How he knew this, he did not know. It didn’t matter.
The dream came to him each night. It had come to him each night since he was a child; since he awoke in a room in a Tokyo hospital.
The young man could consciously recall nothing that came before that day, save extensive martial arts training at the hands of a master he no longer remembered. He couldn’t even remember his name. Perhaps what he’d been through before was traumatic enough that it shut his mind down, in some way.
It didn’t matter, because that was all in the past, and what mattered was the present. And the present was now.
~--~
Ten years earlier...
Iori Yagami sat in a chair in the hospital room of the little boy whose life he had saved.
In Iori’s mind, it had been sheer coincidence. He’d been in the hospital waiting room – why, he couldn’t recall – when a nurse had loudly called out for anyone with his relatively rare blood-type to come forth, because it was an emergency. And so the martial artist walked forward, answering the nurse. And she had taken him to the emergency room, where a blood transfusion was quickly performed.
That had been two days ago. The boy was still not awake, but the martial artist had long since recovered from the transfusion, and his blood had replaced itself.
And that brought him here, to this room. He knew that having Yagami blood in his veins would have consequences for the boy, although he was not sure what. He did have suspicions, but they were nothing more than that.
He decided he should take the boy in. The child hadn’t been identified, and no perpetrator had been found. And if his suspicions about the consequences proved correct, well...he would be the best-qualified person to deal with them as they came.
~--~
In time, the martial artist was proven completely right. The Yagami blood running through the little boy’s veins had acted, not as blood, but almost as a mutagenic virus: transmuting that which was not its like, to its like. In effect, the little boy had been genetically rewritten from whatever he had been, into a genetic duplicate of the martial artist; Iori Yagami, Mark II, one could say.
When the boy had woken up, he had begun to cry, because he was in pain. The martial artist had looked into the little boy’s eyes, and made the boy this promise: nobody would ever hurt him again.
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(Posted Fri, 19 Dec 2003 06:52)
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