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This far out there was no shoreline to split the world into the sky and the ocean. There was the bright gray overcast sky, and the steely waves, and no way of telling between the two. It hurt Reigen’s eyes. It made vision shimmer and narrow, like the fluorescent lights at his old office used to make the plastic houseplants and burbling water fountains and inoffensively beige cubicles blend into one even paste.
The ship cut through another wave, and sprayed him with water. It was a splatter of sleet on his face. The sway made his foot slip, and he clutched the railing with white knuckles. Only the heel of his other shoe was slotted on the tiny ledge. He watched his leg dangle over the fall down – nothing too bad, he had jumped from higher in a pool as a kid – and shivered.
He needed to jump, before it was too late.
Already people were in the water, trying desperately to climb on the chemical orange rafts. He would be a savior, someone talked about in admiration. More than that, he needed to help the others – there were still the crew, the client, rest of the psychics hired to take care of this vengeful spirit who needed to get to safety. Still, no matter how he argued, he couldn’t let go. His fingers felt like they had frozen into hooks around the cold, slippery wet metal.
Wind snapped at him, spraying more salt in his eyes. He gritted his teeth and struggled to get his other foot back on the ledge, straightening to stand tall. He could help in other ways, too. He could help with people getting on the rafts safely. Even if he was the only one to survive, he could report the incident to authorities, get a search party looking for unlikely survivors that much sooner.
If he was the only one to survive, he would return to his empty apartment. The pile of cup noodles and white walls. He would have his office, the endless wait for clients that wouldn’t come. The bar, where everyone would avoid him, the man who saved his own skin and let others die instead of doing the right thing.
He would sit in the dark, alone, and wonder if there ever was an end to the cold.
When Reigen’s body hit the water, the ocean rushed over him in an explosion of bright bubbles. Instinctively, he flailed his arms, clawing at the water that was flooding his shoes and turning his clothes into lead. For a moment, he breached the surface. One of the rafts was right next to him, filled with people and swaying dangerously. Something pink and cyan sparked in his eyes among the black stars starting to overwhelm the edges of his vision. He gasped for air, but his mouth was still filled with seawater, cold enough to make his teeth ache. He needed to get only a little bit higher to hack his lungs clear and draw a proper breath. Just a tiny bit –
– but Reigen was already sinking.
Before he knew, the bright surface and the small shadow reaching through it were long gone. The world turned into a disorienting black, where there was only the direction the last air bubbles escaped to, and the direction he was falling head-first. The icy water felt like knives running down his scalp and over his fingertips. It crushed it’s way inside him to form a heavy chunk of ice cradled in his ribs. In comparison, his head was light, his limbs weightless. Eventually they also turned numb, like his skin was ice that didn’t let through any other feeling than a distant sense of pressure.
After a while of floating down in absolute silence, an idle thought passed his mind.
‘ This is… taking long.’
Drowning wasn’t supposed to take this long. He remembered reading an article that claimed it would feel good, as asphyxiation made the brain fire off mixed signals. Maybe that was it – this was a final moment stretched out for a little self-contained piece of eternity. He just hoped he wouldn’t see his life flashing in front of his eyes. He didn’t need to see himself dream about floating away quietly when he had been twenty four and done with his meaningless job, the chilly office and the cold, superficial smiles. Blessedly, it was just him and darkness – until something started shimmering.
He stared with half-lidded eyes down – up? – his body. His tie trailed after him, the suit billowed like filled with wind, and his hands swayed at his sides. Everything was glowing faint blue, flickering when the luminescent ice chips grazed at him as they floated up or he sunk through them. The stream of water distorted his vision, especially when his hair decided to flutter down in the middle of its attempt at imitating a wispy polyp. When his eyes finally focused on his fingers, he could see that they were transparent and painted over with frost flowers. Trails of something glittering parted from his fingertips.
From the dark water, another hand appeared. It curled around his little finger. Something pale flashed, a smug flourish before it dove down, and pulled his arm along with it. The water was filled with glittering shards, as the arm creaked and crackled on the edge of shattering. There were now three hands holding onto it, tugging somewhere behind his back, each tug making the sense of triumph and joy ring louder in the ocean.
Seamlessly, that ringing turned into a high-pitched sound in his ears. A deep, ruddy pulse made the blue light go out, but after a flash of black an acidic green glow made the water roil. With a bubbly shriek, the hands let go.
He managed to catch the impression of a face with too many teeth and large, empty eyes, like a deep sea monster, before it exploded into opaque slush quickly dispersing into the water.
The ice in his chest burst, and Reigen twitched into a ball. It hurt so much there was barely anything else to him than hurt. Then, something bumped against his shoulders, coaxed it’s way under his armpits and around his chest. They grabbed at his shirt before clutching each other – hands, and arms, tangible and holding onto him tight. They yanked him close to something, that felt like a furnace on the edge of exploding. It hit the back of Reigen’s head and rushed over him. The ringing turned into a hammering – his heartbeat, so loud it drowned everything else under it.
Next thing Reigen knew, he was kneeling on a hard surface. The deckof the ship. There were people – people wrapped up in foil blankets, people crouching over them. Through his blurred vision, Reigen saw familiar, small sneakers in front of him. A cough ripped through him, and he spewed water on top of them. The shoes didn’t move anywhere, even though he kept retching water, helpless to stop it. He could hear a voice, and then more joining in, but they were distorted and distant, like his ears were still filled with water.
The only voice he could make out was the voice that spoke with his mouth.
“I can keep him alive for now, but we need to haul his ass to a hospital like fifteen minutes ago.”
His mind stuttered to a realization as his lungs decided to force another cough on him. He couldn’t check, but the prickly warmth on his cheeks must have been them shining red from. His eyes were stinging too much from tears and salt, and thick mucus was spilling from both his nose and mouth. He was shaking, but Dimple kept him up on all fours, forcing the water out and keeping his heart beating. He wasn’t doing anything for the pounding in his head, or the pins and needles rushing through his body. It hurt enough to make him want to cry, but soon there were hands on his shoulders. They were hot enough to burn him, smoothing the blanket around him and rubbing soothing circles on his back. Serizawa was hooking an arm around him, again, pulling him upright. He couldn’t understand his words, but he felt the deep rumble of his voice.
Through a haze, he saw another flash of the white sneakers. Mob had managed to keep them clean. What a resourceful kid, ready to take up even his useless teacher’s slack, Reigen thought as he slipped back under.
The hospital room was painted in an off-white color that made Reigen’s eyes just slip off of it. The other bed across his was empty. On the windowsill, a cactus basked in the faint sunlight streaming in, unobstructed by the blinds that had been drawn all the way up. A stray ray lighted up his hands, too, resting on top of crisp white sheets, the frostbitten fingers covered in ungainly gauze.
“It took us so long to find you that I was sure…” Serizawa trailed off. He had been talking for a while. He had been there when Reigen woke up – every time he had woken up. He had eventually asked if Reigen wanted him to tell everything that had happened, and Reigen had been lucid enough to nod. He had started by listing out all the treatments and scans and names of doctors that slipped right off Reigen’s mind. Now, judging from the small tremble sneaking into his voice, he was moving on to something else. It made a shiver sneak down Reigen’s spine despite the layers of blankets cocooning him.
“Apparently, –” Serizawa stopped to let out a flat laugh, “– hypothermia can be a real savior. The cold prevented any lasting damage, doctor Izakawa said. They’re still looking at some things, said something about being unconscious for that long wasn’t normal, but… I think it might have been how Dimple had to push your body over its limits to… I, er, think it was just caused by the possession.”
His voice was quiet. It just and just carried over the whirs and beeps from the monitors, the footsteps haunting the corridor behind the door. It was halting, wavering between word choices, peppered with breathless sounds and small hums. It washed the remains of the ocean’s silence from Reigen’s eardrums.
“… either case, they want to monitor you for a day more before releasing you. But… everything will be fine.”
He seemed to say the last sentence to himself – he was rocking the guest chair, and the cactus was slowly turning, and the window panes were chiming. Even if Reigen wanted to console him, he couldn’t – not with how his throat was still sore and voice gone to a whisper.
“I… don’t know how much you remember, but… the spirit wasn’t anything the client had described. Not at all,” Serizawa continued, avoiding looking at him. His eyes looked glassed over, and his shoulders were tense. He was wearing his dark suit, one fit for a funeral. The sunlight did nothing to lighten it, nor the shadows under his eyes.
“It was a rather powerful one. It wasn’t haunting the ship. Dimple said it was most likely bound to the remains of its former body, that the ship’s route just happened to cross over the place where…”
Reigen closed his eyes. The tube feeding him oxygen dug into his nostrils unpleasantly. It felt warm against his cheeks, looped behind his ears. Each breath felt mechanical and forced, when he remembered with his body the stillness of the ocean floor.
“It wasn’t… It didn’t drag people with it. The others just… started going in the water on their own, but they weren’t possessed, either. The spirit seems to have somehow projected its will? Shigeo-kun said it was like telepathy, that the spirit said some… unpleasant lies to him. The one that tipped him off was the one about the ship being about to sink.”
Reigen couldn’t do anything but to listen. He had always been good at reading people, hearing where their stories were going well in advance. It must have fed into the spirit’s ability, helped it dug deep into him, whisper about how old and rusty the ship was, how reckless the captain was, how they were close to an area notorious for its shipwrecks.
“I… was hit by it early on, but I just locked myself in a toilet, because…” Serizawa’s breath hitched. He did have a habit of retreating to the small storage room in the back of Spirits and Such when he was overwhelmed, didn’t he. “… anyway, after Shigeo-kun found me, we ran to the deck because he had felt the spirit withdraw. That’s when…”
Serizawa couldn’t bring himself to say it, but he didn’t need to. Reigen had puzzled it out himself. That was when they had seen him jump, and Mob had leaped after him, reaching for him on top of the life raft. Serizawa and Dimple had been the ones to haul him up, because Mob’s powers had scattered all over the place from shock and the spirit had lashed against him specifically. He had collapsed right after they had been told he would survive. Dimple was off keeping him company, and keeping an eye on him. Reigen was glad for that – he didn’t want to see Mob before he could say that he was fine with his own mouth.
“You… wanted to save us. Shigeo-kun said, the spirit said –“ Serizawa cut himself off, and when Reigen peeked from between his eyelids, he was staring a little right from his head. On the bedside table there was a small basket of pears, a single red gerbera, and a get-well card.
It had been more than that, a crushing cold loneliness, a sense of worthlessness, of not being needed or missed, a cold that was still just leaving his body. He felt the ghost of cold leaving but not without a fight, pain aching in his heart instead of in his limbs. It made Serizawa’s weak, worried smile feel like boiling water trickled on top of frostbites. He was silent for a long time before he looked at Reigen, directly and without pretense, like he seeing through his eyes into his mind, and looking like a heartbroken puppy at what he saw.
“… I’m… I’m hopeless at this, aren’t I?” Serizawa asked looking like a heartbroken puppy and making Reigen’s heart lurch. He tried to tell himself it was just the near-drowning and whatever they had pumped into his veins. The pretense flew right out of his head when Serizawa reached out with his hand and placed it gently over his.
“I’m… not sure if I understood it correctly, or if it’s my place, but…” Serizawa said quietly, cradling Reigen’s fingers gently under his palm, careful not to jostle the needle taped on the back of his hand. His hand was callused and a little sweaty, and it felt hot enough to burn Reigen’s fingers into stumps.
“Reigen-san, you… do know that I… that there are people who love you…?”
His grip tightened for a moment, until he caught himself. His fingers relaxed, and his thumb caressed gently the side of Reigen’s palm. The heat of it tingled up Reigen’s arm and seemed to settle on his cheeks. He couldn’t answer, couldn’t even grasp all the possible implications, he was reeling too hard, swept away in a burst of feelings. He hadn’t ever felt more ashore than in that moment, watching Serizawa avert his gaze bashfully, fidgeting a little.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked, and squeezed Serizawa’s hand back weakly. “I’ll.. do my best to keep that in mind.”