The truth behind one's charm is kindness.

AU HISTORY: Collaborated AU history with esplosion and esperimental!

• Reigen was born to a single mother who loved him, but was very strict and controlling of him - mostly because Reigen was a troublesome child, and always had a really strong sense of will and stubbornness. His mother was an immigrant from Japan and while he had a few step fathers (or "mom's new boyfriend"s), none of them stayed that long to leave any real impact on his life for better or for worse.
• Throughout middle and high school, Reigen got perfect grades - but rebelled against his mother at every opportunity. She wanted him to grow up and become a doctor, and get a successful, stable job. She was every bit the stereotype of a "tiger mom" - as such, Reigen was forced to maintain his grades and to learn extracurriculars that would be beneficial.
• Reigen's rebellion mostly amounted to brief stints of delinquency, and only really stuck around as his light smoking habit. He only really smoked a couple of times a week, just enough for the faint smell of it to irritate his mother - it wasn't until the tail end of high school that it started to be more for stress relief.
• Rebellion settled down for a time as Reigen agreed to attend college and get a nursing job. He worked it for a time, and was moderately secure and successful. Those were the years he got along with his mother the best.
• Eventually, Reigen's discontent with being just another nobody nurse, or even just some regular doctor, was really bothering him. He started looking into other ways to use his field.
• He encountered a patient that was brought in for an emergency. The patient insisted on rejecting proper medicine, in order to use her homeopathic remedy, despite nearly dying. Struck by the desire to help her, and armed with his quick wit, he convinced her that he was an expert in her homeopathic field. After a long evening of speaking with her on how she was incorrectly using her homeopathy, he even managed to persuade her to add normal medical treatment to her repertoire, altering her homeopathic dosage and getting her the actual help she needed.
• This incident was a major formative event in Reigen's life - it inspired him to quit his standard nursing job, and to spend a year studying every brand of homeopathy he could find, even taking a trip to other parts of the world to incorporate faith healing and herbal remedies. Every sort of bogus healing measure under the sun, he learned enough to become an "expert" in those fields.
• He returned to the city and started his own business - Home Healing And Such Consultation Office. He would lure people in seeking these alternative treatments, and convince them after a few sessions of their placebo work to seek actual medical treatment. Unlike canon, Reigen's motivation to become someone great did not hinge on meeting Mob... it hinged on a moment of triumph as a doctor as he successfully started tricking people into taking their proper medicine, thus saving their lives.
• After settling into this routine, Reigen's pretty financially stable and quite popular! But his life is hollow - the only people he knows are people who need him to lie to their faces and his mother, who is still upset with his fraud but won't do anything but send him applications for hospitals looking for nurses and doctors by email.
• Out of the blue, one day Reigen encounters a small, sobbing child - the kid looks slightly emaciated, ragged and homeless, but not by very long. He takes the kid in, and after failing to either get any information about his family from him (only being told that they're dead, somehow, and he blames himself) and failing to find a missing child description matching the kid's story, he settles for adopting "Mob" himself.
• It's a long and harrowing road, but after a year and a half of constantly fighting legal battles and waiting for the government to finish investigating Mob's story, Reigen finally adopts him. The officials never find out where Mob came from. He then becomes "Reigen Shige".
• Reigen does his best to be a good influence for Mob, working really hard to make sure he's provided for and given as normal and healthy of a lifestyle as he can provide. Reigen's business starts expanding to teaching people how to discover which homeopathic treatments are completely bunk, or which ones are scams, and puts the tutorials online - this gains him notority and increases his business.
• Meanwhile, every day off, Reigen is desperately seeking advice in raising children. Eventually he meets some of the mothers of Mob's classmates, and becomes friends with them - particularly with the single moms at the one other single dad. None of them adopted a kid, but they all pitch in to offer whatever advice they can.
• Reigen quits smoking entirely for the sake of Mob's health.
• Mob initially was extremely closed off, but Reigen decided that the best way to help the kid through his trauma was to adopt a dog. The idea was to give Mob something that he had to take care of, and had to talk to, and to give him and Reigen both something to work on together.
• Reigen also brushes up on his ASL, since Mob takes to learning it like a fish takes to water. So watch out world, here's the chattiest sign language speaker you could find.
• It's a slow process, but it works! Reigen manages to slowly get Mob willing to talk to him after a lot of patience, encouragement and time.
• Reigen celebrates the day he officially adopted Mob, April 18th, as his birthday. He's been Mob's father for around four (?) years.

AU PERSONALITY: There aren't a lot of major differences but there are indeed a few key ones! First and foremost is that Reigen's priorities for work are slightly different than in canon. In canon, he acts like a spiritual expert to gain fame and he'd prefer to help people along the way, while Recolle's Reigen is more focused on helping people and is working on getting famous for the sake of getting more of an outreach. And once he finds Mob and starts working with him, he differs from canon as well - with the responsibility of actually being Mob's father, the two of them aren't friends the way they are canonically. Reigen delves head-first into being a good father for this kid, and while he's generally a lonely guy, he's not nearly as lonesome as he is in canon. Canon Reigen has issues with making friends because he often locks himself into a "mentor" type of role with people, while Recolle's Reigen has issues making friends because he's so delved into his work and into Mob that he forgets to actually just make time for himself. Not to mention that he's the sort of guy that tells people how to raise their kids, which is the kind of guy that literally no one likes.