Chapter Text
A harsh elbow to his ribs made Ritsu wheeze something squealed, high pitched. Shou laughed, only for his amusement at it to melt to worry as Ritsu dropped to the ground, winded. A hand was on his back in an instant, rubbing rhythmically as he tried to cough his lungs back into his chest. My jeans are going to be stained green from the grass , he distantly thought through the slight panic of being unable to breathe.
“Shit,” Shou huffed out beside him. He was warm. “I’m-- are you alright? I’m sorry! I didn’t think I hit you that damn hard.” Ritsu struggled to breath in for a moment more, Shou at arms length but still giving him room. As if his presence in of itself wasn’t overwhelming.
“D-don’t swear,” Ritsu gasped out, collecting his voice finally. “And I’m fine. It’s not like this is the first time.” Shou stood up and stretched a hand down to Ritsu, who took it thankfully, being pulled up to his feet. He groaned, hands on his hips as he arched and stretched his back. There was an aching spot of pain just under the line of his lower ribs.
“That’s not a comfort,” Shou said with a laugh, although whatever concern he’d felt before isn’t nearly as palpable in the air. Instead, he looked around and up, the light breaching through the sky of shifting leaves under the tree’s cover making him squint. His jacket was tied around his hips. There was dirt smeared over a shallow scrape on his face, down his chin, from when Ritsu had slammed him into the ground.
“You’re staring,” Shou said, something in his voice that made Ritsu psychically shoves him back. Shou barely reacted, easily catching his footing. The grin he aimed at Ritsu has his stomach tumbling over itself behind his ribs. Then he tensed, air crackling and fizzing with something unnatural and powerful around him. Ritsu’s stomach dropped to the floor as his body became weightless.
His shield barely protected him. Power sparking against his own, red and gold with Shou’s aura. He pushed away on Shou’s hold. The trees quakes. He sent branches crashing, slashing down at where Shou was.
Or, had been. His form flashed, a smear of light. Dirt and leaves kicked up with the whack of branches slashing across the forest floor. Ritsu lobbed himself back into the air. Feet above the ground, breathing heavily. Eyes traced over the forest, between the trees. His heart was pounding in his ears.
Something flashed in his head, suddenly. Thoughts of flying through night skies hand in hand with Ritsu, hanging out in his room, on rooftops as the sun sets, seeing himself from eyes that aren’t his own at all angles. Something hyperactive and fond and hypnotic in it’s honest affection. Twisted and tangled in with the tart desire to kick his ass.
Ritsu twisted, whirled around. He saw Shou’s bright eyes seconds before throwing up a roiling barrier.
The force of Shou throwing his power against him shook Ritsu to his core. His bones ached, teeth chattered. His shield cracked, hairline fractures through his resolve.
A flash of feelings. Emotions, hot and burning outwards from his chest. It didn’t belong to him.
Ritsu turned, his neck cracking with the whiplash of the motion. A flash of light. Shou flickered into view, smirk cracked across his face. Ritsu didn’t have time to react.
A fist crashed through the barrier. Shards of it burst in towards him, fizzling away into nothing. He gasped aloud at the hand grabbing him. Fingers dug into his shoulder, rough, the hold electric. Ritsu felt the current zap through his veins, stunning him.
His nerves lit on fire. He was shoved, pushed down to the ground. Power and energy and pressure forced him down. The weight was harsh, heavy, extreme. He yelped, feeling forced into falling. Panic scratched up his throat with gnarled fingers. He grabbed and clung to Shou’s hand forcing him downward between the treetops.
His feet didn’t touch the ground. He kicked out, toes barely brushing the grass. Shou was laughing.
Sense found its way into Ritsu’s mind at the sound of his laugh. He glared up to see Shou hovering above him, swathed in pinkish-red energy. His eyes were bright, alight, as he held Ritsu in the air with one hand.
“You’re a piece of shit.” Ritsu managed to articulate aloud, breath airy and thin. His heart was still hammering away at his bones, slow to calm. Shou snorted, chuckled loud and hard an unabashedly. The energy in the air, a thick film of it all around Ritsu like sharp fog, flushed and lulled to something softer. Something warmer in its comfort.
Shou put him down, gentle, floating down to Ritsu’s eye level. He crossed his legs midair, floating lopsided. Leaves were sticking out of his hair. “I win!”
“Nah.”
He pouted, floated upside down and around at Ritsu’s monotone remark. “You’re a stick in the mud,” he huffed, “who can’t admit that he got his ass beat.” Ritsu says nothing, instead glowering and glaring at Shou, who just looked back at him with a grin. He felt bested, and he knew that Shou thought so too. If not in the cocky hands on his hips and smile on his face as he floated down to the grass, but in how it was on the forefront of his mind.
Shou let go of himself, one leg splayed out forwards. He grunted, rolled his shoulders, fingers kneading into the bruised skin of his shoulder blade. Ritsu watched every movement, felt the way his focus shifted to Ritsu himself. Shou met his eyes, soft smiles, smoothing his fingers over the grass and dirt beside him. “C’mere.”
The ground was rough, kicked up and bumpy from the times they spent running through the forest, digging their heels in deep and fighting one another. Something in Ritsu’s hip ached as he sat down, falling nearly backward with the weight of suddenly relaxing after spending hours training with Shou. He knotted his fingers into the grass, dirt under his nails. The wind blowing by so gently was calm. The world was at peace, now.
They’ve been spending more time like this lately. Between fist fights and energy fields and bursts of power, they’ve sat in quiet; either patching wounds with gauze or waiting for their hearts to settle. Whether it be hours past the sun setting or in the middle of a scorching day, Shou has done as he said he would.
Although, Ritsu felt… on edge.
He was humming. Shou was humming some tune that sounded familiar but Ritsu couldn’t place. He bit into his cheek, wanting to say something but unable to figure out what to say; how to say the words in his own head in a way that will get through the busy buzz of Shou’s brain.
“We should go get some lunch,” Shou says the same time Ritsu spits it out; “We haven’t been training like you said we would.”
“What?” His head snapped towards Ritsu. The shadows of the trees suddenly felt cold. “Sorry, what did you say Ritsu?” His teeth are wearing a line through the flesh of his lip. He brought his knees up to his chest, not breaking eye contact.
“You said we’d figure out my powers,” Ritsu says, words feeling janky and wrong in his teeth, “But all we’ve been doing is… just, the usual. I throw up a barrier… you go invisible… I end up hit in the back and with my face in the dirt…” Shou doesn’t even snicker, doesn’t even rub it in deeper that Ritsu has walked away time and time again, defeated.
His mind is that electric, static fog. Thoughts whirling around, busy and hyper and frantic. It’s as cacophonic as ever. Maybe even moreso than usual. Ritsu had always found it to be anything but overwhelming, but now he found himself spooling through his thoughts, trying to grasp for anything.
Shou met his eyes. Saw his question, Ritsu’s frown and his attempts to read Shou’s thoughts, feel what he was feeling, thinking.
There was a flood of something, warm and sickly-sweet flushing and flowing through him. He couldn’t focus on it for more than a second, couldn’t catch Shou’s feeling and identify it, before it went blank.
“Yeah,” Shou hummed. He wasn’t feeling anything, wasn’t thinking anything. There was no bitter tang of lies on Ritsu’s tongue or feelings of fondness or nothing. It was like looking at a picture. He could see Shou’s smile, but he couldn’t feel the emotion behind it. “Sure!”
He jumped to his feet, a spring of motion. Ritsu felt disconnected, from the person with him. The wind moved his red hair and his eyes were bright but dull all at once. He extended a hand down to Ritsu, nails down to the quick, dirty and scratched and scarred.
“How ‘bout tomorrow,” Shou hummed, peppy but low in his throat, “we go for lunch. Or breakfast, or dinner or whatever. We can go use your brain on unsuspecting civilians.”
Ritsu wasn’t content. If anything, it felt worse. But he took Shou’s hand anyways.
Ritsu has realized his grasp on himself and the people around him, how he feels and how they think and how the thoughts and feelings of others meld into his own, it’s not what people feel. His relationships, his ‘intuition’, how he can tell from even less than a sentence from someone’s mouth whether they’re someone worth his time. Others can’t do this. Even other espers that he’s met can’t do this.
There’s something both comforting and othering in that fact. He’s different. And he’s alone.
Shigeo has become his confidant, obviously. Right beside Shou, of course. Shou had been the first to know, the first to figure this out with Ritsu and to fall into a steady rhythm beside Ritsu. Shou was there for every step of Ritsu’s struggle with this.
When Ritsu had told his brother, he’d felt guilty. Maybe ashamed, even. He knew it wasn’t rational, but the creeping thought that he was a liar, that he’d been hiding his abilities from Shigeo this entire time, left gashes as it clawed up his spine.
And then he told Shigeo he was an empath, he’d always been, and his smile was so bright and so proud that Ritsu felt nothing but the warmth of his affection. They’d spent hours that same night, Shigeo begging for every detail, everything he knew and thought and could feel. Ritsu hadn’t fallen asleep in his brother’s room for a very long time before that night.
Still, Shou was someone he went to first about these kinds of things, usually. Late night texts, or taps on his window, or when they’d drag each other around town, through downtown shops and forests and parks for the hell of it.
But it was different this time.
He hadn’t meant to stand around the entrance way that long. But his head was falling to his feet, gone and away as he cracked the door open to a silent house after Shou and his scuffles in the woods disguised as training. Something, the feeling of Shou blocking him out like that in the moment, had liquified through his bones and now clogged his legs with cement.
Shoes hit against the wall as he sluggishly kicked them off. He settled, sitting at the bottom of the stairs. Elbows digging into his knees, chin propped up on his palms, his fingers dug into the flesh of his cheek as he scowled.
The house was empty. He was alone. He knew so. Both parents working the day away, and Mob’s frequent power now leaving and absence in the air. He was with Teruki, or Tome, Ritsu couldn’t remember. But he’d be home soon. Ritsu was wayward until then.
He didn’t know what to do, or think, or say. Didn’t know what this meant. But he’d felt it. Shou had learned to block him out. He’d created something Ritsu’s ability couldn’t breach. It had felt wrong.
But why? Shou’s brain could be disorienting, more so than anyone Ritsu had ever met before. The structure of his thoughts, both the absence and intensity of his emotions alarming. Shou lied both never and all the time, omitting truths or twisting his words so they’d be more interesting. Yet nothing so bold and horrid to leave a nasty texture on Ritsu’s tongue. His words always left the bitterness of slightly oversteeped tea in his mouth. He’d come to not think much of it, maybe even enjoy the taste.
He wouldn’t tell him this, maybe at least not now, maybe not ever. But there was something in the self-assured, tactful chaos of his brain that Ritsu loved. It was comforting. Familiar, something that he found soothing in a way. He couldn’t put a finger on it, couldn’t give it a word or a name to explain it. But Ritsu enjoyed everything about Shou. The wisps of stray thoughts that brushed against his own mind and the crackles of feelings, it made soft electric static shoot up his spine. He didn’t want to think about the why or the how behind that. But he didn’t want it to go away.
Shou had blocked him out. That bothered him more than it should.
His nails dug half-moons into his skin.
The sound of a key in the door, then it being pushed open made Ritsu frown. He must have been sitting there longer than he thought, now seeing Shigeo shuffling in. He met Ritsu’s eyes half way through closing the door, instantly frowning. “Ritsu?” He hummed, shuking off his shoes. Ritsu sat up straight as he watched him. “What’s the matter?”
“You don’t read minds,” he said bluntly, “or are… empathic, or whatever.”
Concern furrowed his brow, dragged his expression into a frown. “No? Why?”
He stood, shuffled on his feet. Shigeo’s eyes snapped over his face and Ritsu blinked. The dirt and grime still caked onto his face, he tried not to look too embarrassed as he rubbed it off. “It’s just, uh--”
“You and Suzuki-kun were training,” Mob hummed, walking past Ritsu and through the living room. Ritsu snapped to pace, following him into the kitchen. “Yeah, we were?” He dug his teeth into the soft of his cheek, “why?”
“Something happened?” Shigeo questioned it, but Ritsu didn’t hear it as a question. More a statement. He didn’t know if Mob was right or wrong. “Yeah? Sort of.”
“With your powers?”
“ About my powers.” Shigeo paused, hummed, shut the fridge door. He held a carton of milk in one hand, the cupboard behind him creaking open and two cups floating out. He poured two glasses of milk, handing one to Ritsu without a question regarding it. “What do you mean?”
He took the glass, scratching the side of his head. “I mean, like… so I can pick up on people’s thoughts? And feelings, right?” Shigeo nodded, focus intent on Ritsu. He continued on. “Well, I… was just talking to Shou about them, and he…” He frowned, bit his lip, teeth digging into the skin. He couldn’t wrap his head around it, how to describe it.
“He suddenly… went blank? Like he didn’t exist anymore, besides me seeing him and talking to him directly and knowing he’s there. I couldn’t feel him in the same way.” He realized that probably sounded stupid, downing his glass and then looking straight at Shigeo. “Is that how it is for you?”
Mob blinked at him, looked slightly perplexed, like this was something that made no sense, was irrational in itself, and Ritsu supposed it was. For other people, maybe. But Ritsu felt like another sense he had his whole life had suddenly been covered, gone.
“I don’t experience anything you’ve told me, Ritsu.” Mob said it simply, so simply, like not experiencing such things wasn’t ripping at the innards of Ritsu’s stomach. He huffed, a hand threading harsh in his hair. “But,” Ritsu groaned out, “really? Like, what’s it like? How do people feel to you?”
Mob shrugged, leaning on the counter, two hands wrapped around his own glass. “I can’t feel them. I mean, besides other espers, people are just… there. If I’m not talking to them or looking at them, I don’t know there thoughts or feelings.” He pinched his lips to the side, thoughtful. “Well, even then I don’t know. People need to tell others what they’re thinking, saying. Shishou can see it in people’s face, apparently. I don’t get that all the time though.”
Ritsu couldn’t get it. That sounded strange, unnatural, uncomfortable. “That’s… weird.” Mob shrugged, sipping his milk down to nothing. He floated Ritsu’s across the room and placed it into the sink. “Not for me. Or other people, I don’t think.”
Ritsu rubbed his hand over his mouth. He couldn’t think of not feeling what he could, knowing what he could. Even know, brushes of thought and feeling were at the edges of his own skull. He saw thoughts of himself, feelings of concern and curiosity towards him. And residual memories of Tome dragging him through suspect shops along busy downtown roads.
He couldn’t imagine not knowing this, feeling this. With Shou, it was even worse. It felt like losing a sense of him, the feeling of him. His presence and the comfort of him.
“Maybe he doesn’t want you in his head.” Mob hummed and tapped his chin. Ritsu balked. “What, but. I, uh…” He stopped, frowned. The words sunk to the murky bottom of his heart. “...Could it?”
Mob couldn’t sense the discomfort, the turmoil and worry in his head. It was evident in the way his thoughts began to drift away. “You’ll have to ask him.”
That was terrifying in itself.
Shou was chewing at the straw of his practically empty bubble tea, swallowing the tapioca balls whole like some sort of animal. Ritsu averted his eyes.
It was happening more often since yesterday, more frequently. Once turned to twice, then five times. After chuckled glances, wide grins, Ritsu's questioning and teasing and remarks on topics unrelated, Shou had shut him out. Over and over, repeatedly.
Ritsu watched him, over a cup of hot chocolate he hadn't touched once. The sun was up above them at an angle, the wind gentle. People were all around them, sitting at two person tables surrounding them at the outside seating of this pompous cafe. They're presences and minds craddled around him but Ritsu ignored them all, the brushes of thought and the lull of conversations.
Shou was looking out at the street, watching cars slide by listlessly. His head, his presence, he was open, now. Ritsu spooled through it, picking up the stray thoughts of whatever movie he'd watched last night, cupping the feeling of content as a glowing liquid in his hands.
Shou hummed something, glanced over to Ritsu and met his eyes. His mind went blank, opaque. Ritsu couldn't feel him anymore, so suddenly. Ritsu dug his nails into the palm of his hand. Shou just tapped his fingers against the glass of his coffee, smiling like nothing was wrong. Like he was unaware, wasn't doing anything to make Ritsu's heart clench at all.
"We should find someone to practice your powers with right?" Ritsu couldn't tell him that he'd technically found a target in Shou, simply nodding his head instead. Shou smiled and looked happy, excited, maybe nervous. Ritsu wasn't sure; he felt the scratch of the wool pulled over his eyes.
Shou hums, looks around, eyes scanning over the people all around them and walking by them without any shame when someone met his gaze. He drank his bubble tea, let out a sigh. “What about her,” he tried to say silently, nodding towards a woman a table away. “She seems distracted. What’s in her head?”
Ritsu glanced over, catching a mop of sandy blond hair over dark skin. She was on her phone, alone, oblivious. Ritsu frowned slightly, something uncomfortable about his eyes being off Shou; every time he was out of view, it was like he was gone. He couldn’t feel him, and it was unnerving.
But he could pick her out, feel her drifting thoughts through the air, in between and colliding with everyone else’s. It took little thought to focus on her.
Ritsu thumbed at the lid of his drink, the heat entirely cooled down. “She’s just getting off work,” Ritsu hummed, “from an office job a few blocks away from here. Apparently she comes her after almost every shift at this time because a waiter she likes usually works now. But she hasn’t seen them today and she’s both disappointed and a little worried. She has seen them here almost every day without fail but has never gotten their number or anything and is paranoid she missed out on them.”
His eyes flicked up to Shou, who was staring at him. “Is that what you wanted?” He said curtly. Shou didn’t respond, not instantly, and Ritsu felt that there might have been something he should have seen in the slight lilt of his expression, the tightening edges of his eyes, the inward jerk of his aura. But he grasped for nothing, saw nothing he could understand. Just felt a pit of something like confusion and discomfort in the confines of his ribs.
“Damn,” Shou whistled, low and long, “you can get all that from a glance?” Ritsu shrugged, took a sip of his drink for the first time to fill the space in his head. It was cold. “I don’t need a glance.”
Shou’s eyes might have widened, marginally, Ritsu wasn’t sure. “Seriously,” Shou breathed out, “like, you can read minds without even needing to look at them?” His eyes were bright, looking past and over Ritsu’s shoulder. His gaze fell on someone, but when Ritsu tried to look over his shoulder a warm, invisible force grabbed his face. He frowned at the ghostly, nonexistent feeling of fingers on his cheeks, making sure to glare at Shou.
His hand was raised slightly, a nearly indiscernible faint glow within the line of his palm. He dropped his hand and the feeling of contact on Ritsu’s face dissipated, although the warmth it left clung to his skin. “What was that?”
“Don’t look,” Shou snickered, a shrill whisper. He leaned forward and knocked over his now empty coffee cup. “The person directly behind you. What is he thinking?”
Ritsu ground his teeth, leaning closer over the table to Shou. “Keep your voice down!” He hissed, clicking his tongue when Shou just grinned and shrugged-oh-so innocently at him. Ritsu sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Okay,” he ran his teeth along his bottom lip, “well, the person behind me, I’m guessing the guy actually sitting down and not the worker who is asking if he’s enjoying his drink? Well that guy has been grocery shopping all day and is now waiting until he needs to go pick up his three kids from school. He’s tired as hell but excited to see his kids.”
Shou was silent again, achingly so. Ritsu looked up to him from his drink and leveled a downcast stare at him. “You know I can do all that. What did you think?” He got the creeping suspicion that this was making Shou uncomfortable, if the way he couldn’t read him, either his mind or expression, was giving him much of anything.
A tendril of thought wormed its way into the front of his brain. Of what his brother had said, of the discomfort he felt from this, of the creeping, ebbing and waxing worry that Shou was hiding something from him. But it couldn’t coalesce until a presence clicked into place, making him sit up straight and snap his head back to the street.
Shou seems to notice him as well. “Ay, Teru!” He cupped one hand by his mouth, the other waving wildly. Ritsu felt Teruki’s surprise, then happy contentment as he noticed the two of them. There was a book bag hanging off his shoulder, his jacket gaudy and distracting with it’s patterns of vibrant colours.
“You’re jacket is physically assaulting my eyes right now,” Ritsu deadpanned, Shou snorting out a shrill, high pitched laugh. Ritsu shot him a smarmy grin as Teruki wound through the tables and occupied chairs.
“How very nice it is to see you, little brother!” Teruki smiled, making sure his cheery voice sounded as fake and plastic as it was. “Or it was before you decided to be a jerk.”
“Hey, c’mon,” Shou said to Teru, glancing between Ritsu and Teru. “He’s just thinking aloud. What are you doin’ over here anyways? Isn’t your apartment, like, a long ass distance away?”
Teru lit up, his mind flooding with thoughts that made Ritsu fondly roll his eyes. He couldn’t help but blurt it out before Teru got the chance. “Study date with Nii-san,” he blinked, jabbing a finger in Teruki’s direction, “hey, don’t get so excited at me calling it a ‘date’. That’s how you’re considering it. I’m just saying what you’re thinking.”
At least he had the decency not to deny it, despite the desire to flaring between the coils and curls of giddiness Ritsu felt reverberating off of him.
“Haven’t you and Ritsu’s bro been dating, like,” Shou huffed around the straw he was chewing on, “a month or something now? You guys sure act it.”
“Wait,” Ritsu paused, looking at Teru with narrowed eyes for dramatic affect. Teru spared him a frown as he grabbed a chair from a nearby table, throwing his leg over the back of the chair as he sat down. “Aren’t you and
nii-san already dating? And haven’t you guys for, like, a couple of months now?”
The pause in conversation had Ritsu sweating, glancing between them: from Shou, his thoughts and feelings locked tight behind the widened eyes of his expression, to Teruki, the confines of his skull not confining in the slightest. Their stares were drowning him. “What? So, I’m wrong?”
“Y-yeah?” Teruki squeaked, face red. “We aren’t-- I haven’t-- Kageyama-kun, uh. ” His mind was a mess. Ritsu almost felt bad for him. “I haven’t even. Asked him out yet.”
Ritsu raised an eyebrow. He tried to feel out for any inkling of feelings, or anything from Shou. Ritsu decided to pretend that it was overclouded by Teruki’s insistent, ecstatic thoughts. The incessant joys of his mind was synced with the beat of his heart, to the point that Ritsu felt he could pick up the pieces of Teruki’s mind and string together a full-fleshed person.
“Well,” Ritsu huffed, looking at Teruki with a purposefully bored expression. “Are you sure Nii-san hasn’t asked you out instead?” His mind goes stone-cold still, so shockingly so that Ritsu finds himself laughing aloud.
It was evident in his expression, too, Ritsu figured. His face was near-white, eyes wide, mouth opening and closing like a beached fish. “Oh…” He wheezed out, sounding strangled. “Well…”
“Oh my god are you fucking serious,” Shou spoke up, making Ritsu jump. He looked to see Shou leaning on his elbows, heavy on the table, intent on Teru with the biggest smirk Ritsu had ever seen. It felt like plastic. “Dude, has he actually, word for word, asked you to go on a date with him?”
Teru was fidgeting. “Uhm, uh--”
“It’s a yes or no question.”
“Well--”
“Actually scratch that you don’t even need to answer holy fuck-- ”
“ Oh would you look at the time!” Teruki suddenly yelled out. Ritsu balked, wincing at the flood of attention and curious minds it brought to their table. Teru didn’t notice, wide eyes looking to a watch on his wrist that didn’t exist. His chair screeched against the ground as he jumped back off of it, nearly tripping himself in the struggle to stand up.
“I, uh, gotta go,” He coughed, cleared his throat, pointing down the street, “see M-M-Mob. Uh, yeah. Okaybye.”
Shou snickered oh-so bluntly at Teru’s obvious plight, waving innocently as Teru bolted in the wrong direction. “Say hi to Ritsu’s brother for me!” His yell gartered no response, just more concern and annoyance that had Ritsu hiding his smirk behind his hand.
“Wow,” Ritsu laughed, his whole body shaking with the movement of it. His sides were splitting, smile making his face ache. “I can’t believe Teru, Mr. Popular, could be so obliviou--”
Ritsu gasped, suddenly. A flash flood of feelings and incoherent thoughts hit him hard. He choked on it, the pressure of warmth and unintelligible thoughts of wonderment and things, emotions he didn’t know how to place. He couldn’t say it aloud, the way it made his body tense all the way down to the marrow of his bones. He could never say aloud the flashes of himself he suddenly saw, the soulful hum of warmth attached to it.
Then it broke, stopped altogether. Ritsu felt empty.
He gasped and noticed his eyes were wet, stinging with emotions he’d shared for less than a second. His head snapped up, and met Shou’s eyes.
He was standing, face red eyebrows crinkled at the center and something painfully confined in his eyes. Ritsu’s heart was thunder, lighting through his bones. Words he could never speak aloud, could never bring himself to say in the middle of the day without the night to hide him, shivered at the back of his skull.
“ Shou,” Ritsu gasped out the word like it hurt. “Shou, Shou. What was that ?” He was helpless to watch his expression harden. He felt nothing, Shou having completely block him out all over again. It hurt even more, this time.
“I, uh,” his words were hesitant, so unlike him. “I have to go, Kageyama-kun.”
Ritsu bit his tongue and just watched him go, wiping his face on his sleeve.
From Shou [3:32am]: Hye sorry for boltin on ya. Realized i didn pay D: yo ill take u to lunch again soon i swear
From Shou [3:40am]: yoyoyo what u up to tmrrow? I bought new spraypaint we can go to town on some mega canvases i found in a garbage >:D
Ritsu rubbed his face, holding his phone over himself as he squinting stinging eyes up at a bright screen. Shou’s texts glared down at him, feeling harsh in their feigned innocence. Like nothing had happened.
Something bitter built up in the back of his throat, Ritsu huffing into the line of his blanket. Freeing an arm, he typed up quickly, then hesitated.
To Shou [3:48am]: are you really going to act dumb like this? Shou what is wrong with you
He deleted it. The bitterness, the anger, the frustration melted down into what it concealed. The tired drag of his eyes made it easy for tears to build up, again. He mindlessly wiped his face on his blanket, thumbs slow as he typed.
To Shou [3:50am]: shou why are you running from me? I thought we shared everything. Were friends forever right. Why are you hiding something im sorry did i
He deleted it, tried to numb the waves of his mind. He could feel the soft, subtle currents of his family’s minds all melding, moving slow in their dreaming sleeps. He tried to mimic it, hitting send and then burrying his face in his pillow before what Mob had told him, the niggling words in the back of his head, could catch him.
To Shou [3:52am]: sure why not
Shou will talk to me if something was wrong, Ritsu told himself, trying to will himself into drifting away. He’ll talk when he needs to.