First and Final

The discovery that Evan was in an alternate dimension somehow managed to be less alarming then the discovery that he had a family. The thought that there might be an alternate version of him had simply not occurred to either Evan, and when someone had brought up that they was, in fact, an entire Sideralis family on the island he'd been taken aback.

So he'd sat in the station while he'd been called up, waiting to find out what was going on. The discovery that Evaristus--because apparently his alternate universe variant didn't go by Evan at all--was missing did not come as much of a surprise.

It wasn't hard to figure out what had happened. They'd swapped places, although the hadn't the faintest idea why. Aberrant powers? Something to do with the island itself? Maybe Evaristus himself had instigated it, trying to escape something or another.

It had obviously backfired. Evan was fairly sure that Evaristus had taken his place, just as he'd taken Evaristus's, meaning the man had likely found himself in the middle of a high security US government facility. According to what he'd been told, Evaristus didn't look much like him, and still had both eyes, which meant the government would be very interested in him.

Hopefully he was still alive, but Evan was firmly of the mindset that whatever had happened, he bore no responsibility. He hadn't asked to be brought over, and if his life would be better for it (and he was having a hard time imagining a way it could get worse than how it had been) then so be it.

The police had opted to drive Evan over to the house, where his family were apparently very worried about him. Evan wasn't quite sure how to feel about that. They'd never met him, after all. They knew an alternate version of him that was, by virtue of them not being dead, very different than he was. He was effectively a stranger, and yet apparently they were willing to welcome him with open arms.

For all his skepticism, the first glance of them was a punch to the gut. There was his father, just like he remembered, a bit older and grayer, a little bit more tired. His father as he would have been. His mother, though, was different. Thinner than his mother had been, her hair showing no signs of gray. Almost younger looking, as if she'd aged backwards in the years since he'd seen her alive.

But they weren't his parents. Not really. They were the parents of some other version of himself, and he had to remind himself of that fact every moment that he looks at them.

They slot him into their lives with alarming ease. They don't talk about Evaristus. They call him Evan when he asks them to. They show him a room that isn't his and tell him he can stay there. The entire experience is surreal, even more than being on an island filled with monsters already is.

The longer it goes on, the more convinced he becomes that there's something else going on. They're leading up to something, but he doesn't know what.

Evan was oblivious to the goings on behind the scene. He knew something was happening, knew there was some layer he wasn't getting. His 'family' were too normal, too welcoming, and he suspected almost immediately they were involved.

One didn't just have their son disappear, replaced by the doppleganger, and act like nothing had happened.

They oohed and awwed over him, they fed him and let him sleep, and the whole time Evan became more suspicious.

He was rich again. He'd been rich growing up, and then he'd given it away, and then he'd lost everything, and now he was right back where he started. They had a doctor check him out to make sure he was healthy, and they'd given him a new wardrobe, and they'd explained the island, and the entire time Evan became more and more convinced there was something else they were hiding.

He was going to have a helper. That was just one of the words they used as they started feeling out how he'd respond. A servant. A helper. An assistant. For what? Who knew. He didn't have a job. He didn't need a job either. But supposedly he was going to have someone anyway, someone who they seemed to dance around their identity.

It had, he decided, something to do with the man who was always around his father. His butler, or something like that. He dressed like a butler, but he barely spoke, and even though he was almost always there, he hadn't been introduced to Evan at all.

He hadn't existed in Evan's world, which meant there was something different.

"We have someone for you to meet," his parents had said the second night he'd been there. There was a clear level of expectation with it, but Evan was in no position to deny them. Not when seeing whoever they wanted to meet was the path of least resistance. So he let himself be shuffled into one of the waiting rooms, looking far more put together than he cared to. Too formal. Too stiff. He had his dog tags on, but otherwise they'd stripped away his military gear, his self.

He felt out of place as he sat and waited.

The vibe was weird. Absolutely undeniably. There was a tension, an obvious something might happen, but nothing did. Just a man--younger than him by a few years and shorter as well--dressed very nicely, not meeting his eyes.

Wondering if he'd left left Evan waiting.

"Evan," his not-mother said, taking control of the painfully awkward situation. She seemed to know what they were doing, and Evan sure as fuck didn't, so he was happy to let her take control. "This is Jugemu," she said, giving a gesture. "His father works for your father, and he'll be working for you."

It's impossible not to wonder if this is somehow new, but Evan keeps his mouth shut.

"Why don't you two get to know one another? I'm sure Jugemu can explain things."

And then she's gone, watching carefully as she departs.

There are cameras, Evan knows, but he's not sure if they're watching through them. Maybe they're just security. He's used to being watched though, so it doesn't bother him as much as it should.

"Uh, hi," Evan says, looking Jugemu up and down as he does. He's a stranger to him, so all he can get are the physical bits of it. The suit, the short hair, the muscular body. He's not bad looking, but his relationship is a great big question mark. "I guess you knew the old me?"

Evan was aware enough to know that something was going on, but he didn't have nearly enough understanding of the situation to even hazard a guess as to what it was. It could have been a dozen things. Nerves at meeting your new employer? A past experience with the original Evaristus?

"Bodyguard?" Evan said, raising an eyebrow. It brought two questions to his mind immediately, but he dismissed the first and went with the second instead. "Am I likely to get targeted for some reason?"

He kept to himself that he probably didn't need a guard, because he very well might. He could handle himself against humans, but now he was facing things that weren't human at all. Who knew what they could do? And who knew why they'd be after him?

Evan couldn't help but wonder where Jugemu and his supposed family of bodyguard butlers were back in his own world. Did they not exist? Were they guarding someone else? IF they'd been there, maybe things wouldn't have gone so awfully. Maybe they'd still be alive, but Evan doubted it would have helped in the long run. Dead or alive they'd obviously been found out somehow, and that meant they'd have ended up in a camp in the best of situations.

"So we've probably fucked some people over, driven some people out of business, that stuff," Evan said, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. He wasn't going to play nice and act like they were innocent, because even in his own world, his family had their own enemies. Maybe not as much as here, considering demons and whatnot ran around here, but still enemies.

"Just Evan is fine," Evan corrected. "Evaristus sounds... really formal. No one's called me that for years." Basically just his parents, and not at all since then.

Evan didn't even realize what he was really asking when he popped his next question.

"So what was Evaristus--the one from here I mean--really like? I get the impression I'm pretty different." It made sense. This Evaristus still had his parents, and still had his family from what he'd been told. He'd been cut off, on the other hand.

As confident as Jugemu was that Evan was not so different, Evan certainly wasn't. A few small changes could make a big change in the end, and that was how he felt about his other self. Without having met him, and knowing only a bit about the world, his greatest suspicion was that he'd never been disowned. When he'd been disowned in his world, he'd moved to another city. He'd escaped their influence, grown as a person, and been better for it. But if he was stuck on the island, would he have really left?

At least independent had been correct.

"Sounds like me," Evan said. "Minus the incredible a bit." He really didn't think he was, and he was a bit thrown off by how... uh, invested in him Jugemu seemed.

"We had different lives," Evan pointed out. "Even if they were probably similar to start. I wasn't close with my family in my world. I left them, and did my own thing, even if it meant giving all... this up."

He paused, then gestured around the room, meaning the whole mansion thing and hoping Jugemu would get it. "I guess Evaristus didn't?"

There was no getting around it. He wasn't going to lie and pretend like there was another reason. He would be doing a disservice to Jugemu if he did.

"Different priorities," Evan said. "Then I had back then. I was angry at my family for trying to control me, and I basically cut them out. I barely saw my little brother, and then they died. Good and dead and just me left behind. So now I'm here, and I can maybe fix things, so I'm not going to try and do that. Not repeating the same mistakes, basically."

A second chance, even if they weren't quite his parents. Similar enough that it probably didn't matter, and his brother...

Well, his brother'd probably never been adopted in the first place. Maybe he still existed in a group home in New York.

Technically speaking, the answer was no. Evan was complacent, in a way, uninterested in pushing the boundaries of what was allowed. He wanted to settle in first, get used to life on the island. He didn't want to risk shoving his family away.

Even if it was fake, he still wanted to hold onto it. He wasn't a sentimental person. He almost never cried. But he wasn't going to throw his family away again, not after losing them.

"What about you?" Evan said, gesturing to Jugemu himself. "Evaristus probably knew who you were, but you don't have a version in my world, so I don't really know anything about you outside your name. Japanese, I guess?"

He said all like it was nothing. Just causally mentioned yes I'm japanese, yes I turn into a giant skeleton. Nothing too useful.

"Hold on," Evan said, cringing at the entire situation. "Rewind. You're a - a yokai?" Which he'd vaguely heard of. "A gasha... something?" Which he hadn't heard of. He had no idea what it is, and 'a giant skeleton' sure as hell wasn't cutting it.

"I mean just - start at the beginning, I guess?" It seemed like Jugemu was just glossing over the whole him part of things, and it was throwing Evan off.

Evidently, Jugemu was having a hard time figuring out what the beginning was. He kept starting in the middle, more or less, even if he'd picked up on Evan's clear alarm with the whole yokai thing.

"So it's not something you do often," Evan said. An emergency backup, he guessed. If everything else went wrong, turn into giant skeleton and solve the issue that way.

"The world I was from didn't have anything that wasn't human," Evan said, entirely incorrectly. "So we didn't have, uh, Yokai."

He probably wasn't saying it right, was he?

"So what'd you do before this? You said the military?" If Jugemu wasn't going to start from the beginning properly, Evan was going to just have to poke and prod him through answering what he wanted to know.