Chapter Text
He came upon the house in what was otherwise a pure void. It was an empty, lightless place, one without sky or ground, but he knew it immediately to be his home.
Smoke poured from the windows and billowing into the air, disappearing from view upon reaching some threshold where he could no longer make it out against the darkness of the starless sky. The house itself had become a great, burning hearth: full of hungry fire that licked up the walls and raced across the roof, obscuring anything inside like a bright red-orange curtain.
He walked into it. It did not burn him; fire had never hurt him. It was energy. He was energy. They were of the same kind, and moved harmlessly around one another, but for where the fire was drawn in and became part of the infinite well of energy simmering beneath his skin.
It was this massive force that threatened to break out beyond him now, boiling beneath the confines of his control, his emotions stirred up into a hurricane of the rage and fear and sadness that came from the sight of his home burning down.
When he came upon the bodies, it was that same power that exploded outwards, enveloped him in wrath and murderous intent, and this time, there was no green spirit to pull him back from the edge.
Power. It was everywhere, rolling off him in tidal waves that laid waste to everything around him, and he remained alone at the epicenter. Alone.
He could still smell the smoke.
⸻⸻⸻
Shigeo woke, startled, to the distinct sound of a fire alarm going off.
Panic seized him; he threw aside the blanket covering him and sat up, looking around the unfamiliar room with a sudden sense of fear and confusion.
His dream lingered on him like a cloying shroud, or plastic caught up in the branches of a tree after being haphazardly thrown around by the force of wind. It threatened to choke him with the overpowering smell of smoke in the air, assaulted his senses with visions of orange fire and brought his fear boiling to the surface once again- but when he looked around, everything seemed quite normal. There was a light scent of something burning, but the room he was in was not enveloped by fire, nor were the charred corpses of his family anywhere to be seen.
There was, however, a strange note that took a moment to slot itself back into place as Shigeo realized where he was and reality finally settled down.
Ah. I’m at Master Reigen’s apartment.
As he relaxed, a few objects that had taken it upon themselves to raise into the air settled back down, and Shigeo’s own breathing resumed a normal pace. There was sunlight coming in through the small gap that the curtains refused to close; it cut a straight line across the small room, illuminating motes of dust within it up until the point where the light met the wall, climbed, and abruptly ended at the ceiling.
It might have been a calm scene, were it not for the sudden sounds of shouting and the clattering of pots and pans that were coming from the other room.
The kitchen was a chaotic sight. Master Reigen was holding up a dish towel and waving it frantically at the smoke in the air that was pouring off of a charred something in a pan on the stove, while Ritsu was standing on the back of the couch and fighting with the fire alarm in an attempt to make the blaring sound stop.
“Oh, hey Mob!” Reigen waved, grabbing a plate on the counter and slamming it over the frying pan to finally quell the outpouring of smoke. “Would you mind opening the windows? Ritsu was trying to make breakfast for us, and, well, as you can see, ended up nearly burning my apartment down.”
Ritsu scowled. “Don’t try and pin this on me. You were the one who left them on the stove for too long, you filthy liar.”
“I don’t remember anything like that,” Reigen shrugged innocently - at least, as innocently as a known conman could manage - and shook his head. “It was probably an unconscious accident of your psychic powers. It happens sometimes, you can’t help it, no need to be ashamed. You know, this is why my impeccable guidance is so important for you kids.”
“Shut up,” Ritsu glowered at the man. “You can’t even crack an egg without dropping eggshell in the batter.”
Shigeo watched the two argue for a moment, dumbfounded and still really only half-awake, before waving a hand towards the windows and opening them all with his power so that the smoke could clear out.
“Thanks, Mob. You’re a lifesaver,” Reigen smiled, deliberately ignoring the indignant Ritsu glaring at him from across the room. “Uh... do you think there’s any chance you could restore these pancakes back to an edible standard?”
Shigeo glanced at the shapes in the frying pans, then looked up to his master. “These... are supposed to be pancakes?”
From the other side of the room, Ritsu snickered.
Reigen looked distraught, but turned away before Shigeo had time to understand the expression as a reaction to his unintentionally scathing comment. “...it’s fine. We can eat cereal,” the man said quickly.
Shigeo’s eyes lit up. He liked cereal, but he didn’t want to mess up his master’s breakfast plan, and didn’t want to rub any salt in the wound that was the man’s abysmal cooking skills.
“That sounds good.” Ritsu was already pawing through the cabinets, seizing upon a colorful box while simultaneously retrieving milk from the fridge. He was aware of his brother’s preference, and much less conservative about voicing his own opinions. He wasn’t the biggest fan of cereal, but Shigeo was, and that was the important thing to the younger Kageyama brother.
At least, it was until he saw the visuals on the box.
“What kind of cheap knockoff is this?”
Shigeo peered at the box. At first glance, it looked like any regular cereal, but closer inspection revealed an awkwardly paraphrased name and off-color decoration. It was no kind of cereal that he had ever seen before, much less tried, and something about the fact that the siding advertised it as containing ‘hole wheat’ concerned him. Was that a misspelling, or was that an actual ingredient?
“It’s store-brand,” Reigen muttered, crossing his arms indignantly. “It tastes just as good as the real thing, okay? It’s just cheaper. These are the kinds of smart economical decisions you’ll have to make as an adult,” he muttered, pulling three bowls from a cabinet. All three of them were mismatched- one was a solid green, the second a plastic branded bowl with the face of a cartoon character printed on the inside, and the third was just a glass mixing bowl.
Ritsu blinked at the sight, and failed to repress the harsh laugh that built up within him at the sight. “You’re such a cheapskate,” he observed with a grin; rare was the occasion that he ever passed up an opportunity to poke fun at his older brother’s master.
“I am a financially responsible adult!” Reigen protested, looking frustrated.
Ritsu looked for a moment as if he was going to prod more at the conman’s fragile ego, but simply shrugged instead after receiving a very pointed look from Shigeo. “Yeah, yeah,” he waved, moving to open the cabinet drawers at random. “So, where do you keep your silverware?”
Reigen blinked. “Ah, wait, hold on-"
Ritsu stared at the drawer he had just opened- second from the left- and at the unorganized heap of distinctly plastic cutlery within it, and then at Reigen, who was looking thoroughly embarrassed.
“Plastic... is this also an economic decision?”
The man sighed, ran a hand back through his hair. “No... it’s just easier,” he admitted sourly. “...I don’t have a dishwasher.”
Shigeo smiled. He was glad to be back, he decided, looking on at how his master and his younger brother continued to argue with one another.
⸻⸻⸻
The flight from Bean Town back to Seasoning City took only around four hours. It was a much shorter trip than it had been to get there, and a more pleasant ride as well; the two espers had all the room they could wish for to maneuver within the infinite boundaries of the sky, and their powers intercepted any wind resistance that might have otherwise been painful.
The horizon stretched out all around them in waves of gray and green, occasional glimmers of light near towns, cities far away on the horizons.
At a certain height it became hard to breathe, so they swept over the countryside at a level similar to the hills they had left behind. It made for a beautiful view: roads turned into dark rivers, trees became single blades of grass, and towns became little breaks in the endless horizon with only their lights to make them stand out from the rest of the landscape.
“People probably won’t see us since it’s pretty dark tonight, but if they do, we’ll look enough like birds at this elevation,” Ritsu had said.
Shigeo had found that keeping himself in flight was an easier task than he had anticipated. Carrying his own weight with his powers was a minimal task, and with Ritsu’s guidance about flying, he was even able to zone out for most of the trip and simply enjoy the scenery below them.
“Everything looks so small,” Shigeo remarked as they went by a town, observing the little boxes he knew to be houses lined up around the roads. It was night, but there were a few cars moving around the little town. From here, though, they looked like tiny armored beetles.
He was amazed by just how much farming land there seemed to be, and felt a newfound appreciation for the well-stocked shelves of grocery stores. All of that had to come from somewhere, after all. It was easy to take things for granted when you were so detached from the hard work it took to bring them all the way to you.
Ritsu seemed equally as enthralled. “I think there’s a fault line over there,” he pointed towards a jagged line on the horizon. “That’s why there’s mountains.”
Shigeo nodded. He remembered learning about tectonic plates in class, although the details of the lesson were a little hazy. But he knew about the energy lurking under the earth that created mountains and earthquakes whenever a fissure let the pressure through. That part had stuck with him because of the similarity of the phenomenon to his own powers- only his explosions were emotional, not geological.
He angled himself to fly a little higher and get a better breadth of the landscape. He could see the mountains that Ritsu had pointed out more clearly now; it was a range of them, all jagged and uneven. He had never seen mountains from a view like this before. It was nice, if a bit cold; they had dressed in the warmest clothes they had and donned multiple jackets to protect themselves from the wind, but it was still chilly.
After a while, Shigeo began to understand why landscapes were described as rolling: the hills, which went up and down as far as he could see, resembled waves of forestry with a startling likeness. It seemed almost like a painting- the mountains in the distance were topped with snow, and above those white-capped mountains was the sky. The night was thick with clouds that completely snuffed out any glimpse of the moon and stars, but Shigeo felt the same strange familiar feeling he had experienced while looking at the Milky Way on the bright night that they had driven up through the countryside to Aunt Hina’s house.
That had been a nice drive. As a family, they had used to go out for more trips when he and Ritsu were younger and less withdrawn, and Shigeo always remembered having a good time- even on the occasion where he fell and scraped his knee.
But that memory felt somehow distant now. He felt distant, detached, drawn up to the sky by some invisible force. Even his powers seemed attracted to it in a magnetic sense, reaching out without his own awareness, up to a height where the ends of his aura licked at the clouds, curious and hungry like birds in the early hours of the morning that searched for things to eat beneath the soil.
Birds, right. His mom had owned a birdwatching guide that she brought with them on vacations- they marked each entry with a slight pen mark for every time they spotted one in the guide. He liked the warblers. The song they sang began as a low whistle and ended with a chirp- to him, it felt like they were always saying hello.
Maybe... maybe I’ll see some soon. Maybe they were hiding in the stars. He could go look- it wouldn’t hurt to check. Besides, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something up there; something that he couldn’t see.
The wind was rushing in his ears now. Louder and then louder still, it seemed to block everything else out; his thoughts, the sound of his heart, everything fell away in the face of that overwhelming sky, and the stars beyond it. Even his breathing was coming in shallower. His head felt light, his body distant, and in the mental fog that the absence of these things left behind a single thought occurred to him, materializing out of the sight and from what Ritsu had commented about earlier: mountain faults, and the well of energy beneath them.
In an unconscious part of himself, the Milky Way, the thing that he could not see through the clouds but that he could feel with a sight as vivid as if he had put a telescope up to the sky, seemed just like that mountain range. A celestial fault, a fissure in space with energy lurking behind it. Energy that he could pull from, he thought, if he only reached out and tried.
A sudden weight yanked him back down. For a moment, Shigeo remained transfixed, his eyes blown wide open and fixed on infinity- but then he was being shaken, and someone was saying his name.
“Shi—!”
“Nii-san!”
Huh?
Shigeo blinked, which took some effort. His eyes felt dry. He wiped at them, felt ice around the corners, tears that had frozen over. He looked around and saw that he was much higher than he had been before- he was practically grazing the clouds now, and the ground had become a distant shadow. Ritsu was clinging to his leg, bearing an expression of panic, and Shigeo realized that he must have flown up there, even though he didn’t remember deciding to do so.
His head still felt light, and his breathing was shallow, but he could make out Ritsu’s words again.
“Hey-- are you okay? You weren’t responding,” Ritsu was asking him, frowning. “I told you- we can’t go that high. The oxygen levels up there aren’t sustainable. It’s dangerous.”
“Oh. I-I’m sorry, I just...” Shigeo took a moment to breathe, and felt clarity return to him as he cleared away the last bits of ice that were clinging to his eyelashes. “I just zoned out, I think. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“You scared me,” Ritsu shook his head, but he looked relieved. “Don’t do that again, okay? Once we get back to the city, you can take a nap or something.” The younger esper paused. “You... did tell Reigen that we were coming, right?”
Shigeo blinked. “Uhm.”
⸻⸻⸻
Reigen Arataka, the self-proclaimed ‘greatest psychic of the twenty-first century’, who had very much not been told that the two brothers were planning to crash in his apartment, woke up around three in the morning to the sound of his phone ringing.
“Who the hell...?” Reigen muttered, still-half asleep, as he wrenched himself up from where he had fallen asleep on the couch and into waking order. His pajamas were in a rumpled state about him, and his hair was a mess, sticking up in random directions in direct defiance of all the laws of physics.
The ringtone - a three-note tune, subtle, but effective, every bit the kind of thing that any respectable businessman would choose for their ringtone and definitely not chosen because of a ‘top ten most professional things a person can do’ list where the ringtone was advertised for purchase - played a few more times as Reigen struggled to pull himself into full awareness, then came to an end.
He blinked a few times, staring at the door, then glanced down at the illuminated screen of his phone.
Missed Calls: Mob (2)
Voicemails: 1
Oh shit.
Reigen snatched up the phone and fumbled with it for a moment before pressing play on the voicemail, and held it up to his ear with unsteady hands. His mind was running rapidly, or at least as rapidly as it could at three in the morning; his mind was coming up with all sorts of unwarranted scenarios: Mob was calling to say he was going to hate Reigen forever, Mob was hurt, Mob had been kidnapped and somebody was using his phone to call for ransom-
Things like that.
“-oh, the voicemail’s going.”
“That means you need to start talking, nii-san.”
“Oh. Um. I don’t know what to-”
“Here, give it to me.”
The sounds of the phone exchanging hands.
“Hey Reigen-san, we’re coming to crash at your place, so open a window or something, you old fraud-”
“-don’t call him a-”
And that was where the message ended. Reigen stared at his phone in silence, his mind struggling to catch up with the play of events this early in the morning.
He wasn’t given much time to make sense of it; only a moment after he had finished listening to the message did his doorbell ring. Repeatedly. It sounded like whoever was on the other end was spamming the button with all of their strength, which was likely to wake the neighbors on either end of his unit up, and he was already in enough trouble with the landlord for the fact that reporters still occasionally showed up at the building asking for interviews and follow-ups on the scandal from half a year ago.
Must be another reporter, then , he thought sleepily, rousing himself out of bed and mentally preparing himself to chase off whatever tabloid was short on material this month.
Reigen moved for the door, nearly falling over in the process, and wrenched it open. “For the love of god can you please not ring my doorbell so much, it’s three in the-”
It was then, at the sight of Mob and his little brother standing in front of his door - his disciple looking thoroughly anxious, and Ritsu looking at Reigen like the man was a bit of dog shit he had stepped in - that the contents of the voice message fixed themselves into place.
“Hi,” Mob, his student who he had not seen awake and conscious for nearly a month, smiled awkwardly. “Um, we-”
“-can we come in?” Ritsu asked, though he was already pushing past Reigen to get inside the apartment, and pulling along a suitcase behind him.
Reigen furrowed his brows and rubbed first at his forehead, then at his eyes, and pinched himself for good measure. He still wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t dreaming all of this up. “It’s… three in the morning, Mob. Why are you…?”
Mob glanced quickly away from him, shying further from the door. His anxious body language did something to twist painfully at Reigen’s heart, and he decided that there were more important things than why.
“Mob, shit, are you... okay?” He hadn’t meant to curse, but he was tired, and he was worried, and… yeah. That was the gist of it; he was worried about the kid. He had been for a while now. The awful sight of Mob asleep in the hospital, as pale and unmoving as a corpse, still lingered in his mind.
“Mhm,” Mob nodded. “It was just a long flight. I-”
From within the apartment came a noise of disgust. “When was the last time you cleaned in here? You’re going to get bugs ,” Ritsu’s affronted voice remarked.
“Hold on a sec,” Reigen told his student, turning to step back into his housing. Mob’s little brother had apparently already set himself to cleaning up the place; in fact, most of Reigen’s belongings were floating in the air and re-organizing themselves.
“Knock that off! It’s an organized chaos, if you move things, I’m not gonna know where they are!”
“Mhm. You’re welcome.” Ritsu smiled, turning around to continue doing what he was doing and completely ignoring the protesting conman behind him. “I think I can make the layout of your furniture a little more cohesive, anyway. Haven’t you ever picked up a magazine? What do you even do all day when you’re not scamming people?”
“You-” Reigen sighed, decided there were more important things at hand to address, and turned back towards the doorway. He had expected Mob to have come in by now, but the kid was still lingering around the entrance, fidgeting with pale hands and looking characteristically anxious.
“…Mob, you can come in, you know.”
“Oh. Okay.” His student shuffled inside, and Reigen noted that Mob was also pulling along a suitcase.
He wanted to press for an explanation, to demand to know why these two kids had suddenly appeared in front of him pulling along suitcases as if they were headed on some vacation- but they both looked exhausted, and it was three in the morning, and...
Both Ritsu and Mob were looking at him with poorly concealed anxiety, he realized, and coughed into his fist to clear the air.
“You can stay,” he began, and watched relief swim in their dark eyes. “I’m gonna need answers in the morning, though. And I’m gonna need to talk with your parents.” He had almost refrained from asking about their parents; there was a part of him that feared the worst in that regard, that something horrible might have happened- but neither Mob nor his little brother seemed agitated at the mention, so that probably meant all was well.
The Kageyama family was nothing like his own, Reigen reminded himself. There was no reason to think that the brothers might have come to him out of fear.
“So that means we can stay?” Ritsu inquired, still in the active process of rearranging the apartment.
“Yes. As long as you put my furniture down.”
“Great,” the younger brother nodded, and allowed Reigen’s personal belongings to settle back onto the floor.
“I think I’ve got a futon around here somewhere,” Reigen sighed, moving to his closet before staring apprehensively at the door. He usually only opened the door a bit to shove things in. It probably hadn’t been sorted through ever , and who knew how many spiders could be lurking inside…
He sighed again before wrenching it open and ducking back - just in case - with both his arms raised in some abstract self-defense position.
The brothers looked at him.
“All clear,” Reigen dropped the pose and nodded briskly, coughing once and straightening up his stance. “I was just checking it for… uh…”
“Master Reigen is afraid of bugs,” Mob chimed in helpfully. (Or not at all helpfully, if you were Reigen.)
Ritsu, for once, seemed to empathize with Reigen’s fear. “It’s a reasonable fear,” the younger brother nodded gravely. “Insects can carry all sorts of diseases.”
“You’re being sensible about something for once,” Reigen agreed.
Mob frowned, looking downcast. “I like bugs.”
“That’s okay,” Ritsu said quickly. “You can like bugs, nii-san. It’s just that…”
“Yes, it’s perfectly fine, Mob. But, uh… some people are going to dislike things you do like, and that’s okay. People disagree. That’s a natural part of life.” Reigen patted the boy’s shoulder. “Now, since you’re, ah, not worried about bugs… would you mind getting the futon out of there?”
⸻
It had been a long time, the faux-spiritualist thought, since there had been anyone in his apartment but for himself. He had forgotten what the noises of livelihood were like, and though the conman’s own childhood was so far behind him, seeing the two brothers getting ready for bed had called up memories of his youth.
He had no siblings, and no friends to speak of to have sleepovers with back then. But he had always wondered what they looked like, turning to TV and movies to get a general gist of the idea. Pillow fights seemed to be the staple. Reigen had never been in a pillow fight, but he had thought about it extensively, planning in advance the kinds of tactics he might deploy in order to come out victorious. Perhaps he could employ pillow diplomacy, to give himself more of a fighting chance. He had almost gotten to try out his tactics during the Spirits & Such company trip, but due to the horrendous events that had taken place, no such thing ever happened.
At least that experience had been a job well done. Things had felt resolved easily back then, before. There had been plenty of problems along the way, of course, with some of them being worse than others, but those situations had eventually been solved, and there was little room for uncertainty thereafter.
...it didn’t feel that way now.
Reigen glanced over at the two young boys. They had fallen asleep by then, with Mob having curled up comfortably on the bed and Ritsu set up on the futon beside it. That had left him just the couch, but he didn’t really mind. They looked worn out, after all, and growing kids needed rest.
Grown men also needed rest, he supposed, and returned to the couch to get his own.
⸻⸻⸻
Sleep, however, did not come. Reigen lay restlessly, wishing that he hadn’t finished the last of his chamomile tea during the three-week period that Mob had been comatose and those who cared for him had endured three entire weeks of uncertainty about whether or not the kid would ever wake up. He had been hit by a car , after all, and then had gone around walking through (read: destroying) the city with what was definitely a severe head injury.
But... now Mob was here, and he was fine, or at least he appeared to be, even though Reigen hadn’t heard a word from him since getting the news that his kid had woken up.
Ever-prone to overthinking, it had only taken a couple of days for Reigen to begin fearing that Mob had decided to cut him entirely out of his life after learning the truth about his fraudulent nature.
But now he was here.
What did that mean?
Reigen jolted a little, pulled back from the precipice of being half-asleep and the slow winding of his own thoughts by the sound of the door to his apartment opening.
The motion was slow and careful, but delicacy did nothing to stop the hinges of the low-quality door from screeching out like a kicked feline. and Reigen could make out the shifting dark outline of Mob’s upraised hair illuminated by the lights outside - most of which seemed to be flickering madly, as if an invisible entity was feverishly flicking them on and off and on again - as he slid out through the door and out into the night.
Reigen sat up, scratching his head and frowning. Ritsu seemed to still be asleep, curled up comfortably on the futon spread out over the floor- he had insisted that his older brother take the bed (without asking Reigen himself, of course, who had been resigned to the couch).
“Mob? Hey, hold up- Mob?” He managed to get up pretty quickly, despite the fact that he hadn’t been able to catch any sleep, and shoved his feet into the sandals by his door to follow his student outside.
He found him sitting at the top of the metal stairs that came off the building- upset, it seemed, if the shifting of the boy’s dark hair was anything to go by.
Reigen sat himself down a stair down from Mob, to put them on equal level but also give the kid room to breathe. He didn’t say anything; best to let Mob start the conversation on his own time. Such was how this kind of thing went with them.
“Sorry,” was what Mob finally said, his voice soft and sleepy. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“You didn’t wake me up,” Reigen shrugged a shoulder and let it fall in a casual gesture, hoping it communicated the fact that he was telling the truth. (He could not, after all, help but wonder if Mob would ever trust him again. He had lied for so long.) “I couldn’t sleep.”
Mob nodded. “I couldn’t sleep either. I’m tired, but...”
“Your mind just won’t shut off, right?”
“...yeah,” the young esper blinked. “How did you know?”
Once upon a time, Reigen Arataka might have tried to pass off his natural ability to read others as some sort of spiritual technique, or woven a lie along the lines of ‘well, you see, I employed a spirit to look into your mind’... but those days were over now. Instead, he simply decided to tell the truth.
“I’m the same way,” he admitted. “At least, sometimes. Usually I just browse the internet until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore, or drink some tea. To distract myself, you know? From thinking.”
Mob nodded his silent agreement.
They sat there quietly for a while; the night was pleasantly cool, so Reigen wasn’t worried about his student possibly catching a cold, but... he was worried. Whenever he glanced over at the kid, Reigen could see that Mob’s hair was still drifting in a wind that wasn’t present- clearly, he was upset about something. But... was it okay for him to ask? Was Mob mad at him, maybe? What if Mob hated him now?
Then I’d deserve it, Reigen thought. I lied to him for so long... he has to hate me now. I tried to be a person that he could rely on, but maybe I’ve screwed all of that up now. I’m a horrible excuse for a mentor. I... I should apologize to him.
Before the words could leave his mouth, though, Reigen found his attention suddenly drawn away, towards the streetlight posted on the corner of where his street adjoined with another. Ordinarily, it steadily illuminated the area beneath it in a gentle yellow light, but now it seemed almost as if the thing was burning. The light it produced was a bright, startling white, and lit up nearly the entire street around it.
Such seemed to be the case with the other lights in the area, too. The small security light that was mounted near the roof of the building he rented his apartment in (Reigen had thought that light to be long broken, but it was shining now), the headlights of a parked motorcycle, and a bus stop advertisement were all glowing radiantly as well.
The corner light streetlight flickered briefly, and seemed to sway lazily back and forth- for a moment, Reigen feared that it was going to tip over completely, but the invisible wind abated as Mob took a deep breath and squeezed his hand into a fist.
Was he doing that... unconsciously? That was new, and slightly concerning, but Reigen decided not to mention it right then; he could bring it up later, when Mob seemed a little less stressed.
“So...” he started, dragging out the word into a low hum: “...what were you thinking about so much that you couldn’t sleep?”
Mob leaned forward a little to hug his knees and rest his head on top of them, turned away to look through the metal bars of the railing and, more significantly, avoid eye contact. For a moment, Reigen feared that Mob had decided to ignore him altogether- but the response came eventually, although it was barely above a whisper.
“...m’sorry.”
Reigen frowned. “There’s nothing to be sorry about, you know. I already said that you didn’t wake me up, so-”
“That’s not it,” Mob cut in, shaking his head. He seemed... small, or like he was trying to make himself small, all curled in and rigid.
Reigen waited for him to continue, but when it became clear that no follow-up was on its way, he went ahead and asked: “What are you sorry for?”
The middle schooler tensed, and drew himself in a little more, but didn’t respond.
God, he was a middle schooler, Reigen thought, feeling suddenly cold. It was easy to forget that simple fact sometimes. Mob was still just a kid, and yet he had been through so much- how was that possible? How was that fair? He deserved to be out with friends and getting into small-scale trouble, not dealing with... with all this.
“...do you want to know what I was thinking about?” Reigen offered, hoping that him electing to share first could make the kid feel a little more comfortable. When Mob gave a slight nod, he went on: “...well, uh, first of all... I was worried about you.”
Mob lifted his head to look at him, obvious confusion written across his face. “You... were?”
“I mean... you got hit by a car, kiddo. That’s not usually a good thing.” Reigen smiled softly, but there was a sadness in it, and in his heart as well. “It was no wonder that you passed out right after you came back from confessing to that girl, but still... it was a little scary.”
“I’m sorry,” his student said quickly, but Reigen just waved a hand and shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it. None of that stuff was your fault, so there’s no point in thinking about it too much, okay?” He reached out and patted the young esper on the back. “But... yeah. I was worried. So I’m glad to see you’re doing alright- even if you did show up at my apartment with only a couple minutes notice.” Reigen added, smiling.
He had meant for that last bit to come off as comedic relief, but Mob had gone suddenly still. The kid was still looking at him, though, his eyes wide with shock and... tears, Reigen realized with a jolt. Tears. Mob was crying.
“Is- is something wrong?” Reigen’s mind flooded with concern; he wanted to reach out and hug the kid, but... was that okay? He still felt the fear that there was a possibility that Mob was upset with him, or that he wanted nothing to do with him now that he knew the truth about his lack of powers, even though the kid was right here in front of him and had yet to make even a single mention of it.
“...huh?” Mob blinked. The action made his tears finally spill over through his eyelashes and onto his cheeks, seemingly surprising Mob himself, who reached up a hand to his own face with a slightly surprised expression. “Oh. I...”
Apparently, realizing that he was crying only made the tears intensify; they transformed quickly from watering eyes into a small, audible sob that Mob immediately pressed his hands over his mouth to repress. The action failed, however, and the sound struck Reigen like a shot through the heart.
Seeing Mob trying to shut down his emotions hurt. It hurt because Reigen knew that he was hurting, trying to contain it, repress it, to shut himself completely away again. He knew what doing that led too, after all- and it wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t good for him.
The flickering streetlight gave one final great burst of light as the light popped in a great shower of yellow-white sparks, fluttering down to the sidewalk as burning snow. Reigen did his best to ignore the explosion, instead focusing his attention towards where it was needed most- on Mob.
“Breathe,” Reigen insisted in the best firm-but-gentle tone he could muster up. “You can talk to me. Tell me what’s going on, okay? Just... don’t shut it down. Nothing bad is gonna happen, I promise.”
Mob shook his head fervently, staring at the streetlight’s cascading rain of sparks with wide eyes. “No,” he gasped, “I- I can’t. It hurts. It hurts too much, I can’t-” the tears were overwhelming him now, coming in a steady stream instead of a trickle, his breathing bordering on the knife-edge of hysterics. There was fear in it, too, Reigen saw, and the sight was a pitiful thing. It was the same fear that had always clouded around Mob’s emotions- the fear that he could hurt someone with them.
The expression was so similar to the one before - right after he had confessed to Tsubomi and come back with a small, forced smile before finally breaking into tears - that for a brief moment, all Reigen could see was that moment.
Mob had returned from the small park still clutching the sunflower - it was all that remained of the bouquet - and smiling a small, sad smile.
“She turned me down,” was what he had said before finally, finally, breaking into tears.
It had been a long time since Reigen had seen the boy cry. Months, at least. Possibly even years. He had done all he could to console the young esper, cracking occasional jokes and trying to point out the good things that had come out of the situation, even though there were so very few. That fact was made painfully clear through the destruction all around them- the sight of the complete devastation was inescapable, with shattered buildings and roads closing in on them from all sides.
The wreckage made it hard to navigate, and at first he had attributed Mob’s slowed pace to the difficulty of the landscape - but the truth of it revealed itself soon enough, when Dimple’s concerned shout had cut through the air like a knife.
Reigen had barely been able to catch him in time.
He found himself reaching out to his kid now, drawing Mob into a tight hug to make sure that he wasn’t hurt, that he wouldn’t fall, that he wouldn’t disappear from him again, because if he let go, Reigen feared that Mob might somehow fade completely away from him.
That fear had always been in him, from the very beginning: the fear that Mob would lose his footing on the earth, and drift somewhere that Reigen wouldn’t be able to reach him.
I can’t let that happen.
So he clung to his kid, and felt Mob reach back and hold onto him, too.
“It’s okay,” Reigen reassured, running his hand back through the boy’s ever-shifting hair. “You’re okay.” He held him like that for a long moment, until the flickering lights finally dimmed away, and Mob’s hair began to settle.
“I was afraid that you’d- that you’d ever want to see me again.” The words came as shaking whispers, caught up in the wavering of a voice that was trying to hold back tears, but they shot through Reigen like bullets.
“...what?” What? Reigen’s mind lagged behind the words, struggling to puzzle them out- Mob had been... afraid that he was mad at him? “You... Mob, what do you mean by that? Why would I...” That was what Mob had been staying up thinking about? That he somehow... didn’t want him around anymore? “Mob, no. That’s not...”
Mob seemed to bury his head further into his own arms. “I know! I know it’s stupid, and it’s not true - Ritsu told me that it wasn’t true, and I believe him, but I can’t stop thinking about it - that even if you still want me around, I’m still dangerous .” His voice caught on the word and broke into a small, choked sob. “I keep causing trouble for people. And I keep messing things up by accident, and I don’t mean to, but-” he hesitated, tensing, “-so I thought that things could be better if maybe... if I stayed away. That way I wouldn’t hurt you again.”
Reigen found himself hugging the boy a little tighter. He understood what Mob was saying; it was a sentiment he himself had experienced many times, after all - the allure of self-isolation in the midst of crisis was a powerful one. It called out to the grieving like a siren’s song, promising relief in the place that lurked just beyond the edge of the cliff. Reigen had seen that place before. He knew the sound of the song.
And he knew that there was nothing beyond that cliff worth visiting.
Reigen pulled slowly away from the hug, but kept his hands on his student’s shoulders so that he could steady the boy to look him in the eyes. “Mob, listen to me. What you were thinking about... it doesn’t work. And you don’t cause trouble for me.”
“But-”
“You don’t,” Reigen said again, more firmly this time. He needed Mob to understand. “If anything, it’s the opposite. You...” You don’t even understand how much you’ve done for me. “You’re a good kid, Mob. And you’re growing. If you’ve made any mistakes, that’s just a part of life- you’re trying to learn from them, right?"
A small nod.
“That’s what matters,” Reigen insisted, and allowed the words to hang in the air for a moment. “Whatever you think you’ve done wrong... it doesn’t make you a bad person. The fact that you feel bad about it proves that. Bad people don’t worry about being bad, or about becoming better, or about learning from their mistakes, but you do.” He smiled softly, adding: “So you’re not a bad person. Trust me on this one-- I know what I’m talking about.”
The esper stared at him for a moment, taking the words in. “I...” His tears had come to a slow end by then, leaving his eyes slightly red and weary-looking. In fact, pretty much everything about him seemed tired, Reigen noted- he kept blinking slowly, and even though Reigen was still supporting him by the shoulders, his student seemed just about ready to fall over. “I believe you, but...” he seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment, staring off into the distance before continuing. “I’m not used to this. I promised that I’d listen to my emotions more, but- it hurts , and I don’t understand why. Is it... is it like this for everyone?”
“...I don’t know,” Reigen admitted. “Everyone has emotions, but... I think you feel things a little more than most people. That’s not a bad thing, though. It just means you have a lot of empathy. You have a big heart, Mob. You can’t help it.” He patted the boy’s head. “But that heart is exactly what helps you connect to people, you know?”
Mob nodded slowly. The words seemed to help him relax a bit, and Reigen watched as his hair finally settled completely back into place. With it, what little energy the esper had seemed to leave him as well.
“...let’s go back inside,” Reigen suggested quickly, moving to stand up. His back ached and complained, spine straining from sitting hunched over on the concrete steps for so long, but he ignored the pain as best he could. “Your mom would kill me if she knew I let you stay up this late,” he smiled, jerking a thumb backwards towards the door of his apartment.
Mob nodded slowly. “...you’re probably right about that,” he admitted, pushing up from the stairs and moving to follow. “I hope... Mom’s doing well...”
Reigen saw it before his student had even taken a single step towards the door- a slight, almost imperceptible sway, a fluttering of the eyelashes-
Mob fell, but when he fell, Reigen was there to catch him. Just as he always was. And just as he always would be, if he had any say in the matter.
It seemed to take a moment for the fact that he had collapsed to register with the young esper-- he lifted his head and blinked once before frowning, mumbling something not-quite discernible but much along the lines of: “...what?”
“You need to go to bed,” Reigen said gently. It took some effort, but he managed to get an arm under Mob’s knees to lift him. All that emotion... it must have taken a lot out of him. Poor kid. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, m’okay,” Mob mumbled, nodding against his chest. “I’m just... Flying back home really wore me out, I think. I went too high. There was… there was something up there, I think,” he added, frowning: “It was calling my name.”
He’s already half-asleep, Reigen thought, smiling softly. “Yeah? Well, I’m glad you didn’t leave orbit,” he chuckled, shifting Mob’s weight so that he could nudge the door open and bring the boy in without accidentally whacking his head on the doorframe.
“Me too,” Mob agreed sleepily. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here… with everyone. I’m scared, but… I want to stay. I don’t want to be alone again.”
Reigen froze, and stared down at the kid in his arms. Mob’s face was peaceful, even happy, but there were lines under his eyes that he didn’t like the sight of.
“You’re not alone,” he whispered, and found that he had to fight back tears to say it. “Mob, you’re not alone. You… you believe me, right?”
There was no response from the sleeping boy.
Reigen navigated carefully around Ritsu, who had taken to laying in a strange, contorted position that made the younger Kageyama brother look as if he had come right off the set of The Exorcist, and lowered Mob down onto the bed with all the gentle patience of a father.
He gathered the comforter from where it had been pushed aside and pulled it over the sleeping esper, hesitating for a moment as he worried about if the blanket might be too warm, or suffocating, or…
Now I’m the one who needs to calm down and go to bed, Reigen thought, running a hand through his hair and itching at his scalp. I’m getting all worried over how he’s tucked in like a parent or something.
He returned to the couch and laid down, tucking his forearm under his head for a little extra neck support- he always slept on his side facing the wall, but the back of the couch was a good enough substitute.
It wasn’t exactly rare for Reigen to fall asleep on the couch, but it was the first time that he had needed to do so because of occupancy issues.
…He couldn’t say he minded it, though.
Even so, it still took him a while longer to finally fall asleep. His mind kept returning to the things Mob had said; that he had been afraid of the possibility that Reigen might not have wanted to see him.
And yet… that was what Reigen had been scared of, too: he had been afraid that Mob didn’t want anything to do with his fraud of a master anymore.
They had both been afraid of the exact same thing. There was a dull irony in that, but it didn’t seem funny in the slightest. Reigen had been afraid that his student hated him for all of his lies, and Mob had worried that Reigen no longer cared for him.
And somehow, the knowledge that the other would ultimately always forgive them did little to lift the burden on their shoulders. That was the catch with human emotions: sometimes they were completely beyond logic.