I think of Noa as … well, a Terminator, honestly.
I call him an android, but considering he does have a human brain, I suppose that means he's a cyborg? I don't know the differences, to be honest. Sci-fi has never really been my scene, and anyway there's a lot of handwaving and magic involved in my Noa, so I don't think it really counts as science fiction anyway.
Either way, the point is, sometimes it's fun to push him past human limits.
Just to see what happens.
.
Noa was like Kisara in a few ways. One of the more deep-seated examples was that he wasn't quite human. He was close, and he would have taken deep offense at the idea that anyone would accuse him of not being human out loud; but in the deepest parts of himself, he knew the truth.
His body was synthetic. It functioned almost like a human body; mostly like a human body. It was close enough that, at a rudimentary glass, anyone would think it was a human body. But it wasn't. It didn't adhere to the same limits. One of the first things Seto had warned his brother against doing—purely on the basis of potentially injuring someone else—was engaging in any kind of serious, competitive sport.
"I don't mean to imply that you can't play basketball," he'd said, "or learn how to surf. What I mean to say is that athletes are scrutinized to a serious degree, far past anything a normal person would ever have to deal with. You will be found out. It's not a matter of if, but when. And that's the best-case scenario. The worst-case is that you kill someone."
Noa took this to heart.
It wouldn't be fair, anyway.
One of the other ways that Noa was like Kisara was that he liked to explore Domino City. He'd spent so much of his first life, his original life, isolated, insulated, and avoidant. He'd decided early on in his second that he was going to make up for that. So, he spent a not-insignificant amount of his free time strolling down the various streets and boulevards, the lanes and courts, of the city where he'd been born.
Noa never had a destination in mind when he went on an adventure; he simply left the estate grounds and walked. Another trait he shared with the family's newest (honorary) member.
One day was more ill-suited to such an excursion than Noa was used to; it wasn't storming, exactly, but the winds were fierce enough that his phone had been warning him about them ever since the morning. However, winds would not stop him; Noa Kaiba was not curtailed by human limits, after all. He decided there was something romantic about walking in prohibitive winds, actually; and Noa quickly found himself pretending that he was on a quest, bereft of anything except raw grit and a lack of other choices. He imagined finding a castle, a tower, a dragon's lair, at the end of this journey.
What he found, instead, was a simple yard by a simple street, in front of a simple house.
A middle-aged man was outside, bundled up in a heavy coat, studying an old Carob tree that was swaying ominously with each gust. He seemed to be examining it, trying to determine . . . something. Noa couldn't guess.
The rest happened in a fractured thunderbolt of a moment.
A young girl, no more than six years old, came rushing outside toward the man who was—most likely—her father. A woman, likely the girl's mother, came to the threshold of the front door of their house and called out a warning. An echoing creak rumbled through Noa's bones, then a snap like a hundred arrows breaking over a giant's knee.
He was moving before conscious thought caught up to his instincts.
When next Noa was aware of the world, the man was on the ground, staring at him in stunned silence with eyes wider than soup plates. The little girl was curled up beside him, awestruck and pale. The woman was inching closer, out onto the yard, her hair whipping about her shoulders as she reached out a hand to them.
Noa realized that the old Carob tree was lying across his shoulders.
The storm had ripped the thing out of its yard, leaving a gaping crater in the grass.
The girl was the first to speak: "Are you Superman?"
Noa winked.
"Who knows? I might be."