Chapter Text
It’s supposed to be a normal day.
A stable day.
A “look how well Victor is doing now” day.
My sister asks if I want to go downtown with her—coffee, errands, a little bookstore she likes. I say yes because that’s what someone recovering is supposed to do.
I don’t think.
I don’t feel.
I just go.
We walk into the bookstore at sunset, warm light spilling across creaking wooden floors. The bell above the door jingles. My sister wanders toward the mystery section, leaving me by the front table of new releases.
Everything is ordinary.
Perfectly, painfully ordinary.
Until it isn’t.
Because then I see her.
She’s kneeling in front of a bottom shelf, sliding books into place, her hair falling in a soft wave over her shoulder.
At first, my brain doesn’t process it.
It can’t.
It thinks: That’s a girl working at a bookstore.
It thinks: Nice hair.
It thinks: Move on.
But then she looks up.
And the world drops out from under me.
Her eyes.
Blue.
Not just blue—the blue.
The impossible blue.
The blue that glowed in a world painted red.
The blue that found me every morning in the grove.
Her face.
Her mouth.
The shape of her jaw.
It’s her.
It’s Nova.
My breath stops entirely.
She stands slowly, wiping her hands on her apron. The movement is so familiar my chest aches—because I’ve seen her do it a thousand times in the dream-world she’s not supposed to exist in.
She turns fully toward me.
And she smiles politely.
“Hi,” she says. “Do you need help finding anything?”
Her voice—
Her voice.
It’s identical.
The same pitch.
The same softness.
The same slight upward lilt at the end.
My knees almost buckle.
I grab the edge of the nearest table to steady myself because the room tilts sharply—bookshelves bending, light warping, my pulse thunderous in my ears.
Her smile fades a little. “Are you… okay?”
No.
No, I’m not okay.
I’m seeing a ghost.
A hallucination.
A dream made flesh.
A promise I broke standing three feet away from me in jeans and a bookstore apron.
Except she’s not a ghost.
She’s solid.
Real.
Breathing.
Nova.
Nova.
I try to speak.
Nothing comes out.
I try again.
Still nothing.
She steps closer, eyes filled with genuine concern, not dream-concern, not symbolic-concern—
real, tangible, human concern.
“Do you need a chair? You look a little pale.”
Her voice hits me again—soft, warm, achingly familiar—and my vision blurs.
“Oh my god,” she says, reaching out a hand, “you’re going to pass out.”
I nearly do.
The floor sways under me, and I grip the table harder, fighting against the urge to collapse to my knees.
Nova touches my arm lightly.
A grounding, gentle touch.
Exactly how she used to touch me in the dream-world.
Exactly.
Heat rushes through me, dizzying.
I choke out a breath that breaks on the way up.
“Victor?”
My sister’s voice suddenly cuts through the haze. She appears beside me with a worried frown. “Are you okay?”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
Because all I can do is stare at the girl in front of me—the girl from the red world, the girl who cried when I left, the girl who begged me to come back—
Standing in a bookstore like she didn’t just shatter the laws of my sanity.
“Do you need water?” Nova asks.
Her voice trembles slightly—concern, not recognition.
She doesn’t know me.
She has no idea she held me in her arms while a world collapsed.
No idea she kissed me like she was saving me.
No idea she whispered my name like a prayer.
But she’s here.
Real.
Alive.
And I feel my heart slam against my ribs as if trying to break free.
Because everything I thought I’d let go of—
everything I’d buried,
everything I’d accepted as hallucination—
comes roaring back in an instant.
And it hits me with absolute certainty:
She wasn’t a dream.
She exists.
And she’s standing right in front of me.