Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Reigen kicks someone in the jaw.

That’s probably the best that can be said about his showing in this particular fight. It’s a solid hit, sending the man careening back into the bookshelf—Reigen hadn’t realized he could still kick that high, and is pleasantly surprised—and the man doesn’t get up right away, which is even better.

Then one of his other assailants gets an arm around his throat from behind, and it all goes downhill from there. He takes Reigen’s sharp elbow to the gut without loosening his hold, and the third one punches Reigen in the solar plexus. It knocks the wind out of him, and they manage to force him down against his desk without too much effort, knocking over his cold corner-store coffee and scattering papers across the floor.

Reigen is still trying to pull air into his lungs when they close the handcuffs around his wrists. So: things could definitely have gone better. It was still a good kick, though.

They go through his pockets, tossing everything onto his desk. By the time they turn him around again, Bookshelf Guy is back on his feet, shaking off the effects of the hit. He locks eyes with Reigen and walks forward, arms stiff—ah, shit—and punches him hard in the face.

Reigen manages to turn his head just enough to avoid a broken nose. He takes the hit across the cheek instead, sagging back into the hold on his arms.

Bookshelf Guy winds up for another punch, but goes still at the sound of the lock turning in the door.

Oh, thank god. Serizawa left for class twenty minutes ago, but maybe he forgot something—

“Hello? Anyone there? Why’d you lock the door?”

Tome rounds the corner and stops, freezing in place. There is a quiet thunk as her schoolbag hits the floor.

Oh, fuck. He forgot she was coming in today.

“Tome, run,” Reigen says, low and urgent.

As long as she gets out of here, she can call for help. That’s the most favourable outcome in this scenario. He can tell she’s thinking the same thing, because she tenses, hand moving unconsciously to the pocket of her blazer, and starts back toward the door. Reigen kicks out at Bookshelf Guy’s knee, but is brought up short by the press of metal against his neck.

“Stop,” says the man holding the knife, “Or we’ll kill him.”

It’s probably a bluff, but it’s enough to make Tome hesitate.

“Go, Tome. I’ll be fine,” Reigen says. His calm, confident smile falters somewhat as the knife presses in. It cuts slowly across the side of his neck, and Tome makes a small sound as it draws blood.

“Be reasonable, girl. No one has to get hurt,” says Knife Guy.

The man on Reigen’s right lets go of his arm and starts walking forward, obviously planning to get between Tome and the door.

“To—ngh,” Reigen says as the tip of the knife jabs upward, into the underside of his jaw.

“Stop talking.”

Reigen looks back at Tome and realizes that she’s not going to leave. She looks terrified—her hands are shaking—but she doesn’t move. A few seconds later, and her exit is cut off.

“Grab her,” says Knife Guy. Tome backs away from the man in the doorway, and Reigen’s fists clench uselessly behind his back.

“Come on, she’s just a kid. She doesn’t even know the guy you’re looking for,” Reigen says, lying through his teeth. “You kidnap her, and you’ll have the whole city looking for you.”

Knife Guy’s grip on his arm tightens.

“I told you to stop talking,” he says.

Bookshelf Guy walks forward, moving right up into Reigen’s space. Reigen flinches slightly as his hand comes up and undoes Reigen’s tie. He slides it out from under Reigen’s collar and takes no small satisfaction in gagging him with it.

Bastard. He’s really glad he kicked this guy in the face.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” Bookshelf Guy says, stepping back. “You’re going to come with us quietly, like we’re all just going for a walk. You’re going to get into the car without a fight, and neither of you will get hurt. Understand?”

Tome nods, eyes wide. The third man has her in an arm lock.

That is, essentially, how it goes.

There’s a moment after they reach the car when Reigen realizes they’re going to be separated, and makes his displeasure at this arrangement known—he digs his heels in and struggles against his captors’ hold. Then a hand slams his head into the side of the car, putting an effective end to any further resistance.

“Don’t!” Tome says, stricken, but they pull her away.

Tome gets into the back seat, and they throw Reigen, still dazed, into the trunk.

Tears have always come easily for Tome. Sure, maybe it’s manipulative (Reigen has called her on it a couple of times, the hypocrite). But it’s useful. And Reigen is always telling her to use the tools at hand.

She shifts a little closer to the door. There’s a good amount of space between her and the man across from her, but he still makes her uneasy. At least he’s not the one with the knife, or the guy who hurt Reigen earlier. The sudden, casual violence of that still has her on edge.

She starts to cry. Not loudly—she doesn’t want to provoke them—but with the slow, slightly stifled rhythm of someone trying not to. She keeps a covert eye on the scenery passing by as she does. The two in the front ignore her, but the man across from her keeps eyeing her with an uncomfortable look on his face.

“Hey, kid, we’re not going to hurt you,” he says after a few minutes. He literally twisted her arm earlier, so she doesn’t find that statement particularly reassuring.

She peeks over, like she’s afraid to look at him. It’s not entirely a lie.

“Where are you taking me? I want to go home,” she says with a hiccupy little sob.

“This deal goes down okay, and we’ll let you go. You’re just here for insurance.”

To keep Reigen in line, is probably what that means. He doesn’t seem like he’s lying. She’s gotten pretty good at reading people over the past few months.

He doesn’t say what will happen if the deal doesn’t go down okay.

“You will? You promise?”

“Yeah. You’ll be home before you know it.” He gives her a reassuring smile, and she nods hesitantly. She scales back from crying to the occasional sniffle.

“Tome, right? How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” she answers cautiously.

She’s not getting any creeper vibes off him, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.

He sighs. “I have a daughter around your age. Maila. She’s just finishing middle school.”

Oh. Good, a parent. She can probably count on at least a little sympathy from him.

“Hey Yamada, don’t tell her your fucking life story. She’s a hostage,” snaps the guy in the passenger seat. That puts an end to that.

Then they start talking among themselves, which basically amounts to the same thing, but she’s not complaining. She listens, keeping her ears open for any useful information. It’s a long drive. They leave the city entirely, and Tome no longer has any idea where they are beyond ‘somewhere North-ish’. She catches a glimpse of a road sign a little while later—they’re on Syrup Road—but she doesn’t know how far out they are. She can’t see the dash clock from where she’s sitting and she doesn’t want to lean in to check.

She hopes Reigen’s okay. They hit him pretty hard, and he was already hurt. And while the interior of the car is heated, it’s probably not nearly as warm in the trunk. There’s no snow on the ground yet, but it’s been getting steadily colder since November started.

Are car trunks ventilated? Kidnappers wouldn’t put people in the trunk if they could suffocate, right?

They eventually turn off onto a dirt road, passing through a protective screen of pine trees to what looks like an empty field. There’s nothing there, no buildings or anything. Tome has a sudden, vivid image of being taken out into that field and shot. No one knows where they are. They’ll never know what happened to them. Her nails bite into her palms.

The others all leave the car, doors opening and slamming shut, but she’s frozen in her seat.

The door beside her opens in a rush of cold air.

“Get out.”

She hunches down. She can’t make herself move. Her whole body is shaking.

“Now—” A hand grabs at her arm, and she shrinks back.

“Okada, wait. Let me try.”

The hand lets go.

“Hey, Tome. Can you look at me?”

The voice is a lot closer to her head level. She looks over. It’s that Yamada guy, the one with the kid. He’s crouched slightly in the dirt, in that classic ‘talking to children’ pose.

“No one’s going to hurt you. I promised, remember? But you need to get out of the car.”

She can see the other two standing impatiently behind him.

“Can you do that?”

Slowly, she nods.

Yamada offers her a hand up, and after a moment she takes it.

Once Tome’s standing clear, they pop the trunk, and Okada hauls Reigen out by the back of his suit.

He looks awful. His forehead is one giant bruise, and the side of his face is noticeably swollen; he blinks rapidly in the sudden light. His eyes land on Tome for a moment before drifting sideways, toward the field. He seems to be having trouble standing. Okada has to manhandle him upright, and he keeps slumping over.

Maybe he’s faking it, to keep them off-guard. She hopes so.

They all march into the centre of the field. Yamada is holding onto her arm again, but this time it’s more of a guiding hand on her elbow. She could probably break free, if she had anywhere to run to. And if Reigen weren’t (possibly) concussed.

Further in, Tome notices the ground to their right sloping upward into a small hill. They circle around it. On the far side, there’s a flat concrete surface with a large, sturdy-looking metal door.

Well, at least they’re not going to be shot. Probably.

Chapter Text

Past the door is a set of metal steps leading down to a second, smaller metal door. Tome’s starting to think they’ve been kidnapped by some kind of doomsday cult.

Through that is a large room with sloped ceilings and walls. It’s furnished to look a little less like a sad subterranean room made of concrete—there are carpets on the floor and comfortable-looking couches along the walls. There’s even an honest-to-god pool table, and a bar with a neat row of bar stools. There’s the entrance to a hallway at the far side, presumably leading to more sad subterranean rooms.

There’s a man sitting on one of the bar stools, drinking a beer by himself. He looks up as they file into the bunker.

Oh, god. He’s wearing a fedora.

That’s the first thing she notices about him. Otherwise he looks fairly unremarkable, with shoulder-length brown hair and dark eyes.

“You succeeded? Good.” He gives them a lazy salute.

Tome glances at Reigen to see if he recognizes him, but mostly he looks confused. He’s not even looking at anything in particular.

Then the guy notices Tome. “What the hell—who’s the girl?”

“She walked in on us during the mission,” Yamada says. “They seem to know each other. She had a key to the office.”

‘The mission’, that implies some kind of organization, right? Or maybe they’re just a bunch of crackpot survivalists living in a bomb shelter.

“Whatever,” the man says, turning back to his drink. “Find a place for her somewhere. We can discuss it later.”

And that seems to be that.

They head down the hallway. Okada half-carries Reigen into a room near the end of the hall, and Yamada pauses, considering. Tome sees her chance.

“Wait,” she says, and pulls at his sleeve, “Mr. Yamada, please don’t separate us.” She lets tears spill out of her eyes. “He—he’s hurt, and I don’t want to be alone. I’m so scared.”

Her freak-out getting out of the car is probably working in her favour. She can see him wavering, and plays her final card. “Please. I want to be with my dad. I won’t cause any trouble.”

“He’s your father?”

She sniffs. “Yeah.” She does some quick mental math. “My adoptive father. Mom divorced him, but he’s still my dad, you know?”

He folds.

He leads her to the end of the hall, and they head through the open door on the right. It’s just as dismal as the other rooms, but this one’s been cleared out almost completely.

Reigen is sitting on a mattress on the ground, slumped against the far wall. There’s a D-ring bolted into the wall around the level of his shoulders, with a set of long-chain handcuffs threaded through it. Okada is in the process of fastening them around Reigen’s wrists.

They both look up when she and Yamada enter the room. Reigen’s eyes are still a little glazed. If it’s an act, it’s a good one.

“What?”

“I don’t see why we can’t keep them together, as long as they behave,” Yamada says. “It’ll make our job easier.”

Okada snorts. “You’re soft, Yamada. Fine, like I give a shit.” He gestures brusquely at Tome. “You, girl. Come here.”

She lets go of Yamada’s sleeve. “Thank you,” she tells him quietly.

She sits down next to Reigen, and Okada closes the other cuff around her wrist.

“If you make any trouble, we will separate you again,” Yamada tells her. She nods, and the two of them leave the room, locking the door behind them.

It looks like they’d been using this room as storage, before they converted it into a murder dungeon. There’s an old desk at the other side of the room, surrounded by dusty cardboard boxes. A single lightbulb hangs down from the ceiling.

There’s a drain in the floor. She tries not to stare too hard at that.

There are no cameras, as far as she can tell. She waits a minute in case they’re still outside the door, before nudging Reigen’s shoulder.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Do you actually have a concussion, or what?”

He winks at her.

“You faker!” she hisses, punching his arm. The swell of relief leaves her a little shaky. “I was actually worried, you know!”

He pulls the tie out of his mouth, grimacing a little. “Sorry. Are you okay? They didn’t hurt you?”

“No, I’m fine.” She can tell he’s unconvinced, so she says, “Really. They mostly ignored me. I cried a little so they’d let their guard down. That’s why,” she waves a hand encompassing her red eyes and blotchy face. She’s never been a graceful crier. “The guy with the square-frame glasses, Yamada, he’s got a daughter, so. It worked.” She doesn’t mention freezing up. Her reaction seems kind of dumb, in retrospect.

She gives him a quick run-down of what she learned on the ride over.

“The short guy with the totally-not-overcompensating moustache is Okada. He’s the one who introduced your face to the side of the car.”

“Oh, him,” Reigen says, rubbing his forehead. “I kicked him in the head, earlier. Seems like he holds a grudge.”

“Nice,” Tome says, picturing it. “He could stand to be kicked in the head more often.” The mental image is very satisfying. “The guy with the side-part is Nakano. He’s super bitter about his wife cheating on him. He wouldn’t shut up about it. Their leader is Ishihara. They said something about breaking someone out of prison? They think he can give them back something they’ve lost.”

“Well, that’s great. I’m sure that’s not going to end badly for anyone.” Reigen sighs.

“Do you know who they were talking about?”

“I have a guess. They probably used to be in Claw.”

“Oh,” she says. Nice to know they’ve been kidnapped by a bunch of has-been psychic terrorists (no offence to Serizawa). “They didn’t use any powers, though.”

“I’m thinking they were part of the ground team, maybe. Their powers were borrowed. They lost them when Mob beat their boss, or something. I don’t remember how that was supposed to work.”

“How did you figure it out?” Tome asks, impressed.

“Ah, well—I notice the little details, Tome. You’ll get to my level one day.” He pauses for a moment. “Plus, the Claw symbol on the wall was a bit of a giveaway.”

“Oh, shut up,” she grumbles, as he laughs at her embarrassment. She didn’t even see it.

“It was above the inside of the door. I’m assuming you didn’t look back after we came through,” he says, still smiling.

“I was too busy worrying about you, you jerk,” she says.

“Yeah, sorry about that; I’m hoping it bought us some time at least. They said they’re after Mob. They probably think he’ll break Suzuki out of prison for them if they threaten me. I told them you don’t know Mob, by the way, so don’t forget.”

“Okay.” She hesitates. “I told them you’re my dad, so.”

Reigen’s expression stills.

“I, okay. Good to know.”

“Adoptive, obviously. Since you’re not really old enough to be my biological dad.”

“Right,” he says. He actually looks a little off-balance.

“You and mom had a messy divorce. She doesn’t talk about you anymore,” she says, starting to get into it. “She doesn’t really approve of me still coming to see you, but she doesn’t want to be overbearing. She wants me to make my own choices. She got—”

“Tome,” Reigen says, cutting her off.

“Too much?”

“No, no, it’s good. But keep it simple. It’ll be easier to remember in the moment.”

“Right.”

She pulls at the handcuff a little. It looks pretty sturdy.

“Do you have a bobby pin?” Reigen asks, following her gaze.

“Do I look like I have a bobby pin?” she retorts. She gestures at her hair.

“I don’t know; they’re useful. I usually carry a couple.” He gives a mournful sigh. “They emptied out my pockets, unfortunately. I don’t have anything.”

Neither does she. Although…

Tome looks thoughtfully at the boxes across the room.

“What do you think are in those?” she says.

“Why don’t we find out?” he replies, raising an eyebrow.

They’re far enough away that one person alone wouldn’t be able to reach them, but the two of them together have a good chance of it. Reigen holds his cuffed wrist flush against the D-ring in the wall, and Tome stretches as far as rest of the chain will allow. The edge of the cuff digs painfully into her wrist.

“Wait, come back. You should wrap that first,” Reigen says.

She sits down on the mattress again.

“Use your scarf thing,” he says, gesturing at his neck.

“Scarf thing,” she repeats. She undoes her bow and pulls it off.

“I don’t know what it’s called. Here, hold out your hand.”

She does, and he pushes the cuff further up her arm before wrapping the fabric around her wrist. He ties it off with a flourish.

“What about you? Give me your tie, I’ll do it,” she says, reaching. Then she cringes. “Ugh, it’s wet!”

“I wonder why,” Reigen says, deadpan. He holds up his wrist.

They try again. Stretched as far out as she can go, she can just about nudge the nearest box with the tip of her shoe.

“It’s too far,” she says. “You try, you’re taller.”

He does, and after a few minutes, he manages to hook the edge of the box with his foot and pull it close enough to reach.

“Yeah!” she says, and he brings it over to the wall.

It’s full of papers.

“Oh. How boring,” she sighs.

“No, this might be good,” Reigen says, digging through the box. He starts flipping open file folders and thumbing through sheaves of documents. “Aha!” He holds up a bundle of stapled papers and pulls off the paperclip holding them together.

“Can you pick the lock with that?”

“Sure,” he says, digging through for more. “I’ll teach you.”

He gathers four of them into a pile, and starts repacking the box. Then he carefully nudges it back into the spot they found it, scuffing up the dust to hide the drag marks.

He shows her how to bend the paperclip into the right shape, and demonstrates. It looks surprisingly simple, but it takes her a few tries to get the hang of it.

“Well done,” he says as she pops open the cuff.

She grins at him. “This is so cool!”

“Yup. Why don’t you put that back on, and try again.”

She does. When she gets it for the third time, he pats her on the shoulder.

“Nice work, Tome.” He hands her one of the unused paperclips. “Hide this. Somewhere that would be hard to find if someone searched you.”

She looks up at him, frowning.

“Just in case,” he says.

She thinks for a moment, then flips up the edge of her skirt. She digs a small hole in the stitching and pushes the paperclip through to the inside of the hem so it rests at the centre of a pleat.

“What now?” she asks, looking up. The rest of the paperclips have disappeared as well.

“If we’re going to escape, we need a proper plan first. Running blind will just get us captured again.” He looks over at the door. “The lock’s on the other side. We don’t know a whole lot about these guys, or what kind of schedule they keep. So it looks like we’ll have to wait and see what they do next.”

The opportunity comes sooner than she was hoping.

“Giraffe,” Tome says, staring up at the ceiling.

“Elephant,” Reigen replies. He’s leaning back against the wall with his hands folded behind his head.

“Tiger.”

“Rat.”

“Ta—shit,” Tome says, as the pipes in the wall start up the clamour that signals the end of the round.

“That was so much shorter than last time,” Tome grumbles.

“That’s just the way it goes, Tome. Better luck next time.”

“You are such a sore winner—!”

There’s a loud scrape as the lock in the door slides open, and they both stiffen, looking up. Reigen drops his hands down, and Tome scrambles back upright.

She’d almost forgotten to be afraid, while they were talking. The door opens, and Nakano and Okada enter the room. There’s a flash of light and the sound of a picture being taken.

“Feeling better?” Nakano says to Reigen, lowering his phone.

“Sure,” Reigen says.

“Good. Hands on your head.”

He complies, and Okada comes forward with a second pair of handcuffs. He fastens them around Reigen’s wrists before unlocking the cuff attached to the wall.

“Let’s go,” he says, dragging him up by the arm.

“Dad—”

“Don’t worry, Tome. I’ll be fine,” Reigen says without missing a beat. He smiles at her over his shoulder, and they pull him out of the room.

Chapter Text

They head back down the hallway. Reigen catches a glimpse of the other rooms as they go past—there’s a washroom right next to their cell, no wonder the pipes are so loud—before they turn him to the right, into the last room before the front end of the hallway. It looks like a dining room, with a long table and eight chairs. One of them is already occupied.

This must be Ishihara, going by what Tome overheard. He looks like he’s in his early twenties, dressed casually in jeans and a button-up shirt. He’s surprisingly young for the supposed leader of the group.

The fedora really isn’t a good look for him. It makes his head look far too big for his body.

“Hey, great, sit down,” he says, waving them inside.

They sit Reigen down in the chair across from Ishihara and then sit on either side of him, boxing him in.

“So, good news for you and the kid,” Ishihara says, leaning back in his chair. “Our friends made contact with that student of yours.”

“Former student,” Reigen says.

“Sure, sure. He’s agreed to our proposal, provided he hears from you first. So if he pulls it off, you two can be out of here as soon as we get confirmation.”

He’s hard to read. Reigen finds it very unlikely that they’ll actually let them go, but Ishihara doesn’t have any obvious tells.

“Unfortunately for him, we’re not going to be letting you talk to each other. Too many variables, you understand. They might try tracing the call, you might try to leak information; things could get ugly.”

“Right,” Reigen says.

He gives Reigen a bright smile. “Good! So we’re going to send him a nice picture of you two, and you’re going to record a message for him. Let him know you’re doing okay.”

That should be fine, he can still—

Ishihara slides a sheet of paper across the table. “You’ll be reading this.”

Oh.

“Really?” Reigen says, scanning it quickly. “He’s going to know it’s a script. This doesn’t sound like me at all. First, I never call him that. And see, there? I wouldn’t say that either. No one says that.”

“I don’t care,” Ishihara says. “That’s what you’re going to read.”

Nakano places a smartphone on the table in front of Reigen.

“Press record when you’re ready,” he says, voice mild. Reigen glances over at him, and then takes a second, longer look. He’s pulled that knife out again.

Damn, okay.

He clears his throat and looks down at the phone. The clock reads 8:07pm, meaning they’ve been missing for just about four hours. He presses record.

“Hi, Shigeo,” he says, voice flat. “This is Reigen. It’s the twelfth of November. Tome and I are both perfectly fine.”

“Stop. That sounded sarcastic. Start again,” Ishihara says.

“Oh, come on. Anyone would sound sarcastic saying ‘perfectly fine’ because nobody—”

He breaks off abruptly as Nakano jabs him in the neck with the knife.

“Do you have some kind of neck fetish? Stop tha—ow!”

Nakano grabs onto Reigen’s arm with a surprisingly strong grip. Reigen freezes as he very deliberately digs the blade into the cut on his neck.

“Start again.”

He does.

“That was better,” Ishihara says when he’s done. “I think we can send that. Flip it over.”

Reigen turns over the paper, keeping his head as still as possible. There are three shorter messages written out, each dated consecutively from tomorrow through to the end of the week.

Reigen looks up again, uneasy. “What, so if you kill us, he’ll think we’re still alive? He’s not going to fall for that.”

Ishihara laughs. “Nah. We’re not going to kill you, as long as he keeps cooperating. But if anything happens during the week—you try something, and someone gets hurt—you two know each other pretty well. He’d probably be able to hear it in your voice. We don’t want him getting needlessly agitated, so you’re going to record those now. And they’re going to sound just as normal as the first one. Understand?”

“You mean, someone’s-stabbing-me-in-the-neck normal?” Reigen says without the slightest hint of sarcasm.

“Works for me. He knows you’re not here for a spa day.” He waves his hand carelessly, but his eyes are cold. “We may need to record something more motivating later on. We can workshop it then if you want.”

“You—what do you think is going to happen if he succeeds? Do you really think Claw is just going to pick up where it left off? It’s been a year. Anyone with any sense has moved on already.” Reigen manages to keep his voice steady.

“That’s not really your problem, is it? Now why don’t you get started; that looks pretty painful.”

After the recordings are done to Ishihara’s satisfaction, Okada brings Reigen to the washroom. Reigen does a quick search through it for anything useful, but it’s very bare bones. It looks like they cleared out all the supplies beforehand. He washes the worst of the blood off his neck while he has the opportunity. A lot of it has soaked into the inside of his collar, but there’s not much he can do about that. He pulls up the side of his jacket so it’s not as obvious.

When he returns to the cell, Tome’s sitting behind what looks like dinner—there’s a small stack of protein bars and two bottles of water.

Tome waits until they lock the door.

“What did they want? You were gone for a long time.”

He fills her in while they eat.

“That’s—” She makes a shocked noise, and he looks up. “Your neck—”

He reaches up; it’s started bleeding again.

“It’s fine. I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”

Tome gives him a look laden with skepticism.

“More importantly, we now have water bottles.” He tosses his up and catches it again.

“So?”

“So, show me that water bottle thing. The flippy thing you kids do,” he says, deliberately obtuse.

It’s enough to distract her.

“Are you kidding? You’re not that old! And no one does that anymore anyway,” she says.

“So I’m out of touch with the trends. Do you have something better to do?”

“Fine. But you need to drink more of it first.”

The first time he lands one, he turns to her with a grin.

“Wait, isn’t there that thing you’re supposed to do with your arms—some kind of gesture—”

“Do not—don’t you dare!” she says, laughing, and pulls his arms back down.

The game comes to an abrupt end a few throws later when his hand slips, and the bottle rolls to the other side of the room. It disappears under the desk.

“Well, it’s gone forever,” Tome says. “You were done with that, right?”

“I am now,” he says.

They observe a moment of silence for their loss, broken only by the clanging of the pipes.

A little while later, they’re carted out one at a time for another washroom break. Then they settle in for the night. They end up splitting the mattress crosswise, lying back-to-back with their legs hanging over the long edge. It doesn’t look like their captors are going to turn the light off, but he’s exhausted enough that he should be able to sleep regardless.

“Hey, Reigen,” Tome says. “The others are looking for us, right?”

“Yeah,” he replies.

“Do you think they’ll be able to find us on their own?”

“Don’t lie to me,” she says fiercely, before he’s even opened his mouth. “I want your actual opinion.”

He pauses.

“It’s possible,” he says eventually. “You can’t just build a secret bunker outside a city without anyone knowing. One of our former Claw contacts might know about it, at least.”

“But you don’t think they will,” she prompts, when he stops.

“It depends. If they do, we could be rescued tomorrow. But this place is pretty hard to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for,” he says, sighing. “And it sounded like they have a window of about three days before things start getting—unpleasant. Well, more unpleasant.”

“Unpleasant how?” Tome asks.

“I don’t know. And I don’t really want to find out.”

“So we need to escape before then.”

“Or at least get a message out. We can talk about it tomorrow, okay? Get some sleep.”

The next morning is equal parts boredom and disappointment. Breakfast is protein bars and water. When they get out of here, Tome’s never going to be able to look at a protein bar again. After their washroom break, they pick the cuffs and search the rest of the room, careful not to disturb the dust too obviously. The desk drawers are all empty, and the other boxes are all similarly full of papers.

“Great,” Tome mutters, closing up the last box.

“Hey, it was useful the first time,” Reigen says, crouched by the door.

“I guess. You know what’d be really useful? A map, or a blueprint, or something. Do you hear anything?”

He shakes his head. “Only faintly. I can’t make out any words.”

Unsuccessful, they return to their places on the mattress and chain themselves up again.

“So, any ideas yet?” Tome asks.

“Sort of. I’m not really sure the benefits outweigh the risks on this one.”

“What?”

“If we just want to get a message out, we could steal a cell phone. We’d probably have at least a couple minutes before they realize it’s gone—enough time to send a text with our location,” Reigen says, scratching his head. “We’d need to delete it after, and ideally send out a decoy text with something less useful. If they think they know what information we’ve sent, they’re less likely to panic.”

“Wouldn’t they punish us for that?”

“Yeah, probably. They’d separate us at the very least. And we’d be operating on the assumption that their phone’s unlocked. Hell, I’m not even sure they get cell service down here. I didn’t think to check earlier.”

“I might be able to find out,” Tome says.

She makes small talk with Yamada on her washroom breaks. He doesn’t seem to mind lingering outside the door for a couple of minutes after Tome comes out—he seems lonely. Kidnappers don’t spend a whole lot of time socializing with each other, apparently.

“Do you guys really live here full-time?” she asks the next time she sees him.

“For now. Once this is over, we should be able to go home,” he says, apparently unaware of the chilling implications of that for someone they’re holding prisoner.

“That’s good,” she says weakly. “Do you at least get to talk to your family? Your daughter must miss you a lot.”

His hand drifts toward his pocket. “Sometimes. I called her yesterday, actually. She has a geography test coming up next week.”

“Well, wish her luck for me,” Tome says.

Oh man. How awkward would that be? ‘Hey, darling! The girl I kidnapped wishes you luck on your geography test!’

It’s not really that funny, actually. It’s kind of sad. He’s been behaving like a parent chaperone on a school trip, which is either seriously deluded or shows that he feels more guilty about what they’re doing than he lets on. Maybe both.

“I’m surprised you get cell service down here,” she says as they’re walking back.

“Yeah, it’s pretty unreliable,” Yamada says, making her heart sink. “If you don’t want to get disconnected you have to go outside.”

“That sucks,” Tome says.

“Yamada’s phone is in his right jacket pocket,” Tome reports afterward. “Also, he thinks he’s going home after this, so. Either we’re dead and can’t identify him to the cops, or he thinks Claw’s going to take over and it won’t matter anymore.”

“Both are wonderful options,” Reigen says.

“They do have service, but it’s spotty. We might still be able to get a message out, though. I can get a look at his phone, see if he has a passcode. He probably has pictures of his kid. Parents love showing those around, right?”

“Be careful,” Reigen says sharply.

“I know! I’m being careful.”

“I think we should table the phone idea for now. We need a plan that doesn’t end in getting caught.”

Lunch is protein bars.

“I feel kind of bad for him,” Tome says, rolling her water bottle back and forth.

“Who? Yamada?”

“Yeah.”

Reigen hums. “That’s pretty normal, I think.”

“What, Stockholm Syndrome?”

“No, it doesn’t have to be. Just—you’re a good person, Tome. You’ve been talking to this guy, hearing about his family. He’s been nice, as much as you can say that about someone who’s kidnapped you. It makes sense you’d be a little sympathetic.”

“It’s dumb, though. You think if they decide to kill us, he’d try to stop them?”

“I don’t know. Depends on why he’s here in the first place, and how afraid he is of the others. I wouldn’t count on it.”

Dinner is also protein bars.

“Can you die of a protein overdose?” Tome says. She flicks the wrapper despondently over the edge of the mattress.

“Probably.”

“Ugh. I’m going to eat an entire bag of shrimp crackers after this. Just tip the whole thing straight into my mouth.”

“Shrimp crackers? You need to think bigger. MobDonald’s. I’m going to order everything on the menu and eat until I pass out.”

“Yeah, okay, rich guy. Some of us don’t run our own business,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“I could buy you something off the kid’s menu, if you ask nicely.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

He laughs. “As your father, I’m shocked to hear you use that kind of language, Tome.”

“Yeah? What’re you gonna do, ground me?”

“Too soon,” he says, groaning.

After their last washroom break of the night, they start working on their plan.

Chapter Text

They wait until after breakfast.

“If we can’t get a cell phone, our best chance at rescue is getting to the road and flagging someone down. That means our biggest threat—assuming we make it out—is the car. We can’t have our whole plan hinge on the chance that our guy has the car keys.”

“You don’t know how to hotwire a car?”

“Strangely, no. And we probably won’t have time to try to disable it. It’d be better to take it out of the equation altogether if we can.”

“So we need someone to leave in the car. That would leave us with two—you could take two guys in a fight, right?”

“Maybe. Let’s try and avoid that if we can.”

“Fine, whatever. I have an idea.”

Tome takes a couple of deep, even breaths, leaning over the washroom sink. If she doesn’t pull this off their plan is tanked before it even starts. She just has to con a gullible man into feeling sorry for her.

Lying to a kidnapper should not make her feel this guilty.

She comes out of the washroom, ducking her head. Her eyes are shiny with unshed tears.

“Um, Mr. Yamada?” she says hesitantly.

He looks up. “Tome? What’s wrong?”

She doesn’t even need to fake the embarrassment. Her face flushes red entirely of its own accord.

“I—I started my period,” she whispers. She clenches her hands in her skirt, looking down.

His eyes follow the movement and catch on the little smear of blood on her leg.

“I only need a little bit. Don’t be such a baby.”

“Hey, you’re not the one who has to open up the same wound for the third time. Cut me some slack, here.”

“Cut—was that a pun?”

“Ha ha. If this gets infected, the hospital bills are coming out of your paycheck.”

“Oh! Oh, it’s okay, Tome.” Yamada’s expression is eerily similar to how her father reacted to her first period—vaguely uncomfortable but determinedly supportive. Then a spasm of panic crosses his features. “Do you have anything…?”

She lets out a little sob, and shakes her head.

“No, of course not. Uh—” he dithers for a moment. “I can go pick something up. Don’t cry, okay?”

“You will?” she asks, and he gives her a gentle pat on the shoulder.

He returns her to the cell with a big wad of tissues.

Reigen sits up, looking between Yamada and her tear-stained face.

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing, dad,” she says. “I just—I got my period.”

His expression shifts from protective anger to something a little more awkward.

“It’s okay. Mr. Yamada said he’d pick up some tampons for me,” she says.

Reigen’s face twitches, like the word ‘tampons’ is psychologically damaging.

“Thank you so much,” Reigen says to him.

“It’s no problem,” he says, closing the cuff around her wrist.

“When will you be back?” Tome asks.

He smiles at her. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

They wait thirty minutes, counting out the time. Reigen picks open his cuff, moving his freed hand behind his leg.

“Hello? Is someone there? Please, I need to use the washroom!”

This is the shakier part of their plan. Without Yamada, there’s no guarantee that anyone will care enough to let her out.

She keeps yelling for an excruciating two minutes, before they finally hear the lock slide open in the door.

“What?” Okada snaps from the doorway.

“I need to use the washroom. Please,” she says.

It looks like he’s seriously considering just closing the door again. She waits, holding her breath, until he sighs angrily.

“Fucking—fine.”

He leaves for a minute and then returns with the handcuff key. He comes forward and unlocks her cuff, staying out of Reigen’s reach.

“Get up, let’s go—” He pulls her up, and they turn to leave the room.

Tome doesn’t see what happens, but Okada’s hand falls away from her arm. When she turns around Reigen has him bent backward, forearms clamped around his neck. It only takes a few seconds for Okada to go completely limp.

“That was fast,” Tome whispers.

“Yup. And he’s going to wake up pretty fast too, so search him,” Reigen says, pulling Okada over to the wall. Reigen snaps the cuffs around his wrists while Tome grabs the handcuff key and goes through his pockets.

“What—there’s nothing on him,” Tome says. She checks again, but there’s nothing. Not even a wallet. “Why doesn’t he have anything?” Her voice wavers. She looks up.

Reigen is frozen mid-motion, but recovers quickly. “We have to go. No turning back now,” he says. “Come on, Tome.”

He offers her a hand up. His expression is confident, but he’s paler than usual. His palm is sweaty.

They head toward the door.

“So, I noticed something earlier. You know the door at the end of the hall?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s an empty space above it that’s a little bit lighter than the rest of the wall. Perfectly rectangular, too. It got me thinking. What if there’s a second exit?”

“…Like an emergency exit—you think they took the sign down.”

“Yeah, exactly. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Place like this would be a deathtrap if you only had the one. We’ve seen all of the other doors in this hallway open at some point, but that one’s always been closed.”

They move silently into the hall, closing the cell door behind them. There’s no one in sight. They turn right, and Tome places a shaking hand on the door handle.

“What if it’s locked?”

“That’s the gamble. But it’s more likely that it’s not. They’ve just pissed off an incredibly powerful esper and they know it. If he finds this place, they need to be able to make a fast exit. You don’t want to be messing around with keys in a situation like that.”

It opens.

Through the door is a shorter stretch of hallway, with two doors on either side. A set of concrete stairs leads down to a narrow tunnel ahead.

Reigen stops at the stairs, looking back the way they came.

“Come on,” she whispers, pulling insistently on his arm.

“We should plan for the worst-case scenario. If something goes wrong and you get the opportunity to escape, do it. Don’t wait for me.”

“No way, I’m not—”

“No, listen, Tome. It’s much more likely that only one of us gets out. If I can distract them, you have a much better chance. You know where we are—you can lead people back here. They need at least one hostage, so it’s not like you’d be leaving me to die.”

“That is such bullshit! You don’t know what they’d do. And if they move you somewhere else, we’d never find you again. We need to escape together.”

“Tome—”

“No! You can’t ask me to leave you behind, that’s not fair. Promise me we’ll escape together, because I won’t go on my own.”

“…Yeah. Okay. I promise.”

“You’d better not be lying to me right now. I will turn around and come right back, I swear to god.”

“Stubborn little brat. I’ll try to think of something, okay?”

She pulls harder, her heart beating an urgent rhythm in her chest. He seems to waver for a moment, before turning back toward her.

“Ah, fuck,” he mutters, and lets himself be pulled along. They head down the stairs into the tunnel.

It’s a tight fit for the two of them, with a persistent damp chill that catches in her lungs. There are emergency lights embedded in the walls to either side, turning everything in the tunnel a bright, vivid red. It stretches for quite a distance. At one point there’s a roaring noise overhead, making them both jump.

“Car,” Reigen whispers. “We must be under the road.”

When they make it to the end, Tome nearly cries in relief. There’s a metal ladder bolted to the side of a concrete shaft leading up. Reigen takes the lead, testing the first few rungs before putting weight on them. They climb to the top, running up against a metal hatch in the ceiling. The hinges are stiff, but after a couple of tries Reigen manages to heave it open with the top of his shoulder.

It opens up into a narrow concrete room with a single door. There’s a plastic first aid kit mounted on the wall to the right of it, which Tome snatches up almost on impulse. If they get cut off from the road they’ll have to take their chances cross-country; if nothing else they can use it to finally bandage up Reigen’s neck.

Reigen pulls open the door and sunlight floods the narrow space, making them both flinch.

They’ve made it out. All they need to do now is head back in the direction they came and find the road.

Tome follows Reigen out the door and runs straight into his back.

Reigen was very good at making their escape seem like a game, masking the danger behind humour and the excitement of planning. Tome had to keep reminding herself of the consequences of failure. With how confident Reigen looked, it was easy to trust that everything would work itself out.

Tome peers out from behind Reigen, and her heart drops into her stomach.

“Hey, kids,” Ishihara says with a jaunty little wave. He’s leaning against a tree only a few meters from the door, holding a phone in one hand. “It looks like Nakano owes me some money—he didn’t think you’d notice the back door.” He pushes himself away from the tree, pocketing the phone.

“It was hard to miss,” Reigen says after a moment. His shoulders relax, and he takes a couple of steps forward. Tome follows, waiting for some kind of cue. Are they going to rush him?

“See, that’s what I thought, too. Nakano’s always underestimating people. Thankfully, it looks like you’re the same way.” Ishihara waves his hand to the side, and the door slams shut behind them.

Reigen stops again.

“Surprise! Now, you might be thinking: maybe he’s one of those awakened espers. Maybe that’s all he can do.” Ishihara gives them a very insincere smile. “It’s possible. Maybe if you can get close enough, you could take me out and still make it to the road.”

Reigen’s fingers twitch.

“How long were you standing there? I hope we didn’t make you wait,” Reigen says, voice light.

“Not too long. Just since you sent Yamada on that wild goose chase. I figured if you were going to try something, this would be the time to do it. Well done on that, by the way. Poor guy couldn’t leave fast enough. Won’t he be embarrassed when he finds out it was for nothing.”

Reigen slowly reaches back toward Tome, making a subtle grabbing motion. Tome inches forward and presses the handle of the hard plastic case into his hand.

“I gave you that three-day timeline for a reason, you know. If you were going to try to escape, might as well make it happen on my terms, am I right?”

“Oh, wow, really? Tell us more,” Reigen says.

“See, there’s that sarcasm again. You should really be more respe—”

Reigen heaves the case forward, throwing it at Ishihara’s head. Ishihara stops it in mid-air while Reigen follows through, closing the distance between them and driving his fist up into Ishihara’s right side. Ishihara folds forward around the hit and collapses to his knees.

Then there’s a flare of energy, knocking Reigen back toward Tome. She catches his arm to steady him.

“Time to go,” he says quickly, tucking his other hand into his pocket.

She’s just turning to run when their shadows surge out of the ground to envelop them, and everything around Tome goes dark. For a terrifying moment she can’t see, or move, or breathe; it feels like she’s been buried alive. Then her shadow peels back from her head.

Ishihara is still on the ground, bent over with his hand pressed against his abdomen. He’s leaning against the tree for support, gasping, face sheeted with sweat. It takes almost a full minute before he can speak at all.

“You fucking—hah. I’ll admit, you’re resourceful,” he says, laughing breathlessly. “Straight for the liver, too. Ouch.” His face twists into a tight smile. “But I think you’ll find that you’re outclassed.”

Reigen makes a strangled sound beside her, face turning red. Ishihara’s power doesn’t look like much from the outside; it just looks like Reigen’s standing in shade from the nose down.

It takes her a moment to realize what that means.

“Stop it!” Tome says, fighting uselessly against the hold. “Leave him alone!”

Ishihara gives her a considering look.

“You know, kid, you’re a bit of a problem,” he says. “This was supposed to be straightforward. I think it would’ve been, without you here. I really don’t think he’d be fighting this hard.” He flicks his hand out. Reigen inhales sharply as the shadows recede past his nose.

“What’s it going to take to make you stop?” Ishihara says, turning to Reigen. “Do I have to break your legs? Or maybe you’ll give up if we kill your daughter. We don’t really need her, anyway.”

Tome’s heart freezes in her chest.

“Or maybe not. Grief can be hard to predict. What do you think, kiddo? Do you have any insight on this?”

Tome stares at him in horrified silence. She looks over at Reigen, and stops. His expression is oddly reassuring. He rolls his eyes slightly, like he does sometimes after they deal with a particularly annoying client, and then flicks his eyes pointedly toward Ishihara.

Does he—want her to keep him talking? Does he have a plan?

“W-what kind of question is that?” she says, and her voice only shakes a little. “How about you just let us go?”

Ishihara laughs. “I can’t do that, kid. We really do need your dad.” He pauses thoughtfully. “But maybe we can compromise.”

He stands up slowly. It doesn’t look like he can straighten up all the way—one hand is still curled protectively around his side. He waves his free hand, and Tome nearly falls as he releases her.

“You made it this far. How’s this: I’ll give you a two minute head start. If you make it to the road and find help, you’re home free. If not, well, you can’t say I didn’t give you a chance.”

Tome gives him a distrustful look, and Ishihara smiles at her. “I’ll have to break his legs, of course. But you’d be safe. I’m sure he’d be willing to make the trade.”

Tome’s fists clench.

He would. She knows he would. Just like he has to know that she won’t—that there was never any universe in which she could.

She can feel furious tears welling up in her eyes, and it’s an effort to blink them back.

Ishihara watches her for a minute, smile growing. “You’re not going to go, are you? You’re really going to make the same mistake twice.” He shakes his head, laughing. “The logical thing would be to go. Bones heal. Hell, I might just break his legs anyway. There’s no advantage to staying. But you just can’t make yourself do it, can you? That’s too bad.”

She knows what he’s trying to do. It doesn’t make it any less awful.

“Was that supposed to be some kind of lesson?” she bites out, forcing the words past the lump in her throat. “What’re you trying to prove? That I care about my dad? Big fucking surprise!” Her voice cracks. “Just because nobody’s ever cared about you in your life, you pathetic—!”

Her shadow engulfs her again, up past her mouth, and she can no longer speak.

“I think that’s enough,” Ishihara says. “Let’s not say anything you’ll regret later. It’s time I checked in, anyway.”

He reaches toward his pocket. Then his hand stops, and he stills.

Despite not being able to move the lower half of his face, Reigen still manages to look unbelievably smug.

Ishihara looks over at him, and his impassive expression cracks. He reaches out and flicks his fingers up. Reigen’s hand jerks out of his pocket and pulls forward. He’s holding Ishihara’s phone, fingers clamped around the buttons on either side. There’s an active call.

Chapter Text

Ishihara walks up to Reigen and takes the phone out of his hand. He stares down at the screen for a second before ending the call. Tome catches a glimpse of it as he does—they’ve been connected with emergency services for nearly eight minutes.

“You’re going to regret doing that,” Ishihara says evenly, like a simple statement of fact. He takes a deep breath, and unlocks the phone to make another call.

“Nakano? …Yeah, but we have a problem. They called the cops. If Okada’s still alive, get him up and moving. If he can’t, leave him. Call Yamada and tell him to meet us at the fallback point. And tell him to turn on the police scanner, see how much time we have. Meet me here; I’m going to need your help.”

When he’s finished talking, he turns and hurls his phone at the concrete wall.

“Well, you’ve made things a whole lot more complicated,” Ishihara says. His voice is as tightly controlled as his expression. “I don’t blame you, really. I’m not the type to give up either. But seriously: you’ve lost. Do you understand? You never had any chance of winning. At this point you’re just making it worse for yourself.”

Reigen stares at him disdainfully, and Ishihara squeezes the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “Of course you’re going to be fucking difficult. We’ll see how long that lasts,” he says finally, and sits down at the base of the tree.

They wait. Tome strains her ears for the sound of sirens—how long would it take for them to get here? Ishihara’s face is still lined with pain, and his fingers tap out an impatient rhythm against his leg.

The door behind them opens a few minutes later. Nakano and Okada pass between them, walking over to Ishihara.

“Police are ten minutes out,” Nakano tells him quietly. “They don’t have an exact location—just the general area. We have enough time, but we need to get moving.”

Tome’s heart sinks.

“Right,” Ishihara says, standing up. “Cuff him, will you? Keeping this up is a pain.”

Okada comes forward with the handcuffs, and Tome wants to scream. They are so close to freedom. They just need to hold out a little longer.

Okada cuffs Reigen’s hands behind his back. Reigen is moving as soon as Ishihara releases the shadow hold, stomping on Okada’s foot and driving his elbow into his stomach. Okada still seems a little out of it; he doesn’t react in time, and falls back with a grunt of pain.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Ishihara snaps, immobilizing Reigen again. “I can’t drag you the whole way—either you start cooperating, or I start breaking your fingers.”

“That’s not going to work,” Nakano interrupts, looking at Reigen’s recalcitrant expression. “And we don’t have time to fuck around like this.”

He turns toward Tome.

They both see it coming. She sees Reigen’s eyes widen, and tries to brace herself. It doesn’t really help.

Nakano punches her in the face. The impact rocks her head backward, and she would have fallen without Ishihara’s power holding her upright. The pain is delayed, distant—it hurts her neck more than her face, at first.

“You can let her go,” Nakano tells Ishihara. “This will be more effective if she can cry out.”

Ishihara drops the hold without comment, and Nakano hits her in the stomach.

She falls after the third hit and stays down. He doesn’t stop—she curls up on her side, tucking her head in under her hands. She can hear voices around her, but it’s like her brain won’t process the words. She curls up tighter and waits for it to be over.

Eventually it stops, and she looks up cautiously from under her arms. She cringes a little when she sees how close Nakano is standing.

“Is this sinking in at all?” Nakano is saying. “We don’t need her. She is expendable. I could kill her right now, and we would lose nothing.” He kicks her again.

“Stop,” Reigen says, “You’ve made your point—she’s just a kid!”

Tome doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t want to see the expression that goes with that voice.

“Have I?” Nakano asks, nudging her with his shoe. “I really want to make sure.” He kicks her arm away from her head and steps on her hand, grinding his heel down. She has to bite her lip hard to keep from screaming. “You’re not going to make any more trouble. You’re not going to try to escape. You’re going to do what we tell you.”

“I understand. Please,” Reigen says, and Nakano steps away.

“Then let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

They start moving around her. She’s not sure she’s going to be able to stand.

“Come on, kid,” Okada says, pulling her up by the arm. He actually sounds a little uncomfortable. He’s gentler with her than usual, letting her lean on him as she tries to get her feet under her. She doesn’t know when she started crying, but her face is wet—she wipes it on her sleeve, and then winces as she rubs the swelling skin around her eye. It hurts with a hot, bone-deep ache; she can barely see out of that eye at all.

Okada cuffs her, and they start walking along a narrow overgrown path into a wooded area. They make Reigen walk in front, with Ishihara and Nakano behind him. She and Okada bring up the rear.

It’s cold, despite the sunlight, with a frigid wind that bites right through her blazer. Her fingers are stiff and frozen, and her knees are almost numb. She doesn’t keep track of where they’re going, even though she knows she should. She just concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other. By the end of it Tome is stumbling more than walking, and Okada has to hold her upright. The adrenaline in her system drops off, leaving her exhausted and aching and quietly, intensely furious. She’s careful not to let it show.

It feels like they’ve been walking for hours when they emerge through the trees and finally arrive at an abandoned gas station. The road beyond it is cracked and riddled with weeds—it doesn’t look like a lot of people drive through here. The building itself is grungy but intact, a single story with taped-over windows. There’s a car parked out front. She recognizes it as the car they were abducted in, and any hope she might have had quickly fades. There's a second car next to it, wrapped in a tarp and covered with dirt and discarded leaves.

They go in through the back door, gathering together in the storefront. There’s a counter with an old cash register, but all the shelves have been cleared out to leave a surprisingly clean main room.

Yamada walks through a door along the back wall and stops abruptly. He stares at Tome, face slack with shock.

“What happened?” he asks, voice faint.

“They tried to escape. We dealt with it,” Ishihara says shortly. “You can handle this, Nakano. Give me your phone. I need to make some calls. Keep them in line, but don’t do anything drastic without consulting me first.”

He disappears into the room Yamada came out of, shutting the door behind him.

There’s a heavy silence.

“If you have anything on you right now, you’re going to want to give it to me,” Nakano says eventually. He gestures at Okada, who unlocks Reigen’s handcuffs.

Reigen looks as tired as Tome feels. He reaches under his jacket and pulls out the paperclip they’d been using to pick the cuffs.

Nakano takes it from him. “Is this how you got out?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Reigen says.

Nakano stares at Reigen for a long moment. “Is that all? Because if we search you and it’s not, I’m going to cut off one of your daughter’s fingers for each thing you were trying to hide.”

Apparently Nakano doesn’t consider that to be ‘anything drastic’.

Reigen’s expression flickers, and he glances over at Tome. She tries to keep her face neutral, despite the fear churning in her stomach.

“Nakano, is that really—” Yamada starts.

“You don’t have any right to object, seeing as it was your idiocy that brought us to this point in the first place,” Nakano snaps. “If we don’t use her as a hostage, then there’s no point in keeping her alive at all.”

Yamada backs down.

“I’m only going to ask you once,” Nakano says, turning back to Reigen. “And then I’m just going to do it. It’ll be a lot harder for her to finish school without any thumbs.”

Reigen closes his eyes for a long moment, before handing over the other two paperclips. It takes him almost a full minute to extract them from his clothes.

“Good,” Nakano says, and Okada cuffs Reigen again. “And what about you?” He turns to Tome.

When her hands are freed, she reaches into her pocket and offers him the handcuff key, eyes lowered.

“Both of you, search them,” Nakano says, “Then separate them. We can’t stay here very long. If you find something, come get me. If you miss anything it’s your head on the line.”

He turns on his heel and walks into the room after Ishihara.

Yamada approaches her, expression uncomfortable. “Can you take off your shoes and jacket, please,” he says, and she does. He doesn’t seem to want to touch her—he checks her blazer very thoroughly and pulls up the insoles in her shoes, but his hands on her are perfunctory at best. She makes a small sound of pain as he presses against one of her bruises, and he snatches his hand back with a quiet apology.

He gives her back her blazer when he’s done, and she puts it on, stepping into her shoes. He’s about to cuff her again when she looks over and sees Okada pulling Reigen out of the room. She doesn’t know if they’ll let her see him again, and her chest floods with panic.

“Wait, please—” she pulls away from Yamada and throws her arms around Reigen’s waist. They don’t stop her, and she tightens her hold, pressing her face against his shoulder.

“Hey,” Reigen says softly, and she looks up. He smiles at her, but his eyes are sad. He can’t hug her back. “I’m sorry. It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

She pulls back a little. Does that mean he has a plan? She looks up at him, searching his face, and realizes that he doesn’t. He doesn’t know if it’ll be okay. He’s lying to her again.

She doesn’t call him on it. She thinks that maybe he needs to say it to her more than she needs to hear it, at this point.

They give them a few seconds, before Yamada comes to retrieve her and Okada takes Reigen out of the room. She stumbles with a short cry of pain, leaning into Yamada’s right side—she slips her hand into his pocket while he steadies her. It’s very easy.

Yamada chains her to a pipe under the sink in the women’s washroom. Thankfully it’s a lot cleaner than she’s come to expect of gas station washrooms. She catches a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror as they come in, and really wishes she hadn’t.

He leaves for a moment and then returns with an ice pack for her eye.

“You lied to me, earlier,” he says quietly, holding it against her face.

“You kidnapped me. I think that’s probably worse,” she retorts, voice shaking.

“Don’t try to escape again,” he says. “You’re just going to get hurt.”

In that moment, she hates him the most out of all of them. She doesn’t want his weak-willed sympathy. It’s just enough to feel bad about what they’re doing, but not enough to stop. He would have stood back and watched as Nakano cut off her fingers.

“Don’t pretend that you actually care,” she hisses through her teeth. “If you did, you wouldn’t be doing this in the first place. And I’m going to get hurt anyway. It doesn’t matter what I do.”

He actually has the gall to look a little hurt by that, and Tome feels a surge of vindictive satisfaction.

“I can do that myself,” she says, and he drops the ice pack into her uninjured hand. He looks at her mulish expression and hesitates for a second, then retreats.

This was probably her only opportunity for this, before the others tell Yamada exactly what happened in their confrontation with Ishihara—she wouldn’t have gotten away with it if he’d known. She’s not sure what he’ll do when he catches her, but if they’re going to hurt her, it might as well be for something she’s actually done.

She twists around until she can reach the pocket of her blazer, and pulls out Yamada’s phone. It’s unlocked. The background is a picture of a pretty brown-haired girl in braids, holding a small fluffy dog. She scrolls through until she finds his maps app. Reigen’s original plan was pretty solid, but he’s a technological dinosaur with a flip phone. She can do one better.

She turns on location sharing, and has a moment of blank-minded panic before she remembers Serizawa’s phone number (she doesn't know Mob's off the top of her head, but that's alright—they're probably together). For the next three days he’ll be able to find them no matter where they’re taken. Assuming he opens the link, and Yamada doesn’t use the app in the meantime. Like Reigen said, it’s a gamble. She hopes it pays off. She sends a very short text along with it so he knows it’s from her, then quickly deletes the evidence from Yamada’s phone.

Her bruised, swollen hand makes it a lot harder to move one of her thumbs, and she’s slower than she should be. She’s still typing out the decoy message when Yamada comes back, which is probably just as well. Better to have him think he caught her in time.

“You—” for a moment he’s actually speechless, looking down at her with a bloodless, horrified expression. He snatches the phone from her and looks down at it. He sees the unsent text message, and visibly calms. “You know that Nakano would kill you for this,” he says, looking up.

She just stares back at him, infusing as much contempt into her expression as she can. For a second she thinks he’s going to slap her, but he doesn’t.

“Do you think Maila would be proud of what you’re doing here?” she asks as he’s turning to leave, and his shoulders hunch inward. It’s petty, but she doesn’t feel bad about it.

Chapter Text

Okada chains Reigen to the post of a sturdy-looking metal shelving unit in an empty stockroom. It’s bolted down to the floor, so he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

“Don’t give me that look,” Okada snaps, sitting back. “I didn’t hurt the kid.”

“And that absolves you of any responsibility, does it?”

“Fuck off. It’s your own fault for trying to escape.”

“What, because we didn’t want to be locked in a basement for the rest of our lives? And I mean that very literally—the only way your boss is going to let us go is if he kills us, you know that, right? You’re fine with having that on your conscience? Killing a kid because she happened to walk in at the wrong time?”

“I won’t feel bad about killing you, that’s for sure. Now shut the fuck up.”

He says that, but his body language doesn’t match his words. Reigen pauses, intrigued. Something’s changed. It takes him a moment to puzzle out what it might be.

“They didn’t tell you we were going to try to escape today, did they?” he guesses, and the look on Okada’s face confirms it. “They just told you to empty your pockets, huh. They must have known how much of a risk that would be. I could have killed you.”

“Why didn’t you?” Okada asks gruffly. And wow, that’s what’s been bothering him.

Reigen chooses his words carefully, using his limited knowledge of Okada’s personality.

“I’m not going to say it’s because I care about you as a person, because I really don’t,” he says, and Okada snorts despite himself. “But I don’t kill people if I can avoid it. Especially in front of my kids. When you have someone who looks up to you like that, it makes you feel like you want to be better—like no matter what mistakes you’ve made, you can still change, you know?”

“You have more than one kid?” Okada asks in disbelief.

Reigen flaps his hand, making the chain rattle. “Sort of. It’s complicated,” he says. “Point is: it had nothing to do with you, so you don’t owe me shit.”

Okada looks away. “Yeah, whatever,” he says, standing up. “You try anything, and I’ll still fucking end you.”

Okada leaves, and Reigen lets his head fall back against the shelf with a quiet thud.

He really fucked up. He’d been trying so hard to keep Tome out of the worst of it, and that backfired spectacularly.

He’s not sure what to do next. He can’t make any move he’s not completely sure will succeed without risking Tome. And she won’t leave without him. That’s been made abundantly clear. Considering it would probably leave him without the use of his legs, it’s a bit of a dead end in any case.

His options right now are very limited.

He can keep working on Okada’s sympathies, but getting to the point where he might be willing to help them would take time that he and Tome don’t have. Right now, the best he can expect is that Okada will feel bad if he has to kill them, which leaves them just as dead.

Yamada’s almost to that point, but he’s a coward, too afraid to make more than a token protest at his colleague’s cruelty. He might eventually be willing to look the other way if they get far enough to escape, but he won’t help them if it involves any kind of confrontation.

He can fake a medical emergency, but that would be incredibly dangerous for Tome if he’s found out.

He can create a medical emergency. But that would probably traumatize her, and he wouldn’t be in any condition to escape.

Fuck. There’s really only one option he’d feel comfortable with.

He can help them. Start actively cooperating, come up with ways to further their goals, play the long game in the hope that an opportunity will arise. That will probably take weeks, but he can work on befriending Okada at the same time. And hell, maybe they’ll actually be rescued in the meantime.

Tome was right—the trunk is miserable.

It’s completely dark. The air feels stale and stuffy, like lying with your head under a blanket for too long, but without the warmth. It looks like she gets to test her suffocation theory for herself. Lucky her.

It doesn’t look like Yamada told the others about the phone. She hopes that means he’s not planning to—as far as he knows, she failed, after all.

Nakano and Yamada came and retrieved her pretty quickly. At first she was sure he told them what she’d done and they were going to kill her, but they just dragged her out to the car and packed her into the trunk like luggage. The second car was already gone, and she didn’t see Reigen at all while they were putting her in.

Going through this alone is so much worse.

At least there’s one good thing about being in the trunk: she doesn’t have to perform. There’s no one here to manipulate, or to try to be brave for. It’s just her.

Without anyone to see, she lets herself fall apart. Crying makes it harder to breathe, but she can’t seem to stop.

God, she wants to go home. She wants to hug her mom. She wants to see her sister—she wonders if Yuna’s come back from college, with Tome’s disappearance. She’ll even take her father’s disapproving looks if it means she can see him again. Maybe he’ll be less of a jerk about her grades after this.

She wants to be with her friends. She wants to hang out in Keiko’s room as she works on her cosplay, or help Maki try out her stand-up jokes. She’d even eat one of Misa’s grasshoppers. She hasn't seen them since the birthday party, but she misses Takenaka and the rest of the Telepathy Club. They're supposed to meet up again for New Years. They might not even know she's missing.

She wants to be back at the office, watching Reigen and Serizawa’s unsubtle flirting while Dimple makes kissy faces behind them. She wants to cheer Serizawa on as he exorcises ghosts and cursed gardening tools (oh man, she’d almost forgotten about that job—one of the work gloves had tried to smother Reigen while Serizawa was busy with the hedge clippers. He hadn’t been pleased about that). She wants Reigen to teach her more about the mundane side of the business, where the worst consequences for screwing up are a disgruntled client and a lecture. They were supposed to go for ramen with Mob and Ritsu and Teru on Thursday—today?—like they do every other week. Something tells her that's not going to happen.

Eventually the crying runs its course, and Tome carefully wipes her face on her sleeve.

They’re going to be rescued. It’s only a matter of time.

It’s a very long drive—longer than the first. Tome slides toward the back of the trunk as the car tilts up, winding back and forth in long loops. Tome can only think of a couple of places near Seasoning City with that kind of sustained elevation.

They stop, and the sudden flash of brightness and cold air makes her duck her head into her sleeve. Yamada pulls her out and she stands on shaky legs, eyes streaming from the light.

They’re definitely in the mountains. They’ve parked next to the other car, tucked into a small screened lot near the end of a short suspension bridge. They cross on foot and head through a copse of bamboo trees to the building beyond. Her muscles have stiffened up in the trunk, and it’s a painful, limping effort to keep pace with the other two.

The building looks like an inn, and Tome has a bizarre moment of incomprehension as she stares up the front steps. After the bunker and the gas station, she wasn’t expecting something so normal-looking. It looks like the place her parents brought her to when she was twelve, back when they were still doing family trips.

They bring her up the steps and into the main room, and make her take off her shoes. She sees Reigen’s next to two other pairs, which is strangely comforting. At least he’s somewhere in the building. They hand her over to Okada, who takes her up a flight of stairs and down a hallway, into what was probably a linen closet. He threads her handcuffs through a metal shelf bracket and leaves her in the dark.

They’re in an inn, and she’s stuck in a linen closet. She almost feels like laughing. It’s nothing compared to what they’ve done already, but god. What a bunch of assholes.

Reigen is just finishing lunch when Nakano and Okada come in and haul him up again. They cuff his hands in front of him this time, like they did the last time they took him to see Ishihara, and this is a good opportunity to put his new plan into action.

They bring him down the narrow hallway into the main room, then up a set of stairs, turning into a small office. He doesn’t see Tome on their way over, but he didn’t really expect to. The main point of keeping them separate is that they don’t know where each other are, after all.

The office is bare but tastefully decorated, with green silk wallpaper and expensive-looking wooden furniture. Ishihara is sitting behind the desk, leaning back with one ankle thrown over his knee. There are two chairs in front of the desk, and Reigen is pushed down into the leftmost one. Nakano sits to his right, and Okada stands behind his chair.

Ishihara’s pose is relaxed, but his eyes are sharp, and his hands betray a certain level of agitation that has Reigen tensing up even before he’s properly processed it.

“There you are,” Ishihara says, sitting forward. “I have a question for you. Which is your dominant hand?”

“What?” Reigen asks, reluctantly catching on.

“I assume it’s your right, since that’s the hand you threw with this morning,” Ishihara continues, opening the desk drawer. He takes out a small ballpeen hammer and places it on the desk in front of him.

Reigen flinches back on instinct and Nakano catches his wrist, forcing his right hand down against the surface of the desk. His left follows, pulled along by the handcuff chain. Okada pushes down on his shoulders to trap him in his chair.

“Now, this isn’t just a punishment for your escape attempt,” Ishihara says. His expression is casual, like the speech he’s giving isn’t a lead-in to torture. “It’s also to make sure you can’t try again in the future. I know I said it’d be your legs, but with the amount of trouble you cause, we might need you mobile.”

Reigen curls his hand into a fist and struggles, fighting Nakano’s grip on his wrist—then his shadow coils around it and pins it in place, slowly splaying his fingers out flat.

“But more importantly,” Ishihara says, watching Reigen’s increasingly frantic efforts to pull his hand back, “We need to step up the timeline on our plan, and your student is dragging his feet. I think he needs a little push in the right direction.” Nakano hands him his phone, and Ishihara holds it up. “This should be motivation enough. You can start,” he says to Nakano, who picks up the hammer.

Reigen has the fleeting thought that he shouldn’t panic in front of Mob if he’s going to see this, but Reigen is absolutely panicking. They are way past that point.

“No no no, wait—!” he says, the words tripping over each other in his mouth. “He won’t help if you do this, just—stop for a second—” Nakano touches the flat end of the hammer against the longest bone in his index finger, before raising it for a strike. Reigen talks fast, voice tinged with desperation. “This’ll backfire—you’re trying to intimidate Mob into doing what you want, right, but that’s not what’ll happen if you send him this video. I promise.”

The phone dips a little, and the hammer hasn’t come down yet; he has their attention.

“He—he’s not emotionally stable. He thought someone hurt his family and went on a one-man rampage trying to find them. That’s not what you want.” Reigen licks his lips nervously, checking their reactions. “If he finds out you hurt me at all, he could snap, is what I’m saying. If you show him this it’s pretty much guaranteed. Then there’s no way he’ll do what you’re asking. You can’t torture me to control him; it’s not going to work.”

It feels wrong talking about Mob like this—like he’s some kind of dangerous lunatic. But it’s better than the alternative. He’s sure Mob will forgive him, under the circumstances. He can apologize if he ever gets out of here.

“Look, I can help you,” he says, going for broke. “I’m willing to cooperate, here, fully cooperate with whatever you need. This isn’t necessary. We can talk this out like adults. I can—we can help each other, but that’s going to be a lot harder if you break my hand.” He takes a shaky breath. “At least hear me out. If you don’t like my proposal, we can revisit the bone-shattering torture, and you haven’t lost anything except a little time. Okay?”

Ishihara gives him an amused look, but puts the phone down. He releases his hold and Reigen snatches his hands back, folding them protectively into his lap.

“I’m listening,” Ishihara says, which is all the encouragement Reigen needs.

“We can make an arrangement,” Reigen starts, trying to regain some kind of calm. It’s a little difficult with the hammer right there on the desk. “I can help with your plans, whatever they are. I’m not going to ask you to let us go—obviously you were never going to do that from the start. I’m not an idiot,” he adds when Ishihara raises his eyebrows. “Don’t pretend you were going to consider it. Having a psychic like Mob in your pocket is too useful to give up, once you figure out how to control him.”

“True,” Ishihara admits, “But getting that control has been more difficult than expected.” He throws that out like a challenge, and Reigen latches onto it like a drowning man.

“Then let me help with that. This doesn’t have to be violent. I’m well aware of the position we’re in,” Reigen continues. “And that’s just to start with. I can help you find former Claw members—former Scars, even. I’m sure it’s tiring being the only one left.”

It’s a guess, but it’s more likely than not, with his level of power. Ishihara rewards him with a slow smile.

“Not the only one. But I wouldn’t mind finding more. It’s harder than it used to be, with the scars healed.” He taps two fingers against the right side of his jaw.

“I know of eight,” Reigen says. “I can help you reach out to them, get them on board. If you tell me a little more about what you need for your plans, I’m sure I can come up with something to make them happen. I won’t try to escape. I just have a few conditions.”

Ishihara leans forward. “And what might those be?”

“No one hurts Tome,” Reigen says immediately. He pauses. “I don’t suppose you’d consider letting her go, if I agree to stay?”

“No,” Ishihara says. Reigen expected that, but the disappointment is still there.

“Then at least make sure she’s comfortable. And if I screw up—that’s on me, not on her.”

Reigen tries to think of things they might actually accept. They won’t let Tome go, and they won’t let them stay together. Ishihara’s not going to risk them coordinating another escape.

“I want to be able to see her. Supervised visits, at the very least, so I know you haven’t broken your end of the deal. If I start getting results, maybe you bring her some books, let her go outside.”

“And?” Ishihara says when Reigen stops.

“And don’t break my hand? Actually—don’t torture me at all, please? Don’t hurt any more of my friends and family? I’m not asking for much, here. Just a basic standard of living.”

Ishihara scratches his chin, considering. “I can agree to most of that. If you manage to bring your student under control, we can work out a more long-term arrangement. And as long as none of them attack us, we can leave your friends alone. But there’s still the matter of your punishment,” he says, and Reigen’s heart sinks.

“Is that really necessary?” he asks, knowing it’s not going to make any difference.

“I think it is,” Ishihara replies with a small shrug. “And it’s my opinion that counts. I’d really like to discourage any repeat attempts. How’s this: we break two of your fingers. Clean breaks, and we’ll even splint them afterward. You can choose which ones.”

Reigen stares at him, swallowing hard. It’s probably the best he’s going to get.

Chapter Text

They lead her into a new room, and Tome comes to a halt in the doorway. It’s a lounge, located on the second floor above the lobby. There’s an unobtrusively-patterned carpet and a big window in the front wall overlooking the bridge and trees below. Early evening sunlight streams in, bathing the room in yellow light.

Reigen is sitting on a couch along the far wall. He looks up as she comes in, eyes flicking briefly back and forth the way they do when he’s reading someone.

“Dad!” she says, and Okada lets go of her arm. It’s an easy deception, now—it rolls off the tongue with barely any thought at all. She moves forward and then stops abruptly.

Closer up, he really doesn’t look good. His eyes have a glassy sheen to them, with lines of tension that weren’t there this morning. His bangs are damp with sweat. She looks him over, worry rising in her chest, and her eyes zero in on his right hand. She sits down next to him, pulling it over for a better look. He doesn’t stop her.

His pinky and middle fingers are splinted and taped to his ring finger. They’re swollen, mottled purple through the gaps in the bandaging. Now that she’s looking, they’re not the only thing. His wrist is ringed in painful-looking bruises.

“What happened?” she asks, looking up at him.

He smiles weakly. “Would you believe I punched a wall?”

He doesn’t put any effort into the lie at all. She purses her lips and glares accusingly over at Okada. He stares back, but shifts his weight a little uncomfortably.

She heaves a long sigh, settling back on the couch. Those bastards. It was too much to hope that they would leave him alone after what happened. The optimism of this morning feels like a lifetime ago.

He must have done something, arranged something, so they’d let them see each other. She wants to ask, but he clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and she supposes it doesn’t really matter in the end. After a moment, she leans her head in against his shoulder.

“We’re going to get out of here,” she tells him quietly. “We’re going to go home, and we’ll see Serizawa and Mob and the others, and we’ll all go for ramen again like we always do.”

Reigen lets out a short huff of breath. They’re both so tired.

“And you’ll clean out my wallet like always, you little scamps,” he says, and she laughs.

“You know you love it,” she replies. He doesn’t dispute it.

There’s not a whole lot that’s safe to talk about with an audience, but they make do. She tells him about the gaming convention she’s going to with Keiko in May, and the costumes Keiko’s making—she’d already told Serizawa while Reigen was in the room, but he doesn’t seem to mind hearing it again. He doesn’t contribute much to the conversation either, but that’s alright.

A little while later, Okada clears his throat, and she jumps; she’d almost forgotten he was there.

“Time’s up,” he says, and she stands up reluctantly.

Reigen’s expression as she leaves is drawn and haggard, like he’s given up. Seeing it now feels worse than everything else they’ve been through today. And that’s saying a lot.

“I love you, dad,” she says impulsively, and Reigen gives her a startled, almost vulnerable look.

“I love you too, kiddo,” he says after a moment.

“We’re going to get out of here,” she repeats, with as much emphasis as she dares. Something changes very subtly in his expression, and she knows he’s understood.

“Don’t make any trouble, okay? Just do what they tell you,” he says anyway, and she nods.

Okada doesn’t bring her back to the linen closet. He leads her instead into a small room with tatami floors and a window with a view of the valley below. He lets her use the washroom before chaining one wrist to the thick wooden slats of a room divider. There’s a futon folded up within reach, as well as a glass of water and an apple.

If she wasn’t suspicious already, the upgrade in room accommodations would have tipped her off—Reigen’s definitely done something. It doesn’t seem like anything she can help with, or he would have given her some indication earlier. She hopes he knows what he’s doing.

“Happy?” Nakano asks from the other doorway, as Okada leads Tome out of the room.

Reigen gives him an unimpressed look, but doesn’t push his luck with anything further. The visceral sense memory of being held down as his fingers were broken lingers in the back of his mind. The fact that he agreed to it somehow makes it worse. It was the lesser of a limited set of options, but still.

This truce, such as it is, is precarious. Tome’s clearly done something that makes her confident in their rescue, which makes him equal parts proud and terrified. This could so easily fall apart. And it would be too easy to make a mistake right now, while he’s in pain and exhausted. If Tome’s actually managed to get a message out, he needs to keep it together.

And Nakano’s staring at Reigen’s hand with a self-satisfied expression.

“No more picking locks,” he says, and Reigen’s mouth twists. Nakano was the one who insisted they break the fingers on his right hand, and Reigen hadn’t been able to talk them out of it.

“What now?” Reigen asks. His voice is carefully neutral.

“Now, you tell us about Kageyama Shigeo, and what it’ll take to get him to do what he’s told,” Nakano replies, sitting down in the chair across from him. He sets his phone on the table between them—it looks like he’s going to record their conversation. “And if I find out you’ve lied to us at all, I’ll cut out your tongue and send it to your student.”

Reigen flinches. Nakano’s voice doesn’t change inflection at all. What a fucking psychopath.

“Okay, that’s—really not necessary. Can we dial it back on the threats, please? I’m trying to help you,” he says shakily.

Nakano just stares at him, and Reigen clears his throat, tucking his cuffed hands in against his stomach. “It depends on what you’re trying to get him to do. He has a strong sense of justice, so if it’s anything that’s likely to hurt someone, you’re going to have a hard time convincing him. It’ll be easier if I can talk to him directly—”

“No,” Nakano says, cutting him off. “Anything he sees or hears goes through us first. That’s non-negotiable.”

“Right,” Reigen says, “Sure, okay.” He stops.

“What would you say are his weaknesses?” Nakano presses.

Reigen pauses for a moment, thinking. He has to tread carefully here. He needs to give them something that sounds useful, at least in theory.

“He’s very trusting—not naïve, really, but he firmly believes in second chances. Even if someone’s done bad things, if it looks like they’re trying to change…he can forgive a lot.”

Fuck, he hates this.

Mob’s ability to look past people’s mistakes is anything but a weakness, but Reigen’s pretty sure people who are drawn to Claw’s ideals would see it that way. And it sounds exploitable if you don’t know a lot about Mob, or the people he surrounds himself with.

“For example, some of his close friends have hurt him in the past, or—lied to him, in a significant way,” he says, and his eyes flick toward Nakano’s face. He looks thoughtful. “And like I mentioned before, threatening the people he cares about is probably the worst way you could go about this. I realize that’s kind of your thing, but I’d really think twice about taking it any further.”

“You would say that, wouldn’t you,” Nakano says.

“Sure, but it doesn’t make it any less true. He’s very protective, and he doesn’t like to be used,” Reigen replies.

“Then what would you suggest?”

“What are you trying to get him to do? Because that’s going to affect how you approach things.”

When Nakano doesn’t reply, Reigen decides to take a chance.

“Are you trying to get Suzuki Touichirou out of prison?” he asks, and Nakano’s mouth tightens.

“That is one of our goals, yes.”

“I mean, that makes sense. If I had the kind of power you guys did on the day of the attack, I’d be tempted to get that back, too.”

Reigen keeps his voice light, like he’s making an offhand comment. It’s purely based on what Tome overheard that first day, but if it’s true, it would be a powerful motivator. Nakano’s brief look of surprise is gratifying, but he doesn’t draw attention to it.

“If that’s your goal, then brute force is not the way to go,” Reigen continues. “He’s not going to want to do anything illegal, and if he thinks you’re planning on rebuilding Claw—which it sounds like you are—he’s not going to hand over your leader so Suzuki can pick up where he left off.”

And oh, that’s an interesting expression. It’s only there for a moment, but Reigen revises his estimation of their plans.

“Or not,” he says thoughtfully. He probably shouldn’t push this, but he can’t help the curiosity. His need to know has always made him a little reckless. “If you’re not going to make him your leader, what makes you think he’ll lend you his powers again?” He says it with just a hint of condescension, looking doubtful.

And it seems that was the right button to press, because Nakano says, “We can be very persuasive.”

“Anything you do to that guy, it’s going to backfire so fast,” Reigen says, incredulous. “I don’t care how prepared you are, you won’t be able to contain him. I’m pretty sure the only reason he’s still in jail is because he wants to be there—he turned himself in.”

“Anyone can be persuaded with the right leverage,” Nakano says, and Reigen is starting to connect the dots. He really doesn’t like the picture that’s forming.

“What, you’re going to kidnap his family?” Reigen says. “You really think he cares about them enough to let you control him?”

“We know his son still visits him in prison,” Nakano says.

Well, fuck.

“You’re well informed,” Reigen says after a moment.

“There’s a lot more of us than you’d think. We’ve been planning this for a long time.”

Someone needs to warn Shou—he remembers Serizawa mentioning that he lives with his mother and her new husband, now? That whole family needs to go underground fast.

And Nakano almost definitely should not be telling him this. Reigen is not looking forward to the moment he realizes that.

“Why do you even need Mob, then?” he says, hoping to segue back into what they’re supposed to be talking about. Maybe he won’t notice. “If you have eyes on the prison, why not just infiltrate it and stage an escape? Mob’s not exactly subtle.”

“That’s the point,” Nakano says.

“Oh,” Reigen says, feeling a little nauseous. “So you’re going to make him a scapegoat—put him in the spotlight, and make your move while everyone’s eyes are on him.”

It could work—after everything that’s happened, the government’s probably already watching Mob. It wouldn’t take much to make them think he’s gone rogue. And it wouldn’t necessarily be untrue, from their perspective. If Claw does manage to get control of him, he would be a convenient cat’s-paw; they could keep making him do their dirty work for as long as they have a use for him.

“And you want me to persuade him to go through with this?” Reigen asks.

“Isn’t that the deal you made? Unless you’d prefer we pick up where we left off. You do have eight working fingers left.”

“No, that’s—not necessary,” Reigen says, sweating. “Just, it’s going to be a hard sell. Maybe if you make him think that Suzuki’s life is in danger, he might go for it. But attacking a prison head-on? I’m not sure you’d be able to convince him to do that.”

“Then what use—” Nakano stops suddenly, and the look on his face is unsettling. It looks like he’s come up with an idea that Reigen is really not going to like.

“I think we’ve been going about this the wrong way,” Nakano says slowly. “We don’t really need to convince him to work with us. We just need to point him in the right direction.”

He reaches over to his phone and stops the recording, slipping it into an inside pocket.

“I think you might be useful after all,” he says.

“Great,” Reigen replies weakly. He’s really not going to like this.

“Nakano has an interesting theory,” Ishihara tells him.

They’ve all convened in the sitting room. It’s been about half an hour since Reigen’s conversation with Nakano. He assumes they’ve listened to the recording. Nakano definitely has—it looks like he’s realized that he revealed too much, because the look in his eyes promises future retribution.

“He thinks that we would have an easier time provoking your student on purpose, rather than getting him to cooperate. Hypothetically, if we sent him a video like the one we started making earlier, and made him think that you were in that prison—do you think he’d come to save you?”

And here’s what he said earlier coming back to bite him in the ass. It was mostly bullshit—he hasn’t seen Mob have a psychic meltdown since that incident in January. But he really doesn’t want to test Mob’s newfound sense of peace by traumatizing him.

“That seems pretty extreme,” Reigen says, throat dry. “If it does work, you wouldn’t be able to direct him. He could kill Suzuki by accident. Also, I distinctly remember you agreeing not to torture me if I help you, which I am still doing, by the way.”

“That’s true. I’d hate to go back on my word,” Ishihara says with a smile. “We can try things your way first. If you can come up with a plausible way to convince him that Suzuki—”

He stops suddenly, head snapping up. He stands and moves toward the front window, and his expression clouds over.

“Okada,” he says slowly, turning back to stare at Reigen. “Go and get the kid.”

Okada gets up and leaves the room, throwing a cautious look over his shoulder as he does.

“What—”

Ishihara’s hand comes up and a band of pressure tightens around Reigen’s throat, lifting him out of his seat.

“I just want to start by saying, I am truly, honestly impressed by your nerve,” Ishihara says. “In the position you’re in, it takes a hell of a lot of guts to lie to my face like that.”

He throws Reigen down into the centre of the room. Reigen lands hard, and gasps in a breath as the pressure around his throat eases.

“Dad!”

Reigen glances over to the doorway, where Tome is being led in with a hand on her arm. Her face is pale and shocked under the bruises.

“Did you think I wouldn’t be able to sense them coming? That’s twice you’ve fucked us over in one day. You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” Ishihara continues. His eyes are dark with fury. “I don’t know how you managed to contact them, but if your esper friends cross that bridge, all they’re going to find are your corpses.”

The surge of hope in his chest is poorly-timed, seeing as it looks like they’re about to die.

Tome must have pulled it off.

Reigen has no illusions about his chances of surviving this, but if he can hold out long enough, maybe the others can get here in time to save Tome, at least.

“I swear I had nothing to do with it,” Reigen says, eyes flicking between Ishihara and where Nakano is pulling out his knife. “Whatever else you might think of me, I would never risk my daughter like that, not after everything that’s happened.”

“See, I want to believe you. I do. But how much is your word worth, at this point?” Ishihara looks over at Nakano. “And I’m reminded that my colleague promised to cut out your tongue if you lied to us again. That seems like as good a way to kill you as any.”

Reigen scrambles back. Ishihara waves his hand almost lazily, pinning him to the floor.

“No, it wasn’t him! It was—”

“Tome, don’t,” Reigen interrupts sharply. The fear makes his voice crack. He’s effectively been paralyzed from the neck down.

Over by the couch, Yamada looks at Tome like he’s coming to some kind of realization. Whatever it is he thinks he’s figured out, he doesn’t say anything. He just watches as Nakano kneels down beside Reigen’s head.

Reigen jerks to the side as Nakano grabs for his chin, tucking his face into his shoulder. Nakano fists a hand in his hair and pulls his head sharply back.

“Stop, please, he didn’t do anything!”

He can see Tome in his periphery, fighting Okada’s grip on her arms. He doesn’t want her to see this. She shouldn’t have to watch him drown in his own blood, which is probably what’s going to happen while he’s stuck on his back like this.

Nakano’s having trouble prying his jaw open, and it looks like he’s just going to cut through the side of Reigen’s cheek. At least the knife is sharp. He remembers that.

The shrill sound of a phone ringing cuts through the room. Ishihara motions for Nakano to stop—he pulls up short, knife tip pressed against Reigen’s face but not cutting in, not yet.

Yamada slowly pulls his phone out of his pocket, looking over at Tome again. After a moment, he answers it.

He listens, and glances at Reigen before turning back to Ishihara.

“It’s them,” he says, nodding his head toward the window. “They want to negotiate.”

“Tell them not to come any closer,” Ishihara snaps. “If they do, we’re killing both of them.”

Yamada relays this, and hesitates. “He wants to speak to Mr. Reigen?” he says, voice curling up at the end uncertainly.

Ishihara scowls, but doesn’t immediately refuse.

“Please, let me talk to him,” Reigen says quickly, ducking away from the knife. “He’ll listen to me—I can tell him to back down, whatever you want me to say.” He swallows nervously. “If you promise not to hurt us, I can try to get him on your side; tell him what I said I would.”

Ishihara gives him a hard stare.

“Fine,” Ishihara says eventually. And from his intonation alone Reigen is pretty sure that if this conversation ends without them being rescued, Ishihara’s going to let Nakano carry out his threat regardless. “Put it on speaker. If you say anything out of line, we will kill both of you as painfully as possible. Starting with your daughter.”

Reigen nods, and Yamada brings him the phone. He tries to sit up, but apparently Ishihara isn’t even going to let him do that much. Nakano’s knife is still terrifyingly close to his face.

Yamada hits speaker, and after a second of hesitation, he places the phone on the floor next to Reigen’s head.

“Hello?” Reigen says, trying to project a calm level of confidence. It mostly comes out sounding small.

“Arataka?”

It’s not Mob. It’s Serizawa.

Reigen closes his eyes briefly. It’s so good to hear his voice. “Hey, Katsuya,” he says, and can’t stop the relief from seeping into his tone. “It’s been awhile.”

Chapter Text

“Where’s Tome? Are you both okay?”

Reigen should probably tell him yes, but the words stick in his throat. Considering what Serizawa just interrupted, that would be a complete and utter lie.

“Could be worse,” he manages after a second. “She's here too, she can hear you.” That’s the closest he can come to telling Serizawa their captors are listening in, but he probably already suspects. Reigen watches as Okada cuffs Tome’s hands to the railing above the stairs.

Serizawa is silent for a moment. Reigen can hear his quiet breathing, a little too fast to be completely calm.

Serizawa’s social skills have grown by leaps and bounds since the day they met. He has a sincere, good-natured charm that draws people in—he’s much better at making friends than Reigen ever was. And given half a chance, his ability to hold steady under pressure has flourished as well.

But hostage negotiation is kind of asking a lot, of anyone.

“You said you wanted to talk?” Reigen prompts, glancing over at Ishihara.

“Yeah. Shigeo wanted me to say that he's willing to work with them, but not while they're holding you two hostage. They need to let you go.”

“He’s not with you?” Reigen asks, and his pitch rises a little at the look on Ishihara’s face.

“He’s still with that other guy, the one who brought him the deal. He hasn’t broken their agreement.”

Whatever that means. But Ishihara’s expression settles, and Reigen takes a slow breath.

They really need to work out some kind of code for these situations. Not that he thinks it’ll happen again—god, he hopes not. Coming up with something on the fly that Serizawa has a chance of picking up on isn’t the most challenging thing he’s ever had to do, but it’s up there. He needs to spin some plausible-sounding bullshit about Suzuki and then seem like he’s trying to convince them to leave, but without them actually leaving. Reigen doesn’t think he and Tome would survive it.

At least, not without an unacceptable level of harm. People have survived losing their tongue, but Reigen doesn’t think he would want to.

“Listen, can you ask if they’ll let Tome go, first? She doesn’t need to be a part of this.”

Ishihara shakes his head, and Reigen laughs bleakly.

“That’s…not going to be possible, Katsuya. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Reigen clears his throat. “Yeah, well. The situation here is, we’ve come to an understanding. I really think it’ll be best if Shigeo does what they’re asking, for everyone involved.”

“Shigeo—?” Reigen can hear the surprise in his voice—good, great, a promising start—and hastily cuts him off.

“Yeah, listen. I know Shigeo and I haven’t seen each other in a couple of months, but I’m still his master, and he needs to listen to me. There are some extenuating circumstances that he doesn’t know about.”

And that’s about as many obvious lies as he can pack into the same sentence. He waits, desperately willing Serizawa to understand.

“Okay,” Serizawa says slowly. “Maybe we got the wrong impression about this. If you tell us what’s really going on, maybe we can work something out.”

It sounds like maybe he does.

“Good! I really hope we can!” Reigen says, the swell of relief making him a little manic. He decides to start with an easy one, just in case.

“Before Shigeo makes any kind of decision on this, he should know that no one is really being threatened, here—I mean, you probably shouldn’t come any closer until we sort this out, but. We’re not in any imminent danger. They haven’t hurt us. We’re actually very comfortable.”

There’s a long silence as Serizawa digests this.

“That’s good to know,” Serizawa says, and it comes out a little strangled. Reigen has to suppress a sympathetic wince—that's really not how he wanted Serizawa to find out they were injured. But at least he knows that Serizawa's picked up on what he’s doing, now.

“I assume he knows what he’s being asked to do?”

“He said they want him to break Pre—Suzuki out of prison.” Serizawa’s voice does a complicated little twist around the name.

“That was my understanding,” Reigen says. “But they’re not planning to set him up as Claw’s leader again, and honestly I’m not sure he would even agree if they asked.” He pauses. “I know Shigeo has a lot of complicated feelings over what happened, but they’re concerned about Suzuki’s wellbeing. They have eyes on the prison, and there’s a lot of unethical shit happening there. Esper experimentation, attempts at enhancing psychic powers; people have been dying. Obviously I don’t condone their methods, but they were getting pretty desperate. I think maybe getting him out of there is the right call.”

Reigen glances over at Tome while he’s talking. She’s fidgeting with the edge of her skirt, looking almost bored. It takes him a while to realize what she’s doing; when he does, his chest tightens with anxiety. He looks around at the others, but no one seems to notice. All eyes are on him.

He watches as she pulls the paperclip out of her hem and starts working on the cuffs.

He hopes she’s planning to run, but he knows how unlikely that is. He can’t risk drawing their attention to her—he just has to trust that she won’t do anything reckless.

“If that’s true, why didn’t they come to us with that in the first place? We could have figured something out without anyone being kidnapped.”

Reigen’s laughter is a little too forced.

“I don’t think they’re used to that kind of transparency,” he says, trying to get his nerves under control. “You know Claw; kidnapping is kind of their M.O.”

“Right,” Serizawa says. “Well. If that’s the case, we can discuss it, at least.” He's trying, but he doesn’t sound convinced at all.

“It’s okay to have doubts,” Reigen says. “I did too, at first. But they’ve been very persuasive.”

Maybe that was too on the nose. Nakano’s expression beside him goes flat, and the blade of his knife presses in against Reigen’s cheek.

“C-Can you tell Shigeo? If he does this for them, we can all go our separate ways. They won’t bother him again,” Reigen says, only stumbling a little. There's no way for him to pull back—the knife nicks his cheek as he talks, drawing a thin line of blood down his face.

“Yeah, okay. If you trust them, we can give it a chance. But they have to let you go first.”

“No, I—no. I don’t think that’s going to work,” Reigen says quickly. “I think maybe they’re worried that if they don’t have any leverage on him, Shigeo won’t have any reason to help them—you're going to have to leave us behind. We’ll be safe if you go. You don’t have to worry about us.”

Please don’t leave, he wants to say. Fuck, please don’t leave us here.

Even without the code, he thinks Serizawa can probably tell.

“You know I can’t do that, Arataka,” Serizawa says. “I promised Shigeo I’d bring you both home.”

The knife pulls away from his face, and Reigen looks over in surprise. Nakano’s cheeks are flushed red in a very familiar way.

Reigen takes a sharp breath. Dimple smirks slowly and sits back on his heels, surveying the room. When he meets his gaze again, Reigen flicks his eyes toward Ishihara.

“I can’t really make that call,” Reigen says, voice shaking a little. “Why don’t I pass you over to the guy in charge, and you two can come to some kind of agreement.” He nudges the phone with his head. Dimple picks it up, sheathing Nakano’s knife, and carries it over to Ishihara.

“Nakano, what—” Ishihara starts. Dimple grabs him by the neck and slams him head-first into the window.

The glass shatters. Ishihara catches hold of his wrist as he falls and Dimple follows after, both disappearing from sight.

There’s a moment of shocked silence. Reigen looks over at Tome—she’s already ducking around where Okada is gaping at the broken window, her handcuffs open and draped across the railing.

She runs forward and tries to pull Reigen to his feet, toward the stairs, but his shadow is still holding him in place. There's no give at all. They probably only have a few seconds before the others get over their surprise.

“Go,” he says softly, but she shakes her head. She gives one final desperate tug before shifting to stand between him and the remaining occupants of the room.

Tome flinches as they look over at her, but stands her ground.

“Just leave us alone! Haven’t you done enough?” she says, voice choked. “There’s no point to this! Our friends are here, your leader’s gone—what’s hurting us going to solve?”

Okada and Yamada hesitate, just for a moment. That’s all it takes.

There’s a yellow blur of motion and something slams into Yamada, knocking him off his feet. Teru plants his feet, knees turning in, and pulls hard. Okada is yanked forward, right into his waiting fist.

“Teru!” Tome says and he turns, grinning, hand clenched around the collar of Okada’s shirt. He looks exhausted, like he hasn’t slept in days.

“Tome, Reigen! You—” his voice trails off as he takes in their appearance, and his expression darkens. He throws Okada into the far wall a little harder than necessary. Okada slides down to the floor, clearly unconscious.

“Are you okay?” Teru asks, quieter, and Tome nods.

“Fine, but Reigen’s stuck—” Tome stops, and her eyes widen.

“What—” Reigen starts, and feels himself slowly slide toward the window.

At about the same time Teru staggers; Yamada’s back up into a crouch, lashing out with some kind of weak telekinesis. It doesn’t look like it hurts Teru much, but it’s enough to distract him for a few crucial seconds.

“Teru, catch him, quickly—!” is the last thing Reigen hears before he’s dragged bodily across the jagged remnants of the window glass, and out into empty air.

He only falls a short distance before something catches him and gently lowers him the last couple of meters to the ground. It feels familiar, warmly comforting, and he looks gratefully over at Serizawa. And stops.

Serizawa is frozen, arm extended toward Reigen, completely covered in shadow.

Reigen turns his head, searching, and finds Ishihara to his left, crouched defensively around a broken leg. Nakano is directly beside him, head tilted at an unnatural angle.

Ishihara meets Reigen’s eyes and grins tightly. His hat is gone, and blood trickles slowly down from his hairline.

“I knew he’d drop his barrier to catch you,” he says, “People who care are so predictable—”

Ishihara turns quickly and throws out his hand, pulling shadows from the nearby building. They wrap around Teru as he leans out the window and drag him to the ground with a lot more speed than he would have fallen normally. He lands hard on the broken glass barely a few centimeters away. Reigen winces, but can’t do anything to help him. The shadows envelop Teru completely, and Reigen can hear the moment he stops breathing.

Ishihara laughs, voice high and strained, and Reigen looks back over at him.

“How many people can you hold onto at once?” Reigen asks, watching. A blood vessel’s burst in Ishihara’s right eye, and his sclera is almost completely red.

“I don’t have to hold them for long,” Ishihara grits out through his teeth, “Just until they suffocate.”

Holding must be easier than moving—otherwise he’d just snap their necks. Reigen holds onto that, forcing down the panic and worry. They still have time before—

Reigen hears rapid footsteps from inside, approaching the door; Ishihara must too, because he whips around like a cornered animal.

Tome runs outside in her socks, skidding to a stop on the front steps. It only takes her a few seconds to take in the scene—her face darkens with anger, and she starts forward, heedless of the broken glass.

“Hey—!”

Ishihara catches her feet in shadow, only as far as her ankles, drawing her to a sudden halt. The shadows around Reigen pull back to his knees to compensate, but he can see the effort it’s costing Ishihara to do that much.

Reigen leans over to check on Teru. His pulse is strong, but he’s bleeding from half a dozen lacerations across his face and arms. Reigen’s not sure if his wrist is broken or just sprained, but it’s bent awkwardly under his chest. Reigen tries to pull it free, and to his surprise, it moves. It’s difficult, but there’s a lot less resistance than he was expecting.

“F-Fuck,” Ishihara says, and out of the corner of his eye Reigen sees Serizawa slowly start to move forward, pushing through the hold. It looks like he’s swimming through mud.

“You’re going to burn yourself out,” Reigen comments. “You should just surrender. You haven’t killed anyone yet—if you do, I can’t speak for your safety.” He keeps his voice even, but it’s been nearly a minute. He pulls Teru up off the glass, resting him against his legs, and puts pressure on the worst of Teru’s cuts with his undamaged hand. There’s a long one on Teru’s forearm that’s been bleeding steadily.

If this goes on too much longer, Reigen’s going to have to start breathing for him. He’s not all that sure it’ll work, with Ishihara’s power.

“Fuck you,” Ishihara hisses. He pushes harder, blood dripping from his nose, and Serizawa slows again, almost to a stop. Reigen can see the strain on Serizawa’s face as he fights it, eyes dark and inexorable. “You’ve been causing trouble since the second you arrived—should’ve let Nakano cut out your tongue—”

“Too late for that now, it looks like,” Reigen says helpfully. By the door, Tome’s reaching down into the flowerbed.

“After this you won’t be talking your way out of anything—your student’s gonna get you back in pieces, even if I have to do it myself—”

Tome straightens up again. She tilts her head, nodding, and her cheeks flush red. The rock she’s picked up isn’t very large—about the size of a golf ball. She and Dimple wind her arm back and throw it, with much more force than she would have managed on her own.

Reigen doesn’t think that Ishihara could have stopped it in his condition, even if he’d seen it coming. And he wasn’t watching Tome. Of course he wasn’t, with Teru and Serizawa right in front of him.

As it is, the rock strikes him in the temple. Ishihara collapses, slumping over across Nakano’s body.

The shadows holding them evaporate, and Teru gasps in a sharp, hurried breath.

“Is he dead?” Tome asks in her own voice. Dimple pulls free to float toward Ishihara.

Teru’s slowly pulling himself up. Reigen tries to steady him, but his arms are shaking, and Teru ends up supporting Reigen’s weight as they get to their feet. Teru taps a finger against Reigen’s handcuffs and they spring open, falling to the ground. Their eyes meet, and Teru smiles. There’s still a hint of anger in his eyes, but it doesn’t touch his expression; it’s not directed at Reigen.

“Nah. Just unconscious,” Dimple announces. “So’s this one—he’s not dead either. But I don’t think he’s going to be moving around much after this. No more stabbing people. You shoulda seen the inside of his head—guy’s a real piece of work.”

“I noticed,” Reigen says. He’s going for humour, but his voice falls a little flat, and Teru’s hand on his arm tightens.

“Yeah, I guess you would’ve,” Dimple says, eyeing him.

Reigen looks up as Serizawa approaches, looking a little uncertain. Teru steps away, moving toward Tome, and Serizawa pulls Reigen into a hug.

“Hey,” Reigen says, wrapping his arms around him. Serizawa takes a shaky breath. “Thank you for catching me.”

Serizawa laughs, dropping his head onto Reigen’s shoulder.

There’s the sound of glass shifting, and Reigen looks over to see Teru sweeping it to the side with his powers, clearing the ground at their feet. Tome walks forward, and two more sets of arms wrap around them.

“Tome,” Serizawa says when they pull away, “I’m—” He finally gets a proper look at her, and his expression freezes. “You’re hurt.” His voice is almost disbelieving, like he can’t believe anyone would have hurt her, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Tome smiles fondly. “I’m fine,” she says.

“That’s some shiner you’ve got there,” Dimple says, and his tone is commiserating.

“Reigen’s hurt worse. They broke his fingers.” Her voice wavers a little at the end.

They look over at him, and Reigen moves his hand behind his back reflexively.

“Let’s not focus on that right now,” he says. His brain starts cycling through the logistics on automatic. “We should probably call the police, and—warn Shou—they said they were going to go after him and his family—”

“That already happened,” Teru tells him as Serizawa dials, moving a little away from the group. “They’re okay, though. He’s not badly hurt, and Ritsu’s with him in case they come back.”

“Okay,” Reigen says, closing his eyes. “Okay.” He’s not sure what ‘not badly’ means, but there’s nothing he can do about that right now. “What about Mob?”

Teru pulls out his phone. “I’ll text him, tell him we found you,” he says.

“Where is he? Is he okay?” Tome asks, and Teru nods, fingers typing rapidly.

“Yeah,” Dimple answers instead, “They sent someone to watch him, make sure Shigeo didn’t try to find you. Shady bastard. I bet Shigeo’ll be real glad to get rid of him.”

What the hell. “Is someone else with him?” Reigen asks, a little more sharply than intended.

There’s a short silence.

“Teru? Who’s with Mob right now?” Reigen demands, and the anxiety that’s been building over the past couple of days threatens to spill over.

Teru doesn’t meet his eyes. “Uh—”

“Reigen, he’s fine, don’t go all mother hen. Shigeo can take care of himself,” Dimple says dismissively.

“He’s alone?” Reigen bites out, and cuts himself off. He can’t take this out on Teru. Teru’s not responsible for Mob’s safety.

“Reigen,” Dimple starts again, as Reigen tries desperately to control his breathing.

He doesn’t know when Tome left, but she comes back with Serizawa in tow, looking worried.

“Arataka? I’m calling Shigeo right now, okay?” Serizawa says, tucking his phone in against his ear.

And now everybody’s looking at him again. Reigen feels raw, exposed, and he can’t even protect a handful of teenagers—

That’s always what it comes down to in the end, isn’t it—Reigen can’t protect any of them, and these kids keep throwing themselves into danger on his behalf. Tome wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for him, wouldn’t have gotten hurt; Teru wouldn’t look like he walked face-first into a paper shredder; Mob wouldn’t be alone with some kidnapping terrorist holding Reigen and Tome’s lives over his head—

“Teru, can you go with Tome to the car? The police should be here soon.” Serizawa says, hanging up. “Dimple—”

“Yeah, I’ll go with them. Come on,” Dimple says, and Teru and Tome leave reluctantly.

“Arataka,” Serizawa says once they’re out of sight, “He’s not hurt, he’s fine. He wants to see you. He’ll meet us at the hospital later.”

Reigen’s breath shudders in his chest, and Serizawa pulls him in again, arms around his shoulders.

“It’s okay, everyone’s safe,” Serizawa says into his ear. “You’re okay.”

Reigen laughs a little hysterically, squeezing his eyes shut. He is so far from okay—he doesn’t know where that would be, exactly, but it’s an entirely different universe from okay. All of the terror and anxiety and rage he’s been suppressing is going to swallow him whole.

With none of the kids there to see, Serizawa holds him while Reigen slowly shakes apart. His uninjured hand clutches hard at Serizawa’s shirt, leaving a smear of Teru’s blood across the front.

Chapter Text

They x-ray and re-splint his hand at the hospital, and talk to him about physiotherapy. Reigen nods along, but isn’t really making much of an effort to focus. The first time he caught himself drifting he nearly panicked, but he can do this now. He doesn’t have to listen. No one’s lives depend on his ability to absorb information about finger flexion exercises. There’s a handout, anyway, he saw Serizawa tucking it into his pocket.

Teru finished early, and he came to keep Reigen company while they were waiting for his x-ray results. Teru’s more bandage than boy right now, swathed in white, but he didn’t seem too bothered about it.

“I heal quickly,” he said in response to Reigen’s quietly horrified expression, “It’s an esper thing. It probably won’t even scar.” He laughed a little self-consciously. “I’m mostly embarrassed he caught me off-guard like that. That was pretty stupid.”

He took Serizawa’s gentle teasing in stride, trading quips back and forth as Reigen slowly relaxed again. Now Teru’s asleep. He’s sprawled out on the armchair in the corner under Serizawa’s jacket, with Reigen’s pillow tucked under his head.

“He’ll be okay,” Serizawa says quietly, “He’s just exhausted. He did most of the legwork while we were looking for you—he didn’t really sleep much.”

Reigen tries not to feel guilty about that.

He has to stop himself from worrying about where Tome is every few minutes—she’s with her family. She’s fine. He thinks that will probably take a little while to get used to.

Mob arrives twenty minutes later, while Serizawa is off looking for tea. He looks tired and a little dishevelled, but unharmed.

“Master Reigen,” he says, and his smile is so much brighter than Reigen’s used to seeing. Mob’s become steadily more expressive over the past few months, but sometimes it still catches Reigen off-guard.

“Hey, Mob,” Reigen’s mouth says on automatic, while he tries to hold back the sudden rush of sentimentality. Get it together, you idiot.

Mob closes the distance and actually hugs him. Reigen freezes in surprise before slowly moving to return it.

“I’m so glad they found you,” Mob says, and Reigen can hear the relief in his voice.

Mob and Reigen don’t tend to hug, as a general rule. There’s usually an unspoken but carefully-maintained physical distance. Reigen will express himself through friendly shoulder pats, or ruffling his hair, or sharing meals (when he has the cash to spare). Most of the times they have were when Mob was little, back when Mob was more demonstratively affectionate.

He used to run up and hug Reigen, sometimes, when he first started on as Reigen’s apprentice; cannoning into Reigen’s legs with enough force to topple him over if he wasn’t expecting it. Mob was so happy to finally have someone to understand him. Reigen has sometimes wondered whether he stopped when he realized Reigen was a fraud, or if that was just a natural progression of Mob growing up.

Reigen hadn't realized he'd missed it.

Reigen’s eyes are wet when he pulls back, but Mob doesn’t call attention to it. Reigen wipes at them discreetly with his sleeve.

Mob’s short intake of breath makes him look up—Mob is staring at his hand.

“Master, your fingers,” Mob says, and his eyes are wide with dismay.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Reigen says quickly, waving them back and forth. The motion hurts, and Reigen has to conceal a grimace. He carefully drops his hand back into his lap. “They’re fine, they don’t even hurt—it looks worse than it is. They’ve really made a big fuss over nothing, with all this bandaging; I don’t know what those doctors were thinking.”

The words pour out of him without any conscious thought. Mob’s expression is doubtful, and Reigen didn’t really want to start this visit by lying to him.

“It’ll be fine, Mob. They’ll be back to normal in a few weeks,” he says a little more honestly. Mob nods, face smoothing out.

Then Reigen glances down, and blinks. Now that he’s looking, Mob’s knuckles are a little raw on his right hand, and—is that dried blood? It’s not a lot; but it’s there, collected in the webs of his fingers.

“Mob? What happened to your hand?” Reigen asks, and Mob looks down.

“Oh,” Mob looks a little embarrassed. “I hit someone.”

“You hit someone,” Reigen echoes faintly. “With your hand?”

Then he feels stupid for the question, but Mob just nods seriously.

“Mr. Yanagawa, from Claw. He was supposed to stay and watch me. He didn’t want to let me leave,” he says, like that explains everything. Reigen supposes it does, to a point. Mob’s always been careful about using his powers.

“Did he hurt you?” Reigen asks, and something in his chest loosens when Mob shakes his head.

“No. He just grabbed my arm. But he said—” Mob’s shoulders stiffen, and his mouth turns down at the corners. “He kept talking about how they were going to hurt you, and then Hanazawa said you were injured in his message, and I—lost control.”

Not of his powers, though. Of his temper, like any kid might have. The thought leaves Reigen strangely proud.

Reigen reaches over and ruffles his hair.

“Sounds like self-defence to me. I wouldn’t worry about it,” Reigen says, and Mob’s posture relaxes.

“I think I broke his nose,” he confesses. “I was really surprised. The last time I punched someone, it barely did anything.”

“All that body improvement paid off, Mr. Vice President,” Reigen says.

Mob smiles at the praise. After a moment, the expression fades into something that has Reigen straightening up.

“I’m sorry,” Mob says. His voice is very quiet, now. “You’re always getting hurt because of me.”

“Mob, you can’t think this was your fault,” Reigen says. “You’re not responsible for what other people do.”

“No, but—”

The door opens, and they both look up.

Serizawa steps through, looking tense. He doesn’t have any tea. Reigen is about to ask about it when another man follows him in, closing the door behind him.

Reigen glances between Serizawa, Mob, and Teru—still fast asleep on the armchair—and his heartrate kicks up.

“No need to look so nervous,” the man says with a sardonic tilt of his eyebrow. “I’m Joseph, from the Special Government Task Force. I’m here to debrief you on the Claw situation.”

Reigen gives him an assessing look. He doesn’t look like he’s from the government, task force or otherwise—he’s a foreigner, for one, hair buzzed short and dyed a pale shade of pink. He smells like cigarette smoke, wistfully reminding Reigen that the last time he had a cigarette was over a month ago.

Reigen looks at Serizawa, who nods. “He was the one who arrested Suzuki after the attack last year,” Serizawa supplies.

“Okay. Nice to meet you,” Reigen says after a moment. Serizawa’s posture is still guarded; it has Reigen on edge. “What do you want?”

Joseph laughs. “I won’t take up too much of your time. This is more of a courtesy visit than anything else. We’re very sorry you were kidnapped by terrorists, etc. etc. Don’t talk to the media about it. At all, preferably, but if you do: don’t mention Claw, or that any of the men who abducted you had psychic powers.”

Mob is watching the interaction with curiosity; it doesn’t look like he’s picked up on Serizawa’s discomfort.

“Why?” Reigen asks after a pause. “Wouldn’t it come up at the trial anyway?”

“Oh, there’s not going to be a trial.” Joseph flicks an imaginary piece of lint off his shoulder. “Public perception of espers is becoming a problem as it is. You know how it is; destroy the city enough times, and people start paying attention.”

The guilt on Mob’s face makes Reigen scowl.

“We’re already going to have to redact your witness statement for the official record. The last thing anyone needs is us giving these Claw fanatics the publicity of a trial,” Joseph continues. “There’ll be a closed hearing—your statements are enough, you won’t need to testify—and then we’ll be dropping these assholes down the deepest hole we can find. Metaphorically speaking.” He gives Reigen a calculating look. “I’m sure you’ll sleep better knowing they’re locked away. From what I’ve heard, you and Miss Kurata had a pretty harrowing experience.”

Reigen is all in favour of Claw being locked away. But Joseph’s nonchalance—and Serizawa’s reaction to it—leaves a bad taste in Reigen’s mouth.

“Well, that’s it, then,” Joseph says when Reigen doesn’t reply. “We’ll have someone keep an eye on you and Miss Kurata while we round the rest of these fuckers up, but I don’t expect they’ll try the same thing twice.”

He pauses in the doorway, and looks back at Serizawa. “Sorry for the mix-up,” he says, not sounding particularly sorry at all. Serizawa nods tersely.

“What mix-up?” Reigen asks, as Joseph shuts the door behind him.

“I was going to tell you later,” Serizawa says, which is never a good start to a conversation.

Reigen is about to insist when he realizes that ‘later’ might mean ‘not in front of the kids’, which—fair enough.

Reigen glances back at Teru. He is, impossibly, still asleep.

“Can you check on Teru?” he asks Mob, a little worried. “Does he have a fever, or something?” He does get those distressingly often, for a kid who lives on his own.

Mob moves over to the armchair.

“He does feel a bit warm,” Mob says, pressing a hand against Teru’s forehead.

Reigen shakes his head. “He really needs to sleep in a proper bed.”

“He can’t go home alone,” Serizawa says. “Someone should be taking care of him.”

Mob nods. “He can stay over, my parents won’t mind. Hanazawa,” he says, gently shaking Teru’s shoulder. It takes a couple of tries to wake him.

“Hm—oh, Kageyama,” Teru says with a sleepy smile. His expression is very soft.

“It’s time to go,” Mob says. “It’s getting late. You can sleep over at our place tonight.”

Teru’s face lights up. “Really? I mean—I wouldn’t want to impose—”

“It’s not imposing. Come on, my dad will drive us home. Bye, Serizawa, Master Reigen.”

They wave them out. After they’re out of sight, Reigen turns expectantly to Serizawa. Serizawa seems to know what he’s waiting for, because he sits down on the armchair with a sigh, pulling it closer to the bed.

“They thought I had something to do with the kidnapping,” he says without preamble. “Whoever’s running Claw right now went out of their way to make it look like I was involved, and I guess it was plausible, with—my history.”

“What,” Reigen says flatly.

Serizawa gives a half-hearted shrug.

“That’s ridiculous! Anyone talking to you for two seconds would know you wouldn’t—” Reigen cuts himself off with difficulty. Reigen’s outrage just seems to be making Serizawa feel worse. “What happened?” he asks, a little quieter.

“They made it seem personal,” Serizawa replies, hands twisting in his lap. Reigen hasn’t seen that nervous habit in months. “A neighbour said they overheard us arguing, said things got—heated. That you threatened to leave.”

“Oh,” Reigen says.

“Yeah. They brought me in that first morning, and they weren’t really interested in exploring other options.”

“But you were in class when it happened,” Reigen protests.

“No, I—didn’t go,” Serizawa says haltingly. “One of my classmates told me it was cancelled. I didn't even think she might be lying.”

It sounds like Claw put a lot of thought into planning this out. Reigen supposes that it makes sense. After Mob, Serizawa would be the most obvious threat to their plans. It actually sounds like they’d been watching them for a while. Reigen’s sure he’ll feel good and freaked out about that, later, once it has the chance to really sink in.

“They weren’t going to let me go,” Serizawa continues. “What Joseph said, about public perception—I think they just wanted to handle things quietly. You and Tome were missing, and I couldn’t do anything to find you." He looks down. "If they'd kept me there, I never would have gotten Tome's message at all.”

Reigen reaches out with his left hand, taking hold of one of Serizawa’s.

“What changed?” Reigen asks.

Serizawa smiles ruefully. “The 110 call. Tome’s parents identified her voice, and they realized things were a little more complicated than they’d assumed. Then the canine unit found the bunker. That kind of blew apart their domestic violence theory.”

“That’s so stupid. Where does Tome come into that?”

“I think maybe Claw built up the evidence before Tome got involved,” Serizawa offers. “They kept asking me where she was—they knew she didn’t fit. They said that maybe she got in the way, and I killed her by accident.” He says it dully, and Reigen can see how much the suggestion had bothered him.

“Hey,” Reigen says, and takes back his hand. He pats the bed. “Get up here.”

Serizawa eyes it doubtfully. “I’m not going to fit.”

“I don’t care. Come on,” Reigen insists, and lifts the side of the blanket.

He pulls Serizawa in until he’s settled beside him, radiating heat like a furnace.

“Careful,” he says, as Serizawa’s hand brushes one of the long scratches across the side of his torso.

“What’s this from?” Serizawa asks, tracing the edge of the bandaging through Reigen’s hospital gown.

“When I went through the window,” Reigen says. “The edge of it was pretty sharp. Hah—I didn’t even notice those until the nurse pointed them out. They were really the least of my problems.”

Serizawa’s hand drifts up, touching the bandaging on his neck.

“Knife,” Reigen supplies after a moment. “It’s not very deep.”

Serizawa’s fingers brush the one on his cheek.

“Knife again. That guy was really stab-happy,” Reigen says. “Serious issues, there.”

The bruising on his forehead.

“Side of the car, when we were abducted,” Reigen says reluctantly. He’s really starting to not like this game.

He sees Serizawa’s eyes move toward his damaged hand.

“Okay, can we not catalogue every injury I got over the past three days? It’s not very fun from my perspective,” Reigen says, a little sharply.

“Sorry,” Serizawa says, and his eyes return to Reigen’s face. “I just—no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to remind you.”

“It’s fine,” Reigen says. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

“Yeah,” Serizawa replies, and carefully pulls him closer. “I missed you so much.”

Well played. It defuses Reigen’s anger completely.

“I missed you too,” Reigen says with a sigh. He leans in to kiss him.

Reigen settles his head in against Serizawa’s chest, listening to the comforting rhythm of his heartbeat. He makes an encouraging sound as Serizawa’s hand comes up to stroke his hair.

The knock on the door makes them both jump. Reigen has to bite back an angry response. If one more person barges into his hospital room uninvited—

But it might be Tome, and Reigen really does want to see her before they go home. Reigen sits up as Serizawa gets off the bed to answer the door.

“Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Kurata,” Serizawa says. He opens the door a little wider.

Reigen looks over in surprise. He’s never actually met Tome’s parents in person, but the family resemblance is obvious.

"What can we do for you?" he asks as they step inside.

Tome’s mother is red-eyed but determined, looking like she’s bracing herself for conflict; her father looks coldly resolute. It’s a pair of expressions that make Reigen suspect he really doesn’t want to be lying in bed for this conversation.

“Mr. Reigen,” Mrs. Kurata says, “Could we talk to you for a minute?”

Chapter Text

When Tome arrives at the hospital, she’s shuffled off away from the others. She’s brought into a room on a different floor altogether. The separation makes her anxious and prickly. She tries not to snap at the doctor for asking invasive questions during her assessment.

Her parents arrive a little while later. Her father actually expresses an emotion—she doesn’t tease him for it, though she wants to—and her mom hugs her for a solid minute before Tome can convince her to let go.

“Mom, you’re getting my shirt wet,” she complains, but without any bite to it. She’s feeling a little teary-eyed herself.

“Oh, Tome,” her mom says, pulling back. Her voice is thick with tears. “I don’t know what I would have done if we’d lost you, sweetheart.” Her fingers trace the edge of Tome’s black eye for a moment, before moving to cup her cheek.

“I’m okay,” Tome says. “They’re just bruises. Reigen looked after me.”

The door opens before either of them can reply. Her sister is standing in the doorway with a carry-tray of smoothies.

“Yuna!”

“Hey, Sassquatch,” Yuna says, shunting the tray onto the side table.

“Stop calling me that,” Tome says like she always does, and pulls her in for a hug.

“Maybe one day,” Yuna replies, voice a little shaky. “When you stop being a sassy little hellraiser.” Tome sticks out her tongue in response.

She drinks her smoothie sitting on the hospital bed, sandwiched between her sister and her mom in a tangle of arms. Tome finishes hers way too quickly—she hasn’t had enough food to feel properly full in days—and ends up with a wicked stomach ache.

She tells them about what happened. Just the broad strokes—she doesn’t want to make her mom cry again. Enough so her father stops getting that pinched look whenever she says Reigen’s name. There’s a knock at the door while she’s talking, and soon Tome has to repeat her story in more detail to a couple of police officers.

The interview takes forever. Tome asks Yuna to sit in instead of her parents, and she’s glad she did. Yuna maintains a serene look of calm throughout, tension only betrayed by the way she spins her ring around on her finger during the difficult bits. Her mom probably would have burst into tears, and her father probably wouldn’t be able to stop himself from interrupting her mid-story. Again. It’s hard enough to say some of it out loud without worrying about their reactions. Tome thought they’d put up more of a fight about staying, but they’re pretty cool about it. She doesn’t realize why until later.

“I want to go see Reigen now,” Tome says after the officers leave. Yuna hesitates for a moment, then sighs.

“Yeah, okay. Come on, Sassquatch,” she says, and they head up to the third floor.

Tome hears voices almost as soon as they leave the elevator.

“—been completely dependent on you for her safety for the last three days, she’s not going to be objective about this,” her father’s voice is stern, clearly audible from the hallway.

“We really appreciate you looking after her, but please. Do the right thing. She’ll listen if it comes from you,” her mom adds.

Tome moves purposefully toward the door, but Yuna catches her arm.

“Tome,” she whispers, voice serious, and Tome looks up at her.

Yuna looks deeply uncomfortable, and Tome realizes that she knew they were going to do this.

Tome considers just barging in anyway. She’s angry enough to do it. But if her parents are putting up a united front, that would probably just make things worse. And she doesn’t really want to get into a row in front of Reigen and Serizawa.

She grabs Yuna by the hand instead, dragging her back to Tome’s room.

“What the hell was that?” she hisses once they’re alone.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Yuna says immediately, but adds, “It was pretty obvious what they were planning, though. Can you blame them? You could’ve died. From what you said earlier, you almost did.”

“That wasn’t his fault!” Tome protests.

“But he was still responsible for you,” Yuna says, and her voice is infuriatingly calm.

“That’s not fair,” Tome says, “He did everything he could. He tried to get me to leave but I wouldn’t go. If anything, it’s my fault I got hurt—!”

Yuna pulls her into a hug. Tome struggles for a moment, before sinking into it reluctantly.

“Nope. No way,” Yuna says fiercely. “This was so not your fault, Sassquatch. Don’t even think it.” She pauses for a moment, one hand rubbing little circles into Tome’s back. “I think they know it wasn’t Mr. Reigen’s fault either. They’re just trying to keep you safe.”

“Everyone’s just trying to keep me safe,” Tome says bitterly. “I’m getting really sick of people hiding things, and trying to make decisions for me. And it’s not like it makes any difference. Sometimes you just get hurt anyway, Yuna,” she adds, and for some reason, Yuna’s face falls.

“I’ll talk to them about it later,” Yuna promises, “Once everyone’s cooled down a bit. I think all three of you could use some breathing room.”

Tome nods reluctantly. She’s just starting to calm down again when her parents come back, and the satisfied expression on her father’s face sets her off immediately.

“Why were you in Reigen’s room?” she starts, immediately on the offensive. She ignores Yuna’s wince. “I hope you weren’t there blaming him for being kidnapped.”

Tome’s mom has the grace to look a little embarrassed, but of course her father is above all that.

“Of course not, sweetheart,” her mom says. “We wanted to thank him for looking after you.”

Tome’s eyes narrow. “That wasn’t what it sounded like. It sounded like you were trying to convince him to send me away.”

“Tome, none of this would have happened if we were keeping a closer eye on you. We should have been paying more attention to your needs,” her mom replies, tearing up again.

“When did you even start working there, anyway?” her father adds. “And when were you going to tell us the truth?”

“I told you months ago,” she says, dodging the first question. “You didn’t have a problem with it then.”

“You made it sound like some kind of occult bookstore. If we’d known what it really was—we never would have agreed to something so dangerous.”

“What—it’s not my fault you weren’t listening!” she says, and something in her chest tightens. She looks between them, at their serious expressions, and knows they’re not going to budge.

She tries anyway.

“It’s not dangerous! I make tea, and answer phones, and talk to clients. I’ve never gotten hurt because of the job,” she pauses, realizing that isn’t quite true, but forges on. “This didn’t have anything to do with that, anyway. They were after our friend—it could’ve happened to anyone he knew. You’ve met him! He’s come over loads of times. We’ve been friends since middle school.”

Their expressions don’t change at all.

“Tome,” her mom says. “We spoke with Mr. Reigen, and he took responsibility for what happened.”

Of course he did.

“He’s agreed that you should—take a break. Focus on your studies. You don’t need to be working a job right now; you can spend time with your friends. Why don’t you start another club?” Her mom’s voice is gentle, coaxing, like she’s offering a consolation prize. It’s the same tone she used when Tome finished last on sports day in elementary school.

“You don’t understand,” Tome says, a little desperately. And she doesn’t know how to explain it to them. The bonds they share, the family they’ve made; there’s so much of her life that her parents have never seen. “It’s not just a job. They—they saved me—”

“You won’t be returning there,” her father says, voice firm.

“You can’t stop me,” Tome retorts, voice shaking. But she knows she’s lost. She lost the moment they went to talk to Reigen.

Fuck.

She pushes past them, heading out the door.

“Tome,” her father says sharply. She cringes away on instinct, but no one tries to grab her.

She pauses in the hall, and sticks her head back through the doorway. They’re all looking at her like she’s done something shocking, but Tome doesn’t have the energy to deal with their reactions. Her father is very pale.

“I’ll be back. Obviously,” she says. That’s as much as she can say without breaking into tears. They should know where she’s going, anyway.

She heads up to the third floor.

The door is open when she gets there. Reigen probably knew she was coming.

He’s sitting on the end of the hospital bed, dressed in street clothes. It looks like they’re getting ready to leave; Serizawa has a little bundle of papers that he’s folding and unfolding next to a small duffel bag, with two coats draped over his arm. He looks up when she comes in and smiles at her, but his expression is sad and a little withdrawn.

“Are you leaving?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Reigen says, not meeting her eyes.

She’s not ready for this conversation. Neither of them is. It’s too soon.

She came in here ready to yell, to get angry at him for giving in. Or she thought she was. But one look at his face and all the fight just drains out of her.

She thought this would be over, now that they’ve been rescued; that things could go back to normal. But she still feels just as tired, just as helpless. She can’t shake off the fear that’s been clinging to her like film. It feels like everything’s falling apart again.

“I’m sorry,” she says finally. “About my parents. I can still come to work. They don’t have to know—”

“Tome,” Reigen interrupts gently, and she stops.

“They had a point,” Reigen says, sounding tired. “This is the second time you’ve gotten hurt working here. I can’t guarantee that it won’t happen again.”

“And I could be hit by a bus going to school,” she argues. “Or smacked by a teacher, or something.” Reigen winces at her example, and Tome feels a little guilty for that. “They wouldn’t make me stop going to school.”

“That’s different. Your education’s important,” he says.

“Dad, please—”

He actually flinches, and they both freeze. That hurt him, somehow, and Tome’s stomach drops unpleasantly.

“I—sorry,” she says, feeling uncertain. She hadn’t meant to call him that; it just slipped out. Serizawa looks startled, hand halted mid-motion.

“It’s fine,” Reigen says, but she knows it isn’t.

“I—as much as I would—” Reigen stops, and looks entreatingly at Serizawa before turning back to her. “Tome, I’m not your real dad,” he says. And that hits like a punch to the stomach.

“I know that,” she says quietly. She stares down at the ground.

“If your parents don’t want you working with us, I can’t…it’s their choice, Tome.”

She stands there in silence, knowing there’s nothing she can say. She could go against her parents, or come to the office uninvited. But she needs someone on her side. She looks over at Serizawa, but he just looks resigned.

“This is important,” she says finally, and knows it sounds childish. Her voice wobbles, and her throat is uncomfortably tight. “You’re important.”

Reigen doesn’t answer, and the rejection stings. “Did you even try to convince them?” she asks, knowing that he didn’t. The silence stretches. She checks his expression, but it’s gone flat and blank. He’s hiding it from her, and she can’t—

“Fine,” she says, closing her eyes. “Fine. Sorry for intruding. Bye, Serizawa.”

She turns and leaves, hoping he’ll stop her. He doesn’t.

Dinner that night is tense and awkward. Mom and Yuna try to keep a conversation going, but her father is rigidly silent, and Tome stares at her plate without contributing.

It’s nearly three hours after they usually eat, and the meal was clearly made with Tome in mind: they’re all her favourites. She knows her father helped, because no one does croquettes quite the way he does. The knowledge leaves her feeling sullen and guilty.

She excuses herself early, and no one calls her back. She heads up to her room for the first time since she left for school Tuesday morning. She closes the door behind her, letting out a long sigh.

Her stuff is on her desk—the things she had on her the day they were taken. Her phone is there, and—

She sits down in the chair, and picks up her alien rock. It settles into her palm, warm and glowing gently. This is probably the longest she’s gone without it.

She’s not sure why that’s what reduces her to tears.

She picks up her phone, and plugs it into her charger. She has a lot of unanswered texts. She’ll look at them later. One of them catches her eye; it’s from Mob, sent about half an hour ago.

Sorry we missed you at the hospital. The doctors didn’t want us to come visit, and then Hanazawa caught a fever. Can I come see you tomorrow after school?

That might be nice. Her parents can’t object to having a friend visit. They were only really mad at Reigen, anyway. She taps out a reply.

Yeah. Get ready, I’m gonna kick your ass at Mario Kart.

There’s a soft knock at her door a little while later. Tome goes to open it—she knows who it is. Her parents wouldn't have knocked.

“Hey,” Yuna says. She’s dressed for bed, blankets folded under her arm. “Is it okay if I sleep in here tonight?” She sounds tentative, like she doesn’t think Tome will want her there. It’s not like her to act so uncertain.

Tome waves her in, and they set up their futons side by side on the floor.

Tome gets ready for bed. Washing in a proper bathtub is fantastic, holy shit—sink baths in a little concrete room do not compare—and she gets to change into fresh pyjamas after. And brush her teeth with her own toothbrush. She feels properly clean for the first time in days.

When she gets into bed, she brings her alien rock with her.

“What’s that?” Yuna asks, and Tome shows her. Tells her the story. Reigen was there for that one, too. She’d almost forgotten.

She fades quickly, once the lights are off. It was an unbelievably long day. She curls up on her side, holding the little glowing sphere in her hands.

She can talk them around. She’s made friends with aliens, convinced Reigen to give her a chance, bullshitted a bunch of kidnappers. If she can persuade her parents, she knows she can get Serizawa on board. She doesn’t know what to do with Reigen’s guilt, but she thinks that’s probably something he’s going to have to work on himself. Serizawa can help.

She’s going to change their minds.

Chapter Text

Reigen’s first week of freedom is kind of a mixed bag.

The first evening starts off a little tense, as they both think very loudly about the argument they’re trying not to have. Reigen knows Serizawa doesn’t agree with how he handled things with Tome, but he doesn’t bring it up. They’re both exhausted and hurting. So they try to keep things normal. Reigen goes and cleans up while Serizawa starts dinner—a hot shower, and he finally gets to shave for the first time in days—and changes into a clean pair of sweats.

He sits on the counter as Serizawa cooks, making unhelpful suggestions and being deliberately obnoxious to fill the silence. Serizawa bears it patiently. He resorts to feeding him the ingredients as he chops them to shut him up for a few seconds, and Reigen’s okay with this solution. Serizawa doesn’t even have to look up from what he’s doing, just floating them up telekinetically, which is kind of sexy.

“You know,” Reigen says around a piece of mushroom, “If you’d used the other pan, you could‘ve—no, I don’t want raw onion, what is wrong with you—” he bats the offending vegetable away.

Serizawa uses the distraction to scrape the rest of them into the pan, but Reigen catches him smiling. The tension eases, and they settle into something close to their usual routine.

Then Reigen runs into trouble with the chopsticks.

“Oh,” he says, trying to figure out how to grip them without using his last three fingers. “This might be a problem.” He tries bracing one against the side of his splint, but then he puts pressure on it and no, that’s not going to work.

He ends up rubber-banding them, and feels like a five-year-old. It’s still awkward, and he drops more than he eats. Serizawa doesn’t offer to help—he can probably tell by Reigen’s expression that it would be unwelcome.

“I guess I’ll have to start using my left hand,” he says in a tone of voice that doesn’t quite cover his embarrassment and frustration. “I’ve always wanted to be ambidextrous anyway.”

“I’m sure you’ll pick it up fast,” Serizawa says. “You always do, somehow. It’s uncanny.”

Reigen huffs, but feels a little better. Getting to sleep in his own bed is really nice. He curls in around Serizawa’s back like an octopus, and falls asleep quickly enough.

He sleeps in shamelessly late, and wakes up to the smell of coffee and eggs. Serizawa’s made him an omelette, conveniently cut into bite-sized pieces (Reigen vacillates in his reaction before landing on charmed). They’re perfectly rectangular, and Reigen hadn’t even realized they had a tamagoyaki pan. Then he remembers: psychic powers. Of course. It’s accompanied by rice and miso soup and the cheap instant coffee that Reigen loves but Serizawa keeps surreptitiously trying to throw away.

There’s no question of either of them going to work today—they don’t leave the apartment at all until Serizawa’s classes start.

“I don’t have to go,” Serizawa murmurs against his ear.

“No, you’ve missed enough this week. I’ll be fine for a couple of hours,” Reigen insists, shifting, and so Serizawa goes.

Reigen is fine, for the first half hour or so. He spends it cocooned in the duvet on the couch, watching game shows and shouting at his TV. Then the anxiety sets in, sharp and crushing and impossible to ignore. It’s not even really directed at anything; being completely relaxed just doesn’t feel right in a way that’s difficult to articulate. He lasts about another ten minutes before he caves.

He digs out the emergency pack of cigarettes he keeps in his sock drawer, and goes out onto their tiny balcony to smoke. It helps him bring the anxiety down to a manageable level. He told Serizawa he’d quit for good after his birthday, but it looks like that resolution lasted all of a month.

It’s not just the one. He’s careful with the smoke and disposes of the evidence after, but when Serizawa comes home Reigen thinks he can probably tell. Reigen deflects Serizawa’s first attempt to broach the subject, and it seems he’s decided to leave Reigen’s shitty coping strategies alone for now.

He gets a text from Tome on Saturday night, around two in the morning. He disentangles himself from Serizawa when his phone beeps—he wasn’t asleep anyway—and stares at the message.

Just checking, you haven’t been murdered by kidnappers right

He’d been planning on going no-contact, but he should probably make an exception for this.

Not that I noticed. Everything ok?

She texts him back almost immediately.

Yeah. Thanks

He gets another one on Monday, and then on Thursday. They don’t talk about the fight, or really anything at all: she checks in, and he sends something back, and that’s that.

He also goes back to work on Monday. Being in the office again is a little surreal, after everything. It’s been neatly tidied since the abduction—like nothing happened there at all.

He spends most of the morning rescheduling appointments with his regulars. He’s not going to be doing a lot of massages over the next few weeks. He could still manage in a pinch, with his left hand and some judicious elbow usage, but it’s not going to be of a quality he’d be comfortable charging full price for. They’re generally very understanding—by this point the ‘recurring curse’ is the thinnest veneer of fiction for most.

They’re going to lose a bit of revenue, there’s no getting around that. They’ll have to be a little more careful with expenses over the next couple of months. Remembering how close he came to having his whole hand shattered—functionally losing it completely—makes him sick.

Serizawa leaves for class again at four. Now that Reigen’s alone in the office, he spends a lot of time watching the door, feeling jumpy and out-of-sorts. He stubbornly sits through the discomfort, because it’s stupid and he’s a fucking professional and they really need the money. He doesn’t know where Dimple’s disappeared to, but he hasn’t seen him since the hospital.

He hasn’t seen any of them since the hospital, really. He thinks about calling them—Mob, or Teru, or even Tome—but can’t bring himself to do it. They’re going to want to talk about what happened. And calling Tome would undermine his efforts to keep her away from the office. It’s better that she’s gone. She shouldn’t have gotten involved with them in the first place. Reigen should never have encouraged her.

Serizawa tries to talk to him about it on Wednesday. Reigen’s been tense and snappish all day, exhausted and a little resentful that Serizawa’s going to leave again in an hour.

“Are you feeling okay?” he asks, setting a cup of tea on Reigen’s desk.

“I’m fine,” Reigen says shortly.

Serizawa hesitates. “You don’t seem fine,” he says. “You know you can take more time off, if you need to. I can manage for a couple of days.”

“No, I can’t, Katsuya. Not if we want to pay rent next month,” he answers, looking back down at his computer screen. The emails in his inbox all kind of blur together, and he takes a steadying breath.

“Okay,” Serizawa says, and Reigen can hear the frustration creeping into his tone. “When you’re ready to talk about what’s bothering you, let me know.”

He moves away from Reigen’s desk, and Reigen stubbornly refuses to look up. They work in silence until Serizawa has to leave. He hears his footsteps pause next to the door for a moment, before he leaves without a word, closing the door with a quiet click.

And Reigen kind of deserved that, but now he’s alone again, and fuck. He can’t just sit here waiting for someone to walk in. He’s not in the right frame of mind to handle a customer, anyway.

He cleans up hastily, and closes the office about ten minutes later. The flood of relief as he locks the door catches him off-guard.

Reigen doesn’t mention it to Serizawa—even when they make up later that evening—but Reigen closes early on Thursday as well, as soon as Serizawa leaves for class. When he turns off the lights and locks the door, Serizawa is waiting for him by the bottom of the stairs. Reigen flushes red, feeling caught, but Serizawa doesn’t say anything one way or the other. They walk to the station together in companionable silence, and Reigen leans in gratefully against his arm.

On Friday, Teru comes by at half-past three.

“Hey Reigen,” he says, leaning casually against Tome’s old desk. Most of the bandages are off—Teru was right, the scarring is minimal and already fading. “My friends cancelled on me, so I don’t have any plans for tonight. You have any work I can help with?”

Reigen glances suspiciously over at Serizawa, who doesn’t look up from the math problems he’s working on.

“Sure,” he says after a moment. “You can help me file these invoices.”

They work through the pile, chatting amiably, and Reigen barely even notices when Serizawa leaves. Teru doesn't ask any awkward questions, sticking to safe topics, and things feel almost normal again. He buys Teru some takoyaki after in recompense.

“You should talk to Kageyama,” Teru says quietly as they eat. “He hasn’t been doing too well lately.”

“Yeah?” Reigen says around a too-hot mouthful of food.

“I think he’s been blaming himself for what happened to you guys,” Teru replies.

Teru leaves it at that. But Reigen feels stupid for not having followed up with Mob after their hospital conversation. He’d been too wrapped up in his own head to think about how Mob might be taking this. Of course he feels guilty—he’d told Reigen as much already.

Reigen makes plans to take Mob out for ramen on Saturday, and sees immediately what Teru was talking about. There are dark circles under his eyes, and he’s paler than usual. Dimple hovers over Mob’s shoulder—that’s where he went, the flighty little bastard—and gives Reigen a significant look.

“You doing okay, kiddo?” Reigen asks after they order.

Mob takes a moment to think about it.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says after a while. Reigen makes an encouraging sound, and Mob fidgets with his napkin. “People are always getting hurt around me,” Mob explains. “And I’m not always there to protect them. I don’t know how to stop it from happening.”

“I don’t think you can, Mob,” Reigen says carefully. “You can’t always stop bad things from happening.” He pauses. “You know it’s not your fault, right?”

“I know. But it still feels like it is,” Mob says, looking glum.

Their food arrives. Reigen rubber-bands his chopsticks again, resigning himself to the embarrassment. He’s gotten better at using them left-handed, but it’s going to be a while before he can handle them confidently. And he’s hungry. He doesn’t want the noodles to get soggy.

Mob watches him do it without comment, a tiny furrow between his eyebrows.

“You know,” Reigen says as he eats, “It’s only natural to feel that way, Mob. You should face that guilt directly—turn it into something productive. Think about what you can do to make things right.”

Mob looks thoughtful, and Reigen smiles, pleased with himself. That was pretty good!

He changes the subject, asking about Mob’s entrance exams, and listens to Mob talk about school. Dimple keeps shooting Reigen exasperated looks, but he doesn’t actually say anything until Mob leaves to use the washroom.

“You gonna follow your own advice, dumbass?”

“Hm?” Reigen pretends not to know what he’s talking about.

“When’s the last time you saw Tome?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Reigen says a little defensively. “Where have you even been the past week? You can’t just vanish without telling anyone. Someone’ll think you’ve been exorcised.”

“Uh-huh,” Dimple says, unimpressed. “I’ll be back as soon as Shigeo stops having nightmares about you two disappearing.”

That takes the wind out of Reigen’s sails. He slumps back a little in his chair.

“Has it been that bad?” he asks.

“Bad enough. He asked me to watch for energy spikes, so he doesn’t destroy the house around him by accident. He’s been pretty worried about losing control.”

“He didn’t mention that,” Reigen says.

“He might have, if you’d talked to him earlier. He mentioned them to Tome—she’s been having nightmares, too. It’d probably help if you actually saw them sometime.”

Reigen doesn’t reply, and Dimple gives him a frustrated look.

“Get your shit together, Reigen. Stop avoiding everyone. You’re supposed to be the adult—start acting like it.”

He vanishes before Reigen can think of an answer. Reigen blows out a frustrated breath.

“Having the last word and disappearing doesn’t make you right,” he says snippily to the empty air. He ignores the looks the people at the next table shoot him, and waits for Mob to get back.

Chapter Text

Tome’s plan is set back somewhat by the dreams, but she should have expected that.

She’s been getting them since she was little—vivid, screaming nightmares that wake up everyone in the house. The child psychologist her mom dragged her to said it was the result of an over-active imagination, and that she’d grow out of it over time. She stopped for a while in middle school, but they still flare up every now and again.

They start on Friday. Tome figures she was too exhausted the night before, but her subconscious comes after her with a vengeance the next night. Yuna wakes her up by cautiously tapping her upper arm—Tome punched her once in her sleep, so they’ve learned to be careful—and waits while Tome gasps awake.

Their parents are hovering in the doorway. Her mom looks worried but resigned. She gives Tome a shaky smile, and heads downstairs. Tome sits with Yuna until the tremors stop, and once Tome feels up to it, they head down after her. They have their nightmare routine down cold.

Her mom is making hot chocolate. Her father is there too, which surprises her. He stopped coming down for her nightmares once she was about ten or so. They move over to the living room, and Tome settles into the centre of the couch. Her father perches on the armchair across from them, looking awkward and out of place.

She doesn’t say anything, fingers wrapped tightly around her mug. She’ll sometimes tell them about her dreams. Yuna used to come up with funny alternate endings when she was younger, trying to make Tome laugh. She might have told them, if it was just mom and Yuna, but she doesn’t want to start an argument with her father. The feelings are too raw right now. But he’s here, and she supposes that means something. He looks like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

The nightmares come back almost every night, that first week. They start out different, but they all converge on the same point.

She’ll be moving around in the dark, trying to find the way out as it grows harder and harder to continue forward. It feels like slowly sinking into a bog. There’ll be the occasional light glowing ahead in the distance, but she never reaches it—and she knows she needs to find Reigen first. She can’t leave without him. The dread will creep in slowly, and the pressure will build until she can barely breathe with the force of it.

The search will exhaust her, and just as she’s about to give up, she finds him. She always does.

“Tome,” he’ll say, turning. He’ll walk over to her, and there’ll be something about his eyes; a flat, deadened look that frightens her. The beginning of blood will drip down the sides of his mouth, spotting his jacket.

“Tome,” he’ll say again. His voice is slow and rough, like he’s having difficulty forming the first syllable. And the blood will start running down his chin, soaking the front of his shirt.

He’ll reach her, resting his hands on her shoulders. He’ll open his mouth to speak again, and there’ll be nothing there. No sound comes out. Just blood; a deep, thick red, and she’ll stare in frozen horror, feet rooted to the ground.

She wishes her brain would come up with something else, but that’s it. Sometimes details will be different, but they’re variations on the same theme.

She texts him after Saturday’s dream, feeling stupid, and he actually texts back. She half-expected him to ignore it. She doesn’t do it too often—just after the really bad ones. It’s probably weird to text her boss/fake-dad in the middle of the night to make sure he hasn’t been gruesomely murdered since the last time she saw him. But it helps. And it has the added bonus of reminding him that she still exists.

Sometimes she hates the lie they used, about him being her dad. It felt necessary at the time, and it was kind of—nice to imagine. But Tome feels like something’s been damaged between them, now; something easy and familial that never needed to be acknowledged. Something she hadn’t realized was there until it slipped out from under her like a missed stair.

She goes to the therapy sessions her mom sets up. She goes into it preparing to hate them, but her therapist looks like a turtle in a sweater vest, and it’s really hard to hate someone after a comparison like that. They’re actually pretty nice, and they don’t interrupt while she’s talking. Or burst into tears. So that’s better than she gets at home.

She takes the week off school. Yuna stays for all of it, but spends most of the day on her laptop at the dining room table, watching lectures and taking notes. Med school is serious business, apparently.

She makes up for it in the evenings. They play a lot of video games. Tome introduces her to Mob when he comes over, and Keiko when she brings Tome the homework she’s been missing. Tome’s bought a few new co-op games since the beginning of her friendship with Keiko. Losing over and over gets depressing, and Keiko is apologetic but ruthless. Mob tends to like the co-op games better anyway.

He looks pretty tired, by Tuesday, and she asks him about it when they get a moment alone. It doesn’t take much coaxing to get the reason.

“Dimple’s been helping,” he says, staring over at where their game is paused.

“With the dreams? How?” Tome asks.

“Oh, um,” Mob looks down at his controller. “When I get nightmares, sometimes, my powers activate without me noticing. Dimple wakes me up when that happens so I don’t break anything.”

“That’s rough,” Tome says. Mob shrugs, a little awkward. “I almost broke my sister’s jaw by accident, once, so I can kinda relate.”

That actually does seem to make him feel better.

“You should message me afterward,” she suggests. “We can be nightmare buddies. You can tell me all about what gruesome horror-show your brain came up with that night.”

“They’re not really gruesome. Just sad,” Mob says.

“Oh. Well, mine are. I’ll trade you,” she offers, and he smiles at that. They don’t really talk about it much in person, but she gets more details out of him over text. She hugs him the next time she sees him, for a little longer than she might have normally, and he hugs back.

Her mom takes some time off work, and spends most of it trying to ‘reconnect’ with Tome.

“You know,” her mom says as she slips a tray of cookies into the oven. “I used to like that sci-fi stuff you’re always talking about.”

“Wha—really?” Tome asks. She’s leaning against the counter with the spatula sticking out of her mouth.

“There was a program—Star Trek. A foreign show; they had subtitles,” she explains, slipping off the oven mitts. “It ran very late. I used to sneak down to the TV and watch it while my parents were sleeping.”

“Wow,” Tome says. “You never mentioned that.”

“It’s for children. You grow out of it as you get older,” her mom says firmly. Tome decides to let that slide.

“What did you like about it?”

“Well. The starship captain was very handsome,” her mom murmurs with a smile.

“Mom!” Tome laughs. “Okay, we’re definitely watching that tonight. It has to be on Mobflix.”

It is. They get through three episodes, laughing like loons whenever the captain walks on screen. Well, that’s mostly Tome. But her mom’s embarrassed giggle whenever his shirt rips artfully down from his shoulders has Tome in stitches. Her father and Yuna join them, though he leaves a few minutes in, shaking his head.

“The special effects are terrible,” Yuna says, flat and unimpressed.

“That’s not the point!” Tome says, dramatically pointing a finger. “It’s about courage, and trust, and—and secretly pining over starship captains—”
Yuna throws popcorn at her, and things devolve into a wrestling match that knocks over both their drinks and the popcorn bowl.

Thursday’s dream is particularly bad, and Tome can’t get to sleep again after. She moves through the house like a sleepwalker all day, tired and bad-tempered.

Her mom finds her in the TV room, listlessly flipping channels.

“Hi sweetheart,” her mom says, sitting down next to her. “Bad night?”

Tome grunts in acknowledgment, not really feeling up to talking.

Her mom sits with her for a while, watching as the screen flickers between different scenes.

“What do you dream about?” she asks tentatively, and Tome glances over. Someone shrieks with laughter on the TV, and Tome hits mute without looking up. “You don’t have to talk about it,” her mom adds. “I know you have your therapist for that. But I’m here if you want to.”

Tome hesitates for a moment, but realizes that she does want to tell her. That she probably should.

She explains, describing the events that culminated in the standoff at the ryokan. They’re both crying by the time she’s done. Her mom brings over the tissue box, and they sit huddled together on the couch.

“It just—it keeps coming back, what could have happened. And I can’t even talk to him about it, now. I know he said he was responsible, but I don’t understand why he thinks it was his fault.”

“You’ll understand better when you’re an adult,” her mom says gently, rubbing her back. “There are a lot of things you take on when you get older, and one of those things is keeping children safe. Though you’re hardly a child anymore, you’re still young. It’s only natural that—he’d want to protect you.”

“Oh god,” Tome replies, voice still a little stuffy. “Reigen and Serizawa followed me, once, when I went to hang out with this guy from school. He had kind of a weird reputation, and for a second it looked like he and Reigen were gonna throw hands right in the middle of the office.”

“You never told me about that,” her mom admonishes. “Who is this boy?”

“Mom, it’s not like it was a date. We went to a psychic convention in the mountains. They followed us in a taxi to make sure I was okay.” Tome laughs. “It was totally overbearing, but they did help us out when we got into trouble.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, we got lost in the forest,” Tome says vaguely. “We were gone for a while, so they came in and found us.”

Her mom is silent for a moment. “You haven’t talked about any of this.”

Tome shrugs. “I didn’t think you’d be interested. Father definitely wouldn’t be.”

Her mom’s expression turns uncomfortable. “When did you start calling him that? You and Yuna used to both call him dad.”

Tome scowls. This isn’t really something she wants to get into, not when they’re making progress.

“You called Mr. Reigen dad, on the 110 call,” her mom says carefully, when Tome doesn’t reply. “We were both very shocked.”

Tome stands suddenly, tipping over the tissue box.

“What—is that what this is about, he’s jealous—!”

“Tome,” her mom says sharply. Tome is surprised into silence; she can't remember the last time her mom so much as raised her voice. “Sit down, please.”

She does.

“We were both shocked, because we’d never heard of him before,” her mom continues, voice even. “Here was this man you were clearly very close with, and you never mentioned him to us at all. You hold everything so secret now, Tome. When did you stop trusting us with the things in your life?”

“Because you and father keep telling me they’re stupid!” Tome retorts, anger stirring again. “Everything Yuna does is great—oh, medical school; soccer champion, top of her class—how was I supposed to compete with that? And everything I like is kids’ stuff, and slacking off, and I was tired of hearing that over and over again!”

Her mom looks taken aback. “We don’t compare you to Yuna.”

“Oh, yes you do,” Tome says cuttingly. “Whenever I brought something home, father just had to remind me that Yuna did it better first. You could never just be proud of me for who I am.”

“We’re doing our best, Tome,” her mom says, getting defensive. “Your father and I work long hours to keep you girls in school. You could show a little gratitude, every once in a while.”

And there’s the word that keeps coming back. Tome’s sick to death of hearing it.

She takes a moment to reign in her temper. This is going in a very unproductive direction, and she was so close to getting through.

“Then you shouldn’t be surprised when you miss things, mom. I’m going to have a life, whether you’re here for it or not. Reigen’s been teaching me how to run the business. This is actually something I’m serious about. Shouldn’t you at least give it a chance before shooting it down?”

Her mom purses her lips, and Tome doesn’t push further. She doesn’t know how much the conversation helped, in the end.

She doesn’t have any idea how to approach her father about this. Yuna swears she’s been helping, but Tome hasn’t seen any results so far.

Their first real breakthrough happens on Sunday afternoon, only a few hours before Yuna has to leave.

The three of them are baking again when the doorbell rings. Tome’s never really been into baking, but she is into eating the results, and her mom wants to send Yuna back with cookies. She’s shaping the dough into rounds with Yuna when her mom returns.

“Tome, there’s a boy here to see you. He has flowers,” she says, her voice low and teasing.

“Mom, I could not be less interested in—” Tome starts, turning, and stops. “—boys with flowers,” she finishes weakly.

Mob is following her mom into the kitchen, looking a little embarrassed. He is indeed carrying flowers—a potted plant, to be exact, with a cluster of purple blossoms at the end of a long stalk.

“Mob!” she says, laughing. “What the hell? What’s with the plant?”

“Purple hyacinths,” her mom says with a knowing look. “They smell lovely.”

“Sure, I guess,” Tome says, not picking up on whatever significance her mom is trying to convey. She takes the pot when Mob offers it, and puts in on the counter.

“What’s up?” she prompts, when Mob just stands there. He fidgets, looking nervous, and it takes him a few seconds to work his way up to speaking.

“Is Mr. Kurata home? I wanted to say something—to everyone,” he says, glancing over at Tome’s mom.

Tome stares at him for a moment, baffled.

“He is,” her mom says. “Yuna, can you bring him down? He’s in his study.” Yuna nods, heading toward the door. “Why don’t we go to the sitting room?”

She makes tea first, pulling out the formal set she uses for guests. Tome leads Mob into the other room. He’s nearly white-faced with nerves, and Tome teeters between sympathy and confusion.

They have tea, and Mob waits a polite interval before getting to the point.

“I want to apologize,” he says, quiet but firm. His face is very earnest. “Tome was kidnapped because of me.”

He explains. As soon as he says the words ‘psychic powers’ her father’s face closes off, and Tome has to interrupt hastily to ask Mob to demonstrate. It’s frankly astonishing that her father has gone this long as a skeptic, with all the supernatural bullshit they’ve been dealing with. Did he forget about the giant broccoli?

Mob levitates the table, teacups and all, and that seems to settle things.

“I’m very sorry for what happened,” Mob finishes, bowing uncomfortably low. “They went after Master Reigen and Tome because they knew we were close. I take full responsibility. I hope you can forgive me.”

“Mob—” Tome starts, discomfited, but stops when she sees the expression on her father’s face.

He actually looks—moved? Impressed? She’s not sure what to call it—but the approval in his eyes brings her up short. She can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen that look.

“Thank you, young man,” he says when Mob straightens up. “I appreciate your apology. But I can’t possibly accept it.”

“What he means is, we can’t hold you accountable for this,” her mom adds at Mob’s expression of dismay. She glances over at Tome. “It sounds like things were perhaps—more complicated than we realized.”

It takes a little while to reassure Mob of their sincerity, talking him down from whatever anxiety spiral he’s worked himself into.

Tome hugs him after. “You are such a dork,” she says, voice choked. Mob’s answering smile is warm and a little sheepish.

“I hope it helps,” he replies.

It definitely does, though Tome isn’t sure why Mob’s acknowledgment of responsibility was so much better received than Reigen’s. It probably helps that they know Mob: he’s been to the house so many times he’s practically family—

Tome blinks. There’s an idea forming, and she has no idea whether or not it could even make a difference. But for it to work, she needs to come clean to her parents. About everything. The thought is terrifying.

Chapter Text

The argument with Serizawa is inevitable, for all that Reigen’s been putting it off.

He’s been using Serizawa’s natural conflict-aversion against him to thwart any attempt at a serious conversation, knowing that Serizawa won’t want to push. It’s a pretty low tactic. He doesn’t even really do it on purpose—it’s more of a defensive reflex at this point. But this time Serizawa refuses to back down.

It starts Sunday morning, after breakfast. Reigen’s been quieter than usual, barely picking at his food. He sees the determination in Serizawa’s eyes, and has the sudden, irrational impulse to run.

“Well, I’m going to,” he scrambles for something, “Update the webpage. Thanks for breakfast—” He gets to his feet, scooping up his plate.

“Arataka,” Serizawa says with a heavy sort of calm in his voice. “We need to talk about this.”

Reigen sits, after a second, thrumming with nervous energy.

“What?” he asks, a little too sharp.

Serizawa just looks at him for a moment, and Reigen looks away.

“Sorry,” he says.

Serizawa takes a deep breath, letting it out in a long sigh.

“We need to talk about what we’re going to do about Tome. We can’t just ignore her. It’s irresponsible.”

Reigen feels himself bridle defensively. “Her parents don’t want her coming back. I don’t see what else there is to talk about.”

“Her parents don’t want her working with us,” Serizawa corrects. “That doesn’t mean we can’t ever see her again. She really looks up to you, Taka. You can’t just cut her off like this.”

Reigen laughs. The sound comes out harsh and abrasive. “You too, huh? Can’t you just let it go? She’s young—she’ll get over it. She can find someone else to hang around.”

“You don’t mean that,” Serizawa insists. “I know you don’t. Can you just talk to me? Please? Why don’t you want her to come back?”

“Because it’s dangerous, Katsuya! We can’t protect her. We’re going to get her killed,” Reigen says, louder than he means to. “She almost died.”

Serizawa’s eyes are full of sympathy, and Reigen hates it. Hates how he always seems to cut through to the things Reigen wants to talk about the least.

Serizawa’s hand moves to cover his, offering comfort; Reigen pulls sharply away before his brain even processes the movement, tucking his hand in against his stomach. The accompanying spike of panic is completely inappropriate to the situation.

Serizawa stares at him. Reigen straightens up again, trying to play it off.

“Look, can we talk about this later? I’m not feeling great—I think it was something I ate—”

Serizawa isn’t fooled.

“Are you ever going to tell me what happened to your hand?” he asks gently.

He doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t even really know why. It’s not like it’s any worse than anything else—the failed escape, Tome’s beating, the constant threat of violence. The knife. But for some reason it feels different. The whole incident is twisted up with a bitter, heavy self-disgust.

He can’t stop thinking about those things he said about Mob, and the pathetic level of terror that would lead him to twist Mob’s personal insecurities into a shield.

And Mob doesn’t know. Now that he’s free, Reigen doesn’t want to tell him. He probably shouldn’t. It would just hurt him—it’s just another way Reigen’s let him down.

“I got my fingers broken,” he replies, in a tone of voice that suggests the answer should be obvious.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

Why is Serizawa so patient? It’s almost infuriating—part of Reigen wants to push him until he snaps, just to see where the breaking point is.

God. What the fuck is wrong with him?

“That’s not—something I want to talk about right now,” he says, reluctant. “Maybe…not for a while.”

He does put his hand back on the table, where it was resting next to his plate. The bruises around his wrist have faded to a sickly yellow-green.

“Okay,” Serizawa says. “It doesn’t have to be that, just—” he makes a pained sound. “There are things I need to talk about, too. And not knowing what you’re feeling, or even really what happened to you, it’s—it’s really hard. At least tell me what I can do to help. We’re supposed to be a team.”

Reigen scrubs his left hand through his hair.

They’ve talked about difficult things before. Probably. Mostly those things were difficult for Serizawa, now that he thinks about it. He’s a lot better at offering sympathy than accepting it.

“With Tome,” he starts, and the discomfort is thick and unpleasant in his chest. He tries to push through it. “I fucked up. We were trying to escape, and she got hurt. You—you saw,” he says, gesturing up at his face. Serizawa nods. Reigen explains, haltingly, what happened. He doesn’t meet his eyes. Even just saying it to Serizawa, who he knows and loves and trusts—it feels like someone holding his head underwater. His lungs are full of a pointless, useless dread.

“I knew we weren’t going to make it out,” he says, finishing. “As soon as I saw that bastard waiting for us. I just didn’t want to give up.” He laughs. “It was so pointless. Fuck.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t blame you for that,” Serizawa replies, and Reigen shakes his head.

“That’s not the point, Katsuya. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

Serizawa doesn’t interrupt, but Reigen stops anyway. Tries to gather his thoughts.

“She had the chance to escape. Without me. And she didn’t. She told me she wouldn’t, but I thought—maybe if the choice was right in front of her, she might do the sensible thing.” He laughs. “Obviously not.”

His eyes sting, and he swipes at them with a sound of frustration.

“Do you understand? She’s just—she doesn’t back down. She runs head-first into danger like she’s invincible. She always has, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to get her to stop.”

“She’s a lot like you,” Serizawa says, and Reigen gives a cracked laugh.

“That’s not a good thing,” he replies. “It’s really not. We had to lie our asses off to even have a chance of getting out of there, and she was too good at it. She’s a kid. She has her whole future ahead of her. I don’t think I should be teaching her to be more like me.”

Serizawa sighs. He gets up from the table, pulling Reigen up to his feet and into a hug. Reigen leans into it reluctantly. Serizawa doesn’t say anything for a moment, and Reigen relaxes slowly.

“You’re being an idiot,” Serizawa tells him. “Tome has good judgment. If she wants to stay, it’s because she sees something worthwhile in our little band of misfits.”

Reigen huffs in something close to a laugh.

“Besides, it sounds like you’re her dad now?” Serizawa’s voice is a little teasing. Reigen winces anyway.

“That was just something we made up so they’d keep us together. She already has a dad.”

“So? She can have two. Or three, or however many she wants. Families change, Taka. Or we have to make our own. You showed me that. You, and Shigeo, and everyone else. That doesn’t diminish the family she has already.”

Serizawa doesn’t let go when Reigen tries to push back, and Reigen grumbles into his shoulder. His sweater smells like coffee and fresh laundry. It’s nice.

“This hug isn’t over until you agree with me,” Serizawa says, and Reigen can hear the smile in his voice.

“Fine,” Reigen replies with a short sigh. “But just because it’s you.”

“Good.” Serizawa kisses his forehead, gently brushing his hair back before letting go.

They clean up the dishes. Serizawa doesn’t push any further, but it feels like something’s shifted between them, just slightly. When Reigen thinks about bringing it up again, it doesn’t feel quite as hard to breathe.

He gets another text from Tome on Monday, at around three in the morning.

It’s close to the usual time, which is why Reigen isn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. He looks up from his laptop screen, setting down his tea, and pulls out his phone.

We need to have a talk. You owe me that much. I’ll come by the office on Wed at 4 unless you respond with a better time. I asked my parents and they’re okay with this so there’s no reason you shouldn’t be

PS: Murdered by kidnappers Y/N?

He stares at it for a couple of minutes. His first thought is that she’s lying—there’s no way her parents know. He feels guilty about it almost immediately. She hasn’t actually lied to him, that he knows of; not about anything important. And he’s pretty sure he knows all her tells.

It’s not like his parents ever gave him the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t want to fall into that.

He sends a reply.

N. Wednesday at 4 is fine.

He enters it into the schedule calendar, then feels kind of weird about making an appointment for Tome. But otherwise Serizawa might book something in.

Serizawa sees it the next morning. Reigen watches the way his face lights up from behind his desk.

“Oh,” Serizawa says after a moment, a little more subdued. “I have class then.”

“You can skip,” Reigen suggests, but Serizawa shakes his head.

“There’s a test. It’s okay. You two need to talk, anyway. I can call her later.”

Wednesday arrives sooner than it feels like it should.

Reigen is restless most of the afternoon, tapping the fingers of his left hand against the desk in that way that Serizawa hates. Serizawa keeps glancing over, but doesn’t ask him to stop after the first time.

“It’s only half as loud as usual,” Reigen replies. “You can ignore it this time.”

Serizawa gives him a bit of a look, but lets the joke pass without comment. He delays leaving, just a little, waiting for Tome to arrive. He’s going to be late for his test, but Reigen doesn’t mention it. He’s pretty glad he won’t have to wait this out alone.

Tome’s mom drops her off.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Reigen,” she says, perfectly politely. She turns to Tome. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

She hesitates, noticing Serizawa with his coat and schoolbag.

“Hi Mrs. Kurata,” he says with a friendly smile. “I’m just on my way out. I don’t think I introduced myself the last time we met—Serizawa Katsuya.”

Reigen watches them go through the polite dance of introductions. Tome walks over to her usual desk, picking up the little UFO-shaped eraser that neither Reigen nor Serizawa have moved since she left. They haven’t touched any of her things, organized in a tidy pile behind the receptionist sign.

She has a stubborn, determined look on her face, but her hands are trembling a little when she puts the eraser back down. It’s like she’s expecting Reigen to kick her out again. And that… Reigen didn’t think that would hurt as much as it does.

“Bye, Tome,” Serizawa says, smiling at her. “It’s good to see you.”

Tome turns, expression softening for a moment. She moves back over to the door and gives him a brief hug. “Bye, Serizawa. Good to see you too.”

Reigen glances over at Tome’s mom, but it doesn’t look like she has any objections to the familiarity. The change leaves Reigen feeling a little wrong-footed.

Then Serizawa and Mrs. Kurata leave, and they’re alone again. The silence is heavy and awkward. And Reigen’s really glad Serizawa waited until Tome arrived, because the last time they were together in this office was during the kidnapping.

“Wow,” Tome says, looking fidgety. “It’s weird being back here. It feels like someone’s going to jump out from behind the bookshelf, or something.” Her laugh has an edge of nerves in it.

“We can go outside,” Reigen suggests, and Tome nods.

She pulls a pen and a notebook out of her bag. She tears off a page and writes:

MOM,

GONE TO PARK DOWN THE STREET. HAVE NOT BEEN KIDNAPPED. PHONE IS ON.

-TOME

She folds it into three sections and props it up on Reigen’s desk so it’s visible from the door.

“She’ll freak out if I text her now,” she says by way of explanation. “We’ll probably be back in time, anyway.”

There’s a park nearby that they go to sometimes: for lunch, if the weather’s nice and they don’t have a client coming; or if one of the kids has something important they want to talk about without the baggage of being at the office. There’s a bench behind a flowerbed that doesn’t get many people going by.

And some things are easier to say when you don’t have to face the other person directly. Mob in particular prefers it. It’s where Reigen finally got him to open up about what happened to him at the Asagiri house.

They walk over. It’s warmed up a little over the past couple of days, enough to be fairly comfortable in direct sunlight. The clouds on the horizon are thick and heavy with the promise of snow.

There’s a short silence, once they’re both seated. Neither of them seems to know how to start.

“How’ve you been?” Reigen asks after a moment.

Tome gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Adjusting, I guess. Does it—I mean. It feels a little weird being back home. Parts of it are so dull they almost don’t feel real, you know?”

He does know. It’s hard to trust in those moments of quiet, when his idea of normal has shifted so radically to include the possibility of what happened to them.

“You?” she asks when he doesn’t respond. “How’s the hand?” She glances down at the huge mitten Reigen’s managed to fit over the splints.

“Still broken,” he says, looking down at it. And maybe that was too flippant. “Better,” he adds.

She shakes her head, looking out at the grass on the other side of the path. Her eyebrows draw together, shoulders tensing up around her neck.

“Would you want me to come back?” she asks. “If my parents were okay with it.”

She looks over when he hesitates, expression set. “Just tell me. You don’t have to sugar-coat it.”

It’s a more complicated question than she might think.

There are so many reasons why he doesn’t. It’s dangerous; and she’s stubborn, and reckless, and too loyal for her own good. And he’s recently been confronted with the knowledge that he can’t always protect her from any threats that come up. And then there are his more personal fears, about leading her down a path that ends in a mediocre fraudulent business with no prospects.

But he’s also selfish. He likes having her around. She’s clever, and funny, and picks things up quickly. He legitimately enjoys teaching her. And she has the kind of heart that rivals Mob’s in forgiveness.

“Don’t do that,” Tome says, and he blinks, startled. She looks close to tears. “With your face—where you blank it out like that. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

He hadn’t realized.

He usually has the opposite problem—everything he feels shows up on his face. But then, he spent nearly three days hiding his reactions; from their captors and from Tome alike. He supposes that might have spilled over, too. A lot of things have.

“Sorry,” he says, but he’s not really sure how to stop. “I don’t know, Tome. I don’t—want you to get hurt.”

Tome is silent for a while, staring down at her knees.

“You know,” she says, looking up again, “I nearly died at school, a couple of months ago.”

Reigen’s stomach drops. He meets her eyes with a retroactive horror that makes his palms itch.

“One of my teachers got possessed and nearly threw me off the roof of the building,” she continues, not looking away. “Dimple saved me, but if he wasn’t there I would’ve died, probably. It didn’t have anything to do with the job. It was just bad luck.”

He can see the point she’s trying to make. He lets her work her way toward it.

“Sometimes bad things just happen. It wasn’t anything we did that got us kidnapped. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” Her fists clench in her lap. "And you know what? I think we did a pretty good job. We survived, and we got out. I don’t think you could ask for better than that.”

“I want to come back,” she says, a little more forcefully. “I don’t know if you were listening at the hospital, but this is kind of important to me. And if—if you care at all, now’s the time to say it. I want an actual answer, this time. I’m not leaving until I get one.”

He tilts his head back, closing his eyes with a ragged sigh.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Of course I care, Tome. You—don’t have to ask that.”

“I kind of do?” Tome says, but her face is slack with relief. “You haven’t made it very clear. But good. Okay. Then you do want me to come back.”

“Tome—”

“No, listen, okay. Being around you and Serizawa, and the others—that’s probably the safest I can be. At least I know you’ll look after me if something goes wrong. And you can set up whatever rules you want, or safety precautions—I’m fine with that. We can ease back in, super part-time, like one day a week to start. Just—don’t think I’ll be any safer if you try to keep me away.”

“What did your parents say?” Reigen asks, hedging.

Tome shrugs. “I’m working on it. They’re open to the idea now. You just have to want it, too.” Her eyes glitter. “When she comes back to pick me up, my mom is going to invite you and Serizawa to dinner on Friday. You’re going to accept, and you’re going to charm the pants off them. Once they actually see you as a person, I don’t think it’ll be hard to convince them.”

Her expression is earnest and almost eager, the way she looks when she’s rising to a challenge she knows she can meet, and it’s familiar enough to make his heart clench.

He did miss her. He’s missed seeing this side of her—and knowing that she feels secure enough to let it show.

“Fine,” he says. “But if they do agree, we need to talk about putting some new rules in place.”

Her smile is endearingly crooked. “Good. My mom is basically on board already—you just need to prove that you’re not a weirdo. My father responds well to honesty.”

She sees the look of amusement that flashes across his face, and scowls.

“Oh shut up, you can be honest. I’ve seen you.”

“On occasion,” he admits.

“Well, this is that occasion,” she says. “He’s going to be a little harder to convince.”

He sighs. “I’ll do my best.”

She leans over and hugs him.

“Thank you,” she says into the front of his coat. When she pulls back again, her eyes are wet. “And I—I’m sorry about the dad thing. I’ll try not to do it again.”

She looks hesitant, like she thinks that he’ll change his mind if she brings it up.

“I don’t mind,” he says, a little awkward.

She blinks, searching his face, and this time her smile is very bright.

Chapter Text

Tome fidgets with the corner of the napkin she’s folding, heart beating a little too fast. The whole house smells delicious—her mom’s been cooking since she got home. She’s always taken dinner invitations very seriously.

Yuna’s already left for college, of course. She couldn’t miss any more classes.

“Good luck, Sassquatch,” she said before she left, messing up Tome’s hair. Tome ducked away with an indignant squawk. “I’ll see you for winter break.”

“You’d better actually come home this time,” Tome replied.

“I will,” Yuna said, smile softening. “I won’t miss New Years’. Promise.” She gave Tome a proper hug. “You can do this.”

Tome’s been texting Mob compulsively between chores, trying to smother the restless nerves. Her father can be stubborn, especially when he thinks he might be wrong about something. But hopefully they can wear him down.

Reigen and Serizawa arrive precisely on time. By then she’s managed to build a thin veneer of calm. They don’t look overly anxious, but Reigen’s smile becomes a little more genuine when he sees her.

“Hey,” she says, not sounding nervous at all. “Come on in.”

“Sorry for intruding,” Serizawa says, and presents her with a carefully wrapped box.

She knows what it is—her mom’s very partial to brandy chocolates. A hosting gift to please her mom was always their best bet.

They remove their shoes, and she brings them into the living room to make small talk with her father. Her mom is just finishing the last preparations for the meal.

Right from the beginning, she can tell that this is going to be difficult. Her father’s particular brand of icy politeness introduces a sour note into the proceedings; watching Reigen get progressively more charming to compensate is a little painful. And her father has never really reacted well to charm.

If Yuna were here, she’d be able to guide the conversation to something more harmonious—she’s really good at that. It’s not something Tome’s ever had the patience for.

Tome sees Reigen wince after the second conversational shut-down, and has to excuse herself to the kitchen. She sidles in to where her mom is busy serving the little starter dishes into bowls.

“Almost ready, mom?” she asks, a little desperately.

“Yes, you can lead them in,” her mom says, taking off her apron.

Dinner itself is marginally less awkward.

Serizawa is the real lifesaver there. He sounds like he’s swallowed an etiquette book—and knowing him, he probably has. It’s a little stilted, and Reigen is unusually quiet, but—

Actually, Reigen is staring down at his chopsticks with something approaching dread. He picks them up a little awkwardly with his left hand, and Tome realizes that this is probably something she should have anticipated.

Watching him try to eat the first course is excruciating. He’s never been a particularly neat eater, but he doesn’t usually spill food across the table.

When Tome goes to help her mom bring in the next dish, she’s pink with embarrassment.

“Tome, you didn’t tell me about his hand,” her mom says. She looks dismayed at the oversight.

“I forgot,” Tome replies sheepishly.

“Oh no. Would he be insulted if we lay out forks? I think we have enough,” she says, biting her lip.

“Mom, it’s fine,” Tome says. “I’ve got this.”

She goes rummaging through the kitchen drawers. They probably still have it. Her mom never throws anything out—

She finds it in a bottom drawer, and gives it a quick rinse.

“Oh, Tome, you can’t give him that,” her mom says.

“It’s okay, he’ll think it’s funny,” Tome assures her, and scoops up one of the serving dishes. She heads back into the dining room before her mom can stop her.

“Guess what I found,” Tome says as she moves around to Reigen’s side of the table.

He gives her a bit of an apprehensive look, carefully smoothed out behind an expression of polite interest; and damn, she hadn’t realized he found her father so intimidating.

She sets the pink plastic bear on the edge of his placemat. It smiles up at him with blank, beady bear eyes.

He blinks at it. “Is that—?”

“Yep,” she says with a grin. “It used to be mine. Isn’t it cute?”

He pauses, eyes flicking over toward her father, before giving her a rueful smile. “It is pretty cute.”

“You can have it,” she says easily, moving back around to her spot at the table. “It matches your tie.”

“Thanks,” Reigen says, actually looking a little touched. He sticks it onto the ends of his chopsticks, slotting them into the feet.

That seems to defuse some of the tension in the room. Her mom is bright with relief at the averted awkwardness, and her father manages to thaw out a little. It’s probably hard to stay aloof when one of your guests is unashamedly using the most adorable chopsticks trainer on the planet.

They get through the rest of the dinner without incident, and are lingering over their empty dessert plates when her father asks the question.

“So, Mr. Reigen,” he says, settling back a little in his chair. “What is it exactly that you do?”

Reigen stumbles a little, caught off-guard. “Well—we run a psychic consulting office. We exorcise ghosts, and lift curses—”

Her father brushes this aside. “Yes, Tome explained about the business,” he says, a little dismissively. “What is it that you do there?”

Tome freezes, something like guilt twisting her stomach.

She’d told her parents almost everything, during their talk last week: how her friendship with Mob led her to Spirits & Such, when she started on, and what it was like to work there. She didn’t leave out the dangerous parts, but she made sure to include the smaller stuff too—the mundane cases, and the downtime. Like doing her homework with Serizawa, and pestering Reigen into showing her how to read people.

She didn’t tell them Reigen’s secret. But in retrospect, to someone as skeptical as her father, it wouldn’t be that hard to read between the lines.

Reigen glances over at her. Tome stares back, a little wide-eyed. She’s not sure exactly what her face is doing, but Reigen swallows, turning back to her father.

“I run the business,” he says, and his voice is mostly steady. “And handle day-to-day issues. I, ah, I don’t actually have psychic powers myself. I leave most of that to Katsuya.”

There’s a shocked little silence. Tome gapes at him, but he forges on.

“Of course, it’s not something I can keep up forever. Tome has an excellent head for business. If she put her mind to it, I’m sure she’d do very well with that side of the work.”

The implication—that he might be willing to turn things over to her someday—leaves her speechless.

“We usually work as a team,” Serizawa says firmly. “This kind of work isn’t really a job for just one person. Arataka and Tome are indispensable.”

“Well, not that we—I mean, if she would rather spend time on her studies,” Reigen hastens to add, waving his hands, “That’s understandable. But if she does want to come back, we’re more than open to it.”

He drops his hands down again. He looks a little red, but not like he’s just casually revealed a secret he’s kept under wraps for years. Had he been planning to tell them from the start? Is this how he interpreted her tip about honesty?

Serizawa smiles at him—a quiet, soft expression that he only ever directs at Reigen. He shifts a little closer, and the way their bodies are angled: they’re holding hands under the table. Tome’s almost sure of it.

Tome glances over at her father. He looks thoughtful.

Tome doesn’t get the verdict until after they leave. She clears the table, and hears her parents talking in the other room. Their voices are just a little too low to hear over the clacking of the bowls she’s submerged in the sink. She washes dishes, and resists the urge to go listen at the door.

She hears footsteps behind her as she’s drying her hands, and doesn’t have to turn around to know it’s her father. The silence is telling.

“One month,” he says after a moment, and she turns to face him. It looks like the words are causing him physical pain to say. “You stop working there for one month. No sneaking around, no stopping by on your off-hours. You go to school, and you do your homework, and you go to therapy. After that, if you still want to go back, you can.”

One month would have her returning just before New Years’. They could still see the aliens, and all go to the shrine together after. Maybe she can convince Yuna to come with them.

“Okay,” Tome says, voice a little rough. “Deal.”

Her father looks a little uncomfortable, now. “This was never meant as a punishment, Tome.”

“I know,” she says. And she does. She moves forward, and gives him a careful hug. “Thank you.”

His hand comes down to pat her shoulder. It’s tentative, like he’s not used to expressing affection. This is probably the first time they’ve actually hugged in years.

And it’s not much, but it’s something. A step in the right direction.

She texts Reigen later, after she’s brushed her teeth.

I can come back in a month

The response is very quick, arriving less than a minute later.

We’ll put you in the calendar. Welcome back.

“That is a bullshit requirement, and you know it,” Tome says, indignant.

“Is not,” Reigen retorts. “You said you’d agree to whatever rules I set up.”

“Yeah, but this is a really stupid rule. I don’t want to go to college.” Her scowl is partially hidden behind her scarf.

It’s Tome’s first day back. They’re walking to the ramen shop in a huge group, the other kids a little ways ahead. They keep stopping to wing snowballs at each other, and Reigen is pretty sure they’re using their powers to do it. Reigen’s given up on trying to scold them. Dimple’s floating above the combat, heckling anyone who seems to be flagging.

“Hey, you want to learn the business, you go to school first,” Reigen says. “You need a college degree to work anywhere, these days.”

“Yeah, but you’re the one who gets to decide whether to hire me,” she argues.

“And I say you need a college degree to work full-time,” he says primly. Then he sighs. "I don't care what marks you get, as long as you go."

She rolls her eyes. “Ugh. Fine.”

She doesn’t sound that upset about it. She hikes her schoolbag up a little on her back. The bright colours on the package of shrimp crackers peek through a gap in the zipper.

Tome’d gotten a little teary-eyed when she found it on her desk. Enough that Reigen had been horribly certain he’d misjudged the gift.

“You jerk,” she said after a moment, a little choked. “You promised me MobDonald’s.”

He'd grinned at her, relieved, and she nearly crushed his ribs in a hug.

There’s an indignant cry from ahead, and they both look up to see Ritsu scraping snow out of his hood. Shou looks like the most likely culprit, with that self-satisfied expression. Ritsu’s glare promises vengeance.

“Are you going to join them?” Reigen asks her.

“I guess,” she says airily. “I’ll have to show them how it’s done.”

She scoops up a massive armful of snow, and sneaks up behind Teru.

Reigen watches her go, and doesn’t realize he’s smiling until Serizawa catches up with him.

“You look happy,” he says. They both watch Tome’s ambush unfold.

“Yeah,” Reigen answers, and leans in against his shoulder.

The walk over to the restaurant is noisy, full of shouting and laughter. Reigen reaches over and takes Serizawa’s hand, linking their fingers together.