The first night after the leap, Rei lay in his childhood bed, staring at the familiar cracks in the ceiling.
It should have been comforting, the distant hum of the city, Mira's soft breathing from the next room, but it felt wrong. Like he was sleeping inside a memory. A painting. Something too fragile to be real.
Did I actually come back? Or is this just a dying man's last dream?
Exhaustion finally dragged him under.
When his eyes opened again, the air was wrong.
Cold. Metallic. Tasting of ash and blood.
His chest seized as he gasped for breath. He blinked, and his blood turned to ice.
The stars above weren't the ones he knew as a boy. These were fractured by smoke and fire. The ruins of the battlefield stretched endlessly around him, exactly as he remembered.
No... no, no, NO,
He tried to move.
His legs didn't respond.
His hands, shaking, clawing uselessly at scorched earth—had no strength left.
Panic tore through him. He remembered the blade sliding in. The nerves severing. His body shutting down piece by piece.
I'm dying again.
"Help..." The word croaked from his lips, barely a whisper swallowed by howling wind.
Then, footsteps.
Steady. Deliberate.
A figure knelt beside him, silhouetted against the burning sky. No insignia. No familiar face. Just steady hands moving with clinical precision.
Bandages pressed against his wound. Metal seared flesh. Pain exploded—but so did relief.
A voice, low but firm, cut through the haze:
"Not yet. Your path isn't finished."
Rei wanted to cling to that voice. To demand answers. Who are you? Why save me?
But darkness rushed in, heavy and absolute.
When his eyes snapped open again, he was back in his bed.
Warm air filled his lungs. His legs tingled as he shifted under the blankets—alive, functional.
He bolted upright, drenched in sweat, heart hammering like a war drum.
For a long time, he just sat there, staring at his trembling hands. His body was whole here—but the memory of being broken still clung to his nerves like phantom pain.
Sleep hadn't brought rest.
It had dragged him back into death's embrace.
And the worst part: someone in that ruined future had decided he must live.
The whisper lingered in his skull like a curse.
Not yet.
Rei pressed his fists to his temples, shuddering.
He understood now.
This second chance wasn't a gift.
It was borrowed time.
And he swore to himself, right then, in that quiet room, that he would not waste it.
Rei's eyes snapped open to morning light filtering through his window.
For a moment, he just lay there, chest heaving, half-expecting to feel the knife wound tearing through his side again. But there was nothing. No pain. No paralysis. Just the warmth of sunlight and the distant sounds of the city waking up.
I'm really here. It's real.
He sat up slowly, his hands trembling as they gripped the edge of the blanket. The room around him was achingly familiar, the old wooden desk where he used to study, the bookshelf his father had built, the faded posters Mira had insisted on hanging despite his protests.
Five years in the past.
His breath came in short, sharp bursts. The weight of it crashed over him like a wave, the impossible reality of what had happened. Time itself had shattered and reformed around him.
But why? How?
Questions spiraled through his mind, but one thought cut through the chaos with brutal clarity:
It doesn't matter why. What matters is what I do with it.
Rei swung his legs off the bed and stood, his knees unsteady. Muscle memory told him his body should feel different, weaker, more broken after years of neglect and despair. But this body, this younger body, still held the ghost of hope he'd long since abandoned.
He moved toward the mirror hanging on his wall, drawn by a need to confirm his own existence.
When he saw his reflection, he froze.
The face staring back was his, but younger. Eighteen years old, not twenty-three. The hollowness that had carved itself into his features over five years of suffering was gone. His skin looked healthier, less pale. The perpetual exhaustion that had hung beneath his eyes like bruises had vanished.
But it was his eyes that held him captive.
Dark brown, almost black in the dim light, the same eyes he'd always had. Yet something in them had changed. There was a sharpness there now, a burning intensity that hadn't existed before. The eyes of someone who'd seen the end and crawled back from it.
His hair, wavy and perpetually unruly, fell across his forehead in the same chaotic way it always had. He'd never been able to tame it properly, and seeing it now, exactly as it had been five years ago, made something twist painfully in his chest.
This is the me that existed before everything fell apart.
He raised a trembling hand to his face, fingers tracing his jawline as if to confirm he was real. The mirror didn't lie. He was here. Solid. Alive.
But the eyes... those eyes were different.
They belonged to someone who'd drowned and been dragged back to shore. Someone who'd watched everything they loved burn and been given an impossible chance to stop it.
"Rei?" Mira's voice called from downstairs. "Breakfast is ready! Don't make Mom wait!"
His reflection's expression shifted, jaw tightening, eyes narrowing with determination so fierce it bordered on madness.
This time will be different.
He turned away from the mirror, but the image of those burning dark eyes stayed with him.
The eyes of someone who'd already died once.
And refused to do it again.