Theo woke up warm.
Not the cloying, suffocating heat of an oven or the sticky press of too many bodies on a train platform—but a gentle, all-around warmth, like being wrapped in something that breathed with him.
His first thought was that he hadn't died after all.
His second thought was that his bed felt… wrong.
Too small. Too soft. Too close.
He tried to stretch and failed.
His arms didn't go where he expected them to. His legs kicked uselessly against resistance. Panic flared sharp and sudden in his chest, a spike of instinct that made him gasp—and the sound that came out of his mouth wasn't a gasp at all.
It was a cry.
Thin. Broken. Loud in a way that startled him.
The world answered immediately.
"...There, there...shh, shh..."
Hands lifted him, sure and practiced. A woman's voice, strained but gentle, filled his ears. The warmth shifted, pressed closer, and something steady thumped beneath his ear.
A heartbeat.
Not his.
Theo froze.
The smell hit him next—milk and clean linen, faint herbs, something woody and old beneath it all. Not detergent. Not smoke. No city grime. His eyes flew open.
Light flooded in.
Not fluorescent. Not harsh. Sunlight, pale and dusty, filtered through tall windows framed by heavy curtains. Wooden beams crossed the ceiling overhead, dark with age. The room smelled lived-in, but not crowded, like a place that had once known activity and was still remembering it.
Theo tried to speak.
What came out was another wail.
"Oh gods," the woman breathed, adjusting her hold. "He's got lungs on him."
A man laughed weakly nearby. "That's good, right? Strong lungs."
Theo's vision swam, the edges blurring as something fundamental inside him tilted sideways.
He wasn't dreaming.
He knew what dreams felt like—the jittery nonsense of half-remembered stress, the way his office sometimes bled into sleep. This was too sharp. Too consistent. Too present.
He was being held.
He was small.
And the world was wrong.
Time stopped behaving the way Theo remembered.
Days passed, or maybe weeks. He had no way to measure them except by patterns: light and dark, hunger and fullness, sleep that came whether he wanted it or not.
His thoughts were… slippery.
Sometimes he felt clear, painfully aware of everything, of the impossibility of this body, of the fact that he could remember spreadsheets and gas leaks and his mother's laugh.
Other times, the world narrowed to sensation.
Warmth. Hunger. Sound.
He learned the rhythm of the house before he learned anything else.
Footsteps echoed differently depending on the hallway, some hollow and long, others muffled by old rugs. Doors creaked in specific ways. Wind whistled faintly through unseen cracks when storms rolled in.
It was a big house.
Too big.
Even without understanding words yet, Theo felt the emptiness of it.
The woman who held him most often, his mother, he eventually realized, moved through the halls like she was apologizing to them. Her steps were careful, her voice always pitched low, as if afraid to wake something sleeping.
She was tired.
Theo noticed that long before he understood why.
Her hair was always pulled back in a simple braid that frayed by evening. Dark circles lived beneath her eyes. When she smiled down at him, it was real, but it cost her something.
The man, his father, was different.
He smelled like cold air and paper and metal. When he held Theo, his grip was awkward but gentle, as if afraid of breaking him. His voice was calm on the surface, but tension sat beneath it, tight and unyielding.
They argued sometimes.
Not loudly. Never in front of others.
But Theo learned the sound of a door closing too carefully. The way voices dropped into strained whispers. The silence afterward, heavy and unresolved.
There was another presence in the house.
A girl.
She hovered at the edges of Theo's world at first—watching from doorways, peering over railings. Older than him by many years. Too young to carry herself the way she did.
When she finally came close, she studied him with unsettling seriousness.
"So this is him," she said.
Theo blinked up at her.
She had sharp eyes. Not unkind—just observant. Like someone already used to noticing things others missed.
"He's loud," she added.
Her mother laughed, a thin sound. "He's alive. That's enough."
The girl didn't smile.
She nodded, once, as if accepting a responsibility she hadn't asked for. "What's his name?" she asked.
Your father and I have deiced to name him Theo Oaten.
Theo learned the house by fragments.
A grand dining hall with a table far too long for the three people who used it now. Chairs sat pushed in, dusted regularly but rarely moved.
A library with empty shelves where books had once stood, their absence outlined in cleaner wood.
Guest rooms sealed shut, the air inside them stale and untouched.
Servants' quarters that echoed.
No servants.
Theo didn't need words to understand that part.
The house wasn't dead, but it was as if it was starving.
As time went on Theo watched his mother grow thinner.
It happened gradually, the way bad things often do. Her hands shook sometimes when she lifted him. She sat more often, breathing through small moments of pain she thought no one noticed.
Theo noticed.
He remembered another kitchen. Another woman. Flour-dusted hands and warmth and laughter.
Guilt tangled with gratitude inside his too-small chest.
He loved this woman and he missed the other one.
The realization hurt more than he thought it should.
Then one morning, his mother didn't get out of bed.
The house changed after that.
The air felt heavier. Sounds traveled farther. Theo cried until his throat hurt, he mind wasn't and infant he knew what was wrong, and he was frustrated that there was nothing he could do to help.
His father held him with a stillness that bordered on breaking.
The girl, his sister, stood straighter, sharper while around him and his father as if the world rested on her shoulders and a single misstep would mean the end.
Theo watched it all from his small, quiet place in the world.
And as weeks turned into months, a single, unsettling thought set deep inside him next to the realization that both his mothers were gone.
I've lived this before.
Not this exact life obviously, but the feeling he felt, in this life.
The silence that seemed to stretch too thin, people struggling to do their best with not enough.
A warmth that had to be protected, or it would go out. Theo clenched his tiny fists, heart beating hard.
Even though the house was empty, It seemed like it was waiting…waiting to be brought to life…waiting to be filled again.