The ornithopter caught the wind before the boy did.
He was still crouching in the grass with his hands open when the little craft lifted itself free. Its membrane wings beat once, twice, and then found a rhythm that looked almost natural. It climbed. It actually climbed, rising above the stone wall and the gazebo and the tops of the hedges.
The boy watched it go and his mouth fell open. He'd spent the night redesigning the wing geometry three times because the first two ratios couldn't sustain lift. The third attempt used a narrower chord and a steeper angle of incidence, and he'd told himself it was still probably wrong, that there was likely a variable he hadn't accounted for. He hadn't actually expected it to work.
He was thirteen. Blond hair and green eyes and a body that looked like it might not survive a hard winter. He wore the dark vestments of the Apocalypse household with the cross at his collar, the same clothes his family had worn since before the plague swept through Europe a century ago. His fingers were still stiff from hours of bending wire and stretching fabric. None of that mattered right now.
Right now, the ornithopter was flying, and he was smiling.
The stone came from behind and above.
It punched through the left wing mid-flight and the craft folded like a living thing that had just died. The frame twisted, the mechanism locked, and everything that had been rising a moment ago fell. It hit the top of the courtyard wall with a dry crack and tumbled over the other side, out of sight.
The boy's smile didn't fade so much as get taken from him.
"Building those useless toys again? Don't you ever grow up?"
"You'll never get over that wall. You're hardly strong enough to stay alive."
"Pathetic. Why did we end up with a baby brother like this one. The shame of the family."
His elder brothers. He didn't turn around because he already knew what their faces looked like when they talked to him. The boredom and the contempt and the way they looked at him like he was a chore that had gone on too long. He'd memorized those expressions a long time ago, the same way you memorize the layout of a room you keep stubbing your toes in.
He said nothing. There was nothing he could say that would change any of it, and he had stopped trying. Not because he didn't have the words, but because he'd already run through every possible response in his head and none of them led anywhere useful.
-----
'This… it fell over the wall. I have to go get it. The left wing joint was the failure point, not the membrane. If I can recover the frame, I can reinforce it.'
He went to the wall and reached up. His fingers found the rough stone and he pulled with everything his arms had, which wasn't much. His shoes scraped against the surface and his elbows shook and his body told him in a dozen quiet ways that it was not built for this.
He didn't make it a foot off the ground before he slipped and fell flat in the grass.
'This body… I really can't do anything, can I?'
He lay there for a moment and looked at his own hands. Dust had settled into the creases of his palms. They were small, a child's hands on a child's body that couldn't even climb a wall built for ordinary adults. His mind could design a machine that flew, but his arms couldn't lift him six feet off the ground. The imbalance felt like a cruel joke that someone had designed on purpose.
'If I could just grow up… this wall wouldn't stop me.'
He said nothing. He pulled himself up and tilted his head back and looked at the sky instead, because the sky was the one thing in this place that didn't make him feel small.
It was blue and vast and cloudless, and the sun was nowhere to be found.
And then a small dark shape crested the top of the wall.
He reached out with both hands toward the figure on the wall.
-----
His hands were pressed against something soft.
Otto blinked. The wall was gone. The sky was gone. The grass and the gazebo and his brothers' voices, all of it, gone.
A pair of green eyes stared back at him from inches away, filling his entire field of vision. Vivid and depthless as cathedral glass.
'This… what?'
His first thought, before anything else, was that the light was wrong. A moment ago it had been afternoon sunlight from an open sky. Now it was artificial, steady and sourceless, the kind of light that came from no window he recognized. That single observation told him more than anything else: wherever he was, it was not outside, and it was not 1465.
But then the eyes caught him and the analysis stopped.
He didn't understand where he was or what he was touching. All he knew was that those eyes were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he couldn't look away from them.
The person looking back at him had gray hair and green eyes and wore only a simple two-piece outfit. Those emerald eyes shifted downward, slowly and deliberately, to where Otto's hands were pressed flat against their chest.
The gaze that met his was cold.
'This person…' Otto thought. He couldn't stop staring. 'This face is so beautiful.'
The face was finely made, almost sculpted, and between the brows there was something that made Otto want to shrink back. He couldn't name it. It wasn't anger exactly. It felt older than anger, and heavier, like standing too close to something ancient.
'This look… why does he seem so angry? No, not angry. This is something else. This person isn't irritated with me, this person is… evaluating me.'
For a long and stupid moment, Otto forgot entirely that his hands were still pressed against the other person's chest. He'd been so completely caught by those green eyes that everything else had simply stopped mattering. He could feel it through his palms, a heartbeat, steady and real.
The person frowned. The coldness in those eyes deepened.
Red lips parted, and the person spoke.
The voice was a girl's voice. In that single syllable, Otto understood his mistake. This was not a boy at all.
"Otto?"
"Is there something wrong with my body?"
Two things registered at once. She knew his name. And she was asking him about her body as if he were someone who would have an answer, which meant she thought he was someone with authority over her physical condition. A doctor, or something like one.
'This girl knows me. Or she knows someone she thinks is me.'
-----
Her name was Fu Hua.
She did not find his hands on her chest strange, even with this man pressing both palms flat against what was, by any honest assessment, the least remarkable chest on the continent, as if searching earnestly for something that simply wasn't there.
She had known the man called "Otto" for several hundred years, and in all that time she had never once seen him express interest in anything as mundane as another person's body. He simply didn't have those kinds of desires. It was one of the few reliable facts about him.
So if Otto was touching her chest and looking confused, the logical conclusion wasn't that he'd suddenly developed worldly urges. The logical conclusion was that something was medically wrong with her.
Was there a problem with her chest?
Genuine concern flickered across Fu Hua's face. She looked down at the smooth and uninterrupted plane of her own chest and considered the possibility seriously. She was a Valkyrie of Schicksal, and a warrior's body had to be sound. She sometimes needed the man before her to help regulate and maintain her physical condition. Not even a hint of carelessness was acceptable.
And yet she could see confusion in the blond man's eyes, real confusion, the kind she had never seen on his face before.
-----
"Miss, do you know me?" Otto asked.
He heard his own voice and flinched.
'This voice…' It was deep and heavy, a man's voice thick with years that didn't belong to him. 'This… why do I sound like Father? Like my brothers?'
He knew that voice. He had listened to that voice tell him he was worthless and weak and a waste of the family name for as long as he could remember. Now it was coming from his own throat.
His hand shot up to his neck and his fingers closed around it. He squeezed, not hard enough to choke, but hard enough to feel the unfamiliar shape of it.
'This throat isn't mine.' He didn't know if he wanted to strangle the men who owned that sound or the version of himself that had somehow become it.
'Wait. Think. My voice changed. That means my body changed. If my body changed, then either a great deal of time has passed or I am in someone else's body entirely. Those are the only two explanations.'
He realized his other hand was still near Fu Hua's chest and pulled it away. Some half-remembered lesson from the only person who had ever been kind to him: 'You can't touch a girl's body carelessly, or she'll get angry.' Though privately he noted that even with curves no different from a boy's, the softness had been unmistakable.
Then he looked down at his arms.
Still slender, but wrong. Thicker and longer than they should be.
'This… these are an adult's arms. So it's time that's passed, not a different body. This is still my body, but older. How much older?'
Otto stumbled backward and raised his hands in front of his face. Ten fingers, long and elegant and fine-boned, the hands of someone who had never done a day of rough labor. Nimble and beautiful, even.
'This isn't right. These aren't my hands. But the bone structure is similar to mine, just scaled up. These are my hands if I never did physical work for… years. Many years.'
He pressed his palms against his own face. The bones were different. The jaw was sharper. Everything about the shape of his own skull was wrong.
-----
"Otto, what's wrong with you?"
Fu Hua watched him touching his own face with the same hands that had just been on her chest, and something about it unsettled her. Not the lack of hygiene, though that was noted. Something deeper.
The Otto she knew called her "old friend" or "Red Kite Immortal." He had never, not once in five hundred years, called her *Miss*. The word didn't even exist in his vocabulary for her. Whoever was speaking to her with that polite and confused and slightly frightened voice, it didn't sound like the man she knew.
She decided to check for herself.
Pink feathers began to fall around Otto, drifting down slow and silent, catching the light as they turned. The tips of Fu Hua's long gray hair had flushed pink. She was reaching into his mind with a power that could read memories, and if necessary, rewrite them entirely.
The moment she made contact, something inside Otto pushed back.
Golden feathers fell from nowhere, bright and sharp-edged, and the air between them split with a sound like tearing silk. Fu Hua's own power came back at her like a mirror made of knives.
Blood sprayed from her mouth.
She raised her head and wiped the red from her lips with the back of her hand. Then she glared at Otto with the kind of look that could stop a charging beast.
Whatever was inside this man had a defense mechanism, and it had just used her own technique against her. She didn't understand how and she didn't particularly care to find out right now.
She dressed, pulling on her coat and trousers, covering the lines of her body with quick and efficient movements. Her expression settled back into its default, cold and closed and done.
If he could still defend himself like that, then nothing was truly wrong with him. Her thankless concern had been wasted.
She passed him without a word and walked out of the room. The door closed behind her, and everything went quiet.
-----
Otto stood alone.
He couldn't move. His body wouldn't respond. Something was happening behind his eyes, a warmth that didn't belong to him, golden and slow and spreading.
And then the room disappeared.
The laboratory, the green jars, the glass, the instruments, all of it vanished. In its place was white, endless and depthless white stretching in every direction. Bookshelves rose out of that whiteness like the bones of some impossible cathedral, row after row after row, taller than he could see, extending into a distance that had no end.
'This is inside my mind. Or inside something connected to my mind. The girl tried to read my thoughts and something stopped her. Now I'm here. The two events are connected.'
"Hi."
The voice came from somewhere close, casual and almost cheerful.
Otto turned his head slowly and timidly, the way a small animal turns toward a sound it doesn't trust.
A figure walked toward him, wreathed entirely in golden light. The glow was so dense that the body beneath it was more suggestion than shape. It stopped before him and offered a small, precise bow.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Void Archives."
The golden figure straightened, and though Otto couldn't see its face clearly, he had the distinct impression that it was smiling.
"The adorable little prisoner your future self kept locked away for over five hundred years."
'Five hundred years. That would mean the year is roughly… 1965 or later. That explains the strange instruments in that room. That explains why nothing looked familiar.'
The voice was pleasant and conversational, the kind of tone someone uses when they are telling you something that should terrify you but they've decided to make it fun instead.
"I don't know exactly what's going on with you right now, but…"
The figure spread its hands in a gesture of welcome, or mockery, or both.
"Welcome to the modern world, Otto from five hundred years ago."
Void Archives grinned, and the expression cracked open across the golden light like a fault line.
It did not know why the soul of an Otto from five centuries past had suddenly displaced the current one. It didn't particularly care. What it knew, what it had known for five hundred years through every moment of suppression and confinement and silent seething patience, was simply this:
The cage was open.
"Your future body," Void Archives said, and the warmth drained from its voice like water from a broken cup.
"I'll be taking it."
-----
This is a work of mine, both translation and rewrite will be working in Revenge fic about ling ke right? I was reworking the system, cause i didn't like the system in there so. I will be combining it with realism and fantasy at the same time. Cause you know. Grand. Carnival is going to be in there.