Chapter Text
Hayato had grown his bangs out for one reason: to hide the madness in his eyes. He could imitate shyness and stoicism well enough to get by. But the older he grew, the more frenzied something inside him became. His heart was an autoclave. Superheated and deadly, it had no safeties, and it yearned to throw its boiling contents onto anyone who dared open it up.
He'd learned at a young age that he was unknowable. Hayato Jin could not be understood. He could only be feared or worshipped. Such was the fate of those with no equals.
If that thought was a little lonely, even after eighteen years, well. There was no point in dwelling on things that wouldn't come to pass.
When he spat his frenzied truth at the grey-haired old man in the lab coat - the one who'd kidnapped him and killed his followers for no goddamn reason, it should've been clear that breaking Hayato's toys wouldn't make him malleable - he was expecting one of those two reactions. Fear, or worship. That was the way things always went.
The old man sighed, his eyes hooded. "You're a more banal and childish man than I expected."
Hayato's cruel eyes narrowed. "What?"
"Conspiracies do exist, to be sure. War, religion, politics, the economy. As ever, the ruling caste you speak of controls these things. But you think that is the truth of this world?"
A long, uneasy pause. They looked at each other, both their faces veiled - Hayato's by his bangs, the old man's by shadow. Then, slowly, Hayato's captor smiled. His teeth were far sharper than they should have been.
"Don't make me laugh. The truth of this world isn't so simple." The old man turned away before Hayato could reply and shouted, "Turn on the lights!"
What had been a vast, gloomy chamber, the kind of concrete underground warehouse where people disappeared, burst into hellish brightness. Hayato snapped his eyes shut on reflex, but not fast enough. A pattern of bright hexagons scorched the inside of his eyelids and a flash of white steel lingered in his mind.
He wasn't sure what he'd seen looming over him in that last split-second of vision. That was unbearable.
Even kidnapped, bound to a chair, and stranded in the face of a light so terrible it burned, he still blazed with curiosity. Birds needed to fly, fish needed to swim, Hayato needed to know.
His vision swam as he cracked an eye open. For a moment, he saw nothing but light. Then he saw everything.
The universe reached out to him with millions of brilliant neon green tongues of flame. Restrained as he was, he could do nothing to escape. He couldn't even look away.
Hayato didn't remember closing his eyes, but he found himself opening them again anyway. He was standing in a vast, open room. Steel walls glittered in the harsh light of a military-style vehicle hanger with the ceiling raised to ridiculous proportions. Cheap concrete flooring cast the glare back. It was almost as blinding as the floodlights he'd been staring into a moment ago. More importantly, it was familiar.
This place was built along the same lines as the room he'd been taken to after... well. He filed the memories of hot blood and Tatsuhito's begging and failure away for later and focused. This was a hanger. There had to be something inside it.
And there was.
Two small figures stood before a towering machine, a mountain of gleaming red metal. The angular 'eyes' set into its face were dark and inactive. Its limbs were frozen in place. The huge horns that sprouted from its head cast odd shadows. Its mere presence sucked the air from Hayato’s lungs.
For a moment, he couldn’t think, much less breathe. His whole life, he’d been raging against the rotten pointlessness of the world, trying to claw meaning out of the mud. Now he’d found it in the form of a scarlet god. Something whose very existence screamed of power honed to a razor’s edge.
It was so beautiful. So awful. He might have been born just to gaze upon it.
"Professor,” someone said. “You shouldn't be here alone."
The voice was a young man's, low and reserved, carefully stripped of emotion. Hayato had had heard similar voices millions of times. There was no reason for it to distract him from the metal god before him, except that he knew this voice.
A human being was incapable of hearing the sound of their own voice correctly - the make-up of the skull led people to hear their own voices as deeper and more resonant than they truly were. But if one listened to enough recordings of themselves speaking, one could learn what they actually sounded like. That was how Hayato knew with certainty that ‘Hayato Jin’ was the one speaking, even though he hadn't opened his mouth.
Tearing his gaze from the towering machine was like tearing a layer of skin off. His eyes stung as they settled on the pair standing at the base of the robot, small and insignificant.
An old man, squat and grey-haired, dark baggage under his eyes and geta sandals on his feet. And beside him, a young man, tall and lean, with the hollow cheeks and too-thin limbs of someone who'd been on bedrest for too long. He looked a few years older than Hayato, in his twenties rather than his late teens. His hair was longer than Hayato's had ever been, but the hue was the same.
The old man snorted. He was familiar, too: it wasn't difficult for Hayato to recognize the geriatric who'd kidnapped him. But this version of the old man seemed wearier. More brittle. "Come to enforce the Japanese government's idiotic ban on me laying eyes on my own creation, Hayato?"
And that would be why. The mere thought of being kept from such a divine thing by something as stupid as the law filled Hayato with rage. But the other ‘Hayato Jin’ simply twisted in his lips in a bitter smile.
“There’s no need for that. After all, Shin Getter won’t turn on for either of us.”
There was, Hayato realized, something wrong with the way his… counterpart’s… face moved. A subtle stiffness that made the man choose his words very deliberately. Under the harsh floodlights, faint scars traced up and down the contours of his face.
A harsh grimace crossed the old man’s face. “Damn it all. If Ryoma hadn’t left-”
“There’s no point in trying to control or predict Ryoma Nagare,” the other Hayato cut in. His tone remained level, but Hayato knew his own tells. He could see the grief flicker through that man’s eyes before it was swiftly buried. “Even if we’d known his intentions, we wouldn’t have been able to stop him.”
“You didn’t even try.”
The other Hayato closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were shining with the same light as the steel colossus. “Dr. Saotome. You introduced us to each other and the Getter, but you weren’t able to become a pilot yourself. So please,” he added ominously, “don’t try to meddle with what you don’t understand.”
Hayato, still trapped in the chair, shuddered. Blood turned to ice in his veins.
What the hell. That wasn’t the brand of frustration that came from a lost toy. The feverish light in the other Hayato’s gaze was overwhelming and devouring as the light that came from the machine.
Incomprehensible. And disgusting.
Even as those poisonous thoughts ran through his head, he found himself turning away from the robot until Shin Getter’s terrible visage was banished to the corner of his peripheral vision, searching fruitlessly for any sign of the man called Ryoma Nagare. If he could find the person who had put that look in his other self’s eyes…
If he could just understand…
He opened his mouth to demand his information, but it was too late. The scene changed. He plunged back into a green light so bright it burned.
When he came back to himself, he was no longer in a hanger. He’d been stranded in an office, cramped and grey, metal ceiling looming overhead like a brutalist nightmare. The air was sour, filled with some chemical Hayato hadn't encountered before and wasn't sure if he liked. The buzz of the light fixtures set his teeth on edge.
In the office was a desk, large, battered, and stacked high with paperwork. A big, old-fashioned computer sat hunched on its shelf, cables surrounding it like a coiled serpent. Behind the computer was an empty chair built to frankly ridiculous proportions.
Well away from the desk, cigarette in hand, blowing smoke directly into the ventilation duct, stood a second alternative version of Hayato Jin. This one was closer to forty or fifty than twenty, and he looked like he'd been dragged to hell and back. The scars that had been faint on the first double's face were a livid red on this one, and the marks that slid under his shirt collar and the cuffs of his dark suit told Hayato they went everywhere. Shrapnel, most likely. Some kind of accident. But a few of those marks looked intentional.
Hayato wrinkled his nose at the smell and wondered who, exactly, had tortured this version of him. The old man? Somehow, that didn't sit quite right.
The old, scarred Hayato Jin sighed, exhaling a plume of thick smoke, and pinched out his cigarette without flinching. Then he crossed the room with silent footsteps that took him right past Hayato's position without appearing to notice.
It seemed Hayato wasn't visible to him. Well, nobody ever said that visions or hallucinations had to see you back.
"Thirteen years," the other Hayato murmured. His voice was low and broken, and it creaked like abandoned machinery, but it still sounded familiar. "I thought you were dead, Ryoma."
Hayato scowled. That name again.
"I don't suppose you'd be willing to explain who that is?" he asked.
The other Hayato took no notice. He ignored Hayato entirely in favour of staring down at his desk with bottomless eyes. There was no apparent difference between the iris and the pupil: it was empty darkness all the way down. Hayato, whose eyes had always been too light to disguise the madness in them, was briefly jealous. Then the scarred man's face twisted, even as a spark of bright fanaticism flickered and then died in his blank and empty gaze, and the feeling vanished.
"Thirteen years," the other Hayato repeated. The hand holding the stub closed convulsively, crushing the cigarette to powder. "And I'm still not done atoning." He laughed softly, brokenly. "Sorry, Ryoma. I still can't let you kill me. This time, I can't even fight beside you. I'm just..."
He lowered his head so his upper face was covered by chin-length hair said no more. But his bangs were stringier than Hayato's. They hid nothing when a trickle of water dripped down his chin.
Hayato shifted uncomfortably in his restraints. He didn’t want to see this. He didn’t want to read into it. But he’d never had any luck turning his brain off before, and he certainly couldn’t control his own curiosity now.
This man had lost everything, Hayato concluded. Pride, anger, trust, even the purity of violence. If there had been a Shin Getter in this world, it had slipped through the other Hayato’s fingers, and the absence of that divine weapon weighed heavily on the man. And yet it wasn’t the metal god he apologized to in the sanctity of his office.
The only name he spoke was ‘Ryoma.’
Ryoma, who he wanted to be killed by. Ryoma, whose face Hayato still hadn’t seen. The lack of knowing sat like splinters under his nails.
“Pathetic,” Hayato murmured, and tilted his head so his bangs would fall between them. He’d seen enough.
Again, the scene changed. Again, he opened his eyes somewhere else.
He was outdoors now. It must have been spring. All around the slopes of Mt. Asama, cherry blossoms were blooming. A small creek gurgled. Its bank teamed with frogs. Someone was playing a harmonica.
Hayato flipped his hair out of the way and sighed. Sure enough, there were two people sitting by the water: a boy and a girl about his own age. The girl had short brown hair held neatly in a headband, a slender frame, and a distant look in her eyes. The boy had broad shoulders, long hair falling over one eye, and a harmonica raised to his lips. His face was somewhat obscured, but he had the same fine cheekbones and long lashes that Hayato saw in the mirror. They both seemed to have rummaged through the old man's closet and stolen matching red outfits that might have been popular in the 70s.
This vision couldn't decide what kind of era it wanted to show Hayato. He'd be annoyed if each glimpse of a setting he got wasn't so convincing.
A pink petal fell through him like he was a ghost. He shuddered at the contact and glared straight ahead.
"Well?" he demanded.
As if on cue, the girl sighed. "Where do you think Ryoma is now?"
The music stopped as Hayato's third counterpart lowered the instrument from his mouth. “Who knows?”
His voice was soft, but not soft enough. Hayato knew what a Hayato Jin sounded like when he was genuinely uncaring. This was feigned apathy at best.
“I’m serious. Do you think he’s gone back to Kyushu? Or north to Hokkaido?”
“Maybe. He could be anywhere by now,” the other Hayato said with careful nonchalance. “He’s not as fast as I am, but he’s not slow, even on foot.”
She frowned and elbowed him in the side. He didn’t even flinch. “Honestly, stop bragging for one minute and think. If we can figure out where he went, then we can beat him there, can’t we?”
“And do what?”
“Talk some sense into him, of course! What was he thinking? The Getter needs him!”
"Why?" Hayato asked at the same time as his double. Only one of them went on.
"Ryoma made his decision," the other Hayato continued. His mouth curled in a faint, sardonic smile. "He signed up for this job. He can choose when to quit it. That's the principle of self-determination, Michiru."
The newly-named Michiru glowered at him. "But Getter Robo needs three pilots to function at full capacity! If the Dinosaur or Hyakki Empires come back, we'll be sitting ducks with just you two!"
"Do you really think either of our enemies will be coming back anytime soon?"
She paused and knotted her brows together. "I... well... it's not out of the question. And if it does happen, we'll need Ryo. My father's been worried sick since he vanished, you know."
The other Hayato sighed and stood up, dusting grass off his black pants. "Dr. Saotome can take care of himself. You're in university now, Michiru. You should be worrying about your own dreams instead of trying to shoulder your father's responsibilities."
Michiru huffed and stayed where she was. "You say that, but you still joined the soccer team even though Ryo didn't go to university with us. Didn't you hate sports? Aren't you just trying to hold onto someone, too?"
"The important thing," the other Hayato said coolly, "is that we remember he's out there. Whether to find him in an emergency, or welcome him home when he's done."
For a moment, the bank of the creek was quiet.
"You really think he'll come back?" Michiru asked finally.
"He has to." The other Hayato's eyes glittered with the same irrational, unreasoning light as his fellows had. "We can't pilot Getter Robo without him."
The sight was breathtaking in the worst way.
Hayato's heart skipped a beat. Ah. That was the connection.
To the other Hayatos he as seeing, Ryoma Nagare and the machine god were not separate. They were tied together. And hopelessly entwined with whatever feeling put that bright and terrible glow into every Hayato's eyes... and an equally terrible emptiness when it was gone.
"Take me back," he said experimentally.
The creek continued burbling.
"I don't know what this is meant to accomplish, but it isn't working."
His restraints remained tight. The vision continued as the other Hayato walked away, raising his harmonica to his lips once more. The song that rose over the sound of the water was at once joyful and mournful. Hayato's own mother would probably have liked it. She always appreciated the bittersweet, especially if it ended tragically.
Her life had ended tragically. That had been enough bittersweetness for Hayato.
He squeezed his eyes shut and willed the scene to change again. When the bright green swallowed him once more, he felt as much relief as he did foreboding.
The chair was in another room. Not an office – a hotel room, rundown and cheap. It contained an unmade bed, one chair, a desk, and little else. The light was flickering, but at least it was quiet. The man sitting at the desk was quiet as well. However, the intensity of his eyes and the curl of his seething mouth suggested that state of affairs wouldn’t last.
Hayato gazed at yet another version of himself. This counterpart was tall and lean, rangy than solid, shoulders narrower and thick hair much longer than the last one. He had narrow, almost beady eyes, and a tan complexion sallower than seemed healthy. He was also hunched over a sheaf of papers. At this angle, Hayato couldn’t make them out, but he could see the curled edges of newspaper clippings.
So this double was on a research binge. Despite himself, Hayato felt a flicker of interest. He tried and failed to scoot the chair a little closer.
"It doesn't make sense," the other Hayato whispered. He placed a long-fingered hand on top of one sheet and traced words Hayato couldn't see. "The math is all wrong."
“Double-check it, then,” Hayato told him.
The room rattled as the other Hayato slammed his palm down hard. "I double checked. Triple-checked, even. All of my readings are giving the same result."
For a moment, Hayato froze. Could this double hear him?
"Michiru's readings are the same! There's no sign of the Getter Rays escaping from the Cauldron of Hell! And yet the overall background radiation of the planet is changing!"
No, never mind. The other Hayato was just ranting to himself like a lunatic. At least it was an interesting rant. Hayato sat back and listened as the man rambled about the experiments he'd conducted, the reliability of the equipment he'd used, and his increasing certainty that something was very wrong.
"It doesn't make sense," the other Hayato repeated, coming back around to the place where he'd begun talking. "Of course ripping a big hole in the universe and not closing it properly would result in the exotic physics outside leaking into our world. We should have seen it coming. You should have seen it coming! If it was all going to be pointless, then why-" His voice broke. He bent so low over the desk that his forehead hit wood with a dull thunk. "Why would you-"
He fell silent. For five full minutes, he said nothing and did nothing. Hayato sat there, holding his breath, watching a version of himself lie face down on a cheap hotel room desk like a corpse.
Silence pressed down on them both with the weight of the cosmos. Finally, the other Hayato lifted his head. He rose slowly, sinuously, a cobra rearing up to strike, but his head still hung low. His eyes shone feverish and bright through his bangs.
“The Getter Rays aren’t gone, Ryoma,” he murmured, suddenly calm. “They’re still here. Still saturating this planet, still mutating it, still a beacon for anything that hates them. They’re just moving slower than they did when you were around. Your stupid plan was meaningless.” He began speaking faster and faster. “I didn’t need to be chosen to figure that out – all it took was basic fucking logic!” he yelled.
Hayato was so caught up in what his double was saying that the sudden outburst made him jump. The chair clattered loudly. His counterpart didn’t acknowledge it in any way, too caught up in his own terrible discoveries to see what was happening right in front of him.
“This is why you need to talk to me before you jump to conclusions! What could you have possibly seen out there to make you decide jumping into the void was the best option you had? Idiot! Dumbass! You colossal bastard, I’ll rip your eyes out, hurry up and come back already!”
With an animal sound of rage, the other Hayato sank sharpened nails into his collection of papers and ripped. They came away with tacky squelches and the tearing of paper, raining down on the floor like tattered snowflakes.
Hayato’s gaze darted from one piece to another. He didn’t like the picture he was putting together. Newspaper clippings, emissions reports, cosmic radiation befores and afters of various locations, print-out after print-out salvaged from the defunct Saotome Research Laboratory… all of that, Hayato would have been compelled by, just for the story they painted about the mysterious Getter Rays. The word ‘Getter’ had popped up far too often in this vision for it to be meaningless. Whether Hayato had been drugged, sunk into hallucination, or was genuinely experiencing something otherworldly, he did not know and did not particularly care.
What mattered was that every single version of himself he’d seen here had something to live for. Something more than revolution.
That, he could just barely wrap his head around. He’d wanted something that mattered his whole life – had pursued it like a hunting hound.
It was the rest of what he recognized as a conspiracy board, complete with red string, that he didn’t understand. A birth certificate. Police records, complete with mugshot. School transcripts speaking about poor attendance, constant fighting, and a difficult family life that no teacher was permitted to investigate. A name.
'Ryoma Nagare'. Flow, dragon, horse. Hayato's interest splintered at the sign of those three kanji: no less compelling, far more annoying.
Him again.
The other Hayato slumped over the desk, chest heaving, eyes wild with something closer to panic than exertion. Cold trickled down Hayato's back as he watched. He didn't know what he was seeing, but he didn't like it.
At no point in his life had he ever been so dependent on another person that it would have broken him to lose them. Clearly, this version of himself couldn't say the same. He thought back on the variations of himself he'd seen and wondered if any of them were still functional. Still salvageable. Still ruled by themselves instead of the memory of a man long-gone. He didn't have enough experience to tell.
“Come back…” the other Hayato begged someone who had abandoned him years ago. “We can’t fight this war without you.”
Hayato clenched his jaw until it ached and willed the scene to disappear. When the hotel room finally blurred back into green light, it was a relief. Opening his eyes to find another version of himself mourning another version of Ryoma Nagare was not.
Over and over, the same sad pattern played out. The pieces were relatively simple to put together. It was only Hayato's lack of experience with anything these visions depicted that held him back from true understanding.
The story went like this. Hayato Jin fell in love – with purpose, with meaning, with the laughing man who sat in the red plane, with the wild-eyed glory of being part of a mechanical deity – and reached for a green glowing infinity. Then he lost it.
Either the Getter was forever beyond his reach or his partner abandoned him. Either his mind began to fray or his body failed him. What an awful joke.
Sometimes, he didn't have to pick one.
Sometimes, he lost both instead.
Inside a laboratory, an old man in a white lab coat slammed his fists into his desk and rose to his feet. His narrow face and cold eyes were familiar. Long black hair fell loosely down his back, frayed and flyaway strands that screamed of poor care and little attention to style. He looked like he was forty, maybe fifty, but he clearly hadn't been caring for himself. And nobody had been around to make him.
"I see," he murmured as the other scientists around him buzzed with frantic energy. Their eyes followed him like magnets as he rose and walked toward the window. "We've done everything we could." A strange smile tugged at his lips. The light caught on the faint marks of familiar old scars. "This is the first time I've felt so powerless during a battle."
Hayato was too tired to feel properly offended or even angry, but he felt a stirring of sneering skepticism regardless. He didn't believe that for an instant. Powerlessness was the worst thing in the world. This version of himself, older than any of the others he'd seen, didn't carry the hate that Hayato could feel boiling in his gut. If anything, this counterpart was nearly saintly. He all but glowed with quiet resolution under the starlight as he gazed up at the heavens.
"The Getter Team, having gone into the Zone, are the only ones burning now," he mused nonsensically.
Getter Robo again. It was clearly as important to the other Hayato as it was to all of them, and yet he wasn’t looking at the screen where it must have vanished, searching for the last traces of its passage. He was staring out the window at the distant stars.
Maybe the lack of hate in him was simply because he was also too tired. Like the scarred man in the tower, the fire in this old man's chest had gone out a long time ago. Smothered by a grief deep enough to drown in.
“I’m just wondering… if I’m alive,” he said, still smiling, and Hayato…
Hayato didn’t understand any of this. But he was uncomfortably certain that he will soon. If he met Ryoma Nagare-
If that man was real-
If he let that man get close to him-
Hayato was suddenly, viscerally certain he'd end up exactly like his counterparts: hollowed-out and hungry, bleeding out in every way but literal, having taught himself how to love someone instead of something just in time to be abandoned. Bright, manic laughter bubbled up in his chest. He couldn't seem to catch his breath.
The chair rattled under him as the world bled green one more time.
All he could think was what a cruel fate awaited him.
It took Hayato a second to register when the green light faded back into white steel. The visions, or whatever they had been, had passed. He was back in the hanger he’d started in, zip ties biting into his wrists. In front of him loomed a white giant. A machine of piercing edges and silver spirals. If he’d had breath in his lungs, the sight would have stolen it. As it was, he coughed helplessly, trying and failing to form words.
“Who…” he rasped at last, eyes watering. “Just who the hell are you?”
And what the hell had the kidnapper – whose name Hayato now knew without having ever been told – done to him?
The old man's round face split into a sickle-shaped grin. "My name is Saotome. A man who knows the truth of this world. If you want to start a revolution... then don't you want to know who the real rulers... of this world are?"
Every deliberate pause was another knife stabbed into Hayato's brain. Of course he wanted to know. At the same time, he was certain he already did.
There were only two things this world revolved around. One of them was right in front of him. The machine he was looking at was the wrong colour, shining white instead of gleaming scarlet, but it was surely Getter Robo. He could feel it in his bones. It had been waiting for him. If he gave it half a chance, it would swallow him whole.
The other...
Just what kind of man was Ryoma Nagare, to leave so many iterations of Hayato broken in his wake? Did he even exist in this world? He must. Otherwise, Hayato wouldn’t be so damn scared.
The corners of Hayato's mouth curled in a strange smile. In the distorted reflection cast by floodlights upon the Getter's armour, it was at once shattered and vicious. Grief sharpened into a weapon. Mourning for a man who might never have existed. Mourning for himself and the end he might still face if he let his guard down.
His bangs had fallen aside at some point. His true face was bared to the world. And Saotome was still looking at him with brewing approval – no. Brewing delight.
“Did you think this would break me?” he asked.
“I think,” old man Saotome drawled, “that you’ve seen the cruel fate ahead of you. And now, you’ll do whatever it takes to overturn what destiny has written.” His own smile grew somehow sharper. Aged teeth glittered, shark-like. “Even Ryoma Nagare must admit that a sufficiently motivated Hayato Jin is a terrible thing.”
"Good."
Hayato wrenched his thumb out of its socket and set about twisting his arms out of their restraints. Neither this prison nor fate would hold him.
He swore it.
Chapter Text
Ryoma Nagare was smaller than Hayato had expected. He'd looked taller and more confident in the headshot Saotome had handed out earlier into the project. It had only taken Hayato one glance to memorize that small face, cheeks still childishly round, eyes like banked coals. The pointy tugs of sideburns growing in early had reminded him of the pictures he'd seen an alternate version of himself lose his mind over.
In this world, Ryoma Nagare was 16 years old. An orphan whose parents had been murdered at a young age. A history of violence had plagued him throughout his childhood before sputtering out as he hit middle and high school. The last violent incident had been reported earlier today, when he had apparently attacked a classmate unprovoked.
Hayato didn't buy that for a second. The teenager clinging to the ruins of a balcony, covered in dust, one eye obscured with blood, didn't look like he'd ever done a thing unprovoked. He was a cornered animal.
He gazed up at Getter Robo with a frenzied stare. The sound of his ragged breathing was so loud the speakers picked it up despite the rumble of collapsing buildings. His posture was hunched, shoulders slumped to make himself look smaller, and there was not a trace of recognition in his eye. He looked at the machine - at Hayato - as if he'd never seen them before in his life.
Getter Robo stepped forward, the hulking mass of steel as responsive as ever. It tore into the Unevolved menacing its last pilot with ease. Controlling Getter-1 was always a little awkward, worlds away from the fluid brutality of Getter-2, but Hayato and Musashi could manage it for a few minutes. Saotome had promised them that was all he would need.
Down on the ground, Ryoma's jaw fell open. His bloodstained bangs were glued to the side of his face.
Unlike Hayato, this boy didn't know how to hide his madness behind a curtain. The frenzy in his visible eye only built higher as the fight continued.
Buildings crumpled. The complex and nonsensical machinery of the Getter purred under Hayato's hands. The Unevolved shrieked as it flailed wildly, each strike more coordinated than the last. One of them finally wrenched one of the mecha's hands off in a hideous screech of steel.
It was learning.
Not fast enough.
Saotome's loud voice cut through the din. "You are the key to drawing out the intrinsic power of the Getter. As it stands, it will only be able to hold out for a few more minutes."
Hayato curled his lip and brought Getter-1's remaining fist back up. "Bold words, old man," he murmured. "We can hold out longer than that."
Musashi chuckled awkwardly from the Bear's cockpit.
"Now choose, Ryoma Nagare!" Saotome thundered, oblivious to Hayato's skepticism. "Will you remain a victim?! Or will you come to the side that takes?!"
Ryoma Nagare screamed. Then he dropped his head and looked at the corpses strewn throughout the rubble. Finally, he spoke.
“So if I get in that thing… I can take down that monster?”
“Correct,” the old man said.
Ryoma delayed a little more, talking about the people the Unevolved had apparently killed – though he only named one of them, Michiru – but he’d already made his choice. Hayato could see it in the way his fists trembled and the gleam of his useful eye.
Yes, Ryoma Nagare was smaller than expected. He held himself like a small animal that had been kicked too many times and he couldn’t shield his emotions for the life of him.
But in the moment when he set his jaw and said “I’ll do it,” he looked dangerous.
Hayato still had no intention of getting close to him. But it would be good if the third Getter pilot was a little interesting, Hayato thought, and slammed the command to Open Get.
Ryoma's Getter-1 fought like a wild animal. It was more than merely responsive: it was primal. An incarnation of the will to survive. Despite everything, Hayato was grudgingly impressed with the rookie's piloting. That the kid stayed conscious after the battle did nothing to impact his opinion. Staying awake after fighting was the bare minimum a Getter pilot should be capable of. The bar was on the floor. If only three people had been able to get over that bar, that said more about the rest of the potential candidates Saotome had gone through that it anything else. The point was, when Ryoma climbed out of the cockpit and was escorted to meet with the other pilots face-to-face, Hayato was expecting a feral, bristling thing.
He could have worked with a beast in human skin. Instead, he got the Platonic idea of a teenager: small, skinny, and awkward. Ryoma's eyes darted back and forth, unable or willing to linger on anything for too long.
Musashi smiled and waved. Hayato simply watched. Ryoma shuddered and looked away from them both. His jaw went slack again as Saotome walked him through the nature of Getter Robo: three planes, three pilots, three forms. The idea that there were other people in the machine with him, putting themselves at risk, seemed to get under the brat's skin.
A flash of a cheap hotel room and his own face screaming like an abandoned cat passed through Hayato's mind. He lowered his expectations of Ryoma accordingly. What followed only cemented his opinion of Ryoma Nagare the person, as opposed to Ryoma Nagare the Eagle pilot.
"Why was I chosen?" the rookie asked, glancing at Saotome from the corner of his eye. He looked like he'd flinch and startle if someone spoke to him too harshly, but he still had the nerve to bitch about other people's callousness. "You... so many people died at school and you don't seem to care."
What a pain. Hayato grunted to get the rookie's attention. A thin smile crawled across his face as Ryoma flinched, met Hayato's eyes, and then froze up like a prey animal.
A feral survivor on the battlefield and a brittle, quailing thing off it. That more or less matched what Hayato had expected. He shouldn't have been surprised. And yet, as he opened his mouth to spit poison into Ryoma's ears, sour disappointment settled into his stomach.
"You seemed to be enjoying the fight, too," he said with a monster's sharp-toothed smirk.
Ryoma Nagare shrank back. He looked at Hayato the same way he'd looked at the Unevolved that had destroyed his life.
Hayato didn't protest when Saotome took the rookie away. He'd seen enough.
"He seemed nice," Musashi said brightly. "A little shy though." He scratched at the side of his cheek with a forced grin.
Hayato glowered at him for a moment, then huffed. "What a waste of time." He turned on his heel and headed for the door. "I'm going to my room."
"Maybe if you toned it down a little, he'd be bolder?"
"You must be joking," Hayato said flatly. "'Toning it down' has no place in the lexicon of a Getter pilot."
Musashi sighed, but didn't argue as Hayato breezed out. If he had tried, Hayato would have lowered his estimation of Musashi as well; after all, it was entirely true that the three of them couldn't afford to hold back. Not in battle and not around each other. Even if their final member proved to be as fragile as Hayato expected.
In a way, it was a relief to know Ryoma's mettle. No matter what had happened in other versions of this story, the Ryoma of this world would never be able to enter Hayato's heart in order to break it.
Ryoma Nagare was unfocused. He couldn’t keep his attention on the task at hand if his life depended on it.
Ryoma Nagare was cowardly. Even when those in front of him were suffering and being manipulated, he couldn’t find the courage to give them the mercy of a swift death.
Ryoma Nagare was weak. When Hayato confronted him about his own failures and rubbed his face in the carnage that surrounded him, he fell to his knees in silence.
Every time someone tried to make him face the future looming ahead of him, he looked away. It was beyond frustrating. Hayato had never felt so much agitation for a specific individual before. He wasn’t particularly enjoying the experience, but the unfamiliar sensation of blood thundering in his ears and his heart thumping in his chest was pleasant enough.
It was funny. Whenever Ryoma screwed up, Hayato felt more alive.
The ruins of Sekisei Private High School suffered a secondary infection. Ryoma froze up in battle, forcing Musashi to defend him. The incident was settled when Hayato, who'd had no interest in playing around in the mud, brought Getter-2 down on top of the mutated staff members. He felt only satisfaction as bloated flesh yielded to his drill. Dr. Saotome had accomplished many things since forcibly recruiting Hayato, but not even he could make Hayato Jin give a damn about the lab's staff.
Everyone connected with this project was complicit in the murders of Hayato's people. Musashi, who had also been kidnapped and had his death faked, was kind enough to overlook that.
There was a reason Musashi and Hayato had never really gotten along.
Ryoma just stared at the corpses that had been walking, talking, and begging him for help a few minutes ago. Hayato glared down through the cockpit display and clicked his tongue.
If it was just cowardice holding Ryoma back, Hayato would be able to understand what was happening here. But it was more than just fear that paralyzed Ryoma. Again and again, the rookie seemed to get lost in his own head. Under pressure, he sank deep into his own mind and lost the ability to control his limbs.
Bizarre. Inexplicable. Despite Hayato's best efforts, interesting.
Ryoma was two years younger than Hayato. If Hayato hadn't sped through his own high school career in such a hurry, skipping grades in his desperation to seize some independence, they would likely have been at Sekisei at the same time. If Hayato had been a third-year when Ryoma had entered, he would have found the contradiction between resigned dissociation and frenzied, animal rage too fascinating to ignore. He would have set his plans to manipulate the stock market aside for at least a few months in favour of playing with the boy like a cat toy.
He wondered if Ryoma would have ended up gnawed on and disemboweled like one, too.
Somehow, he doubted it. Even on his knees in the mud, eyes fully hidden in the shadow of his bangs, Ryoma's silhouette screamed defiance.
"Saotome, I'm securing the specimens," Hayato reported, and stopped thinking about it.
Pouring over the twisted remains of those who'd fallen victim to the Unevolved proved to be more interesting and less frustrating. There was something truly joyous about picking apart the body of something that used to be human. If Hayato had been unable to bear the weight of society's disapproval for his choices - until that disapproval turned to awe and worship - he might have gone down the path of forensic science. Perhaps he, a man who barely qualified as human by any measure save the strictly biological, yearned for his fellows. Or perhaps he simply liked having an excuse to butcher corpses. Whatever the case, Hayato was so invested in the bloated torso on the slab that he didn't notice the approaching visitor until the door opened.
That was unusual, he thought as he angled his head toward the noise. Hayato's paranoia had only grown worse since he'd been recruited at gunpoint.
Saotome kept talking about the corpse and what its genetic makeup - all dormant genes that should never have shown themselves, a manifestation of forced evolution in a very different approach from what Saotome's records of other worlds showed the Getter Rays inflicted.
"Most likely, the Unevolved do not occur naturally," the old man said, one hand on his chin. He seemed perfectly oblivious to the click of approaching footsteps.
"I'd say they sound more like biological weapons someone made," a voice that was both familiar and unfamiliar chimed in.
"Just so."
Hayato frowned and turned properly. "Professor, who would this-"
His voice failed. His muscles locked up. He could not name the cold sensation that flooded his body as he laid eyes on the man standing in the doorway to the autopsy room. All he knew that was that he'd felt it before, watching another version of himself break down.
The newcomer was tall and broad - taller than Hayato, if only by a couple inches. His dark eyes were distant and his black hair untidy. He walked with his hands shoved into his pockets. It should have made him look careless. Instead, Hayato was left with the bone-deep certainty that this man wouldn’t need his hands to kill everyone in the room. That this man had killed before and would do so again. That even as he tilted his head toward Hayato, he was thinking about how easy it would be to snap Hayato’s neck.
Everything about him was dangerous. He’d come out of nowhere. Worst of all, Hayato knew that face.
Hayato finally found his voice again and it was just to splutter helplessly. “You… it can’t be!”
Ryoma Nagare, grown to adulthood, glanced down at him with eyes so hot his skin burned under their stare. The weight of his regard left Hayato’s face feeling tight as fresh scar tissue. Even if Hayato tried to run, he wouldn’t make it anywhere. This must be how mice felt as they froze in front of a snake.
Between one breath and the next, the adult Ryoma was right in front of him. Hayato’s heart battered at his ribs like a cage as the man lifted a hand.
If it was the younger Ryoma, that hand wouldn’t have gone anywhere. The Ryoma of this world hadn’t gathered the courage – or rather, the commitment – to attack his teammates like he meant it. Hayato couldn’t say the same for the man in front of him.
Was he seeing things again?
Perhaps it was the certainty that none of this was real that kept him rooted in place as that hand reached for his head. Or perhaps it was simply the need to know. Whether that hand would go right through him, or if the man radiating a sense of pressure so thick it might as well have nailed Hayato to the ground actually existed on the same level as he did.
A light pressure settled on his scalp. He held himself very still as fingers carded through his hair. Only as the fleeting touch ended did he dare to glance up once more.
The expression on the adult Ryoma Nagare's face was cryptic, but if he had to put a label on it, Hayato might have called it loss.
The feeling of that hand in his hair lingered long after the other Ryoma departed.
It wasn't entirely the memory of Ryoma's adult face creased in silent mourning that sent Hayato digging through the depths of Saotome's files. He'd planned to squeeze the old man for everything he was worth from the beginning. Hayato didn't forgive easy. But having an older version of the rookie - the little brat he'd been trying and failing to nail down in his head - stare at him like he was a fondly-remembered ghost kicked him into high gear.
He'd already lined up most of the pieces. Working in the lab gave him access to all of the old man's computers. He just needed to fake the right credentials and get the right passwords, then transfer the data somewhere he could examine it at his leisure. The next day, he was sitting on his cheap dorm bed with his laptop, scrolling through record after record of parallel worlds.
There were so many alternate realities. Most of them sounded silly.
A world where the Getter was built to fight dinosaurs? Or oni? How ridiculous.
But no matter how goofy the set-up sounded, the outcome was always the same: after the construction of Getter Emperor, each universe was erased from existence.
The old man caught him before he could read much further. Hayato hadn't expected Saotome to be helpful. But he was getting sick of being called banal and childish by a man who couldn't be assed to explain anything. Not even the answer to a question as simple as 'is the Getter evil?’
"How banal," the old man laughed. "You want to know if it's evil? Listen to me. It's not about good or evil. To survive in this world, you take... that's all there is to it. And if you look at it from the side of those taken from... then perhaps you could say the Getter does look like pure, unadulterated evil."
Those words meant absolutely nothing to Hayato. Moral relativism was not useful in a vacuum. But the sheer malicious hunger in Saotome's voice sent chills down Hayato's spine.
When he glanced back at his laptop, it had turned itself. His connection to the lab's intranet had disconnected. When he got it working again, the information he'd stolen had deleted itself from his device.
Hayato waited until the old man had left him alone again before he started laughing. The sound was high-pitched and excruciatingly familiar.
He lay down on the bed and rested his arm over his eyes. “What a bad joke.”
How was he supposed to understand anything like this? Everything Saotome did was a challenge designed to force Hayato into unknown territory. To block off avenues of exploration and activity until all that remained ahead of Hayato was a single, narrow path. His growth was being guided like a bonsai tree.
Ah, maybe that was why Hayato had so much trouble figuring out what to do with Ryoma. The Ryoma from this world was supposed to be Hayato’s partner, but he kept finding himself treating the rookie the way Saotome treated him.
The next time Hayato touched the Getter, he strained himself to try and see the vision those files had painted of it. Not just a mechanical god - a mechanical apocalypse. A monster that would turn humanity into a scourge on the universe. A demon that would reset everything to zero.
Staring into the darkness of the cockpit, he supposed he could see it. There was something terribly alluring about sitting behind the controls of Getter Robo. The sheer destructive potential at his fingertips set his nerves alight.
Getter-1 and Getter-3 could be mistaken for travel or construction equipment, but Getter-2 was a weapon. One that would be terribly easy to point at the world Hayato had been drafted to protect. He'd never wanted to save this world. His only goal had been to understand it. And he had every reason to hate and resent Saotome.
His fingers tightened on the ignition. Then, slowly, they relaxed.
"Would you hate me if I started killing and didn't stop?" he murmured to a face that existed only in his mind's eye. "Or would you still mourn for me and pat my head like a child?"
The Jaguar's comms crackled faintly. He glanced suspiciously in the direction of the sound.
"Why?" a voice that was all too familiar crackled in his ears.
It was his own.
"Why what?" a voice that was almost Ryoma's asked brusquely. "We don't have time for this. Spit it out."
The adult Ryoma. It had to be.
"You were going to leave me behind," the other Hayato said.
Hayato didn't know what to do with that statement. The pieces were all there, but they refused to come together.
How stupid. He'd already known that Ryoma always left. So why was it so shocking to hear playing out again?
"I was going to leave you alive."
"Why?" the other Hayato repeated wretchedly.
"Because that's my role."
"Why is it only you?!"
Hayato inhaled sharply. Those words sounded brittle. Pained, almost. He'd already known what Hayato Jin would sound like heartbroken. Now he knew what he'd sound like in the moment his own heart snapped in two.
The comms crackled one last time and fell silent. There was no answer to that anguished question. When Hayato checked the plane's communications systems, he found that they'd never been turned on.
Later that day, Ryoma approached Hayato to report that the Getter had been talking to him. Hayato wasn't as surprised as he should have been.