Bruce did not know how much time was passing.
Time, inside his small hidden world, did not come in days or weeks. It came in patterns. In effort. In rhythm. In the way his mother's body moved around him like a great, patient engine that refused to stop simply because it was alone.
She worked.
That was the first thing he truly understood.
Not despair. Not sitting down to wait for death. Not curling up and crying into the dark. No—Lili worked, and she worked with a quiet cheerfulness that baffled him. Each morning her body rose, stiff and sore, and went out again. Bruce felt it in her breathing, in her muscles, in the swing of her stride. He could not see it, but he could feel her gathering things—bending, reaching, lifting, cutting.
Berries came first. He learned their season by taste alone, sweetness and sharpness passing into her blood. Firewood followed—harder work, heavier, rough enough to make her shoulders ache and her lungs burn. Eggs arrived daily, warm and steady, gathered from the hens who clucked their opinions like a council that never adjourned.
Sometimes there was frustration. Sharp movements. A muttered curse in a language Bruce did not understand at all—old words, rolling and heavy, tasting of stone and snow.
When she tried spear fishing, Bruce knew immediately that it was going badly.
There was splashing. Sudden lunges. The sting of cold water against her legs, followed by humiliation and laughter and more curses. No triumphant stillness followed—no heavy satisfaction of success. Just stubborn repetition until she gave up and went back to gathering things she could actually catch.
Mostly, she gathered.
Plants. Mushrooms—carefully now, learning which ones hurt and which ones fed. Reeds. Fibers. Stones. Bruce felt her sit for long stretches, hands busy, fingers twisting and pulling plant fibers into cord. Rope, he realized dimly. She made tools next—stone struck against stone, the vibration echoing through her arms and into him. Crude things. Ugly things.
But they worked.
She cut small trees.
That surprised him.
Not big ones—not hero trees—but young, thin trunks that yielded to patience. She dragged them back one by one and used them to brace the cottage walls, to close gaps where the wind had been too friendly. She built a bed eventually—Bruce felt the difference the first night she slept on it. Logs laid side by side. Grass piled thick. A pillow shaped by hand.
It was not comfort.
But it was intent made solid.
The chickens got their own place too.
Bruce liked that part.
He learned the rooster by sound alone—loud, arrogant, convinced of his importance. The hens were calmer, steadier, and far more useful. They scratched, hunted insects, laid eggs, complained loudly, and followed Lili as if she were part of their strange flock. Her laughter came back when she spoke to them, even if Bruce did not understand the words.
Sometimes—rarely—another presence entered the forest.
Rob.
Bruce recognized him by weight and rhythm before voice. When Rob came, the world felt safer and more complicated at the same time. He brought small things—bread, cheese, milk, a bucket, wooden plates, spoons, bits of cloth. Warmth that was not fire. He showed her things too: how to stack stones into a fish trap that actually worked, how to fence the garden so the chickens did not eat tomorrow's food today, how to brace a door so it remembered how to be a door.
Rob never stayed long.
He came, helped, talked too much, and left again, carrying his worry back toward civilization. Bruce felt Lili's mixed emotions each time—gratitude, relief, guilt, something like sadness she never named.
When she was alone, she hummed.
When she was tired, she cursed.
When she was afraid, she worked harder.
Bruce listened to all of it, confused by the languages, confused by the world, impressed beyond words. He trained as she trained, doing what he could inside his small dark ocean. But he noticed something strange: no matter how hard he worked, his body did not grow the way his old one had.
He did not feel big.
He felt light.
Small.
Compact.
Something was off.
He did not know what it meant yet.
Summer passed. Autumn followed. The tastes changed. The work grew heavier. The fire burned longer. The nights stretched. Bruce felt cold creep closer to his mother's bones, felt her wrap herself tighter, felt her prepare without knowing she was preparing.
Then the wind changed.
One night it rose howling, rattling the cottage, driving snow against the walls like thrown sand. Bruce heard it before he felt it—real snow, piling and pressing. The fire crackled harder. Lili fed it everything she dared. The chickens huddled. The world narrowed to one room, one flame, one woman breathing through pain and cold.
And then—
Something changed.
Bruce felt it first as pressure. A tightening. A wrongness where there had always been water and space. Warmth rushed past him—not comfort this time, but movement. The world began to push.
"Oh," Bruce thought dimly.
"Oh shit."
He did not know anatomy. He did not know birth. He did not know what was supposed to happen.
But something deeper than knowledge understood this much:
This was it.
The walls that had held him were opening. The water that had carried him was leaving. Light—real light—pressed in from somewhere ahead. His body felt strange, wrong in a way it never had before. Smaller than expected. Lighter. Different.
He realized then, with sudden clarity, that he was not built like he had been before.
He was not a big baby.
He was not a boy at all.
He was small.
Very small.
Perfectly, dangerously small.
Lili screamed—once, sharp and raw—and Bruce felt himself pushed forward, the world narrowing into urgency and heat and pain that was not his but was close enough to drown him in it.
Instinct took over.
He did not resist.
He dived.
Arms first, like a swimmer breaking the surface. Like a professional diver committing to the jump. The motion felt right, like something he had trained for without knowing why. The light flared around him—not in power, but in guidance—just enough to smooth the passage, just enough to help.
Outside, snow beat against the cottage.
Inside, alone, Lili fought and bled and did not give up.
And Bruce—no longer Bruce, not quite yet—came rushing out of the dark toward the light, ready or not, into a world that would finally see him.