Chapter 1: The End and The Beginning

There was nothing, and then there was everything, and then there was a seven-year-old's car sickness.

Haojun's first coherent thought in this new life was: I am going to throw up on these leather seats. His second was: I read the whole novel for this. His third, following rapidly on the heels of the second: I didn't even like it that much.

He hadn't, really. Jingyi had shoved the link into their group chat at 2am with seventeen crying-laughing emojis and the message you NEED to read this you will DIE and Haojun, who had been awake anyway because his thesis wasn't going to write itself, had made the critical error of clicking it. Six hours later, he'd been late to his 8am seminar, had opinions about fictional people he hadn't asked for, and was genuinely unsure how to feel about the fact that his best friend had been describing Muze as "the most unhinged love interest in the genre" and meaning it as a compliment.

The car hit a speed bump. His stomach lurched. Outside the window, Beijing blurred past and then straightened out into something that was not Beijing , broader roads, older trees, the kind of quiet that happened when you were far enough from the city that the city forgot about you.

He was seven years old.

He was, presumably, also dead.

He was , and this was the part he was having the hardest time integrating , Ren Haojun. The other Ren Haojun. The one who had grown up in this car, heading toward this estate, with these parents in the front seat who were not quite talking to each other and not quite not talking to each other. The kind of careful not-silence that meant something was being not-said.

He knew this because he had read the novel. He knew the car ride. He knew the silence. He knew exactly where this road ended and what was at the end of it, and he knew what happened after that, across fifteen years of plot that had made Jingyi scream into a pillow at 3am and had made Haojun himself feel something complicated that he'd mostly resolved by closing the tab.

He pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window and thought: okay.

It wasn't a great thought. It was the kind of thought you had when the alternative was screaming, which he couldn't do because he was seven, and also because screaming would require explaining, and there was nothing he could say. He had no explanation. He had a dead man's memories and a child's body and a plot he already knew, and none of this was something he could tell anyone. Not Jingyi, who didn't exist here. Not these parents, who weren't really his. Not anyone.

Okay, he thought again. So. The estate.

The estate was the way the novel described it: enormous, and trying not to look like it cared.

That was the thing about old money. It built things that were supposed to look settled, inevitable, like they had simply always been there and weren't making any particular statement about it. The Shen family estate was three stories of gray stone and careful landscaping and a front gate that opened before the car reached it, which meant someone had been watching for them, which meant things were already beginning.

Haojun climbed out of the car and stood in the gravel driveway and tilted his head back to look at the front of the house.

It looked like a place where warmth went to get measured.

That wasn't fair. He was seven, he was nauseous, and he was pre-prejudiced by a novel he'd read six hours before dying. But still. The house.

"Come," said the woman beside him. His mother. His mother in this life, he corrected himself. Liang Feifei, or Shen FeiFei now, thirty-eight, professionally warm in public, privately tired in a way that wasn't anyone's fault in particular. He knew all of this. It sat in his chest like something borrowed.

He came.

Shen Guowei was exactly as described.

That was the thing about meeting fictional people , you kept waiting for them to be different from the version in the text, because people were always different, that was the whole point of people, and instead he was just... there. Tall, careful, the kind of handsome that had started converting into distinguished without anyone's permission. He shook Haojun's hand like Haojun was a small business associate and said something about being glad to have him here, and Haojun said something back, he wasn't sure what, and meanwhile his brain was doing the thing where it knew too much and couldn't say any of it.

He knew what Shen Guowei thought about Omegas.

He knew it the way you knew things from a book: abstractly, at a slight distance. Which was fine, because the whole Omega thing was , look. Haojun had tried, when Jingyi first started explaining the genre to him, to engage with it seriously. He had asked clarifying questions. Jingyi had answered them. He had listened, genuinely, and had then said, "but why," and Jingyi had looked at him with the expression she reserved for when he was being particularly unimaginative.

"It's a secondary gender system," she'd said. "It's a whole societal structure."

"Based on pheromones," he'd said.

"Yes."

"And the Omegas," he'd said, slowly, "are considered , inferior? Socially? Even though they're just regular people who happen to have certain biological characteristics?"

"Yes."

"And this is a modern setting."

"Yes."

"Jingyi," he'd said. "That's just sexism. With extra steps."

She had pointed at him very seriously. "That's kind of the point."

He'd thought about that a lot, in the hours he'd been reading. It was the thing that bothered him most, actually, more than the possessiveness or the kissing-without-permission or any of the things that were supposed to be alarming , it was the way the world of the novel treated the whole system as settled. Like it had always been this way and therefore was fine. Like a person could be categorized at birth and that category could determine their education, their marriage, their autonomy, their entire life, and everyone would look at this and call it tradition.

It wasn't that different from things that had actually happened. That was what Jingyi was always saying. It was a metaphor, Haojun. You're very slow about metaphors, Haojun. Yes, I know you got a 3.9 GPA, that's not what I mean.

He had, at the time, told her that he wasn't slow, he just needed everything to be spelled out. She had agreed that this was what being slow was.

Standing in Shen Guowei's entrance hall, with its marble floors and its careful art and its particular quality of chill that had nothing to do with the temperature, Haojun thought: I understood the metaphor. I just didn't expect to live in it.

Shen Guowei was still talking. Something about the family, the house, the schools in the area. His mother was nodding. Haojun was nodding. Everything was going the way the novel said it would go, except that the novel had never had to account for Haojun's nausea or the fact that his feet didn't quite touch the ground when he sat in the living room chair, or the specific strange loneliness of knowing a story well enough to feel sad for it.

He was going to change things. That was the reason he was here, or at least the reason he was choosing to assign to being here, because the alternative , that the universe was deeply irrational and he was simply a victim of it , was less useful to operate under. He had the plot. He had the foreknowledge. He was going to be smarter than the original Haojun, who had not read any novels and had therefore not known what was coming, and he was going to fix the things that could be fixed.

He had a plan.

He was seven years old and he'd had a plan for about four minutes, so it wasn't a very detailed plan yet.

He was going to refine it.

Shen Guowei's housekeeper showed them to their rooms. Haojun's was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway that turned left before it reached the west wing , he knew the layout, he'd read the description three times , and it was a good room. Large, well-furnished, impersonal in the way of guest rooms that are expected to be permanent but haven't committed to it yet.

He set his bag down on the bed and stood in the middle of the room and thought about the estate's second floor, and about who else lived in it.

There was a room at the end of the hall. The door would be closed.

He went to look.

The hallway was quiet in the way old houses were quiet: not empty, but held. Like the walls were listening. Haojun walked to the end of it, past two closed doors that were not the door, past a small painting of a mountain that no one had chosen recently, past a window that looked down onto the back garden.

The door at the end was closed.

It was just a door. Dark wood, a plain handle, a small scuff at the base where it had been opened too fast too many times, or possibly kicked once, by a small foot. Haojun looked at it.

He was not prepared for what came next, which was the door opening three centimeters.

A pair of eyes looked through the gap. Dark, careful eyes , not wide the way a young child's eyes were supposed to be wide, but settled. Watchful in the way of someone who had learned early that watching was safer than being seen.

Haojun stood in the hallway, seven years old and full of all the wrong memories, and looked at a small face he recognized from a novel that had not yet been written, and had the very specific experience of a plot becoming real.

Muze was five. Maybe six , the novel had been slightly vague. He was small in the way of children who had been, perhaps, not quite nourished the way they should have been, though he didn't look sick, just , precise. Even standing in a doorway, he was precise. Dark hair cut practically, dark eyes that were doing something very complicated in a face that was giving away almost nothing.

He was looking at Haojun the way you looked at something new in your space: cataloguing.

Haojun, who had read about this child for six hours, who knew the ending and the middle and the worst things in between, who was a twenty-four-year-old man operating a seven-year-old's body with insufficient context about what pheromones were supposed to do and whether he was producing them correctly, said the first and worst thing that came to mind:

"Hi."

The eyes blinked.

The door closed.

Haojun stood in the hallway for a moment. Outside, through the window, a bird passed. The house settled. Somewhere downstairs, his mother was still talking to Shen Guowei about schools, or the house, or the future, or something equally theoretical.

He looked at the closed door. Then he looked at his own hands, which were very small, which he was going to have to get used to.

Okay, he thought, for the third time that day.

He had a plan. The plan involved knowing how the story ended and preventing it, because he'd seen the ending , not metaphorically, in the text, but in that cold formless place between the novel's last page and whatever this was, where all the conclusions had already been drawn and they were not good ones. He'd seen the shape of what this story became if no one changed it. The family, gone. Muze, alone. Victorious in all the ways that cost everything.

That was not a good ending. Haojun had not liked it. He was a fixer, constitutionally, in both lives, and this was something that could theoretically be fixed.

Also , and this was the part he was being very careful not to examine too closely, because he was seven and it was his first day and there would be time later for examining things , he had just looked at those eyes through three centimeters of open door, and something that might be called feeling and might be called recognition and might simply be the novel's plot sitting too heavily in his chest had done something inconvenient in the vicinity of his ribs.

He did not have words for that.

He walked back to his room.

He would come up with words later.

At dinner, there was a chair that was slightly further from the table than the others.

No one moved it.

Haojun ate his meal and watched and did not say anything, and filed that away with everything else, and reminded himself that the plan existed and the plan was good, and tried not to think about the fact that somewhere upstairs there was a five-year-old who had looked at him like he was something worth remembering.

He was going to fix this.

He'd read the novel. He knew how it went.

He had no idea how it was going to go.

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