The Rise, Fall, and Ultimate Redemption of Professor Souchi Tomoe

[seitora]

Blood. He tasted blood in his mouth. No chemical substance he had ever worked with could quite match that tinge of iron he tasted on his mouth.

Where was he? His whole body hurt, as if he had overdosed himself with muscle relaxant and his body was now fighting back with one of the few mechanisms it had. But no, that wasn’t right. He wouldn’t have bit his tongue if that was the case.

Letting out a slow groan, he managed to pull his head around from its side position to look straight forward. Right at the ruins of his lab.

With a jolt, and a low groan at the full-body tinge of pain that shot through him as a result, he remembered. Pharoah 90, which he had made a devil’s deal with to save his daughter. Kaolinite, who had come to him, also infected by Pharoah 90, working with him on his experiments, overseeing much of the administrative work of Mugen Academy. Even himself, made a host in his deal with the entity known as Pharoah 90, had succumbed. He laughed when Mistress 9 finally exerted dominance over his daughter’s body. He had laughed!

His daughter? Where was she? Her mere existence had given him the strength to live on in this shell since his wife’s death in that catastrophic explosion. He wasn’t a medical doctor, but with all the research he had done, he may as well have been. And he could self-diagnose himself. His prognosis was grim. He was pretty sure he was bleeding out, if the cold feeling creeping up his torso was any indication. Both femurs must be broken, if the angle of his legs was any indication, never a good sign. He hadn’t long to live, and the rejection of that evil, loathsome part of himself that had exerted itself for several minutes had been further tiring.

But that didn’t matter. He could inhabit this making of flesh and blood and bone for several minutes longer, if he could see his daughter again.

Hotaru. Where was she?

His thoughts were hyper-fast. Even as he approached death’s door, his body hadn’t yet given up the fight. Epinephrine was heightening his senses, slowly dulling the pain, easing him into the dark abyss. He could see the racks of chemicals that still lay undisturbed on the far wall. Odd. He had always needed glasses to see that far. Had his few minutes in that foul form, when he called himself Germatroid, done something to him?

No. No matter. He wasn’t going anywhere. Any theories he could come up with right now would never find themselves etched in paper, or typed up on a computer.

Instead, he thought. He ruminated on how it had come to this.

He already knew how it had started. It had started with his mother.


---

Most of the rest of this story will be presented in a series of flashbacks, which should be a given if you've read this first scene.

Some liberties may be taken with canon but not much. Of course, as Seiya and others may already notice, there is already one deviation from canon in here.

 

[seitora]

His older brother and sister were both nearly a decade older than he had been. Their family was the stereotypical Japanese family, with a salaryman father, two ardently-studying children, and a housewife. Her third pregnancy had been unexpected, but it was not totally unwelcome. And so, the fifth member of the Tomoe family came along, with a healthy, complications-free birth.

Japan’s culture was a stifling one, and so Souichi’s father was often away gone to work by the wee hours of the morning, only coming home by late evening after several beers with the office. His brother and sister, both entering high school, were constantly studying, if not at school, then at jukus. That just left his mother, who doted on him as her last baby.

She was the apple of his eye. She was a foreign beauty, half-Caucasian, half-Japanese, the product of an American soldier who had retired to stay in Japan after his military tenure and his Okinawan wife. While she was untouchable for those Japanese men who were still concerned with blood purity, others fell over to gain her favour. His father was the lucky man who would end up wedding her.

He remembered one day, while on the outskirts of Naha City, she accompanied him on a bug-catching trip, him, a wide-eyed five-year-old boy, her, a woman with a gentle hand who encouraged him to partake in something of curiosity. Those woods were long gone, the swamps drained to make way for construction, but it was one of the earliest memories he had, and cherished greatly. So, too, were the many trips to the beach they made, where he frolicked in the open water, and the occasional trip to the fast-food place, and the family vacation to Disneyland Tokyo. Were he to analyse his state of being at that time, he would say he had an Oedipal complex.

Even as Souchi slowly grew up, she was still the brightest star in his life.

-=-=-=-=-

The first sign that there was something wrong was when he was ten. She had come home from her daily shopping trip to the local grocery store. He didn’t hear about it at the time, but she had shown a red spot on her torso to her husband, his father. As he had learned from the man many years later, the red spot had disappeared, and his mother had put it down as a short-term skin burn, putting some lotion on the spot to moisturise it. It had been completely brushed off until a few months later, the rash came back.

This time, it hadn’t disappeared. Instead, it spread aggressively, from the size of a coin, to the size of her hand. By that time, she had gone to the doctor. After the doctor had run a few tests, he had come out with a grim prognosis: she had a very aggressive melanoma.
Souchi was ten at the time.

-=-=-=-=-

It was Japan, in the late 1980s. With the high life expectancy the Japanese population had gained as a result of the development over four decades following their humiliation in the war, few eleven-year-olds really knew the experience of a funeral. Their grandparents seemed like they would live forever, their parents even longer, and old age for themselves appeared an eternity away.

Souchi, unfortunately, was one of those eleven-year-olds who did.

Her last rites were done in accordance with Shinto, her body cremated and the ashes put in a pot, a stick of incense placed to the side. Souchi did not remember much of that day, dosed up with the ceremonial sake as he was.

He did remember the days prior to that as his mother laid in the hospital, her organs slowly failing her, as the disease slowly killed her. Her head was bald, the result of several chemotherapy treatments that had led nowhere. Her face was sagging, while much of her body was dotted with violent red and black spots, if not completely taken over by the melanoma. A machine hooked up to her gave her life by artificially breathing for her. It was awful. That bag of flesh was his mother? He could not reconcile the image. He remembered sobbing in frustration at her hopelessness and his helplessness when out of public earsight and eyesight, his face crusting over with tears, and then washing the flaked water from his face at the washroom sink.

He had confronted his father once, over how little he had visited his wife, busy as he was working. He had received a backhand for that, but also received a troubling look of guilt for his efforts. Even his brother and sister had little time for visiting their dying mother, busy as they were studying until the candlewicks burned down by the end of the night. He grew distant from them, once he had realised they were expecting, nay, waiting for her to die.

Growing up, Soichi realised he had been more than a little petulant at that time. But it had been the formative moments of his childhood years, defining his adult life.

Once he had made his last respects to the pot containing the ashes of his mother, he vowed he would do whatever he could to cure the disease that had felled her.

It wasn’t long before he started studying genetic engineering.

---

I moved the timeline up significantly so canon Sailor moon would take place around 2010ish.