Chapter Text
Billions of years ago, the universe began its very loud, very chaotic existence.
The Big Bang, as it was later rather timidly named, had no particular plan. It simply happened with enough energy for nobody to be able to ignore it afterwards.
Several more billions of years passed before any of it began to resemble something approaching order. Galaxies formed. Stars. Planets. And eventually: one exceptionally average planet that decided to call itself Earth.
Scientists, meaning highly intelligent beings who still cannot come to an agreement about basic things, continue to this day to determine where the first elements came from and why the universe did not ask anyone for permission.
Some theories are more popular than others. None of them are particularly polite towards the truth.
Despite these inconsistencies and secrets, however, life eventually appeared on Earth.
Approximately eight billion years ago, on one small rock suspended in space, something began to move, reproduce, and evolve in a way which... from a distance... looked somewhat like an experiment that had spiralled out of control, but everyone decided to pretend that this had been the intention all along.
A bit of evolution. A few catastrophes. A handful of asteroids which definitely did not have bad intentions, but still did what they did.
And so humans came into existence.
Humans, remarkable creatures.
Not because they were the strongest, the fastest, or the most rational. Quite the opposite. In many cases, nature itself seemed to look at them afterwards and say, “that was supposed to look different”.
But humans possessed one trait which made them not entirely comprehensible to the rest of existence:
They were aware that they existed. And for some reason, they decided that this was an excellent moment to begin asking questions.
They were not perfect. They did not follow the rules they invented for themselves. They took things that did not belong to them and then called it “progress”.
But they possessed something else as well. Something that has never been fully measured, proven, or replicated under laboratory conditions.
Souls.
Something extraordinarily gentle in its nature, invisible, intangible, and absolutely impossible to control.
Souls were not fixed. They travelled. Through universes, through time, through things that did not yet have names, until eventually they settled wherever they happened to decide it was worth stopping for a while.
And so, at some point, somewhere around the year 1971 AD, which from a cosmic perspective is practically “recent”, two such souls found themselves back on Earth.
Not in any spectacular manner. Not to the sound of fanfares.
They simply… arrived, as something new they had never been before. As two ordinary human children.
And they began again.