Chapter Text
“… this is the job we’re supposed to do?”
The slip of paper held in Shigeo Kageyama’s hands was not one that stood out as anything significant. In fact, it appeared just the opposite: it had clearly been torn off of a piece of stationary that didn’t even belong to the Spirits & Such office - yet another one of Reigen’s economical efforts that bordered on thievery.
Still, the young esper who held it had been expecting much and more of the assignment promised upon the paper, but all that was written upon it other than the second half of a telephone number for whatever company his master had pilfered from was an address and a short description, obviously scrawled out in Reigen’s sketchy handwriting, though Serizawa’s own annotations had been added along the side.
He looked up to the annotator in question, who appeared to be sweating a little.
“Right. Yes,” Serizawa nodded. “This is it.”
Shigeo frowned at the paper as if it could read his expression and offer him something more, but it did not. And while the raven-haired esper didn’t possess any sort of ability that could allow him to see through time, it wasn’t exactly hard to imagine the process by which this paper had made its way to him. His master had probably carelessly reached for any sort of scrap paper within reach, and after making his notes, handed it off with a wave of the hand to Serizawa, who would have surely accepted it gladly, as if it were some precious artifact. But to him...
“This doesn’t seem very important.”
Sure, it was his first “official” assignment since returning to the city, but usually his duties at work consisted of him handling all the major parts of heavy-duty exorcisms. When measured against all of his previous experience, “herding rogue spirits” didn’t seem all that comparable. Was Reigen testing him or something?
“Ah, no…” Serizawa began, catching wind of the thoughts that had begun to swirl around in the younger esper’s mind. “This is just the kind of thing we’ve been doing these days. There haven’t been many requests for psychics coming in lately. Although the rate of reported supernatural phenomena seems to be high…”
That was certainly true, even outside of his own unconscious mishaps, Shigeo supposed. He had seen a lot more spirits in and around the city than usual.
Though spirits were present in all the same places that humans were, they were not often of much significance or strength. Their existences were like the invisible mites that lived on skin, or the microscopic bacterium lingering invisibly on almost every surface. The most dangerous of that particular caliber of spirit were only about as threatening as a mosquito.
However, it wasn’t the microscopic sort that seemed to be flooding into the city as of late. Whether newly formed as a result of the negative energy coalescing in the minds of citizens, or migratory wraiths, or for some other reason he had yet to comprehend, all sorts of spirits had been gathering. Shigeo had seen them on his walks, and Ritsu had often complained of their ominous nature.
“They keep watching me--” his little brother had said, twisting the blinds on the window closed. “--as if they’re waiting for something. Do you think they want anything? Like… pigeons? Some of them sort of look like pigeons,” Ritsu mused, peeking through a crack in the blinds that he had just closed. “Have you been feeding them, Shigeo?”
“No, I haven’t.” That had been a bad habit of his when he was younger; always offering energy to little spirits in an effort to be kind and helpful. “But I think they’re fine. They’re just curious,” Shigeo had responded, and returned to his quiet reading.
Now, though, he was left to wonder: what could a gathering of so many spirits mean? Sometimes, during the holidays and the New Year, human spirits would travel to gather around shrines and observe those that had been left behind, but that time of year had long since passed, and there was no significant holiday coming up to celebrate that he knew of.
He decided to voice his second question. “…is Master Reigen going to come with us?”
Serizawa shook his head. “Not today. He said that he’s, erm... busy. Working. It’s just us today.”
“…right. And we’re…driving?”
This certainly seemed to be the case, considering the fact that they were both standing in front of a small car, and that Serizawa was clutching the keys with sweaty palms.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Neither of them were any good at small talk. This always became readily apparent whenever the two powerful espers were left in a room without Reigen to drive the conversation forward, and even more obvious when a client was around. Luckily, there were no specific clients to deal with on this particular mission—by design, most likely—and so they both climbed into the car in silence.
Shigeo looked around the interior. It reminded him a bit of his parents’ car; clean, but obviously used with regularity: the fabric seats were frayed in some places, and the plastic dashboard had lightened to a soft gray in all the places where the sun often came to rest. An air freshener dangled from the rear-view mirror on a small length of string; closer inspection revealed that it was meant to smell like “summer linen”. But since the car smelled more like food, Shigeo supposed it was probably mislabeled.
He was about to bring up the discrepancy when his eyes fell upon a plastic bag in the backseat. Serizawa, noticing his gaze, spoke up.
“Ah. My mom made us lunch to bring with us,” the man explained, reaching into the back and pushing the plastic aside to reveal two plastic bento boxes, as well as a metal thermos. “This is her car. She’s letting me borrow it for the day...”
Shigeo nodded. That made more sense than his own supposition. It also explained why the car they were situated in lacked the distinctive rental-car-smell he recalled from the Telepathy Club’s trip to Mud Boat Mountain.
A third question occurred to him. “Serizawa-san, do you have a driver’s license?”
“I do. I only took the final test recently, though, so I’m still a bit nervous,” the elder esper admitted, releasing a slow breath. “But it’s alright. I don’t want to let anxiety stop me from progressing. Not anymore.”
A smile formed across Shigeo’s lips, and he nodded.
“Me too.”
⸻
Traffic made their progress slow, and Shigeo increasingly impatient. He was excited to return to his routine, to prove himself, to help his master— all of these things and more contributed to his growing restlessness, which expressed itself in the manner of his leg bouncing rapidly in place. He made up for it with small questions about the goings-on of Spirits and Such during the time when he was in his coma, which helped keep his mind off of the time they were losing stuck in the car. However, all of the answers Serizawa offered him were boring, so it wasn’t long before he changed to a different topic.
“Was it hard to get your license?”
At this, Serizawa nodded. At the beginning of the drive, his hands had been locked to the steering wheel in a vice-like grip, his hands going pale with the effort, but after a while the esper had settled into a more comfortable (albeit still vigilant) position. He was a careful driver, and courteous to others on the road— very different from Reigen.
“If you mean in terms of the paperwork, then, well, yes... but the tests themselves weren’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. As I recall, Reigen had said something along those lines beforehand... that people tend to worry about something more before it happens than during, or after. He was right, I suppose.” Serizawa smiled. “As usual. Now that I have my license, and a place of employment, I’m looking to move out into my own place. I’ve been living with my mom since forever... I figured it’s about time I got out of her hair.”
Shigeo blinked. “That’s nice.” He looked again at the paper they had been given for the job. His fidgeting hands had worn it into a soft and fragile state, but the writing was still clear enough to read. Serizawa’s notes added information about the area that had probably been searched up on the internet; reports of paranormal activity, angry comments on message boards...
“When do you think we’ll get there?”
He had asked this particular question several times already, but Serizawa obliged him.
“GPS says seven minutes.”
“And then we just walk around?”
“Pretty much.”
Shigeo slid backwards in the seat and sighed. This was much less exciting than he had hoped it might be. Not that he had hoped for anything excessively serious — the calmer, the better, but he couldn’t help but feel that Master Reigen was just sending them away for the sake of it. And if that was the case, Shigeo would have preferred they just stay home.
“We’re not doing this for no reason,” Serizawa spoke up, glancing over at the esper in the passenger’s seat. To be honest, he was a little surprised by Shigeo’s display of expression; he knew vaguely of the events that had taken place after his departure during the day of the confession, having been filled in secondhand by Reigen, but still... the boy was so different.
And yet he was completely the same.
Shigeo turned his eyes towards him questioningly, and Serizawa realized that he had gone silent within his contemplation. “Oh,” the older esper started, and shook his head to clear it of his thoughts. “What I mean is that, lately, people have been blaming supernatural activity caused by evil spirits on espers. Master Reigen thinks that if it gets cleaned up, people will start wanting to hire us for actual jobs again.”
“...this isn’t an actual job?”
An uncomfortable static seemed to fill the car alongside the question, and the older esper hesitated. “Well... I mean, in terms of getting paid, not- not really, but, ah..."
Serizawa tried not to meet the boy’s gaze. He kept his hands on the wheel, and tried equally hard not to think too much about the irregularly flickering taillights on the car in front of him, or what kind of things could happen if a car stopped short in the middle of the road in traffic.
“...it’s a real job in that what we’re doing matters,” he managed to say through a throat filled with uncertainty. “We’re helping ease people’s minds about... about everything that’s going on.”
The oppressive feeling lifted; Shigeo nodded. “I’m glad,” he smiled, looking relieved, and as traffic smoothed away and the car drew near the neighborhood they were headed towards, Serizawa couldn’t help but feel the same.
⸻⸻
“So... you’re saying that an esper came into your shop and, erm... made all of your refrigerators stop working?”
“Yes! Exactly,” the store owner nodded enthusiastically, her arms crossed over the front of a blue apron. “The generator I use here keeps flicking on and off all the time. Now it’s finally gone kaput! So I asked my son to check it out, and he said that he didn’t need to, since he had seen all kinds of reports of that thing happening on the Internet. He printed it out and everything, see?”
They had come into the store after following a lead from a pedestrian, who had gotten their information from a poster stuck on a streetlight, and after calling that number they had reached a group dedicated to ‘raising paranormal awareness’, and so on, the two espers always following information that all seemed to be equally dubious in nature. But at least this seemed to be something. Spirits haunting electrical appliances was actually relatively common behavior, especially for minor poltergeists.
Serizawa took the paper and glanced over it. “Ma’am, this is from a website specifically dedicated to appliance maintenance. It’s not going to accurately represent your problem. You should call a certified technician and-”
The shopkeeper scowled. “You think I have the money for that? Pah! You’re the ones who came in here and asked me if I had seen anything weird. Well, I’ll tell you what’s weird! People walking around with magic powers and gunking up my business!”
The two espers shared an uncomfortable glance.
It was the elder of the two who finally spoke, offering the woman a customer-service smile to appease her irritation. “We’ll check it out, ma'am.”
With this, the woman nodded, apparently satisfied. “Good. At least you investigators are worth something! Last guy who came in, he said I was runnin’ too many fridges! Overloaded the breaker! I’ll tell you what, some people just don’t know what they’re talking about...”
“...right.”
For what it was worth, they gave the store a passable onceover, checking for spirits and clues— but while there were spirits present, none of them presented the kind of power necessary to cause the kind of phenomenon the storekeeper was reporting. The matter was unresolved; at least, until they had left.
“The person he was talking about was right,” Shigeo piped up after they had walked a distance away from the place, casting a short glance back over his shoulder towards the small general store. “She’s running too many appliances. The electricity is there: the store is just using more than it can handle.”
The source of the problem had been obvious to him from the moment they had even entered the store— his second sight, which seemed most often willing to show him the invisible currents of power running through the city, had immediately picked up on the extension cord tucked away behind the many fridges dedicated to the store’s offerings of food and drink. Using the extension cord, they had all been plugged into one outlet. It was just too much to ask from the building.
But the woman hadn’t listened to his suggestion that the power load might have been too great, of course, and Shigeo had no way to insist without revealing something that he had no reasonable way to have known about. It was frustrating, and for a moment he had been so annoyed by the storekeeper’s willful ignorance that for a brief moment, all the fridges had come whirring to life under the spark of his anger.
They had left quickly after that, before the woman had time to put two and two together and realize that they had not actually fixed the problem for her. And now, with no more leads to go on, they simply walked aimlessly through the streets of the Cayenne Pepper District and shooing off any rogue spirits they came across.
The effort was mostly successful, with a few notable discrepancies— namely, the spirits that had elected to trail along behind them. These were the truly harmless kind, and so Shigeo was willing to let them be.
At least, up to a certain point. The threshold of his patience, however, was starting to wear thin by the time they had been walking for about forty minutes, and at least a few hundred minor spirits had joined up in stride. Several seemed to behave like small dogs; cute, of course, taking the form of small clouds that appeared to change shape on a whim according to whatever they were feeling, but they also all appeared to be demanding his attention, and would get into small fights with one another if any one of them seemed to hold his focus for more than a moment.
“You seem to be quite popular today,” Serizawa observed. He had to hold in his laughter from the ridiculous nature of the display since Shigeo appeared to be quite fed up with the spirits, but traces of amusement still carried through his voice and caused the boy to scowl.
“I don’t know what they want. None of them know how to communicate with me,” he sighed, and allowed one to leap into his arms. He held it up to eye level and scrutinized the creature, attempting to make communication through his power, but the cloud simply wiggled out of his grasp and settled atop his head.
This time, Serizawa found it impossible not to chuckle. “It’s not your fault. I think they’re attracted to your aura.”
Shigeo blinked. “My aura? Oh. I guess that makes sense,” he admitted, feeling slightly foolish for not thinking of that earlier. “But why me? You’re plenty powerful too, Serizawa. How come they aren’t bothering you so much?”
“I’m better at controlling my output,” the older esper explained, raising his hands and flexing them to demonstrate the point. Shigeo observed the flex of pixelated pink-purple. It washed over him like a pleasant, albeit static-y breeze, and then retreated. The few spirits who had been alerted to the power and began wandering around settled as it ebbed away, and once again trailed after the raven-haired esper. “You’ll get better at it over time.”
They walked for a while longer, passing stores with boarded windows and neon open signs, houses with drawn curtains and children playing in yards under the watchful supervision of their guardians, people who would walk by in groups of two or three but never alone; the city was alive again, but it was a tenuous and paradoxical sort of life, a string pulled taught that could break with a brush of the hand.
Shigeo observed none of these things; instead, he focused on the newly emerged flowers, the clouds, the spirits walking next to him, sparing no glances or worry towards the things he wished not to think too much about.
Life, however, seemed to be at odds with his desires, as it so often was, and it wasn’t long before Serizawa struck up a new line of conversation.
“So... how have you been? You’ve... been through a lot lately, right?”
Shigeo paused and glanced over towards the older esper; it wasn’t exactly unlike him to begin a conversation these days, since Serizawa had made great strides of progress when it came to the social standard, but something about the question felt abrupt, even clumsy.
“I’ve been good,” he answered anyway, and tilted his head in the direction of a building that had caught his eye.
“Ah, right... is that so?”
“Mhm.”
“You know... it would be alright if you weren’t,” Serizawa tried, reaching up and massaging the back of his neck in an attempt to soothe some of his awkwardness- like waves against stone. “It would be okay if you were struggling with... with everything that’s going on.”
This time, the older esper was only offered silence for a response, and the uncomfortable sensation of static from before returned.
Serizawa Katsuya had only ever been to the beach once in his life, but he recalled the rhythm of the water washing up on shore and then retreating. The way that the cliff faces, so solid and imposing, would all eventually be smoothed away by the tides of time. Whenever he felt particularly nervous, or afraid, he would think of the waves.
When facing Shigeo, however, the thought of the sea did little to calm him. What usually brought forth the image of shore and sunset would instead warp into the picture of something black and bottomless. And that image was reflected in the young esper’s eyes; so dark they seemed sometimes completely absent of light.
And yet, while his anxiety regarding that dark power was not unfounded, Serizawa knew that it, like all of his fears, were often unreasonable. It wasn’t right to judge anyone, let alone Shigeo, the boy who had saved him from his own self-destructive cycle, by the worst of their moments. When it came down to it, Shigeo was someone that Serizawa could confidently say that he knew was a kind and gentle person; after all, this fact had been demonstrated over and over again.
Even so, Serizawa found himself worrying. There was just no denying that there was something different about Shigeo— especially now. It was something that only an esper could understand, and something that Reigen remained completely oblivious to, despite Serizawa’s best attempts at explaining why any of his attempts at coaching Shigeo on psychic power would likely fail. Still, he had decided to take this job with the boy, because while his powers were certainly strange and sometimes even unsettling, Serizawa knew better than anyone just how much an open hand could mean to someone who appeared dangerous to those who refused to see them as anything else. He had, after all, been one of those people for a very, very long time.
Shigeo, however, only offered a small shrug in response to his words, his expression serene. “I’m doing fine. Hanazawa-kun and I talked a little bit the other day, and I decided not to worry about it so much.”
“Oh.” Serizawa glanced down. “That’s... good, then.”
Truthfully, he had been expecting Shigeo to be withdrawn and sullen, since that was what Reigen had expressed concern to him about, but it seemed just the opposite now. The boy seemed aflame with energy, and everywhere they went, he observed with bright eyes. He was almost skipping when they walked, and smiling to himself all the while. His aura, alight with positive emotion, painted a striking contrast against the dull background of the city still scarred by the actions of the very same boy who currently walked its streets in stride.
And while Serizawa supposed that it was a good thing that the boy appeared to be doing well, the picture of his elation seemed somewhat concerning. The older esper couldn’t help but notice the way certain electronics would flash or fizzle out whenever Shigeo grew more excited as a result of noting some funny-looking bird or mentioning the training he and his friend had gotten up to, or by talking about whatever he was looking forward to next: going to the aquarium with Ritsu, talking to his friend Tome Kurata on the phone over the weekend... it was good to be happy, but this...
He was about to speak up again when Shigeo’s head turned away from him and towards a building about a block further down.
“There,” the dark-haired esper pointed, his eyes suddenly alight with excitement. “There’s something over there. Come on!”
And then he was off, and Serizawa was left standing on the street corner of a silent, suspicious neighborhood inside of a silent, suspicious city, watching the young esper with dark hair and darker eyes bound off towards to wherever the wind was calling him with an open heart and open mind, and he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, it would be alright to let him be.