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Fanfic: Backup Plans
Originally a prompt fill from here. The original prompt was 'Pink.'
Title: Backup Plans
Fandom: Mega Man Battle Network
Characters: Yuichiro Hikari, Haruka Hikari, Lan Hikari, Megaman.exe
Length: 3k+
Content notes: Character Death (offscreen)
Author notes: This fic assumes you know what a NetNavi is. For the purposes of this fic, all you really need to know is that it's a little digital guy who lives in your phone that you can customize and befriend, and that basically everyone has one.
Summary: Pre-series. Yuichiro Hikari becomes a father to twins. Yuichiro Hikari becomes a father thrice over.
Yuichiro marveled. His wife, Haruka, laid exhausted on the hospital bed, face ruddy and hair stringy from exertion. The child in her arms was wiggling like he was trying to escape; the child in Yuichiro’s arms was quiet and serene.
“How did they even fit inside of you?”
Haruka huffed out a laugh. “I know you aren’t the doctor kind of smart, honey, but really?”
“It’s just, it doesn’t feel real, does it? Even with them here now.”
“It felt plenty real to me…”
Tucking the child closer to his chest, Yuichiro leaned over and kissed his wife on her sweaty forehead. He sat on the bed next to her and scooted close.
He would never admit this out loud, but all newborns looked the same to him. His wife, in preparation for this day, had shown him many photos from the net of newborns. Very pink, very squished, usually not happy to be out of the warmth and safety of their mother’s body. To Yuichiro, their kids didn’t break the mold on that impression–and yet he was in awe.
“I want crackers,” his wife said suddenly.
Yuichiro carefully tucked the boy he’d been holding into the crook of his wife’s arm before hopping up onto his feet. “I’ll see what I can do. The nurses might not let you eat anything yet.”
The wiggling baby started crying.
“Why are you crying?” Haruka asked tiredly. “I’m the one who doesn’t get to eat.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Yuichiro said, attempting to inject some levity back into the conversation. When it became clear it didn’t work, Yuichiro instead picked the noisy baby up, wanting to take some of the burden off his wife’s shoulder’s somehow. Yuichiro’s nervous pacing seemed to help keep the first one quiet.
A thought suddenly occurred to him. “We have a problem, though.”
Haruka’s head snapped up. “What is it?”
“Not that kind of problem,” Yuichiro said quickly. “But we only came up with one name for a boy, and we have two.”
“Oh. Names.” His wife leaned back onto her pillow, closing her eyes. The roundness of her cheeks couldn’t seem to shake their flushed color. “Well, this one will be Hub, like we planned, and that one will be Lan, because I like the way it sounds. Simple.”
“That easy, huh?”
Haruka cracked open one of her eyes to glare at him. “Do you have a better idea?”
“Absolutely not. But why do I get the feeling you’ve been holding out on me?”
“Not holding out,” his wife said, a gentle, tired smile gracing her pink lips. “Just came prepared with a backup plan.”
x
There was no backup plan for when one of their children died. They hadn’t thought that far ahead, hadn’t even considered the possibility. Hub died with far less pomp and circumstance than he was born.
It was a shock–a rare heart condition known as HBD that their kids hadn’t even been tested for. Yuichiro had missed most of this going down, as he’d been working overtime to pay for twice as many children as they planned for. He and his wife had discussed making changes to adjust to their new needs, but not like this.
His wife was inconsolable. Yuichiro felt numb. He couldn’t help but cling to the warm, living, cherry-faced Lan in one arm and blotchy, red-faced Haruka in the other as they were informed of their options of what to do with Hub’s body. As was tradition where they lived, they decided on cremation.
Yuichiro did get to see Hub one last time. The boy had always been paler than his brother, less lively and energetic, but now–now he looked like a doll. Eyes closed, chubby arms rigid. Yuichiro couldn’t stand to look at him and walked away, and then felt even worse about running from the last time he would ever see his baby boy’s face in the flesh. He was an awful, spineless father.
They eventually got home and put Lan to bed. His wife tossed and turned. Yuichiro didn’t even try to get any sleep, instead trying to gather anything that was specific to Hub together so they could decide what to do with it when they were feeling more balanced.
One of things his wife had decided to do was to keep locks of their sons’ hair from their first haircut. She’d gotten the idea from one of her online friends. At the time, Yuichiro hadn’t seen a point. The boys were young and their hair would grow back. But, the point was, they saved it.
Yuichiro sat on a kitchen chair, rolling the surprisingly thick lock of Hub’s hair through his fingers. Tying it around his fingers so tightly that he would squeeze the color out of them, fingertips going from a healthy pink to a strangled white. Back to pink when he let the hair unfurl. He could work with that, he thought as he stared mindlessly at the silver moonlight through the window.
He could work with that.
x
The thing about backup plans is that they tended to rely on pre-existing skill sets. Yuichiro was a programmer. It was, arguably, the only thing he was talented at. So he did what he did best: program.
It would be an understatement to say that he hated this particular series of projects. His coworkers marveled at his progress in making Navis look and behave more human-like, but all he could see was how uncanny they were. Awkward pauses when switching from movement to pose or visa versa. Stiff idle animations. Either flat textures and colors that looked cartoonish or textures that didn’t move like real materials would. In the end, he rewrote the entire Navi playbook. He became a moderately well-known, if reclusive, programming genius, and was rewarded for his ingenuity with a few promotions at work. Those were nice and convenient, but they weren’t what he was aiming for.
“Raise your arm,” he ordered the prototype. A rotation largely from the shoulder, with a moderately bent elbow and a slight rotation of the wrist as the arm came to a stop above the head. It was passable.This was necessary to imitate the instinctive change in the center of gravity of the arm, though it still came off slightly stiff. More akin to toy articulation than a human-like motion.
“Like this?” the prototype asked.
Yuchiro nodded. “Exactly like that. Good job.”
The prototype beamed at him, his face lighting up. Soft and youthful, with good symmetry. He was so close to being perfect, but there was still something missing. Yuichiro resolved to find it.
x
It turned out that dealing with Lan growing up often meant having to resort to a backup plan. Or several.
“What possessed you to jump off the swing?” Yuichiro asked.
Lan pouted. “I wanted to do a flip!”
Yuichiro sighed internally. Sighing externally usually meant that Lan would try to defend himself, even when what he did or said made no sense whatsoever. He loved his son, but he certainly didn’t understand him.
The man knelt down next to the boy and carefully took his hands. They were an angry shade of pink and scratched up from the ground, nothing their first aid kit back home couldn’t handle. “Good thing we don’t live that far from the park,” Yuichiro said. Being mindful of his son’s injuries, he took him by the hand and started leading them home. Lan was quiet.
Yuchiro nudged him. “You okay?”
“‘M s’ry.”
“What?”
“I said sorry,” Lan mumbled. His eyes were cast toward the ground. “You came to the park with me for the first time in months and I ruined it.”
Oh, Yuichiro was truly a spineless, terrible father.
“Has it… really been that long since we went out together? I remember we went for your birthday.”
“In June,” Lan confirmed. “It’s November.”
Yikes.
“No, Lan, I’m the one who should be sorry.” Yuichiro stopped on the sidewalk, placing his hands on Lan’s shoulders and turning his son to face him. “I’ve been working a lot lately, and time got away from me. That’s my fault. I can’t promise a change tomorrow, but maybe I can talk to my boss about rearranging some due dates to free up my schedule.”
“But everything you make is so cool,” Lan said. “At school, all anyone can talk about are those new dance emotes SciLabs released last week. Everyone wants one.”
“I’m not the only one who works on those you know. Someone else can be the project leader for a few projects. The stress builds character, I’m told.”
“...do you think we can go to the park again soon?”
Smiling, Yuichiro carefully took his son’s hand once more and tugged him towards home. “I’ll make sure of it.”
x
Yuichiro needed a backup plan, and fast.
He hadn’t expected quite so much resistance to his request, but then again, he wasn’t the sort to request such things in the first place. All he got was a litany of reasons for why his work was so important. And it was! But not more important than his family. His family was the reason he worked so hard in the first place, but it felt like none of his bosses understood that.
Yuichiro miserably explained the whole situation to Haruka–to be honest, he’d been neglecting her too, and he needed to fix that just as much as he needed to fix things with Lan–but unlike him, she was quick to strategize a new plan.
“They won’t let you come home when you want? Fine. I’ll just send Lan to you.”
She made things sound so simple, his wife. As a chronic overthinker, Yuichiro appreciated her beyond words.
The plan was simple–once in a while, Yuichiro would ‘forget’ his lunch or dinner, and Lan, being a loving son, would bring it to him. While there, Lan could loiter for a bit. The key to this plan was being mindful of meetings, where Lan would be sent back home instead of straight to Yuichiro’s office. And to not overplay their hand–Yuichiro could often be overly-absorbed in his work and miss meals, but it would be suspicious if he suddenly started forgetting lunch every day. They needed to figure out a reasonable, maximum amount of forgetfulness to feign.
“It’s about time we started sending him out on errands anyway, don’t you think? A little responsibility would be good for him.” Haruka said with a grin.
Yuichiro responded by kissing her until both of their faces were flushed an embarrassing shade of pink.
x
With plan B being their new plan A, things settled into a new normal. The first couple of times Lan stopped by were odd, as children generally weren’t allowed to wander the SciLabs building, but so long as Lan went straight to his father’s office, it was fine. The secretaries and security staff got used to seeing him quickly. After a few months, they merely waved him in without fuss.
Lan bounded into Yuichiro’s office and skipped to the minifridge, stuffing a homemade bento inside. “Are you still working on that cape physics thing, dad?”
“It’s not just for capes, but yes.” Yuichiro leaned back in his chair, grabbing a mug off the desk and finishing the mystery sludge inside. His taste buds were immune to old, room-temperature drinks. “Having more fabric-like textures to work with will definitely expand design options for Navis.”
“Neat,” Lan said. Clearly the significance of this development went over the young boy’s head, but that was fine. It’s not like Lan had to be invested in the minute details of his father’s job. Instead he was distracted by the existence of a new colorful tchotchke sitting on the desk. The boy picked it up to play with it, which was the main reason Yuichiro got it in the first place.
Yuichiro stood, bones creaking. “I’m going to run to Mr. Sawakura’s office real quick–but when I come back, we can split that bento, yeah?”
“Yeah!” Lan said, spinning around.
Unfortunately, in doing so Lan dropped the tchotchke directly onto Yuichiro’s keyboard, smashing the keys. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal, but, to Yuichiro’s horror, it activated his prototype Navi program.
Yuichiro froze as the blue Navi popped up on screen. The Navi stared blankly for a second, loading, before he broke out into a large yawn. This was outside of his normal operating hours, after all.
“Dad…?” the Navi asked before his face grew serious. His eyes locked in on Lan. “Who’re you?”
“My name’s Lan,” he said, leaning close to the screen. Slowly a grin formed on Lan’s face. “Are you my dad’s latest project?”
“I don’t know. I’m being designed by Doctor Hikari.”
“That’s my dad!”
“Oh?” The Navi perked up. “Mine too.”
Internally, Yuichiro’s heart pounded so hard it physically hurt.
“Since when were you working on this?” Bouncing in the chair, Lan spun towards his father. “Is this a new kind of Navi you’re working on? He looks different.”
“He, uh, he is different,” Yuichiro said. “He won’t be very replicable, but he is a very special kind of NetNavi I’ve been working on. He’s been… a passion project, for the last few years.”
“What for?” Lan asked with wide, bright eyes.
“For you,” Yuichiro said automatically, because it was the truth. “I’ve wanted nothing more than for you two to be together.”
Lan loudly sucked in air through his mouth as his eyes stretched even wider, and for a moment Yuichiro worried that he’d said something wrong. Before he could try to do damage control, Lan threw himself at the computer screen, slapping his cheek and his hands against the surface.
“Did you hear that?!” he cried, voice and face mushed,“You’re gonna be my Navi! I can’t wait!”
“Really?” the prototype Navi said as he leaned forward a little, bringing up his hands into frame. They were clenched into fists and pressed together as if in prayer. Some expression of demure excitement? Yuichiro didn’t program that specific pose, he knew. “Then I look forward to working with you! I’ll do my best.”
“When’s he gonna be ready, dad? Can I take him home today? I want to show him to my friends. And mom, too.”
Yuichiro couldn’t help but chuckle at his son’s enthusiasm. “He’s not ready today,” he said, and he laughed outright at the offended way his son’s face fell. “But–well. I was going to wait until he was perfect, but since the cat’s out of the bag… maybe for your birthday.”
“Yes!” Lan cried, throwing his hands into the air. He stood in the chair, which wobbled. “I’m finally getting my own Navi!”
“This is, of course, contingent on the fact that I make him completely stable by then. Like I said, he’s different. We both need to be very careful with him.”
“I will! I promise!” Lan turned back to the computer, knees on the desk as he crouched in the chair seat. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Oh, I don’t have one yet,” the Navi said. “Dad said he was going to ask his family what to call me, eventually.”
“Well, since you’re going to be my Navi…” Lan said, bringing a finger up to his chin. “I think you look pretty cool, so I’ll call you… Megaman! How about that?”
“Megaman,” the prototype said, tilting his head. “I like it. Is that okay with you, dad?”
“That’s,” Yuichiro said. He didn’t know how to feel. Terrified? Elated? “That’s perfect for you two, I think.”
Lan launched himself out of the chair–or at least, he tried to. Unfortunately for him, he forgot that he was standing on a cheap rolling chair. The chair moved more than he did, dropping Lan face first onto the floor. Both Yuichiro and the newly-dubbed Megaman cried out, and Yuichiro was by the boy’s side in an instant.
Still, peeling himself off the floor, Lan’s smile was bright and infectious. The corners of his eyes were a bit teary, and his face was flushed a bright, lively pink. He wordlessly threw his arms around his father and hugged him tightly, burying his warm face in his father’s shoulder.
Oh, Yuichiro thought. He looked over Lan’s shoulder at the Navi on the screen, who looked down at them with a much less wide, but no less ecstatic smile. Happy, but contained. Very different in tone from Lan’s unrestrained, hyper-expressive joy.
Could that be what he was missing?
He hugged the boy in his arms tightly, like he was afraid his son would disappear. Yet his eyes remained locked on the Navi.
x
Their plan for Lan’s birthday that next year had always been to give him his own personal electronic terminal. The only difference was that, instead of a standard, beginner Navi, his PET contained his new best friend. His brother, if Yuichiro did this right.
“Yes, it’s you!” Lan said as he held the PET aloft in one hand. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course I do,” Megaman said. “I thought about you every day! Happy Birthday, Lan. It’s nice to finally meet you for real.”
“For real?”
“I’ve been upgraded since last time.” At this pronouncement, Megaman took a few steps back from the screen, showing off his full body for the first time. “Before, this was all wireframe. Now I’m complete!”
“Whoa, so cool,” Lan said. Quickly the two of them became absorbed in their own little world, wanting to learn everything about each other.
Haruka approached her husband. “That Navi… he looks a lot like Lan.”
“He does. That wasn’t an accident.”
“But not exactly. He looks a lot like…”
Yuichiro let his wife trail off. He hadn’t told her his plans for a great number of reasons. He was afraid of what she would say, of what she would think. He was afraid of getting her hopes up if he couldn’t figure out how to do it. He was afraid what would happen to them if the end result was something other than what he had planned. There were so many ways this could have gone wrong, and could still go wrong, that he dared not even think of them all.
But his ultimate desire had never wavered, never changed: he wanted his family to be together and happy.
“I took a lot of liberties,” Yuichiro said. “Can you forgive me?”
Haruka looked at him. Just looked. Then she leaned forward, giving her husband a quick peck on the lips. There was the faintest taste of cherry-flavored lip balm.
“Not mad,” she said softly, to make sure Lan wouldn’t hear. “But I wish you hadn’t held out on me about this for so long. I know you’re capable of amazing things. I’ll always support you, dear.”
Yuichiro froze up like a malfunctioning program. He felt his face heat up. Warm, alive. And very, very obviously pink. How could he think he could ever hide anything from his wife? “N-not holding out on you, dear. Just working on a… backup plan?”
His wife just laughed at him. He could live with that.
Title: Backup Plans
Fandom: Mega Man Battle Network
Characters: Yuichiro Hikari, Haruka Hikari, Lan Hikari, Megaman.exe
Length: 3k+
Content notes: Character Death (offscreen)
Author notes: This fic assumes you know what a NetNavi is. For the purposes of this fic, all you really need to know is that it's a little digital guy who lives in your phone that you can customize and befriend, and that basically everyone has one.
Summary: Pre-series. Yuichiro Hikari becomes a father to twins. Yuichiro Hikari becomes a father thrice over.
Yuichiro marveled. His wife, Haruka, laid exhausted on the hospital bed, face ruddy and hair stringy from exertion. The child in her arms was wiggling like he was trying to escape; the child in Yuichiro’s arms was quiet and serene.
“How did they even fit inside of you?”
Haruka huffed out a laugh. “I know you aren’t the doctor kind of smart, honey, but really?”
“It’s just, it doesn’t feel real, does it? Even with them here now.”
“It felt plenty real to me…”
Tucking the child closer to his chest, Yuichiro leaned over and kissed his wife on her sweaty forehead. He sat on the bed next to her and scooted close.
He would never admit this out loud, but all newborns looked the same to him. His wife, in preparation for this day, had shown him many photos from the net of newborns. Very pink, very squished, usually not happy to be out of the warmth and safety of their mother’s body. To Yuichiro, their kids didn’t break the mold on that impression–and yet he was in awe.
“I want crackers,” his wife said suddenly.
Yuichiro carefully tucked the boy he’d been holding into the crook of his wife’s arm before hopping up onto his feet. “I’ll see what I can do. The nurses might not let you eat anything yet.”
The wiggling baby started crying.
“Why are you crying?” Haruka asked tiredly. “I’m the one who doesn’t get to eat.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Yuichiro said, attempting to inject some levity back into the conversation. When it became clear it didn’t work, Yuichiro instead picked the noisy baby up, wanting to take some of the burden off his wife’s shoulder’s somehow. Yuichiro’s nervous pacing seemed to help keep the first one quiet.
A thought suddenly occurred to him. “We have a problem, though.”
Haruka’s head snapped up. “What is it?”
“Not that kind of problem,” Yuichiro said quickly. “But we only came up with one name for a boy, and we have two.”
“Oh. Names.” His wife leaned back onto her pillow, closing her eyes. The roundness of her cheeks couldn’t seem to shake their flushed color. “Well, this one will be Hub, like we planned, and that one will be Lan, because I like the way it sounds. Simple.”
“That easy, huh?”
Haruka cracked open one of her eyes to glare at him. “Do you have a better idea?”
“Absolutely not. But why do I get the feeling you’ve been holding out on me?”
“Not holding out,” his wife said, a gentle, tired smile gracing her pink lips. “Just came prepared with a backup plan.”
x
There was no backup plan for when one of their children died. They hadn’t thought that far ahead, hadn’t even considered the possibility. Hub died with far less pomp and circumstance than he was born.
It was a shock–a rare heart condition known as HBD that their kids hadn’t even been tested for. Yuichiro had missed most of this going down, as he’d been working overtime to pay for twice as many children as they planned for. He and his wife had discussed making changes to adjust to their new needs, but not like this.
His wife was inconsolable. Yuichiro felt numb. He couldn’t help but cling to the warm, living, cherry-faced Lan in one arm and blotchy, red-faced Haruka in the other as they were informed of their options of what to do with Hub’s body. As was tradition where they lived, they decided on cremation.
Yuichiro did get to see Hub one last time. The boy had always been paler than his brother, less lively and energetic, but now–now he looked like a doll. Eyes closed, chubby arms rigid. Yuichiro couldn’t stand to look at him and walked away, and then felt even worse about running from the last time he would ever see his baby boy’s face in the flesh. He was an awful, spineless father.
They eventually got home and put Lan to bed. His wife tossed and turned. Yuichiro didn’t even try to get any sleep, instead trying to gather anything that was specific to Hub together so they could decide what to do with it when they were feeling more balanced.
One of things his wife had decided to do was to keep locks of their sons’ hair from their first haircut. She’d gotten the idea from one of her online friends. At the time, Yuichiro hadn’t seen a point. The boys were young and their hair would grow back. But, the point was, they saved it.
Yuichiro sat on a kitchen chair, rolling the surprisingly thick lock of Hub’s hair through his fingers. Tying it around his fingers so tightly that he would squeeze the color out of them, fingertips going from a healthy pink to a strangled white. Back to pink when he let the hair unfurl. He could work with that, he thought as he stared mindlessly at the silver moonlight through the window.
He could work with that.
x
The thing about backup plans is that they tended to rely on pre-existing skill sets. Yuichiro was a programmer. It was, arguably, the only thing he was talented at. So he did what he did best: program.
It would be an understatement to say that he hated this particular series of projects. His coworkers marveled at his progress in making Navis look and behave more human-like, but all he could see was how uncanny they were. Awkward pauses when switching from movement to pose or visa versa. Stiff idle animations. Either flat textures and colors that looked cartoonish or textures that didn’t move like real materials would. In the end, he rewrote the entire Navi playbook. He became a moderately well-known, if reclusive, programming genius, and was rewarded for his ingenuity with a few promotions at work. Those were nice and convenient, but they weren’t what he was aiming for.
“Raise your arm,” he ordered the prototype. A rotation largely from the shoulder, with a moderately bent elbow and a slight rotation of the wrist as the arm came to a stop above the head. It was passable.This was necessary to imitate the instinctive change in the center of gravity of the arm, though it still came off slightly stiff. More akin to toy articulation than a human-like motion.
“Like this?” the prototype asked.
Yuchiro nodded. “Exactly like that. Good job.”
The prototype beamed at him, his face lighting up. Soft and youthful, with good symmetry. He was so close to being perfect, but there was still something missing. Yuichiro resolved to find it.
x
It turned out that dealing with Lan growing up often meant having to resort to a backup plan. Or several.
“What possessed you to jump off the swing?” Yuichiro asked.
Lan pouted. “I wanted to do a flip!”
Yuichiro sighed internally. Sighing externally usually meant that Lan would try to defend himself, even when what he did or said made no sense whatsoever. He loved his son, but he certainly didn’t understand him.
The man knelt down next to the boy and carefully took his hands. They were an angry shade of pink and scratched up from the ground, nothing their first aid kit back home couldn’t handle. “Good thing we don’t live that far from the park,” Yuichiro said. Being mindful of his son’s injuries, he took him by the hand and started leading them home. Lan was quiet.
Yuchiro nudged him. “You okay?”
“‘M s’ry.”
“What?”
“I said sorry,” Lan mumbled. His eyes were cast toward the ground. “You came to the park with me for the first time in months and I ruined it.”
Oh, Yuichiro was truly a spineless, terrible father.
“Has it… really been that long since we went out together? I remember we went for your birthday.”
“In June,” Lan confirmed. “It’s November.”
Yikes.
“No, Lan, I’m the one who should be sorry.” Yuichiro stopped on the sidewalk, placing his hands on Lan’s shoulders and turning his son to face him. “I’ve been working a lot lately, and time got away from me. That’s my fault. I can’t promise a change tomorrow, but maybe I can talk to my boss about rearranging some due dates to free up my schedule.”
“But everything you make is so cool,” Lan said. “At school, all anyone can talk about are those new dance emotes SciLabs released last week. Everyone wants one.”
“I’m not the only one who works on those you know. Someone else can be the project leader for a few projects. The stress builds character, I’m told.”
“...do you think we can go to the park again soon?”
Smiling, Yuichiro carefully took his son’s hand once more and tugged him towards home. “I’ll make sure of it.”
x
Yuichiro needed a backup plan, and fast.
He hadn’t expected quite so much resistance to his request, but then again, he wasn’t the sort to request such things in the first place. All he got was a litany of reasons for why his work was so important. And it was! But not more important than his family. His family was the reason he worked so hard in the first place, but it felt like none of his bosses understood that.
Yuichiro miserably explained the whole situation to Haruka–to be honest, he’d been neglecting her too, and he needed to fix that just as much as he needed to fix things with Lan–but unlike him, she was quick to strategize a new plan.
“They won’t let you come home when you want? Fine. I’ll just send Lan to you.”
She made things sound so simple, his wife. As a chronic overthinker, Yuichiro appreciated her beyond words.
The plan was simple–once in a while, Yuichiro would ‘forget’ his lunch or dinner, and Lan, being a loving son, would bring it to him. While there, Lan could loiter for a bit. The key to this plan was being mindful of meetings, where Lan would be sent back home instead of straight to Yuichiro’s office. And to not overplay their hand–Yuichiro could often be overly-absorbed in his work and miss meals, but it would be suspicious if he suddenly started forgetting lunch every day. They needed to figure out a reasonable, maximum amount of forgetfulness to feign.
“It’s about time we started sending him out on errands anyway, don’t you think? A little responsibility would be good for him.” Haruka said with a grin.
Yuichiro responded by kissing her until both of their faces were flushed an embarrassing shade of pink.
x
With plan B being their new plan A, things settled into a new normal. The first couple of times Lan stopped by were odd, as children generally weren’t allowed to wander the SciLabs building, but so long as Lan went straight to his father’s office, it was fine. The secretaries and security staff got used to seeing him quickly. After a few months, they merely waved him in without fuss.
Lan bounded into Yuichiro’s office and skipped to the minifridge, stuffing a homemade bento inside. “Are you still working on that cape physics thing, dad?”
“It’s not just for capes, but yes.” Yuichiro leaned back in his chair, grabbing a mug off the desk and finishing the mystery sludge inside. His taste buds were immune to old, room-temperature drinks. “Having more fabric-like textures to work with will definitely expand design options for Navis.”
“Neat,” Lan said. Clearly the significance of this development went over the young boy’s head, but that was fine. It’s not like Lan had to be invested in the minute details of his father’s job. Instead he was distracted by the existence of a new colorful tchotchke sitting on the desk. The boy picked it up to play with it, which was the main reason Yuichiro got it in the first place.
Yuichiro stood, bones creaking. “I’m going to run to Mr. Sawakura’s office real quick–but when I come back, we can split that bento, yeah?”
“Yeah!” Lan said, spinning around.
Unfortunately, in doing so Lan dropped the tchotchke directly onto Yuichiro’s keyboard, smashing the keys. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal, but, to Yuichiro’s horror, it activated his prototype Navi program.
Yuichiro froze as the blue Navi popped up on screen. The Navi stared blankly for a second, loading, before he broke out into a large yawn. This was outside of his normal operating hours, after all.
“Dad…?” the Navi asked before his face grew serious. His eyes locked in on Lan. “Who’re you?”
“My name’s Lan,” he said, leaning close to the screen. Slowly a grin formed on Lan’s face. “Are you my dad’s latest project?”
“I don’t know. I’m being designed by Doctor Hikari.”
“That’s my dad!”
“Oh?” The Navi perked up. “Mine too.”
Internally, Yuichiro’s heart pounded so hard it physically hurt.
“Since when were you working on this?” Bouncing in the chair, Lan spun towards his father. “Is this a new kind of Navi you’re working on? He looks different.”
“He, uh, he is different,” Yuichiro said. “He won’t be very replicable, but he is a very special kind of NetNavi I’ve been working on. He’s been… a passion project, for the last few years.”
“What for?” Lan asked with wide, bright eyes.
“For you,” Yuichiro said automatically, because it was the truth. “I’ve wanted nothing more than for you two to be together.”
Lan loudly sucked in air through his mouth as his eyes stretched even wider, and for a moment Yuichiro worried that he’d said something wrong. Before he could try to do damage control, Lan threw himself at the computer screen, slapping his cheek and his hands against the surface.
“Did you hear that?!” he cried, voice and face mushed,“You’re gonna be my Navi! I can’t wait!”
“Really?” the prototype Navi said as he leaned forward a little, bringing up his hands into frame. They were clenched into fists and pressed together as if in prayer. Some expression of demure excitement? Yuichiro didn’t program that specific pose, he knew. “Then I look forward to working with you! I’ll do my best.”
“When’s he gonna be ready, dad? Can I take him home today? I want to show him to my friends. And mom, too.”
Yuichiro couldn’t help but chuckle at his son’s enthusiasm. “He’s not ready today,” he said, and he laughed outright at the offended way his son’s face fell. “But–well. I was going to wait until he was perfect, but since the cat’s out of the bag… maybe for your birthday.”
“Yes!” Lan cried, throwing his hands into the air. He stood in the chair, which wobbled. “I’m finally getting my own Navi!”
“This is, of course, contingent on the fact that I make him completely stable by then. Like I said, he’s different. We both need to be very careful with him.”
“I will! I promise!” Lan turned back to the computer, knees on the desk as he crouched in the chair seat. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Oh, I don’t have one yet,” the Navi said. “Dad said he was going to ask his family what to call me, eventually.”
“Well, since you’re going to be my Navi…” Lan said, bringing a finger up to his chin. “I think you look pretty cool, so I’ll call you… Megaman! How about that?”
“Megaman,” the prototype said, tilting his head. “I like it. Is that okay with you, dad?”
“That’s,” Yuichiro said. He didn’t know how to feel. Terrified? Elated? “That’s perfect for you two, I think.”
Lan launched himself out of the chair–or at least, he tried to. Unfortunately for him, he forgot that he was standing on a cheap rolling chair. The chair moved more than he did, dropping Lan face first onto the floor. Both Yuichiro and the newly-dubbed Megaman cried out, and Yuichiro was by the boy’s side in an instant.
Still, peeling himself off the floor, Lan’s smile was bright and infectious. The corners of his eyes were a bit teary, and his face was flushed a bright, lively pink. He wordlessly threw his arms around his father and hugged him tightly, burying his warm face in his father’s shoulder.
Oh, Yuichiro thought. He looked over Lan’s shoulder at the Navi on the screen, who looked down at them with a much less wide, but no less ecstatic smile. Happy, but contained. Very different in tone from Lan’s unrestrained, hyper-expressive joy.
Could that be what he was missing?
He hugged the boy in his arms tightly, like he was afraid his son would disappear. Yet his eyes remained locked on the Navi.
x
Their plan for Lan’s birthday that next year had always been to give him his own personal electronic terminal. The only difference was that, instead of a standard, beginner Navi, his PET contained his new best friend. His brother, if Yuichiro did this right.
“Yes, it’s you!” Lan said as he held the PET aloft in one hand. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course I do,” Megaman said. “I thought about you every day! Happy Birthday, Lan. It’s nice to finally meet you for real.”
“For real?”
“I’ve been upgraded since last time.” At this pronouncement, Megaman took a few steps back from the screen, showing off his full body for the first time. “Before, this was all wireframe. Now I’m complete!”
“Whoa, so cool,” Lan said. Quickly the two of them became absorbed in their own little world, wanting to learn everything about each other.
Haruka approached her husband. “That Navi… he looks a lot like Lan.”
“He does. That wasn’t an accident.”
“But not exactly. He looks a lot like…”
Yuichiro let his wife trail off. He hadn’t told her his plans for a great number of reasons. He was afraid of what she would say, of what she would think. He was afraid of getting her hopes up if he couldn’t figure out how to do it. He was afraid what would happen to them if the end result was something other than what he had planned. There were so many ways this could have gone wrong, and could still go wrong, that he dared not even think of them all.
But his ultimate desire had never wavered, never changed: he wanted his family to be together and happy.
“I took a lot of liberties,” Yuichiro said. “Can you forgive me?”
Haruka looked at him. Just looked. Then she leaned forward, giving her husband a quick peck on the lips. There was the faintest taste of cherry-flavored lip balm.
“Not mad,” she said softly, to make sure Lan wouldn’t hear. “But I wish you hadn’t held out on me about this for so long. I know you’re capable of amazing things. I’ll always support you, dear.”
Yuichiro froze up like a malfunctioning program. He felt his face heat up. Warm, alive. And very, very obviously pink. How could he think he could ever hide anything from his wife? “N-not holding out on you, dear. Just working on a… backup plan?”
His wife just laughed at him. He could live with that.