Sho didn't know what he had been expecting to find in the Treasure Room…but this wasn't it.
"Hey, Sho, you want to watch a microwave explode?" asked Fukuda as he held up a tape. They had been looking through all the junk in the house and this was their latest find. A box of what Fukuda said were movies. Sho had seen these before, tapes, in really old movies. He had never watched a movie on a tape before. When he had been really little mom used to put DVDs on for him but he hadn't even seen one of them in years and years. His old movies were probably around here somewhere, but in another room.
This room was all dad's stuff.
Stuff that hadn't gotten broken when he blew his house up. Only the front got destroyed, Fukuda had said, which didn't seem like much on an explosion at all in Sho's opinion. He didn't know how grandma and grandpa could have died in such a small explosion. Big sis had taken the whole roof off of the Seventh Division when she exploded and she'd broken the whole Eighth Division too. If anyone was scary it was big sis, not dad…but dad was the one that everyone was scared of. He was the one that Sho was scared of…
Someone who Sho shouldn't have been scared of.
He wasn't scared! He was…he wasn't afraid of dad anymore. He was here, wasn't he? He was back at the Castle. Dad didn't even like it when he mentioned mom or the Castle or that they had ever even had a home. Sho didn't want to know what he did to people who went back to the Castle…but he didn't care. He wasn't afraid. He was…he was fine. He….he was….
He was going to watch a microwave explode!
"Yeah, sure." Said Sho. He had his phone, he could have pulled it out and watched every microwave ever exploding at once, but…it could have been cool. It must have been better than sitting on the ground going through box after box after box. There wasn't anything else that they could do, really. All the toys here from when he was in preschool, all of his drawing stuff was either old or broken, and big sis wasn't even here so he could have someone to play with. Even their old Wii games, that dumb stuff they played when they had been little, would have been fun with her around. Sure she always let him win but…but even if he knew the outcome it was still more fun to play with her than Fukuda…or all by himself…
He was a sucky big brother.
"Well? Come on!" said Sho as he got up. He didn't wait for Fukuda. He just stared walking. He walked out of the Treasure Room…a Treasure Room. A room full of treasures. Things that dad had thought were treasures. That had been a room full of the stuff that he played with when he was Sho's age. So far all he'd found were old books. School books, boring books, stupid manga that dad colored in for some reason…and not even right. Sho stepped over a book that he'd thrown away, before, in pure disgust. Honestly. Dad had tried shading with a black marker. Not even a real artist's marker, a little kid's marker. Sho could tell. Dad had tried to do shading with black and grey and stuff like they did in manga.
Obviously that had been a stupid thing to do.
When you were shading with color you just had to use a darker color of what it was that you were shading. Sho kicked the book behind him after he stepped over it. It slid back and hit Fukuda. He didn't care. Maybe he'd get a move on. They finally had something else to do besides look through boxes of junk. Also explosions were cool. Shimazaki would have loved this…well, actually, not really. Not unless they were actually going to be blowing up microwaves in real life.
That would have been fun.
They'd dropped microwaves off of tall buildings before but they'd never blown them up. Shimazaki probably would have liked it, even if it was kind of loud. Shimazaki was weak to loud noises…Sho had the best idea ever. He knew how he could have freaked Shimazaki out. He could have made a bun of pudding and left it on the stove in the kitchen. The smell would have drawn him right to the kitchen and then when he came in Sho could have exploded the microwave. He probably would have screamed like a girl or something…Sho could almost hear it. Maybe if he ever came back then he could…
He couldn't ever go back.
He didn't know how he could go back to big sis after he'd pushed her. He didn't know how he would be able to be near her, not when he would end up being reminded of what he'd done. He didn't know how he could stand to see dad, either, to share a house with him…with the person who ruined everything. His whole life.
Dad had ruined his whole life…from the day that he'd been born.
For as long as Sho could remember dad had always been mad at him because of how he'd been born. About how the doctor had to cut him out of mom's stomach when he'd been born. Maybe if dad hadn't been such a jerk then Sho would have been born the normal way. Even as a baby he must have been able to tell that dad was a jerk. Sure he'd loved dad when he'd been little but little kids were dumb. Even baby sis was dumb, sometimes she did things like climb on top of the fridge even though she didn't know how to get down or eat butter from the tub if you told her that it was ice cream, so Sho must have been dumb too when he'd been little.
Dumb enough to want…something stupid.
Dumb enough to want dad to love him. That was all that he had ever wanted. From the day that he'd been born he hadn't been good enough, worth enough, for dad to love. He must have been able to tell, even when he'd been a baby, that dad liked big sis best. That dad loved her and that Sho would have to work hard, to be as good as she was, if he ever wanted to be anything. Well he was done. Dad could go off and die for all Sho cared. He'd ruined so much. He'd ruined the family, he was the one who made mom leave, and he had ruined Shio's life…if it wasn't for dad then he could have been….he could have been a lot happier.
He could have been with Ritsu.
He could have been with the boy he loved the most in the whole world. He could have been…well not a regular kid but at least allowed to have a boyfriend. Dad had always told him that he had to grow up and marry a girl so he could keep the bloodline going. Mom was different. She had always told him that he could love whoever he wanted. Of course mom hadn't had any ideas that he didn't like girls at all, not just in the way that little kids thought love was gross, but he knew that if she had known about Ritsu then she would have let Sho be his boyfriend and then his husband. She would have been happy for him and then Sho could have been happy and he wouldn't have pushed big sis and…and he could have been happy. All the time. Not just for short times when his brain forgot who he was…that he was Suzuki Sho…
And everything that came with it.
Not just the cool stuff. Not just giant houses and travelling all over the world. Not just not having to go to school and being able to draw all day. Not just having a big sis and a little sis and a bunch of really good friends. The other parts of it. Being Dad's son…being the future of Claw…knowing that dad was such an asshole that he thought he could control the future. That if he controlled Sho enough, told him what to do enough times, that the future that he always wanted would happen just the way it was in his head. Well Sho was done….or at least he wished that he could have been…
Nobody was ever done with Claw.
Sho jumped onto the couch. It was easier to jump, now, since he had longer legs. He was taller now, older now, but still…no matter how much older he got he would never be done with Claw. He was going to have to go home soon. Dad was either going to come after him himself or he was going to send big sis. Sho would just end up going with. There was no way that he could have beaten dad, that he could have done anything at all to stop him. He was still too young, too small, too…too alone. Nobody was going to help him. Not big sis, not Shimazaki, not even Fukuda. He was alone in this…all alone…
But at least he could watch stuff blow up.
"This is going to take a second, I haven't hooked one of these up in years." Said Fukuda. Sho shrugged and reached into his pocket…and found nothing. Right. His phone was at home. Big sis had better not have been going through it. Sho knew her, she would probably try and fix stuff with Emmy for him again or something. She had done it before and she could do it again…and she had every reason to do it, too. Between the fact that he had pushed her and the fact that he was cheating on Emmy and cheating was wrong it was obvious that he deserved it…he always deserved it. He deserved everything that he got. He sucked. He sucked the most out of any little brother and both of his sisters were better off without him. Maybe dad would just leave him here, he was always saying how smart he was so he must have been smart enough to know that Sho sucked and he made everything suck and-
"Hurry up, I want to watch stuff blow up." Said Sho. He needed his phone. A phone. Even Fukuda's phone. Sure it didn't have any games on it but that didn't matter. Sho just needed something to do, something besides sitting on this couch and thinking. Nothing good ever came from thinking about stuff….about himself.
So he just wasn't going to think, ok? That was just what was going to happen.
"We both do, Sho, but I need a second. I have to get this thing going. You know you're really lucky, your generation I mean." Said Fukuda
"I'm not lucky." Said Sho
"Yes you are. You can pull out your phone and watch any movie you want. When I was your age we had to deal with this." said Fukuda
"It doesn't look that bad. Not like when your sister changes the Netflix password for no reason." said Sho
"She's still doing that?" asked Fukuda. Sho shrugged. He hadn't been home in over a day, he had no idea what big sis got up to these days. She could have turned into a totally different person in the time he'd been gone. Her and baby sis, too. Mukai could have been talking like normal now. She could have been reading, too, and going to homeschool. Maybe by the time he got back she would have been sitting there at his spot at the table…she would have been so much older…maybe old enough that she forgot all about him.
Maybe she would have been better off without him.
"Probably. Baby sis can't read and dad can't even remember how to login on his own so it's got to be her." said Sho
"It could have been Hatori. I know for a fact that he changes passwords just to mess with people." Said Fukuda
"Fuck him, then." Said Sho
"You're not going to vow revenge? You're not going to beat him up or pour water onto his laptop or something when we get back?" asked Fukuda
"I don't know." Said Sho. He didn't know what he was going to do to Hatori when he got back…and it was a when thing, not an if thing. He was going to have to get on the train eventually and he was going to have to see big sis and say sorry…and then she was going to forgive him…and then everything would get back to normal. He wouldn't have any choice. There was nothing to do but just keep on doing what he had been doing for years and years.
Just around and around and around.
"Well if you do choose to beat him up then go easy on him. He's fragile, after all." said Fukuda
"Hatori sucks…are you done yet? Come on, I want to watch stuff explode." Said Sho. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about Hatori. Why couldn't he have just stayed big sis's boyfriend? Why did he have to go and make friends with dad? He could have been alright, not great just alright, if he hadn't gone and made friends with dad. Sho didn't know why anyone would have wanted to make friends with dad. Maybe Hatori was just a weirdo or something.
Yeah, that would have made sense.
Claw was nothing but weird people. That was kind of what happened when you had powers. At least that was what Sho figured. Having powers didn't fix anything, and sometimes it could just make more problems for you. Like how really strong espers turned into jerks a lot of the time, or like how weak espers like Hatori were scared of everything. It was different for normal people, maybe, because they couldn't tell just by looking who was stronger and better stuff. Also Claw was a weird place and unless you were kidnapped into it you chose to join.
What kind of person would have chosen to join a place like Claw? To end up working for dad of all people?
"Almost done. Let me just fast forward to the part where we blew the damn thing up." Said Fukuda as he hit a button on the black box thing he attached to the TV.
"Why don't you just hit skip?" asked Sho. Fukuda just laughed…Sho didn't see what was so funny. It you wanted a find a part of a movie then it made more sense to skip until you got close to where you wanted to be. Then you could fast forward or rewind to the part that you wanted to see. This was why he liked watching stuff on his phone better. He could just drag it to the part he wanted to watch, he didn't have to mess around with skip or fast forward or any of that stuff.
Maybe he was lucky…to have been born when he was.
Not to have been born who he was, no, he would have been luckier as pretty much any other kid. He was glad to have been born when he was born, though, in today times. Stuff was just better. You could watch whatever you wanted to watch on TV without having to worry about a schedule and you could take your phone with you anywhere and it could do more than just call people, too. It must have sucked when Fukuda had been a kid, when he'd been Sho's age. Even watching a movie was a lot of work. You had to pretty much fast forward the whole thing until you got to the part that you wanted to see.
Like that part.
Sho hadn't really been paying too much attention to the screen. Fukuda had been mostly blocking it. He turned, though, and for a second Sho thought that he was looking in a mirror. Like to another world or something. One where he had short hair…but he'd never had short hair. He never wanted it, either, since dad had short hair. Dad had always had short hair so Sho had always had long hair. It stood up when it got long and he liked it that way. Dad hated it that way so Sho liked it.
That was why dad had always kept his hair short…because he hated it long.
"Is that…dad?" asked Sho. Fukuda looked down and then took his finger off the fast forward button. He hit pause…yeah, that was dad. He was facing the camera now. Fukuda hadn't said that this was a movie with dad in it. This was…well there was a microwave. A giant one. There was a microwave that he had never seen in a kitchen that he'd never seen….and that was a kid that he'd never seen. Dad, but as a kid. He looked pretty much the same, Sho thought, he was making that same face he always made and his eyebrows were just as crazy as they'd always been. He wasn't wearing a suit, though, no…he was dressed weird.
School uniform were weird.
Sho had never had to wear a uniform before, but he'd also stopped going to school in kindergarten. Dad was wearing one of those uniforms that the guys in big sis's manga always wore. The jacket thing with the buttons that went all the way up and the matching pants, too. Sho was glad that he didn't have to wear stuff like that, he might have looked as stupid as dad did right now…well when he'd been a kid. Dad and that other kid, probably Fukuda, looked so dumb dressed like that…well dad looked dumb all the time. Dad always wore the same thing every day even now. He was like an anime character, Sho had always thought, but now it looked more like he was in a uniform.
A jerk's uniform, since that was what he was, the biggest jerk in the whole world.
"Huh? Oh…yeah. Sorry, I should have said something. I just saw this and I thought, hey, Sho loves that sort of thing…sorry. But, uh, yeah. That's your dad and the kid with him is me. This is just something that we did after school. We used to record our meetings." Said Fukuda
"Why? For YouTube…or whatever you guys had back then?" Said Sho. Fukuda laughed, again, but at least this time he put his hand in front of his mouth. Sho didn't know what he was laughing at. So Sho didn't know what they'd had before YouTube…so what? He hadn't worked in his history book in a while. Tsuchiya mostly just had him and big sis getting caught up with math. He didn't get why. They had calculators and stuff now. Adults were so weird.
He wondered if they had been weird as kids, the adults in his life, or if they just got weirder and weirder as they got older and older.
"Sorry, sorry, and no. We didn't have YouTube or anything like it back then." Said Fukuda
"Then who was this for?" asked Sho
"For us, I guess." Said Fukuda with a shrug.
"That's weird." Said Sho. It really was. He didn't know what the point even was? Sho had sat through meetings before. They were long and boring. Why would you have wanted to record something boring? To watch it again? Why hadn't they recorded something cool….well this was supposed to be cool…not that he could ever picture dad doing something cool like making a microwave explode. Sho couldn't imagine dad ever being anything other than the weirdo jerk he was now.
Maybe that was just the way he had always been.
He didn't have anyone that he could ask Fukuda always said good things about dad, when he talked about back when he and dad had been kids. Sho didn't want to hear about how great dad had been. Dad hadn't been great back then and he wasn't great now. He sucked…he sucked so much…and he had sucked back then, too. Sho sat up and paid attention to the screen. Fukuda had hit play. The black bars on the side of the screen were distracting, though, and just…weird to look at. Like the movie was getting eaten by a black hole or something.
That might have been a good thing, actually.
There wouldn't have been any proof that dad had ever been a kid. Sho knew how life worked, people started off as babies and then grew up. Dad had been a baby and then a kid and now he was an adult. Sho didn't need proof, though, proof that dad had ever been his age...or maybe older. He looked taller and his skin was a lot worse. Big sis was always picking at his face and trying to put stuff over all of his spots. He wasn't a girl, he didn't do stuff like that…but maybe girls had a point. The last thing he wanted to do was wind up looking like dad had looked….
But he was dad's son. Maybe there was no way to escape it. No matter what happened he would always have dad's blood in him.
"You'd better not stab me again, Suzuki, I got blood all over my shirt last time and my mom got really pissed!" said Fukuda. His voice sounded weird. High. Way too high. He sounded like a girl and looked like one too. His hair was short. Not super short like it was now but pretty short. He could see, though, how curly Fukuda's hair was…he never let it get that long. Sho didn't laugh, though, even though Fukuda looked and sounded like a girl.
"I can and will draw blood whenever I see fit, Fukuda. I need to gather data." Said dad…little dad. He sounded like a girl. Sho laughed, and he didn't hide his mouth behind his hand. Dad's voice was so high…nothing like how he was now. Nothing like the voice that gave super long speeches about taking over the world…or told Sho that he sucked as a son and a human being….
"Can't you gather data without stabbing me? My mom's getting sick of getting blood out of my clothes and, you know, you're STABBING me?" said Fukuda. Dad just rolled his eyes and reached behind him with his powers. A plastic bag flew into his hand. Sho couldn't tell what was inside but it looked heavy.
"I don't care about that, now start the tape." Said dad
"I already did." Said Fukuda. Dad swung the bag and hit Fukuda over the head. Fukuda didn't make him stop, he just crouched down and protected his head. Sho felt the couch shift and turned. Fukuda, the real today times Fukuda, was rubbing his head.
"What the fuck, Suzuki?!" Shouted Fukuda. Sho kept on staring. Fukuda had cursed…ok. From this moment in time Fukuda wasn't allowed to bitch to Sho about his fucking language.
"Be quiet. My mother might hear you. Mother doesn't like that and neither do I." said dad
"Well I don't like you giving me a concussion!" said Fukuda. He reached up and grabbed the bag…and dad let him. Dad didn't hit him or use his powers to kill him. He just held the bag in his hand. There was a tug of war…dad won, of course, but Fukuda stuck his tongue out….no way. This was…Sho had heard stories about when Fukuda and dad had been kids but THAT was not what he had been picturing AT ALL.
Fukuda hadn't been scared of dad back then…not like he was now.
"I'm wasn't even hitting you that hard, Fukuda, now be quiet. This is serious work we're doing." Said dad. Fukuda rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, blowing up a bunch of batteries is so serious." Said Fukuda
"Yes, it is. I have it on good authority that batteries explode when they are microwaved and now we must test this. Right now, before father gets home." Said dad. Sho leaned forward from where he'd been sitting. He just wanted to get a little closer…to see…to see grandma and grandpa. He'd heard of them but he'd never seen them. Not even in pictures. They weren't there, no, it was just dad and Fukuda in that kitchen that made his eyes feel like they were going to bleed. None of those colors went together…and that was an ugly shade of green…dad must have designed it. Dad didn't know anything about color or anything like that.
He mostly just knew how to be an asshole.
"Your dad doesn't get home until midnight." Said Fukuda
"Mother forced him to choose one day a week to share a meal with us and this is the night he chose….now stop making me explain myself. I don't have to explain myself to you, you're only second in command." Said dad
"You're so weird sometimes, Suzuki, you know that?" asked Fukuda
"You have stated that before, yes. Are you aware of the fact that you can be very annoying sometimes?" asked dad
"Yeah, you said once or twice before." Said Fukuda. He rolled his eyes again. Dad looked down really fast. The faucet beside him turned on by itself. That must have been dad's powers. Sho couldn't see his aura, it was just a movie. He would have been pissed off, of course, since dad was always a little pissed off. That was just how dad was as a person and probably how he always had been.
"Then maybe you should listen to me. I don't enjoy repeating myself. Now get behind the camera and make sure it actually records this time." Said dad. Fukuda rolled his eyes and walked right up to the camera. For a second I was black but then he moved. The camera moved around a lot like in Blair Witch…it would have been much cooler if it was going to go like that…but Fukuda survived. Not dad. He could be the guy in the corner…that would have been great.
But it wasn't that kind of movie.
"Am I in focus?" asked dad. He reached up and brushed his hair down. Sho didn't know why he did that, he hardly had any hair, and the only person around was Fukuda.
"Yeah, so just do it already." Said Fukuda. He sounded pissed off, there. That was…weird. He had talked to dad like that. Whenever dad and Fukuda talked Fukuda talked like everyone else talked to dad. Like he was scared of dad. Back when they were kids Fukuda might not have been scared of dad….
"You don't give me orders…but yes, I will begin now." Said dad. He cleared his throat and stood up straighter. He did that whenever he gave one of his long, boring, speeches. He didn't know if this was going to be a long boring speech…it better not have been. If he wanted to listen to dad give speeches then he could have just gone to one of the big meetings or something. Or he could have just pressed his ear to dad's door and listened to him practicing. He practiced a lot, he was afraid of looking like an idiot. Sho figured, anyway, it wasn't like dad would ever have admitted to being scared of anything.
"Hello, my name is Suzuki Touichirou, Class 1-A, and President of Claw. Behind me is my second in command Fukuda Tadashi." Said dad. The camera turned around and Fukuda waved. Beside him the real Fukuda, the today times one, shook his head. He muttered something and laughed.
"Fukuda, stop that….alright. Today we are going to see if batteries do indeed explode when microwaved. We are doing this because we need to know. We are doing this in my home because Fukuda doesn't have a microwave." Said dad
"I'm not poor!" said Fukuda
"Compared to me you are. Now focus." Said dad. The camera shook a little and Fukuda muttered about dad being a jerk…and dad didn't stop him. He just took a bunch of batteries out of the plastic bag and put them in the microwave. That was weird. Maybe dad was being nicer because he didn't have anyone else to boss around. If he was too much of an asshole then he would have scared Fukuda off. If he had scared Fukuda off then there would have been no Claw.
No Claw.
He even imagine it. He could imagine a world where he destroyed Claw, where dad laid down on the ground and cried like a baby because it was all over, but he couldn't imagine a world where there had never even been a Claw in the first place. What would dad have done, then? What would his job have been? And what would Sho have been? Would he have even existed? Or would he have been a different kid entirely? What about big sis? And baby sis? Without Claw he knew that Mukai would never even have been born…
There was a Claw. He was in it.
He was freaking out over nothing. He as in Claw, he was the next leader of it. There was no point in imagining anything differently, a world without Claw, because it would have been something so different that he couldn't even predict it. No, he just had to get used to the world as it was, the world that he was living in right now. He knew the outcome. Dad wasn't too much of an asshole that he couldn't make a friend and that friend was Fukuda and then they built Claw together and now here they were a million years later.
With everything exactly the way it was supposed to be.
"How long are you going to put them in for?" asked Fukuda
"What do you mean?" asked dad
"Well how long does it take to make batteries explode?" asked Fukuda
"I have no…why do you need to know? You don't. You just have to record so get to recording." Said dad before he reached over to one of the knobs on the microwave and turned it all the way around.
"What are you going to tell your mom?" asked Fukuda
"I'm going to tell her that what I did was completely justified and she's going to pretend that I don't exist for the foreseeable future." Said dad
"How is blowing up the microwave justified?" asked Fukuda
"Oh, you were speaking in reference to this. I was thinking of something else. As for this I'm going to tell her that we purposely put batteries in the microwave to see what would happen. She's going to become very angry with me and she'll probably pretend that I don't exist. Then father will make me practice with him. Then we'll get a new microwave and all will be well again." said dad
"You're so lucky. My mom would have hit me with a shoe if I did this and my dad would have probably docked my allowance until the year two thousand." Said Fukuda
"Your family is strange." Said dad. He hit the microwave with his hand. So far the only thing that was happening was that it was getting all smoky. There were some flashes, too, but nothing worse than accidentally leaving a spoon in the microwave.
"Maybe we should stop." Said Fukuda
"Why? If anything this is anticlimactic." Said Suzuki
"Don't use words from the vocab homework! This is why people think that we're nerds!" said Fukuda
"No, people think that I'm a nerd. People think that you're a geek." Said dad
"No way am I a geek, that's worse than being a nerd! At least nerds are smart!" said Fukuda
"Yes. That's why I'm the nerd. I'm smarter than you." Said dad
"No, I think I'm smarter than you. I'm not the one standing next to a microwave that's about to explode." Said Fukuda. Dad shook his head…even though there was a lot of smoking coming out of the microwave now, and a lot more flashes. Sho's aura showed. He knew how this ended, dad didn't get killed, but he could still hope. Not to…not to say that he wanted dad to die. He didn't want dad around but if he thought about dad dying, being killed, he would have been pretty much killing dad himself. He didn't know if he could kill anyone. Shimazaki said that he could tell just from knowing Sho that he didn't have it in him to kill anyone.
Sho didn't know if he wanted it in him to kill anymore.
"It's not going to-" said dad before there was a loud pop and a bright flash. The camera went dark after that. He could hear shouting but it was dark….oh. A pair of fingers. Someone was cleaning the glass part. The camera was picked up and focused again. This time on dad...wow. His face was messed up. The whole side of it was pink.
Like when a bruise healed.
That was how it looked, anyway, when Fukuda fixed a burn. Dad's uniform was burnt, too, but not that much. He looked fine. He hadn't even gotten hurt. Sho didn't want dad dead but he did want dad hurt. He wanted dad to feel as bad, if even for a minute, as he had made Sho feel for his entire life. Not only the parts where dad beat him up but also the part where he made Sho feel like show gum…like he'd been walked on….like he was stuck…
There was no way for Sho to make dad feel like that, even for a minute.
"See? What did I say?" laughed Fukuda. Dad made the kitchen shake. Some plaster fell from the wall. There was still the microwave next to him but it was opened…and black. It had been wood on the outside, before, but now it was black. The wall behind him was on fire. The counter was burnt too. Dad was, somehow, ok…..
"Shut up and record….alright. Now as you can see our experiment was-" said dad. The camera shook and turned. Good. Sho didn't want to hear from dad. He didn't care what they were looking at now. He had come to see a microwave explode and he had and now they could watch something else or go back to the Treasure Room or even back to fighting. He didn't want to hear any more from dad or Fukuda or whoever that lady was-
There was a lady there, now.
"Touichirou?! Have you lost your mind!?" shouted the lady. She stomped right over to dad, the camera followed her. It shook as it followed her. Sho had never been a fan of the whole shaky-cam thing but now…well now it was ok. The lady had dad by the arm, now, and she was shaking him.
"Hello mother, how is your painting going?" asked dad. He wasn't even scared. His mom…grandma…looked mad. Her eyes were doing that thing that dad's did when he was mad. They got all small and narrow. If she'd had an aura then she would have been flaring all over the place. But she hadn't had one. Dad had said that both of his parents had been normal. That was a normal lady who had dad by the arm.
A lady with red hair.
She was a redhead…like Sho was. Her hair didn't stand up, though, it was long but it obeyed the laws of gravity and stuff. She looked like….kind of like dad. Kind of like Sho. A little. She had red hair and freckles. Maybe dad looked like his dad…like grandpa. Sho didn't know. He had never seen grandpa either. He wanted…he kept his eyes on the screen. He didn't want to look at dad but he couldn't miss this. Dad's mom and dad were there. Grandpa. Grandma. These people who he knew must have existed but he had never really thought about….that he hadn't ever even seen…until now.
Well, at least for a few seconds.
There was a jump cut there. Grandma asked dad, again, what he thought that he'd been doing and then the whole thing jumped. Now it was a room, a kid's room. There was a bed with a rocket on the blanket and the wall behind the bed had a bunch of glow in the dark stars on it. This was a kid's room and…and it might have been dad's or Fukuda's or…or maybe it was another person's entirely. He didn't know what he thought he was going to see but he knew….he knew what he thought that he would see….
What he hoped that he would see.
"Well that was it. Sorry, it was a lot cooler in my memory." Said Fukuda. Sho felt the couch shift. He reached out with his powers and sat Fukuda down.
"No, it's ok. Let's….maybe more stuff blows up. I mean it's not like you remember it that well, you said so yourself." Said Sho. Fukuda had told him, before, about when he and dad had been kids. Sho didn't care about that stuff, about him and dad being friends. He just…it was nice to see his family. Even if he had never met them. He didn't know those people, his grandparents, but…it was…he had never seen them before.
Family was important.
He didn't care about dad or his parents. They had raised dad and dad turned out to be a jerk so it was their fault. It was just…nice seeing someone who looked like him. A mom. Grandma. He hadn't ever met either of his parents' parents. Nobody liked dad, not even them it looked like. It was just…it felt like he had questions. He had questions but he didn't even know what they were. It was like as soon as one came into his head ten more would come up. That was good. It was better thinking about this than himself…than what he'd done…than what he had to do…
He didn't know what he expected to find but he knew that it was bound to be better than anything else he would have found in the Treasure Room.