Chapter Text
Ritsu’s phone buzzes with a new message. The screen indicates that the sender is Suzuki.
“come over, i’m lonely”
“why should i”
“i’ll teach you some psychic tricks :p”
Psychic tricks… It’s true that Ritsu wants to strengthen his psychic power, but who cares about doing tricks? (Other than bending spoons.) Or is that like, tips and tricks, tools for success? While he’s hesitating, one more message rolls in.
“i got snacks too”
Ritsu lets out a tiny snicker and taps out a response.
“ok fine. when?”
“i’ll be there in ten minutes. and pack a bag, you’re sleeping over ;)”
“What”
“you heard me!! now, prepare yourself!!! see you soon!!!!”
He stares at the phone in his hand, brow furrowed in near-disbelief as he contemplates his next move. Before he can finish contemplating, he finds his fingers typing an answer and sending it of their own accord. He looks down to read his own message.
“see you soon”
That’s settled, then. Apparently.
Ritsu pulls the books out of his school bag and replaces them with a change of clothes, toothbrush, phone charger, wallet, as he silently wonders, Is this standard sleepover fare ? Not that this is definitely his first sleepover. Well, he’s been invited to quite a few sleepovers, mostly birthday parties with many guests. These he politely declined, as he is not a fan of crowds or parties in general. Although, there was one time he couldn’t decline… After that experience chopping wood with the Body Improvement Club, he feels even more disinclined to ever accept such an invitation. But has he ever been invited to just sleep over at a friend’s house? Not a sleepover , but just… sleeping over? One-on-one with a good friend? Come to think of it, he has been invited to a couple of those, but he turned them all down, because every time, the other person just didn’t pique his interest. Meaning, by extension, that Suzuki does pique his interest in some way… In more than one way, really…
These crowded thoughts jingle and stack in Ritsu’s head like marbles in a jar as he finishes packing his bag and heads downstairs.
After a brief chat with his mother earns him permission to spend the night at a friend’s house, he sits down in the entryway to put his shoes on. The instant he finishes tying the laces of his white sneakers, there is a knock at the door. Ritsu opens it less than a second after the knock, but the boy standing there isn’t even startled.
Standing with his back to the sun, his smile almost as blindingly bright, Suzuki Shou extends a hand to Kageyama Ritsu and delivers a line with the macho inflection of an action hero, albeit in the rather soprano voice of a 13-year-old.
“Let’s go!”
Ritsu looks at the proffered hand, unimpressed.
“You want to… hold hands?”
“Well, yeah, we gotta stick together!” Without further ado, Shou leans in and grabs Ritsu’s hand from his side, then bends his knees and prepares to blast off.
“WHOA whoa, whoa, what are you doing?!” Ritsu follows his outburst with a tiny cough of embarrassment at his loss of composure.
Shou straightens up and turns to Ritsu, looking exasperated. He does not release the increasingly sweaty hand still clasped in his. “We’re flying, obviously.”
“Obviously?!
“Yeah, obviously. How do you think I got here in ten minutes? I don’t exactly live nearby.”
“How should I know?! Either way, we can’t just fly across town in broad daylight, someone’ll call the cops on us.”
“Calm down, Ritsu. Relax. No one will see us.” Shou claps his free hand lightly on Ritsu’s shoulder and leans in closer. “We’ll be invisible,” he whispers, looking Ritsu in the eye with a devilish grin. “That’s what I did on the way here.”
“So you can spread your invisibility to another person...?” Ritsu can’t help but feel a little impressed, and it shows on his face.
Shou chuckles with a self-satisfied grin and would cross his arms if both weren’t busy at the moment.
“Probably.”
—
After a few sprawling leaps that concluded with Ritsu, perfectly visible, weighing down the perfectly invisible Shou by the arm and dragging them both back to earth, it becomes clear that neither party is able to keep up their side of the deal; as such, the two of them resort to public transportation. Neither is especially pleased with the day’s events so far, and they sulk in silence as the rattling of the train jostles their shoulders against one another.
Ritsu, who prefers alone time for sulking, recovers first and pulls out a rail map and schedule, spreading the pamphlets across his lap.
“All right, looks like we have to switch trains at the next stop. We need the Soy Sauce Line East at 1:05.”
Shou leans over in front of him to examine the map. “No, we’re going for the Miso Line, that’s in 2 stops,” he says, confidently jabbing a finger at the paper and tracing their current path. Ritsu turns to look him in the eye with what can only be called the utmost suspicion.
“You don’t exactly have a stellar history with maps,” Ritsu says, his quiet voice too blunt for his cutting words. “I’m not sure I can trust you on this, so leave the navigation to me.”
“Hey, don’t look down on me! You don’t even know where we’re going!” Shou abruptly starts to stand up and face him, practically yelling, but Ritsu pulls him back down by the shoulder and moves their faces closer for privacy, a bit closer than he meant to. Nearby passengers nervously inch away from them.
“I’ve been there before, of course I know where we’re going,” Ritsu hisses, “so just let me handle this!” He glances toward the unsettled people nearby before returning his gaze to the face in front of him, then he curls back in a tiny reflexive flinch. Shou’s face has transformed from offended to downright menacing in an instant. Ritsu swallows and lets go of his shoulder, leaning back slightly. I always forget Suzuki can make this kind of face, too , he finds himself thinking, and goosebumps break out over the skin of his arms as he briefly remembers the battle that ensued upon their first meeting. He can almost taste the blood that filled his mouth that time, almost feel the sting of fresh bruises forming, almost feel the crack of concrete against his skin. All this in an instant, and then Shou pulls him in even closer, sending a tingle up his back and alarm signals spreading through his limbs.
“Chill.” Shou speaks directly into Ritsu’s face, his gaze perfectly level, his voice perfectly composed, his face perfectly cold, as if carved from stone. An image of authority. “It’s not the same place as last time. You need me to lead the way.”
Ritsu, trying to stand his ground, swallows again and glances down at the map. “Then… you moved…?”
Shou leans back into his position next to Ritsu and folds his arms behind his head, the slightest grin forming on his lips. “Nah, that place we went to last time, that was just my hideout.”
“ Hideout?! ”
—
After a much longer train ride than Ritsu anticipated, they disembark at an unfamiliar stop near the outskirts of town and start walking. The street is a shady, tree-lined boulevard, and as Ritsu surveys the houses they pass, he notices they’re much larger than his own. In fact, as the boys continue walking, the houses seem to be getting larger and farther apart, separated by extravagant fences, ancient-looking stone walls, or neatly landscaped lines of trees. Ritsu feels a rising mix of confusion and curiosity as it fully dawns on him that this is the wealthiest neighborhood he has ever set foot in. Hands in his pockets, he surveys his surroundings so intently that he fails to notice when Shou, who was trailing slightly behind and enjoying the fall breeze in comfortable silence, stops and turns onto a short walkway leading from the sidewalk. Then he instantly reaches out and grabs Ritsu by the elbow of his jacket, pulling him over with almost toppling force.
“Here we go!” Shou pulls his keys out of his pocket and grapples with them as Ritsu regains his balance and looks up with a glare at the back of Shou’s head.
They’ve arrived at a rather grand front gate, appearing to be a mixture of traditional Japanese and Western architecture and consisting of rather ornate stone, embedded in a matching stone wall that seems much too wide to contain a single property. Shou flips up a rotating stone cover to reveal a keyhole, into which he unceremoniously jams a key. Then he abruptly barrels into the heavy gate door with his shoulder, startling Ritsu, who was trying to read the door’s inscription.
“Come ooon iiin! And close the door behind you!” Shou practically dances through the gate, and Ritsu follows hesitantly. He turns to look at the door as he passes, finally realizing that the inscription consists of a single pair of intricate, heavily stylized kanji, reading “SUZUKI.” He lets the gate swing shut behind him and turns around to follow the impatiently babbling Shou.
“Welcome to my house! You’re my first visitor in ages! Even though I’ve visited you so much, haha! Okay actually the house is still a ways up, so let’s get going!” Shou jogs ahead, up a jagged path of uneven stone slabs that climbs the side of a shallow hill. On either side of the path are overgrown shrubs and hedges, spreading from their plots out into the seas of gravel and boulders that Ritsu supposes were once a rock garden. Trees lean in from all sides as if trained to curve in like a cage above the whole yard. A late-season cicada whirrs loudly from a treetop, its call unanswered.
The building ahead is as grand as befits the gate, a sprawling manor with great swooping peaks of roof above the windows and white outer walls that would have seemed to shine into its shady surroundings had they not been dulled by the creep of vines and moss up their sides. Ritsu follows several meters behind as Shou, completely unaffected by the strangely imposing atmosphere, unlocks the front door and then stands in the doorway, hands on his hips.
“Come on, come in, don’t take your time!” Shou gives Ritsu another 2 seconds to catch up and, when the latter fails to do so in time, throws his hands up and steps inside, half-yelling over his shoulder, “Jeez you’re slow! I’ll go make tea.”
A moment later, Ritsu steps inside and gapes at the grand entryway, whose high ceilings are sparsely hung with spiderwebs but still echo his every footstep until he slips out of his shoes and deposits them in the shoe rack. The hall is dim, even dimmer as he closes the door behind him, and the only light is being emitted from a doorway to his left. Shou suddenly emerges from there and leans out, both hands on the doorframe. He locates Ritsu and smiles.
“So whaddya think of the place?”
Ritsu is so bewildered by the contrast between the bright, hyper, modern Suzuki and this dim, overgrown, expansive mansion that he can’t even summon his usual wit, so he answers in complete earnest: “I didn’t think you lived in a place like this.”
Shou’s grin widens.
“Pretty big, huh? Wanna take a tour while the water’s heating up?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, instead grabbing Ritsu by the wrist and pulling him along. “So that was the entryway, obviously,” he says without fanfare, “and here” — he steers them into a dark doorway— “is the living room.”
He lets go of Ritsu to dart into the darkness and grab at a dangling chain with pinpoint accuracy, yanking it to turn on the overhead light. The room is so large and plain that it feels very empty despite the presence of a low sectional sofa, a coffee table, and a TV that seems disproportionately tiny for its location. Ritsu completes his survey of the room by tilting his head back to look at the lamp above, which turns out to be a cheap paper lantern covering a light fixture that has three bulb sockets but only one bulb.
Shou reaches up and turns the light off without warning, grabbing Ritsu by the hand this time and pulling him back into the hallway.
“You don’t have to keep pulling me everywhere, Suzuki,” Ritsu mutters. “I’ll follow you.” Shou turns to look at Ritsu but answers only with a squeeze of his hand. Still, he slows down just a bit, pulling Ritsu not faster, but closer to him. Ritsu feels the warmth of Shou’s palm against his, and it seems to spread through his arms and up into his shoulders, finally settling as a feeling of distinct heat in his face and ears. A whiff of some pleasant smell— is that coming from Suzuki ?— only makes him feel warmer.
“Up next is the kitchen.” They enter the already-illuminated doorway from which Shou earlier emerged. Ritsu is slightly relieved to find the kitchen to be normal-sized rather than huge, though it’s certainly on the larger side of normal. The countertops are gleaming marble, but there’s a conspicuous gap which must have once contained an oven; it now contains what appears to be a bulk order of ramen, countless packets stacked into an incomplete cube. The once-white fridge is yellowed and emitting a continuous droning hum.
When Shou was here earlier, he started heating water for tea. Ritsu notices that the kettle is sitting on a cheap electric hotplate, and Shou follows his gaze.
“Yeah, it’s gonna be a while. Let’s keep going.”
They proceed farther down the hall.
“The bathroom’s through there if you need it.” Ritsu peeks through the half-open door. He can’t see any details of the bathroom as they pass by, but he feels certain that if he were to call out into the darkness, it would echo.
“And that’s… the rest.” Shou waves a dismissive hand at the rest of the hallway, which contains two more doors and a staircase to an upper story. He’s stopped in front of a door bearing a plaque that says “SHOU” in katakana. “More importantly, here’s my room!”
Shou opens the door with a flourish and flicks a light switch. Ritsu notes that this is the first room with tatami flooring he has seen in the house so far. It is, Ritsu decides, a shockingly normal room. A futon lies folded up under a window on the far wall. The walls are white and unadorned except for two enormous action movie posters (“Got em straight from the theater, hehe”), a cheap desk with an expensive laptop, a bookshelf filled with DVDs, manga, and lots of spiral notebooks, and an absurdly elaborate hamster cage that appears to be hand-built. A big hamster— That’s a big hamster , Ritsu thinks— is in a hamster wheel, running full-tilt in complete silence. Shou notices that Ritsu has noticed the cage, and he scoots right over to it with a sparkle in his eyes.
“Ah, this is Robo-chan! Let me introduce you—”
“Wait, Suzuki.”
Shou suddenly looks very offended. “You don’t want to meet her?!”
“The water’s boiling.” They pause to listen. The shrill whistle of the kettle is getting louder and louder even as it echoes through the empty hall.
—
“Suzuki, I have to ask. What’s with this house?”
Shou finishes filling a mug with tea and hands it to Ritsu. “What do you mean? It’s just my house. Lived here all my life.” He turns back to the counter and start pouring tea into a second mug, this one with a crack running down the side.
“Who else lives here?”
Shou dumps several teaspoons of sugar into his tea and stirs it noisily, then slides the sugar bowl across the counter, where Ritsu receives it. As the latter shovels a more modest amount of sugar into his own mug, Shou turns to him with a half-smile that fails to hide the creases in his brow.
“I got the place to myself. Nice, huh?” He coughs out what’s probably supposed to be a smug chuckle. Ritsu stirs his tea, glancing up with a skeptical look. Shou hops onto a stool next to Ritsu’s, both situated at the counter as if it were a table with absolutely no leg room, and starts blowing on his tea almost hard enough to slosh it out of the mug. Ritsu fixes his gaze on Shou’s face and tries to process what he just heard.
“So when you said you were lonely, you meant…”
You’re all alone .
Ritsu leaves that part unsaid, and when Shou stares into his tea instead of offering a response, he continues. “What about your lackeys?”
Shou is slow to respond, and if Ritsu could see him from the front, he might think he looks like he’s about to cry. When he speaks, his voice expresses a hint of the tension clouding his face.
“Well, money’s tight, after that whole thing …” Ritsu nods in confirmation, as if to say, Yes, the world domination thing. I remember . “To pay for the property damage, the government seized pretty much all of Pops’, uh, assets, except what they deemed necessary for me to,” he bends his fingers into air quotes, “‘live comfortably,’ and obviously there’s no more shady income from cults or whatever…”
He trails off and tries to take a sip of his still-scalding tea, suppressing his instinctive recoil and managing to avoid a spill. Ritsu is still looking at him, which, he realizes, is unusual. Sure, Ritsu returns eye contact when necessary and never hesitates to deliver a withering look, but Shou isn’t sure he’s ever seen Ritsu look at him with this intensity, this concern, this degree of scrutiny. Shou shyly averts his eyes, and Ritsu thinks to himself, That’s unusual .
“So, like, my subordinates all used to live right around here and visit me all the time. And that was great, you know, saving me from being stuck in this house with Pops. Not that Pops was here very often lately…” He paused. “Not that I was here very often either. I had shit to do.” Ritsu nods again and waits for him to continue, resisting the urge to remind him of the original question.
“Anyway, yeah, money’s tight for everyone who had anything to do with Claw, so Higashio moved further into the city to find work a couple months ago. And then Ootsuki and Fukuda left too, I think they got an apartment together in the city to save on rent, something like that. And train rides aren’t cheap, so they can’t really, you know, come around anymore.” Shou laughs weakly and pulls out his phone. “But they all insisted I keep them on speed dial, check it,” he says, holding it up to Ritsu’s face so he can see the Contacts screen.
Sure enough, little icons reading [2] [3] and [4] respectively adorn the three listings, denoting their speed dial number. Ritsu also notices that apart from three more listings (labeled “mom,” “seri,” and “Ritsu!”), Shou has no more contacts. Trying not to ruin the serious moment by smirking at the exclamation point next to his name, Ritsu breaks the silence.
“What about speed dial #1?”
“That’s voicemail.”
“Oh, right.”
Shou pockets the device and continues.
“Anyway I had to sell a lot of stuff, but as long as I live here, they can’t repossess the house. It’s some law about ancestral land or something. So here I am!” With no desire to keep sitting and talking, Shou tries to re-energize the atmosphere by chugging his still-pretty-much-too-hot tea, exhaling with a loud Ahh~ that ought to sound refreshed but comes out as almost a scream of pain from being scalded, and half-slamming his mug on the counter. “Now, let’s go have fun!”
"Hold the phone, Suzuki.”
(Shou reflexively almost reaches to take his phone back out of his pocket.)
“What now?”
“I was told…” Ritsu pauses for effect, staring gravely into the eyes of baffled Shou, then continues in a low voice. “...that there would be snacks.”
“...”
Shou leaps up and flings open every cabinet in the room. Every one of them is stuffed to overflowing with packets and boxes and bottles of every imaginable kind of chips, candy, pocky, crackers, wasabi peas, soda, is that booze?, pretzels, chocolate, popcorn, there is no hint of any dishes or silverware in any cabinet or drawer, and it dawns on Ritsu that Suzuki Shou should only go grocery shopping when accompanied by an adult.
But they pig out anyway.
[[TO BE CONTINUED?]]