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Harry Potter: Shadow of Miracles

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Synopsis
Death had claimed him once, but it set him free. Instead, he awoke... alert, aware—but not quite himself. Reborn as Johan Mercer to a Muggle family, a realization sank in... He was now part of the magical world of Harry Potter. That's right, magic was real, very real. And unknown to Johan, he was perhaps the most gifted magic user since Merlin. So, what exactly did that mean for him? Well, it was a chance not just to survive, but to change the wizarding world forever. And he very much intended to do so. It was his destiny....
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Chapter 1 - The Final Breath

"If I can't use magic, I might as well die." 

- Merlin

_________________

The cold was the worst part.

Johan Mikhailovich had imagined death differently. Cleaner, maybe. Quicker. Something with meaning attached to it, some final act of heroism that would make the whole mess worthwhile. Instead, he was bleeding out in a trench outside Mariupol, mud seeping through his torn fatigues, the sky above a flat gray that matched the emptiness spreading through his chest.

Twenty-three years old. That's all he'd managed.

The shrapnel had caught him in the side during the bombardment, torn through Kevlar and flesh like they were nothing. He'd tried to crawl toward the others, toward anyone, but his legs weren't working right anymore. The sounds of the battle had faded to a distant ringing, punctuated by the wet rasp of his own breathing.

No medic was coming. He knew that. They were pinned down, and even if they weren't, he'd seen enough field wounds to know what catastrophic looked like. This was catastrophic.

His fingers were numb. He couldn't feel his rifle anymore, couldn't feel much of anything below his ribs. Just cold. The kind of cold that started in your bones and worked its way out, patient and inevitable.

This is stupid, he thought. Not profound. Not poetic. Just stupid.

He'd joined the Foreign Legion because staying home felt like dying slowly, because Ukraine needed fighters, and he needed purpose. Six months of combat had taught him that purpose was a luxury. Most of the time, you were just cold, or hungry, or scared, and the moments of actual fighting were too chaotic to feel like anything but survival.

And now he wasn't even surviving.

His vision was tunneling. The gray sky above narrowed to a pinpoint, and Johan found himself thinking about his mother. Not the sentimental memory of her smile or her voice, but the practical reality that someone would have to tell her. Some military officer would show up at her door with rehearsed condolences, and she'd cry, and then she'd have to keep living. Keep working. Keep pretending her son's death meant something.

It didn't, though. That was the joke. He'd die here in the mud, and in a week, someone else would be standing in this same trench, and in a month nobody would remember his name.

The absurdity, Johan thought, and almost laughed. Almost. His lungs wouldn't cooperate.

The cold deepened. Spread. Became everything.

Then... nothing.

Pure, absolute nothing. Not darkness, because darkness implied the absence of light, and this was the absence of everything. No sensation, no thought, no self. Johan Mikhailovich ceased to exist, and the universe continued without him, indifferent.

Except.

Except.

There was a pull.

It started small, barely perceptible, like the current of a river you can't quite see. Then stronger. Insistent. Johan, or whatever remained of Johan, felt himself being dragged backward through something that wasn't quite water but felt liquid anyway. Thick. Resistant. Wrong.

He had no body to struggle with, no lungs to scream, but some core part of him fought anyway. Fought the pull, fought the wrongness, fought because that's what he'd learned to do.

It didn't matter. The current was stronger.

And then, a voice.

Not sound, exactly. Sound required air and eardrums and physics. This bypassed all of that, spoke directly into whatever Johan was now. Ancient. Vast. Neither male nor female, neither kind nor cruel. Just present in a way that made Johan's entire existence feel small.

"You are owed."

Three words. That was all. But they carried weight, significance, inevitability. Like a contract signed in blood, like a debt coming due.

Johan wanted to ask what that meant. Wanted to demand answers, to understand, to fight. But the voice was already gone, and the pull intensified, became irresistible, and Johan was dragged through something, some barrier that tore at him like barbed wire.

Then: light.

Pure white light, searing and absolute. If nothing had been the absence of everything, this was the presence of too much. It burned. It consumed. Johan felt himself unraveling, reforming, being remade into something new.

And then: screaming.

High-pitched, infant screaming that was somehow his own voice but wasn't, couldn't be. His lungs worked but they were too small, his limbs flailed but they were too short, and the light resolved into shapes he couldn't quite process.

A woman's face. Tired. Relieved. Speaking words in English that his mind understood, but felt foreign on his tongue.

"It's a boy," she said, and someone else, a man in medical scrubs, was cutting something, clamping something, and Johan tried to speak, but all that came out was more screaming.

What the hell. What the hell. WHAT THE HELL.

His mind was a soldier's mind, sharp and trained and twenty-three years old. But his body was an infant's body, weak and uncoordinated and wrong. The disconnect was so severe it felt like being torn in half.

He screamed. Kept screaming. Couldn't stop.

Hands lifted him. Cleaned him. Wrapped him in something soft. The woman, his mother, was crying and smiling simultaneously. "Hello, little one," she said, accent thick, German maybe. "Hello, Johan."

Johan.

His name. The same name. Different life.

The screaming finally stopped, replaced by hiccupping gasps as his infant body ran out of energy. Exhaustion crashed over him, absolute and overwhelming. His vision blurred. The faces above became indistinct shapes.

Sleep. He needed sleep. Needed to process, to understand, to figure out what the hell just happened.

But even as unconsciousness pulled him down, one thought burned clear and bright:

I died. I died in that trench. This isn't possible.

And yet.

And yet here he was. Breathing. Alive. Impossibly, inexplicably alive.

The voice echoed in his memory: You are owed.

Johan, newborn and ancient, soldier and infant, slept.

And the world waited, unknowing, for what he would become.

When he woke again, it was to the sound of steady breathing and the smell of antiseptic. Hospital. He was in a hospital. His eyes opened, but everything was blurry, unfocused. Infant eyes. Useless.

He tried to move, managed only weak twitching. His body wouldn't obey him. Panic flared, hot and immediate. Trapped. I'm trapped.

Breathing. He needed to focus on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The panic receded slightly.

A door opened. Footsteps. The German woman's voice again, quieter now, talking to someone. "...healthy. Ten fingers, ten toes. Perfect."

A man's voice responded, deeper, tired. "Good. That's... that's good."

They came into view, these strangers who were his parents. The woman, blonde hair pulled back, exhaustion carved into her features. The man, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, the kind of build that came from manual labor.

Thomas and Greta Mercer, Johan thought, though he didn't know how he knew their names. Some instinct. Some knowledge that came with this new body.

Thomas looked down at him, and for a moment, Johan saw something complex flicker across his face. Love. Fear. Responsibility. All the things a new father should feel.

"He's got your eyes," Thomas said.

Greta laughed softly. "He's barely opened them."

"Still. I can tell."

They stood there, these people who were his parents now, talking in soft voices about ordinary things. Feeding schedules. Names they'd considered. When they could take him home.

And Johan, trapped in an infant's body with an adult's mind, stared up at them and thought..What did you do to me? What am I supposed to do now?

No answer came. Just the steady rhythm of hospital sounds, and the weight of a second chance he'd never asked for.