Sho did not like this omelet.

Dad loved these when he had been a kid. Well dad loved omelets now but when he was a kid he and Fukuda used to come to this diner at least once a day until their money ran out. Fukuda said that this place hadn't changed in thirty years. Sho didn't know about that but he did know that this could not have possibly been the best omelet in Seasoning City.

If it was then he felt sincerely sorry for the people forced to eat this stuff.

"Yup. Tastes like Seasoning City." Said Fukuda. This had been one of their first missions together, him and Suzuki, finding the perfect omelets. Four large eggs, a cup of cheese, bacon bits on the inside, and a generous handful of green peppers. He hadn't had one of these in thirty years. He could have gone another thirty without having one. Another sixty. Ninety…..he wasn't going to live that long.

At least he hoped not.

He wondered what he would have had to be nostalgic about if he lived that long. Omelets in a diner untouched by time? Taking his surrogate Son there to have him take a walk down memory lane? The way Sho was sullenly picking out the green peppers like they personally offended him by existing? He didn't know. All he knew was that he needed to come here. He needed the nostalgia trip.

Because so far this had been a very depressing day.

"I feel bad for the people who have to live here in that case." Said Sho as he picked out the green peppers. He had thought that he liked them. He liked them on pizza. Well not on their own, of course, but on an everything pizza. This was not an everything pizza. This was an omelet and he liked omelets and Fukuda said that these were the best in the city. Sho had decided to go along with what he wanted.

That had been how this whole mission had been going after all.

Sho sort of wanted to go back to dad. At least when he was with dad he knew what to expect. Fukuda had been….weird. Too quiet. Also he had been taking Sho all over the place showing him things. Things like the fort he and dad played in and the house they grew up in and also the graveyard where his grandparents were buried and now this place. This place where Fukuda and dad ate all the time.

What was the point?

The past was in the past. The past was in the past and the present was in the present and…and he didn't remember how the rest of the song went but he knew that he had never wanted to know these things about dad. Not really. The more he learned about dad the more confused he was. Dad was a jerk who hated fun and liked to hit people. That was the dad who he had known for his entire life. Not the guy who liked to build forts in the woods and had parents and hung out with his friends and stuff. Well, friend, since Fukuda hadn't mentioned anyone else…and Sho had no clue who would even want to be friends with dad anyway.

He was such a jerk.

"Sho, be nice. These are actually really good. Your dad showed me this place. He used to come in here on Sundays with his family. They used to take me with sometimes. If they'd let me sleep over the night before. Your dad-" said Fukuda. He wanted to share this with Sho. He needed to share this with Sho. That there had been a time before Claw. That there had been a time before all of this madness had started. That there had been a time before Fukuda had let himself become an accomplice to…to thinks he would rather not even think about.

There had been a time when things had been normal.

Relatively. Suzuki had never been a good friend. Sure they'd spent time together but he had always been so…distant. Distant but also occasionally clingy. It had been weird. Suzuki had been weird. He had been voted the weirdest kid in school all three years of middle and high school. Those had been informal poles though. The vote had not been unanimous. Fukuda…he'd made excuses for his friend…and now he made excuses for his boss…

He didn't know why he wanted Sho to see something good inside of him.

To keep him from thinking that he had to be like his father. To show him that even his father had led a normal life once. He'd gone to school and hung out with his best friend and led the school kendo team to victory every year that he had been a club member. He'd pissed all his money away on manga and junk food. He'd learned how to cheat the arcade machines and ended up almost giving himself arthritis playing Space Invaders for six hours a day five days a week one summer. He'd gotten tongue tied around God only knew how many girls and if it wasn't for Fukuda's pep talks and makeshift social skills classes Sho never would have gotten there.

At one point they'd both been normal kids.

Maybe this was more for him, then. Maybe he was the one who wanted to take a walk down memory lane. The good parts of it. He had taken Sho to a graveyard and the house his father had grown up in but he'd also sugar coated everything. Everything had to be made so a nine year old could handle it. Everything. There were so many things that Sho could not know about…and so many things that Fukuda did not want to revisit. There were things that Sho needed to know, like the whereabouts of his grandparents, and some things that he did not need to know about.

This diner was not something that he needed to know about…but it was something that Fukuda had wanted to share.

"I'm tired of hearing about dad, ok? I'm just….I don't want to know anything else about him. I mean…I mean I do and I don't. I just…what's the point?" asked Sho. He stabbed his food. He stabbed his food even though he knew that he was being wasteful. Well then let him be wasteful. Sho didn't care anymore. It wasn't like dad was there to hit him.

Even though it felt like he was.

He was sitting in the same spot where dad had sat when he had been a kid. He was eating the same thing that dad had eaten when he had been a kid. He might have even been using the same fork and spoon that dad had been using. Why? What was the point? So dad did things when he was a kid. What did Sho need to know about this stuff for? What did he need to know about dad for? Dad didn't care at all about him…just what he could do.

What he could do for Claw.

Claw was the only thing that dad cared about. Claw and…big sis. She should have been the one that Fukuda brought here, not him. She would have liked it. She would have liked to have walked down the same streets that dad had walked down and sitting in the same spot that dad had sat in and all of that stuff. Fukuda should have brought her, not him.

He wanted to go home.

"I just wanted to share some things from our past with you. Things that your dad was never going to show you. This…this is what you're supposed to do with your son and I know that your dad is a…a very busy man." Said Fukuda. Suzuki didn't give a damn about anyone but himself and his daughter. Fukuda wasn't going to tell Sho that. No nine year old needed that in his head. He was just a kid and he needed to…to believe that there was something good inside of his father…

Because every son needed to believe that there was something good about his father even if it was a bold faced lie.

"Dad isn't busy he just doesn't care about me. He doesn't care about anyone but big sis and anything but Claw." Said Sho

"That's…he does care about you. In his own way." said Fukuda. That was not a bold faced lie. He cared about Sho in the sense that he cared about having a male heir. That was why he had cast Mukai aside. If she had been born male instead of female Sho would have been the one cast aside…but Fukuda was not going to tell him that. Nothing good would come of telling him that.

"He cares about Claw and me running it. Ok? It's just….I don't know why I have to know about him when he doesn't want to know about me. He doesn't….when he looks at me it's like he's looking at a piece of gum that he found on the bottom of his shoe. Like I'm shoe gum. Sho gum." Said Sho

"Your dad cares about you. If he didn't care about you then…then he would have left you back at the old house. He would have hired someone to take care of you and he would have just left you." Said Fukuda. He made sure to keep his voice low. He did not want to cause a scene. Sho was getting close to it, though, the way he was raising his voice and scratching up his plate.

Fukuda slid his plate away.

Now he was tearing up a napkin. Fukuda didn't take that away from him. He was getting dirty looks. Someone muttered something rude about him not being able to control his son or something. The sort of thing that was not anybody's business. Even though Sho wasn't his Son it was still no one's business how Fukuda chose to raise him.

Not that he was raising him.

Just…keeping him warm. That was better. Just keeping him warm. Just keeping him alive so that Suzuki didn't finally see fit to kill him. He had come close so many times over the years but for some reason he just never went through with it. Probably because Fukuda was the only healer and the only one willing to put up with Suzuki's bullshit regularly. The weird places his mind went to. The obsessive feelings he would get towards a particular topic or person. The general weirdness that came with the territory of being Suzuki's best friend.

All of it.

"I wish that he had. I mean….I'm trying not to be a jerk. I'm tying really hard not to be a jerk but I just…I feel bad. I feel bad and I want to go back home…home to dad and big sis….and home to the castle, too. Home to mom." Said Sho

"Sho…you know that I can't take you back to your mom. I can't take you back to her or…or the Castle…but I can take you back to your dad and older sister. If that's what you want." Said Fukuda

"….I don't know what I want. I want my mom back but you can't do that. I want my family to go back to the way that it was before but you can't do that either. I want…I want to get it. To get why you keep on showing me this stuff. Like why you brought me to the graveyard." Said Sho

"I brought you there to meet your grandparents." Said Fukuda

"They're dead though. I didn't meet them. I talked to their ashes. That's not the same. They weren't even spirits. Dad should have been the one to visit them since he knew them when they were alive. Just like how when I have a kid then I'm going to have to take him to visit dad's ashes and stuff…but not mom's because…she's gone." Said Sho. He could feel his eyes getting all prickly. He knew that he should not have been sad. He didn't even know what he was sad about.

He was just sad.

He closed his eyes. He closed his eyes so that he would not cry. Maybe he was just tired. He was tired of going around in the hot sun to places that meant nothing to him and he was tired of carrying that heavy notebook around, too. He was tired of being a Suzuki. That was it. He was just…tired.

Tired of being dad's son.

"Your mother loves you, Sho, she does. She loves you and…and your dad loves you too. He just has no idea how to express it or even recognize it. Sho….I've been dragging you all over the city to show you that…that your dad used to be a normal guy. Both of us did. I'm showing you places that are important to both of us…places that your dad would have shown you if he could. Your dad is…he's a busy man and also…he has trouble just being…human. I suppose." Said Fukuda. He had tried his best to sugarcoat it but he was rapidly running out of sugar. He was using economy brand sweetener at this point.

"Dad's…not human? I mean that would make sense I guess. He doesn't eat dessert and sleeps in his day clothes and the only shows he watches are documentaries." Said Sho. He would totally have believed that dad was a robot or an alien or a zombie or something. He was just too weird. That would make so many things make sense…like, all the things.

"No, he's human, he's just…bad at it. He says that he's been this way for his entire life." Said Fukuda

"But you just said that he used to be a normal guy. Which is it?" asked Sho

"He led a normal life but he was never a normal person. He's a lot like…like what your sister would be if she didn't have you for a little brother and…and your mother for a mom. Your dad was born with his powers and he's always seen the world differently. He sees the world in terms of what he can get from it and he sees relationships in terms of what he can get from people. Even when it's not that sort of relationship and he knows it. Your father…he never had to learn a lot of the things that you and I've learned. He never had to learn how to talk to people or to care about how they felt or who they were. Your dad just sort of….he sees people but he doesn't SEE THEM. If that makes sense. He still has the same feelings as everyone else, even towards you, he just can't show it." Said Fukuda. There. That was the truth that a nine year old could swallow. To tell the real truth Suzuki was an asshole and had spent his entire life so assured of his own power that he actively avoided anything that made him feel weak. Like interpersonal relationships.

Even love.

Masami had told him, once, that Suzuki had told her that without the chance of conceiving it was pointless for them to have sex. He had just said something so cruel to her, the woman who he had told Fukuda privately that he was sure he would die without if she didn't agree to marry him, and he hadn't even realized what he had done wrong. He had seen Masami only in terms of what he could get from her. Emotional validation and offspring. Masami had told him this in the middle of the night when…he did not need to think about this and he certainly did not need to be telling Sho about this.

Yet.

Fukuda wasn't sure if he should keep the truth from Sho for his entire life. The truth of himself and Masami. Right now there was no reason that a little boy needed to know a grown man…that was a whole other story. Sho had no model for what a healthy and loving relationship looked like. His mother had left his father, his father had gotten one of his subordinates pregnant, and his older sister was drinking and smoking with grown men three times her age. Sho needed to know what a good relationship was…

Even if it was between his mother and Fukuda.

"Why not? Why can't he show it? Who's stopping him?" asked Sho. Dad was always talking about how you weren't ever supposed to show your feelings and stuff. He was always talking about how you were supposed to control your powers and your feelings and…and he was always punishing Sho for not doing so. But why? Why did dad hate his feelings so much? Who was telling him that he wasn't allowed to have them?

Had his dad been like him?

Had his dad been like him? Or his mom? Was Sho supposed to be like this to his kids? Well he wouldn't be. He was a pretend big brother to baby Mukai and he had never once told her that her feelings were wrong and that she shouldn't have them. Even when she had woken up in the middle of the night crying for no reason. When she was sad then she was sad and when she was happy then she was happy and he would never tell her how to feel.

That made more sense than slapping someone across the face for being afraid of being slapped across the face.

"Sho…he's just….afraid. Your father is a very scared man. I know that he doesn't look it but he's very afraid. He's afraid of himself and what he can do. That's why he's so hard on you and also…also why he won't get close to you. But that's ok because I will always be here for you. Ok?" asked Fukuda. He was lying through his teeth. Suzuki…he may have been afraid of what he could do but that was not why he shunned any and all bonds with people. It would have been easy to blame it on the accident. To blame his inability to understand human emotions on him being cut off from his own for so long and to blame the walls he put up around himself and his terror at the invisible bonds that others formed the result of him losing his parents in such a tragic way. But the truth of it, as far as Fukuda could tell, was that Suzuki was just an asshole.

He was an asshole.

He had always been distant from his parents even when they had been nothing but good to him. He had always been distant from those around him even before he had met Fukuda. He had only agreed to being friends with Fukuda because they were both espers. Even then he had always been so distant and bossy. Their relationship as boys was the same as their relationship as men with the only difference being how aware Fukuda was of what Suzuki actually was.

An asshole.

And he hated him. The last straw had been Sho's awakening. He had disliked the man since the forming of the first division of Claw and resented him since he had been cruel to Masami but now he hated him. He hated Suzuki and the only reason that he hadn't left yet, risked defecting, was that if he left then Sho would have no one. He had made a promise to Masami and he would fulfill it even if he never saw her again.

The love of his life.

"Ok….I guess. But can you be there for me at home. I really just….I really just want to go home now." Said Sho. He had come on this mission to see baby sis and he had seen baby sis and now he could go back home already. He didn't much want to be around dad but he also didn't much want to go to any more places. He just wanted to lay down and just…be….for a little bit. Just be in his bed…a bed…and just draw or something and not have to think about dad or mom or the past or anything.

He wanted to see big sis, too.

He missed her so much. He missed her and…and he needed to say sorry. He needed to tell her sorry and also…also for the millionth time that he was not going to be a jerk to her anymore. He didn't want him and big sis to end up like…like dad and Fukuda. He was turning into dad, being mean to someone who cared about him and pushing them away, and she was turning into Fukuda. She was still being his friend even after he caused her all of that pain.

He didn't want that. He just wanted to go home to his sis…and some decent food too.