Schiller's thoughts drifted back into Novie's mindscape. As he stood outside the door, he could clearly see the chaotic tangle of thoughts gradually losing their color. Not because Novie had given up thinking, but because she was approaching death.
Yet amid those fading shades of gray and white, one color grew especially vivid. It was a bright, crystalline blue, like glaciers, like the sea. It was the color of Bruce's eyes.
At the final moment of her life, Novie finally understood what the look in Bruce's eyes had meant when he watched her. He wanted to save her. Of everyone in her brief and painful life, he was the one who had wanted to save her most.
But he was about to fail. At the brink of death, people could always summon wisdom far beyond their years. Novie realized that she was about to die. No matter what Bruce still intended to do, no matter how badly he wanted to save her, he could never succeed.
From the moment she had entered his life to the moment she vanished from it, she had not left him with a single good impression. All she had brought him was frustration. After the storm, there was no clearing sky, no happy ending from a family film—only a tragedy from start to finish.
Following those oceanic threads and looking out over Bruce Wayne's entire life, tragedies came rolling in like waves. Disasters enough to destroy an ordinary person's whole life were merely the everyday Tides of his own. She should not have let herself become one of them, but she was truly too tired.
If death was destined to come, then at the very least, she wanted the person who had tried to save her to know that he had already done enough. Death