Work Text:
It was nearing summer vacation when he decides it is time. He's not very original, he just asks everybody to go to an empty classroom again.
Is he actually going to show up?
He didn’t show up last time.
Man, I’m hungry.
“Saiki, you came this time,” Teruhashi says when he walks in. He decided to do it during lunch period because Aiura predicted that everybody would be too busy after school this year. He has amassed quite a friend group since his first year at PK Academy.
I have something to tell everybody.
I’m a psychic.
Everybody looks at each other confused: Aiura, Toritsuka, and Akechi wait patiently.
Saiki takes a deep breath. I have the ability to apport, astral project, bilocation, clairvoyance, cryokinesis, curse, electrification, flight/levitation, hydrokinesis, hypnosis, invisibility, mediumship, memory alteration, mind control, petrification, precognition, psychic hold, telekinesis, psychometry, pyrokinesis, restoration, shrinking power/size augmentation, super strength, telepathy within a certain radius, teleportation, thoughtography, time travel, shapeshifting, and x-ray vision.
As he lists more and more of his abilities, he could see his friends' souls seeping out and their opinions of him rapidly declining.
Who knew that Saiki was so delusional? Kaido whimpers in his head.
Saiki levitates him to the ceiling for that. Everybody else, reasonably, freaks out.
“Holy fuck,” Kuboyasu yells.
“Dude, you’re flying,” Nendou laughs.
While everybody is trying to get Kaido down, Hairo starts to stack several desk chairs in a very unsafe manner, Saiki takes this opportunity to hold out his hand to Teruhashi, who is the closest to him. She takes it, thinking ‘oh no'.
“What-” before she could finish, Saiki teleports them 700 meters in the air. He would have teleported her to Paris or Dubai, but he couldn't be certain they wouldn’t have been caught.
For a single second, they are floating in the air and Teruhashi gasps. Then they start falling, rapidly. Saiki decides to enjoy the fall and lets his body go limp. He's finally a third-year and now he's even telling the people closest to him that he's a psychic. This certainly wasn't what he expected to be doing this time last year. The wind feels nice.
“Saiki!” Teruhashi screams, grabbing his arm with her other hand and coming close. Dear God, please don’t let me die.
Falling in the sky with a girl clinging to him is pretty anime opening-worthy, too bad the only thing that anybody ever does in his openings is dance. Why couldn't he have a cool anime opening like Attack on Titan or One Punch Man?
Oh, we're kind of close to the ground. Saiki teleports them back into the classroom, levitating before slowly coming down. Teruhashi’s hair sticks up in every direction and her eyes were twitching. She resembled a tortured cat. Her legs are shaking, but she lets go of her death grip on his hand and steps back.
“You said that you can hear everyone's thoughts within a certain radius, right?” she asks numbly.
Yes, a 200-meter radius.
“Great,” Teruhashi says, before briskly walking out of the classroom and presumably out of the school, her hair and clothes still a mess.
Ah, Saiki laments, maybe he went a little far.
“Hey, you’ve never taken me sky-diving,” Aiura complains.
“Yeah, me neither,” Toritsuka mockingly puckers his lips out and cups his hands next to his face. She punches him.
“I would like to go as well, but I fear that I may pee myself,” Akechi unhelpfully inputs. "I mean if I were to pee myself, it would probably fall at a slower rate than me which would result in me hitting the ground and then having my pee fall onto me - which really means that I would be peeing on myself. I've never tried that before, but I'm sure it would be hard to get my hair clean afterward. My shampoo-
Hairo cuts Akechi off. Sweat on his temple, he states “This is a lot to wrap our heads around, but more importantly-
Saiki. I want to say thank you.”
Huh.
“I mean you saved us from the meteor, right? And that volcano eruption. And now that I think about it, you probably saved all of us even more than that, so-” Hairo stands ramrod before bowing 90 degrees, “-thank you.”
“Yeah, man, thanks.” Kaboyasu bows as well.
“Saiki wouldn’t let us get hurt,” Yumehera sobs, but not out of gratitude. Saiki knew that I had a crush on him and Kaido this entire time!!!
Sorry, Yumehara.
One by one, his friends say thank you and bow. Even Saiko bows his head, muttering thanks. Aiura, Akechi, and Toritsuka smile at him - Aiura giving a wink and Toritsuka gives him a thumbs up, his eyes watering. Akechi, for once, stays blissfully quiet.
Saiki finds himself smiling. Yare yare, how long are you guys going to bow.
Nendou laughs, swinging his arm around Saiki’s shoulders, “Yeah, I’m getting hungry. Let’s get ramen.”
It’s the middle of the school day.
“Saiki, can you mind-control the waiter into giving us ramen for free?” Mera asks.
How is that the first thing you come up with?
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll pay,” Saiko says, flashing his signature rich asshole smile.
Nendou and Mera jump on him, clinging to his arms, “Saiko, you’re the best.” “We love you, Saiko.”
"Hey, can I come down from the ceiling now?"
No.
The rest of the day surprisingly continues uneventfully. Toritsuka tries to ask for quiz answers on Japanese history telepathically, but Saiki threatens to send him to the Edo period so he stops. The only thing different is that the seat to the right of him is empty.
She’s probably just embarrassed that you knew about her crush, Aiura supplies after seeing him glance at Teruhashi’s empty desk.
The guys invite him for ramen, but he declines, opting to head home instead.
At home, he busies himself with homework, chores, and reading the newest shounen jump edition. His mom asks him to call his grandmother, wish him a happy birthday, but he doesn't feel like doing it and decides to do it tomorrow.
He knows exactly when she comes into his radius. A mess of emotions and a lot of 'how dare he' and 'I have been blessed by God.' He puts on his germanium ring to let her have some privacy. But not a lot of privacy, since he just sits at his desk and patiently stares at his street. She comes into view at 7:05. He teleports downstairs, puts on his shoes, waits three minutes, and walks out at 7:10.
At the gate stood Kokomi Teruhashi, the perfect pretty girl, waiting for him. She didn't ring the doorbell. Her face was unreadable, not that Saiki could really see her facial features. Now that he has his psychic abilities back, he also has his x-ray vision. "Hey, sorry for disturbing you so late."
Do you want to come in?
She shakes her head. "I'm not really in the mood to chat with your mom right now."
He nods.
Teruhashi cuts to the chase, “Saiki, I’m hurt that you kept all of this a secret. But I know that I also had secrets I was keeping and it would be hypocritical of me to expect something from you that I didn't give. So moving forward, I'm going to try my best to be honest with you and I want you to do the same,” with that, she looks at him expectantly.
This is it. The part where he turns her down. He knows that. She knows that. It’s time he put an end to it.
There is this ring that I use sometimes. It blocks out everybody's thoughts. I'm wearing it right now...
Saiki can't figure out why he is trying to prolong this. And I have x-ray vision. I only see flesh and tissue when I look at people. The only way I know what you look like is through pictures or reflections. And I can’t fall in love with a reflection.
It wasn’t the rejection he had planned, but it was the truth. Teruhashi sniffles, blinks back tears, "Thank you for telling me." Saiki feels bad. She lets go of his gate, about to leave but stops herself.
“Can you see through your eyelids when you close your eyes?”
No.
“Oh, then why don’t you just make eye contacts out of your own cells?” Teruhashi asks.
Silence.
Teruhashi rubs her eyes, a little red around the nose, “Well, I better head back home. See you at school, Saiki.”
-
The next day, Saiki walks into class. His friends were as rowdy as ever: Nendou and Hairo were arm-wrestling, Yumehara and Meru were devouring a bag of shrimp chips that were left in Yumehara’s locker (spoiler alert: it was her ex), and Akechi was asking the teacher about the homework, but not letting the poor guy answer them.
Teruhashi is listening to music when he sits down. She’s probably ignoring him - she put her headphones in about ten minutes before he walked through the door, but he was already within telepathy distance. Now, she is blasting music, clouding her thoughts. Saiki figures she is still pretty upset about getting turned down and leaves her be.
“Hey Saiki,” Kuboyasu and Kaido greet, walking up to his desk. They’re inseparable these days. “We were talking…” Kaido starts to blush a deep red, clearly embarrassed, “and we think it’s time that we called you by your first name.” His voice squeaks like he’s confessing.
No.
“What! But we know your biggest secret now.”
And I’ve known your secrets this entire time.
Kaido sputters before his face tenses and becomes weebish, “So you know about my arm. This only brings us closer as comrades.”
“Wait, if you guys start calling Saiki by his first name, we should be able to, too!” Yumehara declares from the other side of the classroom. She, Akechi who stopped tormenting the teacher and Mera crowded around Aiura’s desk.
Toritsuka and Aiura already knew and they don’t call me by my first name.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t start, neh Toritsuka?” Aiura calls.
“Yeah, yeah, I have a couple of other playlists if you’re interested,” red as a tomato and practically shaking in his sandals, Toritsuka starts frantically searching his phone.
“Really? That would be amazing,” Teruhashi is leaning on his desk, phone in hand and her head close to his. “Class is going to start soon, how about I just give you my #?”
The monk-in-training offers his phone with both hands, head bowed and tears falling from his eyes. At this point, the other boys in the class have taken notice and are sending waves of negative thoughts Toritsuka’s way. Saiki can only make out feral wailing, frantic praying, and curse words.
Teruhashi types in her number, music still playing in her left ear, and out of sheer ill-will, she signs Toritsuka’s death sentence with a selfie for her contact pic. Whatever he did to her, it must have been pretty bad. She hops, yes hops, off his desk and walks over to her own, on the other side of Saiki.
During class, Saiki finds out that Toritsuka is actually innocent. Teruhashi is planning on doing a make-shift karaoke night for her birthday and wanted songs to download.
Come break, Teruhashi starts handing out said birthday invitations to all their close friends. “If you don’t have any plans on August 6th, I’m throwing a birthday party. We’re doing karaoke. Imu-chan will be there, too. Presents aren’t necessary, just your presence,” she winks.
The entire class gives a collective ‘oh wow’. She finishes passing out her invitations and Saiki realizes he didn’t receive one.
“Oh Saiki, I’m sorry. I guess I forgot one invitation. I’ll give it to you tomorrow, don’t be mad ok?” She didn’t forget the invitation, she purposefully combed through all of the invites this morning and delicately placed his on her desk before leaving. The flashback felt packaged and shipped to him telepathically.
Is this a form of bullying?
Teruhashi tilts her head innocently, “Do you feel bullied?”
“Um, Teruhashi, we haven’t received invitations either,” Takashi says nervously. The rest of the background characters all blush and look away - just as nervous.
Teruhashi sighs softly, “Oh, I’m sorry my parents said I could only have,” she mentally counts everybody she is inviting, “13 people at my birthday party, but if somebody can’t make it. I guess somebody else could come. Everybody except Saiki already RSVPed though.”
This is bullying.
Maybe don't send girls 500 meters into the sky.
It was actually 700 meters.
It was actually a declaration of war.