Alright I've rebooted the fic. It used to be about a tech system and honestly do you guys still want that?
I'm fine with incorporating it back but I'll have to see the reception first. I've also given the protagonist a personality now and I've also deleted all reviews since I'm restarting. It'd be nice you if you can give reviews.
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The last thing Scott Palmer remembered was the light turning green.
He'd been driving home from his shift at the campus library, half-listening to a podcast about some true crime thing. Twenty-three years old, halfway through a master's degree in library science, and perpetually tired. The intersection was empty. He pressed the gas.
Then came the sound of metal crunching, glass shattering, and a brief moment of weightlessness before everything went dark.
No dramatic life flashing before his eyes. No profound final thoughts. Just the vague awareness that he'd fucked up, followed by nothing.
Waking up felt wrong.
Not the slow drift into consciousness Scott was used to, where he'd hit snooze three times and roll out of bed at the last possible second. This was immediate. Sharp. Like someone had flipped a switch and his brain just turned on.
He opened his eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. Dark wood beams. Expensive-looking. The bed beneath him was too soft, the sheets too nice. This wasn't his shitty college apartment.
Scott sat up. His body moved differently. Lighter. Younger. He looked down at his hands and froze.
These weren't his hands.
Too pale. Too smooth. The nails were actually clean, which was already suspicious. Scott's hands had always been kind of rough, perpetually ink-stained from handling old books all day.
A full-length mirror stood in the corner.
Scott got up and walked over to it. He looked at his reflection and his brain just stopped working for a second.
"Holy shit," he said out loud. His voice came out different. Higher. Younger. "Holy shit, I'm hot."
The face staring back at him was not Scott Palmer's face. This was a completely different person. Blonde hair that actually looked good, not like the limp brown mess he'd been stuck with his whole life. Sharp jawline. The kind of bone structure that made people do double-takes. Clear skin that had probably never seen a pimple.
Scott turned his head. The reflection followed. He touched his face. Smooth. He smiled. Even teeth, naturally white.
"Okay, this is insane," he said, grinning at himself. "This is actually insane. I look like I should be in a cologne commercial."
He'd been a solid five out of ten in his previous life. Maybe a six on a really good day with the right lighting and if you squinted. This was a completely different league. This was the kind of face that got people Instagram famous just for existing.
Scott spent the next several minutes examining himself from every possible angle. Side profile? Excellent. Three-quarter turn? Still excellent. He tried a few different expressions. Smirk? Devastating. Serious look? Somehow even better.
"I could literally just stand here and people would probably throw money at me," he said to his reflection. "This is the best thing that's ever happened to me and I'm pretty sure I died, so that's saying something."
He was wearing silk pajamas. Actual silk. He touched the fabric. Expensive as hell.
"Of course I'm wearing silk pajamas," he said. "I'm beautiful now. Beautiful people wear silk pajamas. That's just science."
The room was nice too, now that he was paying attention to things that weren't his face. Dark furniture that looked like it cost more than his previous year's rent. Thick curtains. Actual artwork on the walls.
A photograph on the dresser caught his eye, mostly because he was curious if there were more pictures of his new face around.
He walked over and picked it up. Two blonde kids, maybe ten and twelve years old, standing in front of what looked like a private school. The younger one had the same face he'd just been admiring in the mirror, just younger and less refined.
"Still cute though," Scott said, examining mini-him. "Good bone structure even at ten. That's genetic lottery right there."
The older kid looked like a relative. Brother, probably. Also blonde, also good-looking, but in a more boring way. Scott set that photo down and picked up another one. Same two kids, different ages. Then another. All featuring him and boring-blonde-brother at various stages of childhood, sometimes with adults who were clearly their parents.
Old money types. The kind of people who wore blazers to breakfast and owned multiple houses.
"I'm rich and hot," Scott said. "This is literally the best reincarnation scenario possible. I should buy a lottery ticket except I probably don't need to because I'm already rich."
One photograph made him stop.
It was more recent. The younger blonde kid, maybe fourteen, standing next to an older teenager with dark messy hair and an expression that could only be described as unhinged. The dark-haired kid looked like he was three seconds away from either starting a cult or burning down a building. Maybe both.
Scott stared at that face. He knew that face.
He didn't know how he knew it, but he did. It tickled something in the back of his brain, some half-remembered detail from late-night Netflix browsing when he should have been studying.
"Why do I know you?" Scott asked the photograph. "You look like you'd show up in a true crime documentary. Actually, you look like you'd be the reason for a true crime documentary."
He set the photo down and looked around the room again. Rich family. Private school. Blonde kid who looked like a young Leo DiCaprio if Leo DiCaprio had better hair. And that one face he recognized.
The dots connected slowly, then all at once.
"No way," Scott said. "No fucking way."
He picked up the photograph again, staring at the unhinged-looking kid. His brain was pulling up fragments of memory. A show he'd watched last year. Gothic aesthetic. Some girl who wore all black and had zero facial expressions. A mystery. A monster.
Wednesday.
He'd watched Wednesday on Netflix while putting off a research paper.
Scott sat down on the bed, still holding the photograph. The memories were hazy. He'd binged the whole thing in two days and then never thought about it again. Wednesday Addams went to some boarding school for outcasts. There was a monster. People died. The Tyler kid was secretly the Hyde monster. Wednesday solved it. That was about all he remembered.
He looked at the photograph again. The unhinged kid. What was his name? Something Gates. Garrett Gates.
Scott looked around the expensive room. The blonde kid in all the photos. The obvious wealth. The connection to that psycho-looking teenager.
"I'm a Gates," he said out loud. Then, because the universe apparently had a sense of humor: "Great. The family everyone hates."
He didn't remember all the details. The show had been good but not life-changing, and he'd watched it months ago between studying for finals. But he remembered enough to know the Gates family was bad news. Something about outcasts and pilgrim descendants and a whole historical thing he'd only half-paid attention to.
Scott stood up and walked back to the mirror. The blonde kid stared back at him, looking like he'd stepped out of a Ralph Lauren catalog.
"Sterling," he said, testing the name that had somehow appeared in his head. "Sterling Gates."
It fit. Of course it did. This was exactly the kind of name you'd give someone who looked like this.
He touched his face again, just to make sure. Still perfect. Still unfairly attractive.
"Okay," Sterling said, because he guessed that was his name now. "So I'm in a Netflix show. I'm a Gates, which means everyone probably hates my family. And I look like this."
He gestured at his reflection.
"Honestly? I'm fine with it. I could work with a lot worse. Like, yeah, the family reputation is probably terrible, but have you seen this face? I'm going to be fine."
He looked at the photographs on the dresser one more time, at the younger version of himself standing next to his unhinged-looking relative.
Somewhere in this world, Wednesday Addams was probably already plotting something dark and borderline illegal. People were going to die. There was a whole mystery thing.
But right now, in this moment, Sterling Gates was mostly just really happy about his new face.
He walked back to the mirror one more time.
"Yeah," he said, grinning at his reflection. "I'm definitely going to be fine."