Chapter Text
“Arataka, stop picking at your face.”
“Mhm.”
“Arataka.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Arataka.”
“Yes, yes !” he makes a show of dropping his hand down to his side, loudly slapping on his thigh in annoyance. Next to him Chizue clicks her tongue–he can hear the rolling of her eyes as she speeds her already brisk walking pace and leaves him having to pick up his much shorter legs to catch up with her and not get left behind. “What are we eating tonight ?”
“There have to be bento boxes left from last weekend.”
Reigen groans. “Not these again ! Let’s just get MobDonald’s.”
“We are not going to MobDonald’s tonight, I’m tired.” she says, annoyance clear in her tone.
“If you were tired, you would’ve come to pick me up by car.”
“I was too tired to drive.”
“But not too tired to walk like thirty minutes in these fucking fields ?”
“Language.”
Kicking a stone out from the non-existant path they were trekking through, Reigen huffs his cheeks and sticks his tongue out but doesn’t say anything else. The itchy ache on his forehead is starting to become unbearable again so he brings a finger up to pick at the scab to distract himself from the fact his school uniform is collecting new scratches from the tall weeds surrounding him and also to keep himself from saying something impolite to his sister.
Even now she is a few steps ahead of him, back turned as she seems to keep walking faster and faster and faster until Reigen has to run just to keep her at arm’s length.
A really odd sensation of deja-vu settles in his gut.
“Arataka.”
“Yeah ?” He manages to pull out the scab and has the decency to feel bad when his index comes back red and sticky.
“Mom cleaned your room today.”
Reigen doesn’t immediately understand why that is a problem but Chizue has stopped walking and all he can see is her tense rectangular back in the middle of the crimson-bathed field she insisted on walking him through whenever she picked him up from school.
“Okay ?” he says.
“She found the cigarettes under the floorboards.”
Ah. So that’s what it was. “Do you know if she told dad ?”
“She did.”
Double ah. Reigen really thought he was the only one who knew about the hiding spot and had gotten quite comfortable with it through the years. He absent-mindedly congratulates himself for having managed to keep the packages hidden for almost a year but all sense of desperate pride disappears when Chizue turns around and looks at him.
The disappointment in her expression is so blatant it makes all the air in his lungs burst out in an undignified cough.
“Arataka Reigen.” She begins with his full name which is never a good thing. It always felt unfair to Reigen that on top of his controlling mother he also had a sister twelve years older than him who acted like a third, sometimes even more annoying parent. “How long has this been going on ?”
He doesn’t like her tone, so he doesn’t answer. She seems to dislike that.
“Not only is smoking dangerous for you but it is also dangerous for us. As we share a house and all breathe in the same air you cannot think that putting us all in danger because of a selfish need is w–”
“Can you not do that ? Mom’s gonna chew me out and dad will beat me up enough. I don’t need your shitty opinion on top of that.” he snaps, making it a point to cross his arms over his chest and stand his ground.
As his sister bristles, face darkening further he starts to feel less and less confident in his ability to defend himself. “No, I will do that.” she hisses. “I do everything I can for you to have a good, happy life, and I will see that you do not waste it on toxic habits.”
That actually gets a bark out of him. “A happy life ?!”
“I tutor you in school and you have good grades and I make sure you eat when mom and dad are busy. I give you everything–”
“Stop it !” he yells without being able to repress it, his chest heaving. “Stop saying that, okay ? I’m not smoking because I’m fucking sad or whatever. I do it because I want to, and I like it.”
“You like letting cancer grow in your lungs ? You like shortening your lifespan every time you take a silly drag ?” she accuses venomously.
Again, Reigen refuses to answer. He doesn’t see himself graduating high school to begin with so a few years less or more in his life don’t feel like such a big deal, but he doesn’t say any of that. Instead he looks down and he exhales slowly through his nose and tries to remember what he used to do when he got a beating from his father. It had been a while.
“Can we just go home ?” he pleads.
“No, yeah, of course.” Chizue is buffering as she speaks, passing a hand through her hair and disheveling her head in the process. The sarcasm dripping from her voice is acid like and for a second Reigen wishes she really was killing him with her words. “Let’s just go home and not talk about it so you can keep taking such good care of your body and–your head is bleeding by the way, huh ?”
Stunned, he presses his palm against the wound he knows he just opened up as she keeps rambling. The grass around them swings wildly along an unnatural wind, effectively opening a new hole in Reigen’s thin schoolbag. “I don’t understand why you insist on being mean to yourself, Arataka. It makes us all really upset, you know ?” she ends in an uncharateristically weak voice, making his stomach lurch.
“I’m not doing it to make you upset. It just happens. I’m not asking you to worry for my sake, because I’m fine.”
“Sure you’re fine. The cutter under your pillow also says you’re fine, right ?”
He thought it couldn’t get worse, so it does. His entire body is overwhelmed by pins and needles and the urge to throw up grows exponentially, but he wills himself to stay calm.
“What is that supposed to mean ?”
“Do you really hate yourself that much ?”
It feels like the world around them is collapsing. The evening sky drops on him like a large block of jelly and swallows him whole, cutting out all air and blurring the edges of his vision. There is so much red both surrounding him and under his long sleeves and it’s so hard to breathe, so hard to say something that wouldn’t sound damning.
Chizue hates him. Chizue hates him because he is a slob and because their parents hate him too, and she’s the perfect good child and he’s not. Chizue looks like she is going to start crying even though she should understand why he hates himself, because she does too, just like everyone else.
He is going to be sick.
“I just cannot keep helping you if you refuse me.” she says slowly.
“I don’t need your help.” he answers automatically–it’s a natural reflex.
“Okay.”
Then the world around them really does explode and Reigen remembers that he is twenty eight years old and hasn’t spoken a word to Chizue in over ten years. He remembers going home that night and curling up in a corner of the living room as his father got busy, and he remembers Chizue leaving him to clean up after himself all alone.
He remembers fishing his package of cigarettes out of the trash once everybody went to sleep and he remembers smoking half of it in one go in the backyard that night. That had made him puke in a bush and stay awake until dawn and completely flunk a math test the next day, but he didn’t have the motivation to feel bad about it and had ended up filing the incident among all his other beatings–inconsequential and unimportant.
Reigen hasn’t stopped smoking since his sixteenth birthday, but he has stopped seeing his parents and sister who kept reminding him how big of a problem he was. He doesn’t know why he calls after Chizue and doesn’t know why he is surprised when she turns him down and makes him understand she knows he still hates himself, so many years later.
It’s unfair. It’s unfair and he hates it because she is his big sister and she should tell him it’s fine and then he remembers she had, she had wasted years of her life trying to convince him he shouldn’t allow himself to believe he deserved nothing but parallel cuts and coughing fits. Chizue had given up on him because he had forced her to do so.
He dissolves in Serizawa’s embrace and tries to disappear; it’s all he’s ever been good at anyways. It’s a miracle the man is still working with him after so long and it’s so scary to think about as he repeats that he doesn’t want to leave.
Before he knows it they are the next day and he wakes up on a foreign futon with a dry throat and horrible back pain. A digital clock that displays numbers in green instead of the red he is used to tells him it is seven thirty am, so he gets up without really knowing what to do next. The room is small, almost completely bare save for the minimum required in a bedroom–closet for clothes, small desk and chair, and a less required shelf filled with mecha figurines. Reigen has no idea what to do with the cocktail of information.
When he gets up and haphazardly rearranges the cushion and covers on the bed, Reigen realizes he is wearing clothes that definitely aren’t his from the unfamiliar smell of detergent sticking to his skin. That and they do not have burnt sleeves, which is enough of a sign in itself. He opens the door and enters a modest living room connected to a kitchenette in which a tall man busies himself.
“Serizawa.” he says out of the blue, his voice catching up to the facts before his brain. His associate turns around, pan in hand, and his eyes widen.
“Reigen ! You woke up !”
He waits a few seconds for a follow-up but Serizawa gives him nothing, looking stunned in contemplative silence as he stares him up and down. “Ah, I did. Good morning.”
“Good morning.” he answers, face finally breaking in a smile so blinding it pulls his entire face apart and softens the angles of his body. Reigen swallows an acrid lump.
“Am I still dreaming ?”
“Huh ?”
The smile falls and an eyebrow is raised. “I…I had a weird dream with my sister earlier, and I don’t remember coming back here, and this is just–well, you know, doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense to wake up in a foreign house and you’re here for so–”
Reigen closes his mouth around a spoonful of something. He blinks once and the psychically levitating handle pushes itself a bit further down his throat so he grabs it to show he has it, and chows down to make the crease between Serizawa’s eyebrows smoothen out. His bitter spit is overtaken by the warmth of the metal along with the…
“Omurice ?” He cleanly pulls the spoon out and watches it levitate back into Serizawa’s outstretched hand.
“I tried.” he shrugs the utensil in the sink. “Good thing you didn’t see it before you ate it, because you would’ve never guessed what it was. Let’s have breakfast.”
“Okay.” says Reigen and he sits down at the kitchen table.
The food tastes a little bit weird now that he takes the time to actually process what he is ingesting, but he doesn’t mind it. The textures are pleasant against his tongue and he has tea to wash things away with, so he dumbly gets down to the task that is filling his stomach without really thinking about it. He is kind of far away, right now.
Once he has eaten half an omurice and drank like two sips of tea, Serizawa talks. “You were really out of it after yesterday’s job so I brought you back to my home to make sure nothing happened. We were paid extra, by the way.” he enunciates clearly, focusing his entire attention on his explanation.
“I’m sorry you had to do that.” Reigen answers, because he doesn’t find anything else to say about the situation.
“It’s alright. Dimple possessed you a good chunk of the way so you must be pretty spent anyways.”
“I feel a bit sore.”
“Yeah ? Me too, turns out my sofa is too small for me.” Serizawa chuckles, blissfully unaware of how sickening the statement is.
“I’m really sorry.” he repeats, slower.
The tall man shakes his head and winces, digging the heel of his palm into the juncture between his neck and shoulder with a soft hum. “It’s really alright. After all the nights you let me spend at your flat, it’s only natural that I–are you crying ?”
Reigen tries to reply but his voice doesn’t make it out of his throat before dying out, so he just looks at the barely eaten omurice on his plate and withers as it caves in when a single drop of clear liquid falls on it. He wipes his eyes once, twice, takes a shallow breath and fully buries his burning face into his hands.
“Are you hurting ? Is there a problem ? Is the food bad ?” Serizawa is by his side in record time, droning above his shoulders like he is too scared to actually touch him.
A hiccup interrupts his words but he pushes through. “No, the food is great. There’s no problem. Why are you doing this for me ? Forget about it.”
“I’m glad you like my…experimental cooking.” two weights settle on his shoulders but he doesn’t look up. “I’m doing this because I want to, and because I care about you.” he says so simply it's borderline brutal.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Okay.”
Reigen pauses. He uncovers his face and looks up, meeting Serizawa’s unreadable face. “What ?”
“I said okay. It hurts me that you don’t believe it, but that means I just have to give you more proof to do so.”
“What ?” he repeats, brain not quite up to speed yet.
“It’s like how I don’t believe you when you say I’m a good person. I know you mean it, and I know I just have to keep working hard to accept it.” he states and his expression warms as he speaks, a smile reaching his eyes before it does his lips. “Let’s keep working hard together to become people we want to care about, right ?”
It’s like a tiny lightbulb flickers on at his friend’s words, illuminating a few corners of his brain he didn’t know were even there to begin with, and Reigen finds himself too taken aback to feel anything understandable. He isn’t crying anymore but it’s more due to how dry his eyes are than any form of emotional stability.
“Does that make sense ?” Serizawa asks when he doesn’t get an answer after a minute or two but he doesn’t move, a tinge of nerve slithering into his words.
With a gross snort, Reigen nods. “Yeah. I’ll do my best to help you get better, and we’re even.”
“We’re already even, Reigen. You don’t owe me anything.” his associate answers, sounding a little upset at the mention of fairness. Figures.
“That so ?” he asks with an amused lilt he hopes his partner notices. “I was certain I owed you a haircut and a shave, though.” and he watches the worry in the taller man’s face get cleanly replaced by something that he doesn’t have the confidence to call adoration.
“Mh. I had forgotten about that.” he muses.
“I’ll do it as many times as it takes for you to understand what they mean.”
Serizawa stops looking at him for the first time during the conversation, his eyes falling down on the breakfast table where their glasses and plates hover just an inch or so above the wood, all surrounded by a magenta glow that is so smooth it almost doesn’t feel like the man’s aura. They slowly regain their places without so much as a clink.
“Let’s finish our meal and get to it, then. We have work today.”
“Yeah, and I heard your boss is a real pain in the ass. Better not show up late.”
And as his associate regains his place with a good natured laugh Reigen allows himself to label the emotion he is feeling as hope because it is so bright he doesn’t want to call it what it actually is in the fear of turning it into something too blinding for him to handle. He will settle with hope for now and maybe, just maybe, someday he will grow the will to face it fully.
What he doesn’t know yet is that there is a new number saved into his phone which he will call three months from now, after having found it in himself to quit smoking for a full four weeks. He also doesn’t know he is going to clean the pink bear under his bed and bring it with him to his favorite ramen restaurant where he will offer it with a flourish and assorted hand gestures to a little girl whose hair will be tied in a single braid.
She will say it smells like lavender, and he will look up to her mother who will smile at him and ask about what bowl he prefers to usually order, and he will tell her so. She will also ask about the striped tie he will be wearing and when he had decided to stop hating its patterns and they will have a hearty laugh about it.
All of these are simple conjectures that might never take place, though. A lot of things can happen in three months.