Disclaimer: I don't own Kamen Rider, I just love playing in the sandbox.
Author's Note: Written for my beta, and contains massive amounts of speculation in an attempt to make sense of some of the odder things about the villain of Den-O. Comments always appreciated if you enjoy it or see somewhere I could improve!
A Place to Belong
The metal is cool beneath his feet, a strange, slick sensation he has never felt before. He bends down, running a hand along the wondrous material, fingers tracing the junction between the floor and the wall. It is familiar to him, in a vague way, one of the things he discovered mention of in his research, but to actually see it…
He stands, moving further into the alien structure, sand shifting from his fur to patter on the metal. There is enough light coming through the glass of the windows to see by, though it is dim, his people struggling to keep the sand from reclaiming its treasure.
Reclaiming what is rightfully his, though it hates him, hides from him, a belligerent, skittering presence on the edge of his thoughts.
He doesn't confront it. Not yet. There is no need to, and he is curious about this forgotten realm, this fallen house in which it has squatted for so long.
Curious about the bones that used to house it, now a brittle collection of dust and fragments. He toys gently with the skull, peering into the eye sockets, both alike and unlike his own. Human-looking, though it was not human, just as he is Imajin-looking, though he is not Imajin.
His Imajin call to him, vocally and silently, nervous and worried in this strange place, with this unhappy, unhoused entity. It is almost time to do what he came here to do.
"You hate me." He sets the skull down, allowing it to watch him as he sorts through the rest of the bones. Fingers, longer and more delicate than his own; short arms, long legs. "Just like the rest of this world, you hate me."
This world that has tried to kill him, from the moment of his birth, because he is something that should never have existed. But he will not be erased, forgotten as though he never had been. He is too strong for that.
Instead he has shaped the world that tried to reject him. His protector, his siblings, eventually strangers that they met, he has brought them all to his side. Given them memory, his clear perfect memory of everything he has ever seen, and they follow him willingly.
Maybe have to follow him, now, because he has changed them and because he is strong enough to influence the thinking of most Imajin if he tries, but they come with him willingly at first.
The creature studying him now will not come willingly.
"You belong to me." He settles down, fur ruffling in preparation for what is to come. The presence he is stalking flutters, darts, debating whether to attack or flee or disappear as it should have long ago.
He will not give it that opportunity.
"You belong to me." He bears his teeth, keens a challenge as he reaches out with his mind and surrounds the alien presence.
It is the key. He knows that, part instinct, part deduction, part new certainty as he cuts through the outer layers of the strange consciousness.
The key to changing his world, his people.
To making them more like him.
It remembers, just like he does, more than he does, and that is a wonderful, painful shock. Images flood his mind, knowledge that he will need to sort through later, will have to sort through later if he has any hope of maintaining his sanity.
Not now, though. Now he must fight.
You belong to me.
No.
He can finally understand it, comprehend it on a level other than basic emotion. Pick out more emotions, because it doesn't just hate him. It fears him. It loathes him. Every piece of its essence rejects him as wrong, as out of place, as a mistake, and it fears it may have created him.
You should not exist. It is an accusation, a sigh of despair, a mental knife.
I do exist. It is the only counter he has, the one he has been using all his life, and he clings to it with all the tenacity he has. I will continue to exist.
You cannot. There is sorrow, weariness, bitter acceptance in its mind, drilling for, diving into his. We cannot. Time cannot allow it.
Time cannot stop it. He is winning, he thinks, his will, his strength, his people's borrowed strength binding the unwilling creature. Drawing it to him, tying it to him so that it cannot escape. Time and the world and you cannot stop me.
It doesn't answer. It simply twists, and he is seeing things again, learning things again, a new flood of information drowning his mind.
He cannot exist. His world, his people's world, is allowed because it is not real. It is born from nothing, connected to nothing, goes to nothing. There are no memories here, no need of past or future for the creatures left behind after humanity's self-destruction. Intelligent, emotional animals, the Imajin can be abandoned without fear by the stewards of time.
He screams, in anger and denial and pain, and redoubles his efforts against the creature. He will not accept it. He will claim what is rightfully his, the abandoned remnant of the time stewards' own, and he will use it to change his world.
To give them a past, and open up the possibility of a future.
There is suddenly sand beneath his hands, hot and rough, and the fingers he sees are not his own.
The knowledge is there before he can panic, a shifting, swamping, hideous mass of information from which he somehow manages to draw the proper answers. He has absorbed it, claimed it more thoroughly than any other Singularity Point ever could, his Imajin abilities making him special.
There is no longer any need for a metal shell with which to traverse time, to define shape and purpose for the inhuman creature it housed.
But looking human will be useful, where he is going, and that form comes almost-naturally to the thing he has devoured. He will use it to do what must be done.
His people surround him, study him, awed and frightened by the changes in his body, the changes trickling out from his mind despite his best efforts. Forcing himself to his feet, he meets each of their gazes, softly and carefully touches each of their minds to reassure them that he is—mostly—unchanged.
"We succeeded." His voice is strange, low and hoarse as though he were screaming. He rubs at his throat, tilts his head, stops as another wave of uncertainty is directed at him. "But there's a lot more we need to do. We need to gather more people… and go to the past."
Most don't ask him many questions. They are a curious people, but time and its workings are so far beyond their comprehension that the majority will just accept what he says. A few do question him, his protector and his eldest sibling and a few of the strangers-who-are-not-strangers. Friends, the humans called them, and at least there are words in his head now for the things his people do not understand.
There is far too much in his head now. It hurts, a constant, painful throb, and he needs to go through and try to assimilate the information and memories he has taken, but there is too much to do. Far too much to do, if he is to deny fate and create a world of his own.
Because though he looks human, he is not, though it is hard to pluck a coherent understanding of them from the raging whirlpool in his mind.
And though he would be Imajin, he is not, and never has been, and never can be, because there can be no such thing as an Imajin Singularity Point.
So he will remake the world, and perhaps rename the people, and maybe there will finally, finally be a place where it will be all right to be Kai.