For the longest time, he felt like he was drifting through someone else's dream.
It was warm, familiar, and strangely distant—like watching a movie through frosted glass. In this dream, a boy grew up in a modest home filled with love. His parents were kind, hardworking people. His mother taught literature at Edge High School, and his father coached the school's gym classes. They weren't wealthy, but they had two incomes, and that made life manageable. The fridge was never empty. The lights always stayed on.
Then came the second child.
Not the one he'd been watching through the dream's lens, but another—quiet, thoughtful, and endlessly curious. He devoured books like they were lifelines, reading anything he could get his hands on. He didn't speak much, but he listened deeply. And he wasn't alone.
He had friends—three, to be exact.
One was just like him: quiet, observant, always thinking. Another was a science prodigy, the kind who could build circuits from scrap and explain quantum theory before lunch. The third wasn't particularly bright, but his father was rich, and he had a charm that made girls laugh and teachers forgive late homework.
Together, they made a strange but loyal circle. They shared comic books, secrets, and dreams of escaping the small town someday. But the boy—the quiet one—always felt like he was being watched. Like someone else was living through him, silently, from the shadows of a forgotten life.
And that someone was him.
The dream wasn't his. The warmth, the books, the friendships—they belonged to someone else. He was just a witness. A ghost in the margins.
And one day, he woke up.
He woke up in a world that didn't feel like his own.
The sky was still blue. The streets still buzzed with life. People rushed past with earbuds in, eyes locked on glowing screens. On the surface, everything looked familiar. But something beneath it all felt... off. Subtle. Hollow.
It wasn't the people. It wasn't the place. It was the silence.
No one talked about the things he remembered hearing—those strange, half-believed conversations from his past life. Whispers about alien invasions, time travel, gods walking among men. Not as fiction, but as if they were real. As if they were coming. As if the world was waiting for something extraordinary to begin.
He didn't know where those ideas came from. Maybe from overheard debates in crowded rooms. Maybe from late-night ramblings of people who believed in more than what they could see. He never paid much attention back then. It all sounded like noise—like stories meant to distract from the pain of real life.
But now, standing in this new world, those fragments felt like clues.
This was the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Not the comics. Not the movies. The actual world—before the battles, before the legends. A place where names like Stark, Rogers, and Romanoff hadn't yet become icons, but somehow still lingered in the air like distant thunder. He didn't know their stories. He hadn't watched the films. He only remembered the arguments—who might be the strongest, who would sacrifice themselves, who deserved to lead.
It was strange. Loud. Detached.
He came from a world where heroes didn't fly. They endured. They were mothers who worked two jobs and fathers who fixed broken things with tired hands. Friends who stayed when the world didn't. People who did the right thing without applause, without powers, without plot armor.
Now, walking through this world of quiet anticipation and myth, he felt like a ghost. Like someone dropped into a story before the first chapter, expected to care about legends he'd only heard in passing.
He didn't hate it. He just didn't belong to it.
And maybe that was the cruelest part—being reborn in a world waiting for heroes, while still carrying the weight of a life where no one ever came to save you.