Work Text:
Serizawa was dutifully slogging through his History homework, doing his best to focus over the various shouts and groans that always accompanied one of Reigen’s deep-tissue shoulder exorcisms. He was having . . . mixed success. While that type of service certainly seemed to relax the clients, it did not have the same effect on the people overhearing it.
Across the room, Shigeo sighed and put down the manga volume he’d been reading. The boy had more experience with these sorts of things than Serizawa did, and usually he was able to sit through them as calmly and placidly as if the screaming were no different from the Classical music that Reigen liked to put on the radio. But today even he had seemed restless.
“Serizawa-san,” he said.
(“And now!” Reigen yelled, his voice muffled slightly, but not as much as Serizawa would have preferred, by the door to the bodily exorcism room, “We work this mystical oil into your muscles to repel the spirit!”)
“Yes?” Serizawa answered as soon as it was quiet enough for Shigeo to hear him. He closed his textbook, grateful for the excuse to take a break from studying. He still loved the idea of being back in school, and he was committed to seeing it through, but the day-to-day effort of it all was already getting exhausting. And there were the doubts at the back of his mind: would he really be able to graduate? To become a productive member of society? Or was this just a grace period before he blew up again and ruined everything?
Shigeo stared at him. His expression looked very intense, but it usually did. Anyway, Serizawa wasn’t in any position to judge. His own tendency to scowl whenever he was thinking too hard might have been an asset back in Claw, but it wasn’t serving him very well here at Spirits and Such. Once he’d forgotten to smile when offering a new client tea and she’d screamed and nearly fallen out of her chair.
(“Expressiveness in customer service is a skill, Serizawa!” Reigen had told him as they cleaned up the tea tray. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out in time . . . and for now, leave the first impressions to me, okay?”)
So it would be pretty hypocritical of Serizawa to be alarmed by the way Shigeo was looking at him. And he wasn’t! Not nervous at all.
Besides, he knew perfectly well how Shigeo felt when people couldn’t interpret his expressions or assumed he was angry or uninterested when he was just looking. He knew because he sometimes had the same problems himself, but he also knew because, well, Shigeo had shown him. Sometimes when he looked at the boy he could still feel flashes of that tidal wave of memories and emotions that he’d shared with him back on the steps of the Cultural Tower.
Serizawa had been a little nervous at first when he found out they were going to be coworkers. What if he accidentally referenced some embarrassing memory that Shigeo didn’t want other people to know about? Serizawa had enough anxiety about accidentally bringing up his own embarrassing memories!
But, fortunately, it hadn’t been an issue. Really, when Serizawa thought about it, he didn’t have a lot of specific memories at all, just a jumble of feelings and sensations. Some of them had flashes of scenery or faces associated with them, but he couldn’t really tell you what they meant. It was like a collage, or flipping through TV channels too quickly, or like a bunch of video game assets had glitched and loaded over each other.
It made him less nervous about being a bad friend and somehow not respecting Shigeo’s privacy. It did sometimes give him other problems, like when he’d been walking through the city and suddenly, when he saw the outline of one of the local private school buildings, been overwhelmed with the sudden urge to cry and also the strange certainty that the building should have been a pile of rubble. It passed in only a few seconds, but it was still . . . disorienting.
“What are you doing after work?” Shigeo asked.
“Oh!” said Serizawa. “I have to study. I have a test next week, you see!”
He was determined to prepare for it properly! If he was going to rejoin society, he had to make every effort to do a good job.
Shigeo considered this for as long as it took Reigen to perform some particularly aggressive spirit-repelling technique. When the ruckus had died away, he said, “I have some studying to do as well. Would you like some company?”
Serizawa blinked. He had just been planning on going home to his apartment. But . . . it might be nice to go somewhere else instead. What with work and school keeping him busy he didn’t spend too much time at home, but even on his days off he made a point of leaving the apartment at least once every day, just to prove to himself that he could.
“We could . . . go to a cafe?” he suggested. That was a thing people did, right?
Shigeo nodded. “Okay,” he said.
When work was over, the two of them headed out together. It had been a slow day, mostly shoulder exorcisms and a couple of spirit photographs, so Serizawa hadn’t needed to do much more than make tea a couple of times. He never knew what to expect. Some days he wondered if Reigen really needed him at all, and some days he barely had time to eat his lunch, they were so busy.
Serizawa paused once they had stepped outside the building. He was realizing that he didn’t actually know anything about the local cafes, apart from the one above Spirits and Such, which he’d gotten drinks from a couple of times. If he’d thought of that inside, they could have gone upstairs, but they’d already left the building and people might stare if they went back into it now.
But that was all right. He was still new to Seasoning City, but he was with someone who had lived there his whole life! He could ask for recommendations. That was something his mother had told him, when she was showering him with advice on how to settle into a new place: Ask The Locals For Recommendations. He had it written down in one of his notebooks.
“Do you have a favorite cafe, Shigeo?” he asked.
Shigeo thought for a moment.
“No,” he said.
“Ah.” The back of Serizawa’s neck was starting to sweat. He didn’t know what to do from here. They could walk until they found something? They could go back to the cafe over the office? They could ask–no, of course not, he couldn’t ask some random passerby what their favorite cafe was! That would be creepy!
“I don’t go out very often,” Shigeo continued. “Mostly with Master Reigen. And he says that going to a cafe just to get a special drink is fiscally irresponsible.”
“Oh!” said Serizawa, beginning to panic. “Is it?” Had he made a bad suggestion? Would Reigen be disappointed in him? Was Shigeo disappointed in him?
“I don’t think so. If you do it too often, maybe. But Master Reigen takes me to restaurants all the time and my mom says that’s fiscally irresponsible, so I guess it depends.”
Serizawa relaxed. “All right!” he said. “Good.”
“My friend Tome-san says there’s a good cafe over on Coriander Street.”
“Great!” said Serizara, clinging onto the conversational lifeline he’d been thrown.
Shigeo frowned. “It might be alien-themed, though,” he said. “Most of the things Tome-san likes are.”
As often happened, the mention of one of Shigeo’s friends made something spark in the back of Serizawa’s head, a strange feeling like someone else’s deja vu. Tome made him think of cheerful shouting and choppy bangs and the crackle of chip packets. And, yes, aliens.
“I don’t mind aliens!” Serizawa said.
“Oh.” Shigeo seemed to relax. “Good.”
The decor of the cafe did turn out to be more than a little eclectic, but it was clean and had an open table they could lay their books out on, so Serizawa nodded and filed it away. Maybe he should come back here. Or maybe he should explore more cafes! He hadn’t really thought about the option of doing his schoolwork somewhere other than his apartment or the office.
“Sorry, we don’t have a special this week,” drawled the girl at the counter as they approached. “They made an announcement that we were gonna get these broccoli jellies, and then the next day they made an announcement that we weren’t, but they didn’t send us anything else instead.” She rolled her eyes. “Typical.”
Shigeo quietly ordered a milk tea while Serizawa stared at the menu.
“And for you?”
“Um!” There were too many options! Serizawa felt his powers start to prick at his skin, his hair fluffing out around his head. He stuck his hand into his pocket and held tight to the stack of business cards there. He could do this! He was in control!
“He just needs a moment to decide,” Shigeo offered.
Serizawa nodded, deflating with relief.
“Sure thing,” said the girl, shrugging disinterestedly. “Take your time.”
“Ritsu used to have trouble choosing between things,” Shigeo told Serizawa. “When we were little, he would cry in the department store when it was time to pick out shoes.” He was smiling fondly.
When Serizawa thought about Ritsu, it was like being hit by that entire storm of emotions all over again, too many things happening at once for him to pick out any specific memories of Shigeo’s brother, just overwhelming feelings of love and pride–and also a deep knot of guilt so intense it made Serizawa’s chest ache. It was a very familiar sort of guilt, one that made him remember his mother slamming into the wall with his aura flickering around her.
He blinked and tried to gently push the thoughts away. His mom was proud of what he was doing now. She’d talked about coming out to Seasoning City to visit. She wasn’t afraid of him the way she used to be.
While Serizawa tried to figure out what drink he wanted to order, the cashier hefted an empty ice bucket from behind the counter and headed into the back to refill it. As the door swung open, Serizawa stiffened, and beside him he felt Shigeo straighten up too.
He’d caught a glimpse of something–and more than a glimpse, a sensation. A feeling of psychic energy that looked bright orange and felt cold and bitingly acidic.
“There’s an evil spirit back there!” Serizawa hissed.
Shigeo nodded.
“What do we do?” He’d never dealt with an evil spirit outside of work before! None of them had ever showed up in his room, and at Claw there were so many psychics that the only time a spirit appeared it was being harnessed to someone’s will. He looked helplessly at Shigeo. “Do you think we can exorcise it from here?”
He went to raise a hand, ready to zap the spirit into oblivion as soon as the door opened again, but Shigeo stopped him.
“We should wait,” he said.
“But–”
“It’s just a spirit.” Serizawa wasn’t sure if the expression on Shigeo’s face was a neutral one that only happened to look threatening, or if, this time, it was actually supposed to be threatening. “We don’t know yet if it’s an evil one.”
“There are–” Serizawa stopped. Of course there were non-evil spirits. He remembered seeing them at shrines when he was a boy. And sometimes there were spirits that psychics had tamed, some sort of pet or assistant. And sometimes–
–dark trees, an agony of indecision, a cruel voice and a sorrowful one–
“All-all right,” he stammered. “We’ll see what it does.”
The cafe worker shouldered the door back open, but as she stepped through she slipped, dropping her bucket of ice and sliding to the floor with a yelp. Shigeo raised his hand and she froze, barely an inch above the floor, surrounded by the pulsing glow of his aura. It only lasted for a second, long enough to stop her from injuring herself when she landed, and then the power faded.
“Let me help you with those!” Serizawa offered, gesturing at the scattered ice.
“Yeah . . .” said the girl, dazedly. “Okay.”
He could have gathered all the ice cubes up with his powers, but no. He had a Plan.
“Is there a dustpan somewhere?” he asked cunningly.
“Uh-huh.” She pointed. “In the back.”
Feeling like he’d just outwitted a puzzle quest in an RPG, Serizawa pushed open the door to the back room and came face to face with the spirit that he now had some very compelling evidence was, in fact, evil. It was recognizably human, the form of a middle-aged woman with its clothes sticking up at odd angles like it had been frozen mid-fall. The back of its head was flatter than a living person’s should be, and it was glowing with eerie yellow-orange light.
Serizawa raised his hand and narrowed his eyes.
“Why did you do that?” he demanded.
“Me?! I didn’t do anything! I was trying to warn that idiot!”
Serizawa blinked. “You were?”
The spirit kicked at the ice machine and growled when her foot passed straight through it.
“These machines leak all over the place and no one puts up signage about it!” she snapped. “I was passing through the back room of a restaurant to get to the restroom when I slipped on an unlabeled puddle from an ice maker just like this one, and I hit my head and died! Now I haunt the unmaintained ice machines of Seasoning City! I try to whisper warnings and set up ‘Wet Floor’ signs but . . .” she hung her head. “I’m just not powerful enough!”
Serizawa looked at her. He looked at the dripping ice machine and the wet floor. He looked over his shoulder at where Shigeo was peeking his head around the door.
“I think you were right, Shigeo-kun,” he said.
“Oh,” said Shigeo. His face relaxed in a way that Serizawa only noticed because he happened to be looking very closely. “Good.”
“Do you know how to fix an ice machine?”
“No,” said Shigeo, looking alarmed. “Master Reigen might–”
“Hey!” the spirit snapped. “You need a certified repair technician in here! An amateur messing around will definitely make things worse!”
“Okay. We’ll just clean it up, then.” Shigeo raised his hand and the puddle on the floor levitated into the air, swirling and glowing with purple-blue light, until it dropped into the sink with a plop. Serizawa nudged the floor with the toe of his shoe. It was bone-dry.
“That was great!” said the spirit, floating over towards the sink. “Can you teach me how to do that?”
“I think you don’t have enough spiritual energy,” said Shigeo. “Sorry.”
The spirit pouted.
Then the door opened behind them, the cashier giving Serizawa and Shigeo the sort of baffled, somewhat judgemental look that would have had Serizawa hiding behind Reigen if he was still on the clock. But he wasn’t, so he stood his ground.
“I . . . uh . . . couldn’t find the dustpan,” he lied.
The girl pointed wordlessly to where it was hanging in plain sight.
“Ah!”
He grabbed it and went to sweep up the ice cubes.
“Tell your manager to get this ice machine looked at,” Serizawa said as he worked. “It shouldn’t be leaking this much.”
“It shouldn’t?”
Serizawa shook his head.
“It’s dangerous,” Shigeo agreed.
“And tell her to wear non-slip shoes!” the spirit yelled.
“You really ought to get non-slip shoes, ma’am!” Serizawa told her obediently, doing his best to invoke Reigen’s confidence. “There’s a high risk of falls in a work environment like this!”
“Uh, yeah . . .” The girl squinted at him. “Okay?”
After all of that, Serizawa decided he’d had enough excitement for the afternoon and ordered a milk tea like Shigeo. He could try one of the more adventurous options later.
“Oh,” he said as they headed over to their table. “That reminds me, there was something I wanted to ask you about. Reigen-san always talks about ‘melting’ evil spirits, but when I exorcise things they never really look like they’re melting. Is that an advanced technique?”
“Hm,” said Shigeo. And then, “I think shishou just likes to have his own way of talking about things. The spirits don’t melt when I exorcise them either.”
“Oh!” Serizawa wiped his brow. “That’s a relief!”
They settled down and got their books out, working in silence for a while. When Serizawa had almost finished his tea, he looked up. Shigeo had his books out, but he didn’t seem to be doing much studying. Serizawa was pretty sure that his textbook had been open to the same spread the entire time they’d been at the cafe.
“Are you doing all right?” Serizawa asked.
“Oh.” Shigeo sighed. “I’m having a hard time concentrating today. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right!” Serizawa assured him. “Do you . . . do you want to do something else?”
“I don’t want to distract you,” Shigeo said. “Studying for your test is important.”
Serizawa picked up a page of his notes. Honestly, the characters were starting to swim in front of his eyes. And he looked up at Shigeo and thought about school and felt–
–boredom, shrill laughter, the texture of paper and the scratch of chalk, restlessness–
“I’ve made some good progress, I think!” he said. “It’s important to take breaks!”
Taking breaks was more Reigen advice, even though the man never seemed to follow it himself. Serizawa wasn’t very good at it yet, but he was trying. When he played video games now, he set a timer to make sure he didn’t get sucked in. Maybe he should try doing that with studying, too, even if it was important.
“There was a park down the street,” he said. “We could take a walk.”
Shigeo perked up slightly. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a nice park.”
And when they got there, it did look nice, and also Serizawa felt a strange swell of–happiness? Wistfulness? And an echo of footsteps mirroring his own, and a flash of a girl with mousy brown hair and a soft smile. He wondered who she was.
The two of them found a bench overlooking the river and sat there in silence for a while. One of the things that Serizawa appreciated about Shigeo was how comfortable the silences around him could be. Reigen tended to chatter to fill the space, and back at Claw whenever things were quiet it was . . . tense. Sometimes ‘two of his coworkers were about to get snippy at each other’ tense, and sometimes ‘waiting for a literal explosion’ tense. And when he’d been back in his room, he was sure to have the buzz and tinny music of some video game menu screen playing even when he was asleep. He’d needed the distraction, something to focus on that wasn’t himself. But he was learning to enjoy silence now.
Eventually, he cleared his throat.
“Shigeo-kun?”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering . . . why did you want to spend time with me today?”
The boy stared straight ahead of him, frowning slightly as he thought.
“When we met,” he said eventually, “I promised I would be your friend. But I haven’t been a very good one. We only see each other at work.”
“Oh! I don’t think that’s a problem,” Serizawa assured him. “My mom tells me that lots of people have work friends!”
When he was back in Claw, everyone had technically been a ‘work friend.’ Well, now that he thought back to it, most of them had been more like . . . work begrudging acquaintances. Work unwitting rivals (unwitting on Serizawa’s end; he’d learned later that everyone else knew exactly how tenuous the boss’s favor was). Work . . . well. Work fellow cult members, if he was going to be really honest about it. Which he tried to do these days.
He was still in touch with Minegishi, who was . . . something like a real friend now? Serizawa wasn’t sure. Most people weren’t as direct about these things as Shigeo was. And one of his classmates had invited him to a study group next week, which seemed like a friendly thing to do. He was looking forward to it, even though he had to hold onto the business cards in his pocket and practice his breathing every time he thought about it.
“You’ve still been a good friend!” Serizawa said. “But if you wanted to study together sometime . . . or go for a walk around the city . . . I’m trying to experience new things! It’s nice to do that with other people.”
Shigeo nodded. “I like when the Body Improvement Club goes running on different routes,” he said. “We get to see different parts of the city. If I don’t faint.”
“Faint?! Does that happen a lot?”
“Not as much as it used to,” said Shigeo, with an odd amount of pride.
Pride . . . when Serizawa thought that, he suddenly remembered a feeling of determination and unsteady but continuous footfalls. Getting up and falling and getting up again. And cheering, from . . . those couldn’t be middle schoolers. Could they?
Shigeo talked about the club often. It was one of the things he seemed to get the most excited about.
“I could tell you some of the routes the President of the Body Improvement Club recommended,” he said. “If you ever wanted to start running. And I know exercises for the different muscle groups.”
“Ah . . .” said Serizawa. “I might start with walking. But I’m sure the routes work for that, too.”
Shigeo nodded. After another pause, he said, “What do you want to do, Serizawa-san?”
“Oh,” said Serizawa. “Um. I want to keep working and contributing to society, of course! I want to complete my schooling. I want to keep trying new things, and . . . get better at controlling my powers. And not being so nervous. I . . . want to build more plastic models now that I have a shelf for them in my apartment? But that’s not something that really matters. I–”
“It does matter,” Shigeo insisted. “As long as it matters to you.”
“O-okay.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
Feeling more than a little bewildered, Serizawa asked, “Is there a reason you wanted to know?”
Shigeo stared at the Seasoning City skyline for a long while before he answered. It had been a few days since it disappeared, but Serizawa still kept expecting there to be the silhouette of a giant broccoli in the place the boy was looking.
“I just think . . . Shigeo said, “That you need to listen to what your friends feel is important.”
He turned his head away from the horizon and looked straight at Serizawa with all the force of his dark eyes, as intensely as he had back on the Cultural Tower stairs. The gold-toned light of the sinking sun lit up his face, the flat line of his mouth and his focused eyes and the heavy line of his almost-too-long bangs, solid except for where it was marked with a diagonal nick over one eye, like someone had snipped at the hair with scissors.
“And you need to tell people when they matter to you,” Shigeo said. As usual, his face was almost expressionless, but as he spoke his lip trembled slightly. “That’s why I wanted you to know that I didn’t just say I’d be your friend to get you to give up. I meant it.”
“. . . Oh. Well, it would have been all right it you hadn’t–”
“No,” said Shigeo. “It wouldn’t.”
Serizawa tried to think about what he had felt when Shigeo shared his memories with him, tried to pull the layers apart and tease out any threads that might help him make sense of this, but he couldn’t. It was nothing like his own memories, where he could sort through them and call up a specific image. It was just a tangle. When he thought about friendship, he got a warm feeling in his chest and snatches of different faces, almost all people he didn’t recognize. The only ones he could place were a flash of blond–Teru, although the image seemed distorted; his hair was much too big–and a glow of green–Dimple, that little spirit that was always following Shigeo around. He hadn’t been there today, for some reason. Reigen had remarked on it, but Serizawa supposed that evil–or not-so-evil spirits probably had business of their own.
But there was nothing to explain why the boy was in such an odd mood.
“In that case,” Serizawa said, “I’m glad that we’re friends.”
“Yes. Me too.”
But Shigeo had turned away from him again.
The sun was creeping lower in the sky, and Serizawa’s stomach growled. The tea had been delicious, but he needed something more substantial.
“It’s getting late . . .” he said, tentatively.
“You should go home,” said Shigeo. “I’ll see you on Monday, Serizawa-san.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll be heading home, too.”
Still feeling uneasy, like there was something more he should do or say, Serizawa stood and made his goodbyes.
When he reached the edge of the park, he paused and glanced back over his shoulder. Shigeo was still sitting on the bench, his back stiff and his face blank, staring fixedly up at the empty place in the sky.