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Doppo is born at 4:37 am in Nantes France. He is born to a mother who loves him, and a father who loved him too, but who Doppo will never get to meet.
The first person to hold him is his mother, Marie. The eldest child of her family, raised to lead and to fight from the moment she could stand, brought to tears the first time she lays her eyes on him, on the eyes of her lost love that she feared she'd never see again.
His grandfather and uncle are the next to hold him, three days later when Marie comes back from the hospital with her head held high and the will to act like the last 6 months never happened.
Grandfather, called that only because he was the eldest of the family, not for his age, simply plucks the baby from her chest, and leaves the siblings to fight amongst themselves. Hours later, feelings aired and tears shed, she introduces them properly to her child.
Doppo, she names him, to honor his father. Doppo-Remi Belmont Kunikida is the name she puts on his birth certificate the next day.
A mouthful, his uncle Cyril jokes. Fit for a warrior, Grandfather says. Enough, Marie hopes.
At four, Doppo is gifted his first weapon. A training whip a little too big for him, but one that he will grow into in time.
At five he starts his hand to hand training. Mother teaches him when she can, often busy handling business for the family makes for little time for things she sees as unimportant, like walking her little boy through how to throw a punch, when she could be teaching him to bake cookies or taking him to a park to play with other children instead.
Uncle Cyril teaches him the most. Teaches him how to hold a knife to stab or slice someone, after Mother teaches him how to hold it to chop and cut things. Teaches him how to punch and how to stop someone's punch from hitting you. Teaches him how to tie knots strong enough to hold body weight, and how to break those same knots.
At seven, his Mother leaves for a trip the same as she always does, with a kiss on his cheek, a reminder that she loves him and to behave until she gets back. That is the last time that Doppo ever speaks to her.
The casket is closed for the funeral, something that's becoming more and more common with every body brought back from the frontline. Doppo doesn't know this, doesn't know about a war being fought between countries, about hundreds dying everyday, and thousands more fighting even now. All he knows, is that he can't even see his mother for the last time.
The casket burns in blue fire started by Grandfather. It burns and burns and burns, Doppo stands there until the last of the ashes cool, until uncle Cyril picks him up and Grandfather follows them inside.
Two days later Doppo lights a bush on fire with blue flames, and watches as it burns and burns and burns. When Grandfather comes by later and sees the smoke and ask, he only sighs and scoops the boy up in his arms and walks them inside. A day of making cookies and watching movies later and Doppo doesn't cry, but he doesn't feel quite like his heart is as far away as it was this morning.
In the end it takes watching one of his cousins practicing their summoning some weeks later to break the little boy. He sobs into Grandfather's chest, says he misses Mother's birds, doesn't say, can't say yet, that he misses Mother.
At ten Doppo is brought on his first hunt. Younger then they wanted, but not the youngest Belmont to ever be on one. With both Grandfather and uncle Cyril there he isn't in any real danger anyways.
On that hunt he finally understands that the books that he's read for years, that were read as bedtime stories to him for years before that, weren't just stories. He had known, had believed his family when they spoke of their hunts and their haunts, but believing and watching a vampire rip the throat out of a girl the same age as himself are two different things.
Just after his 11th birthday, when the trees are just starting to turn colors and wearing long sleeves no longer gets him odd looks, a caravan of Speakers come to stay with their family for a bit.
He meets another boy in this caravan, a boy with ideas that don't fit in and an attitude that stands out from his family's. In the ten days they spend together, they grow closer then Doppo has ever been with anybody, they tell each other things that wouldn't dare leave their lips around family members.
The boy, Katai, talks about going home, back to Japan where he was born and raised for 8 years before the war took his parents and his aunt took him in. He talks about it with such longing, so much love that Doppo is promising to go with him before he can even think about it.
Doppo had only thought of going to Japan once, to learn more about his father and that side of his family. When he asked Mother if they could visit, she had made a sad face and told him that Father wasn't buried there, and he had no family to visit. After learning that, any urge he felt disappeared, until Katai showed up.
They teach each other magic, new Speaker magic and old Belmont magic, and tricks with the weapons they're best at, the whip for Doppo and words for Katai.
One day, Katai drags them to a secluded room with a phone, and Doppo learns about abilities. Magic that isn't really magic, known to regular people and sometimes powerful enough to fight wars over, but most of the time normal enough that it doesn't get you anything but fearful looks from people without them.
On the tenth day, Katai passes him a phone with his number already on it. They stay in contact after that, never going more then a few days without texting the other, even during their worst fights they'd send something to let the other know that they were still alive.
At thirteen he's writing in his journal about his day, about his training and about his knife work, when the page starts to glow and a knife falls into his lap.
He hadn't truly understood Katai when he talked about his ability coming from somewhere different then his magic, he had explained it at time as the difference between an app that you install and one that was already a part of the phone, but he got it now.
Magic comes from inside of you, for Doppo it feels like a ball in his chest that wraps around his heart. When he pulls on it for spells, he can feel it run through his body, down his arms and into his finger tips, wrapping around his chest and sitting at the back on his neck. His ability on the other hand, is simply a part of him. The notebook feels no different then his arm, and he has the same awareness of the things he creates as he does his limbs.
He tells Grandfather first, after days of testing and hours of pacing. Uncle Cyril in told next, and the three of them spend months finding out what they can, calling who would answer and talking to the ones that survived the war.
Four months after he wrote that first word, a group of people in black suits knock on the door. Doppo is sent to his room for the conversation, but not even the walls separating them could block out the yelling. He doesn't catch every word, not even after he presses his ear to the wall and tries to, but he catches enough to understand. They want Doppo's ability documented, they want to take him to one of their training facilities and help him, they want Grandfather to sign away him guardianship.
The people in suits are laughed out of the house and told if they ever tried to come back, Grandfather would show them just how much weight the Belmont name holds. The second kidnapping attempt gets Doppo an entourage of his cousins and other family members with him anytime he leaves the house. It takes a year, and two government workers being stabbed, for it to finally stop.
When he's fifteen he goes on his first hunt alone, when he's fifteen he goes home for the first time. Not France, where he was raised, or Japan where he shares half of his blood, but to Wallachia, where the Belmont are from.
He spends almost two years there, wandering from town to town. Helping where he could, from manual labor to hunting night creatures, and learning everywhere else. For almost two years he learns, language and food and culture and about people, the ones that take him into their homes and lives when he's with them, and the ones that he only passes on his way through. And teaches in return, how to fight and defend themselves when a Belmont isn't around to protect them, about anything and everything they ask of him that he can do.
When he isn't traveling, he stays in the Belmont hold. He reads every book he can in his time there, doesn't even get through a quarter of them by the time he leaves. Searches through every room and every shelf, finds pictures of old family members and dolls that just get older and older. Eventually he finds a ornate chest with a lock on it, it doesn't take much to get it off, and the whip inside is a thing of beauty. A chain of pure metal, a handle of red and black leather, and the popper a metal star that moved like water through the air.
He finds the book about it eventually. The Morning Star, a weapon used by many great Belmont's. He wonders if he should put it back, he thinks he should, it stays on his belt and in his hands until he's leavening Wallachia for the last time. He puts it in the same box he found it, fixes the lock and hides it back on the shelf he pulled it from.
At seventeen Doppo goes back to France, back to his family, who welcome him back with a party and the chaos he'd been missing.
He trains and fights and hunts with his family, he falls into a rhythm until he's eighteen, almost nineteen, when he wakes up one day and decides he doesn't want to do this for the rest of his life.
Checking his phone after that revelation and seeing a text from Katai, saying that he'd booked his one way ticket to Japan, that he had an apartment lined up and a job waiting for him, well it felt like a sign. He sends him the money for his own ticket the same day, no point in waiting, he's made up his mind after all.
He's nineteen with a week left with his family, when Grandfather calls him into his office and presses Vampire Killer into his hand. He's only wield her once, when uncle Cyril had been knocked out and had dropped her within reach for Doppo to pick up. He tries to refuse it, to say that she's not his to take, that it goes to the next head of the clan and that's uncle, not him.
But Grandfather pushes it back, tells him that he won't let any kid go so far away from family without protection. Grandfather's last comment of it being his own whip anyways, and if Cyril has an issue then he's fight him on it! makes Doppo laugh until he cries.
Doppo is nineteen when he steps into Japan for the first time.
He's nineteen the first time he's called Kunikida, and soon he gets more used to hearing that name then any other.
Kunikida is nineteen when he steps outside of the school he teaches part time at, he's nineteen when he makes eye contact with a boy his age in a brown cap and a middle aged man with white hair.
Kunikida is nineteen when his life changes forever.