adbindia Chapter 417: Home Was Him
Chapter 417: Home Was Him
Her chest constricted painfully as memories crashed through her mind all at once.
His voice. His calm smile. The way he looked at her when she missed him. The way he always held her hand without thinking.
The way he promised her they would leave the labyrinth together. Their wedding. God...
Their wedding was in days. Days... Her dress was already finished.
She had tried it on three nights ago in secret because she wanted to see his face when he first saw her wearing it.
Now the thought hit her so hard she nearly choked. What was she supposed to do with a wedding dress if the groom never woke up?
She had spent months imagining it. Wedding him, standing beside him, seeing him waiting for her. His hand in hers. Their future. Children. A home. Growing old together.
And now he was sitting in front of her like this...
Silent. Cold. Gone?
"No... this shouldn’t be happening."
The words cracked apart as tears spilled down her face.
"You can’t do this to me..."
Her breathing turned ragged.
Her fingers had gone numb. She barely noticed when her nails dug hard enough into her palms to draw blood. Her body was shaking so badly she could not make it stop.
How was she supposed to live without him? How?
Bruce wasn’t just someone she loved.
He was woven into every part of her life so deeply she couldn’t even imagine a future that didn’t have him in it.
Who would she wake up beside? Who would tease her when she overworked herself?
Who would calmly pull her back whenever she lost control?
Who would hold her when the nightmares came?
Who would look at her like she mattered more than the world itself?
Her knees weakened.
"Bruce..."
This time his name came out like a plea.
Desperate. Broken. She finally grabbed his shoulders.
"Bruce, wake up..."
Nothing.
Her panic worsened instantly. Her hands moved frantically to his neck again. No pulse.
Her own heartbeat thundered so loudly she could barely think.
"He’s dead."
The thought appeared suddenly. Brutally. And once it appeared, she couldn’t stop it.
"He died in front of me."
A strangled sound escaped her throat.
"No!"
Tears streamed endlessly now.
"You promised me..."
Her voice shook violently.
"You promised you’d be safe..."
She pressed her forehead against his shoulder, clutching him tightly now as if refusing to let him disappear.
Her entire body trembled.
"I don’t know how to do this without you..."
And that was the truth that terrified her most.
Not the labyrinth. Not death. Not loneliness.
It was the horrifying realization that somewhere along the way, Bruce had become home to her.
And if he was truly gone...
Then Sophie no longer knew where home was anymore.
"No, there’s no way my Bruce will die so easily. He’ll come back. He’ll come back to me. I just need to have faith and be patient..." She wiped her eyes and said, stilling her heart.
Her aura flared without her instruction, sweeping the chamber in a sharp involuntary pulse. The labyrinth registered her panic. Somewhere far away, three beasts rose from rest.
"Bruce," she said again, and her voice cracked on the second syllable.
She prayed, to anything, to whatever existed, that he was still alive somewhere. That he had simply gone where he meant to go. That she was watching the visible part of an invisible journey, and not a corpse.
A voice answered her.
The voice arrived inside her mind, calm and full and unhurried, the way certain rare presences spoke when they wished not to be mistaken. It carried the texture of authority she had grown to recognize over the past years, vast, patient, tolerant of small mortal panics.
The voice did not sound worried. That frightened her almost as much as Bruce’s stillness had. It spoke with the calm certainty of something for whom death, souls, and separation were ordinary things.
Sophie sat back on her heels. The breath she had not realized she was holding came out of her in one long shudder.
She nodded, slowly, into the empty chamber.
"Thank you, Vaelith," she murmured.
She did not see her mistake. The voice did not correct her.
It was not Vaelith that spoke. Vaelith, in fact, had no idea. The matter of soul departure and metabolic pause was not within Vaelith’s working knowledge, and Vaelith was at this moment somewhere else in Bruce’s interior architecture, attending to other things. The system link between them was thinned when Bruce’s soul left his body, so it just thought that Bruce was keeping secrets again... Even part of its consciousness linked to Bruce’s system was yet to know that Bruce had stopped breathing.
Anyways, it was Akashic who had spoken. Akashic, who had decided, for reasons of its own, not to identify itself; who let Sophie attribute the comfort to the presence she trusted most, because the comfort would land more cleanly that way.
Sophie placed one hand gently on Bruce’s still chest. She could feel no heartbeat. She had been told she would not. She let her hand stay there anyway, for her own sake more than his.
"Come back," she said quietly, to the man she could not currently reach. "Whenever you’re ready. Just come back."
She remembered him half-asleep one morning, pulling her back into bed because she had tried to leave early for training.
"Five more minutes," he had murmured against her shoulder, feeling her warmth.
At the time she had rolled her eyes. Now she would have traded anything in existence for another five minutes.
"Bruce, come back, please."
The mist on the other side of nothing surrounded him, and he did not hear her, and the labyrinth around them both was very, very quiet.