Work Text:
“Well, ah - you’ve got your pay for the day, then. Didn’t think more than half was necessary,” Reigen stated, not meeting his disciple’s eyes. “See you tomorrow.”
To this, Mob did not respond. His otherworldly companion couldn’t help suspecting that Reigen’s presumption was not, in fact, the case.
The boy pulled the office door shut behind him and strode silently down the complex hall towards the elevators, Dimple in tow all the way and uncharacteristically speechless.
But then Mob made an odd change upon their arrival out on the street.
“Ain’t our right turn yet, Shigeo,” Dimple coughed. “We’ve still got another couple blocks, don’t we?”
And, again - Mob greeted these words with silence. He led them uptown, in the opposite direction of the Kageyamas’; they stalked past takoyaki stands and ramen houses Dimple recognized as the boy and his teacher’s favorite haunts, some high-class girls’ high school, a quiet side street lined with flowering trees and contemporary apartment complexes.
They were at the train station, and Mob was pulling some crumpled little card from his pocket and stuffing it into a kiosk.
“Shigeo, I don’t…”
The boy shot him a look. It wasn’t really anything more than his standard hundred-yard stare, but Dimple had known the kid long enough to get his memo - he shut his mouth, and followed Mob into the car.
They rode a long while. Dimple’s gaze flickered between the houses passing by outside, the prominence of their growing sparser, and Mob: looking calmly ahead, unreadable but for the clenched fists around the fabric over his kneecaps.
Forty minutes passed. At some single-platform stop in the verdant countryside, Mob stood, stepped off the train.
“I’d be lying if I said you weren’t worrying me,” Dimple fretted, trailing behind his companion as he trudged through the roadside bog, over a dilapidated median fence, and down to the shore of some reeking, trash littered lagoon, abandoned but for a few shoddy rowboats and an evidently-outmoded concrete landing at its far end.
“What the hell is this place?” Dimple wondered aloud.
Mob sat, hugged his tucked knees against his chin.
There was a horrible, low sucking sound as the water rose into a brackish spout. Dimple practically leapt back, shocked by the sight of Mob’s hair, the fabric of his uniform, shuddering in their familiar pool of self-contained static.
“Sh-Shigeo!” The spirit cried. “What are you doing!?”
The waterspout flipped on its side and swirled into a ring over their heads. From the sodden, empty lakebottom, glass bottles and suffocating fish and algaed stones rose and then smashed, so fantastic and frightening in their clatter, against the rocky shore upon which Mob sat. Dimple caught a shard of glass slice through Mob’s shirtsleeve, though it certainly didn’t slow the horror unfolding before him.
The treetops began to pull towards his body, needles slipping from their branches and bursting in spiny andromedae of green and gold.
“Shigeo, please!” Dimple called. Pride be damned, the spirit was downright terrified. He thought he’d seen Mob at his worst - prompted it, even - but no, this was worse.
“I hate him,” some strange, unfamiliar voice droned. Dimple dared to float around to the boy’s side, and was shocked to find a teary, flustered scowl slapped across his face. “I never want to see him again.”
Dimple glanced aside. “Oh, kid, I don’t know if -”
“He’s a liar,” Mob snarled; a shower of droplets from the vortex above shot down and shattered around them. “A self-centered, cowardly -” more rain, in harder, sharper bursts; the droplets started hardening to sleet - “inconsiderate - I - I - damn him!”
Such tame language, yet Dimple flinched at the syllable, the bite behind it.
“I wish I could argue,” the spirit muttered resentfully. “Don’t let him get you down like this, Shigeo; he’s not worth the energy. Let’s head home.”
“He acts as if I can’t see his every manipulative move,” Mob continued, ignoring his companion. “He wishes I were so clueless.”
Another shower of sleet. Its psychic charge stung Dimple’s form, and he sought some hasty shelter beneath the hunched torso of its perpetrator. For a while, he hid, tucked away between Mob’s limbs and eyeing the perpetual storm surrounding their spot. Water kept falling and rising back into the ring, though the process had begun to lose its force.
“Shigeo,” Dimple said, a bit sternly, “I think it’s time to head back.”
No reply.
The spirit tentatively drifted out to find the boy’s eyelids fluttering shut, his head nodding precariously back and forth in whiplashed snaps.
Again, “Shigeo -”
“Okay,” the boy murmured. “We can -” he paused, let out a tiny sneeze, and shuddered. “We can go.”
Dimple sighed at the sight, fluttered down to take Mob’s hand and pull him up alongside him.
They sat in silence for the majority of the train ride back. Only as familiar buildings began to make themselves visible over the horizon did one of them speak up - or both, as it were.
“Listen, kid, I don’t blame you for -”
“I’m not going in to work tomorrow.”
Dimple paused, swallowed. “Oh?”
“Just thinking about seeing him again makes me -” his hands clenched into fists before relaxing again. “I can’t. I need… time off, I think.”
Dimple looked the kid up and down. Whatever he was feeling - and Dimple could imagine; sure - was evidently new, a soreness in the very foundation of what kept him stable. What could he cling to now, if not his most trusted supporter?
Or so he thought. Dimple drifted down to settle on Mob’s shoulder - he could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t simply splash more salt in the wound.