Checkerface is an apathetic alien who considers himself superior to humanity on a base level and uses strong Flame users to maintain a failing system instead of looking for a better solution. Thankfully, he is not enough of a jerk to leave his latest Curse victims stranded in the woods. Or maybe it was Luce who arranged their transport back to their base of operations.
Yeah, Luce was more likely.
It must have been hours after the Curse when they were able to move. Getting back to their car and driver absolutely sucked. Fon likes to think he faired a little bit better than the others: not only did he know this was going to happen, but he also distinctly remembers what being a toddler was like. It still sucked. His center of gravity is completely off, his limbs are in all the wrong places, and it takes forever to get anywhere because his legs are so freaking short.
It's worse than going through puberty the second time around. Maybe. On the bright side, all the aches and pains from old injuries are gone.
Except for the initial shouting when Viper and Verde found they couldn't immediately undo what was done to them, they avoided each other for the first few days. Fon doesn't know what the others spent that time doing, and isn't actually motivated enough to guess. He spent it in the training room trying to re-establish his muscle memory. While none of the martial arts styles or katas in his arsenal had been forgotten, all but the most basic had been removed from his reflexes. He thinks this is the exact body he had twenty years ago.
He spends a day in a philosophical haze. These hands hadn't killed anyone yet; hadn't held his sister yet; were a child's hands. This body had only ever fought other children, and even those had been controlled spars. Before Fon can get himself excited about having a clean slate, he reminds himself he's going to be stuck like this for the next thirty years. By the time the Curse is broken, he'll have been in this toddler's body longer than it took him to reach adulthood. His sister will be older than him. His future nephew will be older than him for most of the boy's childhood.
Making his way to the kitchen, he spends a good long moment looking at the liquor cabinet. If anyone in the world had an excuse to get drunk, it would be him. Fon doesn't go for it. He does not want to find out how vulnerable he is to alcohol poisoning. And while he's on that train of thought, is he going to have to relearn Poison Disintegration? At least this body doesn't have that slight issue with reflexively misusing Poison Disintegration.
Dragging a chair over to the stove, he starts making himself tea. This, at least, is nothing new. A careful two-handed grip on the kettle, walking slowly to keep from spilling. The last time around it had amused him greatly, to make himself tea. Before, his toddler-self wouldn't have touched it if he'd been bribed with candy. This time around, he had needed the calm and the routine. Also, it was the most caffeine the Triad had allowed. They may be crazy people who raised child soldiers and assassins, but they weren't suicidal enough to caffeinate their murder-toddlers.
Once he got his tea, Fon just climbs up on the counter to drink it. All of the chairs are sized for adults, the table is inconveniently far away, and he'd rather not sit on the floor.
So Fon has some warning when Renato comes into the kitchen. The man toddler hitman is in an absolutely foul mood, and even before the Curse he was never shy about taking it out on others. But Renato is – if not a friend – a fairly trustworthy coworker, and he has never once asked questions while healing Fon.
So Fon sits on the counter and waits for the Sun to notice him. Not that it takes long. As they have discovered, their muscle-memory may be shot, but they've still got their instincts and experience.
An interesting side effect is that child-Renato hasn't quite learned to guard his expression yet. Renato is most definitely not smirking confidently, so Fon decides to break the silence before the Sun shoots something.
"Tea?" Watching the World's Greatest Hitman actually take a breath to keep his hands away from his guns was way funnier than it should have been.
Getting a second cup and pouring the tea takes about the same amount of time as it took Renato to get onto the counter.
Fon is surprised Renato doesn't immediately start interrogating him. He shouldn't be: theirs is a profession that requires surprising amounts of patience. Instead, Fon decides to poke the bear.
"Have you tried using your Flames yet?"
"Have I… Fon, you were there when we first tried it!"
It… hadn't gone well. Normally, their Flames were so spectacularly strong it was only their hard-won control keeping bystanders from being flattened into pancakes. They were people who hadn't struggled to access their Flames since they had first learned. It had been a terrifying moment, after the Curse, when not only could they not summon their Flames, but it also hurt to try.
"Well, yes. I just didn't take you for the kind of person to be discouraged by a minor setback." A dangerous allegation, given the Sun's hyper-competitive nature. "Haven't you ever had to put weight on a fractured limb?"
"Yes." The hitman smirks.
"I mean your own, not someone else's."
"What of it?" Which is as close to an admission of prior weakness as Renato will ever get.
"That's what it feels like. It's doable, and it takes much more concentration and effort, but we've still got our Flames." Fon gets a funny look in response. Maybe if he spent more time around toddlers he'd be having an easier time interpreting facial expressions.
"You're a masochist, aren't you?"
"My apologies," Fon stares blankly, his accent more prominent, "I am not familiar with that word."
"Sure you aren't, you con-artist."
"You're one to talk, Mr. my-alias-is-an-expert-on-this-random-topic."
"And my expertise in psychology is now I know when you're messing with people."
"Oh, which alias was it that studied psychology?"
"Dr. C. Niall DeMencha studied in Egypt."
"…okay, that one is pretty great."
"Well, one of the smartest people in the world came up with it."
"One of the most arrogant, too."
"Speaking of character flaws that most definitely belong to other people," though his narrowed eyes and sharper tone were businesslike and serious when Renato was an adult, it was just comical on his child-self and Fon had to restrain a laugh, "how did you know the hill was going to be a trap?"
"I told you before; I received warning through a story told to me as I lay dying in a past life."
"So, gut instinct?"
"If that's what you insist on calling it, then yes, it was instinct."
It's not like Fon can make people believe him, after all.
