Chapter 1: Someone Else's Life
[Whittemore Residence — September 12, 2011, 6:47 AM]
The headache came first.
Not a normal headache — this was structural, like someone had taken his skull apart and reassembled it wrong. Jackson pressed his palms against the mattress and pushed himself upright. The sheets were expensive. Thread count he could feel without thinking about it. His bedroom didn't have sheets like these.
His bedroom didn't look like this.
Lacrosse trophies lined a shelf across the room — six, seven, eight of them — gold and silver figures frozen mid-swing. A Porsche key fob sat on the nightstand next to an iPhone he didn't recognize. On the wall above the desk, a framed photo: a boy with sharp cheekbones and blue eyes, arm around a strawberry-blonde girl in a sundress. The boy was smiling the way people smile when they know a camera is pointed at them.
Jackson swung his legs off the bed. The carpet was thick under feet that were not his feet.
He stood up too fast. The room tilted. He caught himself on the edge of the desk and something clattered — a lacrosse playbook, spiral-bound, covered in notes written in handwriting he'd never practiced. His hands were shaking. He held them out in front of his face and studied them the way you'd study a counterfeit bill. Younger than his hands. Stronger. Uncalloused in the wrong places.
The bathroom was three steps away. He made it there on legs that didn't move quite right — the stride was different, the center of gravity lower and more athletic than what he was used to. He gripped the sink and looked up.
Jackson Whittemore stared back at him.
He knew that face. He'd watched that face on a screen, episode after episode, season after season. The jawline. The carefully maintained tan. The expression that sat somewhere between arrogance and armor. He touched his cheek — cool skin, slight stubble that a sixteen-year-old shouldn't quite have — and the reflection did the same.
How I died.
The memory hit like a flashbulb — white, blinding, then gone. A highway. Rain. The truck's horn so loud it replaced all other sound. Then nothing. Not darkness, not light. Just the absence of being, stretching out like a held breath that never released, and then —
This. Waking up in Egyptian cotton in a house that cost more than he'd earned in his entire previous life.
He ran the faucet. Cold water on Jackson Whittemore's face. He watched it drip off a jaw that belonged to a fictional character and tried to arrange the information into something that made sense. It didn't. None of it did. But the water was cold and the porcelain was real under his fingers and the face in the mirror kept staring, so he filed the existential crisis under later and focused on what he could control.
The bedroom was a map of Jackson's life. Jackson was meticulous — or vain, which amounted to the same thing when it came to organization. The closet was color-coordinated. The desk drawers were sorted. The laptop was an early-model MacBook Pro, lid half-open, browser still logged into Facebook.
Facebook. Right. 2011. He'd have to remember that.
The phone was an iPhone 4. He pressed the home button and it unlocked without a passcode — sloppy, but teenagers were sloppy. The date on the lockscreen read September 12, 2011.
Jackson sat on the edge of the bed and let that number work through him.
September 12, 2011. Teen Wolf. Season one hadn't started yet — not the events of it, anyway. If the show's timeline held, Scott McCall would be bitten in the Beacon Hills Preserve in roughly three days. Before that, this was just a small California town where the biggest drama was lacrosse rankings and who was dating whom.
After that, it became a hunting ground.
He pulled up Jackson's text messages. Lydia Martin's name dominated the screen — a cascade of messages about a party this weekend, outfit coordination, a passive-aggressive comment about someone named Harley that Jackson had responded to with a single thumbs-up emoji. Danny Mahealani had sent something about a coding project. A group chat labeled TEAM showed lacrosse schedule confirmations.
Jackson's contacts read like a census of Beacon Hills High School. Every name carried weight from six seasons of a television show he'd watched sitting on a couch in a life that no longer existed.
Scott McCall. Stiles Stilinski. Allison Argent — no, she hasn't arrived yet. Derek Hale. Peter Hale.
Peter Hale, who was right now lying in a hospital bed at the long-term care facility, burned and comatose on the surface, and underneath that — planning. Calculating. Waiting for the full moon.
Jackson opened the laptop and navigated to a calendar. Fourteen days until the full moon. Three until the night in the preserve. He had a Porsche in the driveway, a trust fund he hadn't counted yet, the social capital of being the most popular boy in school, and the complete knowledge of six seasons of supernatural catastrophe.
He also had nothing. No allies. No powers. No proof of anything. Just a dead man's memories inside a teenager's body in a world that was about to crack open and bleed.
"Jackson! Breakfast!"
The voice came from downstairs — warm, maternal, slightly impatient. Margaret Whittemore. Adoptive mother. In the show, Jackson's parents were background noise — wealthy, distant, an explanation for his abandonment issues more than actual characters. He'd have to do better than that.
He checked the mirror one more time. Straightened his shoulders. Set his jaw the way he'd seen Jackson do it on screen — chin up, expression locked, like he was daring the world to question him.
Good enough. It would have to be.
---
The kitchen was all marble and stainless steel, the kind of room that looked more designed than lived in. Margaret Whittemore stood at the island plating scrambled eggs with the efficiency of someone who cooked the same breakfast every morning. She was thinner than he'd expected. Lines around her mouth that the show's brief appearances hadn't captured.
"You're up early." She said it without looking. "Your father's already gone. He left your practice schedule on the counter."
Jackson pulled out a stool and sat. The eggs were perfectly seasoned. He ate three forkfuls before he trusted himself to speak.
"Thanks." One word. Safe.
Margaret glanced at him. Her eyes lingered a beat too long. "You feeling okay? You look pale."
"Didn't sleep great."
"There's ibuprofen in the—"
"I know where it is." He caught himself. Too sharp. Jackson would have said it exactly like that, though — dismissive, clipped. The character had treated his parents like furniture. The thought sat wrong in Jackson's chest, but the performance had to be accurate.
Margaret's expression didn't change. She was used to it.
David Whittemore had left a printed lacrosse schedule — practices Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday; first game in three weeks. Jackson folded it and put it in his pocket. He finished the eggs, drank orange juice from a glass that probably cost forty dollars, and said "thanks" again on his way out.
Margaret said "have a good day, sweetheart" to his back, and something twisted behind his ribs that he didn't examine.
---
Back in the bedroom with the door closed, Jackson worked.
The wallet held three hundred dollars in cash, a debit card, a student ID, and a Beacon Hills High parking pass. The laptop's browser history was a portrait of a sixteen-year-old boy: lacrosse stats, sports cars, Lydia's social media, and a single bookmarked page for the Beacon Hills adoption registry that Jackson had visited eleven times without clicking through.
The phone contacts gave him the social architecture. Jackson sat on the bed with a pillow behind his back and scrolled through every conversation thread, building a map of obligations and expectations. Who he owed texts to. Who he'd been ignoring. The rhythms of a life that had been lived by someone else.
The granola bar from the nightstand tasted like chocolate and oats and something he couldn't name. He chewed it slowly, sitting in Jackson Whittemore's room, wearing Jackson Whittemore's face, and tried to remember the name of the person he'd been yesterday.
He couldn't.
Not the surname. Not the middle name. The first name was there — or the shape of it, like a word on the tip of his tongue that dissolved every time he reached for it. The highway, the rain, the horn. A career he'd had. An apartment. A show he'd watched on a laptop screen in a life that now felt like something someone had described to him secondhand.
He finished the granola bar and dropped the wrapper in the trash.
That person was dead. Jackson Whittemore was what was left.
The phone's calendar app was sparse — school, practice, "Lydia dinner Sat." He opened it and started adding entries. Private ones, coded in shorthand only he'd understand. Three days: S.M. preserve. Fourteen days: full moon. Question marks after dates he'd need to confirm from memory — Allison's arrival, Derek's first appearance at the school, the first lacrosse practice where Scott would outperform everyone.
The phone buzzed. Danny: you coming to first period or are you doing the fashionably late thing again?
Jackson typed: on my way.
He grabbed the Porsche keys, checked the mirror one final time — jaw set, shoulders back, the performance locked in — and walked out the door into a September morning that smelled like eucalyptus and cut grass and the beginning of something he wasn't ready for.
The calendar on his phone showed three days until Scott McCall's life changed forever.
Jackson had three days to figure out how to survive what came after.
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