Ethan Cole was pissed.
To anyone watching, he was just a guy sitting calmly on the floor of the first-floor hallway. Back against the wall, legs stretched out, expression blank. Inside, he was fucking pissed.
He was pissed because he died in a car accident, the kind where it wasn't his fault. He was pissed because he died at the peak of his acting career, something he achieved by working his ass off for years. He was pissed because he didn't get to marry his girlfriend of six years because some fat fuck couldn't see a red light.
He was also pissed because he couldn't figure out what to do in his situation, and he was on a countdown.
He took a deep breath, massaged the sides of his forehead, and said to himself, "Anger is right, but right now it's useless. Think clearly. How would you get out of this?"
The situation was indeed headache-inducing. Literally. Because he had a bullet hole in his skull.
He touched the wound again. His fingers came away wet, tacky with half-dried blood, but beneath them, he could feel it: a faint, impossible pull of flesh knitting itself together. The bullet was gone. He could still feel cold air seeping through the crack in his bone, but the skin was slowly, steadily closing.
He'd never believed in souls before, but now he was occupying someone else's body like a squatter in an abandoned house.
After dying in the car accident, he'd woken up in the bleeding body of Ethan Yamada. That had been approximately thirty minutes ago. At first, he hadn't been able to do anything; the pain was blinding, and he couldn't feel his body, much less move. But over the next half hour, sensation returned, limb by limb, and the headache dialed back from impossible to manageable.
He'd managed to crawl a few feet away from the puddle of his own blood, his new blood, and sat down to think.
Now he was here. In a stranger's body. In a stranger's house. With a healing bullet wound in his skull and a ticking clock.
He, Ethan Cole, had been transmigrated into the body of Ethan Yamada, a twenty-year-old aspiring director who lived with his doctor mother in 2011, Los Angeles.
That much he'd pieced together from the room and the memories inside the brain of this body.
This kid had dreams. Ambitions. A long life ahead of him.
And now that life belonged to Cole.
Today, his mother wasn't home. She had a surgery at the hospital. Ethan Yamada had been sleeping peacefully when he woke to a slight sound from the hall outside his room. Thinking his cat, Mochi, had gotten locked out, he'd opened the door, only to find a home intruder trying to break into his room.
Before he could even react, the thief shot him in the skull. End of story.
Except it wasn't, because now Cole was here, breathing through someone else's lungs, staring at nothing, thinking about many things.
Three hours until Fumiko's surgery ends. Three hours to erase a death.
First, evidence. Remove it all before she gets back.
He pushed himself upright. His legs held. His head throbbed in protest, but he ignored it.
If Ethan's mother, Fumiko, came home and saw the blood on the floor and on his clothes, he wouldn't even be able to explain it. What would he say? An armed thief killed your son, and I'm possessing his body?
Yeah. That would go great.
He moved methodically. First, clean clothes. He found a dresser, pulled out a plain t-shirt and sweatpants, and laid them on the bed. Then shower. His hair was matted with blood, thick and drying into stiff clumps. He turned the water as hot as he could stand and stood under it until the water ran clear, watching the diluted red swirl down the drain.
When he got out, he caught his reflection in the mirror.
Ethan Yamada stared back at him. Young with good height. Sharp jaw, dark hair plastered to his forehead, a fading bruise already yellowing at the temple from the fall he had after getting shot. And there, just above his left ear, a scar. Fresh, pink, still tender to the touch. But closed. Already closed.
Cole touched it, and the stranger in the mirror touched it too.
"What the fuck am I?" Before he could get any more distracted, Ethan stopped himself.
He dressed quickly. The bloodied clothes went into a trash bag he found under the kitchen sink. Then came the floor.
Thankfully, no carpets. He grabbed paper towels, cleaner, and got on his knees. The blood had begun to darken, drying into a deep rust color against the pale wood. He scrubbed for who knows how long, until the wood was damp and clean and there was no trace of the fact that someone had died here less than an hour ago.
The trash bag with the clothes and red paper towels went into the bottom of the kitchen trash, buried under old takeout containers and coffee grounds. Not perfect, but it would buy him time.
He stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard, and surveyed his work.
Clean. Silent. No sign anything had ever happened.
He sat back down on the floor, his spot, the one with the wall at his back and the door in view, and let out a long, slow breath.
Okay. Now. Think.
He had three questions.
One: How did he transmigrate?
Two: How was his wound healing?
Three: What the hell was he supposed to do next?
The first two could wait. They were mysteries for later, for when he wasn't running on borrowed time in a stranger's apartment. The third was urgent.
He was in Los Angeles. 2011. He was twenty years old again, in a body that wasn't his, with a mother who would be home any minute expecting to see her son alive and well.
He could run. Disappear. Let Fumiko come home to an empty apartment and wonder what happened to her boy.
But that felt wrong. Ethan Yamada had been a person, a kid with dreams, with a Super 8 camera and a stack of film books in his room. He hadn't asked to die. And Cole was wearing his face now.
"I'll figure it out," he told himself. One day at a time.
He looked at the clock. Two hours until Fumiko returned.
He pushed himself up again, walked to the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee. He had time to think. Time to plan. Time to become Ethan Yamada before his mother walked through the door.
The wound in his skull throbbed, but beneath the pain, he could feel it still healing. Slowly. Surely.
He focused his thoughts again on evidence, checking twice to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything.
The room is clean. It shouldn't raise any suspicion.
However, he still has a scar on his skull and his hair is gone due to the bullet.
The scar should heal with the speed his wound is healing. However, hair is a different question; he doesn't know if it will regrow.
He decided to wait for one hour. If it didn't grow back in that time, he would shave his whole head and make some excuse to Kim—no, his mother.
He has to become Ethan Yamada. He is an actor; he just has to get into the character of Ethan Yamada. He has to immerse himself so much that he becomes Ethan Yamada, because to the world, Ethan Cole never even existed.
He focused on his hearing to find Mochi, his cat. He didn't hear its heartbeat, which according to Ethan's new memories meant he was out on one of those regular tours of the neighborhood.
"Wait, heartbeat?!" Ethan exclaimed in surprise to himself.
"Why did I try to hear a heartbeat? It's not like me and humans can't do that," Ethan thought and focused on his hearing again.
A chaotic mixture of sounds came to his ears. The sounds of his neighbors snoring, their heartbeats, a lady talking about a gunshot she hea—
"She is talking about me!" Ethan exclaimed in panic.
He forgot that his neighbors must have heard the gunshot. They have called 911, and the police officer was talking to the lady who was telling him that she heard a gunshot from the direction of his house.
The police officer will come to his door at any minute to talk to him.
He bolted toward his room to find a hat.
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A/N: This was the first chapter.
With this fanfic, I plan to write a story where a superhuman from our world will use his abilities and parallel world knowledge to become a world-famous entertainer on a parallel Earth.
Do you want me to continue this fanfic? Please comment.
Thanks for reading this chapter.