"I was very afraid at the beginning, until Master told me that pain isn't the truth; it's what you have to get through in order to find the truth."
- Merlin
________________________
The call came during maths.
Mrs. Patterson was midway through explaining percentages when the headmaster appeared in the doorway, his face carefully neutral in that way adults got when something was very wrong. He whispered to Mrs. Patterson, who paled, then looked directly at Johan.
"Mr. Mercer, could you come with me, please?"
The walk to the office felt like moving through water. Every step too slow, too heavy. Johan's mind was already racing through possibilities, cataloging threats the way he'd been trained to do in another life. Fire at home. Accident at the foundry. Something with Thomas.
He wasn't prepared for what waited in the office.
Thomas stood by the window, still in his work clothes, concrete dust on his boots. His face was grey. Ash grey. The color of someone who'd seen death up close and couldn't look away from it.
"Dad?"
Thomas's hands were shaking. Johan had never seen his father's hands shake. Not once in ten years.
"It's your mother. We need to go. Now..."
_______________
The drive to the hospital was a blur of Thomas's knuckles white on the steering wheel and silence so thick it felt like drowning. Johan wanted to ask questions but couldn't make his voice work. The buzzing under his skin had started the moment he'd seen Thomas's face, a low frequency hum that made his teeth ache.
They parked haphazardly across two spaces. Thomas didn't seem to notice or care. He moved like a man in a nightmare, inhuman and wrong, and Johan had to run to keep up as they pushed through the hospital doors.
The smell hit him first. Antiseptic, illness, and fear. It dragged him back to field hospitals in his old life, to bleeding out in the mud, to the sharp, sterile scent of places where people went to either get better or die.
A nurse intercepted them. Middle-aged, kind eyes, the sort of professional sympathy that came from delivering bad news too many times. "Mr. Mercer? She's stable for now, but..."
"But what?" Thomas's voice cracked.
"The doctors are with her. They'll explain everything. If you'll just wait here..."
"I want to see my wife."
"Sir, please, just give them a few more minutes..."
Johan stopped listening. The buzzing was getting louder, drowning out their voices. He could feel something pulling at him, like a fishhook lodged in his sternum, dragging him toward a specific point in the building.
He walked. Down a corridor. Past a nursing station. Following the pull.
"Oi! You can't be back here!"
He ignored the shout. Turned a corner. The pull intensified. Third door on the left.
Greta's room.
She was lying in the bed, too pale, too still. Machines beeped around her. An IV dripped clear fluid into her arm. Her eyes were closed, but Johan could see the rapid movement beneath the lids. Dreaming, maybe. Or something worse.
A doctor was studying charts, making notes. He looked up when Johan entered, surprise flickering across his face.
"Son, you shouldn't be..."
"What's wrong with her?"
The doctor hesitated, clearly weighing whether to explain medical details to a ten-year-old. "She's had a cerebral aneurysm. A weak spot in a blood vessel in her brain. It's bleeding. We're preparing her for emergency surgery, but..." He trailed off, the unspoken truth hanging heavy in the air.
Hours. Maybe less.
Johan's world narrowed to a pinpoint. All he could see was Greta, dying. Another person taken before their time. Another loss he was supposed to just accept.
No.
The buzzing exploded into a roar.
He'd lost everyone once. His mother, his unit, himself. He'd died alone in the cold and been given a second chance he didn't ask for and didn't understand. But he was here now, in this moment, and he had this strange power humming through his veins like liquid fire.
He could feel it. The wrongness in Greta's skull. The pressure building, blood pooling where it shouldn't be. It was like looking at a machine with a broken part, seeing exactly what needed to be fixed but not knowing the tools to fix it.
Except maybe he was the tool.
"I need everyone to leave," Johan said, his voice strange and distant.
"Excuse me?"
"Leave. Now."
The doctor frowned, started to say something about hospital procedures and worried family members, but Johan wasn't listening anymore. He crossed to the bed, took Greta's hand. Her skin was cold. Too cold.
The moment their skin touched, something inside him clicked.
He could feel the aneurysm now. Not see it, but feel it, the way you could feel the layout of a room in the dark. The swollen vessel. The blood leaking into surrounding tissue. The pressure that would kill her within hours if left alone.
Johan didn't think. Thinking would mean doubt, would mean fear, would mean stopping. He just reached for the buzzing under his skin and pushed.
Heat flooded through him. Not uncomfortable. Almost euphoric. Like every cell in his body was suddenly awake, aware, alive in a way they'd never been before. His eyes burned. When he blinked, the world was tinted orange, molten copper, everything outlined in fire.
The heat poured down his arm, into Greta, seeking out the wrongness. He could feel it moving through her, mapping her body, finding the damaged vessel. And then, somehow, impossibly, he felt it knitting tissue back together. Reinforcing the weak spot. Clearing away the pooled blood.
You are owed, the ancient voice whispered in his mind. Power for power. Life for life.
The doctor was shouting. Hands grabbed Johan's shoulders, tried to pull him away. He didn't budge. Couldn't budge. He was a conduit now, a channel for something vast and burning and utterly beyond his control.
Greta's eyes snapped open. She gasped, confused, looking around wildly. "What... Thomas? Where..."
The burning cut off abruptly. Johan felt the absence of it like a physical blow, like someone had scooped out his insides and left him hollow. The orange tint faded from his vision. The world went grey.
His legs gave out.
The last thing he saw before darkness took him was Greta sitting up, alive and alert and whole, and the doctor staring at the monitors like they'd betrayed every principle of medicine he'd ever learned.
Then nothing.....
______
Voices pulled him back. Adult voices, talking in the hushed tones people used around the dying.
"...scans are clear, completely clear, there's no sign there was ever..."
"...That's impossible, I saw the imaging myself..."
"...the boy, did you see his eyes? They were glowing, I swear they were glowing...I'm not crazy..."
Johan's eyelids felt like lead weights. He forced them open anyway. White ceiling tiles. Fluorescent lights. The particular acoustic quality of a hospital room.
Thomas sat in a chair beside the bed, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. He looked like he'd aged a decade in an afternoon.
"Dad?"
Thomas's head snapped up. For a moment, something like fear crossed his face. Then relief. Then something more complicated that Johan couldn't parse.
"You're awake. Christ, Johan, you've been out for three hours."
"Mum?"
"She's fine. She's... the doctors are calling it a miracle. Said they've never seen anything like it. One minute she was dying, the next..." Thomas's voice cracked. "The aneurysm is gone. Like it was never there."
Johan tried to sit up. His body felt wrong, hollowed out, like he'd run a marathon and then donated blood. Thomas helped him, propping pillows behind his back.
They sat in silence for a long moment. Johan could hear the hospital around them. Machines beeping. Footsteps in the corridor. Someone crying in a distant room.
"The nurse," Thomas said finally, not looking at Johan. "The one who tried to pull you away. She said your eyes were glowing. Orange, she said. Like fire."
Johan's throat was dry. "I don't remember."
"Don't you?" Thomas met his eyes now, and there was something raw in his gaze. Fear and wonder and desperation all tangled together. "The window in your room with the frost. The Webb boy's arm. Your nightmares. The way you've always been different, known things you shouldn't know. And now this."
"Dad, I..."
"I'm not asking for an explanation," Thomas interrupted. "I don't think I could handle one right now. But I need to know. Did you heal her? Did you somehow fix what was broken?"
Every instinct Johan had screamed at him to lie. To deflect. To protect the secret at all costs.
But this was his father. This man who'd raised him, taught him, tried his best to be good. Who sat beside him now with his world completely upended and was still trying to understand instead of running.
"I think so," Johan whispered. "I didn't know I could. I just felt it. The wrongness. And I wanted to fix it, so I... pushed. Something inside me pushed, and it worked."
Thomas absorbed this. His hands were shaking again. "....What are you, lad?"
I don't know, Johan wanted to say. I'm a soldier who died and came back wrong. I'm a child with a man's memories. I'm someone the universe decided to give another chance for reasons I don't understand.
"I don't know," he said instead. "But I'm still me. I'm still your son."
Thomas looked at him for a long time. Johan could see him processing, contemplating, trying to fit this impossible thing into a worldview built on concrete facts and reason.
Finally, Thomas nodded once. "Right. Here's what's going to happen. The doctors think it was a misdiagnosis. Faulty imaging. They're embarrassed, covering their arses. We let them believe that. Your mother doesn't remember anything between collapsing and waking up. We don't tell her different. And whatever this is..." He gestured vaguely at Johan. "Whatever you can do. You keep it hidden. You understand? People fear what they don't understand, and fear makes them dangerous."
"Yes, sir."
"I mean it, Johan. No one can know. Not your teachers. Not your friends. No one."
"I understand."
Thomas slumped back in his chair, suddenly exhausted. "Your mother's asking for you. Doctor said you can see her in a few minutes, once they finish the last round of tests. Try to look surprised that she's alright, yeah?"
"Yeah."
They sat together in the hospital room, father and son, separated by secrets neither could fully voice. Outside, the world continued on, unaware that something impossible had just happened in a third-floor room in Sheffield General.
Johan stared at his hands. Small, child's hands that had somehow channeled enough power to rewrite reality. The buzzing was gone now, burned out completely. He felt empty. Scraped clean.
But underneath the exhaustion, underneath the fear and confusion, was something else.
I healed her, he thought. I saved someone.
For the first time since waking up in this life, Johan felt like maybe, possibly, his second chance had a purpose beyond just existing.
Magic was real. It lived in him, humming beneath his skin, waiting.
For what? He doesn't have a fucking clue. But regardless...if he could save one person, maybe he could save more.