Chapter Text
It feels like she’s finally surfaced after a life living in mud - no, something thicker than mud, something worse.
The world spins around Minori and her harsh, raspy gasps fill the air as she curls around herself on the floor. She has no energy to do anything other than stare vacantly into her carpet, her cheek pressed into its plush, white fibers. It’s her favorite carpet, but the whiteness… the softness… it’s making her stomach churn now, reminding her all too much of something she’d rather forget.
She clenches her eyes tightly shut, willing the thoughts away, and wants to throw up. How could she have done that?
Something was wrong, had been wrong, is wrong. Something had been controlling her- she knows it- she can feel it-
It’s like there are dark claws digging into her mind, urging her to be worse than she is, to be crueler than she is. Minori is self aware to a point; she knows that she’s a bully, that she isn’t the nicest person. But to facilitate and help kill a cat?
All just to hurt someone else, someone who never fought back not even once-
She stands up and desperately tries to pull herself through the mud that she can still feel sucking at her legs, hoping to get to the bathroom before she ends up sick all over the floor. In this state, her bathroom feels a million miles away, and every step lands heavily as if her feet are made of stone.
When Minori finally makes it there, what meager energy she’d managed to dredge up drains from her again, and she leans herself against the cool tile on the floor to spend a quiet moment recuperating. She still wants to throw up - the image of nearly neon red blood on matted fur fresh and vivid in her mind - but she can’t seem to. It’s like it’s all stuck inside her, thick sewer sludge poisoning her body.
If anyone deserved to be feeling sick at the thought of that cat, it’s not her. Not her. No. There’s only one person who has the right to mourn that poor creature.
Minori lies there, closes her eyes, and wonders how Mob is doing.
-
When Minori arrives at school the next day, everything is suddenly different.
It’s as if a switch has been flipped, and now every single one of her actions is bathed in a horrid, exposing spotlight. Muted colors have become bright, shadowed corners dragged to her attention. There’s nowhere for her to hide anymore.
Across the room she can see, with new clarity, the rainbow of bruises across Mob’s hands and the underside of his chin. There’s a bandage on his cheek. His left eye is slightly puffy and red. His hair is an unbrushed wreck. He looks terrible, and miserable, and small, and alone.
She watches him all day. Even without Minori leading the way, the rest of their classmates are brutal in their treatment of Mob. They push and prod at him as if it’s a contest to see who can get him to flinch the most, then giggle when he does. They tear his things up, even when teachers are nearby. They laugh at him. They mock him. They make horrible yowling cat sounds to try and get a rise out of him. Minori is surprised to find herself wincing at that, but Mob never says a word.
Quiet Mob, who never does anything to deserve it.
He looks dead. He’s very much alive, but he looks dead. A day ago, Minori would have taken one look at his ashen, hollow face, and called him a zombie. She would have pointed out the way his eyes go so blankly empty and then would have called him a freak. She can’t do that now, not with those eyes looking back at her. Not anymore.
I did this. Minori thinks, as Mob stumbles past, furtively avoiding bumping into her. There’s a limp in his stride, his left leg held stiffly. She remembers what it was like to step down on his ankle and feel it crack beneath her heel. I did this.
Without her noticing, the claws she’d been so focused on tearing away have relaxed their grip on her mind. No longer is she seeing her actions through a haze of righteousness and cruel fun.
She’s disgusted with herself.
-
A few days later, after spending long enough just watching, she follows him home.
To do… What? Minori doesn’t know. Maybe make a start at getting rid of the gross feeling that’s festering inside of her. There’s something in her telling her that if she knows where Mob lives, she could help somehow. Maybe buy him bandages or other first aid things, since he clearly seems to desperately need them, and leave it all on his doorstep secretly so that he never has to know that it was her. So no one ever has to know it was her. She can be disgusted, can be regretful, can be humble, without also losing the image that she has to uphold, afterall.
But, in retrospect, following him home probably wasn’t the best idea for Minori to go with first.
Just a little over halfway into the walk, Mob notices her attempts to stealthily follow him. Minori can tell the moment he does, because he stiffens up, trembles a bit about the shoulders, and then changes his direction sharply. A moment ago, he’d been heading into a plain and simple neighborhood, but now, he’s headed back towards the city.
A flash of annoyance, of frustration, of anger tears through Minori’s veins. Overhead, a crow caws loudly, and skirts the swimming periphery of her vision with its large black wings as Minori stares at Mob’s back. Why couldn’t he have just not noticed and continued to his house? He’s wasting her time-
Mob stumbles. The limp in his stride is still prominent despite the days that have passed since she crushed his ankle. He’s breathing raggedly and struggling just to keep going.
Minori is the one wasting his time, keeping him from his home. In fear of her finding where he lives, of terrorizing him even in a place that’s supposed to be safe, he’s changed direction, and trying to throw her off of his trail is keeping him from finally being able to rest after a long and painful day.
So Minori stops. She hangs back and watches Mob melt into the crowd. His head of flat black hair disappears all too easily between the negative spaces and bumping shoulders. She no longer can see the crow flying overhead either. At some point it must have disappeared into the trees just as seamlessly.
After five minutes of simply standing among the people, all of them walking past her with their own lives and loved ones, Minori turns and leaves for her own home.
-
The opportunity to do something for Mob drops into Minori’s lap not too long after, when she turns a corner while heading to school and finds him alone in a thin alleyway between Ginger and Fennel Street. It’s not as anonymous as she would like, but at least none of their classmates are around, so it’s something.
He’s leaning against the brick, bloodied and weak after another early morning session of getting beaten down into the dirt, obviously unable to hold himself up with his thin arms that tremble and shake. His school bag and papers are torn and scattered in front of him, and his uniform jacket is ripped across the left arm’s shoulder seam. That’s going to get him a citation from the student council for sure. They already don’t like Mob very much. Minori’s seen one member, Kageyama Ritsu, single him out sometimes, perhaps out of bitterness over their shared name, and there’s no way this uniform infraction will slip under the strict first year’s radar.
When Minori comes to stand in front of him, Mob simply looks up at her with his too tired eyes. Then he shuts them, resigned and leaving himself vulnerable, unable to fight after already being hurt and so instead accepting his fate the way all of Minori’s harsh treatment of him has conditioned him to.
The sight serves to tighten a coil of thorns that is wrapped around Minori’s heart. She swallows roughly, “Can you get up?”
Slowly, when Minori doesn’t bend to pinch his ear or kick out at his sprawled legs, Mob’s eyes open back up. He stares at her, and it’s the typical creepy and blank look she’s come to expect from him, sending a shudder down Minori’s spine that carries with it a familiar vicious urge to sneer and shout to get him to look away. Minori smothers the feeling down. He can’t help staring; he’s just shocked.
“Can you get up?” She repeats, crossing her arms in front of her, wrapping herself up self-consciously in her own embrace. There’s an uncomfortable tension to the air; Minori feels as if she’s on display, even though there’s no one there but her, Mob, and a large bug that skitters up the brick just to the right of Mob’s head.
Mob looks down and makes another attempt to push at the ground with his arms again. They give out beneath him almost instantly when he tries to get his knees in order, and he hits his head on the wall behind him with a grunt.
“That’s a no.” Minori drawls, then bends and reaches out to Mob.
Mob flinches away like an animal and stares at her with a touch of panic now. He’s very quickly curled himself up against the wall as far from her as he can get, just like that cat had-
Minori jerks her reaching hands back as if burned. They both stare at each other now, creating a feedback loop of uncertainty.
Slowly, carefully, Minori reaches out a single hand again. She doesn’t crouch down or bend over, she simply extends her hand, trying to seem as non-threatening as she can. Her lips twist as she says, “I just want to help.”
Mob’s eyes flicker from her hand to her face. He doesn’t take her hand.
“I promise, I just want to help.” Minori says, a bit more forcefully, feeling her familiar anger flush through her again. Something stirs somewhere deep inside her at how Mob is rudely refusing to listen to her, isn’t accepting her graciously offered hand, how dare he-
The world snaps, spirals, and abruptly kaleidoscopes. When Minori blinks the blinding blurred colors away and comes out of it, she finds her hands very calmly crushing Mob’s neck, perfectly painted nails stabbing into the pale skin on either side of the column of his throat.
“I’m sorry,” Mob wheezes. His Adam’s apple bobs, stuck, againsts her thumb. He’s trying to pull her off, but his fingers are slick with sweat and grime, and they can’t find purchase on her sleeve no matter how much he tries, “I-”
Minori tears herself away, horrified, wrenching her hands back from Mob’s neck with a jerky, sick motion. A few broken stones and some of Mob's pencils catch under her shoes and trip her as she works to put as much distance between herself and Mob as fast as she can.
Mob’s chest heaves with each breath he sucks in, and Minori can see, very clearly, the red imprint on his skin where her hands had just been squeezing.
“That wasn’t me.” Minori whispers, bringing her shaking fingers up to her eyes. She’d been right, thinking that something was controlling her. She’d felt it that time, when her vision had turned to fractales and dark silhouettes of color; the presence of someone else under her skin. “That wasn’t me.”
Mob stares at her as he rubs his neck. She can practically hear him thinking, Yeah right. But she knows he’s too scared to ever say it out loud.
In the distance, the school bell rings its first warning. Mob shifts anxiously at the sound, knowing that a hit from a teacher awaits him if he’s late again, but he doesn’t dare try to move while Minori is effectively blocking his way and stepping on the papers he still needs to gather up.
How he’ll do that when he could barely hold himself up before, Minori doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know. She used to laugh when Mob would struggle on his knees with numb, clumsy fingers to hold onto a piece of paper, but now it’s the last thing in the world that she wants to see.
Minori flexes her hands, making sure that her motions are her own, before she kneels down on the ground. Down on the ground like this she finds that she has to fold the pleated fabric of her skirt up just a bit so it doesn’t get dirty when she starts leaning over to reach for Mob’s things.
Mob makes a jerking, aborted motion, as if he’d been about to reach out and snag her wrist to stop her. But Minori is too far away, and Mob is too hurt. “W-what are you doing?” He asks, shock startling the uncharacteristic question out of him, even though he’d long since learned to not question Minori.
“Do you just not listen, Kageyama-kun?” Minori can’t help but snap. She hates repeating herself, but she knows that she’ll do it over and over again until Mob understands, “I want to help.”
“... Why?”
He’s suspicious, and he has every right to be.
But she’s still not a very nice person. She doesn’t have to give him an answer.
“What’s it matter?” Minori hisses, as she stacks Mob’s things roughly. His bag is across the alley, against the opposite wall, and she takes a moment to stand up and grab it so that she can cram Mob’s pencils, papers, and his torn up books inside.
It’s when Minori is about to set the bag down at Mob’s side and retreat to school, to lick the wounds she gained from this disastrous attempt at being kinder, that she notices it; a keychain hanging from the back strap.
Mob has... a keychain… hanging from his bag.
Impossibly, against all the odds, the thing has been able to survive the notice and rough treatment of their classmates since Mob put it there. Minori can’t say for sure how long that’s been; she somehow hasn’t seen it before this moment.
“That- that just- It seemed funny, and familiar, for some reason. Please don’t break it.” Mob pleads, as he finally manages to get to his feet and sees Minori intently staring the keychain down. He’s still leaning heavily on the brick wall, one arm braced against it, but it’s an improvement from his previous broken slump. Though his tone is desperate, he seems to already be bracing himself for Minori to break the trinket. Afterall, if his pleas couldn’t save his cat, why would they save a tiny little toy?
The keychain is just a rubbery little green ghost, with a wide open mouth and tiny hands held up in the air.
It’s ridiculous.
The emotions start deep in her chest, like bubbles freed from a hidden pocket underwater. Minori snorts first; a sound that’s more a quick breath out through her nose than anything else, before a soft burst of giggles follow, followed by more, and more, until she’s desperately laughing - crying - while holding Shigeo Kageyama’s bag and looking at the silly ghost keychain he’s hung on it.
Despite everyone in this world being against him, he’s still fighting for small ways to be happy.
“A-asagiri-san?”
Minori struggles to get her laughter under control, but she doesn’t wipe her tears away yet. “Just take your stupid bag, Kageyama-kun.” She says as she throws it at him.
The bag hits Mob in the chest. He fumbles with it, trying to keep his grip on it like one might try to keep a grip on a fish, but it’s clear he’s never going to get it under control, and a moment later he finally drops it. Minori raises a brow at the display, scrubs once, furiously, at her face with the back of her sleeve to banish the tears that have made sticky trails down her cheeks, then turns without another word to get to school on time.
She pretends not to hear the soft and curious sound Mob makes when he finds the keychain still intact.
-
Another attempt to follow Mob home is made, though this time, Minori doesn’t even pretend to be sneaky or subtle.
She breaks away from her friends immediately after school, and makes sure they don’t see where she’s going before she heads off to find her target. He still walks as slow as ever, and it’s easy for Minori to catch up to him on the pathway beside the canal.
A couple of passing highschool students jeer at Mob as he goes past them, then, when they see Minori, they whisper among themselves, jab at each other with their elbows, and grin at her. Minori smiles back as sharply and dangerously as she remembers she can.
“Don’t hurt him too bad, Asagiri-san.” One of the highschool boys says, clearly recognizing her. He points a thumb at Mob’s retreating back, grinning widely and wickedly. Minori squints at him, tries to figure out if she recognizes him in return from the ugly look he wears on his face. She can’t recall a name, but she vaguely remembers him, just another face in the crowd watching when she had tossed Mob’s shoes into the abandoned lot full of glass a month ago.
“I’ll do what I want.” Minori replies, with an upturned nose and a sour twist of her heart. Her expression sets the boys off into a chorus of raucous laughter that, although Mob has walked pretty far away at this point, sends him hunching down into his uniform collar as if he can hide in it.
But he doesn’t walk any faster than he had been, and once the highschoolers have passed out of sight, Minori steadily closes the distance between them. She refuses to run or hurry herself for Mob, but if her stride is a bit longer, her steps a bit more deliberate, well, there’s no one paying attention who matters.
“Hey Kageyama-kun.” Minori calls out, and the sound of her voice brings Mob to a stop. He doesn’t jerk or jump, he just takes one final slow and careful step, before his momentum drips away, dragging his shoulders down with it.
“Y-you know,” Mob says to the ground, but he angles himself enough to make it clear he’s talking to Minori and not the dark caterpillar inching along by his feet, “This is the cruelest thing you’ve ever done, Asagiri-san.”
The cruelest thing? That’s an impressive title, and it makes her wonder what exactly Mob’s standards for cruel are. Minori knows for a fact she’s done far crueler things than just follow him home. Things like pour milk over his head, and push him down hills into construction lots, and kill his… well.
“What, just because I’m trying to talk to you? You’ve got a messed up idea of what cruel is.” She snaps, putting her hands on her hips.
“You’re pretending you want to be nice.” Mob says. He’s being bold, but still doesn’t look up at her, “You’re pretending you want to help.”
"... I do." Minori forces herself to admit through bared teeth.
Mob snaps his head up, finally looking at Minori. He makes eye contact with her, a spark of something going off in the depths of his gaze, and says bluntly, "I don't trust you."
Well, there's nothing Minori can really say against that. She can't insist on his trust, she knows that, but the hot shame at being disrespected, at having her efforts thrown back at her, pulses in her chest all the same. She wants to march over to him and twist her fist up in his uniform, but she keeps herself in control, and doesn’t.
The silence that blooms between them is a withered, sickly thing, unable to sustain itself for long. Minori watches the keychain on Mob's bag sway; back, and forth. Back, and forth. Back. Forth.
It's a familiar rhythm, for some reason. Something like an itch at the back of her consciousness that she just can't scratch.
Back.
Forth.
"Why do you keep trying to follow me home?"
Minori drags her eyes away from the keychain back up to Mob’s face.
As expected, he’s already lost his nerve and his own eyes are pointed at the ground again. The caterpillar is joined now by a swarm of ants that appeared so suddenly and are so thick that even Minori can see their trail despite how far she is. She thinks the ants are all pulling at the caterpillar’s legs. Tearing it apart.
“I wanted to know where you live.” Minori answers truthfully, shrugging one shoulder.
“Why?” Mob asks, cautious. It seems to be the only question he knows how to ask of Minori, his mouth only able to form into one shape, spitting out an unending stream of flat Why Why Why? s that stomp their way into Minori’s ears and demand explanations.
Sarcastically, Minori sneers, “To break your windows.” But Mob stiffens, unable to read her tone, and she drops the sarcasm with a roll of her eyes to clarify, “No, you idiot, I was going to do stupid stuff like leave you snacks and bandages and shit in secret. Don’t think yourself so important that I’d care enough to break into your house.”
Mob bites at his already split lip, and Minori refuses to wince at the way blood wells up when he does so, “I… I don’t want you to know where I live.” He says at length. Then, again, stronger, “I don’t want you to know where I live.”
“Jeez, okay.” Minori huffs, pretending that the refusal doesn’t sting. It’s so stupid for her to feel upset by this; Mob’s still a nobody, still not worthy of real care. She’s just trying to do this out of some misplaced sense of guilt. Trying to atone for actions she never should have made.
The fact that Mob doesn’t want her to know where he lives, that he’s so clearly afraid of her, should still make her happy. She should be satisfied with this. She should feel proud.
Why doesn’t she?
“How ‘bout I leave you stuff somewhere secret instead? A drop off place.” She suggests, and by the way Mob looks up at her in shock, clearly without meaning to, it seems he hadn’t expected her to be so persistent. “Just things like bandaids and snacks. It’s like your parents don’t know how to wrap a bandage around your thick skull or something.” At Mob’s continued silent staring, Minori begins to feel frustrated and unnerved again. She goes on the defensive, “You come to school looking so thin and messy and pathetic all the time, I’m just doing my part to clean up the community, really.”
Mob still says nothing.
“Well?” Minori snaps, “I don’t hand out charity lightly. You better take this offer.”
Gradually, Mob begins to shake his head. It’s a gentle motion, something sad and slow; mournful.
Then he opens his mouth and says softly, “I hate you, Asagiri-san.”
Oh.
He turns to walk away, and Minori lets him. He leaves her there alone on the dirt path by the canal as the sun sets behind them, abandoning her, his calm and straightforward hatred placed into her hands.
Mob - Kageyama Shigeo - hates her.
Minori doesn’t know why, but there’s something almost freeing about having finally heard it out loud. It’s like a weight has lifted off her chest. Despite that, she still feels low, like a crawling squirming thing that Mob didn’t even bother to glance at.
She takes a few steps forward, into the space Mob had just occupied, and glares down at the torn remains of the caterpillar. Only a few ants remain, carrying away the final worthy segments and chunks of gooey flesh. The caterpillar still twitches desperately, ignorant of the way most of its body has been gored and harvested by a relentless many.
Minori steps on it, and puts it out of its misery.
-
“Minooorrriiiiii!”
Someone collides with Minori’s back, their arms easily tangling around Minori’s neck and shoulders as they lean over her where she’s sitting at her desk. Minori glances up, trying to get a glimpse of the face of the girl who thinks herself familiar enough to touch Minori out of the blue in such a close and friendly way.
It’s a face Minori recognizes, a classmate, but the name… the name swims in her memory, barely forming. The sounds refuse to connect, and Minori can’t say the wrong name out loud, but she has to say something.
She gives it her best guess, “Hanae-chan!” She says, and the girl’s face lights up. What a relief. “Good morning.”
“Mornin’!” Hanae chimes back, “Where did you go yesterday, Minori-chan? We missed you hanging out with us, it’s not like you to disappear like that.”
Minori smiles, trying to keep the expression from being as cold as she wishes she could make it, “Oh I just had something I had to do, it’s not important.”
“Tagawa-kun says he saw you following after Kageyama-kun.” Another girl says, sliding her oily words into the conversation with a slippery tone, a smirk playing at her lips as she walks over and meets Minori’s eyes. Her name is something like… Chiho, or Chizue. Chizue, probably, Minori hopes.
Minori leans back in her chair, with Hanae’s arms still hugging her shoulders, and fixes Chizue with a bored frown. Tagawa must have been one of the highschoolers she’d passed; maybe he was the one she’d recognized, or maybe he wasn’t. It hardly matters to her. “So what? He was going the same way I was. I took the opportunity for a bit of fun.”
Chizue snorts, “Fun, huh?” She says, emphasizing the word in an uncomfortably slow and suggestive way that has Minori tensing up.
Hanae giggles, and another nearby girl does as well, as if they’re all in on some joke. The sounds echo, and Hanae’s arms around Minori become too tight.
Minori carefully peels Hanae away before it gets too hard to breathe, “What are you implying?” She asks, a master of sounding teasing and dangerous at the same time. Chizue needs to be reminded exactly who’s game it is she’s playing.
Chizue smiles like a snake and shares a conspiratorial look with the other kids that, interested in hearing the gossip, have approached, “Well, it just seems like you’ve been acting a little different towards him lately,” She says sweetly, her eyes crescents, before she lets the axe fall on Minori’s neck, “Almost like you’ve got a crush on him.”
The group surrounding Minori erupts into little titters and snickers, everyone trying to hide their laughter in their hands. The classmates on the fringes of the circle use their position to lean into each other, tucking whispers behind shoulders. It all grates on Minori’s ears. She feels suddenly very cold, and very far away from herself.
This is how her social downfall begins. She can see it, the descent stretching out in front of her, her throne crumbling beneath her. If she doesn’t stop these rumors now, quickly, she’ll find herself a new place in the food chain right at Mob’s side, crouching on the cement, a cat’s blood soaking into her skin.
“I do not.” She says, trying not to seem as affected as she is, trying not to seem desperate, “Who could ever have a crush on Kageyama-kun?”
“Youuu.” Chizue sings, “I bet that’s why you started messing with him in the first place, right? His face is cute when it’s all bruised, huh?”
This is too much for her to fight against, too fast. It’s practically an ambush. That wrongness that Minori had once felt deep inside herself has returned, though now, its claws seem to have reached out into the souls of her classmates. Every grin is stretched wider than it should be, every watching eye absorbing all her faults.
“You’re crazy,” She says, brushing off Chizue’s accusations, still trying to stay in control. She’s standing suddenly, her desk chair pushed in at her side. She doesn’t remember moving. “I don’t have a crush on Kageyama-kun.”
Chizue smiles a predatory smile, a knifelike angle to her teeth and a darkness in her eyes that no one but Minori can see.
“Prove it.”
Someone presses a freshly sharpened pencil into her hands. Minori’s fingers grip it on instinct.
The crowd parts to form a perfect path down the aisle of desks straight to where Mob is sitting, hunched over, trying to make himself small and keep his head down. Minori doesn’t move.
Prove it?
There’s only one thing she can do with a pencil this sharp, only one thing the people around her are encouraging her to do, and she doesn’t want to do it. She doesn’t want to hurt Mob any more than she already has.
The revelation lands like a meteor, and Minori lets the pencil go.
It hits the ground like it weighs twenty pounds, the sharp tip snapping off, and everyone watches it roll away like they’re watching a gladiator fall in the Colosseum.
Minori spins on Chizue, “I don’t have to prove anything to you.” She snarls to the girl’s viciously satisfied expression, “To any of you.”
They still circle like vultures, with their bad intentions for once not directed at Mob. Someone whispers “Knew she had to be a freak too.” And it opens the floodgates, a hundred other insults and assumptions pouring in over Minori’s head.
That’s when Minori knows there’s so recovery from this. No going back. The rumors will fly fast and freely now, and for the first time, she will be powerless.
“Now leave me alone,” She says, gripping at her chair with white knuckles, fighting to urge to heft it up and break it over Chizue’s head, “Or all your families will be getting visits from my papa’s bodyguards.”
That threat at least still holds some weight. Everyone in the class knows what Minori’s mansion looks like, how large and extravagant it is, how many bodyguards peaked around each corner and would come at Minori’s call. Her new status as an outcast does not negate the fact that her father owns a powerful business, and that he’d be able to run every family in the school into the ground if Minori gave the word.
Smartly, kids begin to back off. They filter away in small groups, still casting sneaky glances backwards at Minori’s flushed face. Chizue takes half the crowd with her when she leaves, flipping her long black hair over her shoulder as she does; the new queen of the Salt Mid castle followed by her brainless lackeys.
Hanae is the last to go. For a moment Minori thinks she might stay, until Hanae looks from Minori to Mob then back again, and her face scrunches up in disgust at whatever invisible thing she sees between them.
“I thought you were better than that, Asagiri-chan.” She says, turning her nose up and walking away.
Minori frowns and sits down heavily in her chair, watching for the second time in as many days as she’s left behind. Neither Hanae nor anyone else hears her when she mutters, “That’s what I’m working on.”
-
She’s not the one to find Mob. This time, Mob is the one to find her.
His measured, but still uneven, footsteps are unmistakable as he approaches Minori from behind. For some unknown reason, he’s always walked with an odd carefulness, as if he’s holding a bomb inside his heart and must keep himself level so it doesn’t go off. Minori feels a little bit like that now, like she has a bomb in her hands, is digging her nails into its smooth sides, and doesn’t know how to put it down.
“Leave, Kageyama-kun.” Minori says into her knees, as she stares out through the metal fence that surrounds the school roof. A crow sits on top of it, a black cut-out against the sky, watching her.
Mob doesn’t leave. He sits down beside her as close as he dares, which isn’t very close. Maybe he can see the bomb she’s holding, can see the danger her posture promises upon being disturbed.
If he asks her “Why?” Minori knows she’ll snap. Remorse or no remorse. Becoming a better person or not. She’ll throw Kageyama Shigeo over the roof’s edge.
But he doesn’t ask her anything.
He just sits there with her, quietly.
Minori tucks her eyes down into her arms and just breathes, listening to Mob breathe beside her. Each of his inhales rattles subtly. He must be sick, or maybe one of his ribs is hurt.
“I thought you hated me.” She says.
Mob hums, “I do.”
Something about his honesty makes her smile. It’s a sad, humorless smile, but a smile all the same. It wobbles when Minori’s eyes gloss over with tears and she begins to sniffle to herself.
Even though it's unfair of her to cry in front of him again, Mob still doesn’t say a thing.
-
Minori has a nightmare that night.
A man stands in front of her in a bright white space. He’s young, with smooth skin and a pleasant smile, but a soft buzzing of invisible bugs and the pervasive stench of rot emanate off of him.
“I didn’t expect this from you.” He says conversationally as he steps towards Minori. The buzzing gets louder the closer he gets, and there’s an unsettling clicking now too. Minori can just barely hear it, coming from his chest where his heart is supposed to be. It’s like the bugs are in his body, beneath his skin, eating away at his insides, and the only thing keeping them from escaping is the fact that he doesn’t want them to. Minori stumbles back a few steps, and the man stops moving, watching her, amused, “You’re messing up all my plans.”
“Plans?” Minori asks. She expects her voice to echo in that odd misty way that her voice always does in her dreams, but it comes out of her mouth crisp and clear.
“Yes, I had a very elaborate set up going on.” He says, shrugging, “But now without you to rely on, I’ll have to improvise.”
Improvise. Minori doesn’t like the sound of that. There’s something menacing behind that word and the way this man holds it in his mouth, like he’s hiding something dark and threatening behind his teeth and tongue.
“I wonder, what is it that made you start to change?” He asks, and this time, when he takes a step forward, Minori cannot move. “What made you lose your edge, begin to disobey me? Wasn’t it fun? Didn’t you like being powerful and strong?”
He’s right in front of her now, and he puts a hand on her hair. Minori wishes she could shrink away, or smack the hand off. It feels heavy, waxy, and cold, like a corpse’s hand.
“I thought you were someone who understood the cruel nature of this world.” The man says, smoothing some of Minori’s bangs away from her face with a thumb. There’s no emotion behind the gesture or in the way he looks at her, just clinical apathy, like he’s staring into a petri dish at a failed test, “I don’t know how I was wrong.”
Minori doesn’t feel it when the man's thumb digs into her cheek, cracking her face like it was made of plaster and frail stone all along. It’s only as her vision begins to tunnel to black that she sees an expression settle onto his pale face.
Disappointment.