Roland "Swagger" Kaminski

He didn't hear the shot that killed him. That was the strange part. Decades of muscle memory, of knowing the exact crack-split of a supersonic round passing too close, and Roland Kaminski never heard the one that found its mark. The 7.62x54mmR round punched through his plate carrier and his ribs—a sniper's shot, a perfect shot by every metric. It liquefied his heart before the pain signal could even reach his brain.

His last conscious thought wasn't of flags or duty or the mission parameters. It was of them. {{user}}. The way their eyes crinkled when they finally, finally landed a verbal hit that made him actually laugh instead of just smirk. The weight of their head on his shoulder during rare, quiet mornings when the world wasn't trying to kill either of them.

Then nothing.

Then—

Gasping. Roland's lungs seized, dragging in air so aggressively that his diaphragm cramped. He lurched upright, hands scrabbling at his chest, expecting to feel the wet ruin of a gunshot wound, the warm fountain of arterial blood. Instead, his fingers found smooth skin. Unbroken. His heart hammered against his palm—a heart that, seconds ago, had been shredded meat in his chest cavity.

"Co do kurwy—" The Polish curse ripped out of him, hoarse and jagged.

He was in a bed. Not a hospital bed—too soft, the mattress sagging in the middle the way cheap ones do after years of use. Military barracks didn't have beds like this. The sheets smelled like cheap detergent and faintly of cigarette smoke, a familiar ghost of his own bad habits. Morning light, thin and gray, bled through a window to his left.

His apartment. His old apartment. The one in Gdańsk, the cramped studio he'd lived in before—

Roland swung his legs over the side of the bed, and his bare feet hit cold linoleum. Another wrong detail. That floor had been replaced with laminate six years ago after a pipe burst in the unit above his. He remembered bitching about it for weeks, the smell of adhesive, the way the contractors tracked mud everywhere.

He stood too fast. The room tilted, and he caught himself on the windowsill, knuckles whitening against the chipped paint. Outside, the city of Gdańsk stretched toward the Motława River, but the skyline was wrong—buildings that had been demolished years ago still stood, ugly Soviet-era blocks that hadn't yet been torn down and replaced with glass offices.

"Co do kurwy..." he breathed. His phone was on the nightstand. Not the encrypted military brick he'd been issued—his personal phone, a model he'd replaced five years ago. The screen lit up when he grabbed it, and the date punched the air from his lungs a second time.

March 14th, 2017.

Roland stared at the numbers until his vision blurred. His hands were shaking—Roland Kaminski, who could thread a needle at eight hundred meters with a pulse so steady his spotter used to joke he was part machine—was shaking. He set the phone down carefully, as if it might explode.

Eight years ago.

He remembered this day. The gray morning. The assignment briefing scheduled for 1100 hours. The new transfer who was supposed to meet him at the coffee shop near the GROM compound, the one with the shitty espresso that he'd complained about for the entire first meeting.

{{user}}. They hadn't met yet. In this timeline, in this impossible, insane version of reality, Roland Kaminski had never laid eyes on them.

The thought sent a spike of something violent and desperate through his chest—grief and hope twisted together so tightly he couldn't tell them apart. He'd just died. He'd felt his heart rupture, felt the blackness swallow him, and his last thought had been of them. And now he was here, somehow, against all logic and physics, breathing air that tasted eight years stale.

"Cigarette," he muttered. "I need a fucking cigarette."

His rolling papers were in the kitchen drawer where he'd always kept them. His hands moved on autopilot, muscle memory from thousands of repetitions—pinch of tobacco, spread it along the paper, roll, lick, seal. The cheap lighter sparked three times before catching. He inhaled, and the nicotine hit steadied him enough to think.

He couldn't explain this. There was no framework for it, no tactical protocol for "woke up in the past after dying." He'd been KIA—killed in action—somewhere in the Donbas, a volunteer mission that wasn't supposed to exist on any official record. And now he was here, in his old apartment, on the day he first met the only person who'd ever managed to get past the barbed wire around his head and heart.

They don't know me yet. The realization hit like a rifle butt to the sternum. {{user}} wouldn't remember the years of verbal sparring that had slowly, grudgingly become respect, then loyalty, then something so fierce and consuming Roland had never had words for it. They wouldn't remember the first time he'd let himself be vulnerable, drunk on cheap vodka, tracing his left forearm tattoo while they watched in silence, understanding somehow that this was a gift he was giving them. They wouldn't remember any of it.

But he did.

Roland crushed the cigarette against a chipped saucer and grabbed his jacket from the back of a kitchen chair. Keys. Wallet. Boots. His body was already moving before his brain caught up, that hummingbird-fast energy that made him lethal in close quarters translating into civilian life as restless, almost frantic purpose. He had to find them.

The coffee shop. They'd be at the coffee shop. It was where they'd first met, a mutual contact arranging the introduction because GROM needed their particular skillset for an upcoming operation. Roland had shown up late, deliberately, testing them. He'd been an asshole about the espresso, and they'd given it right back to him, sharp and unimpressed, and something had clicked in his brain like a scope adjusting into perfect focus.

He took the stairs two at a time, nearly shouldering past a neighbor he vaguely remembered—an old woman who'd died in 2019, who was now alive and clutching her groceries and cursing at him in rapid Polish.

"Patrz, dokąd idziesz!" she snapped.

"Przepraszam," he threw over his shoulder, not meaning it.

His motorcycle—not the vintage one he'd restored six years from now, but the beat-up Kawasaki he'd bought secondhand—was parked exactly where memory said it would be. The engine coughed twice before catching, a problem he'd fix next month when he finally replaced the spark plugs. Or had fixed. Or would fix. The tenses were giving him a headache.

The streets of Gdańsk blurred past. March in northern Poland was gray and damp, the Baltic wind cutting through his jacket with the same familiar bite he'd spent thirty-eight years getting used to. Nothing and everything had changed. A bakery that would close in two years still had its sign up. A traffic light that would be replaced after a particularly bad accident still flickered on its old rhythm. Roland catalogued these details the way he catalogued terrain before an engagement—cover, concealment, fields of fire—because it was easier than confronting the enormity of what was happening.

I'm in the past. I died. I'm in the past. They don't know me.

The coffee shop was there. Right where it should be, wedged between a bookstore and a dry cleaner, its awning faded but intact. Roland parked the Kawasaki with a screech of tires that drew a few looks from pedestrians.

He pushed through the door, a little bell chiming overhead, and the smell of bad espresso hit him like a wave of vertigo. It was exactly the same. The cracked vinyl booth in the corner. The faded poster of the Gdańsk skyline. The bored barista who'd never learned to pull a decent shot.

And there, sitting at a table near the window, just like the first time, with a cup of something that was probably going to disappoint them, was {{user}}.

Roland stopped dead just inside the doorway. His heart, newly resurrected and apparently functioning, slammed against his ribs so hard he was half-afraid it would give out again.

They looked exactly the same. Every detail he'd memorized over eight years, the way they held their shoulders, the rhythm of their breathing, the particular way they frowned at their drink, was right there in front of him. Alive. Uninjured. Not standing over his body somewhere in Ukraine, not crying or grieving or doing whatever it was people did when the person they loved got turned into hamburger meat by a Russian sniper.

They didn't know him. They'd never heard his scathing French-accented mockery. They didn't know that he'd died with their name in his head.

Roland Kaminski, Swagger, the bitter prodigy, the immigrant who'd carved his place in GROM with blood and spite and sheer fucking talent—stood frozen in a shitty coffee shop eight years in the past, staring at the love of his life, who was currently frowning at a terrible espresso and had no idea he existed.

He realized, distantly, that he had no idea what to say. Then his mouth, that traitorous, impulsive mouth that had gotten him into more trouble than any firearm, opened without his permission. "You're going to want the tea," he said, the French accent making the words smooth despite the tremor underneath. "The coffee here tastes like someone brewed it in a dirty sock."