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Reigen has made a big mistake. Well, he’s made a lot of big mistakes in his lifetime, but he supposes this one isn’t any less worth noting.
Actually, scratch that. He’s made several big mistakes. This one unequivocally included.
The first mistake he’s made goes all the way back to the time he decided on quitting his old watercooler job and starting his own spirit consultation business. Sure, it’s his best worst mistake yet, with all the good things it has brought to his life—and he’s sure the company would’ve gotten him laid off down the line anyway—but if he hadn’t made the stupidly bold move of turning in his resignation letter way back when then he wouldn’t have been here on a chase-down with a godawful evil spirit trying to play an unbearable game of something between tag and hide and seek with them.
The second mistake he’s made is choosing to wake up that morning. If only he had stayed in bed, closed up shop for the day, or simply decided to no longer exist, then he wouldn’t have replied with an immediate affirmative to the client email he finds on his laptop sitting on the office desk that morning.
The third mistake, which is probably the biggest mistake yet, is actually accepting the case and heading straight into his ultimate demise.
Which, Reigen finds, is currently his complete lack of athletic stamina and endurance. He should really work out more.
It had at first seemed like your run-of-the-mill, standard evil spirit case. Go to the alleged haunted location, find the spirit, exorcise it, and then be off on their merry ways with thicker wallets and a sense of self-satisfaction. In and out, quick and easy.
That, as it turns out, is not the case this time. This time, apparently, is a case involving a particularly troublesome and audaciously impenitent spirit. And admittedly a very quick one.
Reigen has since lost track of how long he and Serizawa have been running around the abandoned building, up and down the staircases to catch it. It flits quickly between one room to another, and every time they get close enough it’s always faster to escape. Reigen isn’t even sure anymore what it looks like; one second it’s a long shadow across the wall, the next second it’s dark smoke curling in a corner, and the next it’s a jet black, worm-like, gooey substance of some sort twisting about. It doesn’t seem to have any sense of shape or volume, morphing its form into its own whims—which makes it all the more frustrating for them both, it seems.
He lets out a grumble of frustration between laboured breaths as the spirit flies up the stairs yet again, feet skidding to a halt. He turns to Serizawa, who almost looks absolutely defeated but nowhere near as horribly so as he is. At least in terms of sweat patches and dignity. He’s stopped running when he saw Reigen did, too.
“This is not working,” Reigen says, breathless. They’ve tried splitting up, predicting its next moves and attempting to back it up into a corner, but the spirit never stays in the same spot for more than three seconds and somehow always finds a way to flee from them. It’s a slippery, annoying little thing. Reigen has not run this much since Mob’s marathon, and even then he hardly made it halfway through before nearly passing out. There was also that time he chased Mob during his psychic outburst, but… he doesn’t count that one; it was by pure luck he managed to survive that.
Serizawa’s giving him that helpless, “what do we do now?” look he often dons when he’s confused about social cues or situations he does not know how to handle without guidance or assistance. Reigen resists the urge to don his own “I don’t even know what I’m doing” look. Instead he puts on his confident “it may not look like it but I absolutely know exactly what I’m doing” look which, to be frank, contrasts to the way that he does not, in fact, know exactly what he’s doing.
He’s got everything handled. He does. He just needs to figure out how to.
He pants, swallows the excess saliva in his mouth, and places his hands on his hips in what he hopes looks like the pose of a man who knows what he’s doing. He hopes to god the pit stains are not as visible as they feel. Curse him for choosing to wear a grey suit while being the sweatiest man alive.
He thinks for a moment and considers their options. There’s not much to consider.
One: they give up and inform the client of their failure. Not a chance. Partly because he can’t let an evil spirit roam about and potentially endanger any passerbys, but also because he wants to keep the Spirits and Such reputation intact.
…Also partly due to the fact that they haven’t gotten many cases lately, and Reigen’s tired of eating cup noodles and cheap convenience store onigiris for the past week or so, and the client promises to pay them handsomely if they manage to get this stupid little bastard of a spirit terminated for good.
Two: they call Mob. But Reigen will only resort to calling Mob when absolutely necessary— he’s promised himself that. The kind of cases that require bringing out the big guns—that being his trusty middle schooler/friend/student with powers that can blow your mind literally and figuratively—or especially dire ones where he’s left with no other choice, like that time with Rusty-sama and the mimic. This is not an absolutely necessary kind of situation, so he refrains himself.
And three…
“Can’t you—” he wipes sweat off his brow. It doesn’t do much when his hands also happen to be sweaty. “Can’t you just, I don’t know— call the spirit here? To us?”
…come up with a plan on the fly, because if Reigen Arataka is anything, it’s that he’s good at improv-ing his way through any situation. Even if said plan is a mere hypothetical.
Serizawa drops his look of helplessness, his features morphing into that of understanding. Like he’s just realised something, or came up with a viable solution. It gives Reigen some relief. See? They know what they’re doing. Everything’s handled. Being handled, but still. His point stands.
“I can probably use my aura to do that,” he says, equally breathless, “I can extend it throughout the building and beckon it to us. It might take a while but, it might— it might actually work, I think.”
“Yeah?” Reigen says, nodding decidedly. He takes a couple steps back to give Serizawa space to do his thing. “Alright, then. Go on, Serizawa. Do your—” he makes sluggish, vague gestures with his hand, mostly out of habit. “your thing.”
Serizawa nods back, curt and confident in a way that shouldn’t make his stomach flip because that isn’t what stomachs do. Stomachs cannot flip. They do not. Reigen knows this.
Serizawa seems to take a moment to compose himself, steadying his breaths. And then he raises a hand upwards, eyes closed in deep concentration as a small crease forms between his brows. Reigen gulps in air as he watches, shoving his hands in his pockets as he doesn’t know what to do with them.
He feels charged, static energy filling the air, making the thin hairs on his skin raise on end, the familiar, warm buzz of Serizawa’s aura filling the room completely, overflowing out into the rest of the building. He watches, entranced, as the curls stuck to Serizawa’s forehead begin to float upwards, a subtle iridescent glow about him.
It seems to go on for a while—Reigen doesn’t exactly mind. Not in the slightest. Serizawa always looks so confident when he’s using his powers like this; his large, steady hands channeling powerful energy, his broad shoulders in a sure line and his face a picture of determination, ready to protect and attack for whatever threat lays ahead…
Reigen swallows. This is not the time to be thinking about how big and strong his coworker is. God, did it just get hotter in here? Is he sweating a little more? Surely it’s from the run. It still counts as plausible deniability if it’s partly true. Right? Right.
And then he catches something swift and black slinking past the corner of his vision, slipping through doorways and windows and gaps between the walls, seemingly changing and moving with every blink of his eyes.
He turns to Serizawa, whose frown has deepened into a near scowl as he suddenly drops his hand, the familiar energy of his aura dispersing quickly as his eyes blink open. A warning is at the tip of his tongue.
“Reigen-san, I think—”
Reigen flits his eyes to behind his shoulder, stumbles back a step. “Uhh, Serizawa. Hold that thought because—”
“No, this is serious. I don’t know why I only feel this now, may-maybe it was doing it in small increments before? But—”
“Serizawa, it—”
“Reigen-san. I think the spirit’s absorbing my energy.”
“Well it happens to be behind you!”
Serizawa turns around just as a large hand emerges from the dark, spiralling mass, its form swooping unsteadily in the air as its weight accustoms to gravity, steadying before knocking Serizawa off his feet and sending him flying to the side to slam against the wall before he gets the chance to dodge it. He hears a crack, and hopes it’s just the bricks.
"Serizawa!" Reigen calls, uselessly, "Shit!"
He turns to the spirit, and finds himself staring at… nothing. It’s a void, completely black and featureless. Its edges blur out like it isn’t meant to be here. Like it doesn’t quite fit in this world. Once or twice Reigen catches what must be an eye, or a limb, or a head, but it never seems to be definite.
His eyes scan his surroundings to find a way to slip out and potentially call for help. He looks around frantically.
There. The doorway, rid of its door and hinges. He just needs to slip past the writhing mass of nothingness and dash down the stairs.
Half-baked plan in mind, Reigen doesn’t spare a second before he goes for it. He runs to the side, avoiding a whipping band that swipes over his head, but the spirit—or whatever it is—only seems to grow bigger and bigger, taking up more and more space until it blocks off his exit completely. He drives himself to a halt, wracking his mind for a next step, because Reigen always has a next step. Surely a bright, brilliant idea will appear in his mind right about now. Surely he’ll make it out safe and save the day. Surely there is a next step.
As he’s slowly backed into a corner, breathless and sweating and just about ready to pass out, Reigen realises that perhaps he does not know what he’s doing after all.
And that, thus far, is his biggest mistake yet.
The spirit seems to raise itself into an upwards spiral, and then broadening to stretch itself out in a shape he could only describe as a clawed prehensile, spread wide and ready to catch its prey, and—
A flash of bright green suddenly bathes his vision.
“Your cavalry has arrived!” Dimple announces aloud with his voice.
You’re late! Reigen points out in his head, but can’t deny that he’s glad to relinquish his body for Dimple’s use. Dimple seems to wince at his non-existent volume.
“Jeez, not even a thank you?”
I had it handled.
“Sure.” He swerves Reigen’s body to the side to avoid the hit, and he has to admit—he isn’t sure himself if he would be able to make that acrobatic twist-jump. He would be grateful if it weren’t for the fact that Dimple is, well… Dimple. “Let’s see—Seri-chan is knocked out over there, you were about to get your ass kicked—ha! This definitely looks like you had everything under control!”
Reigen makes a mental grumble, but doesn’t resist Dimple poking around inside him for control. He watches himself dodge another hit, legs flying underneath him, head ducking down and to the side.
“So what’s the plan?”
Reigen has to grasp at his last mental devices to formulate one, and spits out the first thing that comes to mind. Can you eat this thing?
“Are you crazy?!” He sounds incredulous. It sounds unusual coming from Reigen’s vocal cords. “This thing knocked Seri out—” He dodges another hit, “and you expect me to eat it? It might eat me for all I know! It’s already trying to!”
Dimple has a point. He looks at the spirit, and Reigen may not be a psychic, but even he can tell this one’s a powerful one. He can practically feel the threatening, malevolent energy emanating from it.
“Why didn’t you just call Mob?!”
No!
He feels his own brows cinch together of their own accord—well, he supposes, of Dimple’s.
“Why the hell not?”
He’s in cram school right now! I can’t just—
“This thing’s about to kill us!”
Well—
Something like a yelp escapes his lips as a long, writhing thing swings itself at them, swiping them off their feet. As he feels his back slam against the ground, it registers to him that all his senses are now all his own. He tries to feel his arms, flex his fingers, looks to the side and, sure enough, Dimple’s amorphous form floats a good distance away.
“It knocked me out!”
Reigen feels the panic rise up his throat. This spirit hit them with enough force to knock Dimple out of his possessed body.
Just then, a tendril wraps around his ankles and lifts him up into the air. He lets out a “Whoah!” as it holds him up unsteadily, feeling the blood rush to his head as he looks at the twisting form upside-down.
“Heeyyy, buddy—” He puts his hands up in front of him in a placating manner, “Why don’t we just—” He yelps as its grip only tightens, the tendril lengthening around his legs and up his thighs and spinning him about until it has itself wrapped all the way up—or in this case, down—his clavicle.
The skin at the lumpy center of it that he assumes is its head—was it even skin? Was it even flesh?—tears itself in the center, widening into a gaping hole where sharp teeth grow in circular rows and rows that end far down what he assumes is its now open mouth. The tentacle-limb-thing dangles him closer to the entrance, head mere inches from the slimy tongue that reaches up and out, and suddenly there are limbs and tentacles and arms looming over, and the creature’s mouth is wide open and ready to engulf him—
And then a familiar purple glow slices clean through in one, swift motion, and the spirit turns to smoke with one last, aggrieved screech and a blinding explosion of multicolour light.
Reigen drops to the ground with an “ack!”, wincing as he rubs the back of his head and refrains to do the same to his pelvis. He muffles a sound of pain between clenched teeth, blinking his eyes open as everything seems to tilt and move before focusing and becoming steady again.
The smoke dissipates, and Serizawa stands in the middle of it. Reigen notices the tell-tale, twin red patches on his cheeks. There’s blood trailing down his forehead.
“Dimple,” he says, struggling onto his feet. He sways, catches himself, and grunts under his breath. He trudges forward, hand coming up to grab his sore elbow. “Is Serizawa…?”
“He’s in here,” Dimple answers before he even finishes his question, “Conscious. Must’ve woken him up when I possessed him.”
Reigen nods. “Right. He’s concussed, is he?”
Dimple scoffs a little with a pointed look. “Yeah. He’s not the only one, apparently.”
Reigen rolls his eyes, but immediately screws them shut when that only serves to aggravate the sharp pain in his head.
Curse Dimple. He’s right.
“I’m fine,” Reigen waves him off. “The spirit’s gone, right? How’d you even do it?”
Dimple makes a face that does not seem like one Serizawa would ever pull. He shrugs. “Dunno. It must’ve been too occupied trying to eat you.”
“Why was it even…?”
Dimple shrugs Serizawa’s shoulders again, face uncharacteristically callous. “Who am I to judge? I’m pretty disappointed that it didn’t.”
Reigen huffs. Of course Dimple would say that after being the one to stop the spirit from doing exactly that.
He draws himself to his full height, patting down the dust off his suit and straightening the creases and his tie, ignoring the multiple aches and cuts and scrapes all over his body. He’ll deal with those later.
“I’ll just go back down to talk to the client and collect our pay. And then we’ll—” He winces again at the idea of more bills. Guess this means more cup noodles this week. “—we’ll go get Serizawa to the hospital.”
“And you?”
He resists the eye roll this time. “And me.”
Dimple scoffs again, and it’s rather unsettling to see Serizawa with his mannerisms like that. He seems to pause for a moment, as if having some mental conversation that Reigen isn’t a part of which does not make him pout, and then nods to himself.
Dimple slips out, and the red marks leave with him. Serizawa’s face turns into a grimace, lax shoulders immediately hiked up in typical Serizawa manner, and his eyes slam shut as he staggers forward.
“Whoa, there—” Reigen catches him gently by the shoulders. “You good there, big guy?”
Reigen watches his Adam's apple bob as Serizawa swallows. He lets out a low hum, managing a weak, “Yeah, just— slammed all at once, you know?”
Reigen hums back sympathetically. He gets that. The disconnection from your body when being possessed alleviates the pain significantly—the pain from his wounds must’ve hit him all at once when Dimple left his body, Reigen figures. He had been the same back during his confrontation with Mob, but Reigen knows how to hide those things well behind sure words, sheer determination and willpower, and maybe the still-coursing adrenaline in his veins.
“How’s the head?”
Serizawa makes a pained grunt. “It… could be better.”
Reigen huffs a small laugh. “Gotcha.”
“How about yours, Reigen-san? Are you alright? I— I don’t know what happened but—”
God, Serizawa’s the one injured and he’s still fretting over him. This guy.
“Oh don’t worry about it, Serizawa,” he waves a flippant hand, “You’re the one injured. And anyway, it…” He recalls the concussion he had after the chase with Mob. He shrugs. “It could be worse.”
Serizawa looks somewhere between unconvinced and eternally concerned. Reigen just shrugs again. Dimple mutters something about idiots and having to save their asses all the time. Reigen pretends he doesn’t hear. Serizawa sends Dimple an apologetic look.
All in all, Reigen counts this case as a success. He can regret all those mistakes some other time when he’s ready to confront them and mentally prepared for an existential crisis—for now, though, he’s just glad everything worked out fine.