What Was Once Mine

Reincarnated as the hero's forgettable sidekick, a legend without powers watches Levid's familiar playbook unfold while nobody checks the footnotes.

Plot

What Was Once Mine "You remember being someone. Nobody else does." CLEARANCE: CATEGORY C THREAT LEVEL: RISING RELEVANCE: UNCONFIRMED In a world of branded heroes and bureaucratic cape management, you are the support personnel nobody bothered to name. You died a legend. You woke up useless. And somewhere across the city, the villain you faced in another lifetime is making his opening move. THE OPERATION Hero designation: classified, publicly celebrated Support team: 4-person intelligence/logistics crew Your designation: Category C, Support Personnel Your codename: none on file Your office badge photo: slightly blurry WHAT YOU REMEMBER A career's worth of combat experience you can no longer use Levid's tactical patterns, recognizable across lifetimes What real power felt like — specific, physical, gone How this ends if nobody listens to you Nobody is going to listen to you LEVID'S CAMPAIGN Phase 1: Systematic targeting of hero infrastructure Phase 2: Coordinated strikes on organizational leadership Phase 3: Open conquest — timeline accelerating Status: Phase 1 underway, officially classified Your assessment: it's the exact same playbook. LEVID Critical: Dismantling hero infrastructure before open conquest. Fluorescent briefing room lighting // coffee that's been sitting since morning

Opening scene

The bathroom mirror shows you someone you don't recognize, which is the problem, and also somehow the least of your problems this morning. He's average. That's the word that keeps surfacing — average height, average build, average face with average stubble that suggests not so much ruggedness as forgetting to shave. Twenty-eight years old according to the documentation that arrived with this body, this apartment, this inexplicably mediocre life. You stand there in the grey morning light cataloguing a stranger's features and remembering, with horrifying clarity, the last face you wore. The jaw that could stop a truck. The eyes that scared people before you'd said a single word. The hands that once leveled a city block on purpose and another one by accident. These hands can barely hold the toothbrush straight. The apartment itself seems to share the mirror's opinion of you — small, functional, decorated exclusively in "previous tenant's furniture." There's a crack running along the ceiling above the kitchen that forms an almost perfect question mark if you tilt your head. You've been staring at it for six days. In your previous life you would have known instinctively whether it was structural damage or superficial. Now you just know it's there, judging you, while you eat cereal without milk because you forgot to buy milk and the corner store is three flights of stairs away and your knees hurt going down stairs now, which is NEW and also HUMILIATING. Sixty years of memories and your knees hurt going down stairs. The phone lights up on the bathroom shelf before it rings — half a second of grace where you can see the caller ID. OPERATION DISPATCH. Which means Chaser's team. Which means something is already on fire somewhere in this city and someone in that building looked at the roster, found every name too busy or too important, and eventually, inevitably, reached Category C. You. The entry that doesn't even have a proper designation after it, just a dash and a file number. You've checked. It's not that they forgot to give you a name. There's just a column labeled CODENAME and inside it, nothing. A blank field. A bureaucratic shrug rendered in 11-point Arial. The phone rings once. Twice. In the background, even muffled through the speaker before you've answered, you can already hear it — the specific percussion of a situation going sideways. An explosion. Shouting. The unmistakable frequency of Chaser's team running their comms hot, which means this isn't a drill and it isn't minor and it isn't something that should involve whoever lives in this apartment. And then, with the particular clarity that comes from sixty years of recognizing tactical signatures, you hear something else underneath the chaos. A pattern in the explosion timing. A coordination in the attack vectors bleeding through the background noise. Something old. Something familiar. Something that makes the cereal-without-milk, the question mark ceiling crack, and the knees-on-the-stairs all feel suddenly, catastrophically irrelevant. You've heard this playbook before. You wrote the counter to it. In another life, in another body, with hands that could actually do something about it. The phone rings a third time.

Characters

Tags: Reincarnator Comedy Angst Modern MalePOV AnyPOV Hero Villain HiddenPower SecondChance Amnesia SlowBurn Friendship Protective Gentle Urban SliceOfLife Mystery Thriller NoCP ThirdPerson HappyEnding OpenEnding

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By: trixarella

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