The transition wasn’t a fade-to-black or a cinematic blur.
It was a sensory assault.
The roaring golden light of ‘Steve’s’ office collapsed into a crushing, suffocating pressure.
Mason felt his consciousness, once vast and cynical, being squeezed into a container that was far too small.
His lungs, once heavy with the smog of a dying city, were suddenly filled with a thick, warm fluid.
Then came the cold, biting, clinical, sharp and a light so bright it felt like a physical blow to his new, fragile retinas.
‘What the hell…
why is everything so loud?
Why does my head feel like it’s being sat on by a Viltrumite?’
He tried to scream, to demand an explanation from the bored deity in the wrinkled shirt, but all that came out was a shrill, wet wail.
It was the sound of a creature that had no business being this small.
“It’s a boy,” a muffled voice boomed.
To Mason’s ears, it sounded like a speaker turned up to eleven.
“He’s healthy.
God, look at those eyes.”
Mason felt himself being passed around, wrapped in cloth that felt like sandpaper against his hypersensitive skin.
He was placed into a pair of arms that trembled, not with fear, but with a raw, terrifyingly genuine affection.
He blinked, his vision slowly clearing.
He saw a woman.
She wasn’t a supermodel or a comic book trope; she had tired eyes, sweat-matted hair, and a look of such profound relief that it made Mason’s heart skip a beat.
“Mason,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
“We’ll call him Mason.
Like we talked about, David.”
‘Mason.
Still Mason.
At least no one fucked with the branding.’
A man leaned into his field of vision.
David.
He had rough hands, the hands of someone who worked for a living, and a jawline that suggested stubbornness ran in the family.
He looked at Mason with the affection of a loving father.
For a man who had grown up in a sterile orphanage, eating processed mash and learning that “family” was just a word used to sell insurance, the weight of their gaze was heavier than the car that had killed him.
The first few months were a blur of biological demands and internal screaming.
Being an adult mind trapped in a diaper-clad prison was its own special kind of hell.
But as the weeks turned into months, the “Saiyan” part of him started to leak through the cracks.
It started with the nursery.
Elena and David were good people.
They lived in a modest home on the outskirts of a city that Mason recognized from his memories as one of the frequent targets of “super-incidents.” They weren’t rich, and they weren’t heroes.
They were just people trying to build a life in a world where the sky occasionally rained fire.
One afternoon, when Mason was barely six months old, Elena entered the room to find him not in his crib, but hovering three inches above the mattress.
He wasn’t crying.
He was just staring at his hands, watching a faint, rhythmic pulse of golden light dance between his tiny fingers.
The scream she let out wasn’t one of joy.
It was the sound of a mother who realized her son had just been handed a target.
“David!
Get in here!
Now!”
David burst into the room, still wearing his work shirt, his face pale.
He looked at the hovering infant, then at his wife.
He didn’t cheer.
He walked over, his boots heavy on the floorboards, and gently, fearfully pushed Mason back down onto the sheets.
Mason felt the bed beneath him and stopped the flow of energy.
He looked up at them, his dark, intelligent eyes tracking their every movement.
‘They’re terrified,’ Mason realized.
‘They don’t see a miracle.
They see a funeral in twenty years.’
“We can’t tell anyone,” Elena whispered, clutching her husband’s arm so hard her knuckles turned white.
“David, if the government finds out…
or those…
those things in the sky…
they’ll take him.
They’ll turn him into a weapon.”
David sat on the edge of the crib, his head in his hands.
“He’s just a baby, El.
He’s supposed to be playing with blocks, not defying gravity.
Look at him.
He’s not even bothered by it.”
“Is it a blessing?” Elena asked, her voice trembling.
“Or is he cursed to live the kind of life we see on the news every night?
I don’t want him to be a hero, David.
I want him to grow old.
I want him to be bored and safe.”
Mason watched them.
He saw the genuine agony in their faces.
In his past life, he would have scoffed at the sentimentality.
He would have thought about how much money they could make or how much power he could wield.
But as Elena reached down and stroked his cheek, her hand shaking, Mason felt a strange, new sensation.
It wasn’t the golden heat of his power; it was a quiet, grounding warmth.
‘They don’t want a god,’ Mason thought, his tiny fingers curling around his mother’s thumb.
‘They just want their son.
This is going to be a lot more complicated than I thought.’
He closed his eyes, drifting off to the sound of his parents debating his future in hushed, frightened tones.
He was Mason.
He was a Saiyan.
And for the first time in two lifetimes, he had something to lose.