Rebirth10 min read
I Woke Up as Her — and He Kept Coming Back
ButterPicks13 views
I woke mid-chew, the rice stuck in my throat, and thought, for the briefest, stupidest second, that eating was the worst decision I'd made all week.
"Stop choking," someone said. The tone was flat, used-to-this-flat. When I opened my eyes I was at a lacquered table, hands smaller than mine, fingers slender as a spider's. My mind supplied the rest: I had read this novel, I knew the plot. I knew the heroine died three times in chapter one. I knew how cruel the author could be.
"Are you all right?" the boy asked. He looked like fourteen. He smelled faintly of jasmine and old ink. He looked like a child, but his eyes—cold and steady—said otherwise.
"Who are you?" I croaked. The original heroine's name popped unbidden into my mouth. "I'm Jayden."
He bowed once, neat and quiet. "Rowan Nicolas," he said. "Rest. I'll have someone fetch broth."
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. Instead, I swallowed, and the rice dislodged with a tiny, humiliating cough. So this was the body I'd been dropped into: Jayden Gomez, a woman long-lived in that world's way, with a life she hadn't had patience for and a string of ridiculous fragile incidents that read like a bad prank.
"You're not supposed to wake up like this," I muttered, and not because of the world but because the heroine I'd read had the stamina of tissue paper. I flexed my fingers. They were real. I had to not follow the script.
Rowan didn't smile. He never smiled at the right time. "Rest," he said again.
I did not last long in the calm narrative lane. Two days later, as if obedient to the author's whim, I tripped on a street stone and—well, I didn't die. I woke again, hand searching for Rowan's presence as if survival depended on it.
"You're safe," he told me every time I blinked into life. Sometimes he was the one who pulled me back—sometimes, inexplicably, I watched his chest stop. Once, he died in my arms and came back with the crust of dirt still warm on his sleeves. When that happened, I realized the book had not told me everything. Rowan had tricks I hadn't known. He had been dead before I ever opened the novel.
"How many times will you pretend to be small?" I asked him once, fingers tracing the faint cut at his thumb.
He only looked at me, very slowly, and said, "I did it so you could live."
"That is the worst line a knight can use," I said.
He leaned closer, eyes softening like winter melting into noon. "Then I will try not to be a bad line."
Rowan Nicolas was not like the boys I'd dated in my old life. He did not flirt, he did not brag. He kept to a narrow code. When he was annoyed he became a winter breeze of menace; when he cared he became a low sun that warmed me without flaying.
"You're full of contradictions," I told him. "I read the book. You were infuriating—brutal, then tender, then distant."
"I am not a book," he said. "I am… what remains."
There were bodies around us that were not supposed to be bodies. A fake sibling, Lane Hanson, had been swapped into my household and then revealed to be what he was: a hungry claim on inheritance. A sweet, tough dog of a man called Ismael Mariani moved between us like a living shadow—he could change from a hollow-winged bat into a man whose jaw could cut glass. Thierry Mortensen—whom everyone called the Frost King—smirked too often and liked to layer himself in fox-mantles in summer.
"Why are you protecting me?" I asked Rowan one night by candlelight. The hall smelled like lemon oil and dust.
"Because you are mine to keep," he answered. "Because when you made the same stupid choice the heroine always makes, I could not let myself be the reason you stop existing."
"Stammering saves lives now? Since when?"
He didn't laugh. He reached for my hand and for a heartbeat, the world narrowed to the heat of his palm. "Since always," he said.
There were many small heart-stopping things. Rowan surprising me by placing his cloak over my shoulders though I'd said I didn't need it. Ismael brushing my hair back gently while explaining, too matter-of-factly, that bats liked sugar and fire. Thierry Mortensen flashing a smile that was somehow both mocking and earnest in front of a crowd, then later slit open a rival's secret with one phrase that left everyone gasping.
"You never tell me everything," I said to Rowan.
"I never tell everyone everything," he corrected, and his voice was a wall and a room at the same time.
We were supposed to be in a slow, soft romance—yet murder followed like a second shadow. Lane Hanson's false identity pulled a thread that exposed a larger fabric: someone had tried to topple the house of Rowan's family years ago. Bodies piled, evidence pointed to servants, to slaves, to the small and the poor, always the easiest scapegoats. Harrison Zimmerman, a slave who seemed on the surface mindless and obedient, had a mark only a few could make. That mark—an old binding sigil, etched across the whorls of a palm—was like a new map.
"Those sigils—who can put them on?" I asked Ismael once, kneeling on the floor of Rowan's private study, the map of their lands spread out like a wound.
"Only someone with the old ropes," Ismael said, voice a whisper. "Only the House they serve. But someone hid it on Harrison. Someone wanted a fall guy."
"Who would do that?" I felt foolish for the question. In a room full of nobles, everyone had many reasons.
Days telescoped into a blur of feasts, examinations, and at the center of it all, a public inquest. The emperor himself sent representatives. The crowd that day was dense and hot; they spoke in sharp little knives. I watched as one by one, people who had once bowed at Rowan's family's threshold were asked to testify. The air smelled of sweat and baked bread. Rowan stood with no feint, seeming to become smaller, older, and then a hard bright thing simultaneously.
"Barons and servants, hear me," the emperor said, his voice a bell. "We will not have our noble lines used as playthings. We will root out this rot."
"Who is rot, then?" Thierry Mortensen called from the side, voice flat and unpleasant like scraping stone. That earned him a glare from the emperor and a hush. Thierry's smile, dangerous as a blade, told me he had bets on more than one table.
Then we moved to the punishment. There are punishments in that world that are cruel and designed to make virtue into public theater. But the rules in my head, the old trope in the book—bad men getting off lightly—would not hold. If there was one thing I had to do as Jayden, it was to make sure the bad men were seen. And so I pushed.
"Harrison Zimmerman," I said, standing when all eyes had become coal. "You were marked because someone wanted you blamed. But there is a mark on others."
A murmur rushed, like wind along reed. Rowan's gaze found mine; his mouth said nothing but the tilt of his head asked me to go on.
I had the emperor's ear. I used it. "Search Harrison's quarters," I said. "Search the houses of those who would profit most from the blood-shed."
It was an ugly chore. The searches began with the serving rooms and went to the clerks' desks and the vaults of men who never slept without a gold-lined pillow. The first buckle they dug out was a placed slave-mark—thin metal run through leather, hidden beneath a desk. The second was a map with a line drawn in a hand that matched the handwriting of an accountant who'd always smiled at me as if the world were a neat puzzle.
The turning came when the emperor himself demanded the accused be brought forward. The crowd swelled. I stood beside Rowan; we were in the high courtyard—a stone amphitheater ringed by faces and torches. Harrison was led out, chains loud against the pavement. He did not look afraid; he looked bewildered.
"By decree of the emperor," thundered the official, "we declare the house of the sigil and its collaborators guilty of murder and falsehood."
There were gasps. Then they read names. Noble names. Names that had whispered of lineage with thinner tongues.
"Why would they do it?" someone asked.
"Power," Thierry Mortensen said as if the word were a toy. "The simplest answer is always the truest."
Then the empire did something no one expected: it demanded public remediation—a punishment not of lonely chains but of exposure and loss. The leaders of the conspiracy were brought out. I watched as their faces shifted: at first disbelief, then a bright flush of anger, then a wet attempt at denial, then the slow, awful cracking of composure.
"You set us up!" one conspirator screamed. "You—"
"Silence." The emperor's voice cut like frost. "You will confess. The city will watch."
They were made to parade. The main villain—an adviser who had eaten with the emperor and whispered in his ear—was made to kneel under the sun. They brought forth the evidence: ledgers, letters with tiny iron sigils matching the binding on Harrison's palm, a thin slip of silk with an embossing that matched the seal of a lord of the council. The crowd leaned in. I saw the way faces glowed with the hunger of being right.
"This letter is in your hand," the emperor said. "And this ledger shows the payments."
The adviser shifted. "These are for the upkeep—"
"For the upkeep of slaughter?" the emperor said. The word dragged the adviser like a net. The man tried to laugh; he couldn't make sound. "You killed to shape succession. You made them die for your coins."
At that point the crowd turned. The sound was like a tide. People who had smiled at those conspirators now spat and pointed; some pressed hands to hearts.
The man who'd called himself the steward of the realm began to crumble. "You don't understand," he croaked. "I did it—"
"You did what you did for your family," the emperor said. "And now, in the sight of all, your purse and titles are forfeit. Your lands will feed the city for ten years. Your line will not be touched by the rank you sought."
Then the spectacle sharpened into humiliation. They shaved his crest, the mark of his house, in public. They stripped him of armor and gave him a basic tunic; the herald read aloud his misdeeds. Children pointed. Someone in the crowd started to film with a little trick of glass—they took to making images of shame as if it were sport. The conspirator's face went through a visible descent—first outrage, then bargaining, then naked terror.
"You're making a mockery," he sobbed. "You will regret—"
"No," the emperor said. "You will live long enough to regret."
The punishment did not end with a strip and a proclamation. It became a process. The conspirators were paraded to their neighbors: merchants who'd lent them coin, widows they'd swindled, servants they'd bailed into debt. Each victim named their hurt, and the men could only stand and hear. The crowd's reaction changed slowly—first stunned, then vindictive, then something like satisfaction. Camera-windows clicked. People took down the names. Some shouted. Some wept.
Harrison was cleared of the taint. He stood quietly while the man who had tried to make him a scapegoat writhed. I watched Harrison's expression change: confusion, then relief, then something like pity. He looked at the conspiracy's head and did not spit. He bowed—an odd, small gesture—and walked away to the servants' quarters. The crowd cheered as if he'd played a symphony.
The lead conspirator's end was not a single act but a slow collapse: stripped, shorn, starved of influence, his estates given to those who had lost sons. He was forced to live under a small wooden sign announcing his crimes, to work those same fields he had so long called "inferior." People came to gape, and then they came to demand more accountability. The man's friends turned away, the faces of courtiers cooling like milk. He begged for mercy in words that sounded thinner than thread. The emperor's messenger delivered news: the offender's line would be watched; heirs would be denied rank. That was stinging in a way that mattered in that world.
Above all, it was public. The performance was meant as a lesson: power could be used—indeed must be used—to reveal, not conceal. The crowd's pleasure was its own kind of law: to see the strong humbled. I saw faces that had fed on rumor now fed on justice. I saw the conspirator's eyes hollow. I saw Rowan's jaw tighten, then relax. He had been the one who lived with the knife at his family's throat; he had earned this.
After the court dispersed, lanes buzzed with gossip and a new, wary quiet. Thierry Mortensen made his usual small jokes from the side, but even he stayed a little closer to the emperor that night.
We walked home in a hush. I kept my eight-meter blade at my side though the day had been finished; the sword's weight was oddly comforting. Rowan slid his hand into mine without announcing it and for the first time his fingers held mine in a way that felt like a promise rather than an obligation.
"Did you think we would stop?" I asked him.
He only pressed his thumb to mine and said, "No. But we are better at the next fight."
Months did not pass in the vanilla way the book had promised; instead days bristled with new truths. Rowan taught me how to keep a room silent. I taught him how to laugh at bad punchlines. We were not perfect: he had ghosts, and I had the dangerous confidence of someone who remembered a future. There were small victories—three sweet instant ones I could list like treasure: the time Rowan laughed at a clumsy joke; the time he tucked my cloak around me so softly that my throat closed; the time he caught my hand and would not let it go when the crowd screamed.
"Do you love me?" I asked him once beneath a bright, absurd moon that hung in the square like a coin.
His fingers tightened. "You are loud, foolish, brave, and dangerous. Yes."
"That's not romantic," I said.
"Romance is a tool," he muttered. "And I have many tools to keep you alive."
That was the verity between us. Hands in hands, blade at my hip, truth in the open square. We had made the punishment public and thorough because secrets had been the weapon. The men who used secrets were broken in the full light. The reward beyond justice was that a slave got his name back, the orphan lane got a home, the bats and men found strange friendships in their small bargains. And I—who had bargained with a story—found something unbookish: a living, difficult, and oddly forgiving man who bent his steel for me.
We returned to the house under stars that smelled like iron and pondwater. My eight-meter blade leaned quietly in the corner. I thought of the book's ending and refused it. I would not be a character that died for poignancy. I would keep cutting my own path forward.
"Tomorrow," Rowan said, when we'd cleaned our hands and the house sighed like a beast settling down, "we ride to the secret grove. There are more questions left. I will not let those who covet my house make spectacles of the ones I love."
"I will bring my courage and my eight-meter blade," I replied.
He smiled in a way I could feel crawling into me, and I knew the promise meant less than the quiet that followed. The world around us had been almost destroyed by men who thought their private plans could stay private. We had made them public. The shame had burned away their protections, and people watched as truth unseated pretense.
"Stay," Rowan said finally, in a voice like a small bell. "Stay close."
I did. And I put my hand on the sword's haft—because some scenes need a blade, and some lives need a guardian.
The End
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