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Ace – not yet ‘Ultraman’, still very young and very small, too small and too thin by half – stood in the newly-peaceful city park, clinging to a camera that he didn’t know why he’d been given.
(Later, much later, he’d realize that either Father of Ultra had mistaken Ace’s attachment to his old family photos as an interest, or – perhaps more likely – had seen through the attachment and straight to the heart of Ace’s fear, a fear of memories made too young that were fading too fast. Either way, the camera had been a gift awkwardly given but kindly meant.)
“Smile, Bel!” Mr. Ken laughed, an arm slung around his best friend’s shoulders (a little awkwardly; the height difference between them was vast, and it made framing a photo difficult). “We’ve gotta give Ace a good picture!”
Mr. Belial grumbled loudly in his deep prideful voice about how they had other things to be doing, but, as Ace lined up a photo as best he could and carefully clicked the shutter – if you squinted at the resulting picture, maybe, perhaps, there was a smile there.
Ace could never decide whether it had really been there or not, as the years went on.
The years did go on, though, and so –
Ace, still not yet ‘Ultraman’ but bigger and finally no longer liable to be blown over in a stiff breeze, smiled wryly as his little brother tried to wheedle his friend into posing for a photo.
“Please, please please? I’m trying to make my closet door into a photo collage of all my friends!” Taro begged.
“You probably already have enough pictures then,” his friend mumbled, looking around in an embarrassment that was so quintessentially ‘middle-schooler’ that Ace had to hide a laugh as a cough.
“But you’re my best friend!” Taro wailed, and that had cinched it.
Ace took the photo, and though he’d frowned a little at how familiar it looked to the first one he’d ever taken – Taro had snatched it away gleefully, running away with his reluctant friend trailing behind him, as usual, like a blue shadow. Or perhaps an echo, a repeating chord of a tragic song… or a mirrored photograph.
And as the years went on once again, Ace tried not to let his mind connect those dots. Correlation wasn’t causation, after all, even if two repetitive coincidences seemed linked by the simple act of photography.
He took a lot of photos over the years, no longer so much for himself but more so for Mother, who enjoyed putting them all together in her family albums (though she complained, often, that he didn’t take enough photos of himself). There weren’t any more eerie echoes in any of them, and he’d settled, in his mind, that coincidence was only that.
There was still a bit of hesitation that couldn’t be shaken off, though, as Ace (now an Ultraman, not much bigger, but big enough,) lined up the camera viewfinder for his nephew.
“C’mon, Uncle Ace, hurry up!” Taiga whined, in a voice so very like his father’s, but still his own.
“Bro, you’re the one who asked him to take a photo!” one of his friends snapped back, loud and brash – and blue, but certainly no-one’s shadow.
“Only ’cause Grandma wants one!”
“Settle down, both of you – unless you want to give her a photograph of you arguing?” his other friend intervened; a deep rumbling voice, but full of far more gentleness than pride.
“No! We’ll be good! We’re being good, aren’t we?”
“I was good from the start, bro!”
… Well, it certainly didn’t seem like an echo, at least.
Ace smiled, and took the photo. It wasn’t one of his best shutter timings, but…
As the years went on for a third time, and the chain of coincidentally bad photos remained firmly broken at only two – he considered that final photo to be one of his best.