The first problem with being twenty-three years old inside a four-year-old body was the legs.
They were short. Embarrassingly short. Johnny had spent two years in Setúbal developing the particular long stride of a man who walked everywhere because the bus was unreliable.
And the distances were manageable, and now every journey across a room felt like a negotiation between where he wanted to be and what his body was prepared to offer.
He adapted. He always adapted.
The second problem was the hands.
He had been a sort of competent cook in his previous life. Nothing extraordinary, but he could make a proper arroz de frango and his mother's recipe for muamba de galinha from memory, and he had been quietly proud of that.
Now his hands were too small to hold a knife properly, and Nel watched him at the kitchen counter with an expression of fond alarm and gently suggested that cooking was perhaps something to return to when he was a little older.
He did not argue. He had learned early that choosing battles wisely was more efficient than winning all of them.
The third problem, and the one that required the most careful management, was the talking.
Four-year-olds did not talk the way Johnny talked now. He had caught Sebastian looking at him three times in the first week with that precise, unreadable expression that meant something was being noticed and filed away. He had caught Hector doing it even more often. He had therefore made a conscious effort to speak less, to let silences sit, to ask questions rather than make observations, because questions were safe. Questions sounded like curiosity.
Johnny sat up, dressed quietly, and went downstairs for breakfast.
Clean and simple. Spiral is completely absent, and Johnny is fully alone, carrying everything by himself, which actually makes his calm and determination feel even stronger.
Then he got up and went downstairs for breakfast.
Hector had a routine, and he kept to it with the discipline of someone who had learned a long time ago that structure was what kept you functional when everything else was uncertain.
He woke early. He exercised in the back garden in the mornings, which Johnny had discovered by accident one day when he woke before dawn and looked out his window and saw his grandfather moving through what appeared to be a personal training program that would have destroyed most professional athletes. He did it quietly and without performance, the way he did most things.
After that, he showered, came to breakfast, and read the news on a tablet while Nel made eggs and Sebastian managed the household with his customary invisible efficiency.
Johnny had inserted himself into this routine.
He came down to breakfast every morning at the same time. He sat in the same chair. He ate what Nel put in front of him without complaint, which Nel seemed to find remarkable, and Hector seemed to find it fishy in the particular way that parents and grandparents found good behaviour suspicious when it arrived without effort.
After breakfast, Hector would read to him sometimes. Not children's books, which Johnny appreciated, but actual books, history and biography mostly, the kind with real sentences and real ideas. Hector read them the way he did everything, directly and without condescension, pausing occasionally to explain something and watching Johnny's face when he did.
Johnny kept his face appropriately four years old during these explanations.
It was the hardest part of the whole performance.
"You don't have to explain that part," he said one morning, before he could stop himself.
Hector had been watching him more carefully since the second day. Not with worry exactly. More with the attention of someone trying to reconcile two things that did not match. The Johnny he remembered from before the fever had been a quiet and intelligent child for his age; he learnt to read just recently, and soon he will be five. Nel's teaching seemed to do miracles.
But things accelerated recently, the child was now at the level of genius, he was proud but also curious about what may have caused it.
He was also a timid person and the kind who needed coaxing to speak and answered questions in single words, even when he knew it.
Johnny asked questions before breakfast and followed the answers with more questions and sat with ideas the way adults sat with them, turning them over, looking at the underside.
He had not said anything about it. But he was watching.
Hector looked at him over the top of the book.
"Which part?" he asked.
"The part about why the hero commission was formed. It is because the government needed a regulatory body for quirk users, and the existing law enforcement infrastructure was not equipped to handle powered individuals." Johnny stopped. Looked at his grandfather. "I mean. I think I understood it."
Hector looked at him for a long moment.
"Where did you learn that?" he asked.
"I read it somewhere," Johnny said.
Which was true, technically. He had read it in his previous life, in a fan analysis of the MHA world structure on a website he no longer remembered the name of.
Hector looked at him for a long moment. Not the casual glance of a grandfather listening to a child. The full attention of someone who had spent a career reading people and was now reading his grandson with the same careful precision.
"You were not like this before the fever," he said. Not accusing.
Just stating it.
Johnny held his gaze.
"I feel different since I woke up," he said carefully. "Like something cleared."
Hector was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," he said. "You seem more mature."
He turned the page and continued reading. But Johnny noticed he did not look back at the book for another full minute.
Johnny brushed it off as a close call and decided to be more careful or simply forget it. After all, could his grandfather even notice? Who would imagine that the mind of a man in his twenties was trapped in a four-year-old's body?
Nel taught him things without meaning to.
She was the kind of person whose competence was so natural it was almost invisible. She moved through the house, and things happened around her, meals appeared, and laundry vanished and reappeared clean and folded, and the endless small machinery of a large household ran smoothly in her wake.
Johnny watched her carefully. Not just because he found it interesting, which he did, but because watching people was how he had always learned what they needed. In Setúbal, he had watched his workmates and known who needed a shift covered, who needed to be left alone, and who needed someone to say out loud that the thing they were carrying was heavy. It was not a special skill. It was just attention.
Nel needed very little. She was one of those people who had organized their life efficiently around what they had and did not spend much energy wanting what they did not. But she liked being thanked specifically rather than generally. She liked it when the people she cared for noticed the particular things she had done rather than just the results. She liked the garden in the early evening and would stand at the kitchen window looking at it for a few minutes after dinner when she thought nobody was watching.
Three weeks in, Johnny said, "Nel, the way you cut the vegetables for the soup today was different. It made them cook more evenly."
Nel turned from the counter and looked at him with an expression he could not entirely read.
"You noticed that," she said.
"It tasted better," Johnny said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled, small and genuine, the kind that meant something rather than the professional warmth she deployed by default.
"Your grandmother used to say the same thing," she said. "That the cutting mattered."
She turned back to the counter, and Johnny filed that away too. His grandmother. Another person who was gone. Another space in this family where someone had been and was not anymore.
He was beginning to understand the shape of what Hector carried.
Sebastian was harder to read.
He was precise and correct and present in the way that excellent butlers were present, which was to say everywhere necessary and nowhere intrusive. He had worked for the Graham family for ten years and had known Devon and Amara and had watched Hector become the quieter version of himself that grief produces and had apparently decided that his job was to hold the household together with the same steady attention regardless of what the household threw at him.
He watched Johnny the way a very good chess player watches a board. Not suspiciously. Just comprehensively.
One afternoon, Johnny found him in the small room off the kitchen that served as a combination office and storage space, attempting to repair a radio that sat on the shelf in pieces. It was an old thing, analogue, the kind that had no practical purpose in a world of digital devices but that someone had clearly loved enough to keep.
"Granpa's?" Johnny asked from the doorway.
"Your grandmother's," Sebastian said without looking up. "He has asked me to fix it several times. I have not managed it."
Johnny looked at the radio.
He did not know why he did what he did next. It was not a decision exactly. More like a reflex, the way you reach out to catch something falling before your brain has processed that it is falling.
He looked at the radio, and he thought about how it should work. Not in a general way. Specifically. The signal path, the tuner, the capacitors, and the particular logic of how the components connected and what happened when that connection failed.
Something moved in him. Faint. Barely there.
The radio clicked.
A small green light on its face came on. Static, then the faint ghost of a signal, a voice speaking too far away to make out the words, but present, unmistakably present.
Sebastian went very still.
He looked at the radio. He looked at Johnny standing in the doorway six feet away with his small hands at his sides. He looked at the radio again.
"I did not touch it," Johnny said carefully.
"No," Sebastian agreed. "You did not."
They looked at each other.
"Maybe, my quirk will awaken soon," Johnny said. It came out steady and natural.
Sebastian was quiet for a moment. His expression did not change, which was itself a kind of change, the stillness of someone deciding how to hold an unexpected thing.
"I think," he said carefully, "that Sir Hector should know about this."
"Yes," Johnny agreed. "He should."
Sebastian nodded once and set down his tools and went to find Hector with the unhurried precision of a man who had decided that whatever this was, it would be handled correctly.
Johnny looked at the radio.
The green light was still on. The faint signal still coming through, the voice still speaking its unheard words into the quiet room.
He looked at his hands.
Something had happened. Something small and uncontrolled and entirely instinctive that had required no effort and no decision. It had simply happened because he had looked at a broken thing and understood it and wanted to fix it.
The affinity for machines, Spiral had said. It will come with time and practice.
Johnny had not expected it to come like this and so soon. Not quietly, in a back room, fixing something that had belonged to a grandmother he had never met.
But then again, the most important things arrived quietly.
Maybe spiral power will awaken as a quirk, he thought.
He heard Hector's footsteps in the hallway, unhurried and heavy, coming toward the room.
Johnny stood up straight and waited.
Hector stood in the doorway and looked at the radio for a long time.
Then he looked at Johnny.
Then he looked at the radio again.
"Sebastian tells me you were standing in the doorway," he said.
"Yes," Johnny said.
"And you did not touch it."
"No."
Hector came into the room and crouched down in front of Johnny the way he did when he wanted to look at him properly, eye to eye, without the height between them.
His eyes were bright and hopeful and very much paying attention.
Hector looked at him the way he had been looking at him for three weeks. Like a man holding two images of the same person side by side and trying to understand the distance between them.
"Did you feel anything?" he asked. "When it happened."
Johnny thought about how to answer that honestly within the boundaries of what a four-year-old with a newly emerging quirk should be able to articulate.
"Something in my chest," he said. "Like when you remember something you already knew."
Hector was quiet for a moment.
"Has anything else happened?" he asked. "Anything you have not told me about," he hoped his grandson would awaken a quirk, since he was already four.
Johnny met his grandfather's eyes.
He thought about the three weeks of careful performance. The measured sentences and the deliberate silences and the constant low-level effort of being less than he was so that the people around him would not be alarmed by what they were seeing.
He thought about what Spiral had said. Let them in. Not all the way. Not immediately. But let them in.
"Small things," he said. "I did not understand what they were until now."
Hector nodded slowly. Something in his face settled, the way things settle when a question you have been carrying for a while finally gets an answer that fits.
"Okay," he said. He put one large hand on Johnny's shoulder briefly, the way he did when he meant something.
"We will figure it out together."
He stood up and looked at the radio one more time.
"Your grandmother would have found this very funny," he said quietly. Not sad. he had a bright smile.
Then he walked out of the room, and Johnny heard him tell Sebastian to call the doctor in the morning for a quirk assessment.
Johnny turned back to the radio.
The green light was still on. Still holding.
He listened to the faint voice in the static for a moment longer. Then he turned and followed his grandfather out of the room.
That night, alone in his bed with the Sydney dark outside his window, Johnny thought about what had happened.
Not the mechanics of it, he had already mapped those as best he could. But the feeling of it. The particular quality of that moment when he had looked at the broken radio and something in his understanding had reached out without asking permission and touched the thing that was wrong and made it right.
It had felt completely natural.
That was the part that stayed with him. Not the strangeness of it but the naturalness. Like breathing. Like walking. Like something he had always been able to do that had simply not had a reason to surface before now.
He looked at the ceiling in the dark.
Somewhere in the city, Rex was sleeping with red light moving under his skin, getting stronger in the dark, the way things that feed on anger always got stronger in the dark.
Somewhere in the world, Onyx was building something that had already cost this family everything and was not finished yet.
And here in this house on this hill, a four-year-old boy with a twenty-three-year-old inside him had just fixed a radio that belonged to a grandmother he had never met by understanding it from across a room.
Johnny breathed.
He had work to do.
He closed his eyes and let himself sleep.