At first he was furious. All those reporters and crewmen around and none of them noticed his son and the others leaving the lab's grounds? They were the real heroes; they saved everyone in the labs, including the men who had been assigned to bring them back. But the media pinpointed their sights on the Blue Beetle, and while Eduardo was thankful to the armored hero for destroying Red Inferno before it could do any more damage to the tech inside his facilities, the teen could use a little more tact.
And speaking of the Blue Beetle, he'd been assigned to find his son as well! They had been right in his sights, just behind the flashing lights and shiny microphones. A little spotlight and boom, the superhero was reverted to the average man, hungry for attention of any sort.
The next emotion that crawled up his skin was guilt. Unbearable, wrenching guilt that kept him up for the whole of the night. If he had just paid more attention to his son while at the labs, offered to take him and the rest of the subjects out to a cozy pizza joint every once in a while, maybe he wouldn't have been so eager to pursue such a foolish plan. He figured it was either Virgil or Tye who instigated the whole ordeal, but mijo must have been too displeased with him to think straight, causing him to go along with any other alternative.
And the last thing he felt that continued on for days, that wedged into his chest and sunk deep into his bones, was worry. Worry that his son had been snatched up again, either by the Reach or another malicious, manipulative force that could bend and break a boy who had already been through so much in his fifteen years of life. Worry that his son's newfound friends would abandon him at any moment if a problem ever arose. Worry that when everything finally settled down, his son would not return to him, would not try to build the loving relationship Eduardo so desired, despite all that had occurred between them.
It was the worry that stayed. It was the worry that lingered. And it was the worry that drove Eduardo to seek out the cure his son so desperately wanted.
