He woke to the rain.
That was the first thing he noticed. Just the steady, patient sound of water striking leaves and soil, dripping from branch to branch, soaking the earth beneath him as if the world were breathing around his still body. Cold pressed against his back, not that it bothered him.
He stared upward, reddish-orange eyes cutting through the darkness, catching glimpses of unfamiliar stars as clouds drifted lazily across the sky. The canopy above him swayed gently.
For a long moment, he didn't move. Then after a while of just looking, he lifted one hand. Rain slid over his skin and did nothing.
His arm was cracked like cooling stone, glowing lines of fire threading beneath flesh that should not have held together. Blue-orange flames licked lazily along his knuckles, curling around wicked claws that tipped his fingers.
Water struck the flame and yet the flame remained, It didn't hiss or even flicker.
It burned quietly. Patiently. As if rain was simply another thing happening around it.
"…right," he murmured, voice rough, unfamiliar in his own ears.
That was when it hit him.
Not the fire but the name.
Kánen'to…No.
Michael.
The name slammed into him with the weight of something remembered too late.
And with the name itself, the dam broke and the flood rushed in without stopping.
⸻
It wasn't gentle.
There was no easing into it, no soft unraveling of identity. The memories came like a flood tearing through a structure that had held somehow for an entire lifetime.
A street made of concrete, headphones blasting something loud and stupid and a cat.
A fucking cat.
The delivery truck swerving—
"Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me," he rasped, the words tumbling out raw and disbelieving.
The impact replayed in his mind: the snap of metal, gravity doing what gravity always did, the absurdity of it all.
'Are you serious? That's how I died?That's the end?'
His chest heaved as he gasped sharply and finally sat upright, rain pouring down his shoulders as two lives collided inside his skull and fucking hell It hurts.
Not physically but mentally, like trying to force two different worlds into the same space.
Modern words clashed violently with ancient language. Sentences overlapped. Concepts tangled. His mind stumbled, tripped, tried to reconcile electricity with firelight, phones with prayer sticks, streetlights with stars.
"Why is it never consistent?" he muttered, pressing a clawed hand to his temple. "Every reincarnation story makes the language thing sound easy."
It really wasn't.
English felt sharp and fast and compressed. His other tongue however was older, slower and carried weight in every syllable he spoke. They refused to blend.
It took him a while and a bit of effort just to focus a kind of conscious sorting. Eventually, the noise lessened in his head. English settled where it belonged and so did the rest.
Then came the faces, Hoshé's tired eyes, lined deep with age and regret, Aiyana's soft smile but that was now gone.
His mother's voice, calling his name from a kitchen that no longer existed.
Friends arguing about pizza toppings like it actually mattered. 'Pineapple,' he thought distantly. 'I never finished that argument.'
'Or… wait that seventeen years ago?'
Blood followed, then fire and ash falling like snow with bodies laid gently into piles.
Legends whispered in low voices around campfires, Phones lighting up in dark rooms.
Electricity humming through walls and just like that It was all tangled together again, jumbled and wrong, like memories thrown into the same box without labels.
He let out a breath that shook.
"Oh," he muttered hoarsely, staring at his burning hands as rain slid uselessly over them.
"Oh, that's… that's bad, isn't it?"
The rain kept falling around him and his flame kept burning true. And somewhere between the two lives crashing inside him, Michael realized the worst part wasn't the power, or the time displacement, or even the fact that he'd been shoved two thousand years into the past.
It was this: He remembered everything now.
His hands shook not from cold or any injury of any kind but from the memories.
The fire had receded completely now, the glowing cracks sealing as if they'd never existed. What remained were just calloused hands.
Hands that had buried villages, hands that had carried a lover to a pyre. Michael Keller stared at them for a long time.
"…yeah," he muttered. "That tracks."
He flexed his fingers slowly, grounding himself in the sensation. Flesh. Bone and now an unfamiliar limitations. For all the fire and legend wrapped around him, this was still the same body that had argued about pizza toppings and crossed streets without looking up.
Michael Keller was back and he was very, very early.
Or maybe not, "Ah man," he sighed, dragging a hand down his face. "This is so fucking confusing."
A weak laugh escaped him, brittle at the edges. It climbed too high, lingered too long, teetering dangerously close to hysteria before he forced it down.
"Two thousand years," he whispered to the rain-soaked forest.
"I get reincarnated and you throw me into hard mode." He snorted quietly.
"No internet, antibiotics or even basic human rights."
Rain soaked his hair as he leaned back against the damp earth, staring up through the canopy. He thought about all those stories about people being dropped centuries into the past who adapted in a montage, learned swordplay in a week, rebuilt modern thinking like it was nothing.
He scoffed.
'What utter bullshit.'
They never talked about the crushing part. The way everything you understood from electricity, medicine, language and culture was stripped away overnight. How you went from knowing too much to knowing nothing useful at all.
Zero. Absolute zero.
"…could've been worse I guess," he admitted quietly after a moment.
"At least I'm immortal."
The thought didn't comfort him as much as it should have though.
He glanced sideways suddenly, eyes narrowing slightly.
"…oh yeah," he muttered. "Where is that old man?"
⸻
Four Hundred Years After Fire
Six Hundred Years Before the Mikaelsons
The forest was quieter here, entirely different trees and different stars… ok the stars were still the same.
Michael sat cross-legged in the center of a fire circle, the flames rising steadily around him, painting the night in gold and shadow. The air shimmered with heat, yet it rolled off his skin harmlessly, as it had for the past hour.
Ancient Greece, though no one called it that yet. That's where he found himself now after wondering around for quite a while. He had thought of searching for a person during this time in Greece. Qetsiyah, but then a thought popped into his head, ' what if she uses you as a property of a spell in the immortality spell? Or worse she could just see you as an abomination because she definitely woukd sense what you are and your under developed magic' that had slowed him down in his tracts and changed his mind about locating arguably the most powerful witch in all of TVD.
He breathed slowly.
In.
Hold.
Out.
Again.
The fire around him responded not violently but attentively. It leaned inward, shrinking as his focus tightened. Sweat traced down his spine, not from heat but from effort.
Magic, it turned out, was harder than fire.
When the flames finally settled into a low, controlled ring, Michael exhaled sharply and broke the circle. He stood, rolled his shoulders, and took a long drink from his water pouch.
"Finally," he muttered.
It had taken decades, decades to even touch magic properly. To feel it move when he asked instead of when it decided. Hellhound fire came instinctively. Witchcraft demanded discipline.
'Hoshé would've enjoyed that irony.'
The thought brought a dull ache to his chest not sharp grief anymore for Hoshé had been dead a long time.
Michael remembered the shaman's final years clearly. How the old man grew smaller, quieter. How pride showed only in the way he watched Michael from across the fire, saying nothing because he didn't need to.
How he'd died beneath the stars, breath shallow, whispering how much he'd longed to see his people again and how happy he was embark on the journey to the pure lands.
Michael had stayed with him until the end.
Then he'd walked away.
He wandered after that. No destination. No timeline. Just movement. Decades blurred together. Then centuries. Time lost its meaning when you stopped counting years and started counting eras.
Empires rose and languages shifted. Borders appeared and vanished but the people didn't.
They aged, they died. Over and over again.
Michael stared into the dying fire, jaw tightening.
'Why would anyone want this?' he wondered. 'Why would anyone choose immortality?'
It wasn't freedom, It was pressure. It was watching everyone you learned to care about become memories while you stayed. Unchanged and alone.
The fire crackled softly, settling into embers as the night pressed in around him.
Michael pulled his cloak tighter and stood.
'Hard mode, indeed.'
He didn't age past his prime, get sick and couldn't die. He had tested some… things and boy it wasn't exactly pretty but each time he healed and regenerated quickly.
Michael had confirmed that much over the centuries with a kind of grim, methodical patience of watching wounds close, watching bones knit, watching time pass him by like water around a stone.
"Well," he muttered as he hiked through the forest, feet crunching over damp leaves, "Jordan Parrish package plus immortality confirmed."
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