I woke up gasping, my chest heaving as if I'd just clawed my way to the surface of a deep, dark ocean. My heart was pounding, a frantic drumbeat against my ribs, and my skin was cold, clammy with a phantom sweat. The remnants of a memory, a nightmare, clung to me like a second skin.
The room was quiet. Too quiet.
My senses, sharpened by the unsettling terror of the memory, registered the sterile silence. The constant, monotonous beeping of the heart monitor was gone. The rhythmic blinking of the IV pump was absent. No nurse was rustling through charts. There were no hushed conversations from the hallway. Just me. Alone. In a hospital bed, breathing hard, the only sound the violent thrum of my own pulse.
My fingers, thin and weak from months of disuse, dug into the sheets as I tried to make sense of what I had just seen—not a dream, but a memory. A conversation.
It had started in darkness. An absolute, total blackness that stretched into infinity, a stage with no spotlight, no audience, no life. It was a place of endings, a void between what was and what would be.
Then, a flicker of light, and a boy stepped forward from the shadows.
His face…
It was mine. Or rather, this body's. Elias Vale. The boy who had been in the car crash. He looked fragile. He was little more than a whisper of a person, hollowed out by pain and fear. But behind those tired eyes, the ones that were now my own, was something deeper. Something sharp, a sliver of broken glass that still managed to reflect light.
"You're not me," he said softly, his voice echoing through the endless void, devoid of anger or accusation, only a profound sense of resignation.
"No," I whispered, the word a simple, honest truth. "I'm not." My own voice felt strange and foreign in this body. I was an actor without a script, a ghost in someone else's play.
"But you're the only one who can finish what I could not do." The boy's voice cracked with a grief so profound it seemed to shake the darkness itself.
I stared at him—the original Elias Vale. The boy whose life I now wore. His posture was slumped, the weight of a secret too heavy to bear.
"They said it was an accident," he said, his body trembling, a faint, visible tremor that betrayed his inner torment. "The news, the police… everyone. But it wasn't. They killed her. And they killed me."
"Who?" I asked, a single word that carried the full weight of my confusion and the beginning of a cold, dreadful understanding.
"I couldn't find out. I was too weak… too broken. I tried. But they took everything. My voice, my hope… even my will to live. But you… you still have a fire in your eyes. A fire that remembers what it's like to have everything stolen."
He stepped forward, the shadows swirling around him like a curtain ready to fall, ready to take him away for good.
"This timeline is different. Here… my sister became my mother. The roles have changed, but the truth remains the same. The same powerful men are pulling the strings. The same lies are being told to the public. They simply changed the play, not the actors. And in this play… you are the lead."
"Why me?" I asked, my voice a broken plea. "Why did you choose me?"
"Because you already lost everything once. Because you know what it's like to be unheard. Unseen. Because this world won't believe the truth—not unless someone acts it out. Not unless someone brings the house down around them." He looked up at me, his hollowed eyes locking with my own, and the raw, desperate hope in them was staggering.
"You were reborn in my body for a reason. So promise me." He reached out a ghostly hand. "Promise me you'll finish the scene. Promise me you'll make them clap for the truth."
I met his eyes. My voice cracked as I spoke. It felt like I was suffocating, as if all the air in the void had been stolen from me and replaced with the weight of a sacred vow.
I muttered with a low, hoarse voice. "I-I promise."
The sudden, sharp knock on the door jolted me fully awake. My heart was still hammering, but the memory was gone, replaced by the sterile reality of the hospital room.
It was Aunt Mira.
"Time to go, kid." Her voice was flat, without emotion, but her eyes, when they met mine, held a flicker of something close to relief. She was a woman who guarded her emotions like state secrets.
I sat up slowly, the muscles in my core protesting the sudden movement. I rubbed the last of the nightmare from my eyes, the weight in my chest feeling heavier than the exhaustion in my limbs.
Eva was already dressed, her small backpack slung over one shoulder, her wide eyes watching me with a quiet intensity. She gave me a shy smile—tired, but real. A genuine expression of relief that I was awake and moving. We left the hospital that day, walking out into the blinding sunlight for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.
Aunt Mira lived in a sleek, minimalist penthouse high above the city. The entire apartment was modern, clean, and utterly cold, a reflection of her personality. There were no cozy blankets, no family photos on the walls, nothing that hinted at a life lived with warmth. But it was safe. It was immaculate. It was stable.
She didn't hover. Didn't ask questions she didn't want the answers to. She treated me as a problem to be managed, not a child to be nurtured.
"I'm not a mother," she said bluntly the first night, setting two mugs of hot chocolate on the cold, glass coffee table. "But I'll keep you two alive. That's all I can promise." that is as much I can do for my best friend.
It was more than I expected. More than anyone had offered me in a long, long time.
Eva and I shared a room for now. It looked like she was still scared that I would go away and leave her behind. She always fell asleep first, curled into a tight ball under the heavy duvet, her breathing slow and even. I stayed up, staring at the ceiling, at the constellations of recessed lighting in the white plaster, my mind a churning ocean of questions and promises. The dream still haunted me. The boy's words repeated in my mind, a mantra of revenge.
Therapy started the next week.
Dr. Linh was patient. Too patient. Always smiling, her professional veneer of concern never cracking as she wrote in her notebook. She was a professional listener, but I knew she wasn't truly hearing.
"So, Eli… do you remember the car crash or anything related to the accident?"
I shook my head. I didn't lie—not exactly. My own memories of the "accident" were hazy at best, buried under the overwhelming memories of this new body. I was telling a technical truth, one the world could understand. But I wasn't telling the full truth either. The truth about the dream, about the boy who gave me his life, about the mission he gave me.
Some wounds were better hidden. Especially when no one believed the truth anyway. I had learned that lesson the hard way in my past life.
Two weeks passed, an endless blur of quiet routine.
I visited Mom's grave.
Aunt Mira drove us in silence, her hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel, her face a blank mask. Eva, silent and small, carried a small bouquet of white lilies. I didn't carry anything. I didn't feel like I had the right to. I hadn't known her. Not really.
The grave was simple, a plain stone marker in a vast field of them.
Celestine Vale A star that never faded
Eva knelt and cried, her shoulders shaking, the sound of her grief the only thing that broke the oppressive silence.
I stared at the name, at the cold stone, and said nothing. I didn't feel the grief. I didn't have the memories to feel it. But I felt the cold, hard weight of responsibility. I felt a duty to the boy who had died for this moment.
Because I knew. My head was clearer now than it had ever been.
The brakes didn't fail.
The car didn't slide.
Someone made it happen. Someone had orchestrated the entire thing. This was no tragic accident. This was murder.
One afternoon, I found an old tablet tucked into one of Mom's locked drawers. Aunt Mira must've missed it. Buried beneath old awards, letters, and a worn script from one of her old plays.
I hacked it. I was good with passwords. My mind, even in this new body, felt sharp and capable of processing data in a way that defied explanation.
"Your hands were trained for the stage… but now they write in code."
[New Skill Acquired: Subversive Scriptwriter]