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“You don’t seem to like it here very much,” Reigen remarks, as his latest visitor takes a seat across from him.
“It smells like old people,” comes the gruff reply, so ill-tempered despite the fact that the speaker is, in fact, an old person, that Reigen is unable to stop the laughter that bubbles up. The man sitting across from him looks properly scandalized, but is forced to wait until the snickers have been tightly capped once more.
“All these years, and you really haven’t changed at all, Mr. Little Brother.”
“Oh shut up you old windbag. You can’t keep treating me like a kid, I’m 63.” Ritsu bristles visibly at this statement. Although it’s streaked with gray and cut much shorter, his hair has retained that catlike quality of standing on end whenever he’s particularly upset about something. Reigen manages to stop another snicker halfway out, disguising it as a cough…
…which unfortunately turns into a very real cough, racking his chest and stealing the air from his lungs. By the time he can breathe again, he can barely hear above the pounding blood in his ears. There’s a hand on his shoulder, steadying him, and he looks up to see worry written across Ritsu’s face.
“You okay you bastard?” Ritsu asks, somehow sounding worried and antagonistic at the same time. Reigen waves him off and Ritsu returns to his chair.
“Right as rain,” Reigen replies, “I didn’t think you cared if I croaked, though.”
“I don’t,” Ritsu shoots back, the concern in his face twisting into something far more wry and cynical. They’re in familiar territory now, and both begin to relax again. “But if you died on my watch, how would I explain that to my older brother? Especially after all the effort he’s put into seeing you survived this long?”
“Well, glad to know that, as always, Mob is all that stands between me and impending doom.” Sadness flashes across Reigen’s good natured look. “What is your ol’ brother doing these days? I haven’t seen him for a while.”
A terse silence follows, Reigen watching the sudden wariness in Ritsu’s eyes while trying to combat the slow sinking feeling in his stomach.
“That’s wrong, isn’t it?” he says quietly.
“Yes. He was here yesterday. He comes every day, actually,” Ritsu corrects him, with surprising gentleness. Then again, it was hard to be cruel to Reigen at this moment, who looks as though he’s ready to cry as he questions the truthfulness of his own memories. “He couldn’t make it in today, because he had a doctor’s appointment after work. So he asked if I wouldn’t stop by to keep you company.”
“I see.” Reigen murmurs, and then fixes Ritsu in a look of intensity. “Tell me, Little Brother, because I can always rely on you to be brutally honest. How bad is it?”
“There’s not really a point in me telling you. It’ll make you sad today, and you probably won’t even remember later.” But Reigen is right. That’s another thing that Ritsu hasn’t changed about himself. And so Ritsu sighs, the slow twitching of his feet the only sign that he’s nervous or anxious about this conversation at all.
“It’s bad,” he says, “You don’t remember most day-to-day things, and your lucid days are getting farther apart and fewer. This is the first time in a while you’ve recognized me. It’s more frequent that you’ll remember Shige, but sometimes it seems like you’re stuck in the past, and you don’t remember my brother because in your mind he’s still fourteen.”
“So I’m right on track,” Reigen says, slowly with a heaviness that Ritsu can feel, “How much longer do you suppose I have, before I’m gone altogether.” He’s clenching his teeth, barely holding at bay the swelling emotions. “The fates weren’t kind enough to see me off the same way they saw off Katsuya, were they? Damn it.”
Reigen’s words cut off abruptly, as he sits tense and fighting against himself. Ritsu wishes he had learned his brother’s ability to endure silence among company, relish in it even. Because right now, as it always has been, it’s just…stifling.
“Ritsu.” Hearing his name snaps Ritsu’s attention back. “Thank you. For the honest assessment. And I’m sorry.”
For the first time since this conversation started, Ritsu is truly stunned.
“For what!?” he blurts out, feeling a little satisfied that Reigen is as startled by his reaction as he was by the apology.
“Everything, I suppose. Well. I know that you’ve never much cared for me,” Reigen says at length, “You know as well as I do that I’ve mostly useless, always leeching off your brother. And I haven’t entirely managed to break that habit, after all these years.”
He gives a wan smile, and Ritsu can see that there is an entire list of things that Reigen intends to apologize for, and nope. They are not doing today.
“Oh pipe down you crusty old con man.” Is his voice straining against his own sudden emotions? Nope, of course not. Ritsu had made sure to thoroughly kill those nasty things when he was a teenager. “If anything, should be the one apologizing to you.”
It’s Reigen’s turn to look flabbergasted, and Ritsu takes the rare moment of stunned silence to continue.
“I was…am mean. Even when I don’t intend to be. I’ve said some unkind things about you, and to you, over the years.” Ritsu shrugs. “Admittedly, some of them weren’t totally unfounded, given that you’re still shifty as hell, but most of it was that I couldn’t really see what my brother saw in you. Not for a long time.”
“And as a result, I never thanked you,” Ritsu says, his head bowed and voice barely audible. “Not once, for the fact that you…you saved my older brother.”
“I didn’t teach him anything he wouldn’t have figured out himself,” Reigen counters, surprisingly resilient to the idea that maybe he wasn’t actually a waste of space.
“Maybe,” Ritsu agrees, “But the day that he needed somebody to listen to him, you were the one who was there. And that was more than anybody else could do for him. You saved him, and by extension that saved me, and Teru-niisan, and so many others.”
“And…you know the worst part about all this?” Ritsu says, a half giggle caught in his mouth, “That after all these years, I’m only telling you this now, when I know that you probably won’t remember tomorrow.”
Ritsu isn’t looking at Reigen. He can’t really see, with his eyes closed so tightly to prevent tears. But he can hear Reigen’s voice, in a tone that he doesn’t think he’s ever heard from him before.
“That doesn’t really matter.”
“It does to me. So let me say this.” And there are definitely tears now, that Ritsu refuses to acknowledge. “Thank you, Master Reigen. For everything. That…that is my most honest assessment I have ever given you.”