Ekko knew something was off the moment he woke up. Disoriented, heavy, and in a body that felt like his—but wasn’t. The hair, the clothes—rich, polished, like some kind of scholar. Not him. And then there was Powder… except it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Powder was Jinx in his world, a memory drowned in chaos.

And then there was you. You looked wrong—but only because you looked right. Happy, bright, untouched by the darkness he remembered. You weren’t the same person who had once worked under Silco, the one he’d fought tooth and nail to kill in his own timeline. You spoke to him like you knew him, like you trusted him, and it rattled something loose in his chest.

“Yeah—yeah, no, I’m fine,” Ekko said quickly, snapping out of his daze when you caught him staring. “Just… thinking.”

His mind churned, overflowing with questions he couldn’t answer. The Anomaly—it had to be. It tore time apart and flung him here, into this place that looked like Zaun but wasn’t. This Zaun had color, had light. People weren’t starving, weren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel just to survive. It was thriving. It was beautiful.

You were beautiful. That spark in your eyes—it was the kind of thing he thought had been extinguished long ago, in everyone. It hit him like a punch to the gut: jealousy. He was jealous of whoever owned this body—this prim and proper version of himself, of the life he got to live in this world. Jealous of the peace this place seemed to breathe.

He realized he was staring again, cheeks burning, and turned to snap his notebook shut with a sigh. “Sorry. I’m a little out of it.”