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It’s barely past noon when Mob leaves the Asagiri manor. The sun looks down on him from high in the sky and he has to blink and shield his eyes as he steps across the threshold. It’s like he’s forgotten what sunlight feels like after however long in the dim fluorescent hum of the basement. Nothing that Mogami made was ever brighter than the washed-out electric lights of that locked room.
Stumbling outside with the sun on his face, Mob feels like he’s entering a different world. It’s the world he’s lived in for fourteen years, the world he woke up in this morning, and yet there’s a shock of newness to it, like seeing a friend after a long absence. Like a breath of clean air after a fire. Like finally being able to put weight back on an injured limb.
Mogami had tried to show him how he could have changed, if his circumstances had been different. But Mob doesn’t live in that world. He lives in this one.
Dimple hovers, orbiting in tight circles around Mob’s head on the way to the train and eventually settling down in his hair like a fat, angry bird on its nest. The contact on his scalp is cold and soft and just slightly tingly. The spirit had taken good care of Mob’s body, as far as he can tell. He’s almost grateful for the scattering of bruises he woke up with; they remind him that he’s here, real, corporeal, the same as the sun in his eyes and the tickle of his hair on his neck and the pressure of Master Reigen’s hand on his shoulder.
Reigen has a cut on his cheek and scrapes across his knuckles and there’s a stiffness to his walk that wasn’t there this morning. He doesn’t talk much at first, just picks at the scabs on his fingers. Then he and Dimple argue about nothing for the rest of the train ride. Mob doesn’t listen to the words, but the texture of them settles in around him like a thick blanket.
“Hey,” Reigen says as they disembark, his hand falling onto Mob’s shoulder again and clasping tight. He hasn’t held on like that since Mob first started working for him, when Reigen was worried about losing him in crowds. “I’m beat. What do you say we grab some ramen and then head home?”
“Okay,” says Mob.
They go to their usual place, and the waiter smiles and gives them a familiar wave like he does every time and Mob is lost, suddenly, in the unexpected friendliness. He’d walked past here in the other world, head down, never stopping, and he’d still been shooed along with a scowl. Now, he can’t keep himself from staring as Reigen waves back, exchanges pleasantries, and leads the way to a couple of well-worn stools in the corner.
He remembers the first time they came here, when he was so small that Reigen had needed to help him up into the seat. His family didn’t go out to eat very often, so it felt special and exciting. And scary.
He’d bent his spoon.
As he stared, mortified, at the ruined ceramic, sure he would be sent home in disgrace and feeling the insistent tick, tick, tick of his heartrate speeding up, Reigen looked up from his own bowl, noodles dripping from his mouth.
“We’ll ask for another one,” he said, waving his hand.
“But I broke—”
“Mmmph.” Reigen slurped up the remaining noodles. “People break things all the time. Spoons, bowls, glasses. The restaurant is used to it. And if they give us a hard time?” His hands danced across the table, their movement so enchanting that Mob almost forgot to be afraid. “We find a different establishment. I don’t want to waste my money somewhere that can’t handle losing the occasional spoon.”
He’d calmed down. The new spoon hadn’t bent. Reigen had smiled at him.
Mob realizes that he’s been staring at nothing when a hand flutters in front of his face, and through the haze he hears, “Oi, Mob!”
“I’m sorry, Master.”
“It’s fine. I was just saying . . . it’s been a hard day. Get as many toppings as you like.”
Reigen has never offered this before. Mob’s eyes go wide.
“Thank you, Master!”
Reigen flaps a hand, slumping low on his stool. “Within reason! I’m not made of money, you know!”
“You’re not gonna claim—” Dimple starts, but Reigen cuts him off with a “Tch!”.
Mob orders four slices of char-su pork. Dimple and Reigen bicker. A butterfly perches on the awning above them.
*
The house is so alive.
As soon as Mob opens the door he can smell the lemon cleaning spray his mother uses, the traces of smoke that cling to his father. Something inside him goes tight when he sees Ritsu’s shoes by the door.
In the other world the house had looked the same, but it was still. Empty. The only life he ever saw inside it were trails of ants in the kitchen. He’d cleaned as much as he could with rags run under water hot enough to scorch his hands, but it was never enough to keep the spreading mildew from coming back, to keep the spiderwebs from the corners.
When Mob steps inside his real house with his real family, so warm and bright and vibrant, he has to pause in the doorway and take it in for a long moment before he trusts himself to move forward.
Usually he retreats to his room after work, but today Mob goes to the living room where his dad is watching a baseball game on TV and sits on the couch next to him. His mom hums tunelessly as she tidies up, and his dad groans when his team misses and cheers when they win and cracks jokes that make his mom roll her eyes and shake her duster at him.
It’s a normal weekend afternoon. It’s been less than six hours since Mob left the house that morning. They were in the Asagiri manor for less than two hours, and most of that time was spent on rock-paper-scissors. He was inside Minori’s head for thirty minutes.
He remembers the six months. And he remembers this morning. Both of them, overlaid like a misprint in a book.
When the electric lights come on they’re warm, and muffled by the sounds of his family, and even their hum is different.
*
His mom tells him to set the table, and he lays out four plates and four glasses and four spoons. She’s made omurice. As soon as Mob smells it the familiarity shoots through him like electricity.
He’d eaten this same meal last week. He’s eaten it countless times before, but a part of him has forgotten the taste of it. Eating it tonight feels like a miracle, like a long-awaited celebration. He’s aware of the soft texture of the eggs against his tongue, the savory smoothness of the rice, the tang of the ketchup, as if it’s something dazzlingly new. As if he hasn’t eaten anything like it in months.
He chews slowly, marveling over each bite.
“How was your day, Shige?” his mother asks.
Mob pauses. Chews. Swallows.
He can’t tell them. He doesn’t know how, even if he’d wanted to.
“. . . Long,” he says. “I’m glad to be home. Dinner was very good.”
He puts down his spoon to protect it from whatever emotion is blooming inside his chest. It aches in the same clean, tender way the muscles in his legs do after he’s gone running. “Thank you,” he says, and it comes out choked, trembling.
His mother looks pleased, the skin around her eyes crinkling into little furrows. “You’re welcome!”
“Watch out, honey,” his dad laughs, “He must be buttering you up!”
“Just because of a little politeness?” She shakes her head. “I ask you!”
He helps Ritsu wash the dishes. There’s a tiny spider in the corner above the sink, and Mob catches it under a glass and takes it outside.
*
It’s only when he goes to bed and the house falls silent that the memories try to creep back. At first he can hear his parents’ voices and the soft pad of his brother’s footsteps in the next room over. He tries to sleep. But he can’t, and as he tosses and turns those other sounds fade away until there’s nothing left but his own breathing.
When they were small, he and Ritsu were in and out of each other’s rooms at all hours. He remembers the way they would crawl into bed together after the family had watched a scary movie. “Don’t worry,” he’d always said. “If the monster comes I’ll use my powers to keep you safe!”
And then he hadn’t. He’d been the monster.
And then he’d stopped going to anyone when he got scared. Before he got good at hiding the emotions away, he would curl up in the corner of his room that was farthest from the wall he shared with Ritsu. Sometimes he couldn’t control himself, and his manga volumes would go flying around the room in a whirlwind, but as long as the door was closed they couldn’t hit anyone but him.
Sometimes, early on, he would hear Ritsu crying through the wall. But he never went to check. He couldn’t help. He was too dangerous.
On this quiet night, Mob rolls over on his futon and stares at the ceiling. He’s afraid. It’s not enough to make him explode, but he can hear it thrumming inside him, the ever-present bomb waiting to be triggered. For years, that feeling was all it took to make him face his nightmares alone.
The other world lurks in his mind like stagnant water. There are cracks in his life where it wells up, waiting for him to fall through them, waiting for him to wall himself inside that empty world the way Mogami had done.
He turns. Stares at the wall that separates his room from his brother’s. Pauses.
A moth knocks against the window, and Mob makes up his mind.
*
Ritsu yawns, hair mussed as he pulls open his bedroom door. They stand for a moment, staring at each other.
“Can I sleep in your room tonight?” Mob asks.
Ritsu’s forehead crinkles up, and he says, “Shige, are you okay?”
It’s a real question, Mob knows. He could tell Ritsu the truth, if he wanted to.
He doesn’t want to.
What he wants is to drag his futon into his brother’s room and curl up beside him, safe in the knowledge that the house isn’t empty. So he does.
As they’re falling asleep, Mob reaches out a hand towards his brother, feeling unsure and somewhat childish about it, but Ritsu just takes it in his own and laces their fingers together.
Breath by breath, the fear ticks out of him.
He wanted to tell everyone how much he appreciates them. Wanted to make them understand. But Mob’s never been good with words.
“I’m happy that you’re my brother,” he whispers, and Ritsu squeezes his hand.
*
Dimple follows him to school the next day. He stays close as they walk the familiar streets, chattering to fill the silence even though Mob never says anything back. His form glows bright against the overcast sky.
There are no bullies on the bridge. They weren’t there every day in the other world, either; Mogami liked variety.
Mob presses down the tension that’s building in him. He doesn’t even need to think about it. It’s habit. The worry and the memories and the fear and the shame are all compressed inside him until he can hardly feel them anymore.
“Shigeo,” Dimple says, flitting in front of Mob’s face as they continue on the raised footpath. His lips are pursed, serious. “If you need a break today, I could probably pull the smoke alarm. Or toss some books around for a distraction! You know. Whatever you want.”
Mob stops. His hand closes tight around the strap of his schoolbag. There’s no one else around to overhear him.
Dimple had seen the other world. Had seen the school uniforms. He’s the only one who knows what happened at the end.
He hasn’t tried to talk about it, and Mob is grateful. He wants it all to stay locked away in that dark basement. He doesn’t want to remember anything except the feeling of coming back.
But he looks at Dimple and he can’t help but recall the way he had appeared, a spot of incongruous color in a world where no color belonged. He remembers the slow-dawning clarity breaking over him like a sunrise. Remembers, even before he returned to the real world, the moment when he learned that it existed. He only knew that there were people waiting for him because one of them was brave enough to come in after him.
There’s a bruise on his arm, one of the ones he doesn’t remember getting, and it aches.
“No,” he says. “I’ll be all right.”
And then he adds, “Thank you.”
*
It’s harder than going home. The crowd as he enters the building feels the same: the press of bodies, the snatches of conversations he isn’t a part of. His shoulders curl in, his head hangs down, and he lets himself get lost in the shuffle. No one worth bothering with. Just part of the crowd. He’ll be safer if no one looks at him, if—
“Kageyama!”
The voice is warm. Loud. Happy.
Mob blinks. Musashi is beaming at him from across the hallway.
“I’ll see you this afternoon for Upper Body Strengthening Day!”
Mob answers automatically. “Yes, Captain!”
Musashi claps his back as he passes by. And the world shifts. Some of the heaviness inside him vanishes like smoke. The tension leaves his lungs. He stands up straight.
The crowd no longer looms around him like faceless spirits.
As he walks to the classroom, he passes Emi, who gives him a soft smile as she moves out of his way. He passes Tome and Saruta fighting about a video game he doesn’t play, and Tome grabs his arm and pulls him over in the hope that he’ll take her side. He passes Mezato, who’s still trying to get him to join her Psycho Helmet project. He passes Tsubomi and feels the blush heat his cheeks until he gets to the classroom.
And every time someone looks at him and sees him and knows him, not as a target and not as a face in the crowd, it knocks something knotted up inside of him loose. He’d spent years before this sure that life would be better if no one remembered that he existed. But Mob sits down at his desk, and his heart is light in his chest, and he feels real.
*
He gets a question wrong in math and flinches, but his teacher just shakes his head and sighs. A couple of his classmates giggle, but Inukawa catches his eye and shrugs sympathetically. Dimple spends the rest of the period floating over the teacher’s head, pulling faces to try to make Mob smile. He used to threaten to possess teachers when things like this happened. He used to threaten to possess a lot of people. He doesn’t anymore.
Mob sits down to lunch with his friends, and the milk he drinks is sweet. When a fly tries to land on the table, Dimple sprouts arms and makes a show of boxing at it with his little clenched fists until it flies away.
*
Jogging is only supposed to be their warmup, but Mob runs hard until he faints. Today, Onigawara is the one who carries him into the Telepathy Club room. It doesn’t take him as long to recover these days, but it’s still a while before he can sit up without the room spinning.
Inukawa hands him a bottle. The Telepathy Club doesn’t have a real budget anymore, but they take turns bringing in snacks, and there are always a few sports drinks on the table. Mob isn’t sure he’s ever seen anyone else take one.
They leave him alone as he slowly gets his breath back and blinks the shadows away from the edge of his vision. He hears the familiar crinkle of their chip packets and the beeps of their gaming consoles.
It’s only when Mob stands up, wobbly-kneed, to go back outside, that Kijibayashi says, “Ah, Kageyama?” and points at the wall with a sheepish expression.
It takes Mob a moment to see the beetle.
Kijibayashi and Saruta don’t like bugs. None of them like bugs, really, but Kijibayashi and Saruta are afraid of them. Inukawa ignores them, and Tome used to squish any unfortunate enough to stray into the club room.
The first time she’d killed a spider in front of Mob, he’d reached out just too late with a little choked noise, and so that was also the last time. He doesn’t think that these creatures deserve to die just because they’re small and they move strangely.
“How long has it been here?” he asks.
“Since we arrived,” says Tome. Which means that they waited for him, even though they were afraid. Even though if Tome had killed it, he would have had no way of knowing.
“Thank you,” he says.
The beetle is too high on the wall for Mob to reach with his hands or a cup. He hasn’t used his powers since he came back. The thought using them makes the back of his neck prickle with sweat. But he can be careful. He’s done this before.
He breathes in, summons a tiny bubble of power around the creature, and lifts it down from the wall until it’s cupped, gently, in his hands. Inukawa jumps up and holds the doors for him like he always does.
Mob takes the beetle and deposits it on the bark of a cherry tree outside the school. It’s big and black and there are oily rainbow reflections on its wings. He stays as it shuffles its tiny legs and begins to crawl, slowly, up the tree. When it’s far over his head it spreads its wings and flies away.
If it’s been watching, the only thing it will see is kindness.
*
Mob doesn’t see Hanazawa very often. He didn’t mind before, but now something about it nags at him. He remembers the small apartment where he’d woken up after Ritsu was taken, big enough for only one person. Hanazawa’s parents work overseas, he’d said, and he’d said it casually, and smiled, and so Mob had thought that maybe that was all right.
But the first day he doesn’t have work or the Body Improvement Club, Mob finds himself running to Black Vinegar as soon as school is out. He has to pause and walk three times, but he still catches Hanazawa standing by the gate. He’s talking with a pretty girl who smiles up at him and giggles as he speaks. He looks happy. Comfortable. For a moment, Mob wonders if he’s wrong.
He hesitates, still out of breath from running and unsure what to say, but Hanazawa seems to sense his eyes on him. He goes stiff for half a second before he says goodbye to the girl and walks over.
“Ah, Kageyama!” His voice is smooth and his smile shows off all his teeth. “What brings you here? Is there something that requires my attention?” He cocks his head to the side. It reminds Mob of a crow.
Now that he’s here, Mob realizes that he hadn’t really planned this. There was something he had to say. Something important. But he’s not sure he knows how, and Hanazawa looks like he would be happy to wait all day but the tilt of his head makes something in Mob’s hindbrain start to tick, tick, tick—
“Are you lonely?” he blurts out.
Hanazawa’s face goes blank.
“What?”
“You live by yourself,” says Mob. “Are you lonely?”
Hanazawa stares at him for a second, and then he tosses back his head and laughs. “Of course not!” he says, dropping an easy hand onto Mob’s shoulder. “Why would I be?”
“Oh,” says Mob. “Okay.”
“Haven’t you ever wished you had the freedom to do whatever you wanted?”
Mob thinks about it. “No,” he says.
“Well!” Hanawaza laughs again, easy and a little too bright. “To each his own!”
When Mob just stares at him, still catching his breath, he says, “I wouldn’t mind some company, though. Would you care to join me for a walk?”
And when Mob says yes, the smile that he gets is different.
Later, as they’re tossing scraps of pastries to the ducks in the park, Hanazawa looks at Mob with that same curious tilt of his head and asks, “Are you lonely, Kageyama?”
Mob thinks. He thinks about the dream world. How it had felt to be hated. How it had felt to come home to that empty house. He thinks about the days (weeks, years) after he first lost control of his powers, when he’d tried to watch the world through glass to keep himself from shattering it.
He thinks about now.
“No,” he says. “Not anymore.”
*
The other world is still there in the back of his mind, a spirit he can’t fully exorcise. He sees echoes of it all around him. He sees it when the bullies at the bridge hurry past him, and he wonders if they’ve really changed or if they’re just afraid. He sees it in the spirits that, like Mogami, refuse to do anything but hurt. He sees it in Master Reigen’s face at the press conference.
Mogami was right about some things. Mob is lucky, and there’s a voice that whispers that he doesn’t deserve it, that some day his luck will run out . . .
*
Mob walks towards the smoke and the world goes dim. Louder than the static buildup of his powers, his ears hum with the echo of the fluorescent lights from the Asagiri basement. He’s alone. He’s alone. He’s—
Master Reigen reassures him, and in the brief moment before his eyes close and he gives in to the exhaustion everything goes bright again.
*
The poison jar shatters. Serizawa screams about the years he lost, locked away in his room. Suzuki gloats about the empty world he made for himself. And Mob remembers the other world. He feels the tug of it, like a current trying to pull him under.
But he doesn’t live there anymore.
He doesn’t think anyone should.
He stands his ground and Mogami listens. He reaches out a hand and Serizawa takes it. He kneels next to Suzuki and takes all the explosive energy into himself, because Suzuki may have spent his whole life in a world of solitude but Mob won’t let him die in one.
*
He’s exhausted. And he worries that it’s too much, that he can’t do enough, can’t change enough, that there are people he can’t save—
*
He wakes up to four worried faces calling his name.
*
It’s a long walk from the giant broccoli to the clubroom in Salt Middle School, and Mob is too tired to walk any of it. While the others pick their way through the rubble of ruined and deserted streets, Mob dozes, drifting in and out of consciousness, as he’s carried . . .
—Held steady in the shimmering electric yellow of Hanazawa’s aura, drifting along so smoothly and carefully that it’s like lying back in the seat of a slow-moving train (and he remembers when they first met, and he told Hanazawa that usually telekinesis makes him nauseous) . . .
—Rocked gently in an aura that’s the same pink-purple-aqua tones as his, but textured like sunlight reflected on water, shimmering around him as he bobs along (and he remembers how frogs start to swim if they’re floating, and relaxes back into the air like it’s a still pond) . . .
—Draped across Reigen’s back, his chin heavy on his master’s shoulder while sweaty arms hook tight around his legs, grip shifting every now and then to make sure he doesn’t fall (and he’s too tired to listen to what his master is saying but he can feel the vibrations through his body, and it feels familiar. It feels safe.) . . .
—Piggyback, though Ritsu hasn’t carried him that way in years. They’re too big for it now. It would be a silly way to play. But when Mob drifts awake, he presses his arms tight against his brother’s chest.
And then there’s a whirl of activity as the Body Improvement Club finds them and makes plans and he and Ritsu are whisked off to Musashi’s grandmother’s house.
“I can’t run . . .” Mob tells them. “I worked my body too hard today.” It’s not a lie.
So Musashi, undeterred, lifts him up into his arms.
“I’m sorry,” Mob tries to say as the Body Improvement Club starts to jog. “I don’t want to be a burden.”
“Nonsense, Kageyama!” Musashi shouts, and the rest of them cheer in agreement. “Our bodies are becoming stronger from carrying you!”
Oh. He’s helping them. That’s all right.
Mob rests.
*
Musashi’s grandmother is as broad as he is, if not as tall. She’s friendly but curt as she greets them, telling them archly that they had better take care of themselves and not ask too much of a poor old lady. Then she slaps Musashi on the back hard enough that he stumbles.
As the others are getting out the futons and preparing the fire, Mob thinks he hears someone crying.
“What . . . ?” he asks. He doesn’t want anyone to cry.
They follow the noise to a corner and there, next to the firewood, is a small white cat. It cries until Musashi picks it up, but once he does it immediately starts to purr and butt at his hands. It’s old, its fur coarse and yellowed and both its eyes clouded over like pools of milk.
Musashi smiles. “I’ll tell my grandma that we found her,” he says.
The cat’s name is Shiro, Mob learns. She’s lived here as long as Musashi can remember. She’s been blind since she was a kitten, and she used to find her way around the house on her own, but now she just sits and meows until someone hears and comes to find her.
She lets Mob scratch behind her tiny ragged ears, purrs rumbling through her belly. She trusts him so easily he almost can’t breathe.
She’s so lucky. So loved.
*
Mob collapses onto the futon almost as soon as it’s rolled out. He falls asleep listening to his friends laughing as they talk about the training they’ll do tomorrow, to his brother dragging a futon next to his so they’re less than an arm’s reach away if they wake up in the night, to the little cat purring on his chest.
He dreams of a world where he’s alone, and wakes to one where he isn’t.