Chapter Text
Tsukasa looks a lot like his mother. She wasn’t quite as tall, nor as nervous, but he has her curiosity, the same eyes, and even the same movements, often.
He also looks like Kadoya’s partner, that creature’s fur is the same texture as Tsukasa’s hair. Their calm demeanor is similar to what the boy shows the world.
Eijiro doesn’t enjoy thinking about his old life. It reminds him of past mistakes. Makes him wonder who, in full, he replaced in this world before he decides that whoever it was, the original Hikari Eijiro of this world doesn’t deserve the son who just wanted his dad to care, nor the granddaughter who thinks him little more than an old fool.
He is old. But he is definitely no fool.
He was the strongest! Doctor Shinigami. Science General of Shocker.
He was a genius, and he needed no one but his own power.
Honestly… he hadn’t cared about anyone. Until…
“And you can—”
“I’m sorry,” Shinigami said. “Did you just solve the altered body problem?”
“Well, it’s not a perfect solution.”
The teen girl tucked wild, unkept hair behind her ear. There was something just as wild in her eyes. He liked her instantly.
(Lab grown from a loyal family and a powerful enemy, Kadoya Ishi was supposed to be powerful. But no one expected her to be a genius.)
“It’s possibly, though,” Shinigami said. “What tools do you need.”
“Um… access to natural born monsters?” Kadoya asked. “If that’s doable. I started working on an outline, but their structures are completely different in some cases, like how most other creatures don’t have a proper corpse, so that’s a challenge.”
“Whatever you need,” Shinigami said. “As long as you share the credit.”
“Sure.”
She was brilliant.
(A distant thought: Kadoya Ishi belongs among monsters, but not among villains.
A distant thought: Shinigami was proudly the latter.)
“Do you want to know how to use that camera?” Eijiro asks as Tsukasa fidgets with it.
“I know how,” Tsukasa says. “I’m just cursed.”
He’s a proud boy, now he’s keeping his memory intact. Proud, bored, and most certainly depressed. It hurts to see that frown on a face so like Kadoya’s. It doesn’t belong there.
“Now, now,” Eijiro says. “Even if you are, I think there’s a charm to your photos.”
He sits next to the boy.
“A lot of people like seeing what they want,” Eijiro says. “Your curse is seeing what is. Perhaps it spreads so far it can turn into a blessing.”
Tsukasa looks him up and down with that deep, discerning gaze. It is inhuman.
Eijiro loves it.
“You’re strange,” he says.
“Maybe a little,” Eijiro says. “Couldn’t say. I’m just an old man.”
Shinigami never had a family. Not even as a child, which is maybe why he cared so much for the lab grown genius fighting a smile at her own parents’ funeral.
She was a lot like him. Single Minded.
She was nothing like him. Good.
“I found it,” Kadoya said. “There are more Worlds. More places to explore and discern. If we can do it.”
“This is very far out of your area of expertise—”
“Well, that’s why I need your help.”
Kadoya smiled brightly. Shinigami could not fight her.
He made the best mistake of his life, and he agreed.
“I think we should kick Tsukasa out.”
“…what?”
Natsumi crosses her arms.
“He’s clearly just taking advantage of us at this point,” she says.
“He has nowhere else to go.”
“I’m sure he’d find one,” Natsumi pouts. She’s still only 19. She’s still innocent of his sins, save for those left on her body.
(He tells himself the changes he made when she was a baby were to protect her. He still mostly believes it.)
She’s right. Of course, Kadoya’s son would find a way, because Kadoya Ishi defied logic all her life, and Kadoya Tsukasa is surely too stubborn to die to anything less than god’s own wrath.
Still…
“He’s got a certain charm to him, though, doesn’t he?”
Natsumi sighs and rolls her eyes. Uses the pressure point he’d taught her on him, and he doesn’t bother to fight back. He’s not the man he used to be for a reason.
Tsukasa stays.
“You know about half of Shocker’s scientists look down on… sexual relations with their subjects,” Shinigami pointed out, awkwardly. He’d certainly done the same, but those were his precious altered humans! Not creatures.
Not that he judged Kadoya, not truly. Kadoya as the first person he had ever loved, he thought. Almost like a daughter.
(Perhaps that’s why her love of monsters worried him, jealousy and protectiveness in one unfamiliar bundle.
He did not enjoy this internal confusion.)
“Only the half,” Kadoya replied. “But no, Cat Silk isn’t a subject, they’re… just a friend.”
“A family is a hassle and a weakness,” Doctor Shinigami said (but he loved Kadoya Ishi ). “Remember that, whatever you claim about that creature you fancy.”
He never did get the chance to find out if she’d ended up with the creature, however.
Tsukasa moves like an unwitting hybrid. Those are fun to observe, since they tend to rise up in the ranks. Some were secretly trying to stop Shocker, not that they had much chance, for sins done to their human parent. Others like the power trip of it all.
Some weren’t born and were altered but just didn’t know. Case studies.
(Natsumi is not a case study, even if he had…)
But there it is, odd grace and odder strength in his form. Shinigami never moved like that, preferring intellect and an ever changing array of monster forms. His favorite was Ikadevil, now he can’t even think of having squid and beer in the same week.
Shinigami marched when in human form.
But Eijiro doesn’t much like thinking about before. He locked Shinigami away in pieces, after all.
“Hey, freak!”
If Tsukasa could stop bringing home angry customers, that might help.
“If you could please go outside, first,” Eijiro says, glad Natsumi isn’t present. She doesn’t get why he’s so lenient. Of course not. She doesn’t get that Tsukasa recently escaped a hell of an Earth.
“Why?” The woman asks.
“Because I don’t want blood in my carpet, and Tsukasa is happy to fight back against a woman, especially if she clearly wants to hit first.”
The poor woman huffs.
“He leaked my affair!”
“Oh, did my photos double expose again?”
He got his mother’s single mindedness in spades.
“I’m afraid his photos are not anyone’s fault but your own for having them taken with both of your partners,” Eijiro says. The woman huffs again.
“I’m getting out of here,” she says. “You’re crazy and his photos are trash.”
Tsukasa just looks bored by the whole thing.
“I don’t ask them to follow me here,” he says, which is his version of an apology.
“I know.”
There was a suicide note by the bed with Eijiro’s name on it. Pictures with a younger version of his face and a boy who looked like himself.
All Eijiro could think was: huh.
Followed in quick succession by a mad cackle at his and Ishi’s success. It seems, in this world too, he was set to become a genius scientist.