Work Text:
He looks just like Teruki, except he wears a beatific smile and a mountain of fake blond hair. It's fantastic. Teruki decides to do that to his hair too, the moment his schedule allows for it. He doesn't have much free time, of course, between directing his subordinates and keeping a handle on them; but surely he could squeeze it in. It's important for a shadow gang leader to invest some time in the aesthetics of intimidation.
Besides, Teruki knows an opportunity will come up soon, because the figure floating in front of him is clearly a version of himself from the near future. His own psychic signature is all over the other boy, and it doesn't surprise him in the least. When you're as powerful as Hanazawa Teruki, time travel is less an impossibility than an eventuality.
Present Teru can't help but grin as well, as he walks over, closer to the sharp brick corner of the Black Vinegar Middle School building. His hands twitch with anticipation, ready to embrace whatever new power is coming his way.
"We did it, huh?" Teruki asks, not bothering to hide the giddiness edging into his voice. "Time travel?" The other Teru still hovers, half a meter in the air, hands in his pockets, smiling. Looking straight up at him, that pile of hair catches the late afternoon sun like a corona. Magnificent.
"Sure seems to be the case," he responds fondly.
"So you're here to tell me how to do it, right? Or give me some kind of power? Oh! Or maybe you're here to give me hints about the future? Any upcoming surprise?"
Future Teruki laughs and lowers himself to the ground. "It's the first time I've done the time travel thing. Might be a one-time deal, for all I know. But sure, I can give you advice, something I should have heard when I was you not that long ago. Chill out on the gang stuff."
Teruki scowls, and his future self keeps chuckling at him. "Oh man," he continues, "the look on your face is so sour! How did I ever act like that?" That serene smile, then, had not been about bestowing himself with power or reminiscing about his meteoric rise. Future Teru looked at him with pity. That smug bastard might not be hovering anymore, but he looked down on Teruki all the same.
"Excuse me?" present Teruki nearly spits. "We- I" he corrects, mentally severing himself from this traitor, "do not lower my standards." He grabs the lapels of his older self's blazer and gets up in his face. Future Teruki only looks amused.
"Lower them? Let them go. You'd be a lot happier if you did."
Shaking his older self roughly by the lapels now, Teruki snarls, "I should be asking you what happened to cause this defect in ambition between now and wherever you're from."
"I got a new perspective knocked into me. Haha! And second of all, it's whenever I'm from."
Teruki's pupils narrow and suddenly the air behind him crackles, the dust of the barren schoolyard picks up, leaves desiccate and fall off a nearby bush. It does predictably little to spook a future version of himself, but he doesn't bother to reign his emotions in.
"Who."
Future Teruki glances up and over his own left shoulder, cheeks still stretched in an almost involuntary smile as he says, "oh, I don't know if I should be giving that much away now, but when you meet him you'll see, he's great, he's another ESPer about our age and he's just got such a wholesome perspective on life, you know?"
The way he chatters is sickening, so Teruki hits him. His fist bounces back.
"See, that's just the sort of thing I was talking about," future Teru continues. "No more using psychic powers to fight people. Stop tying your self-worth to hurting others. Then you can become happy, like m-"
Present Teruki hurls him into a tree and practically teleports over, faster than a human can blink, to pin the older boy there. Teruki cannot stand how the other boy still has his patronizing smile on, somehow. He hates being looked at like that. But, Teruki thinks, he can almost tolerate it from a future version of himself.
"You're lying," he says. "You- you are more powerful, and you've come back here with this nonsense to try to get me to fight back. To spar with you. Because we're the only ones good enough for each other."
"No it's true," older Teru easily replies, "I've just chilled out a little bit. It really is thanks to this other guy, he's great. You'll understand in a short while too. It'll be good for you."
"What did he do."
"He... humbled me." Future Teruki gazes at the sky above the school building, far beyond present Teruki in front of him, even as his back is pinned to the tree by the force of one arm held to his chest. "I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say he formed my entire worldview."
Teruki would not stand for this. Weak, sappy, talk of contentment aside, the idea that someone else had that much power over him at any point in the future was truly unbearable.
"Then you do it for me.There's still a way for us to come out on top, then."
The older Teru gives a soft snort. "His psychic abilities," he says haltingly, glancing down and to the right, "are on a whole different level-"
"I don't mean literally, like, sparring our feelings away or whatever you actually did." Teru gives his future self another desperate shake by the tie. "You be for me what he was to you, and we can take that from him."
Teruki sees a brief glint of hunger in his own eyes, almost ensnaring him. He knew it, he knew he couldn't have changed that much in whatever months or weeks stood between now and this other boy.
Humbled? There was always some way for him to win. It was clear now to Teru who the inferior version of himself was, and he was ready to do what he did with all the inferior people he encountered: bend their will to his, as easily as his mind could bend spoons.
"However formidable his powers are, you don't even need them, you can beat him at being the most important person in the world. To me. You don't have to owe him that anymore," Teruki wheedles. Intoxicating, isn't it?
He has him now. Who wouldn't, after all, take the opportunity to supplant the person who formed you, claim full credit for making yourself?
Relying on other people was risky, even without getting into psychic gifts. Teru wouldn't trust some stranger to make him.
Moving in closer, he asks his future counterpart, "what is he to you?"
And future Teruki slides a hand behind present Teruki's head, fingers winding through strands of his natural hair, and kisses him on the mouth.