Zakiya_Kio
There is a certain kind of loneliness that only dead men know.
Lucien Hart died at 21 years old on the 342 day of the zombie apocalypse, not from a zombie's bite, not from starvation, not from any of the thousand ugly ways the new world had invented for people to perish. He died from a bullet. Clean, deliberate, and fired by the hand of someone he had called a brother (Brother like relationship not a real brother.)
He had survived five years of kidnapping. He had survived a coma. He had survived experimentation, starvation, betrayal, and the slow unraveling of everything he had once believed about humanity. He had even survived the first wave of the dead rising from the ground with hungry, hollow eyes.
When he finally thought that everything is over...
He wakes up to his ten years old self, in a bed that smells of lavender and expensive cotton, in a body that is small and breakable and has not yet learned all the ways the world intends to wound it. He wakes up nine years before the apocalypse. Nine years before every mistake he made. Nine years before every person who smiled at him pulled the knife from behind their back.
So Lucien Hart , who the household calls Little Lian with voices soft as velvet, decides to be very, very patient.
He will be the sickly child. The fragile one. The boy who cries at loud noises and clings to his twin brother's sleeve and needs to be carried up staircases because his legs are simply too weak. He will smile the way children smile, open and guileless and a little wet around the eyes. He will let his stepmother think she has won. He will let his father think he is a problem solved.
And quietly, methodically, piece by piece, he will take everything apart.
This is the story of a boy who came back from the end of the world with a teddy bear in his arms and ruin in his heart. It is a story about what a clever, broken, terrifyingly patient person can build in nine years when no one is watching carefully enough.