Chapter Text
Ritsu’s brother confirms Ritsu isn’t home, and then he falls silent and stares at Shou for so long that Shou has more than enough time to go from impatient to incredulous to entertained and then all the way back to increasingly impatient, and increasingly incredulous, and then increasingly entertained, and then he loops all the way around to hilarity and stays there in disbelieving delight at Mob’s shameless weirdness: still silent, still staring.
“You... can come in,” Mob says at last. He nods once, apparently satisfied with this decision. “If you want. You can wait.”
“Wait!” cries Shou, joyfully derisive. “I can wait! Listen up: I never wait. I got things to do! Places to be! Ritsu knows I don’t wait, so that’s why he oughta be here! I don’t wait for anything.”
Mob nods again, seriously. He’s barefoot in the doorway of his house, his hair occasionally ruffling in the wind of an electric fan. “How do you take the train?” he says.
“What?” says Shou.
“If you don’t wait,” says Mob. He looks kind of like he might be deep in thought, but he also looks kind of like someone switched the lights out before they left and then never came home again. “Do you always arrive at the station just on time...? You’d have to learn the train timetables by heart. I don’t think I could do that. All those numbers...”
Shou’s no expert in reading that weird flat stare. He’s never needed to be an expert; he’s got Ritsu, who’s the most expert expert of all – but no expertise is needed to work this one out. “Bored out your mind, huh?”
“...Am I?” says Mob, which is the kind of thing someone’d say if they were surprised, but his weird flat expression doesn’t change; his weird flat voice doesn’t change. He blinks, but that doesn’t mean anything – everyone blinks. Even Shou blinks, from time to time, when he remembers.
“Well, I dunno,” says Shou. “You tell me. Listen, you wanna do something fun?”
“Fun...?” echoes Mob, looking as bewildered by the concept as Ritsu himself generally does. No, that’s not fair – Ritsu at least gives the impression he knows the dictionary definition, even if he’s never experienced it personally. His brother doesn’t look like he even knows that much. “I don’t know. Something – fun...?”
“Like go-kart racing,” prompts Shou. “Or jet-skiing. Or hang-gliding. You ever been hang-gliding?”
Mob stares at him blankly for a while. Then – eventually, decisively – he says, “No.”
“Me neither,” says Shou. “You wanna?”
Mob blinks. It takes about three times longer than it should do. “Want to... what?”
“Go hang-gliding,” says Shou. He can feel his energy revving up, the needle on his internal speedometer whirring round into the red, trying to balance out the slow-motion crawl of Mob’s entire life. He gets that people are into what they’re into – no accounting for taste, whatever; he’s not judging, or at least he’s not judging when Ritsu’s in earshot, on account of having basic self-preservation skills – but he’ll never understand how anyone could prefer the older Kageyama to the younger Kageyama. It’s like preferring a chunky grey brick of a flip-phone with an antenna the size of his thumb to a sleek, efficient new smartphone, which can do anything and can do it super fast. The flip-phone works fine, whatever, it’s functional, it’s adequate, it can do all the basic shit it needs to – but given a choice between the two, there is no choice: the smartphone’s clearly on another level, plus it looks way cooler. “Right now,” persists Shou. He’s already tapping his foot fast against the doorstep, trying to burn off the energy building up in him thanks to Mob’s total lack of it. “C’mon – you never did it before, I never did it before, you’re not doing anything important—”
“I’m doing homework,” corrects Mob – but then he nods, even before Shou can reply: clearly, they’re both in agreement that homework doesn’t count as anything important. Shou’s running tally of the ways in which Mob’s an improvement on Ritsu rises to a total of one.
“So we can go right now,” says Shou. “Leave a message for Ritsu, he can come find us. It’s his fault for not being home, anyway; he knows I won’t stick around waiting for him.” And nothing’s likely to get Ritsu moving faster than a note from his precious big brother saying that Shou’s taken him hang-gliding.
Mob looks at him a while longer. Maybe he’s thinking about it. Maybe he’s not thinking about anything. Maybe he’s looking that vacant because the inside of his head’s that vacant. Shou’s foot is still tapping; jammed inside his jacket pockets his hands start tapping too, patting in jittery, restless syncopation against his stomach. He’s gonna have to burn this off somehow, when he leaves; he’s gonna have to delay hunting down Ritsu just to sprint a few manic laps of the city on foot. He’s gonna—
“Okay,” says Mob.
“Okay?” says Shou.
“I’ll come with you,” explains Mob. “We can go hang-gliding.” He steps back inside the doorway, looking for his shoes.
“Wait – seriously?” says Shou. His delight is already rapidly overcoming his disbelief; his grin is growing wider by the moment. “For real? You’re not kidding?”
“I’m not very good at kidding,” says Mob, sounding almost apologetic. He’s got his sandals on; he scoops house keys from a table. He means it. He’s seriously coming. He must really hate homework. Shou can’t blame him – everything he’s learned about homework from Ritsu makes it seem like the kind of torture device that should have made Ritsu’s powers wake up way earlier than they did.
“Cool,” says Shou. The disbelief is gone: it’s all delight now. He slams his hand against the front wall of Ritsu’s house so enthusiastically that in the hallway the electric fan nearly topples from its table. “All right, cool! Let’s go! Let’s do this!”
“I’ll text Ritsu,” Mob adds, as he pulls the front door closed behind him.
And he pulls out a flip-phone. Of course he does – but Shou can’t hold it against him. He’s bland as unsalted fries, but he agreed to come hang-gliding as soon as Shou suggested it, no questions asked, and that’s the sort of thing that counts for a lot with Shou. Even Ritsu’d probably have stalled and fussed and asked all sorts of unnecessary questions before caving in to the force of Shou’s ferocious determination – questions like do you even know how to hang-glide, and do you actually have a glider, and are you aware there’s no breeze today anyway.
Shou doesn’t have a glider, but he’s got an imagination as strong as his sense of fear is weak, and he’s psychic. He’s really fucking psychic. Ritsu’s brother’s pretty psychic too. They don’t need gliders; they don’t need a breeze. They need a high place and bedsheets or something, a couple of long sticks for T-shape struts – horizontal for the arms, vertical for the body, staple the bedsheets to the sticks and rely on telekinesis for the rest – and it’s fine that Mob doesn’t like to use his powers, because Shou’s got no similar hang-ups, so Shou can take control for both of them and fly Mob’s hang-glider from the ground, swooping him through loop-the-loops like a remote-controlled plane – and when Ritsu checks his phone and sees Shou’s sent him video footage of that...
Endangering the safety of Ritsu’s brother will be fun for both Shou and Ritsu’s brother. Endangering the safety of Ritsu’s brother will also bring Ritsu racing to Shou’s side faster than anything – it’ll sure as hell bring him faster than Shou endangering his own safety would do.
Two birds, one stone. The afternoon spreads out gloriously before them.
“We’re gonna have so much fun,” announces Shou.
“Okay,” says Mob, obediently.
The number of ways he’s an improvement on Ritsu immediately rises to a total of two: Ritsu’s never obedient about being ordered to have fun.