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“He’s still having those nightmares.”
“What? How long’s it been?” Reigen narrowed his eyes at the despondent spirit hanging before him. “Have you - have you not been telling me?”
“Of course I have,” Dimple snapped. Reigen nodded, frowned apologetically, ran a hand through his hair as he looked down at the office’s linoleum floor.
“After all this time. Growth .” A groan. “We have to get it out of him, Dimple.”
Serizawa returned with the mail, pushing through the office door as unassumingly as he could manage. All the same, Reigen and Dimple turned to watch the taller man enter, and he shied beneath their stares.
“Just bills, Reigen-san. A-and the tax returns, I believe.”
Reigen managed a smile. “Well, that’s good news. Hand ‘em over; we can take a look at everything this evening.”
Serizawa complied, and, thoughtlessly, Reigen opened his topmost desk drawer to toss the envelopes in.
Something caught his eye - a composition notebook peeking out from beneath the various miscellanies he kept tucked away.
Reigen looked up at Dimple.
“I think we’ve been approaching things all wrong.”
“How do you figure?” the spirit asked, cocking his form in a gesture that denoted prompting.
“Mob’s not much of a talker, even now. Never has been.” Reigen pulled out the notebook, slapped it on the surface of the desk. “But he wasn’t half bad at writing back in his second year, and I can’t imagine he’s gotten worse.”
“You think that’ll go over any better?” Dimple implored, drifting nearer to look the notebook over. He smirked at the familiar sight.
“We’ll start slow. One sentence at a time. That’s how they teach ‘em to write these days, isn’t it? Split single phrases until you’ve got a story?”
“Implying I actually pay attention when he lets me tag along.”
“A bit like that, Reigen-san,” Serizawa finally interjected, nodding softly. “I-if I may ask, what are you two talking about?”
Reigen looked at his employee for a moment, then stepped closer.
“Serizawa,” he said, crossing his arms and peering into his cohort’s face. “You’re like him. You understand him.”
Serizawa swallowed. “I - I suppose I’d say so. No better than you, though, Reigen-san.”
Reigen shook his head. “Talking comes naturally to me. To us,” he added, nodding back towards Dimple. “You and Mob communicate differently. Not through writing , necessarily, but…”
In a moment of weakness, Reigen let his expression soften, looked up at Serizawa with an exhausted frown. “Do you think it could be easier on him?”
Serizawa looked away. “If you could tell me what exactly it is that’s troubling Mob-sensei, I might…”
“Not until he’s given me the okay to share,” Reigen muttered, shaking his head. “A case took a bad turn last year, and he still hasn’t spoken to Dimple or I about it. That’s all you need to know.”
Sharp eyes shooting daggers into Serizawa’s. When it came to Shigeo these days, Reigen was pitiless.
“Yes,” Serizawa replied, forcing himself to hold Reigen’s hard gaze. “I think it could be.”
None of them spoke much for the rest of the morning. In part, ample business granted them few opportunities - but Reigen was nervous, and Reigen being nervous made Dimple nervous, and Serizawa mistook all the nervousness for annoyance and shut himself right up.
Mob arrived in high spirits, blessedly. Dimple was relieved to see he’d recovered from his turbulent night of sleep - in the nightmares’ heyday, stabilization took much longer than the span of a few classes.
“Any interesting cases today?” Questions. He’d started asking questions lately.
“You’ll be pleased to hear I saved the best for our afternoon,” Reigen smirked at him, easily concealing anticipation. “That said, we don’t start for another half hour - but I’ve got a favor to ask of you in the meantime, kid.”
Mob nodded.
Reigen conjured a small memo pad from beside his laptop, pen clipped to its binding. “If you could write something down for me -”
“Trying for a bestseller again?”
Teasing. Once he learned he could through a slip of the tongue a mere couple weeks after the incident, Mob had taken to making fun of his mentor’s antics like salt to water. They couldn’t quite get a laugh out of him yet - and, heavens, had the three of them tried - but amusement was at least easier to spot.
“Learned my lesson last time, you pest,” Reigen snapped good-naturedly. Riding off the mood, praying for no wavering ease: “I wanted to consolidate some details on the, uh - the case with Minori Asagiri, as it happens.”
Mob didn’t skip a beat. The little smile disappeared from his face, but he carried on without evident effort. “What for?”
Reigen looked him over. Mob was reading him - or he was trying to, at least. That still wasn’t the boy’s strong suit. “Personal bookkeeping purposes, I suppose.”
“And he’s obviously already got our accounts, but, uh - w-we never really got around to hearing yours,” Dimple assisted him. “After all, you never know when something like this might come up again.”
Both he and Reigen tasted those sour words on their tongues, stinging with mutual regret. A misstep. Don’t let him believe anything but that the things he faced - whatever he faced - were over.
“Rather…” Dimple trailed off, seeing all he needed in Mob’s temperate stare.
You told him about last night .
No anger, betrayal. Just observation. Dimple felt like utter shit.
“There’s not much to tell, Shisshou,” Mob eventually said, gaze lingering on the spirit before eventually finding its way to his boss. “And nothing worth… worrying over.”
The word that struck gold. Poison? Penicillin.
“Clearly there was something worth worrying over, considering you’ve done nothing but pretend it hasn’t happened,” Reigen muttered.
Mob narrowed his eyes, just a little. Reigen had seen that look before; he pulled his lips between his teeth.
“There wasn’t.”
“Mob -” Reigen flinched in preparation for an interruption, but it never came. He should have figured; it wasn’t Mob’s way. But things were changing. “I won’t pry. But if there’s anything about it that’s troubling you, I encourage you not to hold it in.” Tentatively, he gave Mob a knowing nod - and the boy looked away, understanding and pointedly avoiding his meaning. It had been a month now. He’d silently promised himself and those around him that he was finished concealing his feelings.
-
“Residual habit,” Dimple sighed that night as he perched beside Reigen on the balcony. “A complex like that’s gotta be a bitch to break.”
“I know,” the man murmured, filing through locks of hair. “Was I a little sharp with Serizawa today?”
“I don’t think he’d blame you, if so,” the spirit replied. “He was there to see it, Reigen; he knows how bad it got.”
Reigen nodded, unconvinced and not doing much to hide the fact.
“You’re not wrong for worrying,” Dimple continued after a minute, “if the intensity of his last nightmare’s any indication.”
“Yeah.” The conman seemed simultaneously comforted and upset by the spirit’s words. “Speaking of, maybe -” He stopped, sighed.
“I should go keep an eye on him.”
Hesitation. “Yeah.”
Hesitation. “You want me to stick around?”
“No, no,” Reigen waved a tired hand. “You’re right. Let me know if anything happens.”
“Okay.” Dimple drifted away into the night, sparing a second to turn and say, “get some sleep, Reigen,” with half-hearted austerity.
-
Mob put a yellow Post-it note on Reigen’s desk when he walked in the following afternoon, not bothering to say hello to any of his coworkers.
Reigen didn’t ask what it was - he only gave Mob a look of meaningful surprise, peeled the halved paper open.
mogami made a world where i didn’t have any powers. or i didn’t know i had powers. and my family wasn’t there. or they weren’t my family.
Reigen tried to calm the instinctive thrum in his heart at the boy’s words, force down the boundless questions they spurred. He just nodded, folded the paper in half, tucked it into his desk.
At dinner that night, once Serizawa had gone home: “Thank you.”
Mob said nothing.
“Is that all you can tell me?”
Mob shook his head, fixated on the steaming bowl of ramen before him.
“Is that all you want to tell me?”
Mob paused before saying, in a very quiet voice, “for now.”
“Okay,” Reigen replied. His voice was warm. “You take it at your own pace, kid.”
-
Another message the next day, this one scribbled on half a sheet of notebook paper.
ritsu was there but i don’t think he knew me. dimple wasn’t there. neither were you
Reigen nodded when he read it, and they went on with their case, a plot of haunted plantation out in the mountains. On the train back, Reigen pressed, just a little.
“Your parents weren’t there?”
Mob didn’t turn from the window. “No.”
“Where did you live?”
“My house.”
“Alone?”
Mob took his time nodding.
Reigen wanted so badly to understand. To gauge the severity of all this.
“Was it… was it like a dream, Mob? Can you remember all of it? Just - give me an idea of how things played out. Did you go to school?”
“Yes,” Mob whispered, “to school. No to it being like a dream. It was - it felt real.”
Reigen furrowed his brow. “How… how long did it last?”
Fists curling on kneecaps. Reigen, too focused to see. He had to lean in to hear Mob’s response. “D-Dimple told me I was inside for an hour.”
“No, not for Dimple and I,” Reigen murmured, shaking his head. “For you.”
“I-I -” Mob’s hands were shaking. With their sides pressed together on the close seats of the train, Reigen noticed. “I thought -”
“Speak up a little,” Reigen requested, gently, but urgently.
“I thought you - you s-said - you said - I -”
As always, Reigen didn’t see the obvious until a few seconds too late. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, kid, y-you don’t have to -”
“I can’t!” the boy finally sputtered, hair and clothing suddenly whipped up in a staticky wind. “You told me I could tell you as much as I wanted, when I wanted!”
Reigen felt all his muscles stiffen in protest of the sight. Get away from that thing , they seemed to beg. We’ve only just healed.
He took a deep breath. His body may have been afraid of Mob, just a little, but not one force in the universe could drive his mind and heart down the same road.
“I know. And I meant that,” he stated calmly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
Mob relaxed after a few quavering breaths, and he didn’t protest when Reigen rested a hand on his shoulder.
But he didn’t give his mentor any more notes for the next two days.
“I think he was in there longer than we realize,” Reigen muttered frantically, pacing his bedroom with Mob’s dual quotations in hand. “Or - or he thought so, at least. He perceived it differently. Mogami made him perceive time differently. Why?”
“And just how differently?” Dimple agreed grimly. “He had to be reminded of you and I when I went in -”
“It was long enough for him to have forgotten us?”
“Or he’d had his memory wiped of us from the beginning.” The spirit sighed, drifted into Reigen’s path, effectively halting the conman for the time being. “Like it or not, you’ll have to wait for him to open up again. I’ve told you all I know - shitty kids, Mogami pestering him incognito - and he did have his powers.” Dimple nodded towards the Post-it note. “Hell, I think he was about to go apeshit with ‘em when I managed to get in.”
Reigen swallowed. Even after all he’d seen of his student, through thick and thin, Mob’s reservations towards turning his powers on anyone (at the time, at least) were downright debilitating. He’d designed his terms that way, certainly, but never had he expected Mob to have to face a trial of this caliber.
Whatever it was.
-
The third note was waiting on Reigen’s desk when he came in the following afternoon, Mob already there and reading silently at his small reception table. Dimple and Reigen looked at each other, then down at the unfolded paper.
Reigen’s stomach was turning long before it caught up with his eyes.
six months but i stopped counting after that.
“Shit,” he whispered. And he had such a good track record keeping his language clean around his student.
When Reigen turned to look at Mob, tentatively opened his mouth, he was met with a shaking head. No more, then. Not yet.
They worked the rest of the afternoon like any other, though business was slow. Serizawa did his homework in between kettles of tea. Reigen distracted himself with the mindless methodicalism of taxes. Mob had gotten ahold of the memo pad Reigen offered those few days ago, and he was slowly writing things down as they occurred to him. Dimple floated between the three of them, peering over their shoulders.
Mob made no effort to cover his work when Dimple drifted over, and Dimple only pursed his lips at the words he could catch without moving in too close. No use making a scene; Reigen would know soon enough.
Without fanfare, the boy finally stood, tore the pages in one small swipe from the pad, and walked over to hand them to Reigen.
“This is a lot,” the conman commented softly.
“I didn’t write much on some of them.”
“That’s alright. Do you want me to read them now?”
Mob began to shrug, then nodded, looking away.
He went back to the reception desk as Reigen started rifling through the offerings.
once i didn’t know a math problem and the teacher hit me. i was surprised but nobody else thought it was weird so i thought maybe it wasn’t. and that was how school was.
What?
minori was there. she was a new student. she seemed nice but then for some reason she and the other students started picking on me.
Was this where Mogami’s world diverged? To nobody’s surprise, Reigen’s least of all, Mob was well-liked by his peers. In spite of his shyness, he always had been, as long as Reigen knew him.
when i interduced introduced myself i said i liked milk and then at lunch she and the others threw milk at me.
Reigen grit his teeth. Rotten kids. Just the thought made him sick with rage.
when i walked home from school some high school boys tried to get my wallet and phone but i didn’t have a phone because you never gave me one. ritsu saw them beat me up but he didn’t know me i think and i don’t think i knew him.
A glance up at Mob. He was writing again.
nobody was ever home and i didn’t know how to clean the whole house by myself so it was very messy. it was also cold because i don’t know how to work the thermestat thermostat. and i only know how to cook omurice even though i overcook it sometimes so i had that a lot. i had money so i could go out to eat but i didn’t really want to leave and anyways, there were always groceries in the fridge so i could just keep making omurice
“Hey. Reigen.”
it was kind of scary living alone but i don’t think i knew i ever had a family or friends so it didn’t seem weird. i wished i could call you a lot but i didn’t know your phone number and i didn’t know about you at all so i couldn’t, but i still wanted to.
“Reigen-san?”
i think mogami made everyone do things they wouldn’t normally do to try and make me see the world the way he saw the world. like everyone and everything was bad and the only way to make it better was to hurt others or hurt yourself myself like mogami did. i think i almost did but dimple stopped me.
“Shisshou.”
Mob was right in front of him, standing at the other side of his desk and staring at him with a perfectly perceptible look of devastation. He really did get more expressive by the day, didn’t he?
Dimple was at one shoulder. Serizawa was at the other.
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you everything,” the boy murmured, head bowed in ill-hidden shame. “I didn’t want to make you feel sad.”
That’s no reason not to tell me, Mob, Reigen tried to say - but for some reason, the words didn’t come out sounding like words at all. They were just a horrible choking noise, and it wasn’t until Serizawa held a box of tissues up for him that he realized just how much of a mess he’d become reading these quips.
“Six months?” he managed, pushing Serizawa off to stand and stare down at Mob with hands pressed flat against the desktop. “Six months of this?”
Mob nodded.
Reigen set his jaw, ran a furious wrist over his eyes. “Sorry. Is there more? Can you tell me any more?”
Mob nodded again.
He walked back to his desk, picked up two more notes and brought them back to set between Reigen’s steadying hands. Reigen didn’t touch them. He looked down at the notes, and Mob looked upside-down at the notes, and Dimple and Serizawa looked down at the two of them and then down at the floor and then, for a long instant, at each other.
there was a cat
That was all the first note read.
there was a stray cat that i fed sometimes but one day after school
That was all the second note read. Before Reigen could beg for clarification, Mob came around to his side of the desk, picked up a pen, started writing.
“This part’s kind of hard,” the boy whispered. “I kept trying to write it, but -”
minori and the other kids saw me and they picked up the cat and
“B-but I - I’m not really sure what happened.”
i think they broke its neck. i tried to cover my eyes so i don’t know. there was a crack sound and then it was dead but then they started hitting me so i didn’t really see.
“And maybe it didn’t happen at all. I mean - it didn’t happen.”
A sharp inhale, sucked through grit, salivating teeth.
“But I still can’t stop thinking about it.” The boy pressed the flat of his palm into one teary eye. “I just want it to go away.”
He hiccupped. Like a dust speck in a storm he was swiftly enveloped in the familiar gray of his master’s suit, hold around him so tight and so sorely needed that he smashed his face into a shoulder pad until he saw nothing but little blue sparkles and concentric greenish waves, all pulsing and glittering behind his eyelids.
“I’m sorry,” he heard.
“Then she took out a knife,” Mob whispered, drooling into the rumpled crook of Reigen’s jacket. “I stopped myself right before I could use my powers on all of them, but she stabbed me, and then somebody else hit me on the head with something r-really hard and heavy. There was blood everywhere.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“And I know that wasn’t Minori, because I met her after getting back outside. B-but I - I couldn’t - I could barely look at her. That was what Mogami wanted. He wanted me to to use my powers on her because I thought she deserved it.” His voice was rising in level rather than calming along with the stream of his words, and Reigen didn’t stop him. “I know she didn’t. I know it wasn’t her. I didn’t hate her. I didn’t hate Mogami. But I keep seeing all this stuff again and again, and it was so long ago, but - why won’t it go away? Why can’t I forget?”
“Nobody could blame you for hating a world perfectly designed against you, Shigeo,” Dimple offered when Reigen couldn’t find the words.
“I did hate it. I do hate it. I-I hate that it won’t leave. I hate that I can’t talk about it, b-because it’s like talking about a bad dream that you and everyone around you knows wasn’t real. It’s stupid. I-I feel so stupid .”
Reigen pulled back now, both hands clamped firmly on the boy’s shoulders. “It was real enough. Trying to force it to leave will only make it worse.” He let out a broken laugh. “Believe me.”
Mob nodded. He just nodded, as if to force the idea down, until Reigen guided his head back against his shoulder and held him as close as he could.
“I’m sorry,” Reigen whispered again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t - I should have been there for you. I - I should have been in there instead of you.”
“No.” This made Mob pull back, brows crossed incredulously at the idea. “I’d never want that.”
“What, you don’t think I’m tough enough to handle it?” Reigen smirked, wiping at one eye with the heel of his palm.
Mob smiled crookedly. “Of course you are, Master. You’d probably know it was all a big trick from the start. But -” fresh tears tracked down his cheeks; Reigen tightened his supporting grip around the boy’s forearm. “It was just so awful. If Mogami had the chance to do those things to you, I’d - I’d never forgive myself.”
“It wouldn’t have been your job to,” Reigen replied softly. “I know trickery when I see it. I’d have been fine.” He rested a hand on the side of Mob’s head, ran the pad of his thumb through the tears on one cheek. “You’re just too young to bear that kind of weight alone.”
With a sigh, the boy leaned into his master’s touch, crooking his head to rest it in Reigen’s palm.
“And you don’t have to. I can’t fix what happened, but -” Reigen ducked his chin to push away the last of his tears - “I’ll be with you every step it takes to get past it.”
Mob nodded. In what weak shreds of a voice he had left: “Thank you, Master.”
One last time, Reigen pulled him in, fingers twisting in the fabric at the back of the boy’s uniform. “You don’t need to thank me,” he whispered. “It’s right. That’s all. I’ll always do right by you.”
-
Mob left work late, after texting his parents his whereabouts and partaking in suppertime takoyaki with Reigen, Serizawa, and Dimple. Dehydrated and quavery from all their crying, Reigen and Mob were slap-happy (or about as much so as the latter could be), teasing one another and flooring their quiet compatriots as they did so.
But when Mob left, Reigen broke down again, softer this time. He put his head in his hands and didn’t shrug Serizawa off this time when the larger man placed a hesitant palm on his shoulder, nor Dimple when he hovered close by, just above the surface of his desk, reading the notes that the conman had amassed.
“He’s damn lucky to have passed on during that second Claw fiasco,” Dimple growled at one point, voice shaky with rage. “I’d tear that bastard up from the inside out if I could.”
“I wish it had been me,” Reigen whispered. “At the very least, that I’d - been there for him -”
“It wouldn’t have been plausible,” the spirit offered. “If anyone, it should have been me.” When Reigen only replied with a shake of his head, Dimple sighed, floated over to rest against his companion’s concealing hands.
“Stop saying things like that, both of you.”
At Serizawa piping up, Reigen and Dimple eyed him, and he shied away from their gazes.
“Mogami was clearly powerful enough to read into Mob-sensei’s vulnerabilities. He knew how to break him, and he’d have found a way to do so to you, too.” Eyes on the floor, Serizawa swallowed. “Nobody deserves what Mob-sensei went through.”
Reigen was having trouble registering. He looked at Serizawa with a furrowed brow, then down at the notes, back to his employee. “When did you get the chance to read -”
“I - I-I didn’t, Reigen-san, but… um...”
Insensibly, Reigen felt some strange kind of anger firing up in his chest. “What, are you - are you a telepath or something? What the hell are you talking about, Serizawa?”
“When we first met you,” Dimple uttered, suddenly. “In Claw’s headquarters.”
Serizawa nodded. “He showed me - all kinds of things, Reigen-san. His memories from Mogami’s world were there, too.”
“You knew?” Reigen croaked, rising from his seat. “You knew, and you didn’t think to tell me?”
Dimple fluttered in between them. “Reigen, he wouldn’t have -”
“It wasn’t my place to tell,” Serizawa stated. Voice almost unfamiliarly stern, eyes looking straight into Reigen’s for a brief second before flitting tensely away. “Not without his permission. He confided in me his love for you, his family, his friends -” Serizawa shook his head, lips tensing as he swallowed hard. “He changed my mind. I couldn’t betray that trust.”
Reigen stared at him, mouth hanging halfway open. “Is that why you saved me?” he asked dryly.
Serizawa nodded. “You meant so much to him. You still do.”
Another moment of silence. In the second before Reigen’s gaze finally hit the floor, it flickered over Dimple’s - a second of recognition.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so cross with you lately,” Reigen whispered. “I was frustrated I couldn’t help him, and I - put it on you, for some reason. Maybe because I assumed that, since you weren’t there, you couldn’t understand.”
“Rightly,” Serizawa carefully offered.
Reigen let out a short laugh. “But you understood better than either of us. Better than I ever will.”
Gently, Serizawa lifted a hand to rest on Reigen’s upper arm. “What Mob-sensei showed me was revealing, Reigen-san, but… fleeting. You can tell a lot about his trust in you by the fact that he was willing to cement it all in writing.”
Reigen and Dimple looked down at the notes, spread across the desk, some warped and wrinkled where they’d been hit by Reigen’s tears.
“How can I help him?”
“You already are,” Serizawa replied, “just by standing behind him. Being a constant. Every day, it gets a little easier, as all the bad things get farther away.” For a moment, the man was quiet, lips pursed as he calculated his words. “I… I feel that way, at least. And I think it must be the same for him.”
“Oh,” Reigen murmured. “Oh.”
He stepped slowly forward, fell into an awkward lean against Serizawa’s chest. One hand gripped tight around his jacket. Serizawa let his hands fall around Reigen’s shoulders, loosely, and then there was another source of warmth at the conman’s collar as Dimple nuzzled awkwardly in to the messy embrace.
“He doesn’t have to deal with it alone,” the spirit muttered, “and you don’t have to help him without support, either.”
Serizawa nodded, and Reigen felt it on his crown, the little rub of his employee’s chin. When he began to cry again, Dimple and Serizawa said nothing, just held him between them, stable as the night outside moved quietly onward.