Archive of Our Own ^beta

Shigeo Kageyama was a good kid.

Reigen could tell from the start, the way the little boy’s eyes lit up at his words — bullshit as they were — how he accepted his meager 300-yen pay, first fit for a 10-year-old’s piggy bank, then kept well into the next four years, how he carefully considered every client’s words, the compassion behind that blank expression that tugged at Reigen’s coattails and reminded him of what it was like to be innocently, earnestly kind.

Swear to God, Reigen would’ve given an arm and a leg just to beat up every snot-nosed brat who’d given his student grief over the years. Yeah, yeah, kids were kids, it wasn’t as if they understood the gravity of what they were doing for every fake love letter, every whisper, every crude imitation of the boy’s signature deadpan expression, to elbow and snicker at eachother over, but jeez…

…though it wasn’t as if Reigen could say he’d been squeaky-clean in that regard, either. It took longer than he would ever want to admit for him to even begin to understand Shigeo Kageyama — there was an incident when he was 11, something Reigen would soon find the words for in borrowed parenting books from the local library: a meltdown, in which he’d been arguing with a client over pay, perhaps getting more physical than he would’ve liked (in his defense, the prick didn’t even compensate the duo for their time staking out his house)… and from his chair in the corner of the room, Mob’s face tightened, his eyes bulged, and every window in the building shattered in an instant.

That was scary. It had been Reigen’s first true test of mentorship — tempting as it was to take his anger at the client and throw it at that little boy in the chair, to bitch about needing to replace the windows, to focus on the material, the money he’d spent all month scrounging for that had just been taken out of his pockets in one fell swoop… the little boy he’d called a student had his fists tightened into balls, knuckles pressing against his temples, lights flickering in time with his twitching eyelids.

So Reigen told his client to step outside, knelt at Mob’s feet, and just kind of… babbled at him — interrogated him, now that he thought on it. The boy didn’t respond, and Reigen didn’t process he was making it worse until the lights sputtered out. Convenient the kid had mood ring psychic powers, costly as they were, and here Reigen realized that simple, dumb, crucial first step: kids weren’t fucking houseplants, or fancy paperweights, or peculiar conversation-starting ornaments. What had been sitting in his office for the past year at this point was, in fact, a tiny human, and most humans, tiny or otherwise, didn’t appreciate screaming matches at work.

…or the feeling of secondhand smoke up their lungs, or the unfamiliar smell of alcohol on a trusted adult’s breath. Or their new bosses showing up at their schools to drag them to impromptu exorcisms in the middle of what should have been a math test.

Reigen wanted to smack himself upside the head upon remembering the way he’d practically just dragged the kid along on a leash, shoving the psychic sideshow in peoples’ faces for extra pay, not considering his feelings until an embarrassingly long time into their working partnership.

All of that to say — again, Shigeo Kageyama was a good kid. Better than Reigen deserved, really — thinking about it objectively, he was surprised the boy always showed up for him, through it all. No one would have shamed him for spitting on his Master’s shoes the second he gained an iota of a backbone, and he would have grown up telling stories in college about the asshole who’d paraded him around like a show pony all through middle school for 300 yen…

…but that never happened. For years, Mob had worked as his diligent right-hand… man… boy… esper… thing. And part of Reigen wanted to light a cigarette and smoke to it, laugh self-derisively, kick at his desk and wonder why his student was so stupid — but that was a gross oversimplification of things, and moreover, Mob wasn’t a braindead puppy lying in the road just waiting to be run over.

Blind, dumb innocence didn’t make someone good. Sure, you could coo all you wanted at a braindead puppy in the road, scoop it into your arms, hug it close and kiss at its stupidity, an assumption of goodness born from inaction, from pity — but Mob was one of the damn smartest people Reigen knew, stubborn in what little convictions he had, dreaming in colors and seeing the world in ways his Master could never truly fathom. If every kid was like him, Reigen remembered bragging to Serizawa once over a pint, the world would be rid of stupid people.

Did he understand what was going on behind his student’s eyes, though? Not one bit. Nuh-uh. Absolutely zilch. He thought he did, until he learned the kid wanted to join a “Body Improvement Club”, and just that alone set Reigen’s impressions about… ten feet back. Mob knelt in the dirt to play with bugs, he stuffed his face with restaurant appetizers and not a single thing off the menu, he protected his umbrella with a psychic barrier to keep it dry, he worked himself up into moral crises about exorcisms on the level of swatting flies, he recreationally drank milk for crying out loud!

But he brought something new to Reigen’s life. The friendless little freak at his side gave him the drive to start acting like a real damn adult, not an overgrown teenager chasing some pipe dream and dragging his feet through the mud in the process, hardly better than any of the psychic manchildren from Claw. The lost and earnest kid who thought Arataka Reigen truly, truly was the strongest psychic of the 21st century, wouldn’t understand why an equally lost adult would quit a stable, well-paying job all of a sudden, or why his reliable teacher with all of two decades of life experience ahead of him thought to laze through his work and come in hungover.

So he tried — for Mob. For the best kid he knew, who would give him as many chances as there were stars in the sky, because he was just that good, looking at his Master with that same hope in his eyes every time. Throw the ashtray in the trash, clear your browser history, learn to put on the best smile you can, and never let him see your dogshit apartment.

Were there people out there like Mob? For all Reigen’s travels, for all the people he’d met who’d funneled into Spirits and Such for something-or-other, all the handshakes and cordial e-mails… he didn’t think so — at least not until he’d met the other espers who’d flocked to Mob like birds. Hell, for the first week or so, he feared he was stashing some government secret in his office by even speaking to the kid, as if some men in black would kick down his door and tote him away.

But, in Reigen’s mind… he could step up. Pretend. It was better than thinking he couldn’t help just because he couldn’t understand — truth be told, he didn’t understand half his clients, but he pulled up his bootstraps to help them anyway — that shine that had entered Shigeo’s dull eyes, realizing he wasn’t alone, was one Reigen would never forget.

His eyes shut. They still hurt to do so — in fact, it hurt to do anything more than think, and Reigen had done more than enough thinking lately… maybe he’d fucked up with Mob somewhere. After all, his guesses on how to raise a developmentally challenged psychic power timebomb of a child were about as accurate as throwing blindfolded darts — but as any good con would say, just the chance for the jackpot was enough.

He’d done all he could for Mob — tried his best to, anyway. It was hard to tell himself that he’d done anything right, now, when a good half of his bones had been violently dislocated by whiplike tornados, a wayward rock in the wind had cracked his skull open, and the blisters and tears on his soles showed little signs of healing.

But — after everything, even now it wasn’t about him. The past four years had been about him, about how Mob’s powers fit in his hands, the money it raked in and the inspiring tale of a sleazy con artist with a heart of gold. The past four years had been about the chances Mob gave him, about measly 300 yen coins and lopsided attendance records, all for the purpose of making his Master happy.

The incident — some dumbfuck on the news was calling it the Great Seasoning City Disaster — had been Mob’s heartbreaking effort at doing something for himself. And Reigen, for all his attempts to steer this kid the right direction, had never taught his disciple something as simple as how to do that. Never once had he sat at Mob’s side with a simple, “I didn’t know you thought that way.”

And now he had broken damn near every breakable bone in his body over it, lying in a hospital bed far, far from Seasoning City. It was he, Serizawa, and Tsubomi who were the last to evacuate — he remembered grumbling that the picture they used on the news, for the people who were unaccounted for, caught him at a bad angle. He remembered calling out for his student, trying to wriggle out of the straps of his stretcher, surrounded by paramedics who didn’t know or care what a Mob was as they fitted their last survivor with an oxygen mask and radioed their superiors that Arataka Reigen had been found alive.

You have to find Mob, you have to find him, Shigeo Kageyama, he’s my student, this tall, black hair, you have to find him, get him back for me, he’s still in there, you have to…

Of course, the only thing they cared about Shigeo Kageyama for was lambasting him in the news. A dark-eyed, mentally unstable young esper who had leveled an entire city in a fit of unpredictable rage — something evil had been crawling behind the boy’s empty expression for years now, and how it sent shivers up the spines of reporters to see a face so soulless, sunken-in eyes like black holes, careless to the destruction he was causing.

Give me a fuckin’ break, Reigen had thought, wishing he could just fall back asleep through the thick, cotton-mouthed haze of painkillers at the sight of the hospital’s dinky old TV. Yes, he was truly far from Seasoning City now — here, Shigeo was a monster, and the way his mother cried into her hands and his brother snapped at the reporters only proved it.

It didn’t matter the stress he had been under, or the repression that had driven him to that point, or the meaning of the bouquet in his hands as anything other than identification… all that mattered were the results: The damage costs. The broken roads, the evacuation orders. The shocking headlines, paired with crumbled buildings and a dark, swirling, person-shaped mass in the middle. Exploded gas stations. Upturned cars and sheets of broken concrete scattered across the ground. The monster with strangled flowers balled into its fist, who fissured the earth beneath its foot, who could crush ribcages like dead leaves with its mind.

Mob loved milk. His favorite hoodie was green, with a cartoon print of a puppy with a bone in its mouth. He played off-tune tambourine at his middle school karaoke nights. When he was ten, he had once stuck one of Reigen’s cigarettes in his mouth and chomped down like it was pocky. He got carsick easily and once threw up in his brother’s jacket. He read manga under his desk in the office when he thought his Master wasn’t looking. He pointed out people on the street with funny hairstyles as if someone hadn’t stuck a bowl to his head and trimmed around it. He knelt to watch anthills. Monster, Reigen’s foot. Reigen’s bruised, broken-ass foot.

As anyone who’d shared one conversation with Mob his whole life could’ve attested, the boy wouldn’t swat a fly if there was a gun to his head. The fault never fell on kids, no matter what snot-nosed brats they could be. As much as he’d wanted to strangle that Teruki guy at first, what lied in the back of his head even more was the question of, holy shit, where are your parents, and what lessons aren’t they teaching you?

Mob’s parents… tried. Reigen couldn’t deny they were good people, who cared for their boys more than the waking world… but soft hands and Mommy’s kisses weren’t what Mob needed. Kind as they were — Reigen wouldn’t have blamed them for kicking him out of their house at the first greeting of hey, I’m your son’s psychic teacher boss now ‘cause he thinks I’m cool, don’t look me up, bye, but they didn’t, so that was something — they didn’t have the big conversations with him. They didn’t know a damn thing about psychic powers, and didn’t pretend to — because he was their son, psychic or otherwise, which was all well and fine on paper, but…

…it left all of the responsibility on his shoulders. All the big conversations, he had with himself. No one had told him to keep his emotions to himself ‘til they boiled into a screaming kettle, he just… chose that, and then did it. It was a mental maelstrom Reigen couldn’t even begin to try and navigate, so he settled for treating Mob like any other kid under his wing. Give some gold nuggets of advice about how to socialize every now and again. Help him with his long division, while pretending he wasn’t hiding a calculator under the desk.

Only now did he realize he could’ve done better — when the kid who hung onto every word he said walked through the center of a tornado, flinging the roofs off of houses and tossing rubble about like a toddler with a rattle, caving in roads, ripping eighteen-wheeler trucks in half with not even a waver of his eyelid. Shigeo had never been given the opportunity to play — his powers were a knife he couldn’t just swing about like nothing. A part of him had to envy the likes of Teruki Hanazawa, who lived their lives on easy mode whilst he struggled through the mud to even get the girl he liked to look his way. No matter what morals Reigen had instilled in him, there had to be a moment of pause. A sting of pure green jealousy.

Reigen couldn’t blame him for that. Nobody could — tender, terrifying adolescence. Anyone who said they’d never felt a terror enough to tear a city asunder had never been fourteen years old before. It was a damn miracle something like this hadn’t happened yet, over stolen Pokémob cards, or forgotten homework, or one failed math test or odd look in class too many.

Mob had blood on his soles and dust in his lungs, but he was no monster.

For all the damages, an entire city buckling beneath its own weight and falling like a jenga tower, winds that could tear someone’s skin right off their body, every single one of Arataka Reigen’s bones crumbled like clay as his student bounced him off the wreckage like a ping-pong ball… for all the missing people crushed beneath the rubble, shattered windows and live wires rendering any ground not damaged by the tremors too dangerous to walk upon, bruises and broken bones from falling power lines, leveled houses, trees ripped from the ground by their roots, only one person had been killed.

And that was Shigeo Kageyama himself.

Reigen’s ears began ringing at the thought, a pounding in his chest that made him feel like he would flatline any second. He couldn’t think about it, couldn’t acknowledge it, wrong, wrong, wrong, it made his ribs feel like they would shatter into splinters, like the gash in his head would reopen and his brains would come leaking out. The thick blanket weight of the painkillers pressing against his body, fogging his mind, numbing to the gashes and scrapes and pulverized organs, then to the horrible, horrible set of facts in front of him.

But they weren’t enough, for nothing could slip past Arataka Reigen, no fine print on a contract, no holes in arguments, no openings to show his business cards, and certainly no sight as horrible as the last thing he remembered before being found and dragged to safety: the harsh glow leaving Shigeo’s eyes, the shadows, the whipping of his hair, the parts of himself he’d kept locked away all these years finally fading into the slowing winds… and with them, his last breaths.

He’d fallen into his Master’s arms, and for a moment, Reigen exhaled with relief, feeling the hot blood smearing against his temple cool against the stilling air. Everything dropped — the chunks of stone, the leaves, the cars light as building blocks, even the winds of the tornado. Of course Mob passed out after such a long, stressful day — he’d take him to shelter with the rest of Seasoning City, and… it would be hard, but they would rebuild from there. Go out for ramen in an unfamiliar town, his treat. Get a lollipop at the hospital or whatever kids liked. Maybe even get back to work someday. See, Mob, that’s it, you get your rest now, your Master’s here…

…and then his shirt became wet with spittle, and he pulled away, hand in his student’s hair (windswept, but not flowing, that choppy bowlcut frizzed in a way that Reigen could almost laugh at), to see his eyes duller than they’d ever been, slack-jawed, staring sightlessly at a point far past the broken buildings.

A deep crack in his skull, mirroring his Master’s, began to ooze black, and the remains of the bouquet fluttered out from Mob’s fingers.

The world stilled.

The sun was home, bathing the city in its warm glow, and the disaster was over.

Arataka Reigen was an excellent liar — to everyone but himself. It was why he kept Mob around to begin with — he could never tell himself he was a good person, one worthy of praise, of being accepted for who he was (read: a lying sleazeball who brought all his troubles upon himself)... but Mob believed it, earnestly, with not a spark of disapproval or hesitation in his eyes. Whatever on-the-spot yarns Reigen spun about certain spirits being too weak to see, or leaving the small fry to him… there was no sarcasm, no faux-politeness, when Mob nodded along.

And now he was…

Mob was…

…

…they’d called him a monster. Your archetypal quiet kid gone bad, with shadows cast over his dead eyes as he lurked in the back of school hallways. A fuse waiting to go off, some seedier outlets had said, twisting stories from Mob’s parents about how he’d throw neighborhood dogs into the air with his powers to watch them squirm. From dogs, to his own brother.

Bullshit. Heartless, seedy, blood-boiling bullshit, that was, but Reigen knew business. He knew the media. He wasn’t in the state to give them a piece of his mind from his hospital room, but by God, he tried — he told stories about Mob’s youth, about how he and Ritsu had loved that playground, and here’s where you can donate to help repair it, but when the questions steered for the darker, the did he ever show any signs while under your care? How did he speak about that Tsubomi girl?, Reigen lifted his head, and through the spinning lights, the bursts of color, the pounding like a jackhammer against his skull, he made sure one statement was coherent enough for them.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mob was a good kid.”

He wouldn’t be surprised if Mob’s family hated him — they had every right to hate the man who’d taken their son from them for the last years of his life — but he didn’t say it for them. Ritsu could come into his hospital room, spit in his face, and unplug his life support with the ease of twisting a spoon, and he wouldn’t care. The Kageyamas were good people, certainly needed the support of someone who knew their son better than the people the news reached did, but when Reigen fought for his apprentice’s honor, it was for nobody but Mob himself.

“He left a million and three thousand people homeless, jobless, leveled their buildings, their community, and you think this can be forgiven because of some esper brat’s mood swings? We have footage from the drones, for as long as he wasn’t trying to take them down, anyway, Shigeo Kageyama was—”

“— a good kid.” Reigen said it every time, remembering what his student had done for him, once. “I don’t get what you mean.”

According to eyewitness reports, Mob had been struck by a car moments before the incident began — its driver watched in growing horror as the surrounding phones stopped working, then the radios, until the concrete beneath him became a twenty-foot-wide crater. The wild winds and tremors in the earth were attested to the weather, until what one local called a living shadow crawled out of the crater, raised a hand, and blew a chunk out of the nearest buildings.

The shadow wasn’t bleeding. If Reigen had to guess, it was something to do with Mob’s powers, slapping a piece of tape on a punctured dam. But all Mob’s life, he had accepted pain with the serenity of a saint, forgave and forgave and forgave, until the one day came where he was going to bare his soul and do something nice for himself and no one else, and he…

…

…a part of Reigen expected his student to poke his head through the door any second now. Surprise, Master, that pudgy-faced boy would say, with the smallest of smiles on his face, maybe with thick bandages ruffling his choppy hair, I’m sorry about your… bones, Master Reigen, he would mutter, or something equally awkward, and Reigen would be the best Master ever and use this opportunity to apologize for everything the past four years had wrought. Apologize for lying, for not paying him enough, for not considering his feelings, for keeping him from his friends, for giving bad advice, for dragging him to work on such short notices, for making him sit on the arm of the couch when they watched TV, for not letting him order as much chasu pork with his ramen as he wanted, for letting him walk that street alone…

But there was no one for him to apologize to. No deadpan little boy would round the corner and poke his head into the room to snatch a bit of dry-ass hospital rice from Reigen’s tray with that straight-laced mischief only he could’ve pulled off — no, now the boy who struggled with talking in class but could exorcise a tunnel full of evil spirits with a well-placed finger, was on a government autopsy table somewhere, where unusual formations on his brain stem, or whatever the fuck had made him… that, were being prodded at with scalpels and tweezers, before his body was released for a proper funeral.

Reigen didn’t know what he’d do with his life once he was let out of the hospital but make it to that goddamn funeral. He’d be wheeled in on a gurney up to the pulpit to speak if he had to be. There was nothing left of Mob but his memory, but defending it was a job far greater than that of a self-proclaimed psychic or a masseuse with a flashy webpage. Idly, Reigen wanted to write up some speech, but when it ached his whole body to raise a finger, and he could hardly tell the difference between day and night through the curtains, that… seemed out of the question.

Besides. It was like him to be off the cuff. He didn’t think it would look good to treat his student’s eulogy like another press conference, anyway. From his heart, he would tell them everything, take that honesty Mob had died for and spread it out as far as he could. Shigeo Kageyama was a good kid. He was a good kid and we failed him. The four years he was in my life were the greatest I could’ve asked for.

The tears had run dry. Reigen couldn’t lift an arm to wipe his face even if he wanted to, so perhaps that was a blessing. It itched at the back of his head that Mob wouldn’t have wanted to see him in such a condition, that in those big, half-lidded eyes, there’d be a worry brimming as he fidgeted with his knuckles and guiltily peered down at his Master’s scars — but he would lift his head and manage the vague upturn of his lips that Reigen accepted would be the closest thing he’d ever see to a smile from the boy, and he would nod, say he would get well soon.

Arataka Reigen wasn’t going to be a fraud anymore. No more exorcisms, no more pyramid schemes or fake cults or bad bar advice, none of it. (It wasn’t like Spirits and Such had a building left, anyway.) Hiding his true self was what led Mob to think he was alone, that he was evil, a lost cause, a monster… he’d thrown all the responsibility on the kid’s shoulders, and look where that got him now.

His hospital room was welcome to many visitors — most of them Serizawa, or his sister, or hospital staff, or press, or… people pretending to be press, knowing his luck. He’d taken to memorizing knocks, baffled by the sound of a new one, baffled even more by the person who stepped through.

The sight of the top of Teruki’s goddamn head gave him the first genuine laugh he’d had in what felt like decades, as the boy stuck a finger at him and snapped, I’ll unplug your stupid life support, old man! — but settled at the foot of his bed anyway.

His shape was worse than Reigen’s — at least Reigen kept a full head of hair — but, through all the bandages winding up his body, crutches he hobbled on for some steps and seemed to just decide screw it and move with his powers for others, he was up and walking if nothing else. Maybe it was an esper thing — super-healing. Or maybe Reigen just had shitty bones. Both were possibilities.

Anyway — he didn’t know the kid particularly well. They certainly wouldn’t be caught dead talking without Mob present, but, well… there was a first time for everything. He knew about his bratty upbringing, as much as he bowed in repentance until his stupid fucking skyscraper-sized wig oh my god no wonder this kid didn’t have parents nearly fell off his head, and soon he settled into Reigen’s mind under the nebulous title of “one of Mob’s friends who thinks I’m lame no matter how many References To Popular Media I may know” — and, if he had to be more specific, “the one with shitty fashion taste who would’ve bullied me in middle school”.

Certainly, he didn’t know Teruki well enough to cope with the boy bursting into tears in his room, mutterings cracking and thick with phlegm of I should have been better, I should have apologized for real, I should have done this and that, and… and Reigen couldn’t bend his elbow all the way, but he tried his damnedest to set a hand on Teruki’s shoulder as he sniffled.

“Hanazawa-kun.” He started, digging up a paternal part of his brain he’d worried would be gone forever. “You remember what I told him, when we fought those Claw guys?”

Bloodshot blue eyes darted around the room, searching. Teruki swallowed. Reigen had never seen him so humbled before — though the… hair situation, and the bandages, likely had to do with it. He shook his head.

“Leave it to the adults.” Reigen said. A different brand of weird little kid than Mob, Teruki didn’t look satisfied by those words, but numbly listened. Reigen moved to gesture about, swearing when the effort instead sent a lashing pain up his arm that scrunched his face into a wholly unpleasant expression — you okay? Yeah, yeah, fine, it happens, ow — “I mean… let’s face it. You could’ve done better. I could’ve done better.”

He couldn’t talk with his hands and this was going to drive him insane. He hoped splaying out a few fingers sufficed. “But you didn’t have to show up for him out there—”

“I wanted to, I couldn’t have just—”

“—let me finish.” Teruki stilled at Reigen’s grave expression, a bit of that 14 year old in him probably saying, oh shit, that’s Kageyama-kun’s Master, sorry. “Mob told me about you guys’ first fight, way back when. What do you think he wanted from you, back then?”

A heavy sigh vented through Teruki’s teeth as he cast his gaze to the floor. “For me to stop using my psychic powers to hurt people.”

“Mmhm.” Reigen smiled, or at least tried to, feeling like sticking a gold star on Teruki’s bald-ass head. “And that’s what you did. You got people to safety when the rescue teams couldn’t come. More people would’ve died if you hadn’t.” A finger flexed against Teruki’s shoulder, the closest approximation to a fond smack on the back. “You saved people only you could have saved. Mob would be proud.”

Something murky moved behind Teruki’s eyes. Yes, the boy had changed — Reigen didn’t even know him particularly well and could confirm it. He couldn’t picture this… bald little freak, sorry, this was a tense moment but he looked up at Teruki’s shiny-ass dome and felt like cracking up and he would absolutely go to hell for that… whipping around kitchen knives, or getting into gang fights, or nearly destroying half the school building. Which — to be completely honest, was pretty small-fry now.

“What matters is that we keep being people he’d be proud of.” Retracting his hand, Reigen would have to get used to the art of animated finger gesturing. “I specialize more in the evil kind, dunno if Mob ever showed you my card, but I’ve got a line to spirits. I can call him up and ask him if you ever fall outta line.”

Teruki laughed — it was a hollow sound, but a smile had been brought to that worn, scarred face regardless. “Kageyama-kun changed me. I… really hate the person I was when we first met.”

Trilling his lips, Reigen leaned back, aching against his flimsy pillow. “You and me both.” He sighed. “…But hey, leave the self-hatred to the ones with developed brains, yeah? Kids get influenced by the adults around them. You were just caught in the crossfire.” Remembering the sight of the protective orbs floating through the sky on news feeds, Reigen recalled Mob mentioning once that, as a small child, he could hardly lift a single pencil with his powers. “You did far more than anyone should’ve expected of you.”

Motioning to run a hand through where his hair had been, before awkwardly stilling, Teruki shook his head. “It was my place as an esper. I couldn’t just let people choke in the rubble.”

“Of course not. And that’s good of you.” Reigen shrugged — then winced at the pain stabbing up his back as he did. “But before you’re an esper, you’re a person. And the radios were saying people needed to get to safety.” Softening, he smirked, hoping he could put on that same smile that had always eased Shigeo’s nerves. “Unless you got a decade of rescue training behind my back or something, I’unno.”

“So are you glad I saved them or not?” Teruki drew his knees to his chest, dropping his chin to his arms, bandages coiling around them like snakes in storybooks. A pair of deep blue eyes, one of which was pressed half-shut by a bandage, and chunks of blond hair ragged along his scarred head, were the only things that kept him recognizable as Mob’s old shopping buddy. He looked as if he’d aged fifty years in a day.

(Reigen probably did, too.)

“You know what they always say about lifeboats?” It ached Reigen’s IV drip to throw an arm out, but he couldn’t help it. “Women and children first.” A torn fingernail jabbed in Teruki’s direction. “You’re a children.” As Teruki’s face scrunched into a pout, it suddenly became more recognizable. “And I don’t mean that to say you’re not talented, like you don’t have a brain in there running a mile a minute like mine, but…” A heavy sigh. “The people on the news forget Mob was a kid, too.” Reigen smiled bitterly. “I bet he had lots of exams to study for by spring.”

A strangled noise resembling a sob escaped Teruki’s throat. “God…” He sniffed.

“He wasn’t some monster. Some… big swirling shadow of evil.” What little footage news outlets could scrounge together had been grainy and corrupted — at its worst, Mob truly did look like a mass of dark storm clouds, descending over the remains of Seasoning City. A real evil spirit. “People don’t go in boxes like that. And it’s easier for them to treat him like that, ‘cause…” Reigen gestured down to himself, the bandages and scars and grafts making him feel like a damn patchwork blanket. “…we tend to not like thinking people we care about could do this to us. Or in the news’ case, that any old little boy that bends spoons to impress his friends could go haywire and level a city at any second. It takes the responsibility off the adults who could’ve stepped in, and the kid they treated like a decoration.”

Reigen’s voice was hoarse. He hadn’t spoken like this in a while — he felt like he should’ve been clapping a hand on the young boy’s shoulder with a cup of hot tea. “You follow?”

Teruki was still as a shadow at Reigen’s feet, but his jaw quivered, and he finally nodded. “It’s not…” He began, balling a fist, losing his voice as his eyes glazed over with tears. His composure took a moment to break, and when it did, his voice cracked into a high-pitched whine. “It’s not fair…”

Yup. That was about the size of it.

Wishing he had a cigarette, Reigen’s shoulders slumped as he exhaled, leaving a dull pain coursing up his body. He wanted to close his eyes… but he’d felt so fragile lately, like if he faltered, he would scatter away in the wind — and he couldn’t leave a kid in need like that.

He’d failed Mob. Utterly. The teaching bar didn’t get lower than “keeping your student alive”, and look what the self-proclaimed greatest psychic in the 21st century had failed to do. Mob should have felt safe with him — powers, emotions, and all. The inconvenient ones. The ugly ones. The ones that hurt everyone he’d loved. He should have been able to tug his Master’s sleeve and cry to him after a rough day of school. He should have been able to get on the receiving end of one of Reigen’s pep talks, before he was nudged off to go meet Tsubomi-chan with a spring in his step.

He should have been able to laugh, just once.

Trying to scrounge up more words of wisdom, Reigen found himself woefully empty-handed — because what could he say anymore? The past four years crowded to the front of his mind, over and over, like a radio at maximum frequency — the nervous little boy who clung to his backpack straps like vices, the simple teenager who concerned himself with nothing but his work, the ramen shop places that always offered him after-meal peppermints for being such a little gentleman, the fights, the bruises, his powers like fireworks, how he’d started exercising, growing a backbone, developing a fashion sense with Teruki (however terrible), going on road trips with Tome and her friends, studying for exams, fretting over career paths, living a life that was finally his own.

Mob had grown so much, with his Master proudly hovering over his shoulder all the while. Reigen remembered fantasizing about the ruckus he would’ve caused at Mob’s high school graduation one day… he’d give all the boy’s classmates his business cards and cheer as embarrassingly loud as possible. He’d thought about paying Dimple to possess the principal to make a real day of it. A loud, loving, chaotic ceremony — not the kind Mob would’ve wanted in a million years, but the kind he deserved.

He wouldn’t have lived under Reigen’s thumb forever, of course. He’d move onto grander things, and Reigen would shed a few manly tears at the sight. Maybe they’d get brunch every month or so — maybe still at that ramen place, for old time’s sake. Maybe he would have become Mob’s weird family friend, the odd uncle who taught his kids magic tricks. Or perhaps they would’ve drifted apart with age, until a fifty-year-old Reigen would meet his old apprentice in the aisles of a convenience store, and they’d catch up, you still talk to Serizawa these days? …What? The old folks’ home?! Mob!!

Through a sliver in the curtains, the smoky sky was a pale yellow — as if the world had stopped turning the moment Mob dropped into his Master’s arms.

He was already cold.

January, and Reigen hadn’t even passed his student a scarf to leave with. Knowing Mob, he’d throw it off at the smell of old cigarettes the second he was out of his Master’s sight and fold it neatly into his bookbag.

The sight out the window was nothing special — from what little he could make out, it was the landscape of a city Reigen didn’t know and didn’t care for. It wasn’t Seasoning City, and the boy by his side wasn’t Shigeo Kageyama.

Teruki cried into his bandages, and for once, Arataka Reigen was at a complete loss for words.