Chapter Text
“...Mogami,” Kageyama begins, and the flatness of his voice is different. It takes Shou a moment to place, but when he does, his heart drops a little. It’s partly apathy, partly dissociation.
He knows, because it’s how he talked to his pops before the whole… Well. He doesn’t like thinking about it. Nevermind.
“Shigeo,” Mogami replies, and the smile on his face is so sickeningly sweet that Shou wants to puke. “Who’s this? A friend?”
“Yes.”
Simple, one-word answers. The Mob he knew, the Mob Reigen and Ritsu and Hanazawa talked about, was careful with his words, not monosyllabic. This was different.
This was wrong.
Mogami’s pleasant expression twists. “You know what I said about communicating with friends, right?”
Kageyama’s shoulders hunch, and Shou breaks through the barrier with a concentrated burst of power. He doesn’t know who this Mogami guy is, just that he’s clearly trouble.
“He didn’t communicate with me, asshole, I found this place myself,” he declares brashly, trying to catch Mogami’s attention. He succeeds; empty eyes focus on him instead, and he has to suppress a shudder.
“Oh? And why are you out here in the middle of nowhere?”
He bristles indignantly. “I lived here before you, so shut it. ’Sides, you kidnapped my friend! You’re stupid if you think I’m just gonna let that slide.”
Kageyama closes his eyes briefly; Mogami’s smile just widens, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“I see, I see.” And then he’s moving closer, and Kageyama’s aura flashes out again only to be smothered by the sickening aura right in front of them. In a last ditch effort, Kageyama pushes Shou a little behind him; Mogami chuckles, amused.
And then he disappears , and by the time Shou’s turned around he’s fiddling with his phone. “This is dangerous, you know,” Mogami chides, sounding almost… fatherly, maybe? He’s never heard a proper father speak, but Reigen seems to be giving it his best shot, so…
Fuck. Reigen – Ritsu. He needs his phone so he can tell Ritsu where his big brother is. Plus, Hanazawa would definitely have his head for this if he finds Kageyama and lets him slip through his fingers – that is, if Ritsu doesn’t kill him first.
“Wh– Give that back!”
Kageyama puts a hand on Shou’s upper arm, holding him back from launching himself at Mogami. Unfortunately for him, Shou spent, like, his entire childhood worming his way out of tighter grips than that.
He breaks free, clawing at the air where Mogami’s holding his phone. “Stop being such a dick, man!”
When his attempts yield no results except for a mild frown, Shou turns to his next-best weapon: his powers. He feels the familiar shroud of invisibility fall over him, and uses the brief confusion to swipe his phone.
Cold, achingly cold fingers close around his wrist, hard enough for him to hear a crack. In his shock, his invisibility melts away; Mogami’s blank eyes bore into his, unmoving.
“Maybe you do need to learn your lesson.”
That sentiment is familiar, and Shou persists through the pain: he bites Mogami’s arm as hard as he can. Beneath his teeth, his arm is corpse-stiff.
“Annoying brat,” Mogami mutters under his breath, and then he’s shaking Shou hard enough that he can feel his brain rattling around in his skull. Disoriented, he stops biting, and then he’s thrown into the opposite wall.
“Mogami,” Kageyama breathes, sounding closer than before. “Please don’t…”
“Now, now, Shigeo,” Mogami chides, voice swimming in and out of Shou’s aching mind, “you know how necessary these lessons are.”
Lessons…? Shou echoes weakly, darkness tugging at his vision.
—
( “is he going to be okay?” asagiri asks, looking down at suzuki with mild concern. it’s more than she would’ve shown back when they first met – and the six months after that – so mob takes it as the improvement that it is.
suzuki himself, though…
his face is scrunched up, going through minute shifts every few seconds, but it’s his aura that really worries mob. it flared once, right after mogami got him, then retracted so harshly it’s barely detectable.
“...i’m not sure.” the uncertainty makes him sick, sick, sick; if he hadn’t been kidnapped, suzuki wouldn’t have been in this situation. whatever happens when he wakes up is mob’s fault.
“let’s get him to a bed,” asagiri decides, standing up. “if he doesn’t wake up soon…”
as they carry suzuki over to his bedroom together, letting him fall onto the bed, he thinks hard. it’s only been a minute, maybe two, since suzuki was out, but that’s not a comfort. not here.
after all, mob was gone for six months, but it only appeared as though he’d been gone for half an hour. every second here is a week of torment in there; he’s seen enough of the hollow looks at claw’s headquarters to know that suzuki has more than his fair share of things to fear.)
—
Shou opens his eyes to grey, grey, grey. The walls – grey. The ceiling – grey. The floor, the door, the fucking lights – grey.
He recognises this place, and does not want to be here, even if he’s more concerned about how that Mogami bastard got him here in the first place. Reigen mentioned something about mind manipulation – a dream, then?
The door slams open with a loud, shuddering crash, and instinct has him shrinking back against the chair he’s strapped to. Faceless, nameless people walk in, carrying an assortment of test tubes and syringes on a rattling cart.
He recognises this, too. His attempts to free himself of the leather around his wrists become more desperate, cutting into his skin hard enough to draw blood.
“What the fuck are you doing?” He snaps, then recoils upon hearing his voice. It’s childish, high-pitched, like it was seven years ago. He chances another look at his hands, wary of looking away from the bustle of the scientists; his fingers are small and stubby.
The scientists spread out, ignoring him; a few cross over to a wall of monitors, powering up the computer. In response, the wires attached to his arms begin to thrum with electricity.
“You better let me go, or I’ll kill you! Seriously, I will,” he snarls, straining against the leather strap around his forehead, keeping his head secured to the back of the chair. “You’re so stupid, don’t you realise how shitty dad is?!”
One of them sighs. “If I have to hear the brat whine throughout the whole procedure, I’ll go deaf. Any arguments?”
None of the others speak up, and Shou watches with a pounding heart as the one who spoke picks up a syringe, the needle as long as his forearm, and fills it with a clear liquid. The familiar clinking of glass grates at his nerves.
“I’m not scared of you, assholes!” Shou cries. “You’re just yes-men, I bet, not an ounce of power between you! Let me go and maybe I won’t knock your teeth in.”
They approach, stony in their silence; he pulls on every ounce of energy in his body, digging into everything he has to send them flying back. Nothing happens; nothing responds. He’s powerless.
Everything suddenly seems so much brighter, burning his eyes as he fights against his bindings. A pricking sensation of stupid, helpless tears just makes everything worse, and he squeezes his eyes shut as he draws everything back into himself.
“Oh, give it a rest, you brat. Where’s all that bravado now?” A rough hand grips his hair, yanking his head to the side to expose his neck. The needle sinks into his artery, far too messily to be effective, and when they pull away he can feel a warm trickle seep from the wound.
Shou tries to open his mouth to retort – what would he even say? – but none of his muscles respond. His tongue is too heavy, turned to lead in his mouth, but he’s still hyperaware of everything around him.
Another of the bastards sighs, relieved. “So much better with peace and quiet. So, what did the boss ask for today? Hallucinogens or something, right?”
The first one shrugs, gesturing vaguely at the assortment of fluids in tubes and beakers. There’s only one syringe, already dirtied by the tranq.
“I say we just do whatever. ’S not like it’s going to matter, anyway.”
—
It’s five minutes later that Suzuki stirs, small at first, then jolting upwards with surprising force. Mob watches him carefully from the floor, Asagiri settled by the miniscule window.
Wide, wild eyes scan the room, lingering on Asagiri for a second – Suzuki goes tense, tense, tense – before landing on Mob. There’s no warning before Suzuki launches himself into his arms.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Mob says, voice low. “It’s only been a few minutes, here, and you’re okay.”
As if burnt, Suzuki reels back, frantically grabbing at his throat and wrists and biceps. Despite finding nothing there, he still looks unsettled, pulling back a trouser leg to check on the skin of his calf.
“What the fuck was that,” Suzuki manages finally, voice rough. It hits Mob, then, that he’s the same age as Ritsu; he looks young, and could only have been younger when he was hurt.
It makes something angry claw up in his chest, a quiet tick, tick, tick echoing through his skull. He ignores it as best he can.
“Mogami. He did the same thing to…” Asagiri , for the first time in a week, falters. “...to Kageyama and I. We were trapped in a mind world for six months, even though barely any time passed in the real world. He probably did the same thing to you.”
Suzuki stares at her again, expression twisted with a lack of recognition, before he shuts down altogether. He falls back into Mob’s arms, limp this time.
“That fucking sucked.”
It statles a laugh out of Asagiri, and Mob can’t help but echo the sentiment. “It did, yes.”
Carefully, wary of surprising Suzuki after what was undoubtedly an unpleasant experience, Mob lifts a hand to his hair and begins to stroke. It’s surprisingly soft, curling naturally at the nape of his neck, and Suzuki melts into the touch.
Vaguely, he thinks that Suzuki reminds him of a cat. If he could purr, he probably would be.
—
When Asagiri begins to yawn, they figure it’s time to go to bed.
Suzuki gets his hands on a spare pair of clothes – a t-shirt and loose joggers, instead of just using the pyjamas offered – and settles on one side of Mob’s bed. It’s clear he’s not moving any time soon, so Mob just slides in carefully on the other side.
There… really isn’t enough room. It’s not meant for two people, though Suzuki may be even shorter than Mob.
“Goodnight,” he says, not really expecting a reply. From the sudden tenseness at his back, Suzuki hadn’t been expecting the sentiment; they lie in silence for a long, long minute.
Then: “Night.”
It’s strangely uneven, like Suzuki’s not sure what the right answer is. The idea tugs at his chest – Claw didn’t seem like the type of place to tuck in kids and kiss them goodnight.
The night is peaceful enough; and, if Mob wakes up with Suzuki clinging to his arm tightly enough for it to go numb, he won’t say anything.
—
When he wakes up, Suzuki is already out of bed.
It takes Mob a moment to orientate himself, to remember that something happened yesterday to break up the monotony of his new life, but when he does he’s pushing himself up and desperately scanning the room.
If something happened to Suzuki while he was asleep, it’ll be on his head. He’s meant to be the most powerful, but what good is that if he lets others get hurt anyway?
(maybe, he thinks, it would’ve been better if Suzuki hadn’t shown up at all.)
His hands feel clammy as he gets changed, barely aware of the jumper he pulls over his head. Please, he thinks weakly, be downstairs.
Each individual step seems to stretch further and further away as he makes his way to the kitchen, being careful not to look at the shadows for too long.
And, as he approaches the kitchen, he can hear voices. One is Asagiri’s now-familiar drawl, flat in comparison to Suzuki’s spirited replies.
Pushing past the door, he’s greeted with the sight of Asagiri and Suzuki sat at the rickety kitchen table, bowls of cereal in front of each of them. There’s a third bowl, empty, in the middle of the table.
Suzuki seems to be in the middle of explaining something, given how he’s gesturing wildly and pointing at Asagiri with his spoon. Asagiri, in turn, looks entirely unimpressed, though her eyebrow is twitching.
“You realise that none of what you’re saying makes sense, right?” She interrupts the second Shou stops for breath - apparently his first in over two minutes.
“It would if you had powers,” he retorts, and Mob narrowly avoids being pelted in the head by some shapeless brown lumps. “Oh! Kageyama, tell Asagiri here that the sky really is green when it’s getting dark.”
Mob pulls his bowl towards himself, filling it with cereal and milk. He has a mouthful, then says seriously, “No.”
“See?” Asagiri says, at the same time as Suzuki says, “He didn’t deny it!”
There’s a beat of silence, in which Mob crunches his cereal. He’s not sure what it is; none of the boxes were labelled when they… arrived, and they’re each so nondescript that it’s difficult to differentiate between them.
It would be nice to have something else, he considers as his companions begin their shouting match louder than before, like some bread. Maybe pancakes.
Mogami doesn’t appear that day; Asagiri explains their usual routine to Suzuki when he asks why they’re so tense. It makes the boy preen.
“I guess he’s still recovering from my bite, huh?” He grins, running a hand through his hair. It’s almost difficult to reconcile this cocky attitude with the wide, empty eyes Mob had seen yesterday. “Anyway, what do you guys normally do for fun around here?”
“We still do our work,” Mob says, gesturing with his spoon at the piles of paper on a counter a little ways away. Suzuki’s expression is one of such disgusted offence that he almost feels embarrassed.
He stands stock-still in the kitchen, apparently dumbfounded, and only finds his voice when Mob and Asagiri spread out their current project - analysing a classic Mob’s never heard of, with language that’s too dense to understand.
“Wait, seriously? All day?”
Asagiri raises her eyebrows. The two of them seem to have rubbed each other the wrong way ever since Suzuki started talking; it’ll be a tough few weeks until they get used to each other’s presence. “Uh, yeah. What else should we do?”
“There’s gotta be something!” Suzuki stalks off, presumably to trawl the house over for some sort of entertainment. Mob shrugs, and turns back to the extract before him. Maybe Mogami would be able to explain it to him when he came back?
When Suzuki eventually wanders back in, defeated by the house’s bareness, he drags a chair out and props his feet up on the table. Asagiri tosses him one of their booklets; he covers his face with it.
Mob can’t help but smile.
—
They’re lounging together in the sitting room, not really saying much but content in each other’s company, when everything falls apart.
“Right,” Suzuki says from his place tucked into Mob’s side, “what’s the plan?”
Asagiri blinks, and they exchange looks over Suzuki’s head. With a shaky voice, she asks, “What plan?”
“You know, the plan to escape? To get outta here?”
Something cold washes over Mob, something a little like revulsion, but he can’t tell what it’s aimed at: himself, for needing the confirmation about an escape plan, which he should be thinking about anyway?
Himself, for not daring to think about escape in the first place?
“I don’t…” Suzuki looks up when Mob speaks, and he can’t look him in those too-wide eyes. “I haven’t thought about it.”
Not that he hadn’t thought about it at all, it was just–
They’re powerless here; their last escape attempt proved it. He hadn’t even noticed something was off, and had ruined their entire grasp of time for it. They’d made no progress, nothing worth anything, only earning themselves bruised wrists and paranoid nights.
Besides, Mogami had a point when he talked about how dangerous they were, and wasn’t that sad? Two fourteen-year-olds, already lost to the world simply for being a threat to others.
There’s a pause, in which Suzuki draws away, eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. When he finally speaks, it’s bitter. “So – what. We just stay here? What about Ritsu, huh? And Reigen? The fuck am I meant to tell them?”
Mob bites his lip to suppress the pang of pain that sweeps through his chest; Minori averts her eyes to the window. Suzuki looks floored.
“Because– I am getting out of here, but why don’t… why aren’t you coming?” He’s getting angry now, Mob can tell; he doesn’t like people being angry nowadays. “Are you just giving up?”
“It’s easier this way,” Mob finally explains. “Mogami could go out and hurt anyone, but so could I. So could Asagiri. This is… better. For everyone.”
The warmth at his side disappears completely, and Suzuki moves to stand in the middle of the living room, fists clenched. He opens and closes his mouth, deciding what to say, before settling on a simple sentiment:
“Fuck you guys.”
He’s motionless for another moment, as if waiting, begging for them to prove him wrong. When they don’t, he spins on his heel and storms out.
The silence he leaves in his wake is deafening, and neither of them speak as they head up to their rooms. Despite himself, Mob can’t help but hope that Suzuki will be curled up on the bed, hogging all the blankets like before.
He’s not; instead, a pillow is missing, as is Shou’s jacket, and he quickly discovers that the bathroom door is locked from the inside. Asagiri shoots him a grimly resigned look when she passes, and he knows she’s thinking the same thing.
That kind of optimism doesn’t last, and it’s better that Suzuki learn it now rather than at the hands of Mogami.