Work Text:
The paradigm shifts.
Every bug, every leaf, every pebble on the ground – Teru can pinpoint the moment when they suddenly all aligned, as if an invisible electromagnet had fired up and seized them all. He can feel all the hairs on his body stand to attention.
He knows, somewhere deep in the pit forming in his stomach, that he’s felt this way before. He unclenches his teeth and tastes blood in his mouth from where he’s caught his lip without realising.
The same dig in his stomach tugs at Teru like a homing device. With a gallows-humour smirk, he recalls how most animals orient themselves by the Earth’s magnetic field.
It’s just like that, really. Something is happening. It’s his duty to find out what.
The woodland is as silent as the first day of creation.
He sees Him.
All the mannerisms that make up a person, however big or small, however loved or despised; it is sincerely disturbing to see anyone stripped of them. Without them, your closest friend becomes a doll, a clone; a member of the stranger crowd.
Teru does his best to cover up the flinch that passes through him. He plasters on his most concerned and reassuring smile.
He exhales, and feels the woodland breathe with him.
The stranger tilts his head and his eyes blaze.
“Thank goodness I made it in time,” he lies through his teeth, bag thrown across his shoulder in the world’s best performance of nonchalance since theatre began. He winces. He finds himself unable to look his stranger in the eye.
The air between them smells like ozone, and Teru feels the static stronger here than he did across town. There’s no doubt in his mind. Something is wrong.
There is only silence.
Teru tries again. Direct approach? Provocation? He knows Mob. Mob doesn’t rise if challenged, not without good purpose.
He’s a little concerned, just how much he can fight through his instincts here. An echo in him recalls an almost-past of devotion, dedication, reverence…
The echo fades. He shakes his head and meets His gaze.
“So, you’re destroying everything you touch.”
Teru shakes his head and smiles nervously. He reaches out a hand and cocks his hip, shifting his weight from foot to foot discretely.
And oh, was that the wrong approach. His stranger reaches out a hand too, and for a second Teru’s heart skips a beat – so close, their fingertips could brush, their auras probe each other, and maybe not all is lost yet, maybe this is all a misunderstanding-
He comes to smashed against a tree trunk so hard he spits out sap.
It could be worse. He still has all his teeth, bar that one wisdom molar that has been bothering him from beyond the gumline. There’s blood on his face, yes, but it’s not the first time and won’t be the last. He’s got bigger problems. He’s got tears in his eyes from the impact still, but they’re nothing compared to the gaping hole expanding in his chest as his heart plummets into his stomach and he realises something very important.
Mob would never use his powers against someone else, not willingly. Not sanely.
A shiver wracks him. The stranger moves forward.
Teru recalls his past self. He thinks about all the afternoons he’s spent with Mob: walking him home, or at Spirits and Such, or just running into him in town. The feelings the thought of their first encounter stir up in him; a hot shame mixed with foreign, bitter pride at his best friend’s actions.
He bites his tongue. He stands up. He wipes the blood dripping from nostril into his mouth.
Taking a step feels the equivalent of being hit by a jumbo jet, but he wouldn’t know. It’s never happened to him before. And yet he takes a step.
It’s the same with the next, and the next.
His hand twitches by his side, and he grabs at his wrist to still it. Pain in his shoulder. Nerves. He swallows them; the decision to stay, to help, to overcome is greater than the fear tugging at his gut. Teru exhales slowly. Another step.
“Hey,” He swallows again. “You should head home. Stop all this.” He tilts his head, faking light-hearted as naturally as he can.
His stranger doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak, or blink, or breathe. Only his aura emanates from him like a living beast, tendrils feeling and probing and winding into every nook and cranny of his own psychic defences. They’re not quite breaking through yet, but Teru can feel the force behind them, the threat that’s left unspoken. A song of I can pull you apart and put you back together.
The forest around them begins to disintegrate. Teru tenses and solidifies his barrier, allowing himself to be carried by the tide.
Only from the air does he realise the scale of the destruction around them. A ravine passes through the city, the gravity of it bending the land around it, warping reality. Somewhere in the distance, earthquake sirens drone; the noise is so unwavering, Teru takes a second to realise that it’s been ringing in his ears all this time.
A second is all he has to look around him before his aura is shattered again, and he loses orientation in the air. The motion makes him seasick. He spits blood and squeezes his eyes shut, bracing for impact.
If there was ever an impact to kill him, this could have been it. It’s a miracle his barriers restored before the ground meets him.
Still, he ends up with a mouthful of dirt and grit. He drags himself up by his fingertips.
His friend, his stranger, stands across from him. He leans in almost-mockingly and Teru can’t take it anymore.
This isn’t the boy he met back when he saw domination as the only way to survive loneliness. This isn’t the boy who believes in the best in people to the point of naivety, who stops on the way home to look for frogs, who wouldn’t break his resolution until he was pushed to the point of-
Well, Teru supposes. He has actually seen this stranger before.
Maybe that makes him less of a stranger after all.
He leans in. He feels a hand around his throat. The ground gets further and further away. His breath quickens, he feels his powers beat against the aura flame of the stranger protectively, but it’s for naught, his vision swimming; his struggle weaker and weaker as the ground gets further and further and further away.
The last thing Teru recalls is the blaze of Mob’s eyes on him, and the metal tang of blood running in streams across his face.
He comes to lying on a playing field. It’s night, and the sky is clearer than he’s ever seen it.
He sits up and braces for the nausea that usually hits post-overexertion, but all that he can feel is the wet of the dew settling across his clothing. The grass underneath him is dry, and the earth is warm. The air smells like late summer. Teru shivers.
Across the field, he can see a bus stop. Maybe that’ll have a map, he muses. There’s a ringing in his ears he can’t shake; a memory pushes at him of gasping for air, a struggle, but it’s easy to let it slide over him right now. He shakes his head and smooths back his hair.
He’s surprised; it’s longer than he remembers it being. He turns his palms over and flexes, aura glowing like a firefly. That’s a comfort, at least. He lights his way across the field, grass sparkling with reflections.
The bus stop has no numbers or directions, only a lone streetlight humming its fluorescent song. He sits anyway.
It’s only then he thinks to check his pockets for his phone or keys or anything. Teru is a little concerned to be out of school uniform; again, his memory is pushing a different version of events on him in which he was always supposed to be wearing it. In that memory, it is daytime. It is stormy. The stars look different.
The thought of eyes burning bright like meteors flashes past him, and he shivers. His powers flicker.
He shoves a hand into his jean pocket and finds his phone, mobile charms clinking. The screen flashes that familiar blue, thankfully half charge.
He stares at his background.
It’s winter there. He’s somewhere where it snowed. He’s wearing his favourite ski jacket he’d found in a vintage store for dirt cheap, having haggled even more price off for the hideous (unique, beautiful) bleach stains on the sleeves. His hair is shorter there. Teru blinks at the screen again and inspects the people with him by the bathhouse. He knows Reigen, sure, and his (he could never figure this one out, employee or only friend or something more) Serizawa; his almost-adopted-younger-sibling-he-never-had Ritsu, and then Mob.
Mob. His hand shakes and he snaps the flip phone shut with a gentle clack. There was something he was trying to do, something he promised. Explicitly or implicitly, there’s a feeling in him like a string being pulled taught. He swallows and his heart swoops into his stomach.
Teru rifles through the rest of his pockets. He finds keys. A student card dated three years prior with his name but a different face. Pink and blue hairclips. A few coins. A receipt from his favourite café dated three years in the future.
Lights flicker ahead. He looks up from his treasure trove only to see the bus pass him.
Teru sighs before realising. There hasn’t been reason for him to take the bus in years.
Seeing the field from the air reminds him of a place he used to go as a little kid. It feels smaller than it did back then, unsurprisingly; something about growing out of your old self and not quite into your new form. Something about the grass being left uncut at the end of the playing season and lying in it and listening to the city around him.
The city. He looks around, those same bright stars above him, and shivers.
Only the roads are lit below, streetlights blinking on and off as the bus moves along the one road into town. He can see it wind lazily through residential neighbourhoods, stopping at odd times and moments.
Maybe he’ll find people there. Maybe the ringing in his ears will be easier to ignore.
He flips his phone open and looks at the picture again.
The bus is only getting further away.
There isn’t anything to do in this world but follow.
Teru sprawls across the top of the bus. Every house he passes is dark, windows empty. The engine vibrates just strongly enough to ground him; his body feels fine, but he can’t shake the feeling of having walked over his own grave.
They’re moving slowly enough that he doesn’t mind the wind. He peers a little closer at the street names, and they seem familiar from afar until the bus gets close enough to read them.
There. He sits a little taller. He didn’t imagine that. He knows one.
Teru swings his legs over the side and meets the asphalt. The bus driver doesn’t even slow.
His ears are still ringing. His mobile burns in his pocket. He doesn’t dare check call history.
It’s his street. It’s his house.
There’s a hole in the world where it used to be, anyway. Teru twists the keys in his hand, useless.
He turns the keychains over and inspects them closer. House number, sure, letting agency logo, frog torch, silly little pony plush that just about fits in his pocket. Teru tries the torch, but the batteries are dead.
How fitting. Just like everything else around him.
The thought doesn’t quite make it out of his head. The ringing stops.
The gap in reality where his house should be opens up.
Mob steps out.
He’s crying, or at least he was not too long ago, his face tear-streaked and flushed. Something squeezes in Teru’s chest. He has to go to him. He can’t leave him there.
He raises his hand and rattles his stupid keyrings. Mob looks up, and their eyes
(blazing white like twin meteors, aura swirling like a storm at sea)
meet.
“Hey,” Teru begins. “It’s okay. It’s just me.”
Mob nods, visibly reassured. “I don’t know if I can say the same.”
He wipes at his face and nose. He’s in his running gear, shivering in the cold.
Teru moves forward, an uneasy feeling growing the closer he is to the hole. He gently takes Mob’s arm and pulls him away from the portal.
He drapes his jacket over his friend’s shoulders.
“Thanks.” Mob swallows. He’s surrounded by a pale blue glow, a different colour to his usual aura. It feels lighter, somehow, less structured; in the light of the singular lampposts and ambient-yellow of Teru’s own aura, he looks both younger and older than he should be. More open.
“This place isn’t real, is it?” Teru bares his teeth in an approximation of a smile. Mob shakes his head.
“No, sorry.” He stares at his feet. “It’s the only place I could think to take you. Away from him.”
Teru nods. He can feel memories of his real-life pressing at the edges of his vision, swimming like words at the tip of his tongue. He squeezes his eyes shut. He remembers.
“He’s you though, right?”
Mob freezes. Sweat beads down his forehead, and before Teru can say anything more, it’s yet again mixing with tears.
“I tried to stop. I used my powers against other people, against you- “
Teru reaches for him as easy as breathing. He cradles him to his chest and smooths his back.
All he can do is sob.
“It’s not the first time we’ve met on the field, rival.” Teru tucks Mob’s head under his chin. “I’m more worried for you than for myself.”
Mob wracks a laugh between pained breaths. “You’re the one lying in a pile of rubble out there. A pile of rubble he – I – put your head through.”
“And you?”
“I suppose, still moving onwards.” He sniffs and rests his forehead against Teru’s collarbone. “Unless someone else can stop him.”
“More people love you than you may know.” Teru savours the sentence as he says it, bittersweet on his tongue. “I trust you. By proxy, I trust him.”
“Even after all - that?”
He nods, cheek brushing against the top of his head. “Maybe it’s blind, and I’m just naïve, but I don’t think any part of you can be evil, or wrong. You taught me as much. Misunderstood, angry, lonely –“ Teru swallows, throat dry. He remembers those all too well. “ – Yes, but not evil.”
“Oh.” He reflects. He’s no longer crying.
“Oh.” Teru nods again. He tightens his arms around Mob. He looks over his shoulders at the hole in reality. “Do you have to go back there?”
Mob turns his head. He sniffs. “I think so. I think I need to wake up and tell him. Me.”
“Tell you what?”
“That change is inevitable, and stagnation is not healing.”
“Yeah. I suppose you’re right.”
Mob steps away from his friend and faces him. He takes his hands in his.
Teru feels a blush creep up his neck.
“I’m not sure how much you’ll remember from in here.” He’s apologetic, not meeting his eye. “I think you have a concussion out there.”
Teru scrutinises the film-reel of memory at the back of his mind. Sounds about right.
Mob continues. “Um. Thanks. Sorry. See you soon. Hopefully.”
He leans in before Teru can compute what is happening. Lips brush his, quick as a night breeze.
A second. What’s a second in an imaginary landscape?
An eon passes, the two of them frozen. Mob snaps first and makes for the portal.
It’s Teru’s aura that grabs him before he can cross, thin golden string tying them wrist to wrist.
“Hey!” Teru pulls him in before he realises he’s doing it. “Be careful out there, okay?”
A breath passes between them, held too long before release.
“Okay.” Mob nods. “Okay.”
“Next time. I’ll see you on the same side of the river.” He motions a little frantically, face red. “Whatever happens, it’s still you. It’s all you.”
The string between them dissolves. Teru smiles. “You’re the one and only.”