carts. No wagons. No laughter. Only the kind of quiet that made Bruce, floating in his small hidden world, hear not just her heartbeat—
—but his own.
It was there, in that calm, that Bruce began piecing things together.
These people weren't just some small countryside community in the UK speaking a weird old dialect. No—this was the only language they knew. They weren't actors, or re-enactors, or some medieval festival crowd who'd wandered off into the woods. This was real. They spoke in that ancient, melodic Old English so fluently Bruce's brain couldn't keep up. Apart from Rob's name, and "Lili," and maybe three or four simple words, it was all beautiful nonsense.
And it wasn't just the speech—it was everything.
The way they dressed. The way they lived. How few people there were anywhere at all. The land was wide, quiet, barely touched—like the world hadn't been finished yet and someone had left half of it as wilderness.
That's when the thought hit him—the impossible, movie-level twist.
He hadn't just been reincarnated.
He'd been sent back in time.
Not to redo his old life. Not to fix mistakes. Not to save Frank or meet Sarah again. Not even to rewatch Predator and finally see the ending he'd slept through once. No.
This was somewhere else entirely.
Somewhere in the past.
Since everyone spoke some version of English, it had to be England—or what would become England. But this was no England of cars or trains or morning coffee shops. Definitely not even the 1800s—there was no sign of factories, no telegraphs, no bustle. He wasn't about to bump into Napoleon or anyone with a powdered wig.
This was before all that.
Before TikTok. Before the moustache man from history class. Before France and England started calling each other names and fighting about flags and islands.
This was old.
Dark Ages old.
Maybe Viking-age old.
The kind of old that hadn't yet invented proper handwriting.
The idea terrified him—
and, embarrassingly, thrilled him too.
Part of him thought: Okay. This is it. A second chance at life in a real medieval world. Maybe he could become a knight or some kind of wandering hero—Sir Bruce of Wherever—fighting dragons, saving maidens, making motivational speeches about teamwork.
That sounded amazing.
But then the other part of him remembered who he actually was.
He wasn't a sword guy. He wasn't a fighter. He couldn't even play dodgeball without pulling something. And dragons were probably off the menu anyway, unless he wanted to be the snack.
Still.
Possibilities existed. Maybe he could explore. Maybe find America early. Maybe start the world's first gym franchise—Ye Olde Iron Temple.
But first he'd have to learn how to sail.
And survive.
Because living in the middle of the forest with zero civilization around was already turning out to be harder than any respawn on "hard mode."
Worse yet—if this really was the past, then there was no Frank. No Sarah. No kids calling him "Uncle Bruce." No Halo nights. No microwaves. Just him and his new mom in a world without phones, without lights, without anything familiar.
At least he'd have a mother, though.
That was something.
But if he wanted to live here—really live—he'd have to start from scratch. The language. The customs. Even the numbers.
And Bruce, as heroic as he liked to think he was, had one mortal weakness:
School.
He could face fire, pain, even bullies—
but math? Reading lessons? Standing up to give a speech in front of people?
That was worse than hell.
So lying there in the soft warmth of his tiny world, he did what Bruce always did when reality made no sense.
He made a list.
He was alive. (Again.)
His mom was a tower-climbing ninja-badass, and that was good.
The world outside was definitely medieval.
He was going to have to learn a lot from scratch.
This was probably going to suck.
But maybe—just maybe—it would also be amazing.
That idea died fast.
Lili was headed for the middle of nowhere.
The road—such as it had been—fell away under her feet and gave itself to a thread of an animal path that went on like an idea no one else believed in. Ferns brushed her calves; birch and pine traded the wind between them; the world thinned to water-sound and birds that did not care if anyone had ever invented cities.
To Bruce it felt like his mother had chosen monk-life, or a survival-show finale where the grand prize was not dying. No roof, no tools, no plan but forward. Or maybe she was simply done with taxes and had elected for the pure, primitive woods package—which, for him, hopefully meant no school…
…but also no grand voyages to discover new continents.
Movies made the forest look interesting. Living in one without gear sounded significantly less so. Back in Vermont, Amber had told him how "simple living" meant cold nights and hungry days. If Amber could manage it, surely his mother could too—even if this was a different century and a different side of the sea.
They found a hill.
A small waterfall stitched down its shoulder; moss made a green mattress. Under a sky pricked with a thousand cold eyes, Lili slept with one arm around her belly. The water kept its patient counsel; an owl tried the night with a few puzzled notes.
Bruce dozed—and when she shivered, or when a bramble-scratch stung, he bled warmth from his light: enough heat to comfort, enough glow to ease the sting. The night passed in honest, drafty peace.
Another day of walking carried them deeper, farther from anything that wasn't made of feather or fur. By evening the world opened sideways into a lake—he knew it by the bragging frogs and the way wind slid flat over water. Lili drank there and ate a little, pushing reeds aside to clear a patch for her feet. Fish smacked the surface; her stomach answered like a drum.
Then she saw it.
She ran—soft, quick—skirting the shore until a shape interrupted the trees: a door that had to be lifted to be useful; floorboards that answered in the old dialect of creak; a wall that remembered how to be a wall when the wind was polite.
A cabin.
Long abandoned.
Inside: dust and leaf, and a simple stone hearth that sounded true when she touched it.
She went for wood and tinder—back and forth, back and forth—until a little pyre waited on the hearthstone. Then, kneeling, she made fire with two stones and the kind of patience Bruce associated with saints and heavy deadlifts. Sparks flirted, failed, flirted again. Once she hissed at a scraped knuckle—he warmed her, and the sting unwrote itself before her eyes.
She tried again.
The dry grass took.
A flame arrived like a shy guest and then remembered it had teeth. She fed it until it spoke steadily.
Bruce would have clapped if he hadn't just spent more light than was smart. He settled for a baby yawn, a dignified pulse of courage, and a thumbs-up she could not possibly see.
While he floated toward sleep, Lili opened the small leather food-jar she'd been given along the road: hard bread that clicked like stone, a thumb of cheese, something softer—butter, maybe—perhaps even a sliver of meat and two eggs.
Gym food, medieval edition.
She ate without hurry, dipping each bite from a little bucket, letting fire-warmth sink into her bones. For a bed she wove a grass mattress near the hearth and lay down to the sound of wind exploring a hole in the wall and small night-creatures strolling boldly through the open door.
Morning brought a surprise.
He'd heard them in the night—a quiet parade of feet and opinion—and then, at dawn, a throat cleared like a trumpet and detonated into a cock-a-doodle-doo.
A rooster announced himself with military confidence.
Seven hens followed, clucking their policy statements.
Lili yelped; wings thundered; then everyone remembered their dignity.
"Okay," Bruce decided, "we have roommates."
Lili seemed to arrive at the same conclusion—astonished, then calm. She lifted her hands, palms out, and tried a greeting in the only English she almost owned, shy and careful: "God yive thee good morwe, fair hennys."
The words were funny and sweet in her mouth—ancient and new at once. Bruce didn't know the grammar, but he loved the sound.
By midday, Bruce had the beginnings of a farm report in his head.
Inventory: seven hens. One rooster—spectacularly arrogant—who did whatever he pleased and refused to shut up even when Mother asked nicely.
Production: eggs, daily. The hens didn't seem to mind her gentle theft.
Maintenance: Lili cleaned the floor, tended the fire, and made sure the birds had a dry, warm place to sleep where the rain couldn't finger them through the roof.
Services rendered: chickens provided insect control and comic relief.
Days made a rhythm.
Lili learned the choreography of small, necessary things. She ranged the woods and came back with berries, herbs, a fistful of greens, and a face that practiced confidence until it became real. Inside, after she'd swept and sorted, she built herself a little bed—the frame a raft of broken branches, the mattress a thatch of grass. She began stuffing the walls with lake mud, which dried into a hard crust and taught the wind its manners. Even the door, coaxed and braced, remembered how to be a door.
The cabin improved by inches: a draft quieted here, a gap closed there.
Meanwhile, Lili learned—by doing, by failing, by trying again.
That was when a thought settled on Bruce like a heavier blanket:
This was hard mode.
Even with a magic pilot-light in his chest, winter in a hut like this would be a boss fight. The forest did not offer central heating; snow did not accept apologies.
So he prepared the only way heroes do before final battles—
he trained.
One hundred hand-clenches.
One hundred noble fetal crunches.
One hundred kicks the rooster—if asked—would have judged excellent.
Ten minutes of dignified water-running until his ocean grew weather.
Between sets he practiced the small work of his gift: a glow when Mother's fingers numbed, ease when sudden sadness crossed her breath, a little courage whenever night said boo in an old-house voice.
He didn't know what the future was storing for him, or what had become of Frank, or Sarah, or the whole life he'd loved. He only knew that somewhere above the dark had been a small, stuttering god with a task—and tasks, in Bruce's world, were meant to be worked on.
He tightened his tiny fists, set his jaw the way heroes do, and filed a note to himself for later:
Be born useful.