The heavy, melancholic bass of “Legends” vibrated through the quiet, dimly lit room.
It was 2026.
Seven long years had passed since the tragic news broke in December 2019, yet for Mike, the music still hit just as hard as the day it was released.
Mike sat slumped in his desk chair, his eyes fixed on the massive, framed poster of Juice WRLD hanging on his bedroom wall.
The glow of his computer monitor illuminated the Chicago artist’s face, a frozen image of a generational talent taken way too soon.
“Man, if you were still here, you’d be twenty-eight this year,” Mike muttered into the empty room, reaching out to pause the track.
Silence instantly swallowed the heavy 808s.
Mike was a die-hard fan, the kind who spent hours digging through unreleased leaks and studying the raw, emotional genius that made Juice WRLD a legend.
But with that admiration came a deep, lingering frustration.
Mike often caught himself daydreaming about the impossible: time travel.
What if someone could just go back to the beginning?
What if someone with the knowledge of the future could step in before the fame, before the money, and most importantly, before the addiction took root?
If someone could just slap those pills out of his hand, tell him how much his mother needed him, and show him the brilliant, sprawling future he was throwing away for a temporary high…
everything would be different.
Jarad Higgins would still be making music, breaking streaming records, and living out his legacy instead of becoming a tragic cautionary tale.
Sighing, Mike rubbed his eyes.
His throat felt like sandpaper.
Shaking his head to clear the heavy, useless “what-ifs” clouding his mind, he pushed himself up from his chair to grab a glass of ice water from the kitchen downstairs.
He opened his bedroom door and stepped out onto the darkened landing.
He wasn’t paying attention.
As his right foot met the top of the wooden staircase, his cotton sock caught on the slick, polished edge of the wood.
Suddenly, the floor was no longer beneath him.
Time seemed to drag to an excruciating crawl.
His foot slipped completely out from under him, sending his center of gravity backward.
Mike reached frantically for the wooden handrail, his heart spiking with sudden adrenaline, but his fingers only brushed the smooth surface, failing to find a grip.
He fell backward.
A sudden, violent impact cracked against the back of his skull.
The pain was a brief, blinding flash of white—and then, instantly, the world went completely, silently black.
Gasp.
Mike woke up with a sharp, desperate inhale, bolting upright in bed like he had just been pulled from underwater.
He clutched his chest, feeling his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
Sweat beaded on his forehead.
He braced himself for the agonizing pain in the back of his head, but there was none.
He wasn’t lying broken at the bottom of his staircase.
He wasn’t even in his own house in 2026.
Blinking against the bright morning sunlight streaming through a set of unfamiliar blinds, Mike looked around in profound confusion.
The walls were different.
The room was much smaller and slightly messy, filled with the unmistakable aura of a teenager’s sanctuary.
His eyes landed on a small, cheap desk in the corner.
Sitting on it was a clunky, older laptop and a basic, silver USB microphone.
As soon as he saw it, a memory that wasn’t entirely his own flashed vividly in his mind.
Yesterday.
He had saved up for weeks just to buy that cheap mic.
He had finally plugged it in, excited to lay down his first real vocals, when the bedroom door had swung open.
It was his mother, Carmella.
She had taken one stern look at the setup, reminded him of her strict, conservative rules against worldly rap music in her Christian household, and shut the whole thing down.
Frustrated, embarrassed, and entirely defeated, he had simply turned off the laptop and gone to sleep.
Mike blinked, rubbing his temples as the foreign memory settled seamlessly into his brain.
Why did he remember that?
Moving completely on instinct, he swung his legs over the side of the narrow bed and stumbled toward the full-length mirror hanging on the back of the closet door.
He froze.
The breath hitched in his throat.
Staring back at him was not the face of a twenty-something guy from 2026.
The face in the glass belonged to a teenager.
He had rounder, youthful cheeks, deep, observant eyes, and a head of short, early-stage twists just starting to take shape.
He was looking at the face from the posters on his wall, years before the tattoos, the heartbreak, and the global fame.
He was Jarad Anthony Higgins.
He was fifteen years old.
Mike gripped the wooden edges of the mirror, his knuckles turning white as a wave of profound, earth-shattering realization washed over him.
The universe had actually listened to his late-night wishes.
It had pulled him through the void and given him the ultimate second chance.
He carried the memories of 2026.
He knew the hits that would define a generation, the evolving landscape of the rap game, and the trap of the SoundCloud era.
And above all else, he knew the devastating price of addiction.
Staring into his own young eyes, Mike made a silent, unbreakable vow.
There would be no lean.
There would be no Percocets.
He was going to understand and care for his mother, Carmella, instead of rebelling against her.
He was going to take the music industry by storm using everything he knew from the future, and this time, Juice WRLD was going to live forever.