My ABO System

A Second Chance

Elliot woke up gasping.

He sat bolt upright, clawing at his chest, searching for the hole, the cold, the hand. His lungs dragged in air that tasted of nothing worse than clean linen and morning. Sunlight. A ceiling fan turning lazily overhead. A bedroom he knew better than his own face.

His father's house.

His hands were shaking. He looked at them.

There were no bruises . A smooth, unscarred wrist, his mother's silver ring on his finger. On the desk by the window sat a calendar he'd thrown out years ago, and a ring of coffee stains on the wood that his younger self had left and never cleaned.

He scrambled up searching for his cellphone, he found it soon and checked the time, it read;

08:30am

his eyes moved to the date

November 6th 2021

Five years.

The number arrived like a blow. Five years before the wedding. Five years before the fires.

He was skeptical at first,

perhaps death was playing a trick on him, or he was having flashbacks.

He stumbled out of bed, nearly fell, and caught himself on the dresser. In the mirror, a young man stared back, pale, wide-eyed, no ring of exhaustion under his eyes. Unmarried. Untouched. Alive.

Down the hall, a door opened. Elias's laughter drifted up the stairs, easy and warm, and Elliot pressed a fist against his mouth to hold in the sound he'd have made.

Alive. They're all alive.

He made himself breathe. In. Out. Then he crossed to the far wall, pulled aside the framed circuit diagram his father had given him at sixteen, and pressed his palm against the cold steel door of the safe behind it.

The keypad glowed.

He knew the password. He had typed it a hundred times in a life that no longer existed. His fingers hesitated over the keys for one long heartbeat, and then he entered it.

Click.

The door swung open.

The vial sat in its foam cradle, small, ordinary, no longer than his finger. A pale light moved inside it, slow and faintly golden, like something asleep. The serum. The key to a system that could lift a person past every limit the world had given them.

The thing that had ended everything.

Elliot lifted it out. It was warm in his palm, warm like a living thing, and it weighed almost nothing at all.

Downstairs, someone called his name. Cheerful. Familiar. His brother.

He didn't answer. He stood in the sunlight with the whole future closed in his fist, listening to the house breathe around him, and thought:

What am I going to do with you?