Chapter 1: RESURRECTION
The fluorescent light stabbed into my retinas before I understood I had eyes.
Beeping. Rhythmic and clinical. My chest rose and fell without my permission. I tried to move my right hand and watched fingers twitch—wrong fingers. Too long. Different calluses. A scar across the knuckle I didn't remember earning.
Wrong.
My throat constricted. The ceiling tiles blurred, came back, blurred again. White. Institutional. Twenty-three tiles from the window to the far wall. My brain counted them automatically while the rest of me screamed.
I died. I remembered dying.
The truck came through the intersection at forty-seven miles per hour. I was looking at my phone—just a glance, checking a notification from work—and then red light became crumpling metal became my body folding in ways bodies shouldn't fold. The last thing I saw was my coffee splashing across the windshield in slow motion, catching afternoon sunlight.
Then nothing.
Now this.
The door opened. A woman in scrubs walked in, her sneakers squeaking against the linoleum. Mid-forties. Kind eyes creased at the corners. Her badge read Patterson, RN.
"Mr. Mikaelson? You're awake." She smiled, checking the monitors beside my bed. "I'll page Dr. Chen. How are you feeling?"
Mikaelson. Not my name. Not even close.
"Water," I managed. My voice came out rough, unused. A different pitch than I remembered.
She poured from a plastic pitcher, helped guide the straw to my lips. The water tasted like minerals and plastic. I drank anyway, buying time to think.
"You gave us quite a scare," Patterson said, adjusting my IV line. "Three weeks in a coma. Dr. Chen will want to run some tests now that you're conscious."
Three weeks. I'd been dead—or whatever this was—for three weeks.
"What happened?" The words scraped out.
"Car accident. Single vehicle, you hit a barrier on I-95. Do you remember any of it?"
I shook my head. That felt true enough. I remembered dying in an accident—just not this one.
Patterson finished her checks and left to find the doctor. I lay still, staring at those twenty-three ceiling tiles, trying to organize the chaos in my skull.
Two sets of memories lived there now. Mine—thirty-one years of a life in Seattle, software engineering degree, dead parents, no siblings, the morning coffee ritual that killed me. And someone else's. Fragments only, scattered like broken glass: a childhood I didn't live, a medical examiner's certification, the smell of formaldehyde mixed with expensive cologne.
Baltimore. I was in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins, if the logo on Patterson's badge meant anything.
And the name. Mikaelson. Adam Mikaelson.
Something clicked in the back of my mind. A recognition that didn't come from either set of memories—something older, deeper. I'd heard that name before. In fiction.
Oh god.
I pressed my palm flat against the mattress, feeling the texture of starched sheets. Real. This was real. But the world I'd landed in—
A second nurse entered. Younger, sharper features, dark hair pulled back tight. Her badge said Williams. She didn't smile.
"Vitals check." She reached for my wrist without waiting for acknowledgment.
My skin crawled.
It started at the base of my skull—a cold prickling that spread down my spine and across my shoulders. My pulse, which the monitor displayed in green numbers, jumped from 72 to 89. My hand twitched away from her touch before I decided to move it.
Williams paused, eyes narrowing. "Hold still."
I held still. But every cell in my body screamed wrong. Something about her—the way she gripped my wrist too hard, the flatness in her gaze, the controlled precision of movements that wanted to be rougher—triggered an alarm I didn't know I possessed.
"Blood pressure's elevated," she noted, voice clinical. "I'll flag it for Dr. Chen."
She left. The crawling sensation faded. I lay there, heart hammering, trying to understand what had just happened.
The body I was wearing knew something. Or maybe I did, in some part of myself I hadn't accessed yet. Either way, something about Nurse Williams was wrong, and I'd felt it in my bones before my brain caught up.
Dr. Chen arrived twenty minutes later—small, efficient, wire-rimmed glasses. He ran me through the standard battery: follow the light, squeeze my fingers, what day is it. I answered what I could. The date threw me. October 2003. I'd died in 2024.
Twenty-one years backward.
"Remarkable recovery," Chen said, making notes on his tablet. "The CT shows no lasting damage. Your reflexes are intact. Some confusion is normal after extended unconsciousness—don't worry if things feel disjointed for a few days."
"What caused the accident?"
"Police report says you swerved to avoid something in the road. Overcorrected. Hit the barrier at highway speed." He looked up. "You're lucky to be alive, Mr. Mikaelson. The first responders didn't expect to find a pulse."
Neither did I.
"I'll want to keep you under observation for another day or two," Chen continued. "Standard protocol after coma recovery. But barring complications, you should be discharged by end of week."
After he left, I lay in the dim room and let my thoughts circle.
I was in the Hannibal universe. I didn't have enough of Adam Mikaelson's memories to know exactly when, but I had enough general knowledge to understand what that meant. Will Graham. Jack Crawford. The Chesapeake Ripper hunting in these very streets.
Hannibal Lecter. Psychiatrist. Cannibal. Monster in a person suit.
And I was three weeks before the series started, if I remembered the timeline correctly. Three weeks before Will Graham walked into that lecture hall and his life began its descent into hell.
I closed my eyes. Counted my breaths. One. Two. Three.
I had no powers, no system, no cheat sheet. Just fragmented memories of a dead man and the itching certainty that Nurse Williams would hurt someone if given the chance.
Four. Five. Six.
Tomorrow I'd start figuring out who Adam Mikaelson was. What resources I had. What I could do.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
But tonight, I let myself feel it—the absurd, terrifying gift of being alive when I shouldn't be. The lime Jello they brought for dinner tasted like childhood summers. I ate it slowly, savoring each chemical-sweet bite, while the monitors beeped and the ceiling tiles stayed exactly where they were.
Ten.
The next morning, Patterson mentioned offhandedly that Williams had been placed on administrative leave. "Patient complaint," she said, refilling my water. "Between you and me, it wasn't the first one."
The cold certainty in my gut settled into something I could name: I had known. Before anyone else, before evidence, before conscious thought, my body had known she was dangerous.
Three weeks until Hannibal Lecter walked into Will Graham's life.
Three weeks to figure out what the hell I was now.
I pushed myself up against the pillows, testing muscles that responded like they'd always been mine, and started making plans.
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