Johan woke up on his ninth birthday to the sound of his father's boots on the stairs and the smell of burnt toast drifting up from the kitchen.
Nine years old. He'd been in this body for nine years, and it still felt wrong.
His hands were too small. When he looked down at them, splayed against the faded bedspread Greta had picked out from some church jumble sale, they looked like a child's hands because they were a child's hands. But in his head, he could still remember the weight of a rifle. The recoil. The specific way your finger had to squeeze the trigger, smooth and steady, if you wanted the shot to count.
Those memories were fading, though. That was the worst part. Every year that passed in this new life scraped away a little more of Johan Mikhailovich, the soldier who'd died in a trench. Sometimes he'd reach for a memory and find it blurred, indistinct, like trying to recall a dream hours after waking.
He sat up, running a hand through hair that was too fine, too light. His old hair had been darker. Or had it? He couldn't quite remember anymore.
The cognitive dissonance made him want to scream sometimes.
"Johan! Breakfast!" Greta's voice carried up the stairs, sharp and commanding. She spoke English with a thick German accent that never quite smoothed out, even after twenty-two years in Sheffield. "Don't make me come up there!"
Johan swung his legs out of bed, feet hitting the cold linoleum floor. The house was always cold. The council estate had been built after the war, cheap and quick, and the insulation was a joke. September mornings bit with a chill that worked its way through the walls and settled into your bones.
He dressed quickly. School uniform: gray trousers, white shirt, navy jumper with the school crest stitched on the chest. Everything slightly too big because Greta bought clothes with "room to grow into." The concept of buying things that fit now, that might need replacing later, was foreign to her. You bought practical. You bought what lasted.
Downstairs, Thomas sat at the small kitchen table with a cup of tea and the morning paper spread in front of him. He didn't look up when Johan entered, just grunted in acknowledgment. That was Thomas. Ex-SAS, Korea veteran, a man who'd learned to say more with silence than most people managed with words.
Johan had tried, in the early years, to connect with him. To find some common ground in their shared experience of combat. But he couldn't exactly explain that he'd died in a war that wouldn't happen for another fifty-five years. Couldn't explain that he understood the thousand-yard stare Thomas sometimes got when the evening news showed footage from Vietnam.
So they existed in parallel. Father and son. Strangers wearing familiar faces.
"Sit," Greta commanded, sliding a plate in front of him. Eggs, toast, beans. Standard English breakfast. She'd adapted to the local cuisine over the years, though Johan had caught her muttering in German about "barbaric" food combinations more than once.
He ate..The food tasted fine. Everything tasted fine. But eating felt like just another thing his body needed, another reminder that he was trapped in flesh that wasn't quite his own.
"Big day today," Thomas said, folding the paper. His voice was rough, worn smooth by decades of cigarettes and shouting over foundry machinery. "Nine years old."
"Yes, sir," Johan said, because that's what Thomas expected. Politeness. Respect.
"Your father has something for you," Greta said, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked pleased, which was rare. Greta didn't do pleased often. Satisfied, maybe. Grimly content. But pleased was special.
Thomas reached under his chair and produced a package wrapped in brown paper. "Here."
Johan took it, feeling the weight. Books. Had to be books. He unwrapped it carefully, because Greta would complain about wasting paper, and found three hardcover volumes. Mathematics textbooks. Secondary school level, maybe higher.
"Saw you looking at your mum's nursing books," Thomas said, lighting a cigarette. "Figured you might want something more your speed."
Johan's throat tightened. It was thoughtful. Observant. The kind of gift that showed Thomas had been paying attention, even when it seemed like he wasn't.
"Thank you," Johan managed. "Really. Thank you."
Thomas nodded once, satisfied, and went back to his paper.
Greta kissed the top of Johan's head. "Smart boy. My smart boy. Now eat. School won't wait."
...
..
..
School was torture.
Johan sat at his desk in Mrs. Patterson's classroom, listening to her explain long division for the third week in a row, and tried not to let the frustration show on his face.
He knew calculus. Or at least, he'd known calculus. The specific formulas were getting fuzzy now, buried under nine years of childhood, but the concepts were still there. Integration. Derivatives. The fundamental theorem. He could grasp mathematical principles that wouldn't be taught in this classroom for another eight years.
But he had to sit here and pretend that carrying the one was a revelation.
"Johan, would you like to come up and solve this problem?" Mrs. Patterson asked, smiling in that encouraging way teachers did when they thought they were helping.
He walked to the board, took the chalk, and solved the division problem in three quick steps. The answer was correct. Obviously. It had been correct since he'd glanced at it thirty seconds ago.
"Very good!" Mrs. Patterson beamed. "See, class? This is what happens when you practice."
Practice. Right.
At lunch, Johan sat alone under the oak tree at the edge of the playground. He had a book with him, always did. Today it was one of Thomas's gifts, working through algebra problems that should have been challenging but felt like review.
"Oi, Mercer!"
Johan looked up. Marcus Webb, the class bully, stood with his usual gang of three. Marcus was bigger than most of the other kids, held back a year, and used his size like a weapon.
"Reading again?" Marcus sneered. "What're you, some kind of swot?"
Johan closed the book carefully, marking his place. "Just doing homework."
"Just doing homework," Marcus mimicked in a high voice. "Teacher's pet. Probably can't even throw a ball proper."
The others laughed because that's what you did when Marcus made a joke. You laughed, or you became the target.
Johan could have fought him. In his previous life, he'd been trained in close quarters combat. He knew exactly where to hit to put someone down fast. Marcus was bigger, but he was clumsy, untrained. Johan could have ended this in seconds.
But he was nine years old. His body was nine years old. And explaining how a fourth-year primary school student knew Systema techniques would raise questions he couldn't answer.
So he did what he'd learned to do: he made himself small. Uninteresting. Not worth the effort.
"Sorry," he said quietly. "Didn't mean to bother anyone."
Marcus looked disappointed. Bullies liked resistance. Liked the fight. When you gave them nothing, they got bored.
"W-Whatever. You're boring anyway." Marcus kicked dirt at Johan's book and walked away, his gang trailing after him.
Johan brushed the dirt off, opened the book again, and went back to his algebra. His hands didn't shake. They never shook anymore. He'd learned to control that in the first year, when everything was new and overwhelming and wrong.
.....
..
That evening, after dinner, Johan helped Greta with the dishes. She washed, he dried. It was routine. Comfortable in its predictability.
"Your teacher says you're doing very well," Greta said, scrubbing a plate with more force than necessary. She attacked everything like it might fight back. "Top of your class in maths."
"It's not that hard," Johan said automatically, then caught himself. That wasn't what a normal nine-year-old would say. "I mean, Mrs. Patterson explains things well."
Greta hummed, unconvinced. "You've always been clever. Even as a baby. So alert. Like you understood things."
I did understand things, Johan thought. That was the problem.
"Your father worries about you," Greta continued. "Says you're too quiet. Too serious."
"I'm fine, Mum."
"Are you?" She stopped scrubbing, turned to look at him. Her eyes were sharp, assessing. Greta missed nothing. It was what made her a good nurse. "You don't play with other children. You read books meant for students twice your age. You look at people like you're... I don't know. Like you're studying them."
Johan's stomach clenched. He'd been too careless. Let too much show.
"I just like reading," he said, aiming for casual. "And the other kids... they're just loud, mostly. I like quiet better."
Greta watched him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "You remind me of my brother sometimes. Heinrich. He was like you. Old soul, my mother called it. Too thoughtful for his age."
"What happened to him?" Johan asked, though he immediately regretted it. Greta never talked about Germany. Never talked about before.
Her expression closed off. "The war. What always happens in war."
She went back to washing dishes, and Johan knew better than to push.
They finished in silence. Johan dried the last plate, put it away, and was heading upstairs when Greta called after him.
"Johan?"
"Yes, Mum?"
"It's alright to be different. Just... try to be a child sometimes, yes? You're only young once."
That's not true, Johan thought. I've been young twice now.
"I'll try," he said instead, and climbed the stairs to his room.
.....
....
..
That night, lying in bed, Johan stared at the ceiling and tried to hold onto his fading memories.
The trench. The cold. The voice saying you are owed.
Why him? Why this life?
He had no answers. Just a growing pile of questions and the uncomfortable feeling that something else was coming. Something beyond council houses and multiplication tables and pretending to be normal.
The curtains shifted in the breeze from the half-open window. Outside, Sheffield settled into its evening sounds. Factory whistles. Cars passing. Someone's television bleeding through the walls.
1969.
Fifty-four years before he'd even be born in his old life. The world felt simultaneously familiar and alien. He knew history. Knew what was coming. But he was nine years old in a steel town in Northern England, and none of that mattered.
He was Johan Mercer now. Not Johan Mikhailovich. That person was dead. Had died in the mud and been replaced by this.
Sleep eventually came, as it always did. And with it, dreams of symbols he didn't recognize and a voice whispering promises he couldn't quite understand.