Idea: Two men go to the bathroom with a baby and come out with a baby. Hikaru's skill with Go may have been more Nature than Nurture.
Hikaru nearly jumped out of his skin when the bathroom door opened. He'd come to the Toya residence to play a game with his off and on friend/ Eternal Rival since the Go Salon was closed for repairs, and after a long game had needed to use the facilities. He always felt uncomfortable when he did so at other people's houses for some strange reason, and this place was no exception. In fact, he felt even less comfortable here since it was the home of the formidable and now retired Toya Meijin. To make matters worse, someone had just walked in on him, and instead of saying sorry, that person was just standing there in the doorway.
When he finished, he turned around to discover that the person who'd been staring at him was the elder Toya. He passed by the man in uncomfortable silence, because he couldn't think of anything to say to the man that wasn't well...
When he got back to his Rival to tell him that he was going to go home rather than play another game, he found himself unable to prevent himself from asking.
"Toya?" he said.
"What?" the younger Toya replied.
"Why was your father staring at my ass?" he asked.
18 Years Earlier:
Toya Koyo stepped out of the stall and stared. Instead of one stroller next to the sinks, there were now two. Both strollers were virtually identical, and were the same common brand and color. Both diaper bags that were hooked onto the strollers by their straps were identical, and both of a common brand. The babies in the strollers were both wearing nearly identical outfits. Both babies stared up at him with a pair of wide gray/brown eyes.
He was mildly ashamed to admit that until his wife had fallen ill recently, he had not spent enough time at home to definitively say exactly what his son looked like beyond the fact that he was a small pudgy thing with a head of messy black hair.
Coming to a quick decision, he grabbed the stroller on the left before someone walked in and found him standing there trying to figure out which kid was his.
Moments later, Shindo Masao stepped out of a nearby stall and blinked.
"That's funny," he said. "I could have sworn I left Hikaru to the left of the sinks."
Shrugging as he attributed his lapse of memory to overwork and sleep deprivation due to the fact that he was taking care of Hikaru while his wife helped tend to a sick relative in Osaka, he grabbed the stroller and headed home.
&!&!&
It had been at home, while he was going through the incredibly tricky process of changing his son's diaper, that Toya Koyo learned that he had chosen incorrectly. The red birthmark that he'd noted as being on his son's backside the last few times he changed his daiper wasn't there.
He briefly wondered what he should do. There was virtually no chance of him finding his child on his own in a city this size now - even if the other father wasn't a tourist who had been visiting for the day - and he really didn't need the sort of publicity he'd receive if he went to the media and said that he'd grabbed the wrong stroller in the men's room and could someone please come and get their kid.
After a while, he decided he would wait for now and when the other parents came forward, he would attempt to quietly return their son to them.
&!&!&
Shindo Masao knew something was wrong when he saw the look on the doctor's face. He had noticed an odd rash on his son's backside when he changed his diaper and had scheduled an appointment with the pediatrician to have it looked at.
"What is it?" he asked.
"This is not Hikaru." the doctor replied.
Masao sat there in shock. How could this have happened? How could he have been such a bad father as to lose his own son and not even notice it for a full Fourty-eight hours? He knew he worked so much that he rarely had the time or the energy to spend time with his boy, but to take another man's child and not even notice it wasn't his?
What would his neighbors say? What would his family say? What would his wife say?
After agonizing over it for a while, and realizing that his only hope of seeing his missing son again would be if there had been another father just as negligent as he - since now that he thought about it he could almost swear that he saw another stroller when he left his son behind before he raced into the stall to deal with an impending bout of diahrea - he decided to wait until the parents of the child he had accidentally taken came forward. For now, he would request the doctor's discretion, and if it took too long, he would find another doctor.