West London, June 2017. 00:45 blinked in watery blue over the coffee machine. The room smelled of chili vinegar and warm oil. Most of the city slept—just not the five American tourists the owner hadn't had the heart to throw out.
The owner—an older Indian gentleman with kind eyes—had stacked chairs and rolled the shutter halfway down. A crooked WE'RE CLOSED sign clung to the door. He should've sent them away two hours ago, but the big man in black had pushed his sunglasses down and calmly announced, "No. I'm finishing the hot-wing challenge." It sounded like a threat, even if he didn't mean it. Out of old habit the owner ducked behind the counter where a chef's knife lived for rough closes.
Before panic could grow teeth, the slightly smaller American, Frank, lifted his hands and, in careful Malayalam, offered an apology and a formal greeting. He explained the big one—Bruce—was harmless, "a special person," not dangerous at all. He even introduced the owner to his wife and two children. The owner blinked, recalibrated, and smiled. Shaken but amused, he let the night drag on.
Now the sounds of battle rang through the shop as two fair-skinned American kids fenced with plastic swords. Emma, six—red-haired, tartan skirt, war paint, and a toy greatsword—faced her brother Ben, seven—blond, cardboard visor, plastic sword and shield. Thanks to Uncle Bruce, they shouted video-game lines like oaths.
"Surrender or die!" Ben cried.
"Your money or your life!" Emma shot back.
"For honor and glory—die!" Ben charged.
Emma roared at the ceiling and met him, yelling, "It's harvesting season!"
Their blades thunked harmlessly. At the table, Sarah watched with a small crease of worry. "Frank, are you sure they're okay? They seem a little too passionate about fighting each other."
"They're fine," Frank said, laughing around a hot wing. "I made them promise—no hard hits and never the face."
Sarah still wasn't convinced. Bruce, on the other hand, frowned at the last few wings. Sweat beaded on his shining bald head; his mouth and hands were a mess.
Frank finished his last wing, pushed his tray aside, and leaned in for a kiss. Sarah's ocean-blue eyes flicked once; her platinum hair shifted as she raised a pink handkerchief like a tiny shield.
"No hot lips, soldier. Not tonight. Maybe later."
"Brutal," Frank said, amused. He took a pull of milk and started cleaning up anyway, still angling for that kiss.
The kids, seeing the look on their father's face, made their objections known. "Ew, ew, ew—no kissing, Dad! That's yucky!" they chorused, scandalized.
Bruce glanced from Frank to Sarah, who was looking out the window, and said nothing. He agreed with the kids. Kissing seemed weird—something people did in movies that left them out of breath. Blocking your airway was bad for living and for lifting heavy weights. Also: unhygienic. These days even first-aid courses said not to blow air into a stranger's mouth; it wasn't helpful and could spread bacteria.
For a moment he drifted, lost in his head. To refocus on the task—eating—he pushed his sunglasses up his egg-shaped head, then settled them back in place. He sat alone now that Frank had slid in beside Sarah; better this way, more room for a body like his in a booth already a size too small. He was over two meters tall—"six-seven" in American—and his shoulders made the seams of his black coat complain whenever he shifted. He had no eyebrows; he'd singed them off years ago doing a stupidly heroic thing with a burning car and a trapped pet rat. Partly because of that, and mostly because he thought sunglasses were cool, he wore them always—even to sleep. They made him feel brave. Besides, in movies nobody laughed at people who wore shades indoors, especially if they looked like the Terminator.
He lifted a wing and studied it as if it had just powered down his computer mid-game. The booth groaned. He took a cautious bite—and it answered with hellfire.
Tears pricked. He wanted to say he couldn't do it, but Frank, seeing the trouble, shook a fist and said, "You can do this, man—just believe in yourself."
Bruce tried to keep a flat, cool face—because that's what superheroes did, except Peter Parker, who sometimes cried (which was okay, because sometimes Peter Parker was cool and brave and didn't cry unless it mattered). Thinking of The Matrix, he slipped into the movie-quote cadence his voice found whenever nerves frayed and words got hard.
"There is no… s-s-spice. It is not the s-spice that burns—o-only myself."
The kids, practicing spinning and jumping attacks like in the movies, suddenly stopped and pointed, howling with laughter. "Look, Dad—Uncle Bruce is quoting again!"
Bruce smiled, glad they were having fun, and—because the spice hurt—broke into his stiff-armed robot dance. Shoulders clanked, wrists flicked, elbows ticked in little squares while he kept eating. The kids laughed harder. Sarah giggled. Frank grinned. The pain eased.
Behind the counter, the owner murmured, "Crazy Americans," smiling in his half-sleep.
Bruce smiled back through the heat and kept going, his sunglasses doing their best to hide the watery eyes. And then his thoughts did what they always did: ran off a cliff, into the dumpster behind his brain, rummaging for answers to questions no one ever seemed to answer.
While the kissing thing disturbed him, it also made him think—about women. Why did Sarah sometimes want to kiss Frank, and Frank want to kiss Sarah? And why had Amber tried to kiss him that one time? The whole business was confusing, but women most of all—women were the loudest, strangest mystery in the world.
He still didn't really understand why women were as they were. Why did Sarah "poop out" children, as he once phrased it, and men didn't? How were babies actually made?
He remembered, long ago, sitting in health class. The teacher had said women had eggs, and immediately he'd pictured chickens—lines of eggs trundling down conveyor belts in a factory. There had been diagrams, arrows everywhere, and some very questionable pictures he'd refused to look at no matter how much the teacher insisted it wasn't sexual, just biology. He'd barely passed the class.
Now, thinking of it again, his brain circled back to chickens—as it always did. Chickens laid eggs, sure. But Sarah didn't lay eggs; she carried them inside her. Yet somehow only one baby grew there, not hundreds of thousands, even though the teacher had said women had millions of eggs.
It was all very strange. How did Sarah and Frank do it? And if there really were hundreds of thousands of eggs, where did all the extra kids go? Did they dissolve? Turn into ghosts? Could an egg be angry?
Did Sarah eat them, the way he ate chicken eggs for protein before lifting at the gym?
He'd once asked Frank about all this—dead serious—and had even tried to be discreet about it. But Frank had only laughed so hard he never answered. It hadn't been a joke.
The wood under Bruce's mass complained. He wasn't fat; he was big—hours of gym work layered on top of the bones God had issued him. Sarah, by contrast, was light. He could probably curl her with one arm, which always struck him as odd because to him she felt more formidable than her weight suggested.
He liked being big, mostly. It helped you carry things. It helped you protect things. Once he'd hoped that if he got big and muscular, people would stop laughing at his odd features and look at him the way they looked at bodybuilders—some mixture of awe and approval. Instead, strangers just stepped aside or crossed the street at night. Big didn't win friends or smiles; it made people wary, as if he were dangerous.
He finished another hot wing, took a long drink of milk, and set the glass down. The next wing stared back like it had insulted his level-79 gnome warrior, HappyMan, who still hadn't hit max because the game kept raising the cap. That was fine. He liked challenges—this one included.
Across from him, Sarah watched. She had a soft, heart-shaped face, a delicate nose, faint color in her cheeks, slim brows, and bright blue eyes that made you feel seen. With the platinum hair, she looked like a heroine drawn in clean, generous lines. She leaned in and, in one smooth maternal motion, dabbed a streak of sauce from the corner of his mouth with a pink handkerchief.
"There you go, Bruce."
Warmth lived in her voice. As she settled back, the low neckline of her cream polka-dot dress shifted; pregnancy had given her a fuller, softly buoyant shape, and the light glanced along the clean line of her cleavage before Bruce looked away. Staring was rude. Mostly he just felt impressed—the way someone might be impressed by an athlete's balance or a sculpture's form. Clothes could do little to hide her curves; the dress wasn't even trying.
Breasts, to Bruce, were a puzzle. At the gym, a bigger chest on a man usually meant bigger numbers on the bench. By that logic, Sarah's chest—larger than his own pecs and most melons at the supermarket—ought to translate into outrageous pressing strength. Yet she didn't bench much. She preferred the spring and control of gymnastics, the thing she'd loved as a kid. And it wasn't just Sarah: most women he saw skipped heavy bench altogether. Bruce decided—wrongly, probably—that maybe size and power matched differently for women, or that they were simply more polite about showing off.
Could women flex their breasts like pecs? Why were they soft and bouncy when men's weren't unless the man was fat? Why did women make milk and men didn't? Questions spawned in his head like quest markers when you enter a new town. Like in games, he ignored most of them before his brain overheated.
For simplicity he filed it under: Unknown means danger.
And from experience he knew that making women angry was very dangerous.
Then, suddenly, Ben roared like a tiny Viking berserker.
"I'll tear you limb from limb!" he shouted, charging after his screaming sister.
Emma darted under the table and squawked, "No! I have no more coins to bleed! Please, Uncle Bruce—let your leg be my shield! It's my only hope!"
Under the table, she wrapped herself around Bruce's legs as Ben crawled after her, plastic sword smacking again and again into pure muscle. Emma retaliated with wild swings of her greatsword while Ben blocked every strike with his shield, both laughing and shouting in a blur of clattering plastic and heroic nonsense.
Bruce just kept eating, chewing thoughtfully as the mock battle raged around him. When Emma popped up to hide behind his left arm and Ben advanced on the right, their toy blades crossed directly in front of his face. He blinked as another sword bounced off his cheek and muttered, deadpan,
"There is no spice. It is not the spice that burns—only myself… and the plastic swords that hurt."
Sarah started to rise to intervene, but Frank held up a hand.
"It's fine," he said with a grin. "Bruce has got this."
Sarah sighed, face-palmed, and sank back down—half embarrassed, half amused.
Eventually the kids tired. Ben gave one last gallant whisper: "Your money or your life!"
Emma, trying to keep a warrior face through giggles, replied, "I'll drink from your skull!"
But the fight dissolved into laughter and yawns.
They clambered onto the bench beside Bruce—he'd conquered all but one wing—and nestled against him: Emma to his left, Ben to his right.
Soon the swords dangled forgotten. Two small heads leaned into him as if he were a mountain made of warmth. Bruce sat very still, careful not to disturb them. The kids were mysteries to him too—tiny once, now school-big—but good mysteries that filled his chest instead of confusing it. They'd once fit almost in his palms. Now they were two of his best friends… maybe his only ones besides Frank and Sarah—and, of course, his girlfriend, Amber.
His phone buzzed. Little shopping-cart icons paraded across the screen—another order from Amber back in the United States; then another, rush shipping. He flipped the phone face-down and slid it under a Bodiam Castle brochure.
Years ago, on a blue-uniform shift, he'd found Amber sleeping rough. She'd made a strange proposal: she would be his "girlfriend" if she could live with him, or for twenty dollars. He took girlfriend literally—girl + friend—and because he had almost no one besides Frank and the family, he said yes (and he didn't have twenty dollars anyway). He took her home and gave her the bed, the bank login, and the quiet of the house so she could sleep. It went fine until she tried to kiss him and he said, "Ew, that's gross, Amber. Please don't suffocate me, and besides I don't want your germs." She'd gotten very angry and banished him to the couch forever after. Helping people like Amber still felt right, even if it made him more financially poor and his back stiff. Understanding just wasn't his strongest stat.
"One left," Ben announced sleepily, apparently keeping count the whole time. He held up two fingers, squinted, then folded one down—accidentally flashing the middle finger. Sarah flinched. "No, Ben, that's rude." He realized his mistake and mumbled an apology.
"Finish line, big guy," Frank said, grinning. "You got this. Do it for the kids."
Emma tried to look serious and failed. "If he poops his pants, we only laugh a tiny bit, okay, Ben?"
Ben nodded, already smiling.
"Oh, and Bruce—chew properly, mouth closed, and remember to finish your milk," Sarah said, tapping the corner of her mouth.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, cheerful even while it burned.
Bruce eyed the last hot wing, then let his gaze drift over the table: castle leaflets, London posters, a dog-eared guide to Anglo-Norman towers. Happiness pressed warm against his ribs. At long last he was here, in Britain, with the people who mattered most.
Before this, the medieval world lived only in movies and in games like Medieval II: Total War, where he always chose England and stacked longbows. His favorite tactic was to box the archers in with peasants. It never stopped cavalry or catapult stones, but it felt right—peasants were cheap and deserved a job. Longbows didn't judge; they just shot the enemy in front of them. That was nice, because he wasn't very good at games.
"For castles and for peasants," he thought, lifting the final wing. He bit, he chewed. He would finish this, at least—one small success.
Then the night flickered wrong at the edge of his sunglasses. The half-eaten wing dropped; his palm found the glass. Past his reflection, under the Westway's ribcage, a tower block hunched against the dark—most windows dead, a few stubborn squares of light. On a fourth-floor window, a new color rose: not lamp-yellow or fridge-white, but a thin, unnatural orange—the kind that doesn't belong inside any home. It pulsed once, testing lungs, then widened like a spark taking.
His body stood before his brain finished the thought. The kids blinked awake; the others followed his stare.
He shook loose every note from his wallet—crisp pounds, maybe a thousand saved for fish-and-chips and castle tickets—and slid the stack under the salt cellar. "I'm s-sorry," he said. "I have to go."
The table's joy switched off like a light. Ben's shield clattered to the floor as Bruce slid past. Emma's plastic greatsword drooped against the empty seat where he'd been.
Frank followed the line of sight. Nearly a kilometer of sleeping city lay between them and that fourth-floor window, but once you saw it you couldn't unsee it: the wrong orange eating the dark. "Call 999," he told the owner, already moving. "That tower. Fourth floor."
The owner came fully awake, looked, and didn't argue. "Yes," he said, phone to ear, voice suddenly careful. "Fourth floor—fire."
At the door, Bruce pinched the crooked bell so it wouldn't jangle. He looked back at Sarah and the kids. "I'm going to see if they're all right over there," he said. "I don't want to leave anyone's fate to chance."
Ben, standing on the booth cushion, called, "But why? Why do you have to go?"
"Because it's the right thing to do," Bruce said, without hesitation.
He stepped out. Behind him, Sarah called, "Bruce—be careful."
Her hand had found the small swell beneath her dress before she knew it. She moved after Frank, who was already pushing for the door. Next to him, she looked almost pocket-sized—barely 156 centimetres tall, her head coming to his chest even in her little sandals. Frank, built like the captain he'd once been, carried the same air of control and readiness Bruce did, only in a tighter, more disciplined frame. Where Bruce was a storm built from bulk and instinct, Frank was the clean line of a soldier honed by training. They looked, for a heartbeat, like two different versions of strength about to run into danger.
Frank stopped long enough to kiss her—spicy lips and all—quick and sure. "Back to the hotel," he said. "And if you have to come, stay behind the tape, okay?"
Emma ran in for a hug, nearly as tall as her mother's shoulder now. "Are you going to make sure Uncle Bruce doesn't burn himself again?"
Frank laughed, and Ben joined in—his blond head almost level with Sarah's chin. Frank hauled them both in for a fast, crushing squeeze that made the three of them vanish against him like a cluster of small birds around a tree trunk. "Don't worry about us," he said. "Guard your mom, brave warriors, and stay strong. I'll bring your uncle back."
Emma hiccup-laughed. Ben straightened like a very small soldier.
Frank shoved through the doors into the warm night. T-shirt, shorts, running shoes—not fire gear, but it would have to do.
Outside, Bruce was already moving. Beside him, Frank lengthened into stride—two tall silhouettes cutting through the lamplight. Bruce, massive and broad-shouldered, stood a head taller even than Frank, moving with that lumbering purpose of someone built for lifting, not sprinting. Frank matched him, lighter on his feet, stride clean and military. Between them, the difference was size versus precision: a tank and a spear.
At that pace, they'd reach the tower soon.
"Let's do what we can," Frank said through panting breaths. "And no crazy heroics this time, okay?"
"Y-yeah," Bruce managed. "I'll try."
They ran under the Westway, feet drumming dry asphalt, breath falling into rhythm—past shuttered shops, damp brick, and the faint after-smell of sleeping diesel. Behind them, the chalkboard clock ticked to 00:48, and the owner's voice carried steady through the receiver: "Yes, that's correct—the fourth floor. I can see it now. Two Americans heading there to help."
Ahead, the thin orange grew teeth—an electrical pop, then a hungry flare along the frame.
"Don't be a movie hero," Frank added, eyes forward. "You're not Neo. You can't dodge bullets or tank fire like a game character."
"I know," Bruce said, still running. "I'm not N-Neo. Just… trying to be useful."
Frank didn't argue. The serious part of him had the wheel now, already flipping through procedures for evacuating a tower block at night.
Bruce's hands opened and closed as he ran, priming to knock, to carry, to calm—whatever the next minute demanded. He thought about being brave in the only way he understood: make it easier for other people to live.
They went—together—toward the wrong orange.