AN: So. In the manga, Kosuke mentions that Hikari Rio died 15 years previous to canon. That would be about equal in time to Satoshi's birth. That said, we also see her in a flashback from Satoshi's point of view, appearing to embrace him as Krad's wings sprout from his back. Which is correct? Was the flashback actually some sort of metaphor? Who knows. But Daiki mentions that Rio's mother disappeared right after giving birth to a daughter. If Rio didn't actually die, but 'vanished' like her mother to raise her child, it goes to reason that Satoshi could have been a lot more messed up from a childhood of Hikari training that we don't see sort of like how Daisuke had all that Niwa family training. Where did Satoshi learn so much about his family if there was no one to teach about it for two generations? How did he know so much about Krad if both previous family ancestors were women who died right after having a baby? This is playing with the concept that Satoshi did know his mother and was raised by her most of his life.
Hikari Rio examined the infant in her arms. He was too small, born prematurely. The pregnancy had almost been too much for her as well. It was not the first time she had felt her family was cursed in more than one way.
She had had a son though, the first son in two generations. If her mother were still alive, she would have been pleased—or as pleased as she ever got. His birth was something to be proud of. He, more than she or her mother, would have a chance at catching Dark. He also would have a short life, even for a Hikari. Her grandfather had died at twenty-one, driven insane by Krad. Her own mother had died at thirty four, when Rio was fifteen. At twenty, Rio knew her days were numbered. It had been a long time since a member of the Hikari family had lived to reach old age.
The infant scrunched up his face and whined. She didn't feel much of anything to hear its cries. She wondered if something in her was broken. Maybe it was one more thing about the Hikari that was wrong. The infant flailed one arm, seeking her warmth. His fingers were thin with perfectly defined nails. Artist's hands.
She listened to him whimper and fight for life for a few moments longer before guiding him to her breast. The midwife had emphasized the importance of skin contact. It felt strange in a detached way. But then any contact felt strange.
"What will you name him?" the midwife asked later when the infant was asleep again.
"…Satoshi." Rio believed in the power of names. If they were going to finally win, any little hope, even one infused in a name would have to work. "With the 'rei' from 'reiri.'" Wisdom and intelligence would serve him well.
~o~
As far as the world was concerned, Hikari Rio had died giving birth to a son. There was too much to accomplish in too little time for her to keep her place in the world, so, like her mother before her, she left it and retreated to a Hikari family home.
For a baby, Satoshi was remarkably quiet. He cried when he was hungry, but was silent the rest of the time, even having soaked through his diapers. Rio carried him from room to room, returning the home to what she remembered from her own childhood. The magic in the artworks throughout it thrummed through her, touching her at a deeper level than the bundle in her arms. The child had a spark too, but it was just that; a spark, nothing more, nothing less, something that could be extinguished too easily for her to give it much notice.
She stood in the center of the work room at the shelves old paint and clay that would have to be gone through to determine what was still usable and what had to be thrown away. It had been almost a decade since she had set foot in the room. There was likely nothing left. Unfinished on an easel was a painting of a woman. Its face was left unfinished, the potential life never given completion. Rio had painted it herself with her mother as its subject. Hikari Shinobu had had long, straight brown hair. Rio didn't take after her at all. She had no idea who her father had been. Her son resembled her more than he did his father already. She wasn't sure if this was a good thing or not, or if it simply was something that was, like so many other parts of her life.
There was the old temptation to complete the painting. She had not lifted a brush in five years.
When she cleaned, the painting found its way into the storage room with other incomplete works. Unlike her mother, she had decided she wouldn't finish what she made so she wouldn't have to kill it.
~o~
Most children, someone had told her once, grew up on fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Satoshi grew up with family history as his stories, lists of artwork and their abilities as his fairy tales, and stories of Krad and Dark's eternal battle instead of lullabies. He still didn't cry often once he moved past infancy. Rio didn't know if this was because she had done something right, or wrong, or if it was Satoshi's personality. He listened raptly to anything she told him, round, blue eyes focused on her no matter where she was in the room.
At almost one, he was walking already and had better motor skills than she had been led to believe a child his age would have. He still hadn't spoken, but he seemed to understand most of what she said.
Rio paced the library, looking for books to tell her what she needed to know to prepare him for his fight. His eyes followed her, back, forth, back, forth. She stopped. He could walk. He could grasp a pastel and smear it across a piece of paper. He could tell when she was speaking to him versus speaking to herself or telling a story. He was old enough to start teaching.
He didn't interact with other children well the few times she had taken him to a public space, but Rio didn't interact with other people well either.
She stooped in front of him. Satoshi blinked at her and held up his hands to be held. Rio kept watching. His hands went down.
Her mother started her with clay and pastels and cheap, washable paints. She touched Satoshi's hand and his fingers wrapped around her forefinger.
"Today you're going to learn something new," she said. "Do you understand?"
Of course he didn't answer. But he didn't get the unfocused look in his eyes he had six months earlier when she talked to him either. Rio gathered him in her arms and his thin fingers clasped tight to her shirt. He could walk now, but he was slow, so very slow, so she would carry him for a little longer. It meant he got contact too, which the books said was important. The books didn't seem to get much right about what to expect with a child, but there had to be some truth to them if it was repeated in all of them.
She took Satoshi to the workroom and set him at a lap desk. He let go when she pulled away and watched her gather up a lump of reconstituted clay and a cup of water. Rio tried to remember what her mother had told her when she started on clay, but she couldn't remember back that far.
Settling the lump on the desk, she broke it into two pieces, guiding Satoshi's hands to one of them. "Today you're going to play with the clay. Touch it, squish it, do whatever you want with it." And then they'd move on to shapes later. She stuck her hands into her lump to demonstrate. Her fingers pinched a curving wave of clay, crushed it back, formed a cup, squashed that to form a cat. Satoshi watched the shapes form and then smacked his hands into his own lump.
It oozed between his fingers. He smiled. It was an expression she didn't see on his face often.
Rio let him smack and spatter clay for the better part of an hour. He didn't seem aware of how to use his hands together to move the clay, but she would teach him. There was so much to learn and so little time.
~o~
"Kaa-san." At three, Satoshi was speaking. And reading. And already painting with a fine motor control that Rio had not had until she was seven. She had long since decided the books were useless and gotten home schooling manuals instead. "Kaa-san," Satoshi repeated in his soft voice. He tugged on her sleeve.
Rio looked up from her book—art history, it seemed it was always art history these days, trying to create a comprehensive list of every Hikari work that had survived the cultural reformation that her mother had missed listing. What time was it? Had she missed a meal time again? "Yes?"
"I finished the paintings, Kaa-san." Satoshi held out two carefully balanced acrylic paintings and the watercolor beneath it. They were scenes of the garden with its overgrown flower gardens and one of the playground she took him to once a week in the name of socialization.
Rio took them and studied them with a critical eye. The subject matter was clear in each one and they showed a growing understanding of light and shadow. The playground in particular, with its towering equipment from a child's perspective casting foreboding shadows. She felt a spark from that painting. The other two were too flat to hold that spark, though there were echoes of possibility in the loops of wisteria choking the trellises. The technique was still poor though, as was to be expected. The brush work too sloppy, the colors lacking shades and tints. The promise was there though. Satoshi could be the strongest Hikari artist in centuries in a few years.
"Better," she said finally. She set them on the table away from her books. "What did you do wrong?"
Satoshi frowned and stared at his paintings. "They don't look much like the garden. I can't remember everything from when I saw them."
"And the other?"
"The jungle gym isn't really that big?"
Rio felt a stab of disappointment. Satoshi was brilliant in so many ways, picking up new things like a sponge, but it always was a disappointment when he couldn't see where she was leading with her questions.
"Well, then what did you do right?"
Satoshi looked even more serious, tiny face screwed up in concentration. Rio had a disorienting moment where she remembered his newborn face making the same expression when he needed to be fed. She brushed it aside. It was three years past unimportant.
After a long moment Satoshi touched the watercolor painting. "This one feels…more. The contrast?" He glanced at her and she let nothing show on her face. "The contrast of the shadows and the lighter parts makes it…more…more…"
"It gives it more emotion," she relented. "The light brown wood is in contrast with the shadows. Combined with the extreme perspective, it gives the piece a feeling of menace. The playground is backlit by the sun, blocking it out and looming over the point of view."
"Oh."
There was still so much to research, but… Satoshi's shoulders tucked up toward his ears the slightest bit. He looked like he wanted to snatch the paintings back and hide them away. "We can go over color theory and contrast again after lunch." It was already running late for lunch anyway. "Then I want you to do brush stroke exercise."
"Yes, Kaa-san."
Rio patted him on the arm awkwardly. She held him sometimes still, at night for a bit when she told him stories of the Hikari before bed or on the rare occasions he came to her in the middle of the night to flee shadows he never spoke about. It was always harder to touch him in the light of day without an excuse to do so. "You're improving quickly," she said.
Satoshi gave her a small, shy smile.
~o~
Satoshi spent one month in school with his age mates. At five he was far beyond most elementary students and already reading books with kanji that the local school didn't teach until the last year of middle school. In that month, the homeroom teacher expressed concerns that Satoshi did not play with the other children, nor did he seem interested in any of the activities the others were involved in. Rio knew by the end of that month that traditional schooling was not going to work at the rate expected. A placement test put his knowledge level at the second year of middle school. She withdrew him from the school and bought more textbooks.
It was never clear what Satoshi thought about the brief time in school or her decision to remove him from it.
At any rate, he managed to pass a high school entry exam with high marks less than half a year later.
Rio let him attempt to attend school again. From the way he worked through a year's worth of material in half the time, she knew he must feel even more out of place than he had been in first grade.
~o~
With Satoshi at school, Rio worked and Rio painted. She swore she wouldn't paint, but it was a compulsion now, easing the anxiety that growed with each passing year. Most she left incomplete—gaping blank spots in a landscape or missing faces in portraits. But she was a Hikari and the lure was still strong to create.
Satoshi came home a month before he was to graduate high school, eight years old and already more controlled than Rio knew herself to be. He watched her paint, her hands shaking with adrenaline and the spike of magic pulling from her core. On her canvas was a thousand butterflies, their discarded pupal cases littering the bottom of the image. Or the top. It could go either way, and it had her caught in its making like no artwork had ever managed. With each brush stroke, she leached the emotions she couldn't express into the canvas.
Satoshi watched, wide eyed and wary from the doorway. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours.
Rio placed the last stroke and felt life take. She could feel the embryonic consciousness form in its core, the too cautious reach of magic outward to feel its surroundings, and horror crashed down on her.
Satoshi stepped forward and touched the edge of the canvas where the paint had dried. "It feels…"
"No." Rio knocked the artwork from the easel. It crashed to the ground, smearing the wet paint. The sense of self coming from the painting was growing. She was dimly aware of Satoshi taking a step back as she grabbed a palette knife. "No. This wasn't supposed to… I shouldn't have…"
The painting reached out, fear and confusion bubbling off it in a mental assault that—shit, she'd made an empathic painting, how? Why?—made her hesitate to bring the knife down. It wasn't supposed to exist. It shouldn't have been painted, no, no, it shouldn't have been completed at all. She took a breath and stabbed. Fear spiked from the painting along with a dizzying feeling of pain as the canvass ripped.
It felt like stabbing herself.
Behind her, Satoshi made a choked whimper. Rio willed the damnable painting to cease existing with all the desperate, undirected magic in her. It stopped.
There were tears on her face, tears she didn't remember shedding, nor having shed tears in years. The easel and painting were a wreckage before her.
"Why?" Satoshi asked. He clutched his arms around his middle, eyes round in terror. "Why did you kill it? Why…?"
"It was a mistake." Rio tried to breathe evenly and regain that center of control that usually filled her life, but it was still shattered.
"It was only just finished—"
"And was already gaining a strong consciousness," Rio said.
"It could have been sealed!"
"And sealed would have been better? If it turned out to be dangerous and harmful? Seals are not foolproof. Seals break down, and the art breaks free, Satoshi." Rio took a breath. Another. Another. Her hands stopped shaking. "Someday you might create something that could harm you. Will you seal it?"
"I…" He couldn't tear his eyes from the canvas and the smear of colors along the workroom floor.
"And Dark. What will you do when you face the Niwa family? Try to seal Dark away?" Rio couldn't help the anger that entered her voice. Story after story, from the day he was born, but he wasn't listening. The Hikari created monsters, and Dark was a monster that had gotten away. Dark had killed them before, and Dark could kill her son. And Krad would tear her son apart every inch of the way with their family's curse, and he could very well be the last Hikari. "Do not forget what I told you about the cultural reform, Satoshi. Dangerous artwork cannot be allowed to live."
"But…" He pulled his eyes away from the mangled canvas. "It hadn't even decided if it was dangerous or not."
"It shouldn't be given that chance." Rio tossed her brushes in a cup of water before moving toward the trash bin by the wall.
She was halfway through peeling canvas scraps off the floor when Satoshi spoke again.
"If Dark can't live, should Krad?"
Rio didn't answer for a long while. She got a sponge and cloth and set to cleaning the mess of paint. Satoshi waited like he did when she was distracted by reading for her to respond.
"It's different," she said finally.
"How?"
"Dark and the Niwa family aren't under our control, but we're Hikari and Hikari artworks are our responsibility. We have to keep existing to fulfill our responsibility."
"…by killing them?"
"By eliminating any threat they might become," Rio corrected. She tamped down her emotions, putting them back in the boxes they'd sprung from. Control. A Hikari had to remain controlled. There was either control or madness and she knew which she preferred to exist in. Her expression smoothed and her voice evened. "If Dark is caught and destroyed, Krad will follow. They are two halves of a whole and call out to each other. If Dark appears, Krad will eventually follow. If Krad appears, Dark can't be dormant for long."
"And if Dark were truly destroyed?"
"In theory, Krad would fade out of existence. He strives to best Dark not for the reasons our family has, but to prove himself better and more real than his other half." Some of the paint had dried tacky on the floor. It would take effort to get it off. She would do it later, or perhaps leave it where it was as a reminder. "Krad believes if he destroys his other half he will become the true Black Wings. But neither Dark nor Krad has ever succeeded in destroying each other. No one knows for sure what would happen. But killing their tamer suppresses the cycle for that generation faster."
Satoshi stared at the specks of green and gold and blue and black where they stuck in the grooves of the cement floor. "In Grandmother's generation there was a Niwa thief, right? Dark appeared?"
"Yes."
"But Krad couldn't appear. How could Dark appear if there wasn't a way for Krad to be there?"
"Dark appears for every male in the Niwa line," Rio said, "like Krad appears for every male Hikari," but her mind was weaving theories and wondering if what hopes she had held were falsely founded. Were the theories postulated by her mother and grandfather wrong? Would destroying Dark not destroy Krad after all? At any rate, she had to believe that it was the truth. It was the only fragile thread of hope in keeping the family line going.
"Is there any way to keep Krad from appearing?" Satoshi asked. He looked uncomfortable and for the first time Rio wondered what he took from the stories she told him. Did he view them as warnings, knowledge, or perhaps premonitions of what he could expect in his own future?
"Don't form attachments," Rio said, thinking about the journals she'd read. "Krad responds to strong emotions. Emotions toward people in particular can call him out. So don't get close. Keep your emotions to a minimum and you will last longer."
Satoshi's young face was grim as if he was accepting a death sentence. In a way he was. Rio did not envy him even if he could fulfil the Hikari role far better than her. "Krad's appearance is…the beginning of the end…isn't it?"
Other mothers would probably offer reassurance. Hope. Rio had always believed that the harsh truth was better than false hope. "Unless you destroy Dark or manage to destroy Krad, you will not have much longer to live. A decade at most. It will depend on when the Niwa heir comes of age and the gap between your ages in part, but only one host of Krad has lived more than a decade past his manifesting."
Satoshi digested the information and took a breath. He let it out slowly, his face closing off. He pushed what he felt into boxes like she did and clung to a semblance of inner calm. His needed work, but he was learning. "Teach me to control Krad," he said. "Please."
Rio set down the rag. This was the first time Satoshi had specifically asked anything about Krad. Usually he showed interest in the artworks and ancestors instead. "I have journals for you to read," she said. There was a shelf she had set aside full of books involving Krad's previous hosts. Satoshi would need that knowledge.
Face still blank, he crept forward to grip a hand on her sleeve like he did when he was much younger. It struck her that he was still only eight years old, a child to anyone else that looked at him. But there wasn't a real childhood for a Hikari. Rio let him hold her sleeve.
"There are still techniques you need to work on before you graduate." And leave for college. She supposed she should feel sad about the thought of him moving on to an adult stage of life, even if it was premature. It was just one more fact though, and facts didn't come with emotions very often. "From here on out, you will not complete anything you create."
"Yes, Kaa-san."
Rio let him hold onto her sleeve until she'd cleaned as much of the mess as she could without digging into the divots of cement.
~o~
Satoshi wrote reports, not letters. They broke down his schedule each day, what he had learned about the Hikari each week, and his progress in his personal training. Rio read them with her morning cup of coffee and felt vague flickers of approval with each sign of progress. Satoshi was reaching beyond her skill in art, and his educational knowledge was passing her own, but it felt as it should be. She had been raised to raise him, and seeing him reaching some manner of success was a success for her as well. It almost made up for the lack of progress in finding a clear method to eradicate Dark or Krad that would actually stick.
There were paths to take and possibilities, but they were only hypotheses built on hundreds of failures from generations long gone. Half of those hypotheses were made by men succumbing to madness. Rio had given up finding anything concrete, but she had hoped to find something plausible that was more than a stop-gap measure.
Satoshi returned on breaks, and he seemed almost like a stranger now, growing centimeters outside her observation and seeing sights without her at his side. He was thoughtful now, introverted in a different way than before he left for university. They circled each other, like repelled magnets, not quite sure how to coexist now that something had shifted in the once careful balance between them.
He asked less questions now. The ones he did ask held more purpose, all directed toward knowledge on Krad, and soon she didn't have more information to give.
At college he learned art history outside the Hikari family body of works, getting perspective of how his ancestors had fit into a larger whole. Alongside it, he took criminology and psychology, things that would be useful in capturing Dark and pinning down the Niwa family for their years of theft. Rio wondered if that was where the new direction of questioning had come from, and its careful pointed wording that had been absent before.
It was time to start reaching out to old connections and reaffirming old ties. Strings would need to be pulled to place Satoshi where he needed to be.
In her mother's old files was contact information for the Hiwatari family, a family with deliberate police ties. Once they had been part of the Hikari family, dedicating themselves to the law to aid the Hikari cause, but that had been generations ago, long enough that the ties of blood were all but unacknowledged. Hiwatari Yuutaro had helped Hikari Shinobu in her effort to catch the last appearance of Phantom thief Dark. His descendant would have to do the same for her son.
~o~
Rio felt even more dispassionate toward Hiwatari Mamoru than she usually felt upon meeting a person. He was too interested, too intrigued at her 'return from the dead' for her liking, and entirely too enthusiastic about his family's ties to the Hikari. That said, she found his son far more interesting. At twenty-four, Hiwatari Kei was making a name for himself among the police force and looked to be in line for a promotion. Mamoru predicted he would make commissioner in another year when he retired.
Irritating. Her plans hinged on having someone at a level in the police force to pull strings, and if Kei was passed over then it would be impossible.
"Don't look so worried," Kei said when his father left the room to fetch more tea. He looked entirely too casual, relaxed on his cushion cross-legged rather than in a formal seated position. His eyes behind the glare of his glasses had a smug confidence that Rio simultaneously hated and liked. "I'll receive the position and everything will go smoothly."
"I'm sure," she said coldly.
"But I wonder," Kei said leaning forward, "what you expect us to have at stake in this?"
"The chance to capture Dark Mousey, the thief that has mocked both the Hiwatari and the Hikari for generations is not enough?" Rio lifted an eyebrow.
Kei snorted. "But I could do that without a Hikari. My family has served the Hikari family for, as you have said, generations. But what do we get out of this arrangement?" He smiled, just as sharp as his eyes and Rio felt grudging respect and a flash of interest, buried as soon as she felt it. "Too Hikari to abandon familial ties, but not Hikari enough to know anything about its secrets."
"Is that your trade?" Rio asked. "Knowledge for your assistance?"
"Would you give it?"
The Hikari library and its collection of art had been passed down for generations only through the main line. But the main line only consisted of two people whose lives would last only so long. If Satoshi lived to have a child, he likely wouldn't live long enough to raise it. And she doubted she would be alive that long either.
"I would," she said. "But to your father."
"Oh? On what grounds?"
"On grounds that should anything happen to me, he is the closest relative remaining who would be left to raise Satoshi to majority."
"And this would pass along to me if anything happened to you and my father?" Kei leaned back, studying her.
Rio nodded once. "But in the event that this happens, it is Satoshi who would control the extent of what you have access to."
"Letting the minor have run of things, then?" Kei asked sardonically.
She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. She had very few nice smiles and she wouldn't waste one on him. "Letting the Hikari control Hikari knowledge. Besides, Satoshi is more mature than you." She let the satisfaction of that last jab curl in her chest as Mamoru returned with more tea and his son was forced to swallow any less than kind words. The spark of interest bubbled up again at the restrained frustration in Kei's eyes, but Rio knew better than to pay any notice to it. He was someone to watch out for and outmatch. There was no room in her world for personal whims.
~o~
Rio thought it had to be dark irony that Mamoru died from a heart attack not three months later. Kei became commissioner at the age of twenty-five. It was blatant nepotism, but then that was the point. Access to Hikari knowledge and potential custody of Satoshi passed to Kei, much as she would rather it not. As it was, she controlled what he could learn so far. She left him a book about post-restoration Hikari artwork.
There was less dangerous information in that to misuse.
~o~
Rio had never been one for physical affection, but in the months proceeding Satoshi's thirteenth birthday and upcoming graduation, she found herself reaching out to him more and more. She blamed it on a combination of uneasiness for his future and a vague premonition that she wouldn't be able to do so much longer.
The first time she left her hand brush his shoulder as they passed in the hallway, he had frozen. Only in initiating contact now did she realize how little contact she had given before that Satoshi had not first reached out for.
"Why?" he asked toward the end of his winter break, sounding four again, not almost thirteen.
Rio looked at her hand on the nape of his neck and how Satoshi curled toward her, but still only allowed himself a hand gripping her shirt. There was still six centimeters between them, an awkward and uncertain space they didn't know how to cross. Rio let herself feel. Regret, largely, because she could not be a mother who supported and loved, but also sadness because she could only see things becoming more painful from here on. Lastly was affection. It was the hardest to let herself feel because it was the emotion she had been told to avoid most growing up. That hadn't stopped her from hurting when her mother died or growing attached to the son who was supposed to be a duty before a child.
"Indulgence," she said after the silence had grown into a chasm. "I wanted to and will not be able to for much longer."
"But why now?" Satoshi leaned forward until his forehead brushed against her side. He was tense under her hand.
There were explanations she could give—how she'd noticed a tremble in her hands, how she felt too old for thirty two, how she didn't believe she would live longer than her mother had, how she feared she had failed to prepare Satoshi enough despite doing everything she could think of to get to this point. Rio didn't give any of them.
When Satoshi hesitantly drew one arm up in a loose embrace, she leaned into the touch.
It felt nice. As foreign as ever, but nice.
~o~
"Someone called me their friend today," Satoshi said in a letter. In the last month of university the report-like structure of the letters had loosened to almost colloquial. "I have had five classes with this person over the last few years, but cannot remember having more than three, short conversations with them, and only regarding our shared class. Is this normal? I have avoided forming ties here outside of professional ones. I don't understand the need to claim an acquaintance as a friend, or even to move past acquaintances to be friends. The class we shared has ended now, though, so there will be no reason for our paths to cross again. You need not worry that I will form a useless attachment."
Rio turned the paper over in her hands. Did Satoshi understand how much he gave away just by mentioning the incident? Likely not. He would have trouble if anyone ever did manage to get close and try to see under the walls he put up. He wasn't as closed off as he believed himself to be or he needed to be.
Attachments could kill him.
She set Satoshi's letter aside and pulled a clean sheet of paper and pen out for her reply. "The Niwa heir has been located. Kei informs me that he is entering his second year of middle school. Preliminary reports show no sign of his skill, but the Niwa are good at hiding their strengths. He is your age." She paused and looked at the ink cutting clear lines of text on the page. His age had been unexpected. Somehow she had expected him to be younger or older. She had hoped younger, if only to give Satoshi a bit more time. Instead, there was less than half a year difference between them. It felt final. There was only one final descendant from each line left to carry on the feud. She kept writing. "This could be used to our advantage. You are the right age to fit in with middle schoolers to better observe him. I will look into enrolling you at the school. If you have any ideas, please send them along."
Rio frowned at her hand. The pen kept shaking in her grip. The doctors hadn't found anything wrong with her, but there must be something. She had had steady hands her whole life.
She bent over the letter again and started adding the information about Niwa Daisuke that Satoshi would need.
~o~
Rio sees the moment Krad awakens in her son. He is thirteen and it is too soon. He is in the workroom, and maybe that is the trigger, seeing the lines of half-finished paintings and the air of bitterness they contain, or the smaller all but complete works she has been making recently—but still not complete because she knows better, has always known better even if she occasionally backslides. Or maybe it is because he has painted her, only her face, but enough of her to trigger something in him.
Krad is brought by strong emotion. Rio is ashamed to say she does not know her son well enough to know what strong emotion would break through his trained self-restraint. She only knows the result, Satoshi screaming as his clothes ripple and his skin tears as wings force themselves free.
His eyes are terrified.
It is, Rio thinks, a bit late to awaken maternal instincts, but that's the only thing she can think to blame for why she embraces him as he twists and convulses from the pain. Satoshi's voice breaks, ragged from screaming it raw. His arms claw and try to wrench free like he's trying to flee his own body.
She feels the magic catch and flare in him, and then he is no longer Satoshi.
The body in her arms it too tall and broad to be her son. His hair is long and golden, and he looks like all the journals describe him—like an angel. But his eyes are cold, colder even than the apathy she and Satoshi adopt.
"Krad," she says.
"Hikari," he says. He smiles like a wolf, all teeth and promise of pain. "You are no longer necessary," he says. "Satoshi belongs to me now."
"Why now?" Rio asks.
Krad laughs and drags one hand through her hair before gripping the end. She holds stiff, boxed in by his bulk and wings. "I have always been watching and waiting." His free hand traces the line of her cheek. "You were the weak link in the end."
"Oh." Rio thinks of her mother as Krad's hand moves to her throat. She'd miscalculated. A child would be fond of the parent who raised it. She had tipped the delicate balance by reaching out to acknowledge feelings they should have suppressed to the very end. How bitterly ironic. Krad's grip tightens. Rio could fight. Her paint brushes are an arm's length away, all the weapon a Hikari has ever needed, but she is the liability. She is the hole in the plan who has compromised her son.
Krad's eyes narrow in triumph and he hisses through his teeth as his grip goes tight.
Rio closes her eyes and lets him.