The pain in his chest, which had been a dull ache, suddenly sharpens into a white-hot poker, stealing his breath. His vision blurs, the edges darkening.
He slumps forward, his head hitting the sticky table with a dull thud. His last conscious thought is not of a family he never had, or friends he'd long since lost touch with.
It is a desperate, primal scream of a wish, a prayer to a god he stopped believing in long ago, a final, futile act of a dying fan.
If only I could go back. If only I could save my club.
The world dissolves into an infinite, silent darkness. There is no tunnel of light, no parade of loved ones waiting to greet him. There is only the void, cold and absolute, and the echo of his final, desperate wish.
If only I could go back. If only I could save my club.
And then, from somewhere in that infinite darkness, something answered.
…
Cold. A damp, biting cold that seeps into his bones, so profound it feels like it's crystallizing his marrow. Marc's eyes flutter open.
The first thing he registers is the smell. Damp, disinfectant, and the faint, unmistakable odour of despair.
He's not in the pub. He's on a lumpy, sagging mattress, a thin, coarse blanket tangled around his legs. A single, grimy window shows the familiar, perpetually overcast sky of Manchester.
He lurches upright, a gasp catching in his throat. His heart his perfectly fine, steadily, powerfully beating heart is pounding in his ears. He looks at his hands, holding them up to the dim light filtering through the grimy window.
They are his hands, but… younger. Smoother. The faint, silvery scars from a kitchen accident in his thirties, a stupid mishap with a mandoline slicer, are gone.
The skin is tighter, the knuckles less swollen from years of typing and arthritis. He flexes his fingers, feeling the strength, the vitality that he'd forgotten existed. These are the hands of a young man, not the worn, tired hands of a middle-aged office drone.
Panic, cold and sharp, cuts through his confusion. He scrambles out of bed, his movements clumsy, alien. He stumbles towards a cracked, full-length mirror propped against the far wall.
The face staring back is his, but it's a ghost from a life he thought was long gone. It's the face of his early twenties, a face full of a foolish, untempered optimism he thought had been systematically beaten out of him by two decades of disappointment.
The lines of stress around his eyes are gone. The flecks of grey at his temples have vanished. The light in his eyes… he hasn't seen that hopeful spark in a lifetime.
"What the hell…" he whispers, his voice hoarse, unfamiliar. It's higher, less gravelly than the voice he's used to.
His eyes dart around the room, taking in the squalor. A rusty sink in the corner. Peeling wallpaper. This is a hostel. He hasn't stayed in a hostel in twenty years.
Then he sees it. Lying on a rickety bedside table is a folded newspaper. He snatches it up, his fingers clumsy. The Manchester Evening News. His eyes dart to the date, desperately searching for an anchor in this sea of madness.
January 1, 2006.
The date doesn't register at first. His mind, still foggy from the impossible transition, tries to process it. 2006. He was… what, twenty-two? Twenty-three?
He does the mental math, his brain sluggish. He was born in 1983. That makes him twenty-two, almost twenty-three. A lifetime ago. A different person. It's just a number.
He thinks it must be an old paper, a prop in this bizarre, vivid dream. But the paper feels real. The ink smells fresh. He reads the headlines. They are about New Year's celebrations, about the political squabbles of the day. They are not memories; they are news.
A wave of vertigo, so intense it makes him stagger, washes over him. It's not a dream. It's real. And he knows, with a certainty that chills him to the bone, what this year means.
One year. One year after the Glazers had sunk their claws into the club. Six months after the takeover was complete. This wasn't the end of the decline. This was the very beginning.
His breath hitches in his throat. He remembers his last thought, the desperate prayer screamed into the void.
If only I could go back.
As if summoned by the thought, the very air in front of him begins to shimmer, to vibrate. The light in the room seems to dim, focusing on a single point in space.
Particles of blue light coalesce, swirling together like a miniature galaxy before resolving into a solid, translucent screen. It hangs in the air, emitting a soft, ethereal hum that seems to bypass his ears and resonate directly in his skull.
Words, in a clean, impossibly sharp digital font, begin to type themselves across the screen. Each letter is accompanied by a soft, distinct chime.
[System Booting…]
[Searching for Host's Core Emotional Resonance…]
[Resonance Found. Subject: Manchester United Football Club.]
[Emotional State: Terminal Despair, Unfulfilled Passion.]
[Analyzing Host's Final Cognitive Request…]
[Request Analyzed: 'Save My Club']
[Objective Defined: Rectify Past, Present, and Future Failings of Designated Entity.]
[Welcome, Host.]
Marc can only stare, his mind wiped clean of all thought. The screen flickers, the text vanishing, replaced by a final, monumental declaration. The letters are bold, red, and they burn themselves into his retinas, a declaration of war against the future he had just escaped.
[Red Devil's Fortune System Activated]