AUgutst2024 20 Crossover (Shulk, Nagi)

a/n: The opening retold, again, with a conversation between Shulk and Nagi. Lower your expectations, or maybe raise them.

"So." The old man paused, adjusting the embellished cuff of his dress uniform. The tick of the cooling coffee pot in the kitchen kept time with the twitch in his jaw. The silence continued as they stared at each other. "You're ... Shulk. Shulk." The gravelly voice repeated the name as if his mouth was filled with broken egg shells, adding the hint of extra syllables.

The other man, younger, slimmer, dressed informally, tried to look as impassive."Yes, I'm Shulk," he said. "It seemed like the right answer when Elma asked me. Something familiar."

Like hell was he going to admit that he had panicked a little. He'd been joking with the technicians as they prepared him for stasis, choosing increasingly terrible names. The people that seemed to be in charge had emphasized that he was not to use his real name, not under any circumstances, and it was a way of lifting the mood. He'd reached absurdities as they started to put him under. He'd closed his eyes in an anonymous medical facility and a few moments later he had opened them in a rainy field, blinded by Elma's flashlight.

"What's your name? Let's start with that," she had said, a flick in her eyes alerting him to the external tracker recording the encounter. He'd been angry that she didn't turn the camera off, didn't set aside the charade to greet him. He had known she was somewhere in the building where he'd been reanimated, but she hadn't come by to say hello. Now she was acting out this fool drama that the authorities swore was necessary to maintain military secrets. Luckily for everyone his body had betrayed him before he could snap at her. His knees buckled, sending him lurching toward the ground, and he'd almost logged out. Elma stepped in to support him and the quick unseen squeeze to his arm was as good as any welcome.

The cold rain slapping his face was the final trick that brought him around completely. One good shake of his head and he was able to play along with the script. That is, he managed to play along until he had to say his first line and his mind went blank. In half a moment, he would have said something normal, possibly his grandfather's name. No one would be surprised to meet someone named George, no matter how unclear he was about the past 30 years he hadn't lived through, not even asleep. George would have been a fine name.

Instead, he'd blurted out a cartoonish name: Shulk. Partly it was because he was rattled, but he was also still angry that they kept piling lies on him. Couldn't talk about the aliens, couldn't talk about the danger to Earth, couldn't talk about the scans they kept doing in Maryland. Couldn't introduce Elma to his favorite bar. His lip tingled. On second thought, maybe that place wasn't the best showcase for Earth society. It still rankled that crashing onto an alien planet hadn't changed the addiction to secrecy, wiping away the individual whenever it was inconvenient.

And maybe he wanted to surprise Elma, hint that he didn't plan on being meek and obedient and inviting her to join him in some small rebellion. She hadn't even blinked, but that made sense. She had a thirty year jump on him.

Thirty-two. It was 2056, they had told him, and he'd been accidentally regenerated from an obsolete data scan. It was during a test of a partial prototype and they had been astonished when he'd sat up and spoken to them. The techs had grown more distressed as he responded clearly and factually, albeit only about things from decades ago. Their plan, as far as he could piece together during his brief stay in the lab, was to build some sort of super soldier out of the best bits of the incomplete data sets they had salvaged. Instead, they now found themselves stuck with a low-ranking soldier who had missed the destruction of Earth and the escape voyage and the first two hard months on this wretched planet through the sheer fact of that his scans had been lost in some folder.

He was too disappointing to acknowledge, but for some reason he was also too valuable to keep locked away. Maybe they really were desperate for personnel. On their journey to NLA, Elma had mentioned how many evacuation pods had been destroyed. Whatever the reason, the authorities, unseen, had decided he should arrive as an amnesiac with a false name and they would all pray that Elma's performance was enough to sell his presence to the greater city.

So, yes, he had wanted to rattle Elma and see if she broke character back at Starfall Basin, spitting out the ridiculous name before he could regret it. He shouldn't have bothered. Aside from her bone dry response, a nice contrast from the weather, she had acted her part perfectly. He'd shook himself and followed her lead, wondering when she'd get back at him for his goof.

She'd repaid him, generously, an hour later at sunrise. She had gotten her exquisite revenge when she'd revealed the whole fantastic glorious place to him with the simple words, "I promise, you're gonna love it." He'd almost barked with amazement, tilting his head back to howl at everything that he needed to get his hands on right then and there. He thought he'd kept his cool, but her eyes had blazed a blue that made him think he'd done nothing of the sort.

Just like now. "I'm Shulk," he'd said, and the old man had only looked a little tired, as if he could foresee all the nonsense in the future. He personally found it uncomfortable, staring at a fun house version of himself. No, that wasn't right. Fun house mirrors at least had the comfort of being a reflection. This had more of the unpleasantness of looking at a bad photo of himself. It was him, he couldn't deny it, but his hair lay in the wrong direction, the eyebrows arched in the wrong way, the scar dripped down the wrong side of his mouth. That scar hadn't faded much in 32 years. At least he'd kept his hair.

"Shulk," repeated his 32-year-older self. Maybe the old man had every reason to sound so dismayed. Who else knew exactly how much of a dirtbag he had been, back when he'd met Elma in 2025?

He gingerly rubbed the cut on his chin, a souvenir from a brawl the week before he'd been volunteered for a project Elma was spearheading. He now had a pretty good idea what those scans had been about. The scan had copied the wound perfectly.

He had rubbed the skin too hard. When he winced, Old Man Nagi had looked at him without pity. Shulk smiled gingerly around the pain and shrugged. "Could have been worse. I could have said Goku."

a/n: ISTG this will be my next Cross.

Next up: Absurd Tragedy. Okay, but it has to be short.