Chapter Text
“Staring again?”
The voice is loud, alarmingly close to his ear. It startles Mob and he jumps, hitting his head painfully against the wall behind him. He jostles the remains of his lunch with his knees, spilling milk on his black school trousers.
Humiliation, annoyance and a deep throbbing in his skull are all fighting for the front row in his mind, as he turns his head and meets the sharp, probing eyes of Mezato Ichi. She’s got her little pink camera strapped around her neck, a leather-bound notebook in hand, full journalism mode. Mob thinks he might be in trouble.
“It’s creepy to stare at a girl who already has a boyfriend,” she smirks, acute as a slash of a scalpel.
Mob feels a furious blush blooming on his cheeks. Absently, he reaches for the wet spot on his trousers. He hopes it won’t leave a stain. Mercifully, the crowded cafeteria around them bustles on, oblivious to his awkwardness.
“Besides,” Mezato continues, “it’s not like you have a chance against someone like him.”
The words are bait, deceptive in their simplicity. She’ll string him up with them, gut him like a gaping mackerel. Mob knows that, but he’s already captured, helpless to resist. His head turns without his permission, his eyes drawn to them. Hook, line, sinker.
Tsubomi’s dark hair is draped over her ear, heavy like a theater curtain, clipped with a little charm on the side of her head. Her smile is a delicate thing, curling on her lips – a secret, a mystery, light as a butterfly wing. Her deep blue eyes sparkle. They are pools at midnight, reflecting stars.
Reflecting him.
The transfer student next to her is the yang to her yin. His hair is short and bright as the sun, a few effortless spikes pointing outwards like rays. He stands tall and confident a long arm thrown around her shoulder, careless but still so gentlemanly, so put together. He is bold where she is soft and gentle, loud and brash where she is calm.
They don’t quite fit, but it still steals Mob’s breath away watching them like that. The full moon and the midnight sky. The lone lighthouse in the endless blue sea. They make it all seem so easy, the noise and clutter of the world just falling into place around them.
“They make quite the striking pair,” Mezato pipes up next to him and Mob almost jumps again. He’s already forgotten she was there. “Takane Tsubomi, the school idol, and Reigen Arataka, the new transfer student. Pretty late to be transferring schools partway through the second year of high school if you ask me. I bet he ruined the plans of quite a few of our classmates when he shacked up with Takane. You are not the only one left on the sidelines.”
Reigen is telling some kind of story, gesticulating wildly, and Tsubomi laughs, light as summer rain. Mob feels his heart stutter in his chest. One, two, three. Pale December sunlight reflects off Reigen’s hair, the buttons of their uniforms, Tsubomi’s little charm. The two of them glitter like distant stars.
Mezato lists off all of Reigen’s accomplishments, sounding like she’s reading from a dictionary, but Mob’s not listening. He knows most of it anyways. Reigen Arataka joined Salt High School four months ago, in September, appearing like a crack in their drab grey classroom, leaking gold. He seemed to instantly make friends with most of their classmates and even students from other years, his chatter filling the hallways during breaks. Their teachers couldn’t stop singing his praises, his homework always turned in on time, his answers always perfectly composed, even if they are not always correct. He’s not particularly athletic but plays team sports well, making him a popular choice during gym class.
Mob studied all of this like an ancient text, a dense textbook that he couldn’t comprehend. Reigen made it all look so offhand, so simple. He came in and had everything, like it was always his for the taking. It made Mob’s insides crawl with something – jealousy, admiration – it was impossible to figure out, a tangle. A month ago he went and started dating Tsubomi – another slice in Mob’s chest, he’s everything that Mob is not, everything that he can never have.
“Although, I hear that he’s not as perfect as it seems at first glance,” Mezato continues, and Mob turns to look at her again, feeling tired. There’s a bone-deep weariness in him, a cold that seems to seep under the sleeves of his uniform, ever present. Sunshine feels so far away, it can never reach him. “I hear from the student council that he never joined any clubs, nobody knows what he does with his time. I don’t know what he did to piss off your brother, but he swears Reigen is a liar. None of his friends know where he lives, in fact, he never spends time with them outside of school. Despite his friendly demeanour, he doesn’t seem to stick. My sources tell me…–“
“Your sources?” Mob interrupts. There’s a little smirk lighting up Mezato’s face, her eyes focused and business-like. One of her hands is clenched into a fist, like Reigen is yet another fish she’s trying to reel in. String him up and gut him. Mob is suddenly so done with this conversation. “Why are you here, Mezato?”
He makes no pretence of politeness. The back of his head is still throbbing where he hit the wall earlier. The sea waves of their classmates’ chatter wash over him, recede, echo around the walls of the cafeteria. Lunch break in full swing. He doesn’t want to be here, he thinks. He feels distant, like a star.
“I’m here to talk to you about your psychic powers, of course!” Mezato cries, too loud, waving around her ever-present notebook. She’s too used to him by now. His rudeness doesn’t faze her. “Come on! You promised you’d give me an interview!”
Mob made no such promise, of course. But he is bad at confrontation, has trouble stammering out a single no, and she knows it, uses it to her advantage.
Methodically, he packs his half-eaten lunch back in its box, stores away the bottle of milk, mostly empty. He’s stalling and Mezato tracks his movements, calculating. Her gaze makes Mob’s skin crawl, an itch spreading from the wet patch on his trousers all over his body. He hopes for the ring of the bell, the start of classes, even though the prospect of another hour of algebra is excruciating. No dice, there is at least another ten minutes left of the break, he knows. Plenty of time for her to pick through him, debone and slice him.
Still, his powers are not a freakshow for her to gawk at. He’ll have to find a different way to fend her off. Mob tucks the lunchbox away in his bag, looks around briefly, stills himself.
Then he darts out of the cafeteria as quickly as he can.
He breaks out into a run once he’s in the hallway, his footfalls heavy. Somebody calls him, hopefully not a teacher, but he keeps on running. Mob takes a few sharp turns, nearly falls down the stairs, then stumbles into an empty clubroom, using his powers to slide the door shut behind him.
He didn’t run that much, but he’s out of breath, heavy panting ricocheting off the walls of the small room. Mob leans his arms on an old wooden table in the center of it, sees somebody’s forgotten homework laid out, hand-writing neat and careful. He prays it’s not a girls-only club.
The door slides open again, revealing Mezato. Of course she followed him. She’s not winded at all, not a hair out of place on her head.
“Huh, you really can’t run very fast, can you?” she asks, laughing a little. She closes the door again and leans back against it, caging him in. “Now you’ll have to answer my questions!”
She declares it like a victory and Mob gets a sudden, unfamiliar urge to laugh.
“I knew you would follow me,” he says instead, evening out his breathing, concentrating. “I just didn’t want anybody else to see.”
Mezato’s mouth falls open, realization striking her. Too late. Mob focuses on the ugly crawling feeling inside him and lets it out, just a bit. It lifts the hair off his forehead, ruffles the pages of the notebook on the table, then gathers around Mezato, freezing every one of her muscles in place. Something wild dances in her eyes, she’d probably look horrified right about now if she could move her face at all.
“These are my powers,” Mob says, grave. The itch under his skin disappears, replaced by the same old weariness from before. He’s so exhausted of being terrifying. “You can’t understand them.”
He meant to say more, really scare her away, so that she stops following him around, but he is suddenly disgusted with himself. His meager lunch feels like lead in his stomach, the taste of bile sour in his mouth. He lets the ugly feeling dissipate in the air, releasing Mezato. Before she has a chance to rearrange her expression, to show him her fear, Mob pushes her aside and leaves the clubroom.
He’s only halfway down the hallway, stumbling blindly as he tries to keep himself from vomiting on his own shoes, when Mezato recovers, almost falls out of the room calling after him. Thankfully, mercifully, she doesn’t try to approach him, self-preservation instinct finally kicking into gear.
“You are a real jerk, Kageyama, you know that?” she yells, a tremor in her voice. “You’ll never impress that girl of yours acting this way!”
Mob blocks her out, turns the corner. A few more steps and it gets easier to breathe. One, two, three. In, then out. His chest is empty now, speared through by her words, gutted. All around him the students are milling about, returning to their classrooms, ready for the lessons to start. Nobody pays him any mind. Mob blends in effortlessly, swallowed by the crowd. It is as it should be.
His fingers run along the fabric of his trousers. It’s all dried up now, stiff and itchy against his leg. It’s better this way, Mob tells himself. Mezato won’t bother him anymore.
The voices of other students are distant, waves on a foreign shore. Mob shivers. He feels so very cold.
&&&
Later that night his mother scolds him, or tries to, at least. She doesn’t quite know what to do with him these days, not for a few years now actually.
“I heard that you were written up for running in the hallway, Shige,” she says, attempting to sound stern, but there is an undercurrent of worry in her voice that Mob is all too familiar with.
“I wasn’t,” he says, curt.
“Running or written up?” his father asks, a feeble attempt at levity. He sits close with his mother, emotional support. Neither of them were ever good at getting through to him.
“Written up,” Mob says, doesn’t even try to lie. He wants them to yell at him, to show their anger, frustration, anything. Anything is better than the silent weight of their stares, the knowledge that they are as lost when it comes to his feelings as he himself is. They used to be larger than life, long ago, in another universe. “Ritsu smoothed things over on my behalf.”
Ritsu must have also be the one who told their parents, but that’s okay, Mob thinks. He is just worried, helpless. He wants their parents to be larger than life too, sometimes.
His mother sighs and his father grumbles a little, role reversal, wrong-footed. Mob wonders what they would say if he told them the truth. What happened with Mezato during the break, what other awful, terrible things stew in his head sometimes. He quashes the thought. He doesn’t really want to know.
Mob goes back to his room, slides the window open, lets in the sharp bite of winter. The coldness in him has settled during the day, seeped deep into the marrow of his bones. Warmth and light can’t reach him, but neither can December wind. He barely registers its sting against his palms, his face.
Instead he stares as the first stars twinkle in the clear sky. They are pale and distant, hardly more than pinpricks in the dark, easily drowned out by the streetlights, the neon glow of the city. Mob thinks of other things that shine, so much brighter, warmer, closer. Still hopelessly out of his reach.