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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.

Chapter Text

“Are you busy?” Ritsu asked. His gaze roamed around, taking in the fact that his brother was utterly motionless on the floor in typical Shigeo fashion.

“No,” Shigeo answered, “I was just…” he trailed off. He was just… what? What had he been doing? The more he thought about it, the less confident he became in recalling any specific details of the day. 

“I was just thinking.” That was a safe answer. Shigeo tended to do that- spacing out and letting his mind float into formlessness. Metaphorically. Usually.

Ritsu hovered, saying nothing. A familiar pose, hand on the door knob to Shigeo’s room and partially obscured body- half in, half out. Shigeo couldn’t read his face, but the gap of space between them said volumes. He was making an effort, and Shigeo promised to be more genuine and open. They needed to talk.

“Ritsu. Come here,” Shigeo placed a hand on the rolled up futon he was propped against, an invitation.

His little brother obliged, closing the door gently behind him. Ritsu hunkered down next to Shigeo, and wiggled a bit to get somewhat comfortable on the floor. He made a sound of disgruntled acquiescence. Up close, Shigeo could examine his face better, eyes lingering somewhere near his left cheek where a few spots of scabs remained of former pimples.

“You shouldn’t pick at your face,” Shigeo chastised. Their mom had said the same thing numerous times.

“I know,” Ritsu huffed, turning away. His fingers immediately shot to probe another blooming red spot at the right side of his chin. “It’s a habit.”

Shigeo hummed. They fell into a more comfortable bubble of silence, auras brushing against each other with the warmth of physical affection. 

Ever since Shigeo had given Ritsu a concussion, they stopped being physically close to each other. Shigeo had stopped reaching out with his aura too, which had become as familiar to Ritsu as the back of his own hand. Only recently, after Ritsu had gained psychic abilities and finally expressed how he felt, had they begun branching out to each other again. In a way, it was utterly new, since the younger sibling had barely just gained psychic awareness. This sort of thing was a tentative, but welcoming, change of pace. 

Ritsu removed the hand rubbing at the bumps on his face and hesitantly placed it against Shigeo’s wrist. When he didn’t pull away or voice any protest, the younger brother wound his fingers around it, gently over the pulse. Shigeo let it happen, feeling not unlike a motionless crocodile with a butterfly between his jaws. Ritsu’s aura was a small, fluttering thing. He kept poking and prodding at Shigeo’s, gaining more confidence as he went.

“What are you doing?” Shigeo asked, finally breaking the silence, but again as softly as possible. His words were ripples disturbing a still lake.

“It doesn’t feel any different,” Ritsu mumbled. “Just not as heavy, maybe.”

“Eh?” Shigeo was thoroughly confused at this point. “Ritsu…”

“When you were- um- unconscious,” his little brother said, relinquishing the hold on his wrist. He didn’t specify beyond that. “Your aura feels basically the same, is what I was thinking.”

The part of Shigeo that understood where this conversation was heading was absolutely not liking where this conversation was heading. He swallowed dryly. “Okay.”

“So are you… both of them now?” Ritsu asked.

“What?” Oh no. How did Ritsu know? Of course Ritsu knew. He was smart.

“Um, how do I say this…,” his younger brother trailed off contemplatively. “You know, both of them . Both of Shige.”

Shigeo thought for a moment. He didn’t know what other way he was supposed to feel like. He just felt like himself. Hearing Ritsu refer to him like that was… odd. “I guess so.”

“Okay,” Ritsu just nodded. That must have been the right answer since Ritsu was nodding. “Great.”

Silence suspended itself between them, stretching out lazily between the vertices of space. Shigeo just stared at Ritsu, who stared at the floor. There was something pooling right below his rib cage. Anxiety.

“I still don’t know how any of this works, really,” the younger brother admitted, hands open as if beckoning forth truth. “I mean I have ideas, but I guess I should just go on and ask you about it.”

Shigeo stared. He did not understand the nebulous “any of this” or “it” that Ritsu was vaguely referencing. “Ask me about what?”

“Well, you know, you .” Ritsu waved a hand towards him with a helpless shrug.

“I don’t get it,” Shigeo said. He really didn’t. Deep down somewhere, if he really focused on it, maybe. However, there was something blocking that path in his mind. Shigeo did not want to think about it, especially with Ritsu around.

His brother huffed. Shigeo knew he wasn’t upset with him, but with his inability to articulate himself better. Ritsu left the room with a mumbled “be right back”, then returned a few moments later with a spiral notebook in hand. He gently closed the door, walking over to join Shigeo against his rolled-up futon once more. The younger brother shifted a bit, unused to sitting on the bare floor instead of a bed, before turning to face his elder brother. He opened the notebook and thumbed to a specific page, showing it to Shigeo.

“Here,” he nodded to the full page of notes.

Shigeo’s eyes skimmed across the dense walls of kana and diagrams with as much academic rigor as a rock. However, he was above all impressed by Ritsu’s dedication. His brother was really smart.

“Wow,” he said.

“ Read it,” Ritsu complained. He knew full well that Shigeo was not actually processing anything on the pages.

Shigeo hummed with uncertainty. He gently took the notebook from his brother and began tracing the scrawl with his index finger. It was a lot harder than reading manga, and even attempting that had given him a headache. After a minute or two, he gave up.

“Can’t you shorten it, Ritsu? It’s making my head hurt.”

Ritsu took the notebook from his brother. He flipped to a page closer to the beginning, and pointed to a scribble on the page. “Well- let me know if I get anything wrong, first of all.” Shigeo nodded slightly, and Ritsu steeled himself then continued.

“My theory is that, it’s like the two of you were like a plant with two separate heads. You branched off at some point, but the origin is the same.” He traced a little drawing of a plant, where the root system grew into a stem and then diverged.

He paused as if waiting for his brother to interrupt, but Shigeo just kept staring patiently.

“So the way I see it,” Ritsu continued, “is that even though there’s two heads up here, your consciousness is back down here.” Ritsu tapped at the page for emphasis. “Or something. That’s just how I’ve been thinking about it.”

He waited for Shigeo to interject, but he just kept looking at the drawing silently. It was still difficult to get a read on what was going through his head. Usually it was nothing. “Shige? What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he replied finally. “You make it sound so… natural.” Plants, when not being manipulated by violent spirits, were compliant and simple beings. That was part of their appeal. “This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.”

“Well,” Ritsu faltered, then turned to a later page, “I did have a more scientific idea about it, but…” He paused and chewed on his thoughts, becoming exceptionally grave.

Shigeo rested his arms against his knees, “I’m listening.” He braced himself.

“It’s probably a dissociation thing,” his little brother posited. 

“What’s that?”

“You know, when you separate yourself from things. In your head. Like with your emotions, and your powers,” Ritsu said, taking his hands and separating them as if pulling manjū apart. He spoke softly, like he was traversing a minefield. It was practically reflexive at this point, but he still wished Ritsu wouldn’t treat him like that sometimes. 

“You're probably right,” Shigeo said, feeling exceptionally neutral about it.

“And it starts feeling like it’s something else. It doesn’t feel like you .”

“Okay.” There was that feeling again, someone leaning over his shoulder. An adjacent curiosity. And comprehension bloomed in his mind.

Ritsu continued. “When that happens to people, they feel like things aren’t real, or they’re not real. They separate from reality, or themselves. But- I think- with you it’s a little different. Your dissociated emotions and powers became another whole identity. Or something.”

“Hm, I guess,” Shigeo said with vague wariness, “sometimes it feels like there’s someone else here.” That feeling was almost always there now, though. It was like a closed-off emptiness had been opened and filled with something of substance. It bubbled and sloshed and twisted precariously.

Ritsu straightened a bit, attentive. “Yeah?”

“Kind of,” the elder brother tried to explain. 

“Is it, like,” Ritsu started up, becoming even more animated, “switching? That’s what they call it online.”

“Switching?” He parroted.

“Yeah,” Ritsu affirmed with a nod, “like switching places with someone.”

Ah, so he was reading stuff online. Shigeo didn’t know how he felt about it, so he ignored it for the time being. “Mmmn… Usually it's not like switching places. It’s more like just- becoming someone else, I guess. Or not becoming someone else, but becoming more of me…,” He trailed off contemplatively. “I’m always me, just- a different me. Sometimes.” That wasn’t the full truth, but still it was hard to explain.

His two halves had been able to hold a proper conversation only that one time before, when he had been knocked utterly unconscious and drifted down to the deepest pit of his mind while something else piloted his body. Their body. Whatever.

“Does he want to talk to me?” Ritsu asked, and he didn’t look afraid or unsure. He looked bright and expectant, and the thing behind his eyes strained forward desperately.

“M-maybe,” Shigeo mumbled, torn between staying in the present and gently repelling that great rolling wave of thought and feeling. The lightness blooming into his chest was burning, though his body shook as if wracked by cold. All he could really focus on was that his brother wasn’t afraid of him. 

His brother wasn’t afraid of him. Ritsu wasn’t scared. That made him so terrifyingly happy, he couldn’t imagine a feeling greater than this. Relief, glorious and pure relief . A six-year-long anchor was finally letting him go. He didn’t want to fight against it. He welcomed it.

He surged forward, pouring into the cracks of his skull like thick cement, forcing himself into a concrete shape. The tangible body, the physical room. Suddenly, gravity was bearing down on him, light was bending across everything into form and color, air was flowing in and out. He filled the space even beyond his human body, pressing into every nook and cranny, pooling along the floorboards and straining against the walls. This place was familiar, inlaid with a lifetime of his own aura.

His brother was coming into focus now. It felt like he’d only really seen him with the body’s eyes twice before, when the mind was disoriented and everything was hazy. Now, though, Shigeo was thinking clearly. He could hear and smell and see and feel so sharply, as if the world was coming to greet him all at once.

Ritsu must have noticed the change. He was staring at him with an uncertain look on his face. “Um, Shige?” He ventured to ask.

“Ah,” he said, pleasantly surprised, “you said my name.” It was the first time anyone had called him that. Shige. The fact Ritsu was calling his name was… nice. It felt good. 

For one terrible millisecond, Shigeo expected the wary look on his brother’s face to transition into one of paranoid fear. Instead, Ritsu just relaxed easily. In fact, he was almost smiling now. “I was right, then. Wasn’t I?”

“Hm? Oh. Sort of, but not exactly,” Shigeo said. He was still settling into the body, unused to all the stimuli of a quiet room. It was strange to not feel like a constant chaotic force of destructive power. It was so calm , so quiet . He felt like he needed to do something, so he started rocking back and forth a little bit. Ritsu didn’t seem to mind, either.

“So, um, how are you?” His younger brother asked. Shigeo could sense the way his aura fizzled and wobbled with quiet curiosity.

“I am… light,” he answered, trying out these words. “I feel so… real.”

“What do you mean?” Ritsu furrowed his brows. Apparently, that was a strange thing to say.

“I’m so here , but I don’t feel as dense as usual,” he elaborated. “There’s space for me now. There used to be a barrier, and I didn’t come out unless he wasn’t awake at all.” Shigeo felt at the front of his shirt, the soft and cool texture of the cotton threads sliding against the ridges of his fingerprints. “On the inside there isn’t anything. No shape for the body to fill. And I was gone for so long I started to forget what the body felt like.”

Ritsu stared, the way he always did when trying to solve puzzles and problems. His face pinched, and his mouth faintly turned into a frown of intense concentration. When he got like this, he always looked on the precipice of a tantrum. Ritsu was really looking at him. It made him feel- nervous and giddy. Shigeo could feel his mouth tick upwards as a tight laugh bubbled in his throat.

“What are you exactly?” Ritsu asked, dark eyes searching his face. “Psychic energy with a conscience?”

It probably shouldn’t have, but the question pissed him off for a number of reasons he didn’t have the emotional intelligence to examine. Shigeo’s face pulled into a weary frown and he turned to stare at the wood grains of the floorboards. 

“I’ve existed for just as long as he has, you know,” there was a tightness in his throat. “Longer, even.”

Ritsu faltered. “That’s- I- sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It came out that way,” Shigeo replied bluntly. “The other one used to just be an empty shell. No feelings or opinions about anything. Then he started,” he waved a hand flippantly and the air around him trembled, “ improving .” It was so annoying.

“... What do you mean?” Ritsu asked slowly.

“The other one,” Shigeo repeated, “uh- you know- Mob .”

“Huh,” Ritsu said, ruminating. “So Mob is the one who’s usually uh- present?”

Shigeo waved his hand again, as if trying to physically brush the thought away. Again, the air buzzed and wobbled. “Not anymore. He’s not around anymore.” 

As far as he knew. They hadn’t exactly spoken to each other in a while. And he did kind of, sort of, peel him apart and everything. Shredded him up like Emi’s novel. Just paper-thin pieces in the wind.

He was gone. When Shigeo turned to face him, he was someone else.

“Then, what happened to him?” His little brother asked.

“He’s dead,” Shigeo replied automatically. Then he realized that was a really messed up thing to say to Ritsu. 

“I think he died,” he amended. There. That was better. On the surface, more subjective. Even though it was true, it just sounded nicer. It was the truth: Shigeo did think he died.

“What?” Ritsu didn’t look disturbed- thankfully- just baffled. “What do you mean died ?”

“ Mmm ,” Shigeo thought about it. He considered Ritsu’s silly flower drawing. “The paper,” he pointed, “it has lines on it. Words and pictures. Mob was the paper. I am the ink. Now he’s the paper with ink on it. He’s not just the paper anymore. He can never go back. It’s not him.”

“But not you?” Ritsu challenged, “You can still be just the ink?”

“Yes!” Shigeo exclaimed, delighted. “Yes! The ink is still on top. Not underneath. It bleeds through.”

Ritsu did not mirror his excitement. In fact, he looked… sad, maybe? Something not quite sad, maybe just lost. Yes, he looked unbalanced, as if he couldn’t even hope to make sense of his surroundings. There was perhaps a hopelessness to his expression. Shigeo remembered a similar look, as he caught sight of him miles and miles below while he basked in psychic release. A resigned look, like the day he always prayed would never come finally did. Shigeo hated that look.

“Stop,” Shigeo grimaced, turning away. “Just stop.” He couldn’t bear it. He didn’t want to.

“Sorry,” Ritsu whispered. He fidgeted with his hands. “I just… feel like I’ll never actually understand you. I try , all the time, but it's just…” He trailed off, reaching the end of the road, where only thick entangling underbrush extended forth. Ritsu couldn’t continue on even if he tried, and Shigeo knew just how much his little brother tried for him.

“You used to be so small,” Shigeo examined his hands, they were developing a couple calluses from weightlifting. At one point, Ritsu had been small enough for him to hold in his arms, even as a toddler himself. Though, he’d always be small enough to hold with his ESP. Their mom used to freak out about that. “Everything seemed a lot more simple back then.”

“Yeah,” his brother nodded, not knowing what else to say.

In his mind, in his heart, Ritsu was all of nine years old. He is perpetually small and fragile and naïve. There is no twisting nervousness, no higher obligation, no peeking through every almost-closed door. Ritsu is young and his life is still utterly uncomplicated and he looks at Shigeo with love and adoration.

It’s hard to reconcile with the person who existed today. It felt like everything changed, and it didn’t make sense. Now, he was taller, older, smarter, and behind his eyes was an anxious sadness that threatened to spill over if tilted just so . His technicolor aura was his luminous and sleek shield. Not Shigeo, not anymore. 

That shimmering glimpse of the past was just that: past . The time when Shigeo towered above him, weathered anything for him, existed encased within the amber glow of warm childhood nostalgia.

That was a lie he told himself a long time ago; that he protected his younger brother.  Mob had lied about everything all the time, and those lies often became the cobwebs coating the dusty attic of their mindscape. Shigeo didn’t protect Ritsu from anything, save for maybe the occasional malevolent spirit haunting his shoulder. He never helped him with the big things, the important things. Shigeo couldn’t even save Ritsu from himself.

There were feelings and memories from a far-away childhood only now catching up to the present. The stagnant ocean of guilt and hate had receded, pulling further and further from shore. It kept contracting, consolidating itself into the inevitable tsunami.

“I’m sorry for almost killing you,” he said. It came out so easily, and inevitably. Like an exhaled breath, like it meant nothing. 

Ritsu laughed, the strained squeak of a rusty faucet being wrenched open. “I’m sorry. That’s not funny,” he sobered quickly. “It’s- well it’s not really okay . I forgive you, though.” He rubbed at the back of his head, as if there was lingering phantom pain there alongside the nervous tic.

Shigeo nodded just once. His mind was desperate to fidget with something, and so it telekinetically began moving things around. His room was relatively bare, so there wasn’t much to fidget with. Pencils, his desk chair, the lamp. He kneaded at the floorboards and flickered the lights a few times. 

“Is that what started all this?” Ritsu asked, watching the objects spin in midair. There was no awestruck wonder glittering in his eyes, just casual nonchalance. That really hurt for some reason.

“Didn’t help,” Shigeo muttered.“He started pushing me away a long, long time ago, and the whole time it felt wrong . Then that happened, and it was like something finally broke between us.” 

His throat tightened, he swallowed. How could he explain what that felt like? It was nothing, and it was everything. “No. Not ‘broke’, more like ‘cut out.” 

Sharp, precise, surgical.

He just shook his head helplessly. “It was bad, and it hurt. A lot.” It was a violent act without physical consequence, no blood, no crime scene. Yet it felt like someone had broken his rib cage apart and tore out everything important inside until his abdominal cavity was left hollow. Someone had taken a circular saw to his head and performed a clean slice. Someone had excised that final remaining shred of him and preserved its rotting remains in a jar. The bright, burning pain of synapses exploding, and then cold and hollow numbness. “It was bad, and it hurt .”

“Shige- is it okay if I touch you?” Ritsu asked. He nodded. His brother placed a hand on his back and rubbed small circles, the way their mom used to to help them sleep. It was nice. He hadn’t realized how upset he was getting until his rolling boil was brought back down to a simmer.

“Time moves differently inside,” Shigeo continued. “It was just a few moments, but also it’s like it’s been centuries. It’s all really confusing.” Shigeo felt like a young child, and like he had existed longer than anything else. He had wrestled with beings that stretched the concept of known existence thin in places the human conscience could not fathom. 

“Being in a body in reality is kind of a lot right now,” Shigeo mumbled. He massaged his forehead with a palm.

He could, on some level, understand why Mob had kept pushing him into some dark corner. It was easier to just shove all the emotions into a box, just so he didn’t have to feel the painful stuff so much. Now, that box was gone and the barrier was dissolved, and feeling leaked constantly. It was a persistent ache, a knife with a million edges that just kept twisting and twisting and twisting. Shigeo wished the pain would abate for just a few moments, so he could enjoy this time with Ritsu positively. But Shigeo was emotion, and he couldn’t simply divorce himself from that. He was the twisting knife.

“I can’t even imagine,” Ritsu said, in a voice that implied he was actively making an attempt and failing.

There was a lull, and Shigeo dropped most of the objects he was twirling to just let his aura float around the room.

“I hate this,” he said petulantly. “All this concussion stuff is really throwing us off. Hard to focus.” They were both trying, or at least Shigeo had to believe the other one was. They kept missing each other. Turning the corner to instead find a wall and missing the first step on a staircase and grasping at thin air. The dots just would not connect, at least most of the time. The tape would not stick.

“We agreed to accept each other. We were supposed to just be one. I don’t- I don’t know what went wrong ,” his throat constricted suddenly without his say-so. Shigeo wasn’t used to the body reacting without conscious thought. It was unpleasantly surprising. “I don’t know what’s happening.” 

It was scary- this vast unknown. Mob was gone and someone else took his place, and Shigeo couldn’t even communicate with him properly right now. Shigeo knew he was making his family worry, but he didn’t know how to stop being like this.

“I’m sure it’ll get better. Just give it time,” Ritsu tried to reassure him. “It’s only been, like, a week and a half.”

“Really?” Shigeo balked. He hadn’t been keeping track of time. His memory of the past few days was spotty, and the hospital stay was a total blur. Even then, the concept of a day or hour or minute were just words without much substance to him. 

The younger of the two grew quiet, ruminating on something to say. “You know… you should probably tell Mom and Dad about this.”

“No.”

“Shige…”

“ No ,” he said again. “I can’t- I’m not- they don’t need to know. They won’t-,” Shigeo stuttered. His aura bristled defensively, pushing outwards.

“Shige, relax,” his brother said, interrupting him to send steady psychic waves back to him. “You don’t have to right now. Just breathe.”

Shigeo tried just breathing. It worked a little. He nervously pulled at his disheveled hair. “They won’t get it like you do. They’ll think I’m crazy or something. I don’t know how to explain this. It’ll just cause more problems.”

He wasn’t worried about the psychic stuff, per se. The psychic stuff was easy . His parents had dealt with his psychic stuff since he was a toddler. They accepted his eccentricities as much as they possibly could. It probably wasn’t easy dealing with an esper kid like him. They were even supportive of him when he joined the Body Improvement Club, and sucked at it. They still accepted him even though he- even though-

That was part of the problem, wasn’t it? They had spent so much time with Mob, would they even recognize him anymore? Would they support him like they did with Mob? Or would he just be another strange habit to get scolded for, like his spoon bending and flickering lights. Maybe he was something more than that, a malignant tumor.

Then they would wonder why . They would wonder how . Why and how did this happen to their son? When? What went wrong? How could they ever fix this -

He almost got away with getting rid of one of their sons. He was currently getting away with getting rid of the other one. 

It scared him. It made no sense. Anxiety tightened its hold around his rib cage, compressing his lungs and squeezing his heart. There wasn’t any buffer of rationality to stop it. He tried breathing deeply again, gathering enough air, but it never felt like enough. Panic soaked through him. Shigeo stood up and began pacing, the room felt too cramped. He felt trapped in here.

Every facet of reality was now too much. There was so much getting in the way, every impermeable object felt like another bar on his cage. It was all so claustrophobic. His aura flexed against the walls and floor and ceiling, and they responded with heavy groans from the pressure.

“Shige, calm down. You’re gonna break something!” Someone said. It was probably Ritsu. If Shigeo was not so overwhelmed with abrupt and monumental fear, he might have felt annoyed by that supposition.

“Out,” he shook his head and paced. “Out. Out. Out.” He needed to get out . He needed the energy fizzing in his bones out . Shigeo waved his arms to try shaking it out, which helped a little but not enough. His hair prickled and stood on-end, and he ground his teeth.

Then, the body stumbled over to the door. The legs moved without his say-so and the arms reached for the handle. Before the palm could grasp it, the mind wrenched it open. The mechanisms inside twisted and broke apart with his psychic touch, and the handle itself made a loud crack . That didn’t matter now. 

The legs staggered over to the staircase. He was downstairs. Kitchen. Living room. Didn’t bother putting shoes on. He forced the sliding door open, and then he was outside.

This was much better. The night air was cool against his sweaty skin, and he could finally allow his aura to unspool in every direction. Shigeo felt like he was floating, if he relaxed too much maybe he’d float away into the black blanket of the night sky and disappear. Whatever energy had fueled him before fizzled out. Shigeo just felt utterly drained. He plopped down on the dirt, huffing and puffing like he had just run a 3K.

“Hey, kiddo, you doin’ alright?” That was his father’s voice. Shigeo slowly turned to face him, where he leaned against their house wall next to the sliding glass door he had psychically yanked open. He had a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. The smell of it wafted towards him, an adult stench of tobacco and yeast.

Thankfully there wasn’t any shattered glass. Shigeo slid the door closed, far more gentle this time, with a single thought. It clicked back into place, and locked itself.

Shigeo grunted in response, unable to articulate anything at the moment. He had a massive headache and he was exhausted and he could hardly even think. “Smoking…,” he mumbled.

“Ah- just this one,” his dad countered, taking another puff. “I’ll stop after this, promise.”

He said that before, many times over. He had promised his mother when he was five, and again when Shigeo was eleven and parroted some ramble his shishou gave him on nicotine addiction. He just could never fully kick the habit, but at least he had narrowed it down to one every week. However, Shigeo didn’t have the energy to argue. He snubbed the cigarette with his mind, and plucked it from between his father’s fingers, tossing it beyond the fence and into the street. 

His father said nothing in protest, he just stared off to where his precious nicotine stick had been discarded. He exhaled the last lungful of tobacco he was savoring, then took a swig of his beer. There was a lengthy pause between them. Shigeo considered getting up and going back inside, but even the thought of standing was giving him vertigo.

“You’re moving stuff around more nowadays,” his dad said. That’s what his parents called it- “moving stuff around”. To the world it went by lots of scientific and long winded names- extrasensory powers, psychokinesis, telekinesis- but to the Kageyama household it was always just moving things. Just bending spoons.

“Uh-huh,” Shigeo answered numbly. His brain felt spread thin. An empty and fragile crystalline container.

“Something happen between you and Ritsu?” His dad asked pseudo-casually. It was a patient tone, one he used when he wanted Shigeo or his brother to try a little introspection for themselves. Somehow it seemed evasive.

Shigeo opened his mouth to protest, but stopped. He couldn’t actually recall why he came outside now. He tried to answer, but his tongue felt heavy behind his teeth. All that came out was another small grunt rather than a full sentence. 

His parents were used to this. Shigeo was not a talkative child by any means, so they found some workarounds. Unlike himself, Shigeo’s dad had a knack for filling up empty space with verbosity. Whenever Shigeo got quiet, he would ask simple, straightforward yes-no questions, which he greatly appreciated. 

“Did you and Ritsu have an argument?”

He shook his head slightly.

“Did he say something to make you upset?”

Shigeo shook his head. He wasn’t upset. He couldn’t be because he didn’t remember talking to Ritsu, so nothing he said could have possibly been upsetting. Shigeo did not get upset . That required him actually acknowledging his own feelings-

He was supposed to be doing that now, huh. He nodded, then said, “I guess so.”

“Ah,” his dad said, like he’d hit gold, “do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Shigeo stated with abrupt finality. Paused. Reconsidered. “He wanted me to talk. About something.”

“And you didn’t want to.”

Shigeo swallowed thickly. “No.”

“That’s fine,” his father assuaged. “Take your time.”

The air was cool, the breeze brushed past shrubbery and trees in a natural chorus. A few far-off cicadas droned their own buzzing melody. Above them, the stars splashed across the night sky like suspended drops of diamonds. They were the remains of that great cataclysmic crash and explosion of life that sparked at the beginning of all things. Shigeo felt comforted when contemplating that; his minute position within the ever-expanding universe.

It allowed the recent memories he had shoved off to the side to slowly re-enter his stream of thought. Now that the emotions had expended themselves, Shigeo could look at the past situation with a clearer mind. He thumbed at a blade of grass by his side, unwilling to uproot the vegetation.

“Dad,” he said to get the man’s drifting attention. “Ritsu wanted me to tell you and Mom something…”

“Hm? I’m all ears,” his father replied casually. He took another swig of beer.

“I… um,” Shigeo continued to hesitate. He didn’t know how to say it. It didn’t feel as terrifying as the prospect of explaining to his mother, but it was still difficult. He wanted his father to take him seriously, but not too seriously. He wanted the perfect words to say it. The esper rubbed the grass between his fingers more fervently, as if it would help divine some immutable truth. “Uh.”

His father said nothing. For some reason, all Shigeo could focus on was the odd, stale smell of yeast from the beer nestled in his father’s hand.

“Maybe later,” he said quietly. Shigeo stood, reentered the house, and left his father to finish his drink.

Chapter Text

Ritsu’s first thought upon waking, was a resounding I fucked up .

Last night ended poorly. After talking to their dad outside- which Ritsu pointedly did not interrupt- Shigeo returned inside. Despite Ritsu’s attempt at apology, his older brother just gave him a tired look and shake of the head before plodding upstairs and closing his door.

Ritsu had worried at his bottom lip, picked at the hem of his shirt, then paced around a bit. He had startled hard when his dad came inside roughly ten minutes later, though all he got was an inquisitive quirk of an eyebrow in return.

“You okay?” His father had asked, with not a small amount of concern. Jeez, he must have looked really freaked out. Not good.

“I’m fine,” Ritsu said, taking a few deep breaths. He was fine, everything was fine. Nothing was broken- well, maybe Shigeo’s door lock. Oh well. “We were just talking and I… said something I guess I shouldn’t have.” He still didn’t know exactly why his brother got so anxious, and had to swallow back an intense wave of nervous irritation about it. “I tried to say sorry-”

“Nah,” his father waved his worry away easily. “Give him some space, you know how he is.”

Ritsu nodded, and yet he still wondered, did he ?

The thought plagued him all night, while guilt and fear gnawed at his stomach. More than anything, Ritsu was upset with himself. At being scared again, at feeling helpless again, at repeating the same mistakes, again . His aura, seemingly always eager to soak up his anxieties, rolled off his skin in viscous waves.

Inevitably, he wore himself out with worrying, and fell into a light slumber for the next six hours. When he woke again, it was five minutes before his alarm. This was notable given the fact he prided himself on waking at least thirty before it ever struck.

Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Ritsu turned off his alarm that rarely ever sounded. He exhaled and stared at his ceiling, basking in the late spring warmth. The sunlight filtered through his window like honey, suffusing an exquisite calm throughout the room. A large shadow passed by, and Ritsu felt more than saw Shou Suzuki enter his vicinity.

Separating them was only a pane of glass, but his aura was right next to him and it was unhindered by the physical barrier. One second, the light was bending around his form like a soapy film, and the next he was visible. Ritsu was still too sleepy- and too familiarized with his presence- to feel even a modicum of surprise.

Suzuki said nothing, just stared at Ritsu hawkishly before pointing down at the window lock to be let in.

“Are you a vampire?” Ritsu asked, more so mumbling to himself as he unlatched the lock and slid up the glass.

The red-haired esper blinked owlishly, then barked a single rough laugh. “What’s up, dude?”

“Hm. Fine,” he muttered vaguely, “You know your shadow still shows up when you’re invisible, right?” No answer. Ritsu sat back on his bed, giving Suzuki space to freely enter his room, yet he did not. His hesitation was not helping disprove Ritsu’s vampire theory. “…Come in?”

Ritsu knew how to read people- or rather, had himself entirely convinced he knew how- but espers were still an overall mystery to him. Despite feeling their auras, and despite being thoroughly inoculated via proximity and magnitude, he still struggled. Suzuki, along with Shigeo, were masters at façade in their own unique ways. For the millionth time, Ritsu could not decipher the piercing ice cool stare Suzuki gave him. In the next second it had already broken into a small wry grin. He always looked like he was plotting some trouble, and often in fact was. 

“Where’s your brother?” Suzuki diverted.

“Uh, in his room. Asleep.”

Suzuki cocked one eyebrow, and then his head. “You sure?”

“He doesn’t get up this early,” Ritsu stated. He’d been sleeping more nowadays, as well.

Suzuki hummed. He waited a few moments, tensed like a cat measuring the distance to leap before making the jump. Then, he entered, and paused as if expecting to be caught in a trap. When no such thing happened, Suzuki finally relaxed more, and gave Ritsu another grin. Ritsu rolled his eyes in turn.

The other esper made no comment on the state of his room, because he had already exhausted any one he could make before. Though he hadn’t come by recently, he had done this song and dance multiple times over now. Suzuki had slotted himself into Ritsu’s routine.

“Wanna tell me what you’re doing here?” Ritsu inquired, arms folded to show he meant business despite his bed head and pajamas.

“Just checking in on my bro,” Suzuki snarked. Everything he said sounded vaguely backhanded. Especially if he was being sincere. He shifted on his feet and rolled his shoulders back, face set in a discomforted overexaggerated grimace. “Geez, how do you relax in here?”

“It’s… my room,” Ritsu answered obliviously.

“Guess you’re used to it,” Suzuki said, giving one more hefty shrug.

“Uh. What?”

“I mean your- ah,” Suzuki froze for a second. His eyes widened minutely, and he swallowed roughly. “Yep. There it is.”

“Uh?” Ritsu articulated. He was about to ask for an explanation again, before it reared its head and made itself abundantly known.

Faint glimmers in the air, sharp and razor-thin, had snakes around his friend’s arms and legs. As if trapped in the center of an invisible spider web, Suzuki was motionless save for his darting eyes. He glanced to the right, through the few walls that separated Ritsu’s room from his brother’s, then back to the younger Kageyama sibling in front of him. He gave a lopsided smile.

“Asleep, huh?” He didn’t have long to bask in his smartassery before being yanked up to the ceiling, like a puppet being hoisted away after curtain call.

“Oh shit,” Ritsu said, and then his door swung open, and his older brother stepped in.

Shigeo was calm. He hadn’t even lifted a hand, the way telekinetics usually do to better grasp the immateriality of it. Truthfully he looked almost bored. It was difficult to determine whether he was simply feigning nonchalance. Ritsu didn’t have time to tell. Suzuki peered down from his spot by the fan overhead.

“You should dust up here,” he supplied helpfully.

“Who,” Shigeo turned, but didn’t bother looking upward, “are you supposed to be.”

“The main character,” Suzuki stated shamelessly and instantaneously.

Shigeo’s face curled into something different, something pissed . Ritsu couldn’t remember the last time his brother looked so completely irritated. Maybe the closest thing to it was when he beat the crap out of that 7th Division Claw asshole. In any case, the look he gave Suzuki filled Ritsu with unease.

Then he wondered if Shigeo actually even recognized him. When had they even talked, if at all? It must have been only briefly, and a while ago. Did this Shigeo know him? If so, he surely didn’t like him.

“This is Suzuki,” Ritsu supplied helpfully, “you remember him, right?” He pointedly ignored the bemused look his friend was giving him. 

“ Tch ,” Shigeo all but hissed. Even that was weird, in and of itself. “Yeah.” Why ? His unanswered question lingered.

“Well- he’s my friend.”

And despite the anger smoldering in his eyes, his older brother shifted his gaze upon Ritsu with sheer exasperation . In that instant, he truly felt like the younger of the two, reprimanded with a single glance. He felt the immature need to retort that Shigeo was one to talk, what with the company he elected to keep around himself. Not that Teru or Tome were bad people, just exceptionally strange in their own unique ways.

“I see,” his older brother said plainly.

“Yes.”

Suzuki glanced between them, electing to remain silent for the time being.

“… So can he stay a while?” Ritsu asked, more out of defiance than respect, daring his brother to say no.

Shigeo tilted his head slightly, “is he going to burn the house down again?” At that, Suzuki had the good manners to look away with polite contrition.

It could have been a joke, but with his brother it was always best to err on the side of literal. “No.”

Evidently satisfied by that, Shigeo nodded and walked away. As he disappeared, the air became less dense. It wasn’t like you could truly escape the radius of his aura within the house. It wore the space like a hermit crab snuggled into its shell. However, he seemed to intentionally retract from the area to give them both some breathing room. It made Ritsu believe he didn’t entirely hate Suzuki, after all. Said esper eventually drifted back down to ground level.

“Well that was strange,” the redhead stated, though his tone lacked much surprise. “What’s up with him?” Again, his hawkish gaze scoured Ritsu’s face.

“It’s…,” nothing , part of his mind wanted to say. Instead, it was supplemented with, “a long story.”

The explanation took a while. At a certain point, it was getting later into the morning, and Ritsu paused to tell his parents that he had a friend come over. His mom gave him a skeptically displeased look when he told her she didn’t need to open the front door for him. Too bad Suzuki didn’t bring any free vacation vouchers this time.

It was the weekend, so neither his mom nor dad had work. Presently, his whole family had ended up in the downstairs living room watching some game show. It was like they were all patiently waiting to ambush Ritsu and Suzuki whenever they finished their talk. Ritsu was just grateful no one came upstairs to eavesdrop through the door or something.

“... So, anyways. Yeah,” Ritsu finished his lecture limply. Most of his nervous energy had expended itself by then. 

Suzuki was contemplative, having absorbed all the information Ritsu had just dumped on him. It was many long seconds before he spoke. “My dad… he can stockpile energy. I can, too, though he’s better at it than me. Anyways, when he was trying the whole world domination thing, he had absorbed so much energy that- it was like- like he was just wearing his body, you know?” He shook his head slightly, like he was even confusing himself. 

“Your psychic energy is a piece of you. A big piece. It’s one thing to absorb into it to make it grow. It’s another thing to separate it, and then let it feed itself. No wonder he always seemed so… detached.” Suzuki appeared genuinely disturbed at the idea, though Ritsu failed to completely grasp it. That fact alone made Ritsu upset. He was missing something vital, and his pride was loathed to have it pointed out to him.

“What are you saying?” He was getting tired of his friend talking in circles, and was impatient to get some real answers.

“I’m saying he needs to have not done what he did.”

“Very helpful. Thanks.”

“Ha, but seriously,” Suzuki grew morose, “I don’t think you can understand it. You awakened your powers not even a year ago.” He nodded his chin, “what about him?”

“I… I don’t know, since he was four, maybe?” Ritsu remembered a summer day, a dry heat and strong breeze, a scraped knee and a toy airplane. “Since I can remember, really. It could have been longer.”

Suzuki was the only person in which Ritsu had confided this category of discussion. Even then, he hadn’t said very much. Just that his brother was strong, and he had been jealous. From only that, the other esper had been able to deduce far more than Ritsu was comfortable actually saying.

It happened even now. With just those few sentences, he might as well have given Suzuki an encyclopedia on Shigeo. His eyebrows lifted, and he nodded, absorbing the information. “I see.”

“See what ? What am I missing?” Ritsu interrogated. “ Please explain. He’s,” he lowered his voice again, “he’s having a really hard time.” He still remembered Shigeo’s sheer panic last night, and his general moodiness bordering on depression up to now.

Suzuki hummed, frowning in his deeper contemplation. However, his pouting lower lip actually made him look more juvenile. Suddenly, he stuck out his arm, as if preparing to blast something away with sheer force of will. 

“Your psychic abilities are part of you,” he reiterated, keeping his arm up and fingers splayed. “Like your eyes, or skin, or your stomach or heart. It has a function, and you hardly think about the more complicated parts.

“For most people, it’s just seeing ghosts or having a really good sense of direction. Some people can bend objects just by thinking. There’s lots of ways ESP can work.” Suzuki continued to stare at the wall, beyond the wall, into some gaping maw of the unknown. “Your heart beats without even thinking about it. You breathe without telling yourself to. Psychic energy goes through you like blood, or air, or electricity.”

Ritsu absorbed this information with a silent intensity, and resisted the urge to say something smartass, like Duh, I know that already . He was only mildly startled when Suzuki turned his way. “Now imagine pulling that apart. Piece by piece. Get it now?”

It was… a uniquely gruesome idea. Ritsu’s mind drifted to frayed electrical wires, the length of a nerve, the hot metallic explosion of pain, and bone scraping against concrete. He recalled vividly how energy pulsed from his skin like fresh blood from an open wound, like water cleansing the very marrow of his bones. His stomach clenched with nausea and unease.

To Ritsu, he had dug into the depths of his psyche and exacerbated every crack until his circuitry was attuned to ESP. He wallowed in hate and shame, invited an evil spirit into his vessel, and hurt others in the process all as a twisted expression of trying to survive… Had his brother felt the inverse? As he watched Ritsu lay motionless and bandaged, had he been trying to uproot everything?

Once, their family had visited relatives on a rural patch of farmland where rice paddies and potato fields flourished with ease. Ritsu remembered struggling to pull up a large cluster of tubers, feeling the vibrations of roots snapping apart beneath his hands and muscles burning with exertion. He remembered feeling the earth adamantly resist his efforts as he pulled, and pulled, and pulled .

Abruptly, the enormity of the situation became apparent. The unknown gaped beneath Ritsu’s feet, ready to swallow him whole. He was utterly, painfully out of his depth with this.

Lost in his own thoughts, he was completely blindsided by Suzuki’s next question. “Does he still scare you?”

“Wh- this isn’t about me,” Ritsu retorted indignantly, schooling his expression and aura into a more composed shape, smoothing out the jagged edges. Suzuki stared at him.

Ritsu sighed. “A little, I guess. Not that he means it.” He felt at the back of his head, impulsively touching the scar that lingered there. “I’m not as scared as I used to be, but still… He really is struggling. I think figuring this out would make everyone happier, is all.”

If it came down to it, Ritsu could fight his brother again. He had the strength and confidence for it now. He also had Suzuki to back him up, if necessary. He may have a flare for the theatrics and an exceedingly hard head, but he was reliable and cunning and loyal. Ritsu didn’t need much else. Ritsu wasn’t an expert on friendliness beyond surface-level social niceties and practical, objective discussions, and didn’t feel a particular longing for friendship beyond the few he had already compiled. Suzuki, with his headstrong attitude and perceptiveness had more than cleared Ritsu’s convoluted list of requirements.

“Ritsu,” his friend said after a beat, “it’s nice you want to help your brother with all this, but you should accept that there’s some things you just can’t do.”

“I get that. I tried telling him to talk to our parents. He pretty much had a panic attack just thinking about it.” Ritsu huffed a sigh. Then, a realization dawned on him. “Wait a second, aren’t you super connected? There’s no way you don’t know plenty of espers.” Experienced and knowledgeable ones who understood the mechanics of extrasensory powers more than Ritsu did.

“Not many good ones,” Suzuki frowned. “Trust me.”

“But some good ones, right?” Ritsu insisted. “Literally even just one.”

“I mean…,” the redhead leaned back with reproach, “there’s a couple research labs that study psychic abilities that my dad looked into to take them into Claw. The Awakening Lab was one of them, actually.”

Ritsu’s brief twinkle of optimism was dashed against the rocks. If the Awakening Lab served as a litmus test for other researchers, the bar was on the floor. Then again, maybe not all of them were the daydream of a trust-fund manchild. Perhaps some of them even used the scientific method.

Watching his friend deflate, Suzuki rushed to tack on an addendum. “But- I guess- I could check in and see what they’re up to. If you want.”

Ritsu just gave a defeated groan, head bowed. His dour affect dimmed the already low lit room. Suzuki thought it made him look too much like a kicked puppy. It was hard to not feel compelled to help a kicked puppy.

“Ugh,” Suzuki rubbed at the creases of his eyes and the bridge of his nose with exasperation. “Fine. I do know some… government types. They could-”

“Huh?” Ritsu’s head shot back up. “Woah- no, no, no. The government ?”

“If anyone’s got knowledge on espers, it’s these guys.” 

“No way!” Ritsu denied sharply. “It’s honestly a miracle they haven’t already interrogated us.” His expression turned from shock to grave seriousness. “Suzuki. My parents don’t even know all of what happened then.”

It was Suzuki’s turn to look appalled. He floundered for something to respond with. “Dude.”

“I know,” Ritsu winced.

“ Dude .”

“ I know. ”

“They don’t know ?” Suzuki whisper-shouted.

“ No ,” Ritsu hissed back

“Ritsu. Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

Needless to say, it was fucked.

Chapter Text

Shigeo started exercising again, and it felt great.

He started small, not wanting to overexert himself. His club members taught him the importance of that. Onigawara, of course, was the one who pointed out to his face that he was always pushing himself too hard and getting hurt. He needed that. He appreciated Onigawara’s bluntness because he himself often missed subtlety when the others tried coddling him. 

Man, he missed exercising with them. Shigeo missed his friends. Were they his friends, or simply club members? At the very least, they were people he was aware of outside of his immediate family. They invited him to go running and lift weights and sometimes even get food. That counted for something, surely.

He ruminated on this while performing light stretches. He had lost a bit of the flexibility he was building up, but thankfully not too much. His fingers reached his ankles when he stretched his hamstrings, which was a minor personal feat Shigeo was quite proud of some time ago.

“ What are you doing,” a rough voice asked blankly. The disembodied words floated somewhere above him.

“Stretching,” Shigeo grunted from his awkwardly twisted position on the floor.

“You look like a dying cockroach,” Dimple said.

“Well, you look like a fart cloud. So.”

“The kid’s got jokes now. That’s new.”

Shigeo paused between reps and turned to the spirit, unable to stop a small smile from pulling at his face. He had missed Dimple, too. Said spirit just looked miffed. He looked the same as always- neon green, fuzzy around the edges, yet retaining an almost disturbing level of definition to his facial features. He always looked like he was merely pressing his face through a hole in reality, peeking in at Shigeo’s mundane life. At first it was mildly annoying, hardly worth the irritation it managed to scrape together. Now, it was something adjacent to comfort- or maybe just a different form of it.

Just then, Dimple’s expression smoothed out minutely. “How have you been holding up, Shigeo?”

“Great,” Shigeo replied earnestly. In the moment, he was simply basking in the satisfying sensation of stretched muscles, good memories, and familiar company. Nevermind stumbling through an awkward string of apologies to his brother yesterday, or a brief meltdown in the bathroom that resulted in him and his father fumbling with an accident-turned-educational faucet repair. In fact, it felt like that had wrung out all the badness that had compiled inside the vessel throughout the past week or so. Even the mild throbbing in his temples felt cathartic.

Dimple, however, did not look so convinced. “You sure?” He questioned with a frown.

“Yes,” Shigeo said firmly. He shifted his position to stretch the other foot. “Why?”

“Something has changed,” the spirit said vaguely. That in itself was odd given Dimple’s blunt and crude nature. “Your aura, maybe.”

This, of course, was neither a full truth nor complete lie. Spirits- and any properly attuned esper- could sense auras innately, the way the average person gauged temperature or air pressure. Elaborating any of the many mysteries of the supernatural was bound to fall short simply because they were just that. Both Dimple and Shigeo were aware of the fact, so the esper didn’t take the spirit’s vague claim too literally. 

Shigeo gave a noncommittal shrug. Dimple returned with an scrutinizing look, one amorphous arm-like appendage stroking his fabricated chin pensively with scholarly affectation.

“Well,” the spirit continued, “glad to see your brain didn’t get completely turned to mush.”

Shigeo decided not to comment on that. He shifted to a butterfly position, breathing evenly. There had been a tightness in his left hip that he needed to work out. He really had been sitting around for too long.

Eventually, Dimple just couldn’t take the silence any longer. “Reigen has been worried about you. Keeps saying you haven’t been answering your phone. It’s really annoying, so can you tell him you’re not dead or whatever?”

“Agh,” he said. It felt like all the muscles he’d just loosened tightened back up again. “Hm.”

That name was like a punch to the gut. Shigeo had been punched in the gut before and it really, really hurt. He didn’t understand why thinking about Reigen made his stomach hurt, like he was in the middle of a fight or something. That was weird. 

“Come on,” Dimple whined like the scuzzy haggler he was, “just send him a text. I can’t be your messenger pigeon forever.”

“I know,” the esper mumbled. Theoretically, Dimple could do it forever. However, he should take responsibility. Be mature and responsible. Why was he avoiding this? “I know, but… I don’t know…”

“Well, which is it.”

“I don’t know what to say to him.”

“Try, ‘hey Reigen I’m not dead’,” Dimple offered blankly, “‘and stop telling Dimple what to do’.”

Shigeo thought about it. He paused and turned his attention to the emotion flitting about in his chest. It seemed… wispy. It flickered like the tail of smoke that trailed from a candle wick. The expired remnants of something that had burned fervently before. “I’m… nervous.”

“What, because of Reigen? Don’t be,” the spirit waved off jovially.

“Why am I? I don’t know.” Shigeo sat with the nervousness swirling and pooling in his cupped palms. Now that he had it, he didn’t know what to do with it.

The last time he saw Reigen, he had been covered in scratches, bruises, and a heaping helping of dirt and debris. His hair and his clothes were a bloody mess. His eyes were red and watery and he was dribbling snot and his face was making a bunch of weird expressions Shigeo had never seen before. He was a man deconstructed, stripped of all his lies until the sloppy truth had been plopped wetly at his feet. And he patted Shigeo on the back, gave him a comforting smile, and said the world would keep spinning. 

And it did.

Maybe it was spinning a bit too fast. Everything after that was blurry, because at some point he fainted and Reigen had to take him to the emergency room. Then Shigeo had stayed in the hospital and came back and he still hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t spoken to him once. Mentally, Shigeo could imagine a perfectly crisp business suit and neon pink tie and polished black dress shoes. He could envision the precise yet indecipherable gesticulations. He could almost taste the cheap ramen broth on his tongue and smell old AC vents barely masked by cheap incense.

Was it really any surprise that Shigeo didn’t feel a desire to return to that tiny office? What could Reigen possibly offer Shigeo that he hadn’t already attained? He didn’t need that man anymore. He could solve his own problems now, because he was better than before. Shigeo had changed, and everything was just fine now. He could brush off that nagging feeling of unease and avoid all that awkwardness now. Problem solved.

“I don’t think I’ll be going to the office anymore,” Shigeo decided in that very instant. He expected a weight to lift from his chest, but it did not. It only shifted a few millimeters. That was confusing.

The toxic green spirit just blinked at him, brows scrunched in bemusement, “Wait, really? For real this time?”

“Yes.” Something in his head flipped and flopped, wiggling behind his eyes and sinuses until reaching his tongue to say, “no.”

Dimple gave him a patronizing look, “Shigeo, how do you ever expect to get a girlfriend when you’re so indecisive?”

The thing in him writhed, and before he could grab hold of it, it slipped from his mental grasp and struck out at the offending apparition. The haste with which it acted belied its confidence, but not its intention, because it seemed to do little more than bat at Dimple like he was a well-worn cat toy. The ghost flinched, and Shigeo gaped.

“Ow- hey- what do you think you’re doin’!?” The specter sniped while the esper’s aura- that otherness - continued to barrage him with minor picks and pokes and prods. Needle pricks of polychromatic aura flashed before him, entirely beyond his control. Beyond his reach, yet almost within view. Shigeo tried to stop it- as satisfying as it was to occasionally push Dimple’s buttons- but he couldn’t figure out how . The otherness felt like a deep, dark sea rolling under his feet, a yawning hedonistic void that felt so foreign he couldn’t help but recoil.

“Uh,” Shigeo said numbly, “um.”

Stop that , he tried to think forcefully, tried to wrestle his aura back into his mind. It was like someone had taken it and placed it on a very high shelf, out of reach. A cat that had caught a sparrow, busying itself with plucking out its feathers while perched in a tree. It was as if it was taunting him, daring him to make it stop, knowing full well he couldn’t. So he watched it toy with Dimple like a pin-cusion for a little longer, until it grew bored and slunk back into whatever hole in his mind it usually took residence in. 

The gaseous blob of Dimple’s form looked only a little bit frayed at the edges, and his expression only betrayed a slight look of disgruntlement. That didn’t mean he wasn’t upset (Shigeo had learned some time ago that sometimes expressions, words, and feelings didn’t always match so perfectly) but Dimple was someone who readily voiced complaints. The room could be a single degree warmer, and he would find a way to nitpick one’s life choices about it.

“Geez, kid,” Dimple huffed, “you know I didn’t mean it.” His too-tiny arms brushed off nonexistent dust from his face/body. It was the closest thing to an apology the old ghost could approximate to.

Shigeo considered lying. He truly considered just ignoring it and turning to other matters. Dimple would let him, the way friends do with teasing and jokes. 

However, this was a rare moment of lucidity for him, a brief time frame in which he didn’t feel like a walking shadow of a person drifting through the day. He could trust Dimple with anything and everything. Dimple would accept his deepest of secrets, had seen more of his weaknesses than anyone else, and truly, honestly cared. Not to mention, he was a literal evil spirit. Sometimes a defunct moral compass was the perfect instrument for judgment.

“Dimple,” he swallowed warily, “can I tell you something important?”

“Why don’t you let me possess you?” Dimple suggested. As per usual.

“Hm,” Shigeo considered, conflicted.

“I could solve this in like, two seconds flat. I just need access to your brain,” the spirit continued his sales pitch. “Whenever I’ve possessed you before, you were either outside your vessel or unconscious, so this oughta be different.”

“I don’t know, Dimple… What if you get hurt?” Shigeo worried. He was just a spirit, after all. Despite their looks, they were surprisingly fragile. Like spiders.

“You saying you wanna hurt me? Is that it?” Dimple groused.

“No!” Shigeo held his hands up defensively. “It’s just…”

He didn’t trust whatever was lingering in his mind to not treat Dimple the way people often treated spiders.

The spirit huffed a long-suffering sigh. Then, he extended one tiny hand to the esper. “Come on, partner. We’re supposed to be a team.”

That did it. Shigeo relented. “I trust you,” he took the small appendage in one hand. “Please be careful.”

It was hard just letting himself get possessed. Shigeo figured it was simply reflexive for someone with psychic powers to set a strict boundary between the world and their vessel. He recalled the feeling of total concentration when he had an out-of-body experience, shedding his peripheral aura and relaxing until he reached the precipice of it. Then, two things occurred almost simultaneously.

First, Dimple possessed him. There was a minuscule electric shock, then a cloying coldness. Secondly, the invading spirit barely had time to settle in his vessel before the other one dove in and snapped him up in a psychic grip. Dimple was plucked like a ripe tomato from the vine and held far away from Shigeo’s motor neurons. What had appeared as an opportunity before him had flipped into a sudden lethal trap.

In spite of that, Dimple didn’t panic. Rather, he extended into the vessel’s sensory pathways, absorbing the information like a sponge. While he couldn’t force the body to do anything- physically or psychically- that didn’t stop him from appraising its functioning. Possession allowed him to simply take a looser form defined vaguely by the physical parameters of a body. There was no linearity- everything existed in layers and tangents. He couldn’t entirely be pinned down, rather he was denied access to certain areas and corralled into a smaller volume of space.

Whatever it was felt as immensely dense as a thick wall of pure lead, but it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. It was a condensation of energy and emotion that exuded such an air of refined confidence and dextrous power that it could easily be mistaken as something divine. It was that seed of something great that the spirit had so desperately wanted to nurture. It was Shigeo- albeit another facet of him.

Dimple recalled this sensation from a few weeks ago, though he was wearing Reigen as a meat suit at the time instead. He transmitted a mental hello, not so much words as the memory of greeting. It was faster than vocalizing it, and they were useless so deep down anyways.

A wave of verdant light, a candle in a long dark hallway, flecks of shattered glass.

The spirit wasn’t really expecting much in return, he was just making sure that Shigeo didn’t fry him by mistake. He seemed to be playing the part as the esper’s psychic immune system, ready to phagocytize any paranormal intruders. Honestly, it was a risk communicating with that volatility. He could just as easily snuff him out of existence like this, so the message doubled as a distraction of sorts. Dimple had never encountered anything quite like it from anything or anyone else. Though, of course, this was Shigeo. He was an extraordinary case even among rarities. The ghost probed at his vessel’s structures. He noted a dull tugging along the shoulder, ribs, and hip flexor, casually subsumed by a bright injurious streak that raced along Shigeo’s temple and curled to the back of his head.

That must have been from the car accident. Humans were so terribly fragile. Shigeo’s powers must have cushioned the blow a bit, otherwise he probably would’ve wound up as a smear on the asphalt.

The spirit was roused from that particularly morbid musing as he raced along the esper’s neural pathways.

Tactile sensation of hands brushing, coppery scent of blood, warmth blooming like a spring flower, rising to a cacophonous crescendo of pure sensation and light and color impossible to entirely interpret.

It was terrifyingly incredible, as if the very concept of emotions like elation and joy and love were being and the ghost was a transient experience in comparison. It was painfully nostalgic, ringing a bell far, far away in the distant past. For a moment, it felt like Dimple had returned to a place he had always known. It was an instant that felt like forever. Dimple was briefly squeezed so tight he felt he would pop like a balloon. Then, he was easily released, and the wall that had once seemed impenetrable unfolded into something light and permeable. It was Shigeo’s way of granting him access to roam wherever the spirit desired.

Dimple didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

Instead, he steeled himself and went back to parsing the esper’s nervous system. Everything in the periphery seemed entirely normal, so he traced the braided plexuses of nerves along the spinal cord and up into the brain.

“Ugh. Is this what getting hit by a car feels like?” Dimple grouched. Now that he could, he flexed Shigeo’s hands and rolled his neck to loosen up some of the lingering tension. 

“I’ve been feeling better recently,” Shigeo contended.

“Better at ignoring it, maybe,” the spirit snarked. While his right side felt exceedingly tender, the left was equally so from head to foot. Thankfully no severe road rash, but Dimple knew there were recent gashes specifically on his head. He had been avoiding it, but now Dimple waded into his brain matter. It felt like walking across a minefield. Not getting spiritually eviscerated was mostly guesswork and luck, though Shigeo hovered like a dark and ominous cloud of a supervisor. Dimple just prayed he wouldn’t be in too many pieces after this.

Most of it was average for a middle-schooler- immature and still growing. The entirety of the organ pulsed with the holographic glow of Shigeo’s aura, typical for an esper. There were a few bruised areas that flickered and wavered, not out of the ordinary for a recent concussion-receiver. Dimple didn’t linger too much on the cerebral cortex.

There was no one place where esper’s produced their psychic abilities. It spread all across their brains and bodies, connected to the other side- an imprecise and fluid place of contingencies that was best assumed by the mind’s eye. Just thinking about it made Dimple recall how the spirit of Mogami Keiji was able to make it his twisted little circus, and he shivered.

Deeper, infinitesimally smaller, bumping along electrons and positrons, something was cloistered there. A metaphysical tear and fold, reality bending and twisting in on itself to justify the existence of this anomaly. It pushed and pulled at the waves of the world, a dark moon dictating the invisible tide. It beckoned to the old spirit with a grotesque and morbid allure, and simultaneously repulsed him. Dimple didn’t know what exactly to make of it from a distance, and so he ventured inward.

The darkness pulled him in with a gentleness, and all color and light disappeared entirely. The world pulled over like a black shroud, like death eclipsing, turning over restlessly in its sleep. And there was nothing and everything, nowhere and everywhere. There was something growing, a black and luminous fire that burned ravenously to exist.

To tear at the flesh of the world with teeth. To devour experience whole. To live. Live. LIVE.

There was a terrible grating sensation of being demolecularized, millions of needle teeth piercing and picking away at his spiritual form. Dimple released a panicked pulse of energy, using it to rocket himself up and away and back into reality from a hairline fracture in the dark space. After that, he unstuck himself from Shigeo’s mortal vessel, and was relieved when he became weightless once again. If he breathed air, Dimple would surely be gasping for it now.

Once he got his bearings, the spirit turned to the unpossessed boy. “You alright there, Shigeo?” He asked, trying to relax and not show the esper just how badly the experience rattled him.

Shigeo wasn’t looking up at where the ghost hovered overhead. Instead, his face was angled down and away, staring at his shaky, upturned palms dappled with specks of bright red, and sniffled. Oh shit , Dimple thought. He didn’t mean to hurt the kid.

“I-I’ll go get Ritsu-” Dimple started, then paused when Shigeo finally turned to look up at him.

His eyes were as sanguine as the blood dribbling from his nostrils, unsteady and excited.

“Why?” He smiled, “I feel great .”