When he woke up, a bit sore on the right side but with nothing that a nice hot shower wouldn't cure, he first stared around the room in complete confusion. The kind of where-the-hell-am-I-and-how-the-hell-did-I-end-up- like-this kind of confusion that usually only accompanied him to hotel rooms and his first few nights in a new house.
"Well, I see you're taking this pretty well," said a voice from behind him.
Ryan turned, and his first impression of the guy was that he needed a shave pretty urgently; he also looked a little husky. He had nice eyes, though—warm and open in a way that almost reminded him of his mother.
Speaking of Mom… +Hey, Captain Confusing—where'd you put my mom up?+
+Your mother has been placed in one of my safehouses, and will you stop making up stupid things to call me, Crouger?+
+Not unless you start remembering that I have an actual first name, Mr. Roboto.+
He could swear the guy was grumbling incoherently; he had no idea how he could hear something like that, but that was the read he was getting.
"Did you sleep well, Mr. Crouger?" he asked, after they'd spent about a minute or so staring at each other.
"Yeah, once I got used to the whole sleeping-on-a-giant-pillow thing," he said, then wrinkled his nose slightly. "And could you call me Ryan? 'Mr. Crouger's' going to have me looking over my shoulder for my dad all the time."
He winced internally, remembering for only the second time that his dad had chosen to stay back at the house while he'd chosen to take his chances with those Chronos guys. After what he'd seen of them, he really got the feeling that that hadn't been the best idea. It was too late to do anything about that, though, so it was probably best that he just concentrated on what he was supposed to be doing.
Whether he was going to actually be able to do that remained to be seen.
"Okay," the guy said, still smiling amicably. "It's nice to know your first name. After what you did for Sho when you two met, calling you by your last does kind of seem too formal."
The sound of wood sliding against more of the same distracted him before he could think of anything else to say. The girl that stuck her head into the room, looking around for about half a minute – taking in both him and the pudgy guy – distracted Ryan before he could think of anything to say in response. Unfortunately for him, the new girl only spoke in Japanese. It was the country for it, he knew, but it still made him acutely feel just how alone he really was. With Mom gone and Dad opting to stay back at the house, the only one he could really talk to was Sho. Well, him and the new guy.
Speaking of new guys… "So, you got a name to go with that interesting-looking stubble of yours?"
"What?" he rubbed his chin, apparently startled that the stubble in question was in fact still there. "Crap! I was so excited about seeing Sho again this morning that I forgot to shave," he grumbled, still rubbing his whiskered chin and looking like he'd forgotten all about the fact that there was another person in the room with him. Ryan starting to chuckle was probably what reminded him. "I'm sorry; my name is Tetsuro Segawa. I guess I never really thanked you for what you did for Sho, so thank you, Ryan."
Tetsuro looked sincere about what he was saying, so much so that he didn't want to ruin the moment by saying something stupid like "the pleasure was all mine". "You're welcome."
He was expecting that to be the end of it, so he was kind of surprised when the guy lunged – well, maybe it was a bit slow to be an actual lunge, per se – at him and started hugging him. Actually hugging him—it was kind of awkward. Kind of really awkward.
"You're hugging me," he said, as if the guy couldn't have noticed it himself. "Why are you hugging me?"
"I don't care how you did it, I'm just thankful you managed," Tetsuro said, and now he was rubbing his stubble-bearing cheek against Ryan's own, which only made the awkward-vibes stronger.
"Ya know, normally I'm not one to go stomping all over someone's gratitude, especially when it's aimed directly at me, but could you kind of stop hugging me now?"
"I'm sorry," Tetsuro said, his eyes downcast and not seeming nearly so enthusiastic anymore. Ryan felt like kind of a jerk.
"It's not like I have anything against you, I just get a little weirded-out being hugged by complete strangers." He grinned to reassure the big guy that he hadn't been doing anything wrong. Not too wrong, at least. "It's kind of an issue I have."
"I guess that's understandable," Tetsuro said, looking him in the eye again. "I really shouldn't have been doing that in the first place; sorry for invading your personal space, Ryan."
"It's fine; I didn't mind so much. It was just kind of unexpected, you know? Why don't we just forget it ever happened?"
Just as Tetsuro was nodding, the same girl came back into their room. He still wanted to know who she was, but now Tetsuro was speaking in rapid-fire Japanese, and he quickly lost the thread of the conversation. He might have liked those Uchuu Keiji things, but they were subtitled, and he spent most of his time reading the dialogue just to find out what the hell was going on. It almost made him wish the Veediots were here; they could probably explain just what the hell was going on.
Tetsuro was pointing at him now, and when the girl turned to look he waved. He might not have had the slightest, foggiest idea of what the hell was going on, but that was really no reason to be rude. And then, next thing he knew he was being hugged by a complete stranger for the second time that day.
"Hey, Tetsuro? You think someone pasted a sign that says 'hug me' to my chest without me noticing, somehow?"
The big guy laughed, but more importantly he pulled the girl off and started talking to her again. He didn't know what the guy was saying anymore than he had before, but he was grateful to be out of the whole being-hugged-by-someone-I-don't-know situation.
"Not that it's not nice to be meeting new people and all, but what the heck is going on?"
"This is my sister, Mizuki," Tetsuro said, grinning like a guy without a care in the world. "She said she wants to thank you for what you did for Sho."
"I also said I wanted to tell him that myself, big brother," Mizuki said, sticking her tongue out with a teasing look on her face.
Yep, those two were definitely siblings.
"So, anyway, thanks for helping Sho back there, Ryan. I'm glad he met someone like you." She smiled at him, then hung her head and muttered something in Japanese.
He thought he caught a familiar name among all those syllables, but it was like trying to pick out a red bullet from a machine gun while it was firing. Barely possible, but not highly the likely. "Sorry, I don't think I caught most of that. What did you say?"
"She's still in shock…" Tetsuro trailed off, patting his sister on the head as she started to cry. "Over Mr. Murakami. You probably— No; I guess you wouldn't know about him."
"I've heard the guy's name a few times," he said, sensing there was more to this than met the eye. Hell, he'd had to have been blind, deaf, and stupid not to pick up on something like that. "And I'm fairly sure Sho told me he was his friend." He bit the tip of his pointer finger, thinking. "Though you've really got to wonder about a guy who'd make friends with a bloodthirsty sadist like that."
"There's something you have to understand, Ryan: you weren't dealing with Mr. Murakami. Agito told me what happened, and the Mr. Murakami we knew would never do any of the things he did to you or to Sho. He'd been fighting against Chronos for as long as we knew him, and I'm positive he'd been fighting even before then."
"Enlighten me, then: what the hell happened?"
"I'm getting to that," he said, with a slightly annoyed tone. "Anyway, when we were trapped inside one of Chronos' largest Japanese bases – it's been destroyed, by the way – Mr. Murakami ended up fighting Gyou, one of Chronos' other Zoalords. He killed him, but Chronos has apparently either cloned him or revived his body somehow. The Murakami we knew – that Sho was friends with – would have never served Chronos willingly."
Sitting back, leaning on his hands, he considered what he had just heard. It definitely fit with the way Sho had acted when he'd first met the guy, and with the punched-in-the-gut look he'd had when Imakarum had turned on him. It was weird to think that there were people out there who could actually raise the dead, but not so weird as it would have seemed if he hadn't seen most of what those Chronos guys could pull off. Hell, he probably should have been expecting some weird-assed crap like this to be what had happened. It certainly wasn't that much weirder than a bunch of guys who could turn themselves into hulking man-beasts at will.
"So, is there anything else I should know about?"
"Why don't you start by telling me exactly what Sho told you, and then I can fill in anything he might have missed?" Tetsuro offered.
"That sounds good," he said, settling himself down for a long talk.
While she watched Tetsuro and Ryan, not really listening since she already knew the story so well, Mizuki tried to process the fact that Mr. Murakami was gone—worse than gone. Sho had been devastated by what had happened – none of them could really bring themselves to think of it as a betrayal; all of them knew what Chronos was capable of – and none of the others were quite ready to talk about it. Agito seemed to be coping the best, but then that had been true even before any of them had found out about Chronos. He'd always been the strong one. Maybe a little too strong, she thought, wincing at the memory of Takeshiro. The people there had all been turned into Zoanoids, but there had to have been something that they could have done for them.
Pushing those thoughts back into the recesses of her mind, she turned her attention back to Ryan. He was kind of nice-looking, though she didn't quite know what to think of his red hair. It could have been dye – it would have been rude to ask, but that was probably what she was going to end up doing; it was less rude than trying to check, after all – but then he was American. It could very have been real.
He was a Guyver, too, like Sho and Agito. It was nice to have another one working with them, but she'd thought that all the Guyvers had already been found and activated. She really didn't want to think about what would happen if Chronos managed to get their hands on even one Guyver. Just one could undo everything that Sho and all their friends had worked for. But then, maybe Ryan had found the last one and there weren't any for Chronos. That would be good; none of them would have to worry anymore, and they already had another good ally. That was what she was going to hope for, but she couldn't help the sneaking suspicion that the assumption – that was what it really was, after all – would turn out to be wrong.
When a lull in the conversation extended just a bit too long to be comfortable, she looked more closely at the her brother and Ryan in turn. Tetsuro looked the way she'd almost expected him to: like someone who'd just finished telling a painful story and wasn't quite sure what to say next. Ryan looked a little shell-shocked, but who wouldn't have after hearing something like that? She was having trouble believing it herself, and she'd at least known Sho well enough to know he would never lie about something like this.
Then again, Ryan had only seen Mr. Murakami as his enemy, someone who worked for Chronos and had to be stopped at all costs. That was probably why he was having such a hard time believing what a good friend Mr. Murakami had been to them all—even Agito, whom he'd never really seemed to trust.
When the door opened and Shizu came in to invite them all to breakfast, Mizuki was grateful for the break from thinking about all the horrible things Chronos had done – and was probably continuing to do – to all of those people who had been unfortunate enough to cross their path. Even Aptom, as strange and frankly scary as he could sometimes be, had clearly suffered at the hands of Chronos' scientists.
Tetsuro had been the one to pick up on that, of course. Mizuki knew that while she could be quite a few things, perceptive wasn't often one of them. It just wasn't something she was good at, unlike Sho, who could be perceptive but only chose to see the best in people. It might end up hurting him, especially considering the kind of people they were all up against, but she and Tetsuro had already agreed that they would help protect him.
Leaving the room behind, with Tetsuro leading their little procession and Ryan in the middle so at least one of them could help him if he got lost, Mizuki started to smell the familiar scents that meant they were close to the kitchen and, by extension, breakfast.
She wondered for a moment how Ryan would react to having breakfast with them—she'd read that Americans had different kinds of things to eat than people did here. Well, I'm sure we can find something he likes if there isn't any of it on the table. Besides, Shizu always fixes great food.