Chapter Text
The worst part of the hospital stay was actually leaving.
The car ride was absolutely worse than anything else Shigeo has experienced the entire week prior. Once he’d gotten his stitches removed and cleared a brief physical exam, the doctors sent him off with a clean bill of health, alongside the immense bill for all the expenses on his behalf. His entire family piled in the car- his dad driving, Ritsu in the passenger seat, and him and his mom stuck in the back.
Ritsu almost, almost argued about it. He certainly wasn’t happy. His entire hospital stay- whenever he was lucid- Ritsu spent all his waking hours at his bedside, being downright enthusiastic in his support. Now, he basically glowered the entire way home, as seen through the rear-view mirror.
At first, Shigeo didn’t understand why his mom was so insistent on accompanying him when she always stayed up front. It threw off the entire routine of their family car rides. It distorted the energy of the space in such a way that, had the car been spiritually maligned, would have made driving it even more hazardous.
Then the car actually started moving and all doubts flew out the window.
“You alright back there, kiddo?” His dad asked lightheartedly, trying to bring a bit of levity to the whole ordeal.
Shigeo just hummed, leaning forward to rest his forehead on his knees. He tried to only focus on his mom rubbing circles on his back instead of the way all his insides were sloshing around with every twist and turn of the road. The esper kept his eyes closed, and yet there were still kaleidoscopic patterns dancing and shifting in his darkened field of view. That alone was enough to make bile rise up his throat.
It was only a minor temporary side effect of being extremely concussed, the doctors all calmly assured. The bouts of extreme vertigo, light sensitivity, fatigue, and a whole laundry list of other issues, were just brief complications that would relieve themselves in time. Shigeo just needed to be patient. He was pretty good at that.
He was just thankful they gave him something for the car sickness prior. At least it kept him from ruining the interior of his dad’s car. The stale scent of cigarettes did not help, though. He tried to focus instead on his mother’s calming touch and quiet platitudes of “you’re alright, almost home.”
Arriving home was like slipping into the world’s comfiest pajamas. The familiarity of his own aura and his brother’s, tied with the muted energies of his parents, was as calming as a childhood blanket. Even if he did have to basically hobble through the front door braced against his mother like a lifeline to keep from passing out then and there.
Shigeo was very glad to be home. Just being aware of that fact was an immediate additional mood boost, and being out of that unfamiliar white room was an immense relief. For once, happiness did not feel smothered by indifference. It warmed his core and trickled into his limbs like smooth honey.
“Let me start dinner,” his mom all but exhaled after Shigeo had been safely deposited laying back on the couch. Ritsu dutifully took the cushion next to him while their dad also took up residence in the kitchen.
“Do you need anything, Shige?” His little brother asked. “Some water?”
“Mmmno,” he mumbled. “Tired.” He covered his eyes with one arm to block out any more light. Thankfully, the nausea that turned his stomach was receding. It was making room for exhaustion to settle in. Traces of a headache knocked at his forehead.
Shigeo could sense Ritsu’s constant presence, his aura only mildly prickly with worry. He brushed up against it with his own like two cats bumping their faces together, hoping to ease Ritsu’s worries. His energy was actually a bit distracting, and Shigeo was on the brink of a much-needed nap. It was hard to fall asleep with it buzzing around him- as much as he was grateful that Ritsu cared.
His little brother huffed a sigh, shoulders and aura relaxing incrementally in tandem. He pressed back against Shigeo’s aura, a smooth ocean wave lulling him into unconsciousness…
Shigeo awoke to a pressure on his shoulder, recognizing it as his dad’s hand. He blinked up blearily at said man’s kindly face leaning down at him. His face was its typical appearance of five o’clock shadow and laugh lines, and the curly hair that neither son inherited.
“Hey, kiddo. Dinner’s ready.” His voice was unusually gentle. Throughout this whole ordeal, his father had remained a consistent upbeat pillar. His lack of change at a time when nothing felt solid under Shigeo’s feet was immensely appreciated. His corny jokes and unphased appearance were needed. Shigeo felt grateful. Love warmed his core and brought levity to his exhausted body. The esper slowly returned to the waking world with only that mild, persistent ache somewhere between his eyes.
He let his dad be his guide to the dinner table, closing his unadjusted eyes to the bright kitchen light and feeling his way around extrasensorily. It wasn’t anything special. He was only really able to make out vague tactile outlines of objects and people, but it was useful for times like this when everything felt a little too loud.
Still keeping his eyes shielded from the light, Shigeo let his other senses branch out. He could smell rice and katsudon and hot miso soup, feel the smooth wood of the chair as he sat down, sense the magnetic fields of his family members as they all sat in their respective spots. Everything felt in its proper place, an organized domestic routine practiced since he was an infant. Shigeo had really missed this normalcy. The esper’s brain pinged the metal utensils as if it were resonating with a tuning fork rather than ones for eating. In his mind’s eye everything was sparkling and warm, fuzzy with only brief prickles of sharpness.
“Is it too bright right now, Shige?” Ritsu asked.
“Mm,” Shigeo hummed, “just a little.” He finally removed his hand from his face and squinted, picking up his own spoon. Immediately it absorbed his aura like a sponge, twisting itself neatly into the shape of a spiraling alicorn.
“Shigeo,” their mother chided.
“Sorry,” he said as Ritsu wordlessly untwisted the spoon in his hand with psychic energy. “It really just does it by itself.”
They talked. They ate. It was all easy and mindless. Shigeo fell back into the rhythm gladly, hanging back and simply chewing while Ritsu explained his goings-on at school.
Shigeo swallowed. “I’m behind.”
“Don’t worry about that, Shige,” Ritsu said. “Since it’s basically the end of the semester, you’re not missing much.” Their father nodded sagely in agreement. Their mother frowned a bit and exhaled a light sigh. None of them mentioned how the two brothers were not even in the same grade, Ritsu being an entire year behind Shigeo.
They all continued to talk and eat. They all continued the domestic routine. And all the while something grew in the base of Shigeo’s mind.
There was something sitting behind his eyes, leaning hesitantly over his shoulder. It felt dense and heavy like a lump of lead, half-awake and floating just below the murky surface of consciousness. Shigeo mentally prodded at it out of curiosity, and it gave a slow flinch, more like it was rolling over in its sleep. It settled like a weighted blanket around his shoulders, perched and observing this mundane scene of easy family life.
It was making it difficult for Shigeo to focus. The weight of it was pulling him down into the ever-hungry pit of exhaustion below. Fatigue lapped at his mind. Shigeo strained against the heaviness, feeling his shoulders droop incrementally along with his eyelids.
Ritsu was talking. Shigeo processed none of it. His brain was too busy being squeezed like a lemon. He dropped his spoon, which had curled into itself like a dying lizard, and flinched away from the light and sound of the world enveloping him.
There was the mounting pressure, rising until it reached its zenith, when everything squeezed together painfully. It was as if his whole brain was being wadded up into a tiny ball and held there in a clenched fist. He could feel sweat prickling his scalp as his hair bristled with tension. He pressed a hand to his forehead, as if to keep his brains from exploding everywhere. For one, two, three seconds of sharp tension. There was a loud pop that was felt more than heard. Then, release.
It felt like a sort of brain cramp or something. Sometimes when he would go exercise with the Body Improvement Club they’d get those muscle cramps where everything just tightened painfully in an involuntary muscular contraction. President Musashi always stressed the importance of hydration and stretching because of it.
Shigeo slumped like a puppet cut from his strings, feeling particularly drained. All the pent-up energy dissipated, the rolling boil reduced back to hardly a simmer. Muffled sound was returning, accompanied by a faint ringing.
The lights were flickering nervously, throwing the room into a constantly shifting state of dark and light. Shigeo’s head was pounding, the room felt tilted askew on its axis. His body felt tingly yet numb. Distantly, something was rubbing gentle circles on his back.
“-re you alright? Should we call the doctor?” The second half of the questioning didn’t seem to be directed at him.
“Maybe?” A second, lower voice chimed in.
Shigeo groaned weakly. Something was clogging his nose. He swallowed thickly and tasted metal. “‘M okay,” he slurred, lifting his head.
Wet warmth poured from his nostrils. Shigeo pressed a hand to cover his lower face. Being that he couldn’t quite control his arm very well at the moment, he basically punched himself. For once, he was thankful he hadn’t built up too much upper body strength. Yet . The hot liquid quickly coated his palm and dripped from between his fingers and into his uneaten food.
“Oh dammit!” Someone exclaimed, “he’s bleeding!”
“‘M okay,” Shigeo repeated through a cupped hand. That wasn’t even what was hurting. It was his head that hurt, throbbing like a heartbeat in his skull. The rest felt far away.
“Here- can you walk?” Someone else asked, not waiting for an answer before hoisting him to the bathroom. It might have been his mother.
“Tilt your head forward.” Shigeo leaned into the sink, watching bright redness steadily drip into the sink. The water ran, dragging away the fresh blood in a translucent swirl down the drain.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. The esper felt a sour heaviness pool in his stomach. Guilt. Shame. He felt terrible for ruining dinner, and making it all about him.
His mom hushed him gently, massaging the back of his neck with one hand patiently. His brother and father peered in through the doorway, making the whole thing officially a family affair. His stomach squeezed. Then he puked.
“You seem unwell,” someone said, hovering above him.
“Dimple?” He asked weakly, throat still raw from bile.
No response. Just silence. After a few beats, Shigeo moved the cloth covering his eyes just slightly, squinting up into the dim room. After breaking a few things, and then the subsequent migraine-nosebleed-puking combo, Shigeo had been left to rest on the couch. The quiet darkness was nice, yet also terribly hollow. The room felt almost too empty. Almost.
Someone was at his side, dressed in black. They were wearing a gakuran, he realized. The person’s arms were stiff at their sides. Shigeo couldn’t get a good look at their face. It was fuzzy and vague like a dark oily smudge wiped across clear glass, but the haircut and posture were all too familiar.
“Kageyama Shigeo,” they said, each syllable in perfect and precise measure, “you’re coming undone.”
“I’m not,” Shigeo denied quietly. “I’m getting better now.”
“It always gets worse,” the smudge refuted, “before it gets better. And then it doesn’t get better. It only gets worse. And all your hope of it ever getting better is for nothing .”
Despite his confusion, he could feel dread slowly blooming in his chest. A flower sprouting above rot, digging its roots into a poisoned earth. Dread was a heated coil in his sternum, warming him inside and out. In that moment it felt terribly familiar, as if it had always been there. The flash of white fur and sky-blue eyes, the glint of a short, sharp blade.
Since the confession, Shigeo had finally felt whole again. Two halves had snapped back into place like opposing magnet ends. He could finally be a person again. He would find happiness that way.
He couldn’t be coming “undone”, he had just been stitched back together again.
This isn’t Mogami’s world , he reminded himself. He had people who loved him and cared for him, even after seeing that more… unruly part of him. Despite that, when he focused on the space in his chest cavity he could sense that thing nervously swirling and twisting itself into more and more knots. He could rationalize with his mind as much as he wanted, but his heart couldn’t stop worrying.
He couldn’t see the face of the person staring down at him, but he could sense the calm, knowing smile he wore. Within it all the assurance of a long-distance predator slowly and surely wearing down its prey.
There were gaps in his memory.
Shigeo was never the most knowledgeable guy. His memorization skills when studying were subpar at best. Heck, he tended to forget little things here and there, or zone out during exorcism jobs or boring classes. However, these blank spaces in memory were entirely new.
Well, not entirely new. They were uncomfortably familiar, in a way that Shigeo used to avoid and ignore at all costs. Used to.
Mob used to.
Pushed beyond the brink, when the mind slept while the body remained alert, that was when he appeared. The him-but-not-him. The empty space. The otherness.
He didn’t mind the otherness so much anymore. It wasn’t scary in and of itself, but rather the circumstances surrounding it. Shigeo didn’t like the not-knowing. He could feel the other one swimming around distantly sometimes, but when it rose to the surface it was as if they overflowed. Shigeo was forced out of the vessel, or rather farther into it. He felt locked inside the body. The vessel clung to him tightly, unwilling to let go, and the ensuing struggle weighed heavily on the body. It brought all the exhaustion that came with physical exercise without any of the relief.
The brain cramps were avoidable most of the time, and none of them as bad as the first. It was as if the other one was merely adjusting to the vessel, reacquainting itself with the body. That was fine. Totally fine. Sharing was caring, and all that. Shigeo would accept it. He definitely was not worried about lack of control or anything.
However, it still culminated in foggy forgetfulness. The ESP swaddled his brain in a strange way he was wholly unused to. Sometimes it felt like Shigeo was just floating through the motions of daily life, stuck behind a thick net. Other times he would jolt back to reality, a dizzying multitude of feelings swirling in his head and heart. It was disorienting, and honestly a bit frightening. There was a fullness, but also an emptiness. Shigeo’s head felt stuffed with cotton and then put together backwards. Something still felt knocked out of place, but it was so abstract he couldn’t quite say what .
His family seemed worried about it. At least, as far as Shigeo could tell. He really had to contemplate it- thinking was an effort nowadays- but they all did seem more attentive to him. Ritsu and his mom took the doting to a whole new level. Shigeo wasn’t sure if there was such a thing as intense caretaking, but if so they would have won a gold medal. His dad took a carefully neutral stance on it all, which balanced out the other two.
After his little accident- which was much smaller in scale compared to the other recent first-letter-capitalized Accident- his mom watched him like a hawk. Whenever his energy began flagging, she would swoop in and practically force him to go rest. This probably contributed to the lack of any more random nosebleeds. The migraines and puking were reduced as well, but not entirely gone.
Every so often, a viscous bubble of irrational irritation formed in Shigeo’s chest about it. It was frustrating sometimes. It was like neither she nor his brother fully trusted him. He was starting to feel claustrophobic in the house.
The forgetfulness definitely did not help Shigeo’s case re: being trustworthy. He would forget entire conversations, or would realize he was somewhere without understanding how he got there. His attention span was slippery at best. Even Shigeo noticed the off-put looks his family would give him, but he never knew why he would get them.
And then there were the feelings . They came and went at random. It was the strangest thing. Oftentimes they happened so fast, Shigeo didn’t even have time to process them. Light happiness, then heavy anxiety, followed by dark depression with bolts of hot anger, then exhaustion. Repeat ad nauseum .
It wasn’t like he hadn’t felt a single thing in the past however-many years, but they were definitely more intense. It would have been terrifyingly miraculous, had it not been one of the most basic and universal experiences ever. Breaking news: local teen feels a feeling. It was enough to make Shigeo cry.
He did cry. A lot. An embarrassing amount. Whether it was positive or negative, there was a high likelihood he’d start shedding tears. His family was extremely chill about it all, comparatively. They could have rushed him off to a doctor, but instead they would rub his back and wait for it to recede. Ritsu had taken to carrying a handful of tissues around just in case. As if there weren’t at least ten boxes open at all times now.
The emotional volatility was also definitely part of why everyone kept giving him concerned looks. Because whenever he would feel something, his ESP magnified it tenfold. The cutlery drawer was a total mess. They’d replaced at least ten light bulbs by now. However, Shigeo had only broken two plates, so he took that as a personal win. It was about the little victories, as President Musashi would say.
He just wished they would stop looking at him like that.
The face staring at him through the mirror was not his.
It should have been, but it was not. It must’ve been something around the dark, empty eyes, or the curve of his jawline, or the shape of his nose. Whatever it was, it wasn’t right.
Something wasn’t right. This body wasn’t his, he was only wearing it. Wearing the body of someone who was dead . Because Mob was- Mob had-
A sugar cube dissolved in hot tea. Mist evaporated into humid air. Limestone eroded by centuries of relentless wind and rain. Pus flushed from an infected wound with saline.
Shigeo stared at the mirror, a distant fear slowly leaking into his limbs. Someone else was in the mirror, and everything felt so far away. It was a dream, it wasn’t real. He was in some alternate reality. Beyond the bathroom door was an empty house. Beyond the empty house was a world of inhospitable cruelty.
That thought, too, made the terrible fear pool into each and every crevice of his far away, empty shell of a body. He was scared, but of what he had no idea. It was a general feeling of disoriented unease, where nothing felt safe and all concepts of familiarity were nonexistent.
There was no house, there was no room. No up or down, front or back. No dimension at all, and everything pressed flat into one plane. There was no one here now. He could only watch the eyes in the mirror widen and the right hand move to press against the mirror surface.
“I'm real,” said the mouth. “My face…”
It felt like he was being pressed through a sieve, separating the heavier bits until it all came out liquid smooth and refined. He was watching himself through his own congealing mind, and the fear he felt was just someone else’s fear. Someone else walked past him, forwards, and he felt the world pull backwards into nothing- an infinite void on reality’s z-axis. Always present and always unseen.
Then, the room unpeeled itself, coming back into sharper focus, rushing back under his feet like the ocean’s tide. There was a lingering scent of mint toothpaste and the mirror under his fingertips was cool. The harsh white light that granted dimension and form buzzed monotonously overhead.
The face in the mirror was his.
But it looked so… different now. It had lost its soft baby fat. His irises didn’t quite glimmer the way they used to, instead they burned with a strange heat. He seemed more refined , sharpened to a razor point. His eyes had somewhat grown into their scarlet hue, when he wasn’t keeping his face locked in a state of dull ennui. Shigeo pawed at his dark hair, still slightly damp and sticking up everywhere, yet fluffy as if recently washed.
He examined his teeth, where the bone met gum and how they all fit in his mouth. All of his baby teeth had fallen out by now, he wondered if he kept them anywhere. It was odd to consider, but Shigeo was desperate for something recognizable from the life he once had before… everything. At least those would be constants- imbued with nascent psychic energy when he was whole and just sprouting. He needed to ask his parents.
There was a soft series of knocks at the door. “Shige, are you almost done in there? Breakfast is ready!” Oh, it was his mom. Perfect timing. He opened the door abruptly with a psychic pull, with enough vigor that his mother startled a bit when she saw him.
“Ah! You surprised me,” she said lightly, with a breezy smile that seemed so earnest and sincere Shigeo couldn’t help but believe her. Unfortunately his facial muscles weren’t presently cooperating enough to muster a smile in return, but that was fine.
“Are you feeling alright?” She pressed her palm against his forehead, messing up his bangs even more. The feeling was nice. Warmth and comfort. Shigeo hummed a concurrence and closed his eyes, leaning into it. The air was practically vibrating with his aura, and yet she didn’t even seem to notice it.
“Are you sure?” His mom asked again. Shigeo nodded. All of a sudden he felt strongly compelled to just be held by her. He snaked his arms around her and pressed himself close for a hug, smushing his face into her collarbone. His mom made a small sound, not of protest but rather pleasant surprise. She encompassed his shoulders in her embrace and held him there, anchoring him.
It was such a simple joy, being held like this. Shigeo couldn’t remember the last time he hugged his parents. He definitely had at some point, surely. Ritsu, too. He just couldn’t recall it right then, so he decided to focus on the present feeling of being enveloped by softness and security.
The moment didn’t last very long until his mom pulled away. Before he could protest, she gently cupped his face and turned it up so she could look right at it. Her eyebrows pinched together slightly, exaggerating her natural worry lines. It seemed like she was searching for something, desperate to find an untraceable hint to something she didn’t even understand. Abruptly, Shigeo felt like a stranger in his own body, watching his mother gaze upon him. He felt simultaneously laid utterly bare and deeply obscured, peering out at the distant silhouette of her through the mouth of his cave.
He was watching her gaze upon the mask he always wore. Her face had an expression on it, something that was strong enough to make her appear sad and angry and happy all at once.
“I just worry about you,” she said in a flash of maternal vulnerability. This was the typical way she expressed her love: worry. “If something’s wrong, you’ll let me know, okay?”
“‘Kay,” he squeezed past the sudden lump clogging his throat. It felt like a lie.
Ritsu knew something was up.
It didn’t take any ESP to notice. He had a lifetime of hypervigilance as training. The psychic abilities were simply a bonus to that. It really didn’t matter because everyone in the house could tell something was off-kilter.
It was because of Shigeo, obviously. Which wasn’t his fault, but it was the truth nonetheless. Ritsu certainly didn’t hold it against him, and he was sure neither did his parents. Recovering from a traumatic brain injury allowed him a proportionate amount of grace. Ritsu had become a spoon-unbending and lightbulb-rescrewing master by now.
Before Shige was discharged, both his parents and the doctor they spoke with were confident that his brother would bounce back no problem. They all assured him that a little more bed rest was all that was needed. Ritsu was expecting the fatigue, and was well-acquainted with the general listlessness.
He was not expecting his brother to start acting like a completely different person.
Ritsu had done his studying. He had a lot of free time and anxiety and insomnia to channel into Wikipedia deep-dives. The end of the semester truly did leave him with little work to do, so he just decided to make his own. Head trauma could definitely cause drastic personality shifts. Shaking around a person’s brain was already bad, doing that to someone psychically-gifted could only be infinitely worse.
He kept wanting to bring it up. Talking it out- or rather, considering talking it out, waffling mentally about it, making an attempt, then abruptly chickening out- was Ritsu’s tried-and-true method of communication. It was still a work in progress, but he was getting better about it. That one-sided talk with his unconscious brother had really helped.
Speaking of which, Ritsu found it odd that he had seen neither hide nor hair of it- him? Shigeo’s aura felt the same, for the most part. It just seemed to have more to it now, like he’d sprinkled more salt to enhance the flavor.
Sometimes, if Ritsu poked at it a little too much, or if his brother was particularly moody, it seemed to flex and writhe around the room with a will of its own. It also happened whenever he had those- episodes? Ritsu didn’t know what else to all them. Seizures? But they were unlike anything he had known about. Shigeo didn’t foam at the mouth or start convulsing on the floor, but he would just tense up. The entire atmosphere grew saturated with psychic energy, like a pianist striking a singular clear chord before evaporating altogether. It pricked at his fear response far too intimately, and made him feel guilty for getting scared of the potential damage his brother could do, again and again.
Ritsu steeled himself, comforted by the presence of his own aura and the manifestation of his ESP. Being an esper now, at least he could empathize with some of Shigeo’s invisible struggles. Key word being some , and not all .
ESP was tethered to emotion in a way that superseded reason, clumped up with the id. Sure, the superego could access it, but they weren’t buddy-buddy. He didn’t need scientific proof of that to know it was true. Ritsu got to have a peek at Shigeo’s brain scans, which surely would have made Japan’s top neuroscientists incredibly jealous. He saw the way his frontal lobe was illuminated like a Christmas tree. The teenager didn’t exactly know what to do with it, but to be fair he didn’t think the doctors knew what to do with it either.
When someone’s emotions were out of whack, so was their ESP. He had felt it himself. Guilt and shame were his ouroboros of punishment, and it had stewed in him enough to crack open the seed of psychic ability. However, now Ritsu knew that positive feelings- love, compassion, joy- could be just as effective. That’s what he wanted to focus on now. That’s what Shigeo ought to have been focusing on.
Instead, he was wallowing. Or rather, he was drowning. Drowning in sensation, in simply being a part of the world. Before, Shigeo was detached, though he made efforts every so often to reconnect. Now he felt simultaneously near and far, superimposed onto Ritsu’s reality. If he looked too hard, his brother would disappear. An optical illusion.
He wasn’t getting better. Shige most of all. He would just wave away concerns with a sudden nonchalance and positivity. Which was difficult to argue with when he purported to have no recollection of even displaying worrying behavior.
Everyone knew it, but they all kept denying it. Their parents kept putting off scheduling any more doctor’s appointments. Ritsu knew they were clinging onto the hope that Shigeo would eventually make a miraculous recovery, if they just gave it one more day. Just one more day. Then, another and another and another. It wasn’t like Shigeo himself was ever going to recommend returning to the hospital, and it wasn’t like they’d listen to Ritsu, either. A very frustrating situation, all around.
Ritsu would take matters into his own hands. Skip all the unhelpful adults, even if they were his actual parents. Ritsu loved them, of course, but they weren’t a part of the brothers’ psychic world. They couldn’t solve this, but he could.
He needed to talk to his brother; that vague, indistinct shadow of him that existed in peripheries. And he had some theories on how.