Who does Ein consider to be this father figure?
For Father’s Day, feel free to ask my muse anything you’d like about their father.
Seeing as neither of Eins parents were present in his life, technically the closest thing Ein had to a father was his grandfather- Francis Stein: The man who was hardly present during his early childhood, and the times he was, he showed nothing but hate and disdain towards the child. All of this magnified in his early adolescence once he was brought into the Shadow Pokemon Project-- given nothing but the most brutal punishments for the slightest mistakes, and the most arduous tasks that no young researchers should take on-- as if Francis set the boy up for failure at any given moment for the sake of proving how worthless he truly was. By blood, this monster of a human being was his father figure-- And while he melded Ein to be an absolute genius, evil breeding evil is also a very unfortunate truth in this story. However on the other side of the scale, we see the one man who treated Ein like a human being-- Allen Kotan: The man who not only spent long, grueling shifts as Eins personal teacher, but the man who reared him as if he were his own child. If anyone had a chance of teaching Ein how to be human, it would’ve been the Cipher Admins now second in command. However, after eleven years of bonding and learning together, the man upped and abandoned him. Not a whisper spoken to him before he was released from Francis’ employment. Not to be seen again for the next five years; the five years when Ein needed his guidance and comfort the most. Because of this, Ein would deride the mere thought of considering this man his father-figure. However, the very fact that out of all of the veteran researchers Ein could have brought into the revived project after Francis passing, he only allowed Kotan to accompany him, contradicts his stated scorn towards the older scientist. Perhaps deep down, buried under all the hate and betrayal, behind all the spats of how emotion and morality present nothing but a sign of weakness, Ein is reluctant in losing the one person who treated him not only as a human being, but treated him as he could only wish family treated him. If asked, Ein would scoff and state that he has no father-figure and did not need one as the only person he could count on was himself-- but on long nights when working with the second-in-command, he finds himself pondering a lot on the what-ifs and tries to picture how things could have been so different had maybe he stayed-- maybe if he had let him escape with him. A sense of longing that is immediately shut down as there is no room for such pathetic daydreaming in this line of work.
